×

Clay and Buck

For a better experience,
download and use our app!

Behind-the-Scenes Convo for EIB 24/7 VIPs Only

28 Jul 2021

Why was Buck wearing a kilt this weekend? Why’s Clay going to Vegas?

EIB 24/7 members can find out by listening to this exclusive behind-the scenes conversation.

If  you’re not a member, sign up now. And then listen here:

Oh, and in case you’re still not believing the kilt thing. Here’s a larger version, suitable for framing…

Recent Stories

Get Password Hint

Enter your email to receive your password hint.

Need help? Contact customer service.

Forgot password

Enter your e-mail to receive your account information via e-mail.

Need help? Contact customer service.

The Lies of Biden and Fauci Exposed

28 Jul 2021

BUCK: President Biden was talking about how he is considering a mandate for all employees.

BIDEN: I don’t think it should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory. But I would do everything in my power. Just like I don’t think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide.

BUCK: So that was him saying he doesn’t want to make it mandatory. But now, Clay, it looks like the federal government — as of tomorrow — may make it mandatory for employees.

CLAY: For federal employees. Two million people.

BUCK: Biden is talking about for federal employees. What changed?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: This was Rochelle Walensky then, the director of the CDC, explaining why there was no need for masks any longer because the vaccines worked so well.

MADDOW: It is hard for me to imagine myself (sputters), you know, waltzing into the Stop & Shop tomorrow morning and not wearing a mask. I just feel like I’m not wired that way anymore, and it still feels risky.

WALENSKY: There’s extraordinary amounts of evidence now, that demonstrates that the vaccines are working in the real world, umm, in, uhhh — in covert studies, ummm, in care facilities, in — in… across all states. These vaccines are working the way they worked in the clinical trials. There’s also new data, um, just even in the last two weeks, that demonstrates that these vaccines are working against the variants that we have circulating in the United States. And also, data has emerged that has demonstrated that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely — not likely — to asymptomatically shed the virus or give it to others.

BUCK: You mean data changes over time, Clay? So there can be new data, new facts, new information that can come to light? So that shutting down discussion and debate of critical public health issues — having social media do the bidding of one political party by censoring people — that’s a bad idea?

How many times do we have to learn the same lesson in this process, before the people in charge finally have to stop what they are doing, stop shutting down things that they don’t like, stop telling us they know things they don’t know, pretending that we can’t remember what they said two weeks ago or two months ago, pretending that we can’t see that they’re letting illegal immigrants with no covid protocols, really, to speak of in…?

First of all, they generally bring them… I’ve seen the facilities like the Donna facility in McAllen, Texas, which is vast. It looks like a small city, and they bring them all together for processing there. Then they’ll be released, often into a local charity. Texas just found this out. There was a story in the last 24 hours on Fox that there are illegal immigrants with covid who are being placed in hotels — all done at the expense of the government processing and bringing them in.

And then either a charity or the federal government just gives them a bus ticket, whatever it is. How can we pretend to care so much about covid when they’re basically saying, “Covid protocols don’t count for illegal immigrants”? But if you want to come into the U.S. right now from the U.K.? Good luck. That’s scary. Covid is too much of a threat.

CLAY: Well, and you can’t even go into Canada. I was just talking about that. I was up in Michigan with my family recently, and we can see where my father lives, across the Detroit River is Canada. You can’t go into Canada. I went into Mexico with my wife; in order to come back to this country, as Americans citizens, we had to take covid tests.

Yet there are people walking across the border. This is, I think, significant, Buck. Because there’s a lot of talk from the CDC, “Oh, we have to get everybody vaccinated because the variants are going to continue, and the variants — the Delta variant is the latest — can be more dangerous than the existing covid virus. But around the world, vaccination is occurring at an incredibly low level.

So if there is a variant of covid that emerges that is wildly more dangerous than the covid that exists right now, the odds of it coming from the United States are really pretty minuscule. It’s going to come from somewhere else around the world. And we’re going to have to deal with that same threat as is. And I think this is important. That threat is not going away for years. No matter how many people get vaccinated.

BUCK: You also can see the dishonesty in the way they try to frame that issue. And even Fauci himself, I believe, earlier this week said, “You gotta watch out for those unvaccinated people, because they’re essentially petri dishes for what would be a super covid variant that could evade all vaccines.”

So they just keep turning up the heat. They’ll say whatever they have to say to continue on this narrative. And yet, somehow, it’s only the rural areas. I never hear the Biden administration say, “Why is only about a third of the African-American population of New York City vaccinated?” Just to take them.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: Why is that the case? I’m just wondering. Does anybody want to…? Nope. They won’t talk about that. It’s Trump supporters. This is a religious belief now. The whole covid-mitigation mantra, Fauci-ism. People take real meaning from this the same way they do from climate change. It makes them feel like they’re doing something worthwhile. They’re smart. They’re virtuous. They’re good people, and it costs them nothing.

It costs society a whole lot. It costs people who don’t want to live in that fear a whole lot. But they’re happy to sit on the couch, order in delivery and watch Netflix while they do their remote work, and tweet at you and me that we don’t care that old people die. That’s basically the way this shakes out.

CLAY: It’s become very tribal, and even the focus on, quote-unquote, “Trump voters” is misaligned, as you mentioned, when you look at the data. The reason why red states — which is where I live in the state of Tennessee. It’s why many southern states — the SEC footprint, so to speak — has a more significant number of people choosing to be unvaccinated.

It’s not exclusively, certainly because of Trump voters. It’s because we have a large black population. So you are combining a large black population — most states in the South have a much larger black population than the average of the rest of the country — with a large number of Trump voters as well, and the combination of those two groups is leading to large numbers of unvaccinated people.

But a lot of those people, remember, have already had covid which is important. And second, we never hear about Biden voters who are choosing not to be vaccinated, even though the black population supported Joe Biden, 92-8 or whatever it ended up being in the final tally. And statistically, as the data shows, they’re the most likely to be unvaccinated.

BUCK: No one ever discusses it, and no one ever brings it up, and no one also tells us, “What does the end really look like, here?”

CLAY: That’s a great question.

BUCK: When do they finally get to say, “We’re done”? We’ve gone through this with Afghanistan and the draw down there. Finally, after 20 years, the answer to the question, “What does victory look like?” has been asked so many times with unsatisfactory answers or really, effectively, no answer, other than just, “Keep doing this. Keep doing this. Keep doing what we’re doing.” It’s a similar dynamic playing out now with the lockdowners

Where they’re saying, “We’ll keep going with this as long as we have to, and we’ll keep raising up the mitigation measures. We’ll get over to do it over the winter.” This is something that they’ve become accustomed to, that they like. One of the things that I find most remarkable is there will be people, Clay… I was walking around today in New York City in Midtown, which is where I live, and which is where our New York studio is.

And there are a lot of people masked up. It’s definitely already… Now, you could say they’re doing it by choice. What I find so fascinating is that whenever I try to say, “No mandates,” the pushback is often, “What’s the big deal?” As if any normal human being could say, “You know what? I really want to walk around and breathe uncomfortably all day.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: That’s not a big deal.

CLAY: Well, for no reason!

BUCK: For no reason.

CLAY: For no reason, right.

BUCK: It really does remind me, I mentioned on the show yesterday in the Middle Ages, medieval period, people would wear — as a show of their piety — a hair shirt.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: People who were extremely religious would wear it, and it would agitate or itch, and sometimes even cause them to bleed. For some people, the mask is like a hair shirt now. It’s, “Look at how dedicated I am to Fauci and science!” Oh, we’ll talk more about their science dedication in a little bit when we discuss how they don’t believe that there’s such a thing as men and women, or what is a woman.

