Biden Wants to Pay $450K Per Person to Separated Illegals

29 Oct 2021

BUCK: It’s rare that we see a story these days about the Biden administration that you say, “Hold on a second. That can’t actually be true.” But this is one of those moments. Given all of the just idiotic decision-making around covid and the economy and countless other areas, we have a Biden administration that is failing in real time before all of our eyes.

So you’d think that we’d be pretty prepared for more bad decision-making from them, but we hear that they’re planning, Clay, to pay $450,000 a person for families that were separated at the border under the Trump administration, the ACLU bringing this lawsuit. The ACLU is working very hard, always, to kick at the load-bearing walls of American civilization.

No interest in free speech. No interest in liberty. They just want to collapse America and rebuild with leftist authoritarians running the show. But we’re actually now, Clay, looking at the possibility of $450,000 a person, a million dollars a family — for illegal aliens who came into the country in violation of our law, did so willingly and knowing exactly what they were doing — more per person than we give to the families of those who die in combat for the United States military abroad. There is a point at which you just wonder: The Biden administration, is it so ideological that it has lost its mind?

CLAY: It’s such a bad idea, Buck. Let’s discuss it. As you just laid out, the raw politics of it is insanely stupid. But we’re talking about Joe Biden already having the worst record at the border in terms of American, independent, Republican, Democrat. Everyone acknowledges that the border is a sieve, that it’s an unmitigated disaster. And, if you thought to yourself, “How could Joe Biden make an already disastrous situation worse?” this might well be the answer.

Because in addition to it just ringing wrong I would say for, frankly, 99% of Americans… I really do believe that when 99% of Americans hear, “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that illegal immigrants who illegally crossed into this country, knowing that they were unwelcome and that they were violating our own law…? When we separated those families, we’re now gonna have to be paying them hundreds of millions of dollars?

“And we’re paying them despite the fact that they broke the law?” And you want to talk all the time about the message that the Biden administration is sending. How, Buck, do you think this kind of payment would be received for anyone who was thinking about trying to cross the border? They are going to be incentivizing as many children as possible, because you know the way the game of telephone works as it spreads down through all of these different refugee camps and all the different people that are illegally in Latin America and want to be in the United States.

They already think of America as a land of milk and honey which, compared to where they are, is accurate, and is one of the driving reasons why they are coming here. But then you add in that they can break the law and potentially become millionaires in our country. We’ve already had in October the worst month basically on record at the border for crossings ever in most of our lives.

And now you’re going to be this incompetent and give even more incentives to anyone considering trying to cross the border to think that they might end up millionaires? It’s so bad. If you were trying, Buck, to come up with the worst thing to do at the border, I think the Biden administration might have come up with it. I think it’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

BUCK: I think it goes beyond incompetence to maliciousness. I think they know what they’re doing. See, this is where we have the big separation at the southern border. It used to be that there was at least a belief that Democrats and Republicans agreed that we should have something of a secure border, that there should be a control over who comes and goes; we should have sovereignty at our international boundaries.

Democrats at least paid lip service to that. They pretended that they cared about that. Increasingly, what we see is that’s obviously not the case. They want it to be a de facto open border. They want as many illegal migrants as possible to come into the United States. They aren’t able to because there are still federal laws on the books to do so across the board.

But they allow all of these massive loopholes and incentives to stay, and they make sure that there’s really no punishment. If there’s no punishment, if there’s no downside of trying to come in the country illegally, you’re gonna have a lot of people who keep trying to come in. They know that. And as long as the incentive structure is what it is under the Biden administration, Clay, we both know the numbers keep getting worse.

But by putting these payments out there, this is just gross politics. It’s meant to be a repudiation of the Trump border-securing efforts, right? This is meant to be, “See? We have to pay these families,” and this is just a decision made by the Biden DOJ. This isn’t like there’s not some fair-minded approach lane. This is Biden’s people saying, “We’re gonna write checks to these families because of all the terrible things Trump administration did to them.”

Because this makes them look like, “Oh, Trump was the evil monster when it comes to the border.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden has set up a situation where you have more people than ever being human trafficked. The cartels are getting richer off this human smuggling than ever. We have fentanyl flooding into the country that is killing people in towns and cities.

If you’re listening to this right now anywhere in America, there are people within a few miles of where you are likely who are taking fentanyl that comes across the U.S.-Mexico border because Border Patrol is overwhelmed and the cartels are richer and more influential than they’ve ever been. This is a disaster, but they won’t stop it because ideologically the Democrat Party has moved to being an open-borders party. They think America deserves this. They think we’re getting what we deserve right now.

CLAY: And that’s why I think as we get closer to 2022 and as we think about 2024, the number one weakness of Joe Biden is, “It’s the border, stupid,” and this perfectly fits, “It’s the border, stupid,” ’cause it’s the border and — guess what? — it’s stupid what they are doing at the border. And the incentive structures! Buck, you hit at what I think is just a jaw-dropping way to convey this. I tweeted it out yesterday.

We are potentially paying illegal immigrants more money than we pay service members who give their lives to this country who are citizens and who are fighting and risking their lives every day for this nation. The idea that that could be possible strikes everyone — Democrat, Republican, independent — as not only an awful choice, but also a pathetic one and an indefensible one.

BUCK: Clay, let’s also remember that what we’re paying these people, what we would be — and when I say “we,” I mean it, ’cause it’s taxpayer money.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s what everyone listening —

CLAY: — everybody out there.

BUCK: — we, the American people — are paying to these families of illegal immigrants in the United States who willfully broke U.S. law, who enriched the cartels in the process, who gamed the immigration system, jumped to the front of the line. We’re paying them for psychological trauma. Look, if the U.S. government had taken people into custody and someone had died because of malfeasance, that can’t happen, right? There are some basic expectations we have. We’re paying people because of the trauma of being separated. The U.S. government puts Americans through trauma of separation all the time.

CLAY: Think about what’s going on with January 6.

BUCK: Yeah. What about the families of people that have been held in solitary confinement for six or seven months —

CLAY: For trespassing.

BUCK. — for nonviolent crime. It’s unbelievable what we’re seeing happening here. But, Clay, you said Democrats are opposed to this. I think what you’re talking about are centrist Democrats, persuadable Democrats.

CLAY: Sane. There are sane Democrats.

BUCK: There are some.

CLAY: Some of them. Yes. But when I look at the numbers, Buck, when you look at the numbers on the border, even the most die-hard Democrat right now, Biden is so far underwater. I’ve never seen an American politician, president, who is this far underwater on any single issue, even with his own party his underwater issue.

BUCK: And here’s the problem, though. We’re talking about the numbers and how — and you’re right. I would guess, and I haven’t looked at them recently, maybe only 20 or 30% of Democrats, something like that, think Biden’s dying good job at the border.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: That’s definitely a core group. It’s like, oh, yeah, open borders!

CLAY: Doesn’t matter what Biden does —

BUCK: Doesn’t matter what he does.

CLAY: — 20 or 30% are gonna be like, “Oh, he’s doing an incredible job.”

BUCK: But from an electoral perspective, that’s a total mess. That’s a disaster, unless the whole game here is what we see with the continued efforts to pass the largest amnesty in the history of the United States, and so you don’t care, Clay, right, you don’t care about the 5 or 10% of persuadable Democrats you’re losing over these immigration policies because the plan here is to add 15 or 20 million newly made Americans, so to speak, giving them citizenship through an immigration amnesty, illegal immigration amnesty. That’s what they’re hoping to accomplish.

