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Clay and Buck

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The Bidas Touch: Everything Joe Biden Touches Turns to Crap

14 Jan 2022

CLAY: I am back to 100% having vanquished Omicron. I am ready to fire away in support of truth and justice, and I know Buck Sexton is as well. This is the worst week, I believe, that we have maybe seen from a president in most of our lifetimes. Think about how bad this week has been for Joe Biden and — as a result — also why he is in such incredibly awful positions.

It’s early in Friday so there may be something else awful that can happen to Joe Biden before the week is out. But just think about what we have seen so far as the week as played out. And, by the way, before we get going into analyzing this, Afghanistan, I agree, was an awful week for Joe Biden. But it was primarily a failure in one specific area.

It wasn’t everything he was trying to do falling down on him in every different direction simultaneously. It’s no coincidence that Joe Biden’s approval ratings turned negative for the first time after Afghanistan and have continued to go down since. But Afghanistan was one significant failure. We’ve got multiple different levels of failure going on here this week. First of all, inflation hit a 39-year high at 7%.

Covid hospitalizations and cases hit an all-time high this week every single day they’ve continued to build. His own party rejected his demands to pass a voting bill and to change the filibuster, and the Supreme Court struck down his vaccine mandate by a 6-3 vote while we also got his lowest-ever approval rating at 33%. Buck, the question that I think should be being asked at this point…

That’s the worst week that I can remember any president having on that many different fronts simultaneously. And again, we’re not even considering the continued disaster of schools not letting kids come to class. We’re not talking about the border being a mess. There are lots of things. The supply chain issues, bare shelves, all those things. Buck, I think you have to start to ask legitimate questions.

We know that Biden’s mental faculties are not strong. But are the people who are advising Joe Biden actually doing an even more awful job than he is? And, by the way, I didn’t even mention how bad Kamala Harris was in yet another interview that she tried to do. But, Buck, what are they thinking? On Tuesday, they went down to Atlanta.

He called everyone who didn’t support his voting rights bill Jefferson Davis and George Wallace and then his own party, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, two Democrats, said, “No, thank you,” to changing the filibuster. They knew this was gonna happen. How have they managed to create such a cluster with Joe Biden this week?

BUCK: I think you’re seeing the collision of two major components of the Biden regime right now. You’re seeing two areas of systemic failure for what this regime, what the apparatus of Joe Biden has been built on. One of them is the collapse of the promise, and by that I mean — we’ve talked about this many times, Clay — Joe Biden managed to be elected in the historical, fluke, once-in-a-century pandemic year with all of the media creating as much fear, panic, and blame for Trump as possible.

BLM rampaging through cities across America, corporate America terrified, bending the knee everywhere. All those things that were happening, Joe Biden was the guy who shows up and says, “Hey, I’ll bring back unity and normalcy,” right? They had to hide him in the basement for that case to be made as we know, but that was what the apparatus was able to do.

We have seen through every major action he’s taken but most notably this week in that speech in Georgia that that’s just a lie, that he has no interest in uniting, that in fact he uses terms like “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” as a pejorative specifically to otherize what he views as his political opponents. Somehow the unvaccinated always — in the minds of the left, Clay — is white Trump voters.

It’s not still the considerable number of minorities in urban areas of the country who have chosen not to get vaccinated. They’re not part of the disparaging of the unvaccinated, right? They’re not part of that terminology. When Biden says, “It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated and the unvaccinated are being unpatriotic,” he means Trump voters. That’s become a proxy for that.

The other level where you see collapse is the results. Right? Look at the decisions that have made: The decision to spend the $1.9 trillion earlier this year; the decision to make an enormous, $5 trillion or $6 trillion — depending on however it’s assessed — transformational spending package. When you’re at a 50-50 Senate and a handful of seat advantage in the House of Representatives, in what universe is Joe Biden supposed to be transformative? That’s one part of it. The other part of it is everything… I think you mentioned the reverse Midas touch, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Joe Biden has the reverse Midas touch, and we’re seeing everything turn to lead. If it wasn’t gold before, it’s gotten worse.

CLAY: The Bidas touch. Everything that Joe Biden touches turns to crap, and I try to think all the time in terms of… Maybe the lawyer in me, Buck. You have to think as if sometimes you have the losing hand. Every lawyer out there who’s listening to us right now, everybody who’s been involved in court cases, you’re supposed to defend to the best ability that you can, to advocate for your client.

And sometimes your client doesn’t have very good arguments, but you still have an obligation to do them to the best of your ability. If I step back right now and I try to make an argument for what Joe Biden in his first year has done well as an advocate, right? You come to me and say, “Clay, I’ll pay you a thousand dollars an hour — you’re an attorney — make the case phone number Joe Biden in a court of law right now that he’s done a great job in the first year.”

It’s almost impossible for me even to come up with an argument, Buck. You can maybe argue that infrastructure got passed, although I don’t know what the significance of the infrastructure bill was in general. You can’t argue anything positive about covid right now because cases are at all-time high. I guess you can argue but for the amazing effort of the Biden administration to get the vaccines out, millions of more people would be dead. But I don’t think most people buy that, right? That’s not an argument that has a sound, logical, scientific basis. Maybe you can argue that China hasn’t invaded Taiwan and that so far Russia hasn’t invaded Ukraine, but it’s almost impossible.

BUCK: I would add into that because of the approach of the Biden apparatus and the way that they’ve allowed Fauci to just go around haranguing everybody who doesn’t agree — to essentially oppress everyone, be wrong all the time — and then say, you know, “Shut up, peasants! I’m Lord Fauci.” The issue has not been access to vaccines. Anyone who wants to get a vaccine, at this point, if they know how to get to the grocery store and get food for themselves, they can get a vaccination.