CLAY: I think that’s a great discussion. But I think the question you asked is a widely important one. How does it end? Because I think for a lot of people when the White House came out on May 13 and said, “I no longer to have wear masks anywhere,” that was at least a road map to believing that normalcy was going to return.

But if Covid Zero is the goal or 95% vaccination is the goal or whatever that number is? What is success, and how do the goalposts keep getting moved so we’re never there? It’s a fascinating question. I’d love to hear Fauci say, hey, what’s the answer for when this is over, for when we’ll never see you on television again?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

FAUCI: Right now, fortunately for us, we have enough people vaccinated that you will not see a wave or a surge of infections among the vaccinated. It will be a surge of infections among the unvaccinated. It will be an outbreak among the unvaccinated. People not getting vaccinated is not only a bad thing for them, it could actually interfere in a negative way with the rest of the country by generating variants that would allude the vaccines. That’s the thing we’re concerned about.

BUCK: (Fauci impression) “Welcome back to duh Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show and Buck Sexton Show.”

CLAY: (chuckling)

BUCK: “Where Mr. Travis ‘n’ Mr. Sexton are not takin’ duh surge with all due seriousness, and duh variants when you add the parabulahs on the data, and you do a nonlineuh analysis of duh droplets where it comes all together with…” Basically, at this point, if you still listen to this guy, Clay — if anyone listens to this guy and takes him at face value, it’s an intelligence test they are failing. This guy is a disaster. He does whatever the Biden administration wants him to do.

He never upsets the Democrats. He’s always on the right side of the left, and I’ve had enough of him. Okay. If people are unvaccinated, and they’re the only ones who are at risk — which is what they’re saying, even though, that’s apparently not true — then the vaccinated people, need to stop whining about this. I don’t want to hear it.

CLAY: They can do whatever they want and not have to worry about the unvaccinated people! If that were true, then I don’t think you would be bringing back masks — and also, again, you would have taken care of you and your family, and you wouldn’t need to obsessively worry.

People say, “Well, there’s still the danger of variants emerging,” and I understand that. The variants, if you look at the data, are not coming from America because comparatively the ones that are going to spread, going forward, are going to occur in the countries with minimal vaccination rates, which is much of the world right now.

BUCK: And the Delta variant was ripping all over India, as we know.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: They had a terrible time with covid. There are so many giant lies that have been told by the Democrats, by the Fauci-ites about covid the whole time. But just one of the ones they were pressing so hard last year was that it’s Trump’s fault. “America had the worst response of any country.”

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: “It’s Trump’s fault.”

CLAY: That story has disappeared.

BUCK: These people are psychopaths. They lied to you. Other countries — European countries, India, Brazil — had worse covid deaths and hospitalizations and infection rates. I’m pretty sure that’s not because Orange Man Bad. So remember that, while they’re telling you to now (Fauci impression) “just listen to duh science.”

Recent Stories

Mask Mandate Battle Lines Drawn

28 Jul 2021

CLAY: The battle lines are beginning to form on the new mask mandate. As it is rolling out in some ways across the country, all of the conflict is coming to a head, I believe, and the conflict may be the most pronounced in the state of Florida, where Ron DeSantis has effectively laid the gauntlet down, and said:

Florida will not be acquiescing to mask mandates or any other restrictions on his state while he is governor down there given all the time that he has spent branding the state of Florida as an oasis of freedom. And I want to play for you — this is last week — DeSantis standing up against the idea of all of these restrictions, which are coming down on all of us. Let’s listen.

DESANTIS: If anyone is calling for lockdowns, you’re not getting that done in Florida. I’m going to protect people’s livelihoods. I’m going to protect people’s right to go to school. I’m going to protect people’s right to run their small businesses. We have a situation where we have three vaccines that have been widely available for months and months now.

And people need to make decisions what’s best for them. But to have the government come in and lock anyone down or restrict anybody is totally unacceptable. And it’s easy for some people to advocate that because it doesn’t affect them. It does affect the people in this state. So we’re going to lift people up.

We’re not locking people down and we’re going to make sure that folks are able to exercise their decision making, what’s best for them. And I think millions of Floridians have obviously done that for the last year and a half. So we want to continue to support their effort.

CLAY: So, Buck, the question here — and I do think that DeSantis is maybe going to lead the Republican opposition at this point to the overreach that we’ll see — from the Biden administration, from the Fauci-ites, from the CDC and all these different places that as we’ve been telling you about — as we move into the fall, the Draconian restrictions are going to become more and more apparent on a day-to-day basis.

So the question that I think many of our listeners have, and certainly you and I have debated both on and off air: How do we respond? What is appropriate? What is potentially effective? And there’s a little bit of a story out of St. Louis that we can touch on associated with that as well.

BUCK: I think it’s a panic spasm. I think that it’s probably not going to last more than a few weeks. But that doesn’t mean that we should do what we’ve done in the past where we concede, where we go along. We say, “Okay, fine.” Just two weeks, Clay. Right?

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: Look what “just two weeks” got us this time around. It’s remarkable when you look at the way this is covered. Let’s be honest: Lockdowns and Democrats go hand in hand. That’s what’s happened here. This has become an almost entirely politically affiliated, politically tribal issue for people.

You know what someone is going to think, by and large, based upon their party and their political beliefs when it comes to covid. It shouldn’t be about this, but it is. When you look at the numbers — and I did some of this deep diving last night on the New York Times website. That’s right, Clay.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: We go and root around in the bowels of the New York Times website —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — so our folks today don’t have to spend their time sullying themselves and their eyes with what they’re doing there at Commie Central. The reality is you look at cities like New York and Los Angeles. Just take those. People might think right now, “Oh, my gosh. We’re a mix of a surge.

“Mask mandates have to come back.” In Los Angeles, they already have. In New York, they haven’t made it official. It’s more of a vaccine than a mask push. Clay, there’s a few hundred people — 200 to 300 people, depending on the day you look at it — in the hospital for covid in New York, in Los Angeles.

This is not a moment that should be inducing panic in people. But I really think the brains of people on the left have been altered in such a way that it’s not really possible for them to judge and adjudicate risk in a reasonable fashion. They should all be wearing helmets when they get into a car and wearing a snorkel when they get into a bathtub, because they can’t handle the normal risks that all the rest of us can.

CLAY: It’s interesting that you point that out, because I made the argument in the past year that one of my number one tests for adulthood is, “Can you adequately assess risk and adjust your behavior accordingly?” Certainly a large percentage of the population have failed this mantra — and if we are correct, Buck…

And the data reflects, frankly, that we’re months ahead of where everybody else is going to be, and that covid is basically going to become a chronic, endemic, seasonal attribute, unfortunately, that rises every fall. We have to, at some point, recognize that and stop treating covid like it is a disease that is unprecedented in the history of mankind.

And I just don’t know, what is that pivot point? Because I think Democrats bought into the idea that the vaccine was a panacea, that it was a magic bullet, that it was going to cure everything — and, frankly, that’s partly what Joe Biden sold to everybody, and it just hasn’t taken.

BUCK: And you and he I both know that if Donald Trump were still the president, there would be so much more willingness among the Democrat-aligned media to question the vaccines.

CLAY: Zeroed out.

BUCK: You would be seeing reports all over the place about the vaccine — VAERS, I believe, Vaccine Adverse Event Reaction System. You would be seeing people talking about this and saying, “We’re just asking questions,” but it’s become so utterly and deeply political. I just feel like at this point, there’s something that people need to know.

