CLAY: Let me kind of recap what has been going on of late. Joe Biden’s new grand plan to deal with covid is to give 500 million free tests. The problem is those are not gonna be available until January, and I just want to tee off on testing here for a moment. It doesn’t make any sense, by and large, to test that often for covid at this point. Let me explain what I mean by that.

The covid test requires you to test multiple days in a row, right? So if you’ve got a little bit of a scratch in your throat, if you test, you might be negative on today but you might be positive for tomorrow. So how many tests are you going to buy? Are you going to test yourself every day, every time you have a little bit of a sniffle, little bit of a catch in your throat?

I have had the flu, like many of you have, many times over the course in my life. Do you know how many times I’ve ever had a flu test? Never. We have lost sense for basic sanity. The rule for most of our lives has been this: If you feel sick, stay home and avoid exposing yourself to others. If you don’t feel sick, then you should go to work, you should go to school, you should live your life in a normal fashion. This idea that testing is in some way going to free us from covid has always been a total and complete joke unless the idea is we’re going to have billions of tests and everybody is going to test themselves every morning first thing when they wake up? It doesn’t make any sense.

Five hundred million tests are going to be gone basically the moment they go up online because the most filled with hypochondria of those of us out there are going to immediately buy them up. In fact, if you live in many parts of the country right now, you can’t find these tests even if you’re trying to buy them yourselves. They’re limiting how many you can buy already. What we are doing with testing is further solidifying the extreme neuroses that exist out there for people who are extreme hypochondriacs. We are endorsing their anxieties.

I just flew. I’ve been flying for two years. I never really stopped. And down in Key West, I gotta be honest with you, most people were pretty chill. You know what happened to me at a gate as I was getting ready to get on my flight back from Key West? I was sipping a coffee, and the gate lady came over to me, and she said, “Sir, between sips of your coffee you need to cover your face to protect everyone around you.” And there are many dumb things that I believe we’re going to look back on as it pertains to covid and say this was the most nonsensical element here. But the idea that you should replace your mask between bites or between sips inside of an airport or on an airplane is, I think, the most fundamentally, illogical, insane, and without scientific justification mantra that has become commonplace in our culture.

But let me tell you this. I do see some reasons for optimism, notwithstanding Biden’s ridiculous address yesterday and the fact that he wants 500 million tests. Let’s be clear on this. Biden has failed on covid. Dr. Fauci has failed on covid. And the reality is everyone was going to fail on covid because it was a virus, and almost everything that we have done has been cosmetic theater since this entire thing began. In fact, I want you to just follow me down a primrose path here and think — and I know Buck and I have talked about this a bit — but think about what would have happened if Donald Trump had won reelection in 2020.

Now, I know a lot of you out there are saying, well, he did win reelection in 2020. Understood. But let’s presume that he wins and is president right now. What is happening in America if Donald Trump is president right now and we had just crossed 800,000 covid deaths? What are the blue states saying? What are the red states saying? Everyone in media, just about, is blaming Donald Trump for 800,000 deaths. Notice how when Joe Biden took over all the blame for covid deaths miraculously disappeared? And I think we need to continue to talk about this data because it matters, but more people have died with covid. I say “with covid” because they’re typically dying with multiple comorbidities, and covid is one of them. But more people have died with covid since Joe Biden took office than died when Donald Trump was in office.

How many people in America do you think know that? Probably not very many because as soon as Democrats were able to get their guy in office in Joe Biden, she stop arguing that the president of the United States was responsible for everyone who died with covid. And remember, Joe Biden has more deaths from covid despite the fact that there are many therapeutics, despite the fact that the covid vaccine which we’ll talk about during the course of today’s show exists, despite the fact that we’ve had over a year to get used to what does and does not work in terms of medical treatment for covid.

Despite all of those advantages, Joe Biden as more deaths on his watch than Donald Trump did. And remember Joe Biden memorably said during the debates, any president who has over 200,000 deaths on his watch from covid doesn’t deserve to be president. I keep waiting for Joe Biden to resign, considering that he now has twice as many nearly deaths on his watch from covid as Trump did at the time that he made that statement during the debates.

