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Clay and Buck

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

26 Oct 2021

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Clay Talks Enes Kanter, China and Nike on Fox

26 Oct 2021

Clay appeared on Fox’s America’s Newsroom to discuss Enes Kanter’s bold China stance with Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino.

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Biden’s Approval Rating Collapse Is the Worst Since WWII

25 Oct 2021


CLAY: I am reading we got the article up at OutKick you can read this, they also dove into it. This is overall approval ratings from Gallup. When Joe Biden started office — and I understand some of you out there gonna say, I don’t trust the poll. Polls are always wrong. This is a consistent poll, right? This is Gallup. They regularly do approval ratings. They’ve been doing ’em for decades, generations. When Joe Biden took office, they gave him a 57% approval rating. That is in late January, he takes the oath of office. Between his inauguration and right now, he has had a drop — his approval rating now in Gallup is 42%. His drop is the biggest drop in approval ratings for a president since World War II. That’s a whoa moment for me, Buck. That’s multiple generations. That’s a lot — that’s almost 80 years, basically, of data on presidents. No president, based on this data, has had a worse 10 months going all the way back to World War II. Does that surprise you that Biden has got that bad data? Or — and how much worse can it get is one of the questions.

BUCK: Let’s think of it this way, right? One thing that I’ve had to get used to, you know, from back in the day when you actually could have debates with libs on the air on cable news, doesn’t really happen. I mean, when I got into this and, you know, you and I came in the media roughly the same time period, and you could actually go on, and you’d fight about, you know, is the Obama administration doing well?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And you could be a conservative go on TV, is the Bush administration doing well? You’d go on TV. And you’d have sometimes things I know they’re gonna hit me with X, I know they’re gonna say look at the — you know, look at the unemployment numbers or look at the amount of people that are happy with their new health care, they can stay on their parents insurance, these things that you knew the talking points that would be thrown if you that as a conservative you were gonna have to parry and explain and deal with. I bring it up, Clay, because the Biden administration’s got nothing right now. And you can see it. You can feel it. When you and I are sitting here talking about the incredible collapse of their ratings, when we’re looking — ratings. Well, kind of. Polling, close enough, same idea in politics. But as we see this, what is the thing right now? If they put, you know, Jen Psaki in a side-by-side with you and me and she was supposed to talk about what a great administration that has been for this year, the things she’s say — would say would be somewhat laughable and we would easily be able to crush without exception, the border, the economy, Afghanistan, you know, go down the list of things that people care about, inflation and covid, covid cases, nothing. They don’t have anything right now on the self-that they can point to and say speaking of shelves, empty shelves, Biden, there’s nothing they can point to. So that I think is a really strong indicator of how weak a position they’re in right now.

CLAY: So when I look at this and I see, my goodness, ’cause he came in — and remember, Buck, the media’s just started to get a little bit tough, and I mean a little bit tough on Biden in the last couple months. I think Afghanistan for many people was a pivot point in terms of starting to ask difficult questions ’cause to your point Trump became such a good or evil dynamic for the media that they wouldn’t even allow anyone on CNN or MSNBC to even offer a defense of the Trump presidency. That’s how aggressively opposed both of those networks became. And so I look around now and yet we’re maybe we need to talk about this and we are during the course of today’s show we’re gonna talk about taxing this unrealized capital gains idea, billionaires tax, this is it for Biden. If he gets this budget deal through his finished because the House is gonna flip, nothing’s getting passed in 2022, he’s not going to run, I don’t believe, again. If you were sitting odds, what do you think the chances are Biden runs in 2024?

BUCK: Oh, man. That’s a — that is a super tough question right now ’cause I think the play is for Dem — and sates shameless one, right? But we’re talking about Democrats here, Clay, so come on, shame, who cares. I think the play for them is to have Biden run and then step down in the second term because I do believe they recognize how much weakness there is in a Kamala candidacy versus the narrative for Biden becomes that he has passed the torch to the first, you know — the first —

CLAY: Black woman, yes.

BUCK: — minority female president, and that then becomes, oh, forget about the fact that was it essentially a bait-and-switch election but one more — I brought up Afghan and I have been thinking more about this because what they sold us on New Yorkers they’ll know what I’m talking about, for Bloomberg, Mayor Bloomberg, horrible on all of the things but overall a competent administrator of a Nanny State Big Government approach. A compensate administrator of that, right? That can be harder to fight against because if the trains are running on time, think of it like compensate socialism. Still bad but, you know, Venezuela is like the end state of incompetent socialism right? What we’re getting with the Biden administration is the Big Government policies we warned about executed incompetently and that’s why I think Afghanistan was so dangerous for them because people said, you’re not even good at doing the bad ideas that we know aren’t going to work.

CLAY: It crystallized for a lot of people ’cause the general position is people don’t pay attention to foreign policy. I’d say the exception to that rule is when the major foreign policy disaster also reflects what’s going on in America. And, you know, we’ve got the border caravan headed this way. I mean, one of the most intriguing parts of the Biden presidency right now — and again we’re talking about, according to Gallup which has been around one of the earliest polling companies ever for people out there who just — this is the biggest collapse in support for a president in almost everyone’s lives who’s listening to us right now going all the way back to World War II. All right? So how in the world does this change? And to the point I was asking you, Buck, about a larger context here, what are they gonna do? How do they get out of this are you the? And is there any way that they could even get Joe Biden on the campaign trail to get ready for 2024 even before you get to the general, does he have the sort of ability to even be on the road — remember they hit him for 2020. He’s only gonna be worse for 2023 when he would have to win in nomination again.