Okay. No one really thinks that vaccine lack of access is what is driving this. It’s people who either have made the affirmative decision from early on they don’t want to take it, which is a position that I understand why they make that case or how they make that case. But beyond that, the Biden presidency has destroyed the U.S. for a lot of people in all this. So while they can say, “Oh, we have all these shots everywhere for everybody, that’s not really the problem.

The problem isn’t that they don’t have enough shots. The problem is that they don’t trust Joe Biden, and they don’t trust what’s been done in the name of the regime by the CDC and the rest of them. And when we see what’s going on right now with their refusal to just speak openly about the fact that stopping the spread was a massive failure, of course people are going to have questions. They’re right to have questions about how much they can trust people like Fauci, ’cause they keep lying to them.

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Should Clay Wear This Mask on His Next Plane Trip?

14 Jan 2022

BUCK: We have Phil in Colorado. What’s up, Phil? How you doing?

CALLER: Oh, having a great day. Good morning, gentlemen. I was giving you a ring. I heard about Clay and was thinking about a new mask. I’m here in Boulder — in Denver, Boulder — Colorado, and so there’s plenty of the mask hysteria here. I personally don’t usually choose to wear one, but when I do, I always wear a mask that says, “Placebo” in big, white bold letters just to let everybody know exactly what I think about the usefulness of these things. I generally get nothing but compliments for it. I haven’t gotten but maybe a dirty look once or twice. But, by and large, people are just like, “That is so true,” and at least out here in Denver, people are abiding by it. But I don’t think that many folks believe in it.

CLAY: Yeah. What you know, “Placebo” is a smarter version of saying, “This Mask Doesn’t Work,” so the people who are able to see that and think, “Oh, placebo effect,” are probably, what, a smaller percentage of the population, probably smarter and unaware that masks don’t work. That’s a smart idea. I’m more blunt. I like the idea of just wearing a mask that says, “This Mask Doesn’t Work” on an airline flight. I just don’t know what it would do to flight attendant antagonism. Am I putting myself in a rough spot? Can they demand that you take off that mask and replace it with another mask?

BUCK: Right. Obviously if you stand up on a plane and yell, “Everybody freeze,” or something worse it’s gonna be a violation of federal law. You’re gonna get arrested, right? Obviously. Can they use the same kind of you’re creating a disturbance by wearing a placebo mask on a plane? I don’t know.

CLAY: Has that happened to anybody out there listening to us? I imagine. I know for a while there, Buck, they were like looking at masks and saying, “Oh, this one isn’t effective enough.” I haven’t seen that happening for a while, and they would make you put on another mask. But I’m curious if anybody’s been forced to take off something that says like “This Mask Doesn’t Work” or “Placebo” because the airline isn’t happy with the message that you’re sending while you’re flying.

BUCK: I wonder. I think that pretty much my sense of it is that… Now, there are many lovely airline attendants and great guy and gal airline attendants out there who love freedom and this radio show, and you are part of our family. That all said, I do think that, if an airline attendant wants to act like a Siberian prison guard, you’re in their world. There’s very little you can do.

If they decide that they don’t like the look on your face — if you said something snarky — they will hold that plane up for an hour before it takes off. They will drag your butt off with the police and you will be banned from that airline forever. My understanding, having seen this play out, is that that’s kind of the way it is. It’s a little bit like, actually, if you’re Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the border —

CLAY: Oh, yeah. You’ll be there a long time.

BUCK: You are there for as long as they want you to be. If they want to break open something that you have — if you’ve got some kind of a clay pot that you brought over the border or something — and they want to smash it, they can. There’s a lot they can do and you are powerless. That is the reality of it.

CLAY: That’s my concern about deciding to send that message with a mask. I’m fortunate that the only place I have to wear it is on the airplane. We got a big event no Fort Myers next week, so Ali said, “Don’t wear it when you’re traveling down.” We’re gonna be down there Thursday for our event on Friday and that is funny, if I wasn’t allowed to fly because I was trying to fly with my “This Mask Doesn’t Work” mask.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Sylvia in Spokane, Washington. Hey, Sylvia, how you doing?

CALLER: Great! Great. Hey, in December and also in January I went down to Fort Worth, Texas, and back again, and I’m a redneck. But I’m old, and I’m a little bit feeble, and I was only brave enough to wear that mask as I came into Spokane — which would have been the same time — and it said “This Mask Is Useless as Biden.”

CLAY: (laughing)

CALLER: But I did get one hug from a stewardess, a major airline. Other people looked at me but they were afraid to say anything.

CLAY: (laughing) That is fantastic.

BUCK: Yeah, that’s fantastic, great stuff. Thank you, Sylvia.

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RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel Battles the Debate Commission

14 Jan 2022

CLAY: We bring in now the chair of the RNC, Ronna McDaniel, and she is here as you guys have created — thank you for spending time with us here on Friday — a bit of a tempest in the Washington, D.C., weather. I want to play for you here what Jen Psaki said yesterday — I’m sure you heard it, but if our audience didn’t — about presidential candidates not participating in debates sponsored by this group.

PSAKI: The president has participated in many debates over the course of his career, and, uh, believes they play a role in allowing the American people to hear from candidates and where they stand. So I think it’s more a pose — uh, a question best posed to the RNC on what they’re so afraid of.

CLAY: So, she asked the question, “What are you guys so afraid of?” How do you respond to Jen Psaki.

MCDANIEL: Yeah. I think the question more should go back to her, What you are afraid of? Because of course you love a presidential debate committee that picked a moderator who worked for you, worked for Joe Biden. They started debates after 26 states had started absentee voting, and they moved the second debate to virtual because Joe couldn’t leave the basement. So of course they love that commission. I would say to them, “Why are you so afraid to negotiate with the networks directly?