Which is the people that have been pushing this all along have done so with the idea that if we only listened to them, we would be in a better place. Now we’ve all seen that they go back on what they’ve told us was certainty a couple of months ago.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They’ve never said, “This is just a judgment call,” because if they say it’s a judgment call, we can fight back. It’s “the science,” Clay. They’ve been doing this all along. The real red pill moment here is not recognizing the Democrat’s mandatory vaccine and mask policies are overreach. That’s certainly true. It’s that this cloud of authoritarianism has been obvious all along, from the very beginning.

CLAY: And this is what the White House tweeted, Buck, on May the 13th. It wasn’t that long ago. I think most people can think back all the way to May the 13th, a little bit over two months ago. This is direct from the White House Twitter account: “Big news from the CDC.

“If you’re fully vaccinated, you don’t need to wear a mask indoors or outdoors in most settings. We have gotten this far. Whether you choose to get vaccinated or wear a mask, please protect yourself until we get to the finish line,” and the headline is in all caps from the White House, “FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE CAN STOP WEARING MASKS.”

And now, they have flip-flopped on that directive. So you mention Facebook, Buck. It raises the question. Do they now have to go back into Facebook and start to remove all the misinformation about mask wearing that they shared as recently as two months ago from the CDC?

BUCK: There’s been a total lack of humility from the lock-downers, the Fauci-ites, and the Democrats this entire time. You see this continuing on. They don’t care. There’s an interesting piece in Slate, which is a far-left website — not quite as far as The Nation, but it’s pretty left wing — where they were saying, “Is there such thing as ‘a noble lie’ when it comes to public health policy?”

I saw them finally admit — and I know you feel this way too. When we were willing to… Well, we weren’t. But when people were willing to believe that Fauci lied about masks, because it was for our own good. Remember that, back in February of 2020? It was he lied about mask effectiveness because he decided to change his mind, and then we were told they were worried about a run on masks.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: No intelligent person should have believed this. Okay? We weren’t running out of masks. We never ran out of masks. We never ran out of hospital capacity. We didn’t actually need a million ventilators. In fact, what we found out was a lot of the medical community were far too quick to put people on ventilators, in part because they might have been too panicked about dealing with covid in the first place when we didn’t know as much about it.

Being put on a ventilator was, for a lot of people, a death sentence, because they were put on it too early. The point being, we were willing to believe that Fauci lied to us for our own good. And then he had credibility afterwards. No, he didn’t lie to us for our own good, Clay.

Any adult that’s really thinking this through says, “Oh, he just wanted to change his mind because his team felt like masks were going to make everybody feel better.” Not stay healthier. But emotionally, psychologically feel better. It became their little blanky. Their little safety blanket.

CLAY: No. It’s 100% right. And we’re fortunate that we have laboratories in all our state governments, because if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be all the evidence to prove how completely unnecessary and unworkable the mask requirement is at all. I think there are three things, Buck, that we have been talking about on this program that we are going to continue to hammer home as one of the only, I believe, honest and trustworthy sources you can find anywhere.

One: Covid is not going away. We’re never going to get to Covid Zero. That’s important because there are a lot of people who still don’t understand that. Two: Masks, if you look at the data, do not work — or at least don’t work in a substantial enough way to be this absolute crazy mandate that we are seeing. And three: If you look at the data, virtually nothing that we’ve done since covid started in terms of our day-to-day interaction has changed anything.

BUCK: I also think it’s fascinating that we’re led to believe that the people demanding masks are the ones who are vulnerable because they’re not vaccinated. That’s what the media, the corporate media narrative is in general. That’s not true. The people demanding masks are hyper anxious Biden voters in their 30s and 40s and 50s who are already vaccinated. But it’s not good enough.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: This is safety-ism above rational thought, and that’s what we’re seeing.

Recent Stories

Why Make an Infrastructure Deal with Santa Claus?

28 Jul 2021

BUCK: Clay, I want you to tell me what this turns into for the GOP. The senators… This just broke in the last hour. “Key senators,” here according to CNBC, “have announced they’ve reached a bipartisan infrastructure deal. It’s unclear if the plan had enough votes to pass.” Chuck Schumer says he’s prepared to push it through the chamber. They would need the 60 to overcome what is still a filibuster that would exist if somebody is going to exercise that.

And it’s looking like Republicans, Clay, are going to go along with this. The Democrats have wanted to, as they say, “invest” $3.5 trillion in social programs, plus something like a trillion of this is going to be actual infrastructure, and the text isn’t out yet. But it sounds like we’re just going to spend ourselves into oblivion. Is that the plan?

CLAY: While inflation is skyrocketing. And here’s my big question. And you tell me where I’m missing something, Buck. Most of the time when you agree to a compromise in legislation, the way to compromises work… By the way, I’m married for 17 years, so I also understand that all compromises (laughing) are not actual compromises. There’s a lot of married men out there.

They say, “Yeah. I’ve compromised a lot. She gets exactly what she wants. That’s how I stay married.” It feels like this is that kind of compromise for the Republican Party right now. Most political compromises, you give up something that you didn’t want to give up and you get back something that the other side did not want to give up in exchange for your compromise.

No one has been able to walk me through what the Republicans are getting from this infrastructure agreement. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that could happen. If Joe Biden said, “Hey, you know, I’ve proposed 43.4% capital gains tax,” right now, it’s 20%. So we’re talking about roughly a doubling of that capital gains tax.

“I’ll walk that back to 28% in my $3.5 trillion deal if you’ll agree to support the infrastructure bill that I want.” Okay. I could see that. If Joe Biden is walking back his corporate tax rate, if he’s walking back the overall tax increase he’s getting — and Republicans, in exchange, are saying, “Okay. We’ll support infrastructure,” the Democrats are giving the Republicans are getting and vice-versa.

But, Buck, given the fact that they are… I know this is a little bit procedural, but the Democrats are basically letting it be known that they’re going to pass their budget — this massive tax increase, the biggest tax increase that’s ever existed in the history of the country in the middle of inflation.

They are doing this with the budget reconciliation, where they get 50 votes plus Kamala Harris to break it. What are the Republicans actually getting? Have you seen something where you thought, “Oh, this is a good compromise?”

BUCK: So here’s where we are: Collins and Sinema. So the key moderate Democrat in Sinema —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — and the key moderate Republican in Collins are on board for this already. I’m hearing… I was just checking with the D.C. source. I’m hearing that it’s going to be substantially less, because remember, the text isn’t out.

CLAY: Yes, that’s right.

BUCK: This is all a horse trading behind closed doors. What they’re doing is coming out. You have a bunch of senators now high-fiving each other. “Yeeeeah, that’s right! We have a deal,” and everyone’s supposed to say, “Oh, great! Our government at work. Look at the amazing things they do.”

But a deal … that does what? They talked about the broad outlines of this, but we’re looking at federal legislation here from the Congress. Guess what? The devil is in the details. So we can’t even know exactly how much is being spent or what it’s being spent on, but as to the question about Republicans?

Look, Republicans — and some people are gonna get a little bit upset, a little bit upset with this. This is true. Republicans like to spend a lot of money too! Republican senators. Remember the Congress wants to bring back pork to their district. That hasn’t changed, and there’s no serious movement, underway, Clay, right now, to rein in spending and the debt and the deficit. There is no Tea Party, and not even the beginnings of one, today.

CLAY: Modern Monetary Theory basically teaches that deficits don’t matter, and there’s no consequences for them, and that’s the era of magical economic thinking, in which we are living right now. But have you heard though? Your point of, “Hey, there are lots of Republicans who want to be able to go back and bring the pork back to their community.”