BUCK: You know, there’s a lot of surrogates out there they’re still focused on the midterms because they realize the Biden — this is — the reason — and we should talk about the latest for their bill — we got a couple things to get this hour, the latest with the spending bill, which includes this billionaires tax that’s not a billionaires tax, Clay, it’s just a tax on billionaires or — not a wealth tax. It’s a tax on wealthy people from Janet Yellen. It’s pretty hilarious. But also they recognize that if they do lose control in the mermaids, Biden agenda is fished. I mean, there’s no overarching vision there’s no middle ground they’re going to get they went scorched-earth. Let’s not forget they went $1.9 trillion of spending without Republicans earlier this year and that was all a big cash infusion so they’ve already been going wild with the purse strings but if they don’t get this through this is their one and only shot so I think they realize how much hangs on all this.

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Karmic Justice: World Series in Georgia After All-Star Boycott

25 Oct 2021

CLAY: I’m headed down to Houston tomorrow with my 11-year-old, die-hard Atlanta Braves fan. And this is karmic justice, Buck, because you’ll remember — even as somebody who is not a die-hard Major League Baseball fan –, Rob Manfred, the commissioner of MLB pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in a misguided attempt to placate woke social justice warriors over the Georgia voting bill.

The Georgia voting bill, by the way, that was far more lenient than the rules in New York State where Major League Baseball is based or in Delaware where Joe Biden’s been elected for over four decades now and the Georgia voting bill that was in some ways, that was in some ways less restrictive than the Colorado bill. So they moved the Major League Baseball All-Star Game out to Denver.

Well, the Atlanta Braves hadn’t been to the World Series since 1999. They’re going up against the L.A. Dodgers, the defending World Series champs, and so Saturday night they closed them out, the Braves did, to advance. Now, as a result, you have got the Houston Astros hosting the Atlanta Braves, and there will be at least probably — could get a sweep, but at least — two, probably three World Series, which were infinitely bigger in terms of viewership than the All-Star Game would have ever been, and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is exalting.

So are many other baseball fans. I hope that Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball commissioner, goes to Atlanta and they put him on the jumbotron, and the Atlanta people let him have it. It would be best of all, as Astros fans, if the Braves won it in game 5 in Atlanta and Rob Manfred had to present the Major League Baseball World Series trophy and the Atlanta Braves fans could just tee off on him. But the governor of George, Brian Kemp, who’s been fighting back against this idea of taking away the All-Star Game, wanted to take a little bit of a victory lap and enjoy the Braves success. Here’s cut 18.

KEMP: Well, look, this is gonna be great for hardworking Georgians. That was what was so outrageous about the last decision to took a $100 million of economic impact away from small business owners, a lot of minority businesses and employees — in Atlanta and then Cobb County, where the ballpark is — for really no reason other than politics. So it’s great to see the game coming here for the team and the fans and the organization, but it’s also good for those small business owners and hardworking Georgians.

CLAY: We should mention, Buck, this is pretty great, right? To cut through and feel like you won the ultimate battle here.

BUCK: Absolutely, and notice how he makes this case. I think it’s so important for what often happens when there are these social-media driven, virtue-signaling cancellation campaigns out there that you have a bunch of people who are clustered in places like New York, D.C., Los Angeles, saying, “Oh, Georgia,” which just voted for Biden, by the way. Sorry, but that’s the outcome. We won’t get into whether there were some votes that were problematic. Every time I say this people start emailing me. I know about the issues. I’m just saying technically, Georgia got racked up as a victory for Biden, and also those two Senate seats, obviously, that went for Democrats.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: But, Clay, they think, “Oh, we’re going to send some big message by stopping the All-Star Game from being in Georgia as a state in the Atlanta area.” It really affects people that need that business. It effects the guy that owns a pub a block or two away. It affects the people selling merchandise. It affects the vendors and those folks.

It reminds me in a sense of what you see even here this morning with the climate Extinction Rebellion and a bunch of left-wing climate change lunatics. Who are they actually hurting by lying down in traffic on the FDR Drive and the major arteries into Manhattan? The really rich people, for the most part, are already in Manhattan. They’re hurting a lot of working-class people — a lot of folks are commuting into their jobs — and not doing anything in the process other than feeling good about themselves.

I think that’s just a classic left-wing thing. And you see it here with the baseball situation where what was accomplished by all that? All that nonsense about how Georgia’s voting laws, it’s just because people wanted to play into a narrative of the Republicans trying to suppress minority votes — which is not true — and beyond that, people just want to feel like they’re good when they don’t have to sacrifice anything. They’re sacrifice other people’s stuff, though.

CLAY: Yeah, and I loved this. One, the Atlanta Braves haven’t been there since ’99. But to do it in this year of all years when the All-Star Game got pulled, it just feels like karmic justice in many ways for the Atlanta Braves and that organization. And I do think Brian Kemp’s point is a good one. They calculated this is gonna be a $100 million cost, and now those people who were harmed get an unexpected boon from the NLCS and the World Series.

I’ll just point this out: The most popular people in Georgia, Buck — I know that state pretty well — they’re not Republicans, they’re not Democrats, they’re not independents. It’s the Atlanta Braves and the Georgia Bulldogs. Those are the teams that cut across state lines in a way that nobody else is popular in the state of Georgia.

And if you remember, Buck, even Stacey Abrams herself got caught editing her USA Today article to make it look like she was fighting against the All-Star Game getting pulled out of Atlanta, ’cause Stacey Abrams didn’t want to have to take any responsibility for this even though it was her organization and her fight that led to in happening. And she tried to say, “Oh, that wasn’t me.” Well, unfortunately it was. She tried to go back and edit. I’ve never even heard of that happening, going back and editing an editorial that had already run in an effort to try and protect yourself going forward.