“Why do you need a middleman to do your dirty work for you?” And that’s what the RNC is saying. We’re sick of working with a biased committee. The things that we’ve asked them to guarantee that they wouldn’t do for 2024 — like not picking a moderator that works that works for the Democrats, starting debates before 26 states have started voting, and not having their committee members trash the Republican nominee — I think are pretty common-sense. They told us, “We’re not gonna guarantee those things,” and so you now we’re gonna look for a fair forum for our debate for our candidate.

BUCK: Ronna, this is Buck, and this is music to my ears — and I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve watched the debates increasingly in recent years with frustration. It’s so obvious. Just off the top of one’s head you can think about someone of the likes of John Harwood involved, who is just a clear Democrat partisan in a presidential debate. What happened with Candy Crowley at CNN when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were debating the issue of Benghazi.

There’s so many key moments that even come up, never mind the overall tilt toward the left and toward the Democrats on this. So what can be done now? Assuming that — and you are running the RNC, so you are the person we need to talk to about this — there is an understanding that these debates are biased and unfair in favor of Democrats because they control 95% of — quote, unquote — “journalism and media” in the country. What does a more fair forum look like? How can we get to a place where we don’t have a Democrat hack taking cheap shots at the would-be next Republican president of the United States on a debate stage?

MCDANIEL: Totally, Buck, and I think a big part of it is getting rid of a commission that’s biased, and part of their plan is are, “Oh, we negotiate with the nominee and renegotiate with the nominee.” Well, the Republican nominee won’t be in place until July or August of 2024. By then, they have contracted the venues, they’ve picked the moderators, it’s too late. So the RNC is intervening now before we pass our rules for 2024, and we are putting them on notice.

And we are saying, “Our candidates cannot seek our nomination unless they agree to not work with the CPD,” which is gonna open the door for less bias or nonbias — neutral arbiters — to come forward for us to negotiate directly with networks and to find forums that will conduct a fair debate for the American people, conduct debates before 26 states start voting, agree to not pick moderators that worked for either candidate. Really simple things that we’re asking for. This is a rule change we’re gonna propose at our winter meeting, and it will be passed at a later meeting.

CLAY: Ronna, I know people are super excited about the midterms coming up in November, but there are also a ton of our listeners that are even more excited about the idea of a 2024 presidential campaign. When will the first debates begin for the Republican presidential candidates? Because those were wildly entertaining in the run-up, if you remember — certainly as you well do — in ’16 with so many different candidates on the stage. We’ll see how that looks in ’24. And do you anticipate still Iowa as the official launching point for the Republican race for whoever’s gonna get the primary?

MCDANIEL: Yeah, so all of this is starting right now with the Republican National Committee. So we’re gonna our winter meeting where the presidential nominating committee and the debate committee will put their suggestions forward and then it will be embedded in the rules. I haven’t seen a lot of movement from the members saying they want to move away from the traditional Iowa-New Hampshire. So we’ll see what they do.

I don’t want to get ahead of their work. And on the debates, I think they’re gonna have to start earlier. If you’re looking at the primaries and how that’s stacking up for 2014, they’re gonna be starting earlier than ever. You could have some primaries back in December of ’23. So that means debates will have to start earlier and earlier. So we’ll be adjusting the calendars accordingly.

BUCK: Is there anything that’s going to stop this from happening? I just want to know. This all sounds great, Ronna — and we’re speaking to Ronna McDaniel, head of the RNC. Is this gonna be implemented? I just don’t want to get excited that we’re not gonna go into Democrat ambushes in the presidential cycle and then all of a sudden, you know, it’s like Lucy pulling the football at the last second.

MCDANIEL: So the only way this can happen really right now is if the RNC takes an affirmative stance, because the CPD has had a monopoly; there’s been no competition in that space — and all their bias always is towards the Republicans. So the debate committee for the RNC voted unanimously to take this step, and now we’re gonna take it to the full 168. I’ve got work to do to make sure the members agree to this rule change.

But we’ve had overwhelming support from grassroots and people who have understood this process for so long, who bang their head and say, “Why do Republicans let their candidate deal with this and get into these debates with these biased moderators?” and this is the first time the RNC has stepped up and said, “Enough is enough. We’re gonna fight for our 74 million voters and we’re gonna fight for our future nominee,” and that starts right now.

CLAY: Ronna, thank you. Fantastic stuff. We’re looking forward to the fight — and also, we can’t wait for that 2024 race to start.

MCDANIEL: Thank you. We’re fighting for 2022. We have to win the midterms first. (laughing)

CLAY: Everybody is excited for 2022. We’re already looking ahead.

BUCK: We promise. Clay and I are mobilizing everybody.

MCDANIEL: Thanks, guys. (laughing)

CLAY: Thank you.

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Is Russia About to Roll Into Ukraine?

14 Jan 2022

BUCK: Here’s the headline on Daily Mail right now: “Putin Will Stage False Flag Attack on His Own Troops as an Excuse to Invade Ukraine, U.S. Intelligence Warns — Russia’s sabotage plan revealed as Moscow sends more troops to the border and Kiev,” or “Keeve,” as some say it, “is hit with a massive cyber attack.” So we have over a hundred thousand troops built up already on the border, Russian troops on the border with Ukraine.

It does seem as though there’s a very real possibility here, an imminent one, of a Russian incursion, and this will obviously create a whole lot of — well, first — national security challenges for the Ukrainians because they’re gonna have to fight against a very capable and very serious Russian military. But beyond that, the Biden regime — which is already bellyflopping, it seems, every day in the pool, so to speak — is gonna be in a position where they’re supposed to lead some kind of international diplomatic consortium to hold back Putin.

There’s so much here that I think is fascinating. I mean, Clay, for one thing, you know when Russians took a big chunk off of Crimea — or rather, of Ukraine in Crimea by seizing it, essentially — through what people view as a phony referendum or a fraudulent one. You know how they seized eastern Ukraine? It was when Obama was president.