They get a bridge, they get a new road, whatever it might be. Much of this “infrastructure,” by the way, not actually infrastructure when you actually look into the details of the legislation. But I just don’t see any horse trading, so to speak, where I feel like Republicans are getting anything out of this deal other than giving Joe Biden an opportunity in 2022, to say, “See! I told you I would bring back bipartisanship.

“Now we just need more Republicans eliminated so we can have more people who want to work and understand that importance,” and if they try to drag Joe Biden across the finished line again in 2024, I can already see what his television commercials are going to say, which is, “I made Washington work again by passing the biggest infrastructure bill in generations!”

BUCK: It’s really hard to run against Santa Claus. Republicans have learned this. Talking about the budget, looking at the math, the long-term projections, the challenges of funding Medicare and Medicaid going forward — all those things that, remember, the Republican Party of ten years ago, was very much fixated on, very much interested in.

Although we didn’t really accomplish anything in terms of… Look, we’re going to be at $30 trillion. The numbers speak for themselves. At some point, the scoreboard matters here. We’re going to be $30 trillion in national debt very soon, and so Republicans have spent. Look, under the Trump administration, we were still spending, spending, spending.

This is where we’re going now, because the free-stuff people — which you brought up MMT, Modern Monetary Theory — is the party in power or just the political party in general says, “We’re going to give you stuff, and other people are going to pay for it.” That keeps working until financial catastrophe happens —

CLAY: Brilliant.

BUCK: — until the bill comes due. So right now, it’s like both parties are on this train, throwing coal into the furnace, saying, “Let’s see where this thing ends.”

CLAY: At least if we are going to be on that train, can we not increase taxes? If we’re just going to buy into the idea that budgets don’t matter — if we’re going to do that — what is the benefit at all, of increasing taxes in the middle of a pandemic? And that’s my big thing from the get-go.

BUCK: Oh, it’s the right thing to do. As Obama would say, “It’s the right thing to do.” Remember that? It didn’t matter even if it hurt the economy. It’s about sticking it to the rich people. But as you know, it doesn’t really stick it to the rich people. For all the talk that Bernie Sanders has of (impression) “the millionaires and the billionaires and the oligarchs,” they can afford your 3% marginal rate.

They can afford to get rid of the carried-interest loophole. They can afford this stuff. It’s the small business owner who gets 150K, 250K maybe combined household income who is finally hitting their peak-earning years. They’re the ones where all of a sudden, the lack of the SALT deduction really hurts and changes their long-term outcome.

They’re the ones for whom the corporate tax rate really matters. And it’s all about the politics of envy, man. You have to tell people, “You would have more stuff…” This is what Democrats do. “Were going to give you that stuff! It’s other people’s fault you don’t have it, and we’re going to punish them for not giving it to you before.” That’s what taxes are all about.

CLAY: Sadly, that’s correct. My argument is just, “In the middle of a pandemic, how is nobody standing up and saying, ‘Increasing taxes is the wrong move at this point in time’?” It seems like madness to me.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BIDEN: (slurring) You may have heard that in Washington now — I was just on the phone looks — it like they reached a bipartisan agreement on “infrastructure,” a fancy word for bridges, roads —

CROWD: (applause)

BIDEN: — transit systems, high-speed internet, clean drinking water, cleaning up and caffing… cap… capping the orphan wells — over thousands of them abandoned — and abandoned mines, and a modern, resilient electric grid to build. And guess what? A lot of those (sputters) abandoned wells are leaking methane! And guess what? The same union guys that dug those wells, they can make the same union wage capping those wells.

CROWD: (applause)

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. This is Buck and that was Biden. He is currently, as we are speak to you, in lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania. He’s trying to sell people on his American rules as well. A few things here, Clay. One: See? How are the Democrats selling this? It’s roads and bridges.

It’s also a Green New Deal Corps, kind of like the AmeriCorps or something, for people to become little social justice activists about climate change. There’s $10 billion at least in the budget for that, and I think it’s also fascinating that Biden is pushing Buy America rules. I don’t know.

I feel like there was a president before Biden who was really into putting American products first, you can say. Buying from American companies, supporting companies that are here in America, and not putting them second, but first. I think somebody else was doing this beforehand. But then it was nativism; it was bad.

CLAY: Yeah, and all of this is so cyclically — and I hate to be a cynic about all of this. But this is the conversation we were having earlier about the infrastructure package. Now, Joe Biden is going to go run around and talk about all the success he’s had bringing bipartisanship back to Washington.

By the way, by “bipartisanship,” he means just a filibuster-proof majority. Sixty. So ten, roughly, Republicans are going to join this idea. And then he’s going to shove through the largest budget with the hugest tax increases we’ve ever seen in the history of this country under budget reconciliation measures that allow Kamala Harris to break the tie. The combination of both of those bills is going to be well over $4 trillion. So the end result, is going to be, I think, we’re just pouring jet fuel on to a fire of inflation that is already burning.

Recent Stories

C&B’s Buddy Will Cain on Simone Biles and More

28 Jul 2021

BUCK: I’m Buck and he’s Clay — and he is Will with us now, our friend Will Cain, host of the Will Cain Podcast and, of course, co-host of Fox & Friends Weekends. Will, buddy, great to have you, man. Thanks for being here with us.

WILL: Fellas! I can’t tell you how surreal it is to sit here, and I think I told you this individually. But to sit here and talk to you, it’s like my worlds colliding. It’s like your high school friends and your college friends becoming friends independently of you. Because, Buck, you and I go back now well over a decade. And for the last five years, Clay and I have been playing in the same sandbox and getting to know each other. So to see you guys together, it’s really a beautiful thing.

BUCK: I agree. We have some big news to get your take on today, Will, but I have to lead into this for one second and say: When you and I were co-hosting Real News at TheBlaze ten years ago, did you ever think that fast-forward ten years, you’d be on the show that I would be co-hosting with someone that you had known from when you were hosting at ESPN, and now you would also be hosting Fox & Friends on the weekends with our friend Pete Hegseth while Clay and I have taken over for Rush on radio?

WILL: (laughing) No. You throw Pete into the equation, and it’s a fascinating evolution. But look, I think the world of both of you guys. You’re both smart and independent and the world needs to hear your opinions. I mean that sincerely. So, I consider all of this growth, all of this evolution, a good thing for America, and I feel the same thing about Hegseth. You know that, Buck.

BUCK: Yeah.

WILL: I think Hegseth is an awesome dude.

BUCK: Yeah.

WILL: So I love that I get to hang out with him on the weekends.

BUCK: He’s a great guy. The control room, by the way, is reminding me: We’re taking over a time slot. There’s never any replacing the greatest of all time, Rush Limbaugh.

WILL: Right.

BUCK: Let’s get into it, Will. Tell me this, man… Actually, no. I want to hand off to Clay. Clay, you get first crack, because I’ve been babbling.

CLAY: No. That was great. Will, I think you’re in Hawaii, first of all.

WILL: (chuckles)

BUCK: So thank you for taking some time off from the family vacation and hanging with us. How is Hawaii? What does it feel like out there? Are they back to normal?

WILL: No, Clay. I will tell you, Hawaii is always beautiful. I will contend, I think it’s the most beautiful place not just in the 50 states, but possibly in the world. I mean, the natural beauty that just exists here is unmatched. That being said, man, it feels like you’re flying into… I don’t know what. I had to go through so many different covid tests, protocols, paperwork.

