Pelosi on the Budget: Let’s Not Talk Numbers

27 Sep 2021

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CLAY: Buck, we have got a big week on Capitol Hill. The debt ceiling is in play. The $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, the infrastructure bill which has already been passed, that one has, by the Senate. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, told us that she was gonna vote on it today.

In fact, she promised to the moderate members of her caucus that she would. They now have bounced it back to Thursday, and I don’t know if this is gonna happen, Buck. But the entire Biden legislative regime of bills has the possibility of collapsing right here and now.

BUCK: Pelosi, as you mentioned, has had to back off a little bit on this. I’d also note for everybody that we really should be thinking about this as $5 trillion of additional spending. Just bounce that one around. They keep saying the $1 trillion of infrastructure, $3.5 trillion, you know, plus able to say here and there. We’re looking at basically a $5 trillion spending package.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is on top of the other expenditures, this is on top of the covid money that’s already been spend. I mean, to put it in perspective, when Obama was doing his stimulus package, it was just shy of a trillion dollars, I think, was what the original number was. And that led to the Tea Party movement. We’re talking about $5 trillion here, give or take, in new spending.

And we’re acting like, “Oh, well! I guess this will just not have some massive inflationary on the economy.” Here’s wait they want to try to justify this Clay which is what I want to get to. Somehow this is not gonna cost anything — or if it does cost something, it’s only gonna be those evil rich people.

PELOSI: Chuck Schumer and I and Secretary Yellen the other day came forward in a precedent and said that we have reached a framework of agreement. People said, “What are the specifics?” Well, we’ll see what we need. We’ll see how the number comes down and what we need in that regard. But we have agreed on an array of pay-fors in legislation.

This will be paid for — and that’s the beauty of it — by those in our economy and society have not paid their fair share paying their fair share. So again, the Senate and the House, those are who are not in full agreement with president’s rate, let’s see what our val… Let’s not talk about numbers and dollars. Let’s talk about values.

CLAY: By the way, you’re not married yet, Buck, but just take that last sentence. If your wife comes home to you and we ask, “Hey, how much are we gonna spend on Christmas presents this year?” and she says, “Let’s not talk about numbers. Let’s talk about values.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let’s talk about numbers.

BUCK: This is a budget bill! It’s not like we’re talking about health care or something where they want to avoid the cost, the price tag, this is an actual spending bill. And Nancy Pelosi says, “Let’s not talk about dollars. Let’s talk…” No, let’s talk about the dollars, Nancy Pelosi, ’cause there’s a lot of them, almost $5 trillion!

CLAY: Let’s think about this. In normal life, Buck, if you were saying, “Hey, we’re thinking about buying a new car,” which everybody out there at some point in their life has done. Everybody may want the… I don’t know. I’m not a huge car guy. But let’s just say you want the Range Rover, right? Might cost $130,000.

Most people don’t spend $130,000 on a car. So if you said, “Hey, what’s our budget?” and one of the spouses — ’cause sometimes men are clueless, sometimes women are clueless when it comes to household budgets. Just about everybody out there has got somebody in their family who has no clue how to spend money and they said, “Let’s talk about the values that we want in a car. We gotta buy a new house! Let’s not talk about the cost of the house. Let’s talk about the values that we want in the new house.”

BUCK: “Does this house care enough about climate change? That’s really the key. I want to know! Is this a house that believes in equal pay? Let’s not worry about the original payment, honey.” Totally agree. But Nancy here, this is… Clay, they’re actually saying… This whole notion of “pay for,” it’s called taxes.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: They’re going to be taxing you.

CLAY: The largest tax increase ever.

BUCK: They’re going to be taxing you heavily, thoroughly, across the board in so many ways. There will be costs that are passed on to you even if you’re not affected by this. But when they’re talking about raising capital gains to the income rate —

CLAY: Existing tax rate.

BUCK: — the existing tax rate on income, that’s gonna have a huge implication on investment and people’s willingness to put money forward into that, which also has a huge implication for starting new businesses, for growing businesses. Clay, you very successfully started and sold a business, right? These are things that people are gonna have to think differently about. The notion that it’s… The other thing, Clay, is they say it has no cost.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They keep saying, “There’s no cost.” This is Crazy Town. What they’re saying is, “It’s not going to be added to the debt in the way that you think because we’re going to tax people so heavily.” That’s the cost!

CLAY: Yeah. And look. Democrats have a childlike understanding of basic economic issues. Their new policy is effectively “money grows on trees.” That’s their policy. That’s Modern Monetary Policy. You can agree or disagree with, for instance, the Trump tax cuts, but the logic there is very sound in the context of what Reagan economics was.

You lower the tax rate, you increase the overall growth rate, you put more money to work, and the tax revenues pay for itself, right? This is a theory that was born out with the Trump tax cuts. This is what’s so frustrating, I think. And I know there’s a lot of you out there who understand this, too, but I don’t think an argument gets made very well.