CLAY: Oh, yeah. This, to me, is the most interesting part about the Russian collusion disaster on many different levels, but Russia actually feared doing things while Donald Trump was president in a way that they have not when Barack Obama or Joe Biden have been in my office, and so you’re the international affairs expert here. So how do you play this out if this is going to happen, if Ukraine is going to be invaded by Russia?

Let’s presume that they do it, the United States — ’cause this is what they’re doing in Russia right now, right? They are game planning, strategizing, game theorizing what the United States response and what the larger international community response is going to be. So if Ukraine is invaded, Joe Biden’s first response is what, and what ultimately is he able to do to stop this or in any way significantly censure this in any way?

BUCK: There’s very little that they’ll be able to do to either prevent it at this point if the Kremlin, if Putin — Putin and the Kremlin are one and the same, right? He’s running that country as an actual dictator and authoritarian. You know, you heard this for four years under Trump. Yeah, Trump was such a dictator that anytime some judge from the Ninth Circuit would be like, “You can’t do that,” he was like, “All right, I’ll see you in court.”

That’s not how dictators work. We all know that, right? But Putin is a dictator, and so he’ll do whatever he wants. If he views it in Russia’s interests, national security interests to do this, then there’s very little that the U.S. — and quite honestly, there’s very little any U.S. president — can do right now. If you’re really close to that decision point, it’s unlikely there’d be much that would be done to sway them because nobody — and this is important to say from the outset.

Nobody believes that the U.S. should put troops in Ukraine to fight on behalf of this country, and if you’re wondering how clear that is, the Russian incursion that we’re preparing for here would be an escalation, really, Clay of a war that’s already been going on for about, what, five, six years now? Maybe even longer than that. This goes all the way back to the Obama years when the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine was essentially a pseudo-separatist region.

It was really Russian paramilitaries out of uniform who were saying, “We are now forming the independent Republic of Donbass” or whatever it was, and so this has been going on for a while. You have had Ukrainian soldiers in actual trench warfare on the eastern part of the country where Donbass is squaring off against these Russian-backed — or in many cases, actually just Russian –separatists who have come across the border.

So this is gonna be a very serious escalation of that conflict. But that’s been going on already for years, and to your point about or the question about what will the Biden administration do? Putin knows what the latte drinkers in Brussels and the rest of the E.U. will do in response to this — or The Hague, really. That’s very, very little. They’ll have conversations about it. There will be sanctions.

But Russia’s really too big to sanction in a meaningful way. The guys in charge there are so rich, how are you going to sanction them? As long as they’re selling oil and gas and natural gas to countries like Germany on a huge scale, sanctions aren’t going to cripple this country. So I think you’re gonna see a lot of ineffective talk. You’re gonna see some countries on the Russian periphery.

Notably the actual NATO countries that we have, right — Ukraine is not a NATO country — you’ll see saying, “Hey, you better put more troops here.” Yeah, “and so we need more resources. We want U.S. presence, or we want additional help for our military there.” But this is gonna be a conflict I think could get really ugly very fast. I know that true of any war, but —

CLAY: That’s the general American, I would say, response right now. We got out of Afghanistan after the 20-year basically disaster, and we left in as dispirited and pathetic of a way as was possible. So if Russia invades Ukraine and we issue some sort of diplomatic response injunction other western democracies, what’s the worst-case scenario here for the United States if you’re projecting out how things could go awry in a way that becomes a major negative? ‘Cause, frankly, most people in the United States don’t know anything about Ukraine. We need to get your buddy on who was so good from Ukraine.

BUCK: Oh, Nolan? Yeah, he’s been living there.

CLAY: So good.

BUCK: We have him back for short. He’s in Ukraine still. He’s been covering this on the front lines.

CLAY: He was fantastic in trying to contextualize why it matters but from your perspective what’s the worst-case scenario here?

BUCK: Worst-case scenario would be there there’s some consensus that forms in the national security and international relations circles of our — of the current — the Biden regime government that maybe we do need to put some U.S. troops. The worst-case scenario is you have Americans shooting at Russians in any capacity in Ukraine. At least… This is, you know, my opinion, my estimation. That’s the worst case. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

I think that’s, you know, less than a 5% chance of actually occurring — very, very, very remote — but there is going to be ’cause for all the focus on Ukraine. There are other places where there could be this playbook run again. This happened in South Ossetia in Georgia and Abkhazia, these breakaway regions that the Russians backed so what they do is they go and find areas of Russian speakers on the Russian periphery and they foment some kind of unrest.

And the Russians deploy military force and say, “We’re protecting our own. This is a humanitarian or even peacekeeping mission,” and they call this Maskirovka — which is Russian warfare by deception — and they’re very good at cyber. They’re very good at picking people off and doing this, and they’re trying to expand — the Russians are trying to expand — their defensible perimeter against the threat of NATO which they still view very much, Clay, as a threat.

We just say, “Oh, NATO’s a thing.” They say, “NATO was a huge military alliance made to stop us and we don’t want them on our border.” At least this is Putin’s vision and version of events. So I think it’s very likely that you will see a major incursion there, and now you’re talking about two developed countries with advanced economies and technology going toe-to-toe.

The Ukrainians wouldn’t be able to put up much of a battlefield tank-for-tank fight, if you will, but if there’s some kind of enduring insurgency that could actually happy that’s where I think you could see things getting really ugly. And if you want an approximation of this, you think go and see what it was like back in Chechnya in the nineties when people were like, “Oh, my gosh.” Chechnya was turned into a hellhole because of the fighting that was going on there.

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Mollie Hemingway Exposes the Democrat “Voting Rights” Fraud

14 Jan 2022

BUCK: Mollie Hemingway — senior editor at The Federalist — is with us now, also Fox News contributor. Her book is Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Mollie, great to have you.

