BUCK: Clay and I are two of the people — and you can go back as a matter of public record — who have been saying really from the beginning of the pandemic that we abandoned, as a society, things that we had known for a long time. We allowed a so-called expert consensus to be formed in science when science is not about consensus. Science is a process of analyzing data, of testing and retesting hypotheses, and yet that was all kicked to the side, and it was, “Do whatever Fauci and those around him say or else!”

And now people are starting to realize, “What is the end state here? Massive, catastrophic failure to stop the spread with the mass vaccination campaign as you know, massive failure to stop the spread with the mask policies that are out there.” Right now, we just got word — Clay and I just got word — that Senator Rand Paul came on our show last week for an interview where now not only is it pulled off of YouTube, but our show…

Fortunately, we’re on Rumble, by the way. Please, start following on places like Rumble. Start following us on Gettr and these alternative platforms because speaking the truth is gonna get you kicked off. We’re suspended for a week on YouTube right now because of this madness. People are realizing something crazy is going on here.

Now, I want to talk about what we do with this. But Clay shared this clip over the weekend on Twitter. It went mega viral, and we have Bari Weiss who — we can talk about her background in a second. She’s a centrist, maybe center-right, maybe central-left person depending on the issue finally saying she is done with this.

WEISS: This is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime. The city of Flint, Michigan — which is 80%, I think, minority students — has just announced indefinite virtual schooling. In the past two years, we’ve seen among young girls, a 51% increase in self-harm. People are killing themselves. They are anxious. They are depressed. They are lonely. That is why we need to end it more than any inconvenience that it’s been to the rest of us, I think it’s a pandemic —

CROWD: (wild cheers and applause)

WEISS: It’s like at this point, it’s a pandemic of bureaucracy. It’s a pandemic of bureaucracies. It’s not real anymore.

The most impressive thing about Bari Weiss on last night’s Bill Maher is the wild applause after she finishes here. After two years the tides are turning, even for the left leaning people in this country when it comes to covid. Watch this: pic.twitter.com/8DIH3zTibM

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 22, 2022

CLAY: Okay. So, Buck, what I would say stood out to me on Saturday early morning when I saw that clip and I shared it and it went super viral on Twitter was the reaction from the crowd. The cheering. Now, you’ve done Bill Maher’s show before. I never have.

BUCK: Couple times. Yeah.

CLAY: You can say what the culture of the show and the fan base and the crowd is like far better than I can, but it’s filmed in L.A. It is a Hollywood-centric show in that it is overwhelmingly watched — by and large, as it airs on HBO — by a quote-unquote, “elite media audience,” and the way that that crowd reacted, Buck, as they were… It was as if they were walking in the desert, and somebody finally gave them a bit of water.

Now, Bari Weiss did not say anything that you and I have not been saying for two years, that many of our guests have not by saying for two years. But what is significant about it is not only the reaction, Buck, but the way that the reaction occurs is the expansion of what is acceptable to say now is suddenly moving in our direction in a big way. And that’s why I wanted to share that clip. Because a year ago when you and I were saying all these things —

BUCK: Eighteen months ago, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah. Well, even a year ago, even earlier this year people would scream at us that we wanted their grandmas dead, how dare we have these opinions. And now you’ve got many left wingers there — at least a persuadable segment of the left wing — that is looking around and finally willing to say publicly what many of them may have said privately.

After that clip, Buck, I was texting with one of my good friends whose super high up in the Hollywood establishment, and he was saying to me, “This is what people have been saying in private for a long time here. What’s changing is people suddenly feel like they can say it in public.”

BUCK: Well, it’s also who is allowed to say these things.

CLAY: True.

BUCK: As you know, we’ve had Scott Gottlieb, former FDA chairman, who’s one of these big blue check docs — and we’ve got some sound bites of his today even on the show we will play. He said cloth masks don’t work very well. You’ve had Dr. Leana Wen who’s the former Planned Parenthood director — may God have mercy on her soul — and she is somebody who also saying cloth masks don’t work very well.

And here we are in a circumstance, Clay, where we are seeing, finally, people saying things that we’ve been saying for a long time, but they’re allowed to say it, which is so interesting. Rand Paul was on this show? I’m sure it’s… Masks is really the gateway drug for all the tyranny. I’ve been saying this from the beginning. Masks lead to all the other things, which is why they’re so control obsessed over this.