And then once you get here, it’s nice. Don’t get me wrong. I’m having a great time. But yesterday, I watched a guy berate another guy — I’m telling you, berate, dog cuss another guy — for not wearing his mask indoors. And, look, Hawaii… One of the special things is Hawaii is so removed. Not just physically, but time zone wise.

You lose the news cycle. You lose the pressure of everything. That’s nice. But you can feel like a frog boiling in water. What’s happening over there, obviously is happening here. The rhetoric on the CDC and mask guidance and vaccine push, it’s all reaching a full boil, and you feel it here on vacation, no doubt.

BUCK: You know, Will, I have a friend who is firmly on the left who was in Hawaii recently, and we had a conversation about how he had his first experience… It was actually. I can say it was Marc Lamont Hill because we said it on a podcast, on-air. He had his first experience where somebody told him, that he could not order… This was in Hawaii. He was on vacation, same as you.

He couldn’t order a drink that was at a bar, that was outside, like by the beach bar. And he said, “But hold on a second. There are people sitting at the bar right now, ordering drinks without masks on. Why do I, standing, need to order with a mask on to get a drink to go back and sit down on my chair at the beach?” And they said, “Because that’s the rule.”

WILL: (groans)

BUCK: And he finally said to me, “I realize that this covid theater stuff does have limits,” and I was like —

CLAY: Thank you.

BUCK: — “Welcome to the party, pal.”

WILL: Yeah.

CLAY: Will, I know you’re out in Hawaii, so I don’t know how much you followed it. What do you make of this Simone Biles controversy? Big story to you? Not a story? Overreactive story? How did you break it down in your world?

WILL: All right. So I’m not totally removed. I have an addiction to the poison that is social media like everyone else. So I saw you all over this, Clay, yesterday, and here’s the honest truth: You’re telling the truth and nobody likes you for it. You lean into social media and you let everybody know your opinion, which I appreciate that you do.

The bottom line is, we are celebrating quitting, and that’s where we have gotten as a culture and as a nation. Now, first of all, I do think Simone Biles deserves her own individual criticism. But without me knowing all the details of whatever it is going on with her, my focus and my attention, Clay, is way more on the reaction.

There’s a headline. There’s a cover today, I believe, of the New Yorker praising her bravery for quitting. And look, you tweeted it, Clay; I feel exactly the same. I put my sons, 13 and six, into sports to learn the lesson that we are now saying the opposite is praiseworthy of. Meaning, I put my boys into sports to fail, to be resilient, to never quit.

They’re not going to be professional athletes. (chuckles) I know that very well. I put them in to learn life lessons — and look, this is reflected across all of our culture. “Words are violence. Protests and riots are ‘mostly peaceful.’ Boys are girls. Quitters have strength.” Everywhere you look, it’s not just the language that’s been turned on its head, but it’s the values that have been turned on their heads.

And somehow, if you tell that truth — maybe it’s a harsh truth — you’re the villain. Clay, you’re the villain. I’m the villain if I believe that, if I say that, and I don’t understand that. I don’t understand this deep cultural rot. To me, to be real to your audience listening right now, that deep cultural rot is a greater threat to our nation than whoever gets elected president.

This is what sets America apart: This resilience, this strength; this ability to honestly push West, run the risk of getting scalped, reach the Pacific Ocean, and build civilizations! And if we’re going to sit here and vilify every aspect that made this country great, that’s the cultural rot that takes us down.

BUCK: Will, how much of the response…? Because people were really fired up about this, at least in the blue check social media world that a lot of us have to live in. People listening right now say, “Uh, glad I don’t have to deal with that all the time,” but we do. And we saw what the journos, sports and just general commentary folks were saying about this, and they were fiercely defending Simone Biles.

Is there a part of this where they’re taking this position because she’s a woman, she’s a very prominent millionaire athlete, African-American female? Is this just, we have to assume that there’s going to be people on the left who view this as an opportunity to show their identity politics credentials? How much of that factors into it?

WILL: Definitely. A good amount. There’s no doubt that most sports pundits paint by numbers. They see, “Oh, my gosh, look! Woman. African-American. Therefore, I champion, whatever they do.” Here’s what’s more fascinating. I think there’s something else going on. I’m curious to get your guys’ feedback on this. Mental health.

This is all such a weird thing when we get pushed into far corners. Mental health is real thing, right? We have to focus on mental health. But it’s also become this total Get Out of Jail Free card. Like, if you invoke mental health, no matter what decision or behavior you then initiate? Eh, no one can question it. Listen to the language we’ve adopted. “I need to focus on me. I need to put myself first.”

No! That’s not what we preach or believe, and if you just say, “But it’s in pursuit of my mental health.” “Oh. Well! Get out of jail free. No more questions asked. Celebrate pushing that to the forefront.” I don’t know what that’s about, Buck. I don’t know about the general, societal, “I never want to have a moment of accountability. I want to have that Good Will Hunting, ‘it’s not your fault’ hug at all moments.” I don’t know. I can believe that at the same time saying, “People struggle with mental health,” but it can’t be an excuse for anything and everything.

CLAY: I talked about yesterday, Will, that my 10-year-old — I used this as an example — he hurt his finger playing basketball, jammed it. I’m one of his Little League coaches. He plays shortstop. He’s one of our pitchers. He told me when we wanted to put him in to pitch, “My finger hurts too much. I can’t pitch.” He could hit and he could play shortstop.

We put another kid in; we ended up losing the game. After the game — and this goes to the point of lessons — I set him down and I said, “Look, I’m never going to be upset at you, whether you succeed or fail. But I expect 100% effort on behalf of your team at all time. You could have pitched and you chose not to. You’re ten. You learned a lesson,” and we had that conversation about sports as an opportunity to give credence and credit, not to results, but to effort.

WILL: Yes.

CLAY: And I feel like we’re losing that a lot. You hinted about that, a lot, Will. That’s why my kids play sports is to teach them those lessons, because they’re not going to be pros. But hopefully they apply those lessons going forward.

WILL: Yeah! I really… I’m shocked, Clay. You ran a ton of analogies out there, all of which are apropos. If Tom Brady threw an interception in the first quarter, yanked himself out of a massive game, and said, “Look, fellas, I just don’t have it today — and by the way, it’s not a physical injury. I just don’t have it today. I’m stressed. I don’t feel good about myself.

“I don’t feel confident for the rest of the three-quarters I’m going to play well. So back up, step up; it’s your game.” We would — rightfully — crush him. Because look, your son. You just laid out a physical thing that he was debilitated, right? A jammed finger or whatever, and you want to overcome that, too, based on the severity. But “stress,” and “I don’t have it today”? That’s the whole point of getting over things in sports, right? That’s foundational.

BUCK: Not that we are professional voice athletes here, Will.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: But I can take some degree of comparison, I think, where I’ve had to do radio shows with huge numbers of people listening when I’ve had traumatic things. I’ve had breakups in my life, emotional things. We’ve all had our stuff.

WILL: Yeah.

BUCK: Family member sick. Dog dies. Whatever it may be. And you don’t get… For our job, it wouldn’t be okay to say, “Well, I’m just not feeling like doing it today because of all the stress,” right?

WILL: Buck?

BUCK: No one is saying that Simone Biles can’t go get…

WILL: Buck, you and I have known each other —

BUCK: Sorry, Will. Go ahead.

WILL: I’m saying that you and I have known each other a long time, Buck. I think I probably know some things that happened in your life; you know some things that have happened in my life. Whether or not we have shared those publicly, if you did, your choice to be on the air that day — your choice to perform and do that duty in the face of that toughness — would be worthy of praise, right?