HEMINGWAY: It’s great to be here with you.

BUCK: So, let’s start with this one. When you’re seeing the Democrats get this whole mobilization going on voting rights, acting like there is — one — never fraud — and two — endless numbers of people who are somehow being prevented from voting but we never actually meet any of them, what do you want people to know? What’s the truth of the election fight these days?

HEMINGWAY: I think first off it shouldn’t be said in terms of “voting rights.” Nobody credible thinks that there’s a problem with voting rights in a country where more people voted in the last election than any in history (chuckles) by a significant margin. The question is really about who controls elections and how secure those elections are. Democrats have spent decades really smartly strategizing about how to loosen security of elections and open up opportunities for shenanigans, shall we say.

And they have put a lot of money and effort into that, and now they want to federalize that. They think that what they did in 2020 to destabilize the elections worked out well for them and they’d like to nationalize that, and make Nancy Pelosi the election czar of the entire country. So, it’s really important in this country that both winners and losers — and of course that changes over time, who those people are — both can trust elections. It’s actually the entire republic rests on that. So, we need to always make sure that our elections are secure and that people can trust them.

CLAY: Mollie, the whole story here is a mess because it feels like Biden somehow thought his Tuesday speech was going to change the overall calculus associated with voting rights. Instead, he gets kneecapped by his own senators, Sinema and Manchin saying, “Hey, yeah, we’re not gonna change things associated with the filibuster.” But in a larger context this whole story seems very strategically failed to me by the Democrats.

Because if you look at recent Supreme Court jurisprudence as it pertains to states having the right to set laws as it pertains to their elections, there’s no way in my opinion that these Democrat bills would be constitutional in any way at all, either. So this has always felt to me like somebody sort of biking full speed into a brick wall and pretending the brick wall isn’t there. What am I missing about this?

HEMINGWAY: Yeah. I think what you’re missing is that the whole idea is a long con, a long game. They might not succeed right now, but what they’re trying to do is move the window to get people to think differently about election security and to make this a winning issue, you know, in the next several years. And this is another thing I think the Democrats are good at.

They say something that’s very extreme that has no chance of winning, and might even cause some electoral problems in the short run — say, limitations on gun rights — but they get, over time, more and more people adopting their perspective, and that gives them the weight they need to push for what they really want. I mean, everything they did in 2020 they claimed was for covid relief.

It actually had been stuff they’d been working on for decades: Decreasing the ability to determine whether a ballot actually comes from someone it claims to come from was something they’ve been working on for a long time. It wasn’t just something they came up with during covid. Expanding voting day into voting season — which incidentally, is something the country used to have and moved away from precisely because we did see too much fraud when you expanded voting day beyond a single day.

You’d have different states voting on different days for presidential elections, and it did increase the chance of fraud. And so these things have been flow, but the Democrats have been very good I think about thinking long-term and not just about the win that they can get right now, ’cause I don’t think they’re gonna get it right now, but they’re thinking next year and beyond.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Mollie Hemingway, author of Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. And to that end, Mollie, talk to us about the role — ’cause you know, Big Tech, we’re often having these discussions about, one, the way that the censorship and essentially the collusion with not just the Democrat Party generally but with the White House specifically to suppress conservative and just alternative points of view is out in the open, they’re demanding more of it, they’re not pretending not to do it, which was the case even let’s say five or six years ago. How does Big Tech change, in your mind, the course of the 2020 election and what can we do about it?

HEMINGWAY: It’s funny because we talk about election laws — which are very important and there were massive problems with it — but it pales in comparison to how much Big Tech controlled the outcome of the election. You might remember that when Democrats spent four years claiming that the 2016 election was stolen, that they didn’t really have a case and their big case was that it was stolen because Russians had bought a hundred thousand dollars in Facebook ads, some of them for Hillary Clinton, some of them for Donald Trump.

That was enough to have the country be hysterical. Well, compare that with what happened in 2020. For four years I think Big Tech really worried that they had helped Trump win by allowing him to go around the media and speak directly to people. So they started changing algorithms. They started deplatforming the most effective conservative voices.

They increased reach of leftist voices. They engaged in so much election rigging, it’s unbelievable. I mean, just by way of… Just take one small example. When Donald Trump would say that mail-in ballots were susceptible to fraud — something that everybody agreed with prior to 2020, including like the country of France, the Jimmy Carter Election Commission, the New York Times, Washington Post — he would be censored for saying that.

And when Joe Biden said that there was a conspiracy with the post office to control the outcome of the election, none of those tweets were censored. None of that rhetoric from anyone on the left was censored, and it was a crazy conspiracy theory. That affects elections — and most dramatically also, you think about how they conspired with Democrats and other people in the media to suppress the single most important story of the 2020 election, which was information about the corruption of the Biden family business.

There is no question that American voters had a right to know about the Biden family business — how it worked, who all was involved in foreign entities — and the Big Tech companies brutally suppressed that story. You know, go back to that Russia story, you know, hundred thousand dollars in Facebook ads. “It’s a horrible threat to democracy,” but then you look at what they did in 2020, and it’s just so much more massive.

CLAY: Mollie, as you were about to come on — and we appreciate you coming on — right before the show started, I was looking at my Twitter trending tab section. I’m not sure if you had a chance to look at this thread yet. But I shared a couple days ago — and we played on this show — the Pfizer Cree saying the first couple of shots of his vaccine had limited, if any, protection against the new Omicron variant of covid, and he said that in an interview.

It was with Yahoo News. It was distributed. Twitter took it down and said it was a copyright violation. I then put it back up — some other user it grabbed it — they didn’t take that down, but then they brought in (we’re gonna talk about this a little bit on the show in just a moment), they brought in a fact-checker, Reuters, and Reuters said that the Pfizer CEO was being taken out of context.