BUCK: The moment you start to analyze where the Democrats are so dug in on this narrative of — as they’ve called it many times, including Joe Biden, so let’s — this is not some fringe Democrat issue. This is from the very top, the literal top of the Democrat Party, the very head of the organization, so to speak, the guy who’s calling the shots.

They call it Jim Crow 2.0. The reason they do this is they want to create laws in the states and actually create laws at the federal level that will mandate in all the states that will favor Democrats. And somehow, Democrats are always favored by having looser voting restrictions, looser voting laws that make it harder to prove or find fraud. That’s one part of it.

Another part is just constantly calling Republicans racist so they get that benefit of, “Oh, if you want to move a voting booth or if you want to do anything — if you want to change 10 days of voting to eight days of voting — that’s racist.” That’s all they’ll say and ultimately, Clay, and I think we have to remember this, too.

The last election they got what they wanted, by and large, or at least with Biden and then in Georgia essential the two Senate seats. But the next time around, what do people think Pelosi and Schumer…? The most mainline, mainstream media Democrats, what are they going to say if it is a midterm shellacking that they’re in for? “Oh, it was voter suppression!”

The people that lecture us all the time about, “You won’t accept the election results,” their obsession with voter rights, restrictions, et cetera — their obsession with Jim Crow 2.0 lies — is that it’s a built-in, psychological mechanism for, “We never lose elections. Republicans just suppress minority votes!” That’s what they’re building with every one of these statements they make.

CLAY: Stacey Abrams lost the election in 2018 in Georgia by more votes than Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, right? She lost by 50,000 votes in Georgia. Trump lost — even by the numbers that are out there right now — the 2020 election by 40,000 votes. Stacey Abrams refused to concede. She said they cheated. She became a Democratic hero. Donald Trump does the same thing and it’s “a fundamental threat to democracy.” They’re not playing by the same rules. We all know that.

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He Tortured Puppies! Is Fauci’s Job Finally in Jeopardy?

25 Oct 2021


BUCK: Let’s start, though, with the latest Fauciite madness. There’s a lot about Dr. Anthony Fauci that I don’t like. Clay and I talk about this with some regularity. There are things you can just not explain away. He’s lied to people in the past. He has lied about masks. He has been wrong many times. He’s clearly a partisan political player who pretends not to be. So there’s a lot about him that people don’t like.

But this! This connection may be just too much to bear, Clay. This may be the first time in a long time that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s job would seem to be in some degree of jeopardy — at least it could be theoretically — because of the outcry against it. He’s under fire, according to the Daily Mail here, over the White Coat Waste Project exposing a program…

Now, I’m just gonna give you the short version of this, everybody, and I’m just warning there should be a content warning ’cause I love dogs and I know this audience loves dogs. The N-I-A-I-D, NIAID, spent millions of dollars — this is Anthony Fauci’s organization — funding an experiment in Tunisia where they took beagle puppies, removed their vocal cords, and let sandflies eat their heads. They’re alive.

Members of Congress are asking for explanations of this. We’re gonna be getting more details, I would think, in the days ahead about this. Clay, this it seems to be finally a moment that’s too much for a lot of people, even though I know what Fauci’s gonna say. He didn’t know; he didn’t order it. Well, doesn’t the buck stop with Fauci? At what point can we say this guy needs to be aware of what the money that’s going to Wuhan, or aware of what the money that’s going to Tunisia is actually doing?

CLAY: Yeah. It’s interesting because it isn’t really connected to covid. And one of the truly remarkable things about Fauci’s career would be if he had to step down because of an experiment involving puppies that has nothing at all to do with covid — and that, frankly, he probably was not involved in micromanagement of. But I think it speaks to the overwhelming amount of anger that is starting to be provoked in many ways by Dr. Fauci.

And also the fact that he’s just being caught now by — even people who are middle-of-the-roaders — as someone who is speaking out on every different angle of every different story. For instance, Buck, this weekend on Friday he said, “Hey, you shouldn’t mix and match your vaccines.” In other words, if you got the Moderna, you shouldn’t get a Pfizer booster.

If you got Johnson & Johnson, you shouldn’t get whatever. Now on Sunday he came back, and he said, “Actually, you know what? Maybe mixing the boosters isn’t a bad move at all. You should be able to get whichever vaccine you want,” and when you define that… I know we’re gonna get into this in a little bit. But today, as we speak, Florida now has the lowest rate of infectious for covid of anywhere in the entire the United States, any state.

It is 50th out of 50 in the rate of covid, and so a lot of people are saying, “Wait a minute. Fauci is so outspoken about Florida this summer and what an awful job DeSantis was doing and how you had to have masks and how you had to have vaccine mandates, and Florida hasn’t done either of those things and the cases have all come down.”

I think, Buck, a big moment for Fauci where he really overextended himself happened and — bang, bang — in the early fall, when he said, “Hey, all these full college football and NFL stadiums, covid is gonna skyrocket all over the college football universe.” The number of cases have plummeted by a massive degree, and then when he said, “You’re not gonna be able to celebrate Christmas,” and then quickly drew back on it.

And now he’s out there telling everybody, “Hey, you gotta go out and celebrate Halloween.” I think the duality of that — ’cause that’s something that I think moderate people noticed. They said, “Wait a minute, you’re telling me I can’t celebrate Christmas? You’re telling me that I can’t celebrate Halloween? You’re telling me I can’t go watch a football game?”

Not particularly partisan people, people who don’t look at everything through the prism of Democrat-Republican. We tried to talk about sane versus insane. A lot of people who are sane are now recognizing what you and I have been saying for a very long time and been accurate about: Dr. Fauci’s logic and analysis and leadership is a fundamental failure rooted in a failure of logic.