CLAY: Maybe the real secret of the Joe Biden administration, Buck, is he said he’s gonna bring Americans together. Maybe he’s bringing Americans together in recognizing how awful he is instead of he’s doing a good job, ’cause that’s what he’s managing.

BUCK: You have more faith in these Democrats than I do. A lot of them are like, “Yeah, it’s not my problem, and also, I like the cheap labor.” But we’ll see. At least the right and independents are furious.

CLAY: Overwhelmingly rejecting this.

BUCK: That is the only saving grace politically.

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Allison Williams on Why She Quit ESPN Over the Vax Mandate

29 Oct 2021

CLAY: Someone who knows a little bit about sports — also a fellow college football fan — she will appreciate, I believe, that I am in Jacksonville right now for the Florida-Georgia world’s largest outdoor cocktail party. She is Allison Williams, who recently quit ESPN over covid vaccine mandate. Allison, thanks for joining us. How you doing?

WILLIAMS: Hey, guys, I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.

CLAY: Do you have a Halloween costume planned for the weekend?

WILLIAMS: I’m so lame. I have a Halloween outfit. Does that make sense? I have some weird Halloween thing I’m going to wear.

BUCK: Is that like you put a little sticker on your chest that says “Halloween costume” or a little more ornate than that?

WILLIAMS: (laughing) It’s a little more than that but not much more. I am more focused on my son’s setup than anything.

CLAY: What is your son gonna be?

WILLIAMS: He’s gonna be a mailman because it’s like his favorite, the trash truck and the mailman, right? The costume is totally Amazon ordered, but we are doing the DIY part. We’re turning his wagon into a mail truck.

CLAY: That’s awesome.

WILLIAMS: I feel like costumes don’t count unless you make part of it. Like, my parents made all my costumes growing up from the crap they found in the garage and, like, a lot of duct tape and sometimes chicken wire and so forth. So I feel like you have to be a part of your costume; so that’s what we’ll do for him this year.

CLAY: All right, so Allison, I want to get into your decision-making. I know you joined The Daily Wire. You did a great job on Tucker, Megyn Kelly. You’ve talked to a lot of different people about your decision. But I wanted you to be able to talk with our audience about that decision as well. You had worked at ESPN for a long time.

ESPN comes out and says, “Hey, we have a covid vaccine mandate.” I believe you tried to get an exemption; they didn’t grant it. When did you make the decision, “Hey, if they’re going to require me to get the vaccine, I am not going to comply,” and did you expect for it to get to this point where you were forced to leave the company?

WILLIAMS: It was a really long process, Clay. So, I had a feeling mandates would be coming for months. I was encouraged when, in April, Disney sent out a company-wide email saying they believed it was a personal choice. I thought, “Okay, wow. I’ve got a chance.” I knew that I wasn’t comfortable receiving this vaccine for a number of reasons.

And when ESPN put out the statement that as of August 1st, to work any events, you had to be fully vaccinated, I knew that was gonna put me in a precarious situation and I started down the road of, “Okay, how do we navigate this?” It was kind of a roller coaster ride, honestly. When I initially reached out to the company, the people I spoke with understood and they seemed like they could…

They thought, like, for sure we could work something out, right? Like, I mean, yes, there’s this mandate that August 1st you have to be vaccinated but why couldn’t you test and mask and kind of do what we did last year, which obviously worked well. Nobody had any issues, and so he explored some options with people above him in H.R., all of this stuff, and it was a hard “no.”

Like, there was no budging, there was no wiggle room, there were no conversations. It was a hard “no” for any event. So that ended my college football season. But I really, really truly thought I could still work for the company. I’d hosted shows in the past. I hosted them in studio. I hosted them virtually from here in California where I live.

And then I also thought there could be a role for me to kind of help mentor some of the new sideline reporters they brought on. I just felt like there’s of a way for me to contribute even if it’s from my house, right? I think the people that are on College Football Live all do it from their home or remote studios. So to me, that just seemed like there’s got to be a way I can maintain my employment and provide value to the company safely without being vaccinated.

And ultimately, they said there wasn’t. (laughing) That’s like kind of the long story — the short story. It was a long process. This went on for think it was like three months it took. And the tough part, too, was I was also my contract was up, so we were negotiating that, and then I was considering getting vaccinated, and I was like, “All right, extend last year’s deal,” which was for very little money, “just to stay employed and do what I can, and the next year, you know, we’ll kind of reevaluate, see where things are at, whatever,” and it just wasn’t an option. And I really feel like… If I’m being honest, I just feel like they didn’t want to deal with me.

BUCK: Hey, Allison, it’s Buck. Just for everybody joining us, we’re talking to former ESPN reporter Allison Williams, who has recently joined up with the great folks over at The Daily Wire for a new show. Allison refused to get the vaccine under mandate from ESPN. Allison, Clay and I spent a lot of time speaking through or talking about the nuances of what’s true, what’s not about risks, about the data, about everything related to covid.

So my understanding is it was a fertility-concerns issue with the vaccine. Can you just tell us what are the concerns? What made you think about this? Did you speak to doctors you know about it? Essentially, explain to us what would be considered your reasons for the “hesitancy” to get the vaccine. I think “hesitancy” is the word people tend to use.

WILLIAMS: First of all, isn’t it insane that I have to explain that?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Yes.

WILLIAMS: This is a medical decision I’ve made. That should be private. And no offense to you, Buck, I totally respect the question. I understand where you’re coming from. But I just think we’ve gotten to this place where we expect to know everything about everyone. It’s ridiculous. Like, “I feel bad asking you this.” I’m like, “Thank you, because this is insane that I have to go and publicly explain what’s going on with my family planning, how my husband and I are trying to get pregnant.”

This is private crap that people should be able to keep private. But rants aside, look, I went to all the websites they tell you to go to. K? This is a new vaccine. Just do the math. Like, how can they determine that it’s safe and doesn’t affect affect fertility? That takes years. This vaccine rolled out in December. It hasn’t even been out a year. So while women are getting it when they’re pregnant and having successful pregnancies, that’s tremendous. But there’s also issues that are taking place who people in the mainstream media I guess want to ignore because it could, quote-unquote, “add to vaccine hesitancy.”

CLAY: Allison, could I just ask you, did you see the FDA panel member that was part of the vaccine approval for kids say, “We gotta give it to the kids to find out how safe it is.”

WILLIAMS: We don’t know if it’s safe! Exactly. So when they came out and said that it’s safe for pregnant women that set off alarms in my mind. You’re not supposed to have a freaking turkey sandwich when you’re pregnant, okay? So how do you know that this brand-new mRNA technology is safe? So I went to their website to understand why they’re saying it’s safe and the first thing they say is it’s, quote, “based on what they know about the mRNA technology.”

What? Okay, that makes no sense, and then two, it was “based on studies of infertility in animals.” Like, there were there were no women involved in the clinical studies that were pregnant. There was no effort to study pregnancy or fertility-related issues. So that just, like, made me a little concerned and set off some red flags. And it’s just not something I’m comfortable with.

And the CDC’s conclusion is based on what we know about the risks of covid-19 during pregnancy — because you are at a higher risk, it makes sense right? You gain weight like all these crazy things happen approximate your blood pressure. I totally understand that. But their conclusion was the benefits outweigh risk. That should be an individual’s decision!

CLAY: It’s so well said, Allison, because we’ve been fortunate enough to have three babies, and by “we,” I mean my wife did because I can’t be a “birthing person” despite what some people might claim out there.