If you look at what they’re doing right now, it is an unbelievable height of disinformation. Reuters’ chairman, by the way, sits on the board at Pfizer. They are the official fact-checker for Twitter. This is effectively a paid advertisement for Twitter masquerading as a factual fact check. This kind of thing happens all the time. How do we fix it?

HEMINGWAY: I’m not entirely sure how to fix it, but it is a massive issue. It feels Soviet what they’re doing.

CLAY: Yes!

HEMINGWAY: They are limiting what people can say about things that we all see and that we all witness. They’re saying that there’s one approved interpretation of events. It is true that people sometimes misinterpret things and take things out of context. The cure for that is people saying that! (chuckles) You can say it in response. “No, actually, this is what they meant to say or here’s how that should be read,” and people debate, and that’s what happens in a free society. In an authoritarian regime like the one we have now with Big Tech colluding with — at the request of Joe Biden!

CLAY: Yes.

HEMINGWAY: He just yesterday said, I ask you, my allies in Big Tech, please suppress information if I say it’s disinformation. I mean, that’s not a direct quote, but that’s what he was saying. He decides what disinformation and misinformation is, and then you get suppressed based on what his views are. With everybody in Big Tech being — almost everybody in Big Tech being — closely aligned with the Democrat Party, this is an attack on some of our most foundational values as a country, that we have the right to pursue truth and that we can do that by obtaining information and debating the meaning of that information.

It is so un-American, and there’s so much money in this, as you know, people are paying to do the suppression of information, and it’s not just American companies. China’s heavily involved in all of this. It works for them to control the people and control the flow of information. But it’s sort of not working because the one thing you know is that if something is fact checked, that’s a good chance that actually it’s true.

CLAY: (chuckling)

BUCK: Mollie is the author of Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. I’m actually about to buy my copy in real time as I’m talking to you right now online. Mollie, before we let you go, though, when people — as I’m sure they do all the time — come up to you and say that there was fraud in the 2020 election, what do you say to them?

HEMINGWAY: Well, I think that people need to expand their understanding of what happened in 2020 to be much, much, much bigger than fraud. And what I talk about in the book is how there were changes to hundreds of election laws to make it difficult to even detect fraud, to make it so that you couldn’t have confidence in the results, that you wouldn’t know if a ballot was legit.

That Mark Zuckerberg — another way that Big Tech medal — spent $419 million to take over government election offices and flood it with left-wing activists so that they could run the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation in blue areas of swing states. It was complicated. It was a conspiracy. Actually, even TIME magazine admits it was a conspiracy which they described as “a cabal of powerful people” in all these different establishment institutions to control the outcome of the election. So I think don’t limit yourself to just fraud. It’s much bigger — much, much more coordinated and widespread — and much more effective in controlling the outcome of the election.

CLAY: Mollie, last question for you. Were you surprised that Brett Kavanaugh — you wrote a great book about Brett Kavanaugh — flipped his vote to allow the health care mandate? And that’s kind of a two-part question. Do you, based on your connections to the Supreme Court, think that Stephen Breyer is going to step down as Democrats are trying to persuade him to do by the end of this term?

HEMINGWAY: So there’s a lot there, but A, I would just say it never works well to pressure people, to pressure these justices to resign. It usually means that that’s how they will stay there forever. I wrote in Justice on Trial with Carrie Severino about how the Trump administration was able to encourage Anthony Kennedy to feel comfortable stepping down, which enabled them to nominate Brett Kavanaugh.

And then we also detail why he was chosen for that position, and it really had a lot to do with how narrow Republicans held the Senate and how they couldn’t really put someone much more strong than he was, and we tell that whole story. So I’m, sadly, not completely surprised, but there were very particular circumstances for why he was chosen.

BUCK: Mollie Hemingway, everybody. Check out Rigged, her book. Go get your copy now. Mollie, come back and hang out with us again soon. Thanks so much.

HEMINGWAY: Thank you. Take care.

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Roberts, Kavanaugh Join Libs on Health Care Vax Mandate

14 Jan 2022

CLAY: Let’s talk a little bit about the Supreme Court decision that came down while we were in the third hour of the program yesterday. So on the one hand, we got a big win, and that was what we were discussing as we were seeing the news come down, the 6-3 decision that the Biden administration vaccine mandate that impacted 84 million people — if you are one of the two-thirds of workers out there essentially that was employed by an employer with a hundred or more people, that vaccine mandate — is not constitutional.

Okay? So it was an unconstitutional overreach by OSHA. We could get into the nitty-gritty of the law. But that’s the big takeaway. The larger issue here — and this is where I’ve gotten — and we’re gonna get to — the other choice on medical workers here in a second, the other decision which did not, in my opinion, reflect well on Brett Kavanaugh or on Chief Justice Roberts.

We’ll get to that in a second, but the big issue here, Buck, is what the Supreme Court really did was provide a lot of protection. If you are fortunate enough to live in a red state and if your governor in that red state has said, “Hey, you can’t be fired for refusing the vaccine mandate,” then that state law would be in effect and you would have legal recourse, okay? So if you live in Florida, if you live in Texas — if you live in Tennessee, Georgia, any red state out there — most governors have tried to protect you.

They have tried to protect your right not to be fired if you choose not to comply with the vaccine mandate. So the company would be obligated to theoretically be bound by that state law in the red states. But, Buck, there are people who are in cities that have aggressive restrictions about the covid vaccine, for instance, where you are right now in New York City.

And I imagine, although I haven’t done a deep dive on this, there are some people in red states who live in blue cities who might have in some of those places a conflict between the city law and the state law in terms of which governs when it comes to vaccine mandates. So this is a big mess. My easiest answer to everybody out there — ’cause I got blown up, ’cause this is complicated with so many people asking questions about this — is, you need to consult with a labor and employment lawyer in your city or state to know for certain how this applies for you in light of the Supreme Court decision striking down the big mandate that would have impacted 84 million workers.