BUCK: I think people are recognizing the politics that are at work here too. I mean, Fauci, for example, is very certain when he says that it is impossible for the viruses research in the Wuhan lab to lead to covid-19. This is news to so many of the world class scientists who have come out in recent months, Clay, who have said, “No, the lab leak theory does seem to make a lot of sense.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But maybe Fauci’s saying that, well, the viruses that we were funding the study of couldn’t have been covid, but they still would be funding a lab that was involved in the study of viruses that eventually one of them became — you know — right? I mean, I feel like he’s parsing a little bit here. Play clip 6.

FAUCI: Unequivocally, anybody who knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses knows that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2. And yet when people talk about gain-of-function, they make that implication — which I think is unconscionable to do — to say, ‘Well, maybe that research led to SARS-CoV-2.” You can ask any person of good faith who’s a virologist and they will tell you absolutely clearly that that would be molecular impossible.

BUCK: So Fauci has completely disabused us all of the lab leak theory? That’s big breaking news. Clay, he’s so full of it. He’s such a little lab coat tyrant. I do think the thing that you’re bringing up, the “college football is gonna be a feast for covid” and “maybe you can’t do Christmas this year,” and now I would add to the list just the fact that NIAID is funding these puppy experiments.

This is now going into… When you put it in context of their funding, they did fund — NIH did fund — gain-of-function research in Wuhan. That has now been established as a fact. They look like they were funding the puppy thing. When you add all this together, you say, “What are the federal health bureaucrats doing? Do they have any accountability?” And how can Anthony Fauci now say no person of good faith effectively believes the lab leak theory anymore? When did that happen? Where’s that research?

CLAY: There are tons of people, Buck, who are acted in good faith and are eminently qualified to analyze the genesis of a new virus that are saying it’s like that this virus was created inside of a lab. So just because Fauci now comes out and says no one of good faith is making that argument, that’s a 100% lie. And I think this is the evidence of his starting to feel a lot of pressure all of a sudden.

It’s adding up for him. It’s layering on. And sometimes when you start to feel pressure, you start to make really bad statements. And I think he’s been garlanded, he’s been praised by the MSNBCs and the CNNs of the world, the New York Times and the Washington Post. They’ve done everything they could to try to keep this guy in the good graces, and I think the numbers are turning against him in a big way to the point where even the Biden White House might have to acknowledge that Fauci could be a negative for them.

BUCK: That’s the only time where Fauci goes. He’s never gonna resign, by the way. He’s a little megalomaniac on top of everything else. He’ll never resign. But if he becomes a political liability for the White House or if they’re able to essentially tie it off with Fauci and say, “All right, we’re gonna push him away now he’s done…” They’ll never say he’s done a bad job but they may decide he’s done enough. The whole situation is absurd. This was a guy who was running what Democrats said was the awful covid response under Trump. By the way, Trump listened to Fauci too much.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I talked to the former president with this. He listened to Fauci more than he should have for longer than he should have, in my opinion. I think he would admit that now, by the way, for anybody who’s testy about it. And this guy kept his job — in fact, in a sense got elevated into the… This is like the general who’s losing the war under one president gets elevated to be, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the next administration. Well, that actually does sound like something the Biden administration would do now that I think about it.

CLAY: Well, and the challenge here is to your point how do they get him off the stage? Because I think when they brought him back out to try to clean up the Christmas thing, he’s been, oh, avuncular Grandpa Joe, Anthony Fauci lately, right? He’s been telling everybody, “Oh, you need to go out and trick-or-treat.” Next thing you know, he’s gonna be on television breaking down what candies he likes the best.

Because they’re desperately trying to cancel out what has been a disastrous fall for Fauci and we just repeat this ’cause I think it’s significant. I think a lot of people say, “Holy cow, more people have died of covid in 2021 are Joe Biden in charge than died in all of 2020 in the United States of America.” So Biden said, “Hey, I’m gonna fix this; we’ll have no issues whatsoever.” He’s got more deaths on his watch than Trump did, and everybody talked about how awful Trump did. I think the Fauci mess with Biden deserves to be discussed as well.

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DeSantis to Out-of-State Law Enforcement: Move to Florida

25 Oct 2021


CLAY: We were talking as we went to break about Fauci, and whether or not this puppy-testing absurdity experiment that the NIH was involved in could be adding up along with the Fauci (who tried to steal Christmas) and also all of the lies just kind of culminating — the college football and the NFL stadiums. I want to contrast… I mentioned in the open that Florida now has the lowest covid rate of any of the 50 states, the absolute lowest — and, by the way, most media aren’t covering it, right?

When cases were going up, it was, “Oh, my God! Ron DeSantis is killing everyone.” Now the cases are at their absolute lowest. Almost no one is talking about it or discussing it because it destroys the narrative that has happened in Florida without a vaccine or mask mandate. But I love a lot of things that Ron DeSantis is doing — and, Buck, we were talking about this off air. He’s now saying, “Hey, if you’re a police officer and you get fired over a covid vaccine mandate, we want to hire you. We’ll treat you better down in Florida.” Listen to cut 3.

DESANTIS: In Florida, not only are we gonna want to protect the law enforcement and all the jobs, we’re actually actively working to recruit out-of-state law enforcement because we do have needs in our police and our sheriff’s departments. So in the next legislative session, I’m gonna hopefully sign legislation that gives a $5,000 bonus to any out of state law enforcement that relocates in Florida. So NYPD, Minneapolis, Seattle, if you’re not being treated well, we’ll treat you better here. You can fill important needs for us, and we’ll compensate you as a result.