The Trump tax cuts worked fabulously well. In January and February of 2020, we were seeing real income grow across the entirety of the country. The black unemployment rate was at an all-time low. The Hispanic unemployment rate was at an all-time low.

The profit margins were being reinvested based on these tax cuts. And then covid hit. And so, it was like a meteor all the sudden hit right as all of the excellence of the Trump tax cut plan was coming into its essence, and it’s as if that didn’t even exist and it wasn’t working, and Democrats have abandoned this.

BUCK: When was the last time…? When you think back to what the country was doing in, say, 2019, pre-pandemic America in Trump’s first term, in 2019, I think it’s difficult to think of a more prosperous, stable, good time in America.

CLAY: It was Reagan-like.

BUCK: Remember, the great fear that everyone was supposed to have was over the imaginary Russian Kremlin theft of the election.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That was the thing that kept —

CLAY: That was the bogeyman.

BUCK: — insane liberals up at night. Now it’s that they might be outside with two masks on breathing fresh air. But at the time it was the Russia collusion madness because there was… Clay, if they had had a border crisis, the Afghan debacle, inflation rising, 30% rise in murders, the highest in history under Trump, we would have heard about that stuff nonstop.

One of the reasons we heard so much about Russia — the Russia collusion fantasy, fable, the myth — was because they had nothing else out there? What else were they gonna say? “We hate all this peace and prosperity and American Greatness that people are feeling; oh, it’s so terrible”? Although there are libs that actually feel that way.

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Forever Vaccines, Brought to You by Pfizer©

27 Sep 2021

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ALBERT BOURLA: I believe that within a year, I think we will be able to come back to normal life. I don’t think that this means that variants will not continue coming, and I don’t think that this means that we should be able to live our lives without having vaccinations, basically.

But that, again, remains to be seen. The most likely scenario for me, is that because the virus has spread all over the world, that we will continue seeing new variants that are coming out, and also we will have vaccines that will last at least a year. And I think the most likely scenario is annual vaccinations. But we don’t know, really. We need to wait and see the data.

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. There you had the Pfizer CEO. Some of that might have been a little tough to catch, but the Pfizer CEO saying, “We’re gonna get back to normal in about a year or so. There will be variants, though. There will be covid forever and you’re gonna get shots forever.”

I’ve gotta say, the guy who is running the company that has made tens of billions of dollars already from these shots and is setting itself up to make tens of billions more… Clay, this is quite a situation. Now it’s the acceptance of not only Forever Covid — which we were told we wouldn’t have to accept but we said we would, we knew we would — to forever boosters as well. Look at that.

CLAY: I’m skeptical any time the best-case scenario for a company is that you have to use the company’s product forever. And we call them medical experts! I’m just gonna say. If I got to… From a pure capitalistic perspective, if I said, “Hey, every radio station in the country has to play the Clay and Buck show from 12 to 3 Eastern, 9 to noon on the West Coast, every day, and we get a monopoly, or else I’m afraid public health will suffer”?

I think most people out there would say, “I’m not sure that I trust Clay Travis’ radio expertise there, ’cause it benefits him an awful lot that we can only hear him.” Do you think maybe the Pfizer CEO saying, “Hey, you’re gonna have to get vaccines every year, maybe forever in order protected yourself from covid” maybe you should just have a little alarm bell going in the back of your head and say, “Hey, that’s hundreds of billions of dollars they’re making.”

BUCK: I’m not sure he’s totally objective on whether we as a society should do this.

CLAY: Yeah, maybe a little.

BUCK: Remember he’s talking about globally, folks, global vaccination campaign —

CLAY: Forever.

BUCK: — every single year for the rest of your life for a virus that as the previous epidemiologist from Yale medical school we just had on pointed out, once you’ve had it, you’re basically going to be fine once you’ve cleared it. So why would you keep getting vaccines and vaccines? Maybe this goes to — on some level, Clay — why we don’t get to talk about natural immunity very much ’cause there’s not a lot of incentive for a lot of folks to talk about it.

CLAY: How about the fact he said 70% of people he thought had natural immunity?

BUCK: Yeah. I’ve been thinking it’s about 200 million that have been infected for a while now. But I don’t have an MD; that guy does.

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FBI Informant Destroys the Left’s “Insurrection” Narrative

27 Sep 2021

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BUCK: Clay, I want you to do a little lawyering here for us.

CLAY: Yeah?

BUCK: Here’s what we know. “Among Those Who Marched into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant.” This is not from RightWingCrazy.com. This is the New York Times. So LeftWingCrazy.com, actually.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: “A member of the far-right Proud Boys texted his FBI handler during the assault, but maintained the group had no plan in advance to enter the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.” Here’s just a little bit of this: “As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on January 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.