WILLIAMS: (laughing)

CLAY: But you know what’s interesting about it is, I hadn’t really even thought about it. When you say like, “Hey, you’re not supposed to eat turkey sandwiches,” sliced turkey. “You’re not supposed to eat sushi,” like all these things, “you can’t have a glass of wine,” but they’re saying, “Hey, it’s perfectly fine to get shot up with drugs — a brand-new vaccine — while you are in the process of trying to have a baby which is incredibly difficult for so many people.”

WILLIAMS: Yeah, and they acknowledge it’s still being gathered! The acknowledge the data is still being gathered.

CHILD: (noise)

WILLIAMS: They literally ask you to submit your information, you know, if you get the injection and then go on to get —

CLAY: Is that “the mailman” in the background there?

WILLIAMS: Sorry, that is the mailman. He’s, like, trying to drop off —

BUCK: He always delivers.

CLAY: Yeah, he’s delivering for our audience right now.

WILLIAMS: (laughing)

CLAY: Allison, I’m curious. What’s the reaction inside among ESPN people that you are friendly with to your decision, and what has the external reaction been like for you? Because as you said there’s very few examples where people give this much medical detail about their choices when it comes to vaccine.

Now, by the way, I also want to point out, even though people are like, “Oh, Allison Williams or Clay Travis,” ’cause I made the same decision as you, except I’m obviously not trying to have a baby. But they’re like, “Oh, you’re anti-vax.” No. My kids gut measles, mumps, rubella vaccines. Like, I’m anti-mandatory covid vaccines in order to work, and I think that’s pretty much your perspective as well.

WILLIAMS: Yeah! It should be a choice. Like, this I feel like — and I guess that’s why I’ve kind of gone down this road. I initially… (laughing) I didn’t want to do this, guys. I kind of just wanted to lay low. It went may more public than I ever anticipated. I thought, “I’m gonna make any post on my Instagram just to get some things off my chest and explain myself,” because I knew, like, this information was gonna come out eventually.

And then everybody… I don’t know. It just kind of blowing up and I’m like (sigh), “God. Do I really want to take this on?” And honestly, I didn’t, but I felt like it matters that much. And I’m like, “Look, I’m gonna get pegged a lot of things. There’s gonna be assumptions about how I believe on other issues and how I voted in the past and all these things,” and ultimately I decided I didn’t care, that nothing matters more than individual freedom and medical freedom and bodily autonomy.

And I just can’t shake this feeling that people don’t realize what they’re giving up! Like, I’m gonna fight for my freedoms while I still have them before it’s too late. But I felt like to stay silent was to comply. And so that’s when I said I went on with Tucker and chatting with you today, because you can get this vaccine and still think that people should be able to choose to get the vaccine like you did! (laughing)

BUCK: Well, this is what we did. This is what we say here on the show. We were just talking before, Allison, before you joined us, about how Clay’s parents have already gotten the booster — the booster, never mind the vaccine. My parents are scheduled to get their boosters in the next couple of weeks. And yet I’ll have people yell at me and say I’m anti-vax, right?

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

BUCK: I mean, this is the reality of the world we’re in now. It’s madness. But your feelings about freedom and the need to defend it we really do appreciate that and clearly you have the courage of your convictions on this one and folks should certainly go check out your new show which is “sports without the woke,” I hear, over at The Daily Wire.

WILLIAMS: Their words, not mine. (laughs)

BUCK: Allison, any more about what you’re doing?

WILLIAMS: I’m excited, you guys. Look, again, it was like, “Do I go down this road? Do I wait for this to blow over?” And The Daily Wire reached out, and they said, “Look, we think we can do something really cool here.” And they were so aligned with what I wanted to pursue and how I wanted to pursue it with an unbiased angle and really dive into how these mandates are affecting sports. So we’re gonna do a special.

It’s kind of still the details are being ironed out. I just wrote an opinion piece for them that’s up right now kind of explaining why I made the decision that I have. But I’m excited to work with a company that still sees (chuckles) I can be a valuable employee despite not being vaccinated. And I hope we can get into some really serious issues that are affecting not just sports but our country as a whole.

CLAY: Allison, how excited are you? You’ve been in sports for a long time and certainly I’ve been in sports for a long time, and there are a lot of handcuffs put on what you can and cannot say. Do you feel incredibly liberated to just be able to say — finally, I would imagine — exactly what you think about a variety of issues, covid vaccine and everything else, that wasn’t allowed in the world of sports?

WILLIAMS: A little bit, yeah. I kept feeling like I was kind of muzzled the past 18 months, two years, whatever it’s been. There were so many things I wanted to tweet out and share and say but I just bit my tongue because I knew of the backlash, and I knew kind of how it would portray the company and stuff. Not that there was… I don’t want to, like, misconstrue this.

There was never any directive sent down or, like, any instruction to not speak on certain things, right? But you just kind of knew. (chuckles) You knew it wasn’t in line with the company policy or thought, if you will, to question a lot of what’s been going on. So I did feel a bit muzzled. I feel a bit liberated. I feel… I don’t know. I’m still trying to navigate this, honestly, guys. Like, it’s a weird space for me. I like to tell other people’s stories. I don’t like to be the story. But I do feel a little bit liberated. I feel a little less (crosstalk) (laughing).

BUCK: Well, Allison, you’re not alone. The Clay and Buck show has your back, and there are millions of people listening across the country who do as well. Good luck to you over The Daily Wire. Give those folks our best. Clay and I are fans of theirs and really appreciate what they do, and thanks for joining us today.

WILLIAMS: You got it, guys. Thanks for having me. Have a happy Halloween.

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As Democrat Budget Bills Stall, All Eyes Turn to Virginia

29 Oct 2021

CLAY: We were saying yesterday that Nancy Pelosi was going to try to get the infrastructure bill in the House done. She can’t. Biden is in Europe right now. They wanted to give him a victory and at least not embarrass him. Instead, they were unable to give him a victory, and I think the whole budget process is an embarrassment at this point in time.

We are weeks, I would say — just based on the numbers — away from some form of resolution there. The failure to get the infrastructure bill voted on — the failure of, so far, the Biden budget to also be implemented — has become a bit of an additional weight in the Virginia governor’s race. If you have not been following this, we are gonna be, I think, leading on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday…

This is my prediction. Crazy same things can happen. But I think on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we are going to be focused on this Virginia race and how many different directions it could go and all of the messages that it is potentially going to be sending. Fox News yesterday came out with a poll that showed Glenn Youngkin up by eight points. Now, I think that is a widely out of whack possibility that he could be up eight points.

But the numbers are moving — from gambling perspective — in the favor of Republicans in a big way. All right? I had Dub who works on the show with us — you may remember earlier this week, he was looking at what the odds markets were showing overseas, and so you can gamble political results in England at many of the biggest places over there.

And we told you that Terry McAuliffe was a decent favorite in that race. Much of his dollar value from a gambling perspective is now gone and we are moving basically — in a gambling perspective, Buck — into a dead heat. Are you with me that you’re a little bit skeptical of the eight-point lead —

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: — that the Fox News poll showed?

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: That would be an 18-point swing since the 2020 election.

BUCK: I want our Virginia Clay and Buck audience to know that this will be a razor-thin race and you better show up and vote.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Every single one of you listening to this right now in Virginia, do not get complacent. Do not think, “Oh, there’s a poll. It’s fine. Oh, it’s deer season; I got other things to do.” Get out there and make sure you vote so that Terry McAuliffe, the slimy Democrat, is not the governor of your state. Now, look. What Clay is saying is right. Obviously, the numbers and all this are looking good right now.