BUCK: Clay, I’ll just tell you this right now. I spoke to an NYPD friend of mine, not about this specifically, but just about morale these days, because there’s a mayor’s race coming up there and New York is having a tough one.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: I can tell you this: There are gonna be some longtime, top-quality NYPD folks who take a long look at this one. There are gonna be people in other cities. So there’s the vaccine mandate issue, but just even in places where they haven’t fully implemented or people haven’t been fired, their law enforcement officers I know are saying, “You know what? Florida $5,000 bonus to cover your move, plus you get no state income tax?” This is the kind of stuff we need to see. GOP governors in states like this are your only government line of defense against this creeping tyranny. That’s it. There’s really nothing else right now.

CLAY: Well, not only that, but we’ve talked about how covid has led to a large reorder and resorting of the country. The blue gets bluer. The red gets redder. And, by and large, the red is getting redder because a lot of people — to your point, Buck. If you’re the kind of police officer who might be out in Washington State or let’s say you’re in the Chicago area or you’re in New York and you’ve been thinking about making a move south for some time.

That $5,000 extra is a nice cherry on top of a freedom sundae, which is what Ron DeSantis has been offering — and, frankly, also what you’re seeing from Greg Abbott down in Texas. It’s not a surprise that Elon Musk and many of these different companies are relocating to places that have made business much easier to embrace.

I don’t see that changing. I think this “Great Resorting” — particularly because so many people have found out they can work anywhere, why would you stay in a high-tax jurisdiction that doesn’t have maybe the best weather, where people are sneering at you over your political beliefs, where your kids are being vaccinated in force, all of these things? I would bail in a heartbeat. This could be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back.

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Panicked Dems Deploy Barack Obama in Virginia

25 Oct 2021


BUCK: How do you know Democrats are worried about a governor’s race? Well, you see who they start to deploy. You see that they send in everybody, right? They send in the troops, so to speak. They send Biden, Harris — and, yes, even Barack Obama himself. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. You have Terry McAuliffe certainly feeling the heat in the Virginia governor’s race, as Clay and I keep telling you, because we think it’s important for the message to get out there across the country.

This would be a huge win, if Glenn Youngkin is able to pull it off, not just for the state of Virginia, but Virginia has become the front line of the battle over critical race theory teaching, over the transgender agenda being taught to kids at a very young age, and even over mask mandates and things like that. Parents who want a greater say in teaching and the apparatus of left-wing education controls are coming under assault, honestly for the first time in a long time in a meaningful way.

So they need to stop this because, “Oh, my gosh! If Youngkin beats McAuliffe in Virginia, some other states might get some ideas about this,” right? Virginia feels like a very blue state, unfortunately, because of the recent election. So this would be a pretty seismic win if it happens. So they put their top guys and gals on it, so to speak, and they’ve sent now — the Democrat National Committee.

They’ve sent down Barack Obama, because they still believe. It’s amazing. Obama was never actually successful in pushing for other candidates. If you look at the beginning of his win against Hillary Clinton back in 2008-2009, Obama’s personal charisma and the way the Democrats mobilized behind him didn’t translate to other candidates. In fact, it was the Democrat Party going into 2016 had been decimated in terms of statehouses and a lot of races that they lost. So he’s out there. But Clay and I want to focus on the case that he’s making here about the culture wars and how this is just a phony issue. Play clip 8.

OBAMA: We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars, the fake outrage the right-wing media peddles to juice their ratings. And the fact that he’s willing to go along with it instead of talking about serious problems that actually affect serious people, that’s a shame. That’s not what this election’s about. That’s not what you need, Virginia. Instead of forcing our communities to cut back at a time when we’re just starting to recover, we should be doing more to support people who are educating our kids and keeping our neighborhoods safe.

CLAY: I think this is —

BUCK: Clay, how is it a phony issue?

CLAY: It’s not a phony issue, and I think one of the challenges is, everybody gets so caught up in their media silo in this day and age, particularly if you’re active in any way on social media, that you don’t really understand what is confronting real the people. So this situation in Northern Virginia surrounding a sexual assault and the fact that parents were labeled as domestic terrorists…

And that fell apart, by the way, really fast. The organization… I’m sure you saw over the weekend. If people missed it, the organization that called for the Department of Justice and the FBI to be involved in investigating school boards basically apologized for ever making that request in the first place. But I think what’s going on for a guy like Obama is, first of all, he still skated on that 60th birthday extravaganza absurdity, right?

BUCK: Where they were the “sophisticated, vaccinated crowd,” as it was said.

CLAY: That’s right. You become so wealthy, and at some point, you end up in your own bubble and you lose touch with what the reality is dealing with. Everybody listening to us right now, do you feel like they believe that many of these things are “phony, trumped-up culture wars” when you can’t get on the Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and say what you really think for fear of being fired? Buck, one of the things I love about my bus tour that I’m on…

And, by the way, we’re gonna be down in Jacksonville, Florida, this weekend at the Florida-Georgia game. I’m basically on a tour of the American South. That’s what I’m doing. I’m on the grassroots, face-to-face conversations. IT’s not hard to find me. People can come up; they can shake my hand. They can tell me anything under the sun that they want to tell me.

It puts you in touch with the real world in a way that I think very many people in media and politics and government are not in contact with the real world. So when I hear Obama speaking like that in Virginia, he’s not going to connect with any of the people that are facing real issues in this country right now, and he’s become such a poor representation of even what he was back in 2008. I think he may even have mentioned it. One of the things he used to talk about was he had been in grocery stores and gone around and bought milk, right?

BUCK: He’s been somebody who is going between his mansion in Kalorama and his $12 million mansion in Martha’s Vineyard for quite some time now. This is not a guy who has the common touch, so to speak. But I would say this. Clay, to call it “a trumped-up culture war issue”? The school board in Loudoun knew about and suppressed the sexual assault of a young teen girl in the bathroom.