“The recipient was his FBI handler. … In the informant’s version of events, the Proud Boys … were largely following a pro-Trump mob consumed by a herd mentality rather than carrying out any type of preplanned attack.” Gee, it sounds like people got carried away in a big crowd and engaged in a riot, not an insurrection to overthrow the United States government. Gee, that’s kind of what it sounds like to me, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah. And again, I would say that the number one story to me about in the riot on January 6th is, one, how much different this has been treated than months of Black Lives Matter riots which were “mostly peaceful protests” as we’ve long been told. But a failure of security, right, because it wasn’t as if the people who ended in the Capitol… We’ve seen the videos that came out, by the way, last week and got very limited attention mostly showing people walking around taking selfies inside like tourists as opposed to people who were trying to overthrow the government.

BUCK: If you made a video of people walking around your standard art museum, it would have looked like this.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I’m not saying the whole thing but that video that was released people kind of milling about sort of taking a selfie, standing around, looking around, not exactly an insurrection.

CLAY: Right, and many of these entrances were not even overrun. It was like the police just said, “Okay, we’re not even gonna fight over this” —

BUCK: They strolled in!

CLAY: — and stepped out of the way. So the doors were open. There’s a big mass of people that are going in, and you go in and you take a picture. I bet a lot of those people had never been in the United States Capitol before. Now, did some people take the step beyond that and deserve to be charged with crimes? Yes, in the same way that so many people deserve to be charged with crimes in the Black Lives Matter protests that occurred for months all over this country.

And, by the way, Buck, the officially the news has come out — we talked about this, I believe, on Thursday or Friday — what the FBI data was going to say for 2020. Well, now it’s officially official and we had the largest increase in murders in the history of the country since 1960.

BUCK: And it’s so important that everyone remember, it’s not really the increase in murders in the year 2020. It’s the increase in murders starting in June for six months!

CLAY: Yes, ’cause they’re gonna try to blame covid.

BUCK: They’re gonna say that somehow covid is the reason for this.

CLAY: Which actually would work against it because we were under the rate of murder because so many cities were locked down in March, April and May until the George Floyd protest started, there was no massive increase in murder at all.

BUCK: It’s very straightforward. When one political party, which is the Democrat Party in this country, embraces a narrative of both lawlessness and victimology at the hands of cops, very bad things happen — and disproportionately happen in high crime, majority minority neighborhoods in major cities. That is the reality. They can try to say other things as much as they want.

CLAY: Thousands of mostly young black residents of inner cities are dead now — thousands — that would not have been dead otherwise, probably.

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President Trump Is Out There Fighting

27 Sep 2021

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CROWD: (chanting) We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you. And I love you too. You’re incredible people.

BUCK: He’s out there, folks. He’s still fighting. Hasn’t decided to give it up. Not even a little bit. In fact, the more I talk to people… Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. This is Buck. The more I talk to people from President Trump’s orbit, the more I’m hearing he’s running. It’s just a question of who the team is gonna be around him, who the vice president would be. But I’m hearing that it’s…

I’ve had people tell me it’s a hundred percent in their minds at this point now, it’s obviously not a hundred percent until he declares, which is not gonna happen as we talked about so many times before until after the midterms one would think. But there is an electricity at the Georgia National Fairgrounds over the weekend as President Trump was rallying for a bunch of candidates who are running for office in 2022.

But Trump is just back out there doing what he does, and one thing — especially given there’s a lot of focus right now on whether anybody is allowed to talk about the Arizona audit, the Arizona ballot audit. A lot of people say you can’t. You can’t talk about it. Even on some conservative networks, even on some platforms that you would think would be more open to conservative points of view, Republican points of view, pro-Trump points of view.

Trump was reminding everybody over the weekend about how the people that claim the right — whether it’s on social media or just in general in our society — to determine the boundaries of acceptable political conversation were the same ones who lied about Russia and also are pushing January 6th as an insurrection.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: That’s what’s goin’ on with Russia! They made up a hoax, and we had to live with it for three years. What kind of a sick, perverted mind does that? And it was the lawyer and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, they made it up. It was a hoax. And now they’re doing it again with the January 6th. Okay? They’re doing it again. They’re doing it again. We went through three years of hell battling this fake charge that was only allowed to happen because the media was complicit — as they always are — for the Democrats.

BUCK: They always are, Clay. That’s for sure.

CLAY: I gotta a question for you, Buck. Two questions. One — and I agree. Everybody that I am talking to says Trump’s gonna run too. So at this point I think it would be a big upset if he decided not to run in 2024. Who do we think is his best possible vice-presidential candidate? ‘Cause not gonna be Pence. And then…

Maybe we could talk about that when we come back for the next segment. Let’s tease that. We’ll pause it. But I want to ask you this question. Has it actually worked to Trump’s favor that he is banned by all these Big Tech platforms? And let me explain my thesis, and you tell me if I’m a mad genius or just crazy. Everybody already has an opinion about Donald Trump — pro or con, every single person in the entire United States.