I don’t care. Go into this with the mentality that only crushing victory is acceptable. A two- or three-point victory for Youngkin is not good enough. Our Virginia listeners right now, you have it in your hands to send a message for the entire country to see about the failure of Democrat policies, about the failures of this administration all the way down to the state level, because the Democrat Party calls all the shots from D.C., as we know. Clay, we gotta get our people out there. It’d be huge to have a Youngkin win.

CLAY: Monstrous. It would change the American political calculus overnight if Joe Biden, who won Virginia by 10 points, if in the first year of his administration we saw a 10-point swing or more in the state of Virginia. If Glenn Youngkin wins, there is going to be a five-alarm fire bell going off right now in the entire Democratic Party. I think it’s happening already because they’re terrified of what this lesson might be going forward into the midterms. But Virginia, you have in your power an unbelievable opportunity. Get out and vote in a big way for Glenn Youngkin.

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Andrew Cuomo Charged with Sexual Assault

29 Oct 2021

BUCK: This Cuomo thing… Former Governor Andrew Cuomo — bringing it into New York State here for a second. The sheriff is on TV right now saying they’ve got a solid sexual assault case against Cuomo. They’re really… We’re talking criminal charge here, folks, for groping a subordinate, and looks like they’re pressing this.

We might have the former governor arrested and brought up on these charges in a way that they’re gonna take this all the way. This is… Honestly, I did not see this coming. I mean, I know we had seen some of the allegations, but they’re taking this guy… They’re taking this all the way against him right now, Clay. This is pretty remarkable.

CLAY: A fall from grace the likes of which, frankly, we’ve almost never seen in the history of politics. To go —

BUCK: Eliot Spitzer. I mean, there are —

CLAY: But Eliot Spitzer was more of a local story. Cuomo was… Like, there was talk of ripping Biden out of the presidency.

BUCK: Oh, yeah. When you add in the height to the fall, I don’t know if there’s ever been such a fall.

CLAY: That quickly.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: It’s really kind of unprecedented to think he might go on trial facing jail time, which I don’t think anybody would have thought. It’s crazy. And, by the way, not jail time for probably his most heinous act as an elected official, which was the way that he handled nursing homes in New York to say nothing about any other misappropriate behavior.

BUCK: There are people who buried relatives because Cuomo is a stubborn, thuggish moron — that actually happened, lots of them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But he’s not going away for that. They’re #MeTooing this guy and #MeTooing in the more Weinstein sense of this. It’s not just he was inappropriate but they’re looking now criminal charges. The sheriff, Craig Apple, Albany County, New York, is right now on TV on Fox News saying we have a solid case against Cuomo. This — to your point, Clay — is remarkable.

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David Harsanyi on His New Book: Eurotrash

29 Oct 2021

BUCK: We got our friend David Harsanyi with us now. He is a senior writer at National Review, got a perfectly timed book out, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. David, my friend, great to have you on.

HARSANYI: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

BUCK: So I have a feeling we have some idea about what’s gonna go on here. You have Biden with the fancy latte set talking about climate agenda and some other stuff. But as a part of all this, as a backdrop to this, why is it that Democrats are obsessed with getting approval from Europeans about our economic policies? I don’t think we have very much to learn from them and I get a sense that from this book you feel the same way.

HARSANYI: (chuckles) I do. One stat, a quick stat that really stands out is if Britain was a state in the United States, it would be the second poorest state per capita after Mississippi. It’s not as if these people are successful in ways that we are not or we need lessons from them. But I think that most Democrats, at least, they admire the technocratic institutions over in Europe that tell people how to act and what they can do.

The big welfare states which make people dependent on government and then that way, of course, controlling the citizens. So I think they admire that those sorts of things exist in Europe. The problem, of course, is it undermines entrepreneurship. It undermines creativity and all the things that make America better and more special than most European nations.

CLAY: It’s really a pretty… I’m blown away. It’s rare that we hear a stat on the show, and it takes my… It’s, like, amazing. That is wild about if Britain were a state, it would be the secondly poorest after Mississippi. It seems interesting, though, that Britain in many ways seems to have declared independence from the rest of Europe via Brexit and what the fallout is going to be there. How would you analyze that relationship and what it means for the United States relationship with different European countries based on what Britain is doing right now?

HARSANYI: Well, I mean, the British have always been a little bit different. They’ve always had a hard time assimilating into a bigger European (garbled cell) super state and many of our ideas, frankly, come from Britain, right? So I think that could have been somewhat more expected. But I don’t know that it changes much. They still have a very big bureaucracy. They still have dependency. They still have people voting…

Even their conservatives are what would be considered statist types. You know, it’s not as if… It’s really just Big Government parties fighting amongst each other. So I think that’s the problem. They have problem with assimilation as well, like other countries do. So as much as I admire the British ideals, I’m not sure it’s gonna change many of the dynamics in Europe. But I’m still happy they’re not part of (chuckles) the European Union, I guess. So that’s a plus.

BUCK: David, one thing that often comes up — and we got, as I said, Biden over there, and he’s doing the whole, “Oh, I’m so sorry” to Emmanuel Macron of France because of the nuclear submarine deal. The French thought they’d get billions of dollars out of this contract to provide subs to Australia, and they felt blindsided. So that’s coming up. A lot of climate change stuff going on, of course.

They’re gonna talk a lot about that, and no one actually does anything meaningful on it over in Europe, but they pretend. David, we often will hear, though, whenever they’re pushing socialism in America — this is what ends up happening — you’ll have a lot of smug leftists here say, “Oh, you mean that we’ll be like that terrible dystopian known as Sweden or Denmark?”

It’s more… Yes, okay, they have a large welfare state in those countries, but what is your response, when people just say that they want America to be Denmark, at least economically? What would the reality of that actually be? I mean, what are the parts of this that are left out of the discussion?

HARSANYI: First of all, the way that they paint Denmark, for instance — or even Sweden — is just untrue. It’s not a socialist state. They have turned towards… In the seventies, they became more socialistic but since then, that hasn’t been working. They’ve tried to become more like us. Denmark is a capitalist country with a massive welfare state, and the idea that we could scale that kind of welfare state here — and let’s face it, that’s what they want to do.

Whether it’s $3.5 trillion or $1.5 trillion, it’s just incrementally going towards that place. We can’t scale that kind of system. We would build a gigantic, centralized bureaucracy in Washington. It’s just not how this country’s supposed to be in the first place, and I’m not sure why we would want to be more like them. Their health care isn’t better than our health care. They claim it’s “free,” but of course (chuckles) everyone has to pay for that.

Another part of that that Bernie never mentions and others is that they pay 65% off the bat in taxation, off their income. It’s not like Democrats are trying to raise taxes on the middle class. They just want to take it from the rich. You can’t have that kind of system, and the Europeans don’t even try. So they’re worse — progressives here are in many ways are worse — than Europeans, ’cause they want to have this massive state but they don’t even want to pay for it.

CLAY: Fascinating that we just heard and have seen all the controversy surrounding the relationship with the United States and Australia and England over submarines. But it’s predicated, really, on China. Much of the United States’ relationship with Europe, at least since World War II, has been about protecting different parts of Europe primarily from the Soviet Union.

What is the relationship going forward, in your mind, going to look like as we move into, at a minimum, a new Cold War against China? Can Europe be mobilized to be strongly allied against China in the same way we all were against Russia and the Soviet Union, or is China gonna be able to pull apart some of those relationships by spending a lot of money in these different European countries and trying to buy allies in that respect? How do you see this new dynamic playing out?