Now, Kavanaugh and Roberts both bailed when it came to the medical mandate. And so that was allowed to stand. That impacts around 10 million workers, is my understanding. And that was allowed to stand by a 5-4 basis, which I think it is a failure of testicular fortitude, to put it mildly, on behalf of both Roberts and Kavanaugh. They’re trying to split the baby here.

BUCK: Yes, and so while we were able to tell you about what felt like and is a big win for freedom from vaccination mandates for companies with over a hundred employees, as Clay points out, there are states where you’re still gonna have to get the shot — I’m in one of them, New York — and beyond that, the CMS, the federal mandate for health care workers means that we are at a time right now when we’ve lost — this is according to my friend Phil Kerpen over at The Examiner — 49,000 staffed hospital beds in the last 365 days, 16,000 staffed hospital beds lost in the last 30 days.

We have fired thousands of nurses and doctors across the country for refusing to get a shot that as we know does not actually meaningfully change the risk of getting and spreading the virus to other people, certainly not beyond a — perhaps a 60-day period of the initial inoculation. And then beyond that, Clay, they’re letting covid-positive doctors and nurses…

They’re demanding that they come back in to provide care to people because they’re so understaffed. So on the one hand there’s the reality of, “Okay, fine. Maybe.” By the way, I think this was wrongly decided, too, but you can see what happened here. They decided that when the federal government is giving money specifically to health care organizations, health care places — hospitals, essentially — and they can make the determination that there are these excessive, in my opinion, mandates in place. Justice Thomas. I read the decision this morning. Justice Thomas is like, “Yeah, but this isn’t about just when you’re in the hospital.” You’ve gotta have that shot with you, so to speak, when you go home at night.

CLAY: Which they acknowledge in the other opinion striking it down for 84 million.

BUCK: That’s right. So in this case, though, they decided all right. “Well, for health care workers, we’ll make this mandatory. We’ll do this.” Okay. Even if the federal government — let’s just say now — has the authority, now the push should be, “What the heck is the Biden regime doing right now?” We’re in the middle of the big surge, we need all the capacity we can get, and they’re going to dramatically harm capacity in some places while there are hospitals that are sending in covid-positive personnel? Think about how… What kind of madness that is?

CLAY: Well, it’s 100% right. From a functional perspective, it’s broken. This is also what I think’s gonna happen with the abortion cases in June, Buck. This is my prediction, that they are going to allow the Mississippi — for people out there who’ve been paying attention to it — 15-week limit. They’re gonna bump it back down from 23 or 24 weeks, whatever it is and shoot down what Texas did.

And so they are going to basically be in that middle area where people can say, “Oh, look, we won but we also lost,” and so it’s a middling result that to me feels very political in nature, and that’s what John Roberts has done as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. He’s tried to incrementally alter the trajectory of the court without rocking the boat enough that people really get upset at him.

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Mike Lupica’s Terrible Take on Novak Djokovic

14 Jan 2022

MIKE LUPICA: You know what you know really happened to an entitled international sports star? Somebody is saying “no,” at least for the time being, and at least until he finds another judge. He found one, but now (sputters) it’s really sketchy that he might get this worked out before he is supposed to play his first round match. I — I — I tweeted out last night, if this guy had any respect for a tournament he’s won nine times — and he had any grace — he would go to the airport and go home, because he’s making a mockery of his favorite major tennis tournament.

BUCK: That’s a really bad sports analysis, some guy I’ve never heard of named Mike Lupica. We’ll get some good sports analysis here from my buddy Clay in a second. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. That’s over Novak Djokovic. I know a lot more about tennis than I do about pretty much any other sport, and Djokovic is one of the greatest players of all time. He’s obviously in some hot water with the Australian authorities right now because of some issues with his visa ’cause he’s unvaxxed and all the rest of it. First of all, Clay, that guy I never heard of him before. Lupica? Lupica?

CLAY: Lupica. Yeah.

BUCK: Was he giving that little rant through three masks to make sure that he was taking the virus seriously?

CLAY: (laughing) Sometimes when you hear the other people who made livings writing about sports, it doesn’t seem so impressive that I made a lot of money writing and talking about sports, because I’m not necessarily competing with the absolute apex predators of competition out there, right. But this is such a bad take, right? Australia has a monster Omicron issue —

BUCK: A million cases —

CLAY: — as most of the world does.

BUCK: A million cases a day right now is I think where they are.

CLAY: Through the roof. They tried to play the covid zero game. They’ve done the vaccine gambit, and it has not panned out for them, and so I believe what’s really happened is Novak Djokovic has become a convenient foil, a way to distract the rest of Australia from the fact that the vaccines are not stopping the spread.

BUCK: I’m sorry, a million Omicron overall — 147,000 new cases Australia. I just want to get the numbers right.

CLAY: Which, if you extrapolate what the population of Australia is like 30 million?

BUCK: That’s right. It would be like a million a day here.

CLAY: Yes. So what they’re trying to do clearly with Djokovic, as you just mentioned, as they’re dealing with a monster surge of Omicron there — and remember, this is a place that locked itself down and basically said, “We’re not going to allow covid to exist here,” what we are recognizing is that is never going to be a viable position. So right now, I believe, politicians are trying to distract from the larger issue by going after Djokovic.

This could also be… We don’t know. He got another appeal in to see whether or not he’s gonna be able to play. I think the tournament starts in like two or three days. It could also be an issue for the United States, because there are requirements when you’re coming in from a foreign country that you have certain paperwork that you filled out as it pertains to covid, and that could be a factor for some of our tournaments as well. This is crazy. He’s already there. He’s already in the country. He’s already been training in the country, Buck. What are you actually losing by allowing him to participate at this point when he’s already there?