I believe — and I know there’s people who disagree — that one of the reasons why Trump antagonized people in the medal of the country that… By middle of the country I don’t necessarily mean middle part of the country, although that certainly factors in, but people in the middle of the political spectrum, was they just got tired of the incessant drumbeat of his Twitter.

And the reality is, most media are lazy and not particularly smart. But Donald Trump’s tweets gave them easy stories to talk about and write about without having to do work. When he’s doing these rallies, you gotta sit and watch him talk for two hours to have a storyline associated with it. So, if everybody already has an opinion about Trump, is he actually getting more favorable treatment because it’s not a daily drumbeat of tweets? Instead it’s the overall end result of Trump within which was right, right? A lot of people liked where Trump got. They didn’t necessarily like the bull-in-a-china shop, day-to-day existence of Trump administration.

BUCK: They had some trepidation about his style.

CLAY: So could he actually be helped by not having daily thoughts on Twitter, hourly thoughts on Twitter in some way? Is this a crazy idea or do you buy into it?

BUCK: It’s interesting. I would say a couple things.

CLAY: ‘Cause because it makes him a martyr, too.

BUCK: See, here’s where I wanted to go. The overall narrative… This is what I think you’re opening up, and I would agree on this point, ’cause I actually think that the Trump tweets were also… We kind of think of all as good or bad. There were days that those Trump tweets were incredible, and the fact that he was able to take his message directly to the people and not have to go through, say, a Lester Holt interview or a Fake Tapper interview or whatever.

CLAY: Yes, and I think that was massive in ’16, but now everybody’s kind of got an opinion of Trump already.

BUCK: So here’s what I’d say. This whole notion of Trump being kicked off of social — and there are some conservative platforms now that are essentially conservative mirror images of Twitter that are out there that are gaining some traction. I’m on some. But it proves the system is rigged. By Trump being banned from Facebook and Twitter when these are the most powerful media platforms in the country, shows beyond doubt the system is rigged.

Full stop, okay? And they do it in the open now. They don’t play any games or, I should say, they can’t play the same kind of games they used to when, “Oh, it was an accident when we ban conservatives.” And it’s also a reminder of how people saw Trump in the early days when he started what felt like so improbable campaign to end up winning the presidency in 2016.

And it was that he was considered a blunt force instrument against the apparatus of elite control. And especially given what we are seeing right now, the country we are living in and what the possibilities are of this continuing and even getting worse. Australia, we think of it as the U.K. with better weather and nicer people. Australia is now East Germany with koalas. They have completely lost their minds, right? Like they’re on another planet.

CLAY: They’re tackling random moms and dads who are just out walking in the streets doing nothing at all wrong.

BUCK: If you are not wearing a mask and you’re out where you’re not supposed to be in broad daylight, they will have police officers wrestle you, face plant you into the cement, and take you into handcuffs in front of your own child.

CLAY: Australia is where America would be if we didn’t have federalism and Republican governors.

BUCK: That’s right. If we didn’t have Ron DeSantis and a few other Republican governors who are able to hold the line against the complete madness, we would be in a similar situation. ‘Cause the Fauciites see it, and you never see criticism. They never decry it. Do you ever see people on the left who are like, “You should mask, you should mask,” who say, “Australia, a little crazy”?

They don’t criticize it. They don’t have a problem with it. But Trump, again, was our sledgehammer against people like Fauci, who pretend they have all these credentials and they’re so smart and they do such a good job. But then they actually stink at their jobs. And they’re little, petty tyrants. And they have bad outcomes. And then they try to blame us ’cause we didn’t mask up enough or whatever.

So that’s why one of the reasons why I think Trump is… We talk about the social media thing, and I just want to throw this in here too. Trump realizes that the social media battle is central to the political future of this country. So he started… There was a “lock him up” chant targeting Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve never heard this before. This was a first time to hear anything like this one.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Officials also took $45 million from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to fund “election-related activities.”

CROWD: (booing) Lock him up! Lock him up!

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, they should be looking at that. What is that all about?

BUCK: The sledgehammer, Clay, I want the Trump hammer, the sledgehammer back.

CLAY: And the other thing I should add in here, Biden and Trump are statistically tied in favorability right now. Pretty crazy, right? ‘Cause Biden ran his entire campaign on normalcy, on not creating a stir. And I wonder whether this is having a reverse impact. Just kind of put it in the back of your mind and think about it.

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Why Are We Still Testing for Covid?

27 Sep 2021

Listen Here:

CLAY: Buck, on Friday we spent some time talking about the ladies of The View, two of them testing positive for covid. They very memorably got their positive covid test in the middle of the show. They had a producer walk out, remove them from the set. They also were interviewing Kamala Harris — and, of course, Kamala came out and criticized the U.S. border security for using whips.

Obviously, that did not occur. But she and Joe Biden have both been passing that along. And now just in the last, what, hour or so they have found out that the positive covid tests they got are actually of a negative nature. They didn’t actually have covid. So, here’s a big question for you, Buck — and I think it’s a good one. Why are we still really testing for covid?

