BUCK: Even some liberals, some of the libs out there are getting tired with how dishonest the wokeness can be and what it means for critical issues of public debate. Bill Maher, who is sometimes a heterodox guy ideologically — he’s a man of the left, but he does get tired of the insane wokeness and will sometimes say things that I gotta say, as a conservative, you go, “Ah, he’s actually right about that.” Here he is on how wokeness will get people killed when it comes to the origins of covid.

MAHER: You said, “It doesn’t get anybody killed.” I think it does. Defunding the police, I think, came from wokeness, and I think it will get people killed.

CROWD: (applause)

MAHER: Wait a second. The Spectator says that the New York Times refused to investigate what they called “the biggest story of our time.” They’re talking about where the virus originated. Maybe it was in the Wuhan lab. Because they suppressed efforts to probe the virus’ origins for among reasons because they thought it was racist. You see, because everything is race — come on — at the New York Times. And so “the paper of record” is not reporting what I would expect “the paper of record” to report: The accurate news. That is an example of the power of wokeness.

BUCK: I mean, what an intellectual betrayal, Clay, for the New York Times. Just for people who work in the information and allegedly journalism sphere to say, “We can’t report on the truth of the Wuhan lab leak because racism”?

CLAY: It’s the biggest story maybe in our lives. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, depending. There are people out there who lived through World War II and have been through American history that may be bigger. But for people out there that are 50 or younger I would say, covid is the biggest story of our lives and where covid came from. And, by the way, how to try to keep covid from happening again is the biggest story of our lives.

And the New York Times won’t cover it because some of the details might be uncomfortable to them. I mean, this is like the whole thing… We’re calling it the Delta variants now, but we can’t even mention the parts of the world that viruses come from now because it might be racist to even suggest where they came from. This is madness.

BUCK: We’re gonna have to rename all of them too. We’re gonna have to rename Zika and Ebola and go down the list, right?

CLAY: Spanish Flu.

BUCK: Spanish Flu, which actually wasn’t even really in Spain, but that’s a whole other thing.