HARSANYI: I just don’t think that European nations, Western European nations — or even Eastern, actually — see China as the same kind of threat that they saw from the Soviet Union or communism that was right on their doorstep. And, frankly, I don’t think… I mean, Donald Trump made a big deal about Germany not paying its fair share, which is a completely fair thing to say.

Even Barack Obama used to complain about that. They don’t. So not only are they trying to compete with us economically, but we pay for their safety generally. So, I don’t think that post-Cold War model works anymore, and I don’t think they view China as the same kind of threat as we do. Obviously, I think that our relationships and our focus have to shift towards China.

They are the real danger in many ways, and they’re a bigger danger in many ways because they’re also an economic power probably in the way the Soviet Union never was as far as a trade partner, et cetera. So I don’t think Europe’s gonna be on board with that with us. They’re not even on board against Russia these days. Germany wants us to pay for NATO, but then they have a pipeline to bring in natural gas and oil from Russia. (laughing) I just don’t understand how that relationship can remain the same way moving forward in the world.

BUCK: We’re speaking to David Harsanyi. He’s got a new book out Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. And to that end, David, “a dying continent.” Liberals in this country — and I don’t even like that term for them, but we still use it. But the left in this country is obsessed with trying to turn us into some American version of a Western European or northern European state. Why is it a…? What are the failed ideas, and how is it “a dying continent” over there? Because I feel like these are… We always just think of charming cobblestone streets and the lattes and the free health care. It’s not that simple.

HARSANYI: They’re literally dying in the sense that they’re old. Germany, I think, is the second oldest advanced country. People don’t have children. So because we don’t have children, they let in a lot of immigrants. There’s nothing wrong with immigration, at least from my perspective. There’s something wrong with immigration without assimilation, and that’s what happened there. So, I mean…

And then you have other cultures who are integrating into society, and that creates other tensions like hyper-nationalistic sentiments, and it gets ugly. And that’s what’s happening now I think in Europe. But I’m also quick to say, I mean, listen. If we’re gonna be like Western Europe, it doesn’t mean that we’re gonna be a tyranny here or that, like, you know, we won’t have wealth. We’re gonna be wealthy. We’ll just be an insipid place.

The point of America is entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and basic freedoms that they mock when you talk about now on the left. But those are the things that matter. That’s what makes us different and special. That’s why people stream in here. That’s why they’re pressing against the border right now. No one is picking up a musket for the European Union.

People care about America for reasons beyond just wealth. And that, I think, is the biggest danger when you’re a giant bureaucracy. They crush that spirit. They crush local communities and that’s what’s happening in Europe. I just don’t think we should let that happen here. That’s the point of the book.

BUCK: The author is David Harsanyi. The book Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. David, congrats, best of luck, thanks for coming on the show.

HARSANYI: Thanks for having me, guys.

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Braves Fans Should Chop to “Let’s Go, Brandon”

29 Oct 2021

CLAY: Have you been paying attention to all the controversy? So the Atlanta Braves… He’s gonna be, Trump is, at Game 4 in Atlanta between the Astros and the Braves of the World Series on Saturday. It’s gonna be an electric environment. We got a lot of listeners in Atlanta. They have not hosted a World Series game in Atlanta since 1999.

By the way, I’m talking to Herschel Walker as soon as we finish this show a little bit later in the day. I’m gonna be doing an interview with Herschel, who is running for Senate in Georgia, and I’m gonna ask him about the World Series. He’s down here for the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville where I am right now. But they are right now demanding, Buck, that the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant — which is they play it everybody starts raising their arms like the tomahawk chant — allegedly started back when Deion Sanders was playing for the Atlanta Braves.

Deion was a legendary baseball-football double athlete went to Florida State where they do the Seminole chant which is endorsed by the Seminole tribe in the state of Florida, and so I was told that that’s where that transported to Atlanta, it’s an amazing thing, everybody gets their phones out, they do the tomahawk chant. Here’s what I want Braves fans listening to me to do, I want you to do the tomahawk chant while chanting “Let’s go, Brandon,” simultaneously to break the left-wing sports media woke fragile brains in one fell swoop. It would be amazing television.

BUCK: This has gotta go in the category of like the Apache helicopter. Look, I get it. Like, with everything there are sometimes where you can make a distinction between are we celebrating some aspect of a culture? Basically is this something that we think is cool about another culture, group in history, whatever? You name sports teams generally speaking after things that you think show bravery, courage, you know, excellence, whatever it may be.

And the Braves… You know, look, I understand there’s some other team names in the past that were… There’s a more good faith case to say, “I don’t know about that.” Fine. The Braves is like an Apache helicopter. We name one of more most amazing aerial helicopters after the Apache because we considered them to be formidable warriors in their day. It is not disrespectful. No one thinks it is meant to be disrespectful, and cultural appropriation is not a real thing. Always remember this. All cultures steal from all other cultures. We have carpets because of the Mongols, folks. Okay? There’s a lot we could talk —

CLAY: We have coffee because of the Ethiopians. The idea that you are only allowed to use things that people created who look like you is fundamentally wrong.

BUCK: The Arab traders from Yemen taking the coffee from Ethiopia, so they were, I guess, appropriating it, and then they spread it across to Europe but this is the whole point, right? Everything is… We have chocolate because of the Aztec. I don’t think we’re supposed to…

CLAY: We have democracy because of the Greeks and Romans, right? Like they don’t get to hold democracy and nobody else gets it.

BUCK: So this is where… Did you see — I think it was TIME Magazine and I bet they deleted it but there was a tweet out; I gotta find it — where they said that the Vikings discovered America a thousand years before Europeans?

CLAY: Oh, that’s amazing.

BUCK: Just to give you a sense of really what education system in this country looks like, the journo elites. It wasn’t Europeans, it was Vikings. Okay. So here’s what you see though. We can no longer have these honest discussions about whether we’re actually celebrating something, and this has come up before, sometimes tribes, Native American tribe will say, “No, like, this wasn’t…

“They weren’t mocking us. It wasn’t some cartoonish characterization of, you know, what a group looks like or something in some way that might actually feel a little bit over the line.” We’re, again, talking about Braves, Apache, you brought up the Seminoles. You bring up these things. Clay, we’ve gotten to point now where what do we have left? We can name sports teams after like wind, fire, and water?

CLAY: You can’t even do that because eventually people are gonna be like why in the world would we name the Miami Hurricanes team after a hurricane it kills people and people are gonna say how in the world can you have the Fighting Irish? That’s offensive to Irish people. It doesn’t end. That’s the problem. Because once it ends, all these lunatic, loser, left-wing, woke nobodies don’t have a reason to exist. So they have to find something else to be offended by every single time.

BUCK: How boring a world would be to live in — I really mean this — where no one was ever offended. A world in which no one is ever offended is one in which there’s no honest and serious discussions happening and there’s no intellectual breakthroughs possible because everyone just walking around all the time with the most anodyne nonsense and trying to offer each other slogans that are —

CLAY: It’s a totalitarian regime. That’s what happens, when everybody votes for Saddam Hussein, when everybody votes for whoever the dictator is because they know they get killed if they don’t.

BUCK: I’m worried that they might start trying to pull down Major League, which I will say is maybe my all-time favorite.

CLAY: Such a good movie. Such a good movie.