Let me give you an example here. I have never tested positive for covid. I’ve been tested many times. Probably seven, eight, nine, 10 times. I know I had covid. I have covid antibodies. I suspect that I had covid when I had a small fever, but I may have had it as far back as at the Super Bowl because I came back and I was actually sick for a few days then, and we now know covid was circulating in Miami.

BUCK: You had antibodies, right? You’re not one of these people who’s, “I had a sniffle so I had covid,” right?

CLAY: No, I had covid. But the reason why I know is I have antibodies. I know. But I never went and got a positive test because I was like, “Well, if I start feeling bad and I need to be treated…” But in my entire life I’ve never had a positive test for the flu, for instance. I’ve certainly had the flu. And when I feel crappy, I stay home. Fortunately, I’ve had pretty good health over the last 20-some-odd years.

But I don’t remember for any other illness going and having a test to see whether or not I had it. Now, when I was a kid, strep throat tests? Okay. But I’ve had the flu a bunch of times like most people out there have. I’ve never gotten a positive test for it. The reason why I’m asking this is, since we know so many covid cases are asymptomatic, how many people are like The View? They have a positive covid test, they never have it, and they are isolating themselves in their homes for however long and it’s completely unnecessary?

BUCK: There’s also a lot of information we just should have and don’t about how much of a spreader are you if you’re asymptomatic, how long are you contagious? Remember we used to have these things? They would say, “Oh, for about seven days. Oh, then it’s 10 days,” and then it was two weeks, and then it was 10 days again. They used to try to tell us —

CLAY: I don’t even know what the number is now of how long you’re supposed to quarantine when you test positive.

BUCK: I think you’re supposed to quarantine for 10 days.

CLAY: Is that the number now? They moved it around, like you said.

BUCK: This is what I mean, right? I don’t worry about it ’cause I already had covid, so I’ve got that natural immunity up here in the Clay and Buck show. But look. I think that having these kinds of tests and having this testing going on continuously is of limited utility. You’ll notice that they’ve actually started to talk again… By the way, there are pop-up sites now all over my neighborhood. If you walk around Midtown Manhattan which is where I live and work —

CLAY: To get tested for covid you just go?

BUCK: — there are pop up sites, pop-up sites for covid all over the place. They are preparing as though we are going into a winter… I’m just gonna say this. They are making preparations as though we’re going into a winter where we don’t have 65% of the population vaccinated and, therefore, at very little risk of hospitalization and death, as well as 150 million, give or take — 20 or 50 million, who knows? — who have had covid.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: We should be feeling much, much better about this in so many ways. But all you have to do is see the way they’re setting up all these testing sites and just the bureaucracy around this. I mean, Clay, there are universities where you have to test every week, even if you are vaccinated, just as a matter of course! They’re making people do this. I know at Duke they’re doing it. There’s some other schools that are doing it, too.

CLAY: We were making fun of Stanford because they have 100% vaccination rate on campus and then they’re still requiring you, if you are in the campus gym, to be wearing a mask while you play basketball on run on a treadmill. So everything that you were sold and that we were sold by the Biden administration, “Hey, get your vaccine!

“You’ll never have to worry about testing positive, you’ll never have to worry about going to the hospital, you’ll never have to worry about dying with covid.” That’s not true, such that Joe Biden just right now live on television, Buck, we talked about on Friday that he would get it soon. Well, he went ahead and got it, he got his covid booster shot as a, what, 78-year-old, I believe. He went ahead and got that done. And the question that’s hanging out there — and I think it’s a good one — is how many more booster shots are you gonna have to get?

BUCK: This is gonna be years. People are gonna do this for years now. There are gonna be those who just accept that they’re gonna get their covid shot. And, by the way, I think it could be every six months, not even every year. They’re just gonna try to top off my immunity, top off my immunity, as if —

CLAY: And, by the way, at some point that starts to decline in effectiveness.

BUCK: Yeah, of course! Also, at some point these are your immune systems, folks! We shouldn’t be just rolling the dice on some of this stuff with our sixth or seventh shot.

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Maher vs. Whoopi on the Black National Anthem

27 Sep 2021

Listen Here:

BILL MAHER: Two weeks ago, I opined that it was fine to get rid of the old anthem. We just shouldn’t have two. The program The View last week devoted a lot of time to this, while somehow avoiding what I actually said. It seemed to be a lot about a need to school me on the “black national anthem” itself.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

MAHER: Whoopi Goldberg said we need two anthems because, quote, “We’re having to reeducate people,” because nothing ever goes wrong when you start talking about “reeducation.”

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause)

MAHER: Just ask Chairman Mao. If we have two anthems, why not three or five? Why not a woman’s anthem, a Latino anthem, a gay, trans, indigenous peoples and Asian-Pacific islander anthem?

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton show.

CLAY: Good point.