The truth of the matter is Joe Biden ran his entire campaign on the idea that he would solve covid and he’s failed. And the reason why he has not solved covid is because politics is not going to solve covid. It’s a virus. The virus was going to virus no matter who was president.

The reality is Democrats in 2020 used covid to get Trump out of office and now that Biden is in office he has absolutely no solution whatsoever. My argument may be a bit of a departure. My argument is the president and Dr. Fauci and everyone else has almost no impact in what has happened with covid and the fact that we had a Republican president and now a Democratic president and the overly covid pandemic has continued is evidence of that. But what is glaring is the fact that the treatment of Donald Trump for covid is seismically different han the treatment for Joe Biden. And what we’re starting to see is reality is starting to set in.

I’m looking right now at a New York Times lead editorial from this morning, the Wednesday edition of the paper. I know Rush like to say his ink-stained fingers. I am old school in the context that I still love newspapers. I like to pick ’em up, I like to read them, the physical copy of the newspaper. Now, I’m online as you guys know all day, Buck’s online all day. We’re constantly making sure that we’re seeing as many new stories as we can. But I like to start off my morning reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, back-to-back, just to see the way that each of them is covering the world so that narratively I’m aware of what the arguments are out there. And what I’ve seen with the New York Times over the past few months is something pretty staggering.

Their headline right now on their lead editorial is: Do Not Close the Schools Again. Now, we haven’t gotten to the point that Buck and I argued back in certainly June and July of 2020 that every school in America needed to open for the fall 2020 calendar. Most schools didn’t. But we’re going to eventually end up there. But the fact that they are now acknowledging even in the New York Times that it makes no sense to shut down schools is a win for Team Reality.

This morning’s ⁦@nytimes⁩ lead editorial, schools can’t be closed again for covid and masking should be voluntary in schools. Welcome to the party, pal! pic.twitter.com/Ub4o2Ita0U

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) December 22, 2021

The fact that they even buried in this editorial a paragraph and I read it and I called my wife over and I said, “You gotta see this,” I couldn’t believe that they were even acknowledging this. Do you guys remember back in August when I went and spoke at my local school board, and do you remember when everybody got labeled domestic terrorists who was willing to stand up to what was going on inside of their schools and I argued because the data and the science supports me that masks made no sense and nobody was any safer particularly young kids wearing masks.

Inside of the New York Times lead editorial: Do Not Close the Schools Again is this paragraph. “We should make masking in schools voluntary rather than mandatory. Masking was a necessary inconvenience…” — I dispute that but — “Masking was a necessary inconvenience early on, but to think two years of masking has no negative impact is shortsighted. Kids are resilient but not endlessly resilient. Anyone who wants to wear a mask should be allowed to, but masking in schools should be voluntary rather than mandatory. ” New York Times. Op-ed. Do not close the schools and masking should be voluntary, not mandatory. Who does that sound like? Team Reality.

Notice the pivots that are going on here. The pivots — where people like Buck and I have been sharing these facts with you since day one — the science isn’t really changing very much. We’ve had reliable data on who was impacted by covid since the summer of 2020 in this country. And the people who’ve been impacted by covid uniformly, whether it’s the Delta variant, whether it’s Alpha, whether it’s Omicron, or the senior citizens, the elderly, and the obese.

Since day one every single impact that has occurred, just about, has been related to elderly and obese people. And I just think it’s amazing here that even in this article in the New York Times, “The weekly hospitalization rate…” — I’m reading directly from their lead editorial — “…for school-age children is approximately one in a hundred thousand. This has stayed remarkably consistent through the original outbreak, the more transmissible Alpha variant and last winter’s surge and, yes, even through the summer Delta surge in the South and the fall, the available data…” — this is from the American Academy of Pediatrics — “…the available data indicate covid-19 associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children.”

Hey. We’ve been telling you all this. Team Reality is slowly starting to win.