That’s not a “phony, trumped-up culture war,” and remember Barack Obama is the guy whose administration hounded the Little Sisters of the Poor, nuns, to make them pay for birth control that they clearly not only did not need themselves but also did not want to support when it came to their employees through Obamacare.

These are the same people, when you’re talking about Obamacare (and the rest of the elite Democrat left), who want to us use plural pronouns for single individuals, who think that Dave Chappelle’s comedy special should be pulled off the air. They want to talk about a phony culture war? They’ve gotta be kidding, right? The problem is they don’t like, Clay, when we fight back in the culture war.

CLAY: I think we’re starting to win, and that’s what’s really scary to them. Virginia could be an important signpost in that victory. But I think you’re starting to see a unique coalition of people fighting back against cancel culture, and the Dave Chappelle comedy special is a representation of that battle that’s going on.

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Leftists Demand You Live by Lies: Men Are Women, Speech Is Violence

25 Oct 2021


CLAY: You know, all of this insanity… Obama accused the right of getting fired up about made-up culture wars. Meanwhile, we’re in two weeks of the Dave Chappelle comedy special continuing to be a controversy where people are protesting and demanding that Dave Chappelle’s comedy special be pulled off the air. Those are not right wingers that are demanding that that take place.

And social media continues to ban people for saying truthful comments. Representative Jim Banks was banned by Twitter for pointing out that Rachel Levine, now a four-star admiral, is not in fact the first woman four-star admiral because she was born a man and decided to change her gender, and that — just sharing that fact — got Representative Jim Banks banned by Twitter. That is an unacceptable fact to share on social media, which is crazy, and this also ties in with the attacks being leveled upon Dave Chappelle.

Here’s activist Ashlee Preston on Netflix talking about the Dave Chappelle special.

PRESTON: So, to be clear, this conversation is about equity in entertainment. And we see that there is a lack of equity, uh, with trans content with content such as, uh, Dave Chappelle’s. We know that Netflix paid him $23.6 million for the Sticks and Stones special in 2019, and for The Closers he was paid 24.1 million, making transphobic content in the middle of one of the deadliest years on record for the trans community, and so this is about the emergence of a hate economy that incentivizes media that marginalizes.

CLAY: This is the insanity.

BUCK: This is insane. This is what the activists do. And, Clay, if they had a real argument to make that wasn’t rooted in hysteria, that wasn’t rooted in the deadliest…what? I would like to see the numbers here, “the deadliest year for trans individuals,” so we’re supposed think that that’s because of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special?

Obviously not, but this is the justification for the censorship and the totalitarian thought police that go people always have. They always say, “There’s some good reason for why we can’t allow you to have your thoughts,” and this is the “speech = violence” paradigm the left has been running with for a long time, which is just…

You’re seeing things now. They’re trying to hammer through and force people to bend the knee to fundamental untruths, to lies. They want you to live by lies. They want you to say that a man is a woman. They want you to say that speech equals violence, because if they can get you to do that there’s no limit to their control. If they can disorient all of us into thinking or into believing or even just going along with obviously untrue things, what limitations do they have Clay on controlling us in any respect?

CLAY: Well, and, Buck, we watched this comedy special, and my wife turned to me after we finished the comedy special and she said, “Did any transgender people who were protesting actually watch this special?” Because what Chappelle was doing was ridiculing much of the modern language that exists across a variety of spectrums right?

One of the lines that stood out to me was he talked about Caitlyn Jenner was named Woman of the Year in the first year that she had ever become a woman, and the analogy he made was like, “Hey, if the BET awards gave Eminem the Black Person of the Year award, people would be, ‘Oh, this is an outrage! This is crazy.'” So the first year Caitlyn Jenner decides she’s a woman, she’s the Woman of the Year?

Look, I can’t speak exactly for you ’cause I’m not sure your exact perspective. I don’t think most people care what gender you want to identify as, right? If it makes you happier and you are a fully grown adult, I really just don’t care at all. I don’t think we ought to be giving hormones to 5-year-old kids to try to change their gender. I think that’s crazy.

BUCK: Do you think we should be forced to call a he a she?

CLAY: No. I’m saying… But if you make that choice in your own life, that’s fine, but expecting that the entire world is going to bend to define you and use the pronouns that you choose and all of these other things? To me, this is about power, right? And I don’t feel like the “marginalized group” is the one that has all the media behind them, that has all the major corporations behind them, that has all of the might of the intellectual left behind them.

And you’re demanding that someone can’t make joke about you? This is what authoritarians do. I always used to talk about terrorists aren’t probably very funny, right? Because absolutism is the enemy of humor. Maybe I’m wrong and they sit around in Tora Bora back in the day and they’re telling all sorts of jokes.

BUCK: No, I saw Al-Qaeda jokes back in the day; they’re not funny, and so there’s that. But I can also say that when you’re looking at the… You’re right about the power dynamics here — the power, the paradigms of who’s actually calling the shots. They’re telling… They are straight… The trans activist community is trying to establish, “We cannot take a joke and you cannot make jokes” as a rule.

And if you try to break this, they will ruin you. They will destroy your career, they will run you out of town and then they turn around and say, “We’re so oppressed.” It’s remarkable that we are still having this conversation. Dave Chappelle is perhaps the most successful — there are a few names to put in there — comedian, period, certainly among of the most successful African-American comedians in his generation. But probably just comedians across all categories as well, and he still has to deal with this, and he has to kind of apologize and all the rest of it? Who has the power here?

CLAY: Not only that, Buck, I’ll just leave you with this thought — and I always think it’s a really massive way to think about it. If you choose your race like Rachel Dolezal did, it’s super racist. If you choose your gender, you’re a hero. Isn’t it harder to choose a gender, shouldn’t it be, than to choose a race? Yet one is racist, the other one is heroic.