BUCK: And that was Bill Maher who… Look, he’s a leftist, and if you listen to him enough (chuckles), he’s gonna upset a lot of conservatives with much of what he says. But occasionally, occasionally — and actually not even that rarely — he says something, ’cause he knows wokeness is self-destroying and corrosive and ultimately self-defeating for the left because it consumes its own.

It always well, and that’s what it will devolve into. That’s why when you mention thing is like Mao and the Cultural Revolution and you look at what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution — something that’s not taught in this country really at all in our history classes. People don’t learn about this, because of the affinity for socialism and communism that so much of academia has.

They don’t tell you the truth about this stuff. But the notion of a multiple-anthem country or of having multiple anthems in America should be so obviously absurd and yet, Clay, people think that this is the way the country should go forward. Can you imagine if a different group came forward and said, “We need to have our own anthem,” how the left would react?

I think it obviously depends on the group. But how the left would react to that. I mean, you know, it’s a little bit like you can only say as we’ve been told by the wokeness, Black Lives Matter. You say any other lives matter —

CLAY: Get fired.

BUCK: — and you are diminishing BLM and you’re diminishing black lives. So do they get…? I think it would be fascinating. He makes a good point. But do you think if someone came forward and said, “We need a Latino-American national anthem” that that would go over well? I wonder. I think probably not.

CLAY: First of all, I think Bill Maher’s been red pilled. I really do.

BUCK: Uh… Uh, Clay?

CLAY: Honestly, I do.

BUCK: A little. Clay, I gotta… A little bit red pilled, like a tiny sliver of it.

CLAY: I think that comedians should be red pill proponents because you can’t be a great comic unless you push the bounds, typically — push the bounds — of acceptable norms in society. That is where comedy thrives is on, dare we say, the penumbra of acceptability. And the censorious nature that we live in now where people say, “Oh, I’m offended by that joke!”

It’s the antithesis of everything that standing up on the stage with a mic represents. Whether you’re a black comic like the guy, Kevin Hart, who just lost of Oscars ’cause of old jokes, or whether you’re a white comic who is also getting raked over the coals. And to your point, Buck, we did this on the OutKick the Coverage radio program.

I thought it was so ridiculous when they started playing the black national anthem that rather than respond with outrage or indignation, I went after humor, and so we created our own anthem, as Bill Maher just reflected. We had an OutKick national anthem that we played which featured the black national anthem, the white national anthem, the Hispanic national anthem, the Asian national anthem, the women’s national anthem — and the gay, straight, trans, LGBT, whatever Justin Trudeau couldn’t say last week Anthem. We had all six of those and we rolled it together in a comedic fashion. Mix tape.

BUCK: There we go.

CLAY: That’s the way, to me, you ridicule it. If you get upset, the people are like, “Oh, you’ve got white fragility! You’re unable… Oh, you’re racist for even thinking of this.” No, no. The way you ridicule the idea of a national anthem and a black national anthem is by expanding it to its logical conclusion, which is Asian people deserve their anthem, Hispanic, white, everybody does.

BUCK: Yeah, this is why it’s so instructive when you have Justin Trudeau whois the perfect, the perfect liberal. I know he’s Canada but the perfect western liberal in so many capacities because for one thing he has a history of… This guy was wearing blackface at parties on a regular basis. This is crazy, right? It wasn’t a one-off.

He did it multiple times, and then beyond that, when he tries to do the LGBTQ+ thing, you can tell it’s not so much that he couldn’t even just say it or mouth the various letters. But you could tell there was a panic in his brain as he was saying that he was leaving off the Z or the G. He was leaving off a letter and, therefore, would be giving offense. And he has to know that the reason the acronym has become what it is, is because they keep adding to it, right? So wokeness is ever expanding.

CLAY: It doesn’t end.

BUCK: Yeah. Its very nature is a demand for power. It’s a demand for the transfer of power. And they’ll say it’s about equality but actually as we see, for example, even with something like the black national anthem, it’s about changing power dynamics. It’s not about equalizing power dynamics with people. They want to transfer in their minds cultural power and authority from some to others. That’s why there is a Marxist twang, if you will, at the heart of so much of wokeness.

CLAY: No doubt. And, Buck, it doesn’t end. That’s what I keep… I think you have to keep hammering that home because there’s some people out there that will say, “Okay, why do you care? This is not that big of a deal,” and I care because it really is a slippery slope. The precedent you set continues to be taken advantage of. And, by the way, Justin Trudeau and Chris Cuomo and everybody of that universe who claims that they’re feminists or whatever it is?

BUCK: Male feminists!

CLAY: Male feminists. All they’re doing is just trying to get as much attention from women as they can, and that’s one of the ways they get it, right? “Oh, I — I’m a huge feminist!” That’s their play.

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Vaccine Mandate Causes NY Health Care Worker Shortage

27 Sep 2021

Listen Here:

CLAY: Buck, we came up with the idea of 15 days to stop the spread back in March of 2020 for those of you who remember that now ironic, I would say, phrase more than anything else ’cause we’re more now whatever it is, 18 months into “15 days to stop the spread.” But in your home city of New York, there is a mandate for vaccines for health care workers.