BUCK: It’s a great movie. But because there’s a lot of… There’s guys dressed up as natives, oh, there’s a lot of that stuff. So who knows. But we’re fighting the fight on this one, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JOY REID: The World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros is happening now, shifting to the stadium in Atlanta for the next three games, which means viewers across the country will soon be subjected to a particular show of fandom that has roiled baseball for decades — and that’s the tomahawk chop. Correction: “The racist tomahawk chop,” a synchronized movement of the arm by Atlanta fans at home games, a gesture and chant promoting stereotypes, caricatures and, frankly, hatred of Native American people. The chop gets its World Series spotlight starting tomorrow.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. There you hear the other side, the leftist MSNBC approach to the tomahawk chop, because it makes people think racist things. It makes them dislike, hate people, even. It’s just not true. No one is doing it. Not a single person is doing the tomahawk chop is doing it because they hate Native American people, or they have some reason that they’re trying to be disrespectful to them.

If anything, it’s supposed to be… Well, for one thing, it’s supposed to just be about baseball and people coming together from all different backgrounds, races, religions, et cetera, and enjoying sport together, which used to be, as Clay often talks about, the great unifier in America. Now even that has been pulled apart and corroded with wokeness.

But it’s obviously just not the case. It is just not the case that this is done to be racist, to be disrespectful. And, Clay, that’s obvious, but we keep coming back to this. You know, every team is gonna have to be the mastodon and the banana slug. It’s gonna have to be random animals until PETA gets too upset and says not allowed to have that anymore.

CLAY: Yeah, PETA doesn’t even want the phrase bullpen to be used because it’s offensive to animals. The bullpen of course is where all of the backup pitchers that might come into the game gather and get loose as well. But I just think it’s important to note, where did the tomahawk chop come from? In Florida State, the Seminole fans, they are the Florida State Seminoles.

The Seminole tribe has specifically said Chief Osceola — and if you’ve watched those games when they run out with the flaming spear and they throw it into the midfield in Tallahassee. It’s one of the great college football traditions. The Seminole tribe has specifically said, “We consider this to be a great honor, that you want to brand your team based on the warrior characteristics of the Seminole tribe,” and so they have specifically — ’cause they were getting attacked at Florida State.

The Seminoles have said, “Oh, no, no, no. We love this. We like the association of Florida State with the Seminole tribe and our history,” okay? So the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant comes from Florida State which has been endorsed by the Seminole tribe via Deion Sanders who was a legendary Florida State Seminole player who also played football for the Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, 49ers, many teams, but baseball for the Atlanta Braves.

He memorably took a helicopter to play in a football and baseball game in the same day, which is one of the craziest sports accomplishments of all time. And so, this is a direct commendation endorsement of Deion through the Seminoles. So if you actually look at how the tomahawk chop came to be, it was a endorsement of the incredible athleticism of Florida State Seminoles star Deion Sanders while playing for the Atlanta Braves. It is an honoring of a black man and his athleticism by the Atlanta Braves fan base which I’m sure Joy Reid doesn’t even know.

BUCK: Speaking of Atlanta — yeah, actual history and knowledge of it is not the left’s strong suit. You know what I said before about the TIME magazine story? Actually I got it confused with a different story. It is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

CLAY: Oh, no.

BUCK: They said yesterday — yup, the biggest — I think it’s like the biggest — newspaper in Atlanta.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s… Oh, yeah. Biggest newspaper in the state.

BUCK: This was their tweet. “The Vikings landed in America a thousand years ago, long before Europeans,” which is amazing.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: These are the people that think they should be not only telling you about reality and informing you about America and about history and the world around you, but they’re also ones that object to you wanting to have any input into what your kids are learning in school. And since we’re speaking about the Vikings, I’ve been saying this for a long time. Just wait ’til the libs figure out that, you know, the Vikings —

CLAY: They were raping and pillaging.

BUCK: — weren’t a bunch of Swedish chefs walking around with horned helmets on. They had a whole society built on pillage, slavery, and, you know, the most predatory practices of those tribes and groups around them. But give it time. They’ll get there. They already went after the Fighting Irish, Clay.

CLAY: Oh, yeah. They play the Viking horn and have a Viking mascot on the sidelines at Minnesota. Now, by the way, that Atlanta Journal-Constitution thing is so perfect because when you see everything through the prism of race, you ultimately blind yourself to the most basic factual realities. They were trying to argue, “Oh, Columbus and everybody else who’s European, they stink. Look who actually discovered America.” Oh, it was other Europeans. My bad.

BUCK: They just… They’re so focused. This is one of the problems on wokeness in the schools and this is why — bringing in the Youngkin-McAuliffe race for a second — the whole parent revolution against the school boards and the absurdity that is often being inflicted upon children on a day-to-day basis in the name of wokeness and diversity and inclusion, all the rest of it? Basic learning is suffering as a result of this. You have limited attention span, limited time in the classroom. We want kids to not grow up and think that the Vikings were not European for example.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JOY REID: The World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros is happening now, shifting to the stadium in Atlanta for the next three games, which means viewers across the country will soon be subjected to a particular show of fandom that has roiled baseball for decades — and that’s the tomahawk chop. Correction: “The racist tomahawk chop,” a synchronized movement of the arm by Atlanta fans at home games, a gesture and chant promoting stereotypes, caricatures and, frankly, hatred of Native American people. The chop gets its World Series spotlight starting tomorrow.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. There you hear the other side, the leftist MSNBC approach to the tomahawk chop, because it makes people think racist things. It makes them dislike, hate people, even. It’s just not true. No one is doing it. Not a single person is doing the tomahawk chop is doing it because they hate Native American people, or they have some reason that they’re trying to be disrespectful to them.

If anything, it’s supposed to be… Well, for one thing, it’s supposed to just be about baseball and people coming together from all different backgrounds, races, religions, et cetera, and enjoying sport together, which used to be, as Clay often talks about, the great unifier in America. Now even that has been pulled apart and corroded with wokeness.

But it’s obviously just not the case. It is just not the case that this is done to be racist, to be disrespectful. And, Clay, that’s obvious, but we keep coming back to this. You know, every team is gonna have to be the mastodon and the banana slug. It’s gonna have to be random animals until PETA gets too upset and says not allowed to have that anymore.

CLAY: Yeah, PETA doesn’t even want the phrase bullpen to be used because it’s offensive to animals. The bullpen of course is where all of the backup pitchers that might come into the game gather and get loose as well. But I just think it’s important to note, where did the tomahawk chop come from? In Florida State, the Seminole fans, they are the Florida State Seminoles.

The Seminole tribe has specifically said Chief Osceola — and if you’ve watched those games when they run out with the flaming spear and they throw it into the midfield in Tallahassee. It’s one of the great college football traditions. The Seminole tribe has specifically said, “We consider this to be a great honor, that you want to brand your team based on the warrior characteristics of the Seminole tribe,” and so they have specifically — ’cause they were getting attacked at Florida State.

The Seminoles have said, “Oh, no, no, no. We love this. We like the association of Florida State with the Seminole tribe and our history,” okay? So the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant comes from Florida State which has been endorsed by the Seminole tribe via Deion Sanders who was a legendary Florida State Seminole player who also played football for the Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, 49ers, many teams, but baseball for the Atlanta Braves.

He memorably took a helicopter to play in a football and baseball game in the same day, which is one of the craziest sports accomplishments of all time. And so, this is a direct commendation endorsement of Deion through the Seminoles. So if you actually look at how the tomahawk chop came to be, it was a endorsement of the incredible athleticism of Florida State Seminoles star Deion Sanders while playing for the Atlanta Braves. It is an honoring of a black man and his athleticism by the Atlanta Braves fan base which I’m sure Joy Reid doesn’t even know.