So, set aside whether or not we should be criticizing Simone Biles. The question is, “What kind of behavior and choices do we praise?” We praise the person that overcomes the difficulty. I thought that’s what we did. Now we’re saying, “We praise the person that gives in to the difficulty.” That is a very scary value to place at the top of our priority list going forward as a country, as a people.

BUCK: Check out the Will Cain Podcast, everybody, and obviously watch him on weekends where he is co-hosting Fox & Friends, also, with our good buddy, Pete Hegseth. By the way, Will, you gotta tell Pete he’s next up on deck here. We gotta get him on, okay?

WILL: Definitely I will.

BUCK: All right.

WILL: Yeah.

BUCK: Check out Will’s podcast. Thanks so much, Will.

WILL: See you, guys.

CLAY: Enjoy Hawaii.

BUCK: I don’t think we have to tell him that. I think he’s good there. I think he’s got that covered.

Recent Stories

Disinterest in the Olympics Exemplifies American Malaise

28 Jul 2021

Is anyone watching the Olympics?

As our resident sports guy, Clay mused that, “sports is a window through which society and our worldview are constantly colliding.” The Simone Biles story and the political posturing of some American Olympians have given even more people reason to tune out.

The Olympics used to focus all of us on the concept of American exceptionalism and the pursuit of excellence. How did our country stack up against the rest of the world? But many people don’t seem to care anymore. Clay wondered: “Is this the general malaise in America — that the Olympics are reflecting a general discontent in America, as a whole, in a way that they maybe haven’t in the past?”

Buck thinks covid restrictions, masks and fan-less stadiums have a lot to do with it: “If we had an Olympics last summer, it would have felt like an act of resiliency. And defiance against the virus. Now it feels like, we still can’t have a normal Olympics.”

However, we had a couple of callers who pushed back against the down-on-sports feeling. We heard from Joe, an inspiring football coach who overcame cancer in his youth, and Michael, who thinks not watching the Olympics and rooting for the U.S.A. is downright un-American.

Listen to Clay & Buck discuss our national Olympic malaise — and debate which host is the better American.

Recent Stories

Woke Virus Infects Elite Med Schools 

28 Jul 2021

Though calling someone “stupid” isn’t usually expected at elite medical schools, both Clay and Buck used the descriptor for those spreading the woke virus that is infecting many of those institutions.

Clay said that due to the unstoppable woke virus (and possible resulting lack of funding), professors, in fact, are “afraid of their students,” which is leading to a loss of freedom of speech from the faculty, even among those with “cushy jobs” at Ivy League universities.

Introducing the current controversy, Buck incredulously asked, “Can you say the word ‘woman’ in woke medical schools without having the mob come after you? They’re asking is there such a thing as men and women!”

The issue arose when students argued that their medical professors, as well as physicians in general, should not use the “offensive” term “pregnant woman,” since, they “ridiculously,” as Clay said, contended that men, too, can become pregnant.

They gave a nod to Bari Weiss, who in a viral resignation letter quit her op-ed position at the New York Times due to the woke bullying that she received, and introduced the preposterous pregnancy proposition in her uncensored Substack articles.

Buck said, although he and Clay are not medical professors, he’d be willing “to bet all the money in the world” that only women can get pregnant. “Let’s face it,” Clay declared. “Women have babies: It’s biology itself that is sexist! Men and women are different. This is madness on an epic scale!”

Some do speak out, such as Douglas Murray, British political commentator, of whom C&B played a fiery sound bite. The author, who has written previously about “pregnant trans men” and health care, was outraged that students can come into medical school thinking that it is women who become pregnant, but leave thinking men can become pregnant.

This is par for the course (medical and all others) since we are now living in a society where Facebook fact-checks opinion and no longer just concrete facts, Clay complained. “This all comes from a place of rejecting the truth,” Buck concurred. “’Your words make me feel unsafe.’ That’s what erodes free speech.”

What’s the impact of this? Clay wondered. Buck chimed in, “Bad medical outcomes? You bet!” And then described one where an overweight man who said he was pregnant came into a busy emergency room and robbed crucial time with his woke words rather than the truth.

Clay said the overall sickness is that this is just the latest proof that “science is broken in this country.”

Recent Stories

Rush: Why Don’t More Liberal Jews Support Israel?

28 Jul 2021

Be sure to listen daily to Rush’s Timeless Wisdom podcast here or on iHeartRadio. It’s absolutely essential information from America’s Forever Anchorman.

Recent Stories

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

28 Jul 2021

Recent Stories

Dems, Pelosi Republicans Kick Off “Insurrection” Hearings

27 Jul 2021

BUCK: As you may know, today is the first day of the January 6 hearings, and there will never be enough January 6 hearings for Democrats all across the spectrum. They use this, first and foremost, as a means of attacking all conservatives, all of their political opponents. This is not just about anybody who broke the law. It’s not about the riots that occurred that day.

This is about trying to defame and undermine — and, therefore, justify a narrative of perpetual offense against conservatism because we’re all supposed to be insurrectionists in their minds. That’s what this is about. This is about collective guilt. And it’s about distracting people from what has occurred under the Biden administration so far.

The things that actually affect your life right now, like the situation of the economy, our wide-open southern border, crime rising in the streets, dysfunction in the major population centers all across America. Democrats not seeming to have a clue about how to get anything done that’s actually good for the American people but, no! It’s much better to have Adam Schiff and others running around telling us that this is just like 9/11.

SCHIFF: Then, uhh, like now, there was some initial opposition of the Bush administration. They thought the — the commission might report negatively on how they didn’t stop 9/11 from happening. But there were enough people of goodwill in both parties to overcome that and come up with a bipartisan product.

But that Republican Party, uh, that was willing to do that in 2001 and 2002 is not Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Uh, had Kevin McCarthy been the leader then, there would have been no 9/11 Commission. Um, there would have been, y’know, an effort that — what? — uhhh, persuade the country that, what, it didn’t happen or it’s overblown or who knows what the explanation would have been.

BUCK: Clay, comparing January 6 to 9/11 is outrageous beyond words. It starts to get alongside, in terms of the exaggeration, when the former CIA director, I believe, said that what Trump was running at our southern border were akin to concentration camps for migrants.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: This is just crazy.

CLAY: It’s crazy, and I wonder how flat this is going to be fall in the general public at large. Right? I understand the idea of for the base, the Democratic Party painting this as an insurrection and everybody is crazy associated with supporting Donald Trump and the way that they’re going to play it. But I feel like this is going to land really flat. Certainly Republicans are gonna dismiss it as balderdash.

But I think independents — and I even think reasonable Democrats — are going to see this as such a vast overreach that I don’t think it’s going to register like Democrats believe it is going to register, and I certainly understand why they’re trying to change the topic, because look.

The truth of the matter is, the Democratic Party might need Donald Trump more than the Republican Party needs Donald Trump, because the Democratic Party has defined itself for so long as the opposition party to Donald Trump that when he is no longer in office, they need to continue to try to dredge and drag up the ghost of Donald Trump in order to kind of shake it out there for their otherwise disunited base to have something to unite on.

Does that make sense to you, Buck?

This is just a desperate attempt, it seems to me, to continue to find something connected to Donald Trump to try to rally they’re base as nothing else seems to be able to rally their base. We see it with CNN and MSNBC. People are turning out, turning off televisions, not paying attention. I also think it serves as a bit of a distraction for the ongoing $3.5 trillion budget that they’re trying to push through as well as all of the infrastructure bill. But this just feels like it’s gonna land flat in a major way.