And some of the people that are least interested in getting the vaccine, ironically enough, have worked in health care the longest. They’ve been surrounded by covid the longest, probably. Almost all of these people have had covid would be my guess. Yet they’re talking about having to call in the National Guard now to staff hospitals. The vaccine mandate itself — in an incredible irony — might end up leading to New York hospitals being overrun and not being able to handle all the patients.

BUCK: It’s not just even New York City. It’s also up in Buffalo, Erie County.

CLAY: Whole state.

BUCK: It’s a statewide mandate, which is why Hochul, the new governor… New governor, not much better than the old governor, I gotta tell you. She probably makes fewer inappropriate comments to staffers. But, other than that, you’re getting really the same policies here. And, yeah, she may be calling in National Guard medical personnel. They’re not like deploying the National Guard, obviously. They’re not gonna be setting up sandbags and pillboxes around hospitals.

CLAY: Yeah, right. But that’s a pretty big deal.

BUCK: It’s a huge deal! You’re at a point… They’re telling us all the time about how the huge concern here is hospital capacity will be overwhelmed and because of their insistence on this particular vaccine mandate, they may actually be creating a circumstance where hospitals… By the way, already they’ve suspended in-patient surgeries.

They’re not taking intensive care patients from other hospitals because the Erie County Medical Center… This is out west in Buffalo, which feels more like the Midwest than New York City. But it’s out west in Buffalo and they’ve got 400 employees who refuse to get the shot. At New York City’s New York Presbyterian, which is the largest hospital network in New York, you have hundreds of employees facing termination because they refuse to get the shot.

There’s so much here, Clay, that I think it’s really interesting. First off, the dynamic that this may be creating the very shortage that we’ve been worried about all along but also notice how they never deal with some important parts of this story, like, how many of the 400 in this hospital, 200 in that hospital, thousands across the state — how many of them — have a previous covid infection and therefore have no —

CLAY: I bet it’s massive.

BUCK: — reasonable medical need whatsoever for this shot? What is the likelihood that somebody has been a hospital employee for the last 18 months dealing with covid patients, even just coming in out of the hospital…? I don’t care if you’re a heart surgeon or a janitor. It doesn’t matter. That you haven’t been exposed to covid in a way that you would have had antibodies and, therefore, again no reasonable need.

As we know, they keep trying to slow roll this. The data makes this quite clear, natural immunity up to this point is better than, better than vaccinated immunity. And, you know, they won’t deal with that, either, Clay. And why is the? And how is it that it’s only MAGA hat-wearing, evil Trump supporters who won’t get the shot, comma, “also nurses at some of the biggest hospital systems in the country.” I feel like they might know something.

CLAY: Also, it ties in with the if this were truly Ebola, if this were a plague that if you get it you’re done for, health care workers would be leading the charge to get whatever protection they could from this, and instead… I’m fascinated by this, Buck. We’ve asked this question of our listeners quite a bit in the past because this is the moment where you have to make a choice:

“Am I going to keep my job or am I going to get vaccinated?” How many people are going to actually decide to walk away? And if they do, Buck — here’s my interesting thought — there’s such a demand for health care workers all over the country. Isn’t there a competitive advantage for hospitals to say, “Hey, if you have proof of antibodies from natural immunity, we’ll hire you?”

And/or, “We’re not gonna require a vaccination at all.” From a pure market-based perspective, wouldn’t you try to recruit these health care professionals if you’re in a different state? In other words, it’s not as if these people are not in highly sought after employment possibilities. I understand there are some people out there like:

“Man, I’m gonna get the vaccine, ’cause if I don’t get it it’s gonna be hard for me to make the same salary doing a job like this somewhere else.” I don’t really think that applies for health care workers if they’re willing to move outside of New York, which would further hurt the overall tax base of New York by driving away people who make decent salaries.

BUCK: All true. And have you also noticed you never see any of these doctors, nurses, or hospital staff, really, on TV.

CLAY: They’re terrified to say anything.

BUCK: You could say, “Oh, maybe they want their privacy, whatever.” Um, if you’re at the point where you’re facing termination already, I have a feeling there’d be people who are willing to speak up. It’s not hard for CNN to get doctors who are like triple mask, mask in the shower, mask alone on your tricycle —

CLAY: — every night because my job’s so hard every day for 18 months.

BUCK: That’s not hard. Somehow, they could always find those doctors and nurses that will sit there and say, “Oh, the final words of every patient I’ve had is, ‘I wish I had listened to Anderson Cooper more and gotten the third booster.'”

CLAY: (laughing) “I wish I was as healthy as Brian Stelter.”