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Joe Biden’s Wealth Tax Sets Awful Precedent

25 Oct 2021


BUCK: What’s gonna be in the huge Biden bill that Congress may be passing here soon? We have some indications of what’s gonna be in it. I want to talk to you about that. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. You have Senator Joe Manchin, who has been one of two bulwarks against the insane spending of their fellow Democrats.

Now, keep in mind, we’re still talking about a whole lot of additional spending over the next 10 years after you already had a $1.9 trillion Democrat rescue package passed earlier this year, trillions and trillions of spending going on during covid. Inflation is getting to be the kind of problem that not even the Democrats can ignore. It’s real. People see it. They feel it. They know.

Plus, you’ve got supply chain snarls, millions of unfilled jobs — and a lot of anxiety, particularly in major cities across the country, about what the winter’s going to be like with covid continuing to have pretty heavy numbers. Now Manchin is closer to a $1.5 trillion top line. Biden had a meeting with him recently trying to pitch him on, “Let’s get it up to $2 trillion.”

So, as we’ve known all along, they’re haggling over the price, and it’s gonna between 1.5 and $2 trillion. And the Democrats will, I believe, pass something here very soon and then they’ll be talking about what a huge success it is and how Biden is amazing and all the rest of it. So get ready for that. But what’s some of the stuff that’s actually in this?

Well, they are talking about a tax on the wealthiest individuals in the country that will go after their holdings in the stock market. So this would be unrealized, so it’s not stock you’ve sold. It’s stock you have — and for the very, very wealthy. It’s not clear exactly how they would implement this. As we know the devil is in the details but here is Treasury secretary Janet Yellen speaking about this proposed tax that would allegedly pay for the Build Back Better Act. Play 12.

YELLEN: I wouldn’t call that a wealth tax. But, um, it would get at capital gains, uh, which are, uh, an extraordinarily large part of the incomes of the wealthiest individuals, and, uh, right now, uh, escape taxation, uh, until they’re realized, and often they’re unrealized and, uh, the tax benefit from, um, so-called step-up basis. So it’s not a wealth tax but, um, a tax on unrealized capital gains of exceptionally wealthy individuals.

BUCK: It’s not a wealth tax, Clay, just a tax on really wealthy people’s stock transactions — or not even transactions, stock holdings.

CLAY: Here’s my problem with it, okay. Let me start with the big picture problem. Once you start taxing wealthy people’s unrealized capital gains, eventually you open the door to taxing a lot of people out there — who aren’t anywhere near as wealthy — on unrealized capital gains. Let’s not exaggerate here. This is a radical change in the way that we are taxing people.

So the idea that we’re suddenly going to implement this is I think a problem because what have we found out about anything that the government implements that allows them to get more money? Eventually they need more money, and they expand the overall number of people that can be impacted by this. It’s incremental. That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is this is incredibly complicated. It’s in general focused on the 700 wealthiest Americans, okay? So and for people out there, a lot of you may not even spend much time thinking capital gains. A capital gain is, let’s say that you bought a stock for $10, right? Let’s say you bought a stock for $10 and that stock then increases to $20.

You would owe a tax on the 10 to $20 when you sell that stock. If you have not sold that stock, then technically you have not realized a capital gain. It is only what’s called a paper profit. So effectively what the government is doing is they are saying they are going to tax paper profits, that is, unrealized dollars that are essentially sitting in your stockholder accounts, okay? So here’s the complicating factor with this.

Only the 700 richest people are being impacted by this, Buck. We are designing a tax plan on the fly in short order. Biden wants it done before he leaves the country in the next few days, six days from now. Who would you rather bet on, Buck, the 700 wealthiest Americans being advised by the greatest tax attorney and accountants that exist anywhere in the world being able to find loopholes to avoid taxation, or the federal government bureaucrats operating on a strict timetable trying to come up with a radical (and, as yet, never implemented before) policy to tax the wealthiest among us?

I am betting, Buck, on the cadre of brilliant people that are going to be advising the billionaires. This tax is not going to work. It’s going to be a mess. We’re gonna spend years in litigation over whether it’s even constitutional to tax unrealized capital gains — and, in the meantime, we’re already going to have spent that money, likely driving up substantially more deficits.

This is not a zero-cost basis as Joe Biden continues to argue. I think we are buying a lawsuit, and I think we are buying a mess here as the American public, and I think we are setting an awful precedent by trying to tax unrealized paper profits, even if it’s among the wealthiest because eventually it’s gonna trickle down to a lot more of us.

BUCK: They’ve also done this overseas, Clay. They’ve tried a wealth tax, and to your point about what happens, the super rich evade it. They find a way, or they just start… People say, “Oh, no, they can’t, ’cause it’ll be so straightforward. You have to pay this fee.” Well, then they’ll invest in real estate. Now what are you gonna do?

Are you gonna force someone to sell the property that they own? Are you gonna force them to sell the apartment building they’re an investor in because of the unrealized, upside gain? They will move their money around as they can because they have options. The super rich, which is what they’re really talking about here, have not only the greatest army of accountants and lawyers imaginable but also have the most options for where to put their money here in the states and all over the world.

The Europeans tried this. The French had a wealth tax. It was between 1.5 and 1.8% of fortunes over 13 million euros, and guess what? It never got to be about more than 1% of tax revenue in France. People repatriated, they left, they moved to other countries, they moved their money to other countries. So as a socialist wealth-redistribution scheme, it was just a lot of hot air, essentially.