BUCK: Well, it’s gonna keep going. So we’ll see this for today, the next few days and look at it and analyze it, and people that pay attention to politics will spend time talking about it. Will it really change any minds right now? No, and the midterms are a ways away. But it’s meant to be the installments of constant hysteria and perpetual outrage from the Democrats about what they call “the insurrection.”

And this, then, trains the Democrat base to think of Republicans not as Americans who belong to a different political party and have ideas about how best to reach a better future that differs sometimes from Democrats and that there have to be political compromises. No! “They’re insurrectionists. They’re bad people. You should just spit on them, not literally, but spit in their faces.”

CLAY: Sometimes literally.

BUCK: Well, sometimes literally.

CLAY: If you saw Tucker Carlson get confronted, we’re not very far from people say spit on them literally.

BUCK: The left has normalized that kind of behavior for a long time, of going up to people. They did it to Trump administration officials. I think that’s also a part of what’s so outrageous here. Just on the Tucker issue for a second: There are no Biden officials who get mobbed in restaurants by angry Trump supporters who get chased out of places in front of their children.

Nor do we have conservatives that follow people around when they’re on vacation with their family and act like psychopaths, and Democrats applaud this stuff. They call it “accountability culture.” By the same token, or rather in the same frame of mind here you look and we’re having a conversation, national conversation right now.

CNN and Fox, everything is leading in live coverage with the insurrection, investigate insurrection, Clay. This is the only riot that’s happened the last MS-13 where law enforcement officers were attacked? Is this the only riot where there were lethal incidents that occurred or where there was substantial property damage? No, of course not.

There was a major political narrative of BLM that started in June of 2020 in an election year that was so effective at spreading terror on the streets that businesses boarded up and prepared for absolute mayhem in case the preferred political party of those demonstrators did not win (i.e., Joe Biden). That’s what we actually saw, but that cannot be discussed.

Part of this was that is so disconnected from reality is that with if you’re looking at which political party routinely engages in harassment, political violence, and also defends it broadly… You don’t defend the people that broke the law that day on January 6. I don’t either.

You break the law; you pay the price. Democrats think that firebombing police cars is no big deal when it’s in the name of BLM. They think that trying to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland is no big deal when Antifa is doing it to “stop Trump’s fascism.” These people are nuts!

CLAY: It’s like also why the criminal justice system can’t play favorites based on the politics involved in breaking the law, and I think that’s significant because, Buck, what we saw during the lockdowns last year was when anybody protested the lockdowns, they were awful human beings trying to spread the virus and kill your grandmother.

As soon as those protests moved from being anti-lockdown to being in favor of Black Lives Matter, all of the — and I’m putting it in quotation marks — “scientists” changed their overall view on whether or not it was safe to be able to have mass gatherings of protesters. I think that broke, for many people, the lockdown hegemony, the idea that you should “listen to experts.”

The same thing is happening, I think, in our criminal justice system when you look at the prosecutions that are going on. In fact, this is being argued right now — and I think it’s being smartly argued — by one of the individuals who was arrested in the January 6th incident. He is pointing to the way that prosecutors have responded in Portland and saying, “Wait a minute.

“Why is my client being arbitrarily and capriciously punished to the full extent of the law in many ways and most of the people who are arrested for violating the federal courthouse in Portland are having all their charges dropped?” I think that’s a very valid and reasonable argument to make that points out the dichotomy here that most of our listeners are intelligent enough to get but most people in the media will not analyze or discuss.

BUCK: Also, the notion — and this was actually said repeatedly. I watched the hearings. Obviously, I’m on radio now; the hearings are still going on. But I watched them all morning, and there were some of the officers testifying. One in particular kept saying, “Nobody cares. Nothing is being done.”

Clay, to your point about the arbitrary examine capricious detention and the way the justice system treats Republicans versus treats leftists and Democrats and socialists, there are people who have been held in solitary confinement — allegedly for their own protection, but sure — for now, six months —

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: — who are guilty of no violent crime nor an attempt at what they could point to as a violent crime. Not a single person has been charged with what is under federal statute insurrection or rebellion, which they could if that’s really what happened, but they know they would lose on those charges and one of the police officers is saying there’s no accountability.

They’ve made hundreds of arrests. People are facing years if not decades in some cases in federal prison. People are… They’re pleading guilty to avoid a 10- or 15-year sentence for “obstruction of Congress.” Go see videos about what they did at the state capitol in Wisconsin during the Scott Walker era. They took the whole building over!

Obstruction is now something that people are facing 20 years in prison for? So we have to look at what the reality is here. Because, yes, something happened that should not have happened. It is not on the scale of 9/11. It’s an outrage to say that it is, and they’re going to continue. But to your point about what the purpose this year, they’re gonna keep this go. This is Russia collusion now.

This is the thing that they just feed to their base every night, and they just hope they can get enough people to feel like it’s socially unacceptable to vote Republican the next time around because of the “insurrection,” if they can keep their fingers on power here. Let’s go to back to the security component of this in a second, Clay, if we can.

CLAY: Yeah, I think that’s key, Buck, because the discussion should be, remember, Democrats were furious at the idea that the National Guard should be called in, that police should be mobilized to respond to riots. The most ridiculous thing about the response to January 6th is how immediately all of a sudden Democrats said, “Hey, you know what?

“Maybe we should call in the National Guard! Maybe we should bring in the military to help protect,” which is the argument that Tom Cotton made back in the summer that got the executive editor of the New York Times opinion page fired because they said it was an unsafe opinion to even share! That is, to me, one of the ultimate hypocrisies here among many.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: The hearing into the January 6th riots is underway. And, Buck, we were saying as we went to break that I think by far — and I think you agree with me — the most interesting part of January 6th is not the, quote-unquote, “insurrection.” It’s why was the Capitol so under-protected to allow this to occur?

How do you ensure that the Capitol is never unprotected like this to allow it to occur again? Because to me that’s the real story. They’re saying, “Oh, this could happen every four years! This could happen every two years.” That’s what they’re trying to sell to the American public. But if there had just been decent security outside of the Capitol, this wouldn’t have ever happened. Why is that not a bigger discussion point?

BUCK: Well, that’s also the fundamental falsehood that we see with all this, which is that this is about protecting the Capitol for the future and making sure that this is a lessons learned. This is not going to be a lessons-learned exercise. This is so Democrat members of Congress can go cry on TV about how the entire United States government was almost overthrown by a few hundred people who were unarmed and in a riot. That’s what it is. This is about launching —

CLAY: (laughing) — and often grandmas and grandpas.

BUCK: Adam Schiff and Adam Kinzinger and Jamie Raskin tear up and all the sudden invoke the founders. For their purposes, the founders are no longer bad racist guys, by the way. Now the founders are great.

CLAY: They’re heroes.

BUCK: The Democrats are gonna wrap themselves in the flag and they love them. “Oh, my gosh. George Washington is turning over in his grave because of what happened.” All this stuff you can expect from them. But to the point you’re making, Clay, about security, do you think you’re ever gonna find out — we still don’t know — who shot Ashli Babbitt? Do you think you’re gonna find out, that anyone’s going to get answers as to why Nancy Pelosi — who, remember, Capitol Police responds to Congress.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: There’s a weird setup that a lot of people didn’t know about until this whole thing happened. They didn’t take into account that there was all this concern about possibly violent rioting happening in the days before this, didn’t make any preparations, didn’t get the backup they needed?

I mean, there are levels of failure here from the security apparatus on Capitol Hill. Like that’s a real thing, and there will be no accountability. No one’s going to get in trouble or get fired for that. You’re just gonna watch Jamie Raskin cry and talk about how he doesn’t feel safe anymore when he looks at the American flag, because we almost lost democracy that day yada-yada.