BUCK: Yeah. So, you keep hearing this, but I’m sorry, there’s obviously an unwillingness for any of the media to show this side of the story. And there’s also a huge double standard in who are we still, as a society, trying to shame and coerce into getting this shot, and who are we very gentle with and say, “Hey, it would be really great”?

I don’t want to get… ‘Cause of social justice or historical injustice or whatever, I don’t want to be too rough here, but I think it would be really nice if you would get the shot. Some groups get that treatment in the media and from the Democrat Party, and other groups, of course, as you know, I mean, basically the Trump supporters —

CLAY: — states.

BUCK: In red states, it’s, “You’re killing people. You’re murdering people.” No. That’s not true. But nonetheless this is the situation. By the way, did you see the data —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — on how the people who are vaccinated —

CLAY: Are more afraid still of covid than the people who are unvaccinated. It’s crazy.

BUCK: — are scared of breakthrough cases, terrified!. This is what we’ve been saying all along. It’s the masked up, vaccinated people who are deriving so many of these policies ’cause they don’t trust the vaccines enough, they’re terrified. They don’t give a crap about what’s happening in red states to people. That’s just meant to shame everybody into compliance so that they in their blue state with their vaccines can feel so much better.

And the unvaccinated in the same poll that Clay and I are talking about were like, “Eh, I’m just not that worried about it.” By the way, for some of them that’s a risk that I would advise against. I would advise against. I would not try to mandate anything —

CLAY: If you’re 80 years old and obese —

BUCK: Please get the shot!

CLAY: — you probably should get the vaccine. Yes.

BUCK: Please. If you’re 75 and have hypertension — if you’re 65 and 40/50 pounds, really, overweight or maybe a little more — please get the shot. But if you’re 35 and you’re sitting around having daydreams about how amazing Brian Stelter is — for Clay’s other comment — ’cause you watch so much CNN and you’re already vaccinated, please stop driving around New York City in a bicycle with a mask on. I’m begging the bicycle people to stop with the masks. There’s a lot of them here in New York. ‘Cause I assure you we’re not talking tandem bikes here, folks. Solo bikes.

CLAY: There’s no doubt. They’re probably saying to you, “Well, why don’t you get off your scooter first.”

BUCK: Scooter people, I’ll have you know, are far less likely to mask up. We’re a more civilized and data-driven bunch, Mr. Travis.

CLAY: I can see it over your shoulder there.

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Counting All the Lies in This Maxine Waters Soundbite

27 Sep 2021

Listen Here:

MAXINE WATERS: They should treat them like they’re treating the Afghans. We’re bringing the Afghans by the thousands into the country, and they deserve to be brought in because they assisted us in the war and that’s how they should be treating the Haitians: Bringing in those who are eligible. Vaccinating and making sure that we are not simply trying to drive them back with, uh, our border on horses. That Haitians have been the victims of, uhh, you know, not only our country, but Canada and France for years historically. Yes, I think they’re treated differently because they’re black, because they are Haitians and because, traditionally, uh, they have not been treated as human beings.

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. There was Maxine Waters. I thought you should hear this, a member of Congress with… It’s hard to fit so much wrong into one sound bite, but she did a pretty impressive job there. First of all, the comparison between Afghans and Haitians here in terms of Afghans who assisted in the war? Right.

They were promised something by the U.S. government in return for a certain service. The Haitians have not been, did not, and have not been. So that’s a big difference that’s obvious to anybody. Anyway. But she does make it clear they wants them all to come in and then, Clay. The other part of this which was very clear as a distraction tactic, but also as a way of virtue signaling and a kind of pseudo-moral elevation for the left here.

Because they’ve kicked open the borders. This is the fault of the Biden administration. We all know it. But when they turn this into a racial narrative whether it’s the Border Patrol whipping people, which did not happen. That is a fact. They lied. They lied for days about it. But then additionally, to say that the Haitians are being treated poorly here? More than half them have been let into the country. What is she even talking about, right? But it’s racism. When in doubt and you’re in a political fight and you’re Democrat, just scream about racism.

CLAY: Well, that’s the default position of the Democratic Party now. If you had to sum up the Democrat Party in three words, it would be “Everything Is Racist.” So Maxine Waters last week said that the “whipping,” which didn’t happen, was worse than slavery. So she attempted to analogize the situation at our border to slavery, which is an insult to slavery.

But also, the inability to distinguish in her mind the difference between refugees from Afghanistan who spent years assisting the United States and would otherwise be murdered for their assistance, potentially, of the United States and are the primary targets of the Taliban. I’m sure you saw, Buck. They’re now hanging people and leaving their corpses in the center of town square.

BUCK: From cranes.

CLAY: The “kinder, gentler” Taliban is basically the exact same. They’re chopping hands off. They are applying Sharia law. And there’s no difference at all, right, to — in many ways — what the regime was when we went there 20 years ago. So comparing that with the situation of Haitian immigrants who are illegally attempting to enter our country is so wrong-headed and, frankly, idiotic —

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: — that only someone like Maxine Waters could even make it.

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