BUCK: Speaking of Atlanta — yeah, actual history and knowledge of it is not the left’s strong suit. You know what I said before about the TIME magazine story? Actually I got it confused with a different story. It is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

CLAY: Oh, no.

BUCK: They said yesterday — yup, the biggest — I think it’s like the biggest — newspaper in Atlanta.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s… Oh, yeah. Biggest newspaper in the state.

BUCK: This was their tweet. “The Vikings landed in America a thousand years ago, long before Europeans,” which is amazing.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: These are the people that think they should be not only telling you about reality and informing you about America and about history and the world around you, but they’re also ones that object to you wanting to have any input into what your kids are learning in school. And since we’re speaking about the Vikings, I’ve been saying this for a long time. Just wait ’til the libs figure out that, you know, the Vikings —

CLAY: They were raping and pillaging.

BUCK: — weren’t a bunch of Swedish chefs walking around with horned helmets on. They had a whole society built on pillage, slavery, and, you know, the most predatory practices of those tribes and groups around them. But give it time. They’ll get there. They already went after the Fighting Irish, Clay.

CLAY: Oh, yeah. They play the Viking horn and have a Viking mascot on the sidelines at Minnesota. Now, by the way, that Atlanta Journal-Constitution thing is so perfect because when you see everything through the prism of race, you ultimately blind yourself to the most basic factual realities. They were trying to argue, “Oh, Columbus and everybody else who’s European, they stink. Look who actually discovered America.” Oh, it was other Europeans. My bad.

BUCK: They just… They’re so focused. This is one of the problems on wokeness in the schools and this is why — bringing in the Youngkin-McAuliffe race for a second — the whole parent revolution against the school boards and the absurdity that is often being inflicted upon children on a day-to-day basis in the name of wokeness and diversity and inclusion, all the rest of it? Basic learning is suffering as a result of this. You have limited attention span, limited time in the classroom. We want kids to not grow up and think that the Vikings were not European for example.

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C&B Debate: What’s the Best Halloween Candy?

29 Oct 2021

BUCK: Spooky times out there. We’ll be telling you some of our favorite Halloween movies and maybe even have a Halloween candy throwdown in the third hour. You candy corn fans better get ready for the noise, ready for the ruckus

CLAY: Are we gonna be the first show in history to go from the president to a candy debate in the space of, like, 10 minutes? I think we might.

BUCK: To go from? We might…

CLAY: Oh, we should ask Trump for his candy endorsements?

BUCK: I think we gotta have former POTUS weigh in. I’m gonna tell you right now Trump is a Reese’s Pieces guy ’cause he knows what’s up. He’s got good taste. He knows. That is the best Halloween candy, all right?

CLAY: Oh, man. I’m gonna… So are you saying like Reese’s Pieces or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?

BUCK: Ooooh. I’m Team Reese’s for the Halloween Candy, but I’m not entirely sure whether I go cups or the little M&M candies.

CLAY: So, I’m going cups. I think the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is the greatest Halloween candy. That’s my first-round draft pick. My personal, I’m a big peanut M&M guy. But if you told me, “Hey, what is the overall best quality you can get in your Halloween bag? What are you gonna steal from the kids?” the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are way up there along with the M&Ms.

BUCK: You know what I always found was kind of a trap and not worth it? The same way that I think they’re calls Peeps at Easter time, they’re never… They look cool but you eat them, you’re like, “What is this?”

CLAY: (laughing)

Below are my top four Halloween candies. Vote below which is the best or fight with everyone else about candy I disrespected in the comments.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 29, 2021

BUCK: It’s like I’m eating Styrofoam packing. Yeah, that’s right, I’m calling out the Peeps. But beyond that, Rolo. Rolos, you look at them and they look sort of gooey and yummy on the packaging and then you try to chew through those things, it’s like liquid cement in your mouth I’m very anti-Rolos. So Reese’s Pieces, obviously Skittles, anything in that realm for Halloween, fantastic. Snickers, Three Musketeers. I actually think I’d take Three Musketeers over Snickers. That’s gonna upset some people.

CLAY: When do you think was the last time Trump himself actually gave out Halloween on Halloween was? Before he was president, could you knock on his door —

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: — in Trump Tower and get candy?

BUCK: Yeah, in Trump Tower in New York? I’m sure he gave out or maybe some of the staff gave out candy.

CLAY: No, I mean himself. When was the last time? I’m sure we can get Don Jr. on. I bet there was a point where you might knock on the Trump family door and Trump might come out. I mean, you went to prom with Ivanka. Did you get the boutonniere there for the picture?

BUCK: Stories for another time.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Stories for another time.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: I put up my power ranking of top candies. You can go vote in it, Buck maybe can come up with his own four and put them out. Maybe we can have a head-to-head battle down the stretch run. My top four Halloween candies, by the way, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Peanut M&Ms, Snickers, and Twix. And thousands of you have voted in the first three minutes that this thing was up on Twitter — I’m @ClayTravis — and the vast majority of you are saying Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are the best Halloween candy.

BUCK: So this is where we have, Clay, this chart that case from Influenster about the parts of the country that have, like, the highest preference for different candies. And I’ve gotta say this was interesting. First of all, California goes with Lifesavers, which, to me, hard candy?

CLAY: No. Poor choice. Poor choice.

BUCK: Get outta here. Gotta give credit to Montana. They give KitKat as their outlier —

CLAY: You know, I just wrote down KitKat. I think I should have put that in there instead of Twix.

BUCK: I’d take KitKat over Twix. I don’t think that’s a tough call.

CLAY: Our producer, Ali, sent me a Twix — sent us a Twix text; and I was like, “Oh, Twixes are really good,” but it distracted me from the KitKat. I disrespected the KitKat. I apologize.

BUCK: And then you got the Nestle Crunch bar.

CLAY: That’s also good.

BUCK: — in Florida, Florida coming through big, I forgot — it was huge. I can still eat that because it’s rice.

CLAY: Delicate diet boy here.

BUCK: Yeah, you gotta watch the gluten when you got celiac disease. Very important. Candy corn’s gluten-free; yet if I were on an island, and that is all I had to eat, you would see the Buckster losing some LBs. That is Texas’ choice.

CLAY: We love you, Texas. Great state, awful candy choice.

BUCK: I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, we know it’s not our wonderful listeners in the Houston area, for example, they’re not candy corn, folks, but the one that I have to throw the most shade toward, New York, my home state, is a Sweet Tart bastion. What kind of commie nonsense is this? Nobody wants Sweet Tarts to be the top candy in their bag when they’re kids, when they’re adults, you name it. I’m just not buying it.

CLAY: I remember having Sweet Tarts when I was a kid in the movie theater and you remember what it was like when you get those big… I don’t know. They were bigger than, say, a half dollar — you know, the circle Sweet Tarts. I think there were like three in a package, but if you lick those things for too long, then your tongue starts to bleed.

It’s like the worst candy ever or you bite it and it’s kind of chalky. I think that I have disrespected KitKat. I would like to apologize to KitKat nation. I also think payday under rated, I’m a big payday guy paydays are tough to beat I know that’s a minority opinion.

BUCK: We got a problem, buddy. You know what the preferred candy of the state of Tennessee, your home state is? Candy corns, dude.

CLAY: No.

BUCK: You gotta a lot of work to do in Tennessee.

CLAY: This is really disappointing.