Give me a break. Conservatives on January 6th were all saying, “Oh, my God. What’s this? It’s a terrible idea,” and then, of course, this is where you start to get into that Democrats would call it a “mostly peaceful protest” if it were BLM, because most of the people in D.C. — this is a fact — didn’t break any laws.

CLAY: Well, I also said — and I still believe — that if Trump had won reelection, there would have likely been a Democratic uprising in Washington, D.C. that would have been far larger than this and certainly would have been more expansive in terms of the number of states and cities that there were protests involved in. ‘Cause as you point out, Buck, that’s why they had plywood up all over the country on election night.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: It wasn’t because they hoped Biden was gonna win.

BUCK: Biden won, and nothing happened. Whether Biden did eventually get called the president and the election was called for him, there weren’t these riots out in the street. We all know what that was in preparation for… We’ll come back to this. At least Republicans some of them see this for what it is. Others are of course trying to get a pat on the head from Pelosi, which is just pathetic.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: You’ve got “Pelosi Republicans.” I actually like that term. I think that works pretty well. Adam Kinzinger — who looks like he’s about to cry at any moment as they discuss the riot on that day — and Liz Cheney, who just decided to go all-in. This is a remarkable thing, and you had this with the Never Trumpers and it continues today.

‘Cause again, the Never Trumpers are the same people who voted for impeachment against Trump. Oh, that’s right, Clay! There was an impeachment over this thing already so we’ve already —

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: There hasn’t been an investigation they say now.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: But we already had an impeachment hearing over this where they said they had enough to know that a sitting president should be removed or rather barred from holding future office. Man, it’s just the weaponization of a political narrative. The whole thing is a sham.

People are going to prison who assaulted officers probably longer than they should, based on what would happen in other circumstances if this were a Democrat situation and they’re just gonna keep acting like this is the defense of our republic and our democracy after they let American cities burn for months and could care less. That’s the reality.

CLAY: To your point, Buck, I think we’re getting a major narrative thing here. It’s not only just going on in the world of politics. This morning — you’re gonna love this, Buck; I’m just seeing one of our writers at Outkick is covering it — one of the ESPN journalists said that he couldn’t enjoy the Olympics because it reminded him of the Capitol riots when he saw the U.S. flag at the Olympics. One of ESPN’s highest paid employees… This is the talking points now. So, this is pretty wild. But I think welcome to the upside-down world. It’s pretty crazy. I mean, it really is.

BUCK: And they’re saying things like it’s like 9/11. In fact, there have been abject morons on MSNBC who have said it’s worse —

CLAY: Worse!

BUCK: — than 9/11 in terms of its long-term implications, which is beyond offensive how stupid and offensive that is but they’ll even say the ones who are less insane. “Oh, it’s the worst attack on Congress since the War of 1812 when the British marched through D.C. and burned down the White House. ”

They forget about the 1954 shooting in the House Chamber where you had three men and won one month enter who all belonged to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. They traveled from New York City to Washington D.C. on that day and they opened fire on the House gallery. So I think it’s important to remember that they’re wrong on that. Five congressmen, five members of Congress were wounded in that shooting, Clay.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: They’re wrong on the facts. They’re wrong on the narrative. They’re wrong on their surrealist interpretation of what the implications are of that day, and it’s just appalling. That any Republican would play along with this when we all know exactly what’s going on here is too much. The Liz Cheneys, they’re gonna switch parties or they’re just again end up consulting for a Democrat think tank when the voters kick their butts out of office. That’s what’s gonna end up happening.

CLAY: Well, and that’s 100% what’s gonna end up happening. And to me I just circle back around to this. I think it’s well said, when you pointed out (laughing) we did have an entire impeachment trial that looked at this in excruciating detail. And the biggest question that’s still out there, if you truly want to stop this from him happening again, Buck?

What you have to do is figure out what kind of security apparatus are we going to have at the Capitol to ensure that doesn’t happen again, right? I mean that’s the only thing that should matter going forward. And, oh, by the way, I would suggest, let’s also go ahead and start holding everybody accountable for all of the violence that took place in what, frankly, is the most violent year, 2020, of many of our lives when it comes to criminal behavior.

And we’re talking about a tiny subset of the criminal behavior and not even discussing all the people that are being let go because of their political leanings during months of, as we well established, mostly peaceful protests.

BUCK: And yet do we think there’s anyone who is facing…? Remember when Trump signed or had the executive order that they were gonna prosecute people from destruction of federal property, which can be up to 10 years? Is there anybody from all those riots all across the country that involved the destruction of federal property that involved mob riots, mob behavior? Remember Rand Paul walking out from the White House —

CLAY: Oh yeah.

BUCK: — and being mobbed with his wife and people assaulting and yelling at them, you know, there’s no accountability on the other side. And then they turn around, the Democrats turn around and look at us. I was furious on January 6th ’cause, one, it was wrong.

CLAY: You knew what was coming.

BUCK: And two, it was a blunder.

I said this on Tucker’s show that night at the time. This has enormously damaged the conservative cause. Their side… They don’t even care about the riots they excuse. “Eh, sometimes you gotta riot. We gotta intimate our political opponents.

“We gotta put our Democrat shock troops with Antifa and BLM activists out on the streets. We have to make store owners afraid! We have to make cops feel like they don’t have the public support anymore for their job we have to destabilize society so we can remake it as revolutionaries.” That’s what they’re trying to do.

CLAY: That’s what they did. That’s basically what Maxine Waters said, and this is where, I think, this leads! So far, we haven’t gotten there but it’s a good discussion and an unfortunate one that I think we probably should have, Buck, but there’s that video that happened with Tucker Carlson which we mentioned a little bit earlier in the program.

When you are confronting people in public in those situations, what you are doing is making people believe that the right thing to do is to have confrontations. And when you have confrontations at some point what happens? Like, to his credit, Tucker Carlson laughed off being confronted like he was. But Democrats…

And we already know the shooting that happened in Alexandria of Steve Scalise that nobody wants to talk about at all. It just disappears. People talking about Charlottesville all of the time. Nobody talks about Ashli Babbitt hardly. It’s amazing what gets memory-holed and what doesn’t in the media’s recollections and their stories.

But I think where we’re headed — and I think this is wildly unfortunate, but I think the temperatures of the day are going to lead to it — is a violent act being perpetrated against someone (media, politics, in that vein) entirely based on their political beliefs and the idea that being on “the right side of history” justifies behavior such as that. That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t know how much fear you have for a situation like that emerging, but I am very, very much afraid that a situation like that is coming. And I think it’s wildly unfortunate.

BUCK: You brought up the congressional baseball shooting of 2017.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: How many people right now listening could name that shooter off the top of their heads? How many people could even remember some of the basic details? That was pushed aside — pushed aside in a matter of days.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You had a Bernie Sanders supporter named James Hodgkinson screaming, “This is for health care,” as he at the same time a mass assassination of specifically conservative members of Congress.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He had a hit list on him, and he was looking for specifically conservatives. Do we all go around, “Oh, my gosh. All the rhetoric from the Democrats, they’re all guilty too”? Did we “wave the bloody shirt” about that shooting so to speak? Did we all pretend like everyone’s guilty? No, we did not. But that’s not how Democrats play the game. It’s very different now.

Clay, you know this. If you’re somebody who’s got neighbors who are gonna try to pressure you in the midterms or if Trump runs again, they’re gonna say, “How could you vote for the insurrectionists?”

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: This is just like it was the Russia traitor, even though that was all a lie. At least this actually happened, but they’re making this a much bigger deal than it was and we all know it.

Recent Stories