But what’s even more concerning in this country is if you look at the history — and this is really instructive. Look at the history of income tax in America, everybody. It started out as, “This is just on super-rich people.” That was how they sold it in the beginning of the twentieth century. “This is just for the super rich. It’s never gonna come after you!

“We’ll use duties and excises and customs and other things to fund the federal government.” Oh, no. Now you get that nice chunk taken out of your biweekly paycheck all based on the “It’ll just be on the ultrarich” promise from about a hundred years ago, by the way, a little over a hundred years ago now.

So that’s what’s happened. So this is why opening the spigot for the government of yet another mechanism of taxation I think is really concerning. But, you know, they may be able to get this one through because class warfare sells, right? Class warfare works. That’s why Democrats do it all the time.

CLAY: I think you raised a really good point, Buck, because it’s relatively easy at least to look at a stock price, ’cause we know every single day what the value of a property is on the stock market. But if you invest in real estate, if you invest in — I don’t know — a Major League Baseball franchise, if you invest in artwork, things that are not as tangibly easy to value? And, oh, by the way, what happens if the stock market tanks, and these guys lose billions of dollars? Are we going to somehow allow them to have massive tax credits based on their unrealized capital gains losses?

BUCK: Clay, the $500,000 Hunter Biden painting that I now have hanging in my living room, as I hold this, it’s going to increase in value over the years; so what are they gonna force me to do? Sell my beloved Hunter Biden finger painting because of the 20% upside that in some fantasy world I may actually get from the obvious money-laundering scheme that they’re using here for the president of the United States’ son?

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Give Alec Baldwin the Generosity He Wouldn’t Give Us

25 Oct 2021


CLAY: We haven’t really discussed this, but it’s like a monster story for, what, the last three days or so, Buck. Alec Baldwin, while filming a movie in New Mexico, shot and killed, I believe, it’s the director of cinematography; also shot and wounded another man who was involved in the filming there. And now there’s a lot of discussion about what is going to happen to Alec Baldwin, how the shooting took place, whether there might be any criminal charges.

Certainly, this is my putting my lawyer hat on. There will be many civil lawsuits before all is said and done relating to the wrongful death and lots of money will be paid out, I would imagine, to the woman and her family. I believe she has a young child. But, Buck, you are pretty well versed in firearms. You’ve been paying a lot of attention to this story. What happened? I think that’s the question that a lot of people are asking.

BUCK: So there are a number of factors that make this look really bad in terms of recklessness. I don’t think anyone believes that Alec Baldwin wanted to do this. That’s crazy. It was an accident. But an accident with recklessness can still be a huge civil problem, and obviously there are ethical considerations that one has to take into account here with everything going on.

So some basics. The armorer on this particular production, I think, was 24-year-olds, and was known to be just reckless and not somebody who understands guns. She was a young female armorer who did not understand firearms very well, and that was known, and there had been other problems with safety on set and other productions she’d already been a part of.

So why was she chosen for this? That’s one issue. There’s reporting that there was a walk off the set for safety reasons earlier on in the production. So it seems like this had already been plagued by issues, and then when you look at this and the fact that two people were hit… Obviously, he only fired this once and saw what happened. It was a bullet.

Initially, there was all this, “Oh, look what happened to Brandon Lee,” the son of Bruce Lee who was killed filming the movie The Crow back in the nineties in North Carolina. That was a shard of a previous bullet, I believe, that was in the chamber and came out so really a freak accident. This seems to be a hot round. This seems to be a gun that was loaded with a bullet ’cause they had to be using the gun for target practice off set for fun out in the New Mexico desert.

So now you’ve got people that are using a weapon, sometimes live rounds, sometimes not. That is highly, highly problematic. And then when you add to it the most basic gun safety stuff. I remembered, Clay, when I was with the federal government, we did firearms training. Even if you were in a classroom and using guns that were essentially squib guns; it’s impossible for them to fire a round.

If you swept somebody with your gun, they would send you home. They would say, “All right, you can come back in a few weeks when you learn gun safety.” They were so strict about it all the time for exactly this reason. All guns are always loaded. You have to be ready to destroy whatever you’re pointing the gun at. Know where your finger is on the trigger; keep your finger off until you’ve made the decision to shoot.

These things are seared into your brain for a reason to avoid a situation like this. It seems like this was recklessness. It was a tragedy accident but an accident along the lines of a distracted driver who runs a few people over on the sidewalk. You didn’t mean to run them over, but you shouldn’t have been looking at your cell phone. You know what I mean?

That’s where I think this is going to get into a serious legal issue and legal battle obviously you got one person killed — and, by the way, the two of them were hit with one round, it was clearly a bullet. This wasn’t the wadding from a blank. So I think obvious. From the beginning, a lot of people were writing about that incorrectly ’cause they didn’t know any better.

So we’ll see. But Alec Baldwin… Look, then there’s a part of this Alec Baldwin is a left-wing bomb thrower. A lot of people hate this guy. He said horrible things about Trump. He’s a nasty, nasty person to his political opponents. All that said, there’s a woman who’s dead here. She was a mother, a wife. I don’t get into the —

CLAY: It’s hard to play politics if you’re being honest in this situation. Alec Baldwin, for whatever his political beliefs may be, certainly we’re gonna give him a level of generosity and coverage probably that he wouldn’t give to others, right.

BUCK: Correct.

CLAY: If he was a Republican who had somehow —

BUCK: He would be mocking us.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: If you or I had been in the situation, he would be mocking us openly. But that doesn’t mean that we should be who he is.

CLAY: And we’ll see what ends up happening from a criminal perspective. Again, the criminal lawsuits certainly are going to be going on for years and years to come, I would imagine. But the criminal nature here: Was it so negligent that there could be a manslaughter charge brought? That will be a real challenge to figure out exactly, that storyline.

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