You cannot find me an intelligent person right now who will sit down and have a debate that cloth masks have been an effective and useful part of this. It doesn’t exist. If you think that you’re just not very bright. A lot of people that know it doesn’t work, but it was a necessary symbol and mechanism of control and so they’re slow to let it go. The CDC just put out a tier of masking now, right? N95s, surgical masks, cloth masks.

And this is the circumstance that we find ourselves going through where they won’t actually relent, they won’t let this go. Instead, they just say things to us like, “It’s not that effective’ do the more Draconian thing.” Bari Weiss, welcome to the team on this, I would say, but I’m also not addressed. I see her; I say to myself, “People should have figured this out a long time ago,” and it’s not courageous after the mass failure of the vaccine program to stop the spread to say, “Maybe vaccine mandates weren’t such a great idea either.”

CLAY: Well, this is… I got a great question. And, by the way, thank you to everybody who came out, WSFX 92.5 Fort Myers. We had hundreds of listeners come to an event Friday night and we had so many great questions. People really missed you not being there, Buck. A lot of people wanted to make sure that you were doing well as you completed your Omicron quarantine. But I got a great question, and this is really what motivates me when I get out of bed in the morning every day, Buck.

“How do we win? How do we change things?” and I understand there’s some people out there who are like, “Well, we win by getting 50% plus one or we win by getting 269 electoral votes, and we take it to the House, and we win the election there.” I don’t want to win by a little bit, because winning by a little bit prolongs these internecine battles that are going on in the country. I want to destroy people. I don’t want to win by a little bit, Buck, ’cause I just had to go watch my Tennessee Titans choke away their chance to play for the AFC Championship this weekend trying to win by a little bit.

I want to wipe the floor with my opponent. I want to destroy them. And the way you win, to me, is when the Bari Weisses of the world recognize the legitimacy of the arguments that you and I have said. And I understand that — and it’s frustrating on some level, but I’ve gotten past it. When you and I say it, the blue check left wingers are not willing to hear us sometimes because it’s you and I speaking, and so they have to hear it from someone that they deem to be legitimate. So if Scott Gottlieb says it or if Bari Weiss says it or if fricking Jake Tapper says it, if they were saying — finally acknowledging — the arguments that we have made for a couple years, I’m willing, because that’s how you win in the big game.

BUCK: So I want to bring them in too. So this is where I think the tactics are important but also there’s some complications, some nuance and there will be some differences of opinion even on the right about this stuff. Yes, we want to bring people over on this one — and Bari Weiss, by the way, I mentioned this before, she left the New York Times because they wouldn’t actually let her publish conservative voices. So she’s not… I don’t know how to define her politics, but she’s been a friend to a lot of conservative truth for a long time in a lot of ways. So she’s not some…

CLAY: She’s open-minded, right?

BUCK: This isn’t Nicholas Kristof who’s just a doctrinaire commie, basically, who wants to be the governor, I guess… Oh, no. He can’t. Too bad he can’t. But this isn’t like someone of that positioning on the left. What I want to be very careful of is this: It’s not, “Oh, great. They’re starting to agree with us now. Let’s all just sort of move on and be friends.” It’s, “Okay. We got Bari, we got all these other people who are saying what is true and what we’ve been saying.

“We need to repudiate and at some level humiliate these bad ideas,” and that means accountability for the stupidity of Fauciism. It’s not enough to say, “All right. We give. We give. Finally we’ve had enough of this.” It has to be, we never should have done this, we never should have shut down schools, Fauci is a little coward, Walensky doesn’t know what the heck she’s doing.

These people made disastrous choices, we suffered, and we can never go down this route again because my concern is we’re gonna have this election midterm year of relative sanity and then you’re gonna find out, “Oh, wait it’s December of 2022? Better mask up on that plane! Better get ready for double-masking season.” You know what I’m saying?

CLAY: I understand that fear.

BUCK: We build this coalition of truth, great. But we have to say, “No, no, no. It’s not that I guess we’ll try something else now. It’s that Fauciism was stupid, destructive, and evil.” That’s what I want to make sure we hit on.

CLAY: I agree, and I also think the way that you reflect that is by kicking ass in the midterms. Because you have to make Democrats terrified of 2024 such that they run for the hills. Frankly, Buck, like we’re seeing with defund the police, it’s almost impossible to find a Democrat now or a left-winger anyone who will even acknowledge that they ever said defund the police. I think that’s what’s gonna happen with masks. I think that’s what we’re starting to see with lockdowns. There is going to be — and I believe Dr. Fauci is going to be held accountable.