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Another Biden Adviser Admits Cloth Masks Don’t Work

14 Jan 2022

BUCK: I want to create a list. We got Leana Wen, former Planned Parenthood president, one of the favorite doctors over at CNN, saying cloth masks don’t work. Former FDA chairman Scott Gottlieb says cloth masks don’t work. That’s what they’ve said on air on TV, ’cause I have been shut down by Twitter and Facebook for this more than anything else. Now here is Biden’s chief medical covid adviser Dr. Osterholm. Play it.

OSTERHOLM: We published work back as early as April of 2020 saying that in fact that this virus is transmitted by an aerosol — that kind of perfume like floating in the room — and that we needed to have that very high level of respiratory protection. The world was slow to come to that, and today the CDC has still been slow to come to that point.

So we all agree now, I think — those who have expertise in this area — you need these very tight face fitting masks that also have breathable — and what I mean by that is it’s fit and filtration, and the way you get fit is like a swim goggle: You can’t have it leak. But if it’s gonna be that tight, then you have to have a material that allows the air to move through. Cloth doesn’t do that.

BUCK: “Cloth doesn’t do that.” You need better masks, Clay, because cloth masks don’t work. This is Biden’s guy.

CLAY: So we’re gonna have to wear gas masks around?

BUCK: Yeah, absolutely.

CLAY: Is that where this is going? It’s funny. Early on — you’re right, Buck — you could never say that the little gators that people are wearing around or that the cloth masks that people wear don’t work — and people still do it. I mean, I’m tempted. I don’t know about you. The only time I ever have to wear a mask now thankfully ’cause I live in a free state is on an airplane. But I’m tempted to buy those masks that just say, “This mask doesn’t work.” Is that too aggressive of a statement to make for when you’re on the airport or when you’re on the airplane? Have you seen those that just say, “This mask doesn’t work”?

BUCK: I love it can I get one? Are you selling them at OutKick? I gotta pick one up.

 

CLAY: Is that too aggressive? Am I gonna get kicked off the airplane if I wear the “this mask doesn’t work” mask?

BUCK: I think that’s a First Amendment issue.

CLAY: On an airplane? I don’t know.

BUCK: Well, it’s private but then using the federal guideline to say it? I don’t know. That will be interesting.

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Rush on Masks: The Democrat Symbol of Fear

14 Jan 2022

Be sure to listen daily to Rush’s Timeless Wisdom podcast here or on iHeartRadio. It’s absolutely essential information from America’s Forever Anchorman.

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EIB 24/7: Clay & Buck’s Show Prep

14 Jan 2022

  • Federalist: GOP’s Old Guard Out Of Touch With Their Voters On Election Integrity – Mollie Hemingway
  • UK Daily Mail: US has intelligence Putin will stage a ‘false flag’ attack on his OWN troops to set up a pretext to invade Ukraine after talks between the US and Russia collapsed
  • UK Guardian: Face masks make people look more attractive, study finds
  • Federalist: 7 Insane Things I Just Learned About How U.S. Elections Are ‘Rigged’
  • New York Post: The week in whoppers: Pelosi’s lame Biden-praise, Harris’ hypocrisy and more
  • Federalist: 9 Times Sen. Ron Johnson Triggered The Left — And Turned Out To Be Right
  • CNSNews: Supreme Court Blocks Vaccine Mandate for Employees of Big Businesses, But Not for Healthcare Workers
  • AP: Biden all but concedes defeat on voting, election bills
  • Wall Street Journal: Biden Dealt Setback on Elections Bill, Filibuster. Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema again voiced her opposition to weakening the filibuster
  • Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point. He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him – Peggy Noonan
  • Washington Post: Harris team looks to course changes to reset her political prospects
  • Bloomberg: IRS Targets Your Side Hustle in Crackdown on Transactions Over $600
  • Breitbart: Bidenflation Stole Christmas: December Retail Sales Crash as High Prices and Shortages Weigh on Consumers
  • PJ Media: Biden’s Big Elections Lie
  • American Greatness: We Are All Domestic Terrorists Now – Julie Kelly
  • National Review: Biden Disgraces Himself

  • New York Post: How the SCOTUS ruling on Biden’s vax-or-test mandate could affect challenges in NY
  • Wall Street Journal: Vaccine Makers Pursue Omicron-Targeted Shots That Health Officials Say Might Not Be Needed
  • NDTV: Gene That Increases Risk of Dying From Covid Now Identified
  • AP: Omicron leaves Germany on brink of recession as growth dips
  • Fast Company: Why global leaders are terrified about ‘social cohesion erosion’
  • Washington Post: Australia cancels Novak Djokovic’s visa again, upending tennis star’s quest for record 21st Grand Slam title
  • Daily Wire: Quebec Will Impose ‘Significant’ Tax On The Unvaccinated In ‘Fairness’ To The Vaxxed
  • JustTheNews: COVID vaccines funder Bill Gates not impressed with their performance, predicts ‘yearly shots’
  • New York Post: GOP Sen. Marshall to push ‘FAUCI’ Act after top doc calls him ‘moron’
  • PJ Media: The Supreme Court’s Incoherent COVID Mandate Rulings
  • HotAir: Manchin plunges the dagger: I won’t eliminate or even weaken the filibuster

  • BizPacReview: GOP sues NYC Mayor Adams, city council over new law allowing noncitizens to vote
  • NewsBusters: Priorities: CNN Spends Almost 3x More on January 6 Hype Than Bad Economic News
  • Daily Wire: Shocking Videos Show Massive Sea Of Stolen Packages Laying On Railroad Tracks In Los Angeles
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  • Breitbart: Democrats Use Dreaded Filibuster to Block Ted Cruz Bill Sanctioning Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline
  • CNSNews: Psaki: ‘We Could Certainly Propose Legislation to See If People Support Bunny Rabbits and Ice Cream’

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