BUCK: And you go big for Halloween. We were all gonna be out there. I’m sick and got my mom’s birthday but we got producer Ali out there at the big party this weekend the Clay Travis household. You go all out on Halloween. You gotta spread the good news about Reese’s Pieces and about Twix and about KitKat. You cannot have your fellow Tennesseans neck deep in candy corn. This is madness.

CLAY: My wife got a tent put in this year for the backyard for our Halloween party. It has spilled outside of the house itself and now is into the backyard, which is pretty wild.

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29 Oct 2021

BUCK: Clay, the scariest movie you’ve ever seen and holiday movie recommendation for the weekend. You got two. We got about 60 seconds here so give me what you got.

CLAY: You were afraid to watch these. I’m going to Conjuring.

BUCK: Whoa! Whoa! Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

CLAY: I’m going on The Coninjuring 1 and 2, recent movies. Also, Paranormal Activity. I watched Paranormal Activity and had to leave the lights on in my own house. This is probably seven or eight years ago I watched that movie. So, Conjuring 1 and 2, I think they’re fantastic, and Paranormal Activity. Those are all recent ones. What about you?

BUCK: No, that’s excellent. The scariest movie I’ve ever seen is The Exorcist, no question. Nothing else comes close.

CLAY: Super scary.

BUCK: And I lived right next to The Exorcist steps in D.C., which did freak me out. I mean like 50 feet from them.

CLAY: That’s phenomenal on Halloween. Such a fun time.

BUCK: Yeah, D.C. is a great Halloween town for that. And then for a movie, I actually liked this Netflix series I’ve been watching a few episodes of — I’d recommend it to anyone who’s looking for something new this weekend — Midnight Mass. It’s actually pretty good, I will say. I’s pretty good so far. I’m a few episodes in. But everyone have a very spooky, very safe Halloween.

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29 Oct 2021

CLAY: I am down in the great state of Florida. I appreciate all the Floridians that I’ve already met down here who are living in a free republic — “the oasis of freedom,” as Ron DeSantis calls it — and, ironically, Buck, if you look at the data… We were just talking about the data from The Lancet on vaccinated versus unvaccinated spread of covid.

If you look at the data — and I tweeted this out. If there’s people out there who you have friends and family, I know, as we move closer to Halloween and the holidays for Thanksgiving and Christmas, that there are many people that will be surrounded by some who might disagree with them, and I would tell them, “Hey, you can spread the gospel of Clay and Buck.”

You can say, “Look, you may not agree with everything these guys say, but their facts are gonna be pretty right. You might disagree sometimes with the opinion, but you should check ’em out, you should listen. We welcome everyone.” It’s a big tent on this radio program that Rush left us, the biggest radio program anywhere in the country.

And the data right now — and I’m reading from the New York Times. Did you know — probably you didn’t — that Florida has the lowest rate of covid per capita of any state in the entire United States and that Florida is less than half the covid rate of New York? We’ve been talking about the vaccine mandates that are being put in place and also less than half the rate of California. That is stunning, I think, to many people.

BUCK: It’s obviously because Governor Ron DeSantis put in place those really extreme vaccine mandates and mask mandates. Oh, wait. He did none of that.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He refused to bend the knee and do these things that they said would be necessary to bring down Florida’s caseload all summer while you and I were saying, “We’ve seen this before. It is seasonal, just like so many other viruses. It will move through Florida and it will move north,” and that is currently what it is doing.

But Governor DeSantis is also pointing out, Clay, that there are gonna be a lot of long-term implications to this when it comes to people’s relationship with the health bureaucracy and how they view just the general public health advice where, for example, because of how much there’s a politicization of vaccines for kids with covid.

You and I sit here and talk about measles. It’s stable, does not mutate, and it’s a thousand times statistically more dangerous to children than a covid. But people keep comparing these things and acting like it’s the same. Meanwhile, you got a one-in-a-million chance in terms of kids actually dying when they get covid. Here’s DeSantis saying this is gonna change the discussion for vaccines for kids in a lot of ways.

DESANTIS: I’m really concerned about how this is gonna impact other vaccines — for example, the normal vaccines that kids take, my kids take, most of your kids I’m sure do. I guarantee you, you are gonna see a decline in that because I think you’re creating a lot of distrust. I think you’re creating a lot of people who are looking at these people that have been on TV for a year and a half, and they ain’t told the truth.

CLAY: It’s 100% right. I think he’s right, and I think it’s unfortunate. Covid has been disastrous for our trust going forward in public health officials because they have told us so many falsehoods for 18 months because they have been dishonest with us and because they have very rarely, if ever, leveled with the American public and let them know what was likely to happen and where we were headed.

I think that distrust is going to take decades to rebuild, if ever. And the body blow that science itself has taken as the argument would be that science is not political, right? That’s the strong argument, that we should follow the truth wherever it goes. When you tell me that it’s safe, when everybody else is locked down, that I can have a BLM protest — and when you tell me that there’s something other than boys and girls in this world — I’m sorry. I’m not buying into modern-day science.

BUCK: Clay, imagine if your doctor told you, “You need to take this antibiotic or you’ll die,” and then — after you took it for 10 days or whatever it was — he said, “You weren’t actually gonna die, but I just thought it might make you feel a little better faster so I told you you’d die.” Would you trust that doctor again?

CLAY: No, of course not.

BUCK: Dr. Fauci, admittedly, by his own words, lied to the American people. Now, what’s amazing is he’s actually lying about lying which is even crazier.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But he admits that he lied about mask effectiveness so that he could then protect the supply of masks for “the people that really needed them” or whatever. Look, don’t trust Fauci when it comes to science. Definitely don’t let him near your puppy. This is a guy that nobody should be trusting or listening to anymore, and yet the left still props him up as the high priest of Fauciism. It’s absurd.

CLAY: It’s because so many people are so invested in the choices that they made that they won’t continue to look at the data and adjust based on those choices. This is not about science in any way. It’s about being right and refusing to admit when you were wrong. And one thing we try to do, Buck, if there were an incredible study that came out that the next couple of studies came out and they showed — I don’t know — that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was way more effective than Moderna or Pfizer, we would come on and say, “Hey, this is a really interesting study. Maybe we need to adjust or our opinion. Buck did take the Spirit Airlines of vaccines.”

BUCK: Maybe some of us know. Yep. Maybe some of us had a feeling, Clay, that the Spirit Airlines long-term would be a better play than your fancy Delta and United vaccines, so to speak. Look, I’ll tell you this, man. I just spoke to my family, my parents early this week. They’re both already scheduled for their boosters.

CLAY: Yeah, mine got theirs.

BUCK: Yeah. They’re getting their boosters, and I’m like, “Go for it,” and we’ve already talked about, you know, if one parent, if one of my parents gets covid we’re gonna try to separate them out and I’m gonna set one of them up so they don’t have to be together, because home spread is such a concern. I take this very seriously, you take this very seriously, based on what is real.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Not based on what you can’t control, not based on hysteria and absurdity. And this is why to call people anti-vaccine because they have these very real concerns that are actually rooted in a more full some understanding, a more honest understanding of not just the data but of human reality day to day. Clay, I can’t tell how many people stand in the elevator — this happened this morning to me — three people, I get on the elevator, all have masks down around their chins. I get on, they pull their masks up.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Oh, gee, I feel so much safer now.

CLAY: Well, I’ve been traveling all over the country all fall, right? I’m down in Florida, I was in Texas earlier this week. I’ll be back down in Alabama next week, and I gotta say: The way we win is by embracing normalcy in our lives.

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