Dictator Trudeau Won’t Give Up Tyrannical Powers

21 Feb 2022

CLAY: Buck, throughout the entirety of the weekend, the amount of force brought to bear on truly peaceful protesters who were actually not creating any substantial threat to anyone is off the charts. And there’s couple things that to me are terribly frustrating and also create a great deal of fear going forward, and that is, first of all, they have seized so many different bank accounts, millions of dollars in bank accounts based on people donating to the Canadian trucker protest.

This is an unprecedented overreach of power that has been embarked upon by Trudeau under his Emergency Powers Act that he undertook. And the second part of this is Trudeau had two options to me, Buck, really two options here at its essence. He could do what a lot of Democratic governors have done: Look at the data coming out on covid and make a decision to eliminate masks and vaccine mandates and claim victory even though many of us out there who have been watching this data know that it didn’t actually occur that all of these restrictions led to covid disappearing, okay?

So that in and of itself was one option. And that’s the option that honestly is kind of a rational option even if you don’t want to admit you were wrong. He chose the other option. Rather than relent and start to dial back all sorts of issues in Canada — and, by the way, United Kingdom, Boris Johnson is coming out in the near future here and effectively announcing all covid restrictions are over, even though, by the way, 95-year-old queen — who we, of course, wish well — is evidently doing fine with covid in England right now.

BUCK: Handling light duty.

CLAY: Yes. Still actually working even while she has covid, and the other option he had is he could have been rational. The other option was: Crush this protest like a totalitarian dictator, and he took the second option here, and even now… I believe we have audio of this, Buck. Even now he’s not saying it’s not over. They’re going to treat these protesters like it’s January 6th and follow them to the ends of the earth. Listen to this.

BUCK: He is the absolute worst. Just start with that. I think you could make a very strong case that he’s the worst politician in North America right now, and I mean that based on his character and on what has happened as a result of his decision-making — his or her, any politician across North America. He’s an absolute joke to anybody who thinks that Canada’s a place that values liberty and freedom at any level.

Justin Trudeau has really made that look like a farce. Beyond that, though, Clay, when you see what’s happened here, there are far-reaching implications of this kind of decision. You have seen the mobilization of a Western democracy and really our closest ally, almost an adjunct state, America Jr., whatever you want to call it.

CLAY: America’s top hat.

BUCK: Yeah. You have seen a mobilization of what is effectively either, you could say, counterinsurgency or counter-insurrection powers of the state to suppress a peaceful political protest. Now, people will remember that it wasn’t long ago that there were actually in this country — not really in Canada so much, but in this country, there were — riots, ongoing riots causing disorder, destruction. They tried to burn down a church across from the White House, right? We remember what he was going on.

Horses are brought in against freedom protestors in Ottawa as police surge forward.

Footage by @PuffinsPictures pic.twitter.com/UzkknSlAlX

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 18, 2022

They were pulling down statues. They were destroying neighborhoods, burning down police stations, trying to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland. And the apparatus of the left was furious with the notion, furious with the notion that Trump was sending in any additional law enforcement resources or anything. That was thuggery. Those were jackbooted fascists going in to Portland or D.C. or wherever — and now look what Trudeau has done.

Clay, they sent guys in full-on, head-to-toe tactical gear with long guns to pull guys out of trucks who had spent the last few days handing out sandwiches and playing ice hockey in the streets and saying, “Can we go back to our normal lives?” The mobilization of a state of emergency in Canada to break a peaceful protest that is a righteous protest.

With demands that should be clear to everybody as the way forward is something that I think we’re gonna, unfortunately, be dealing with the ramifications of for a long time. You think they’re only gonna use it against the truckers? Anytime now there’s a protest that seems to come from the right, they may decide, “Oh, look at the stuff they said! Neo-Nazis! Trumpist insurrection!” They lied about the movement in order to justify what they did against the movement.

CLAY: It is. I don’t want to say America did well with covid because we certainly didn’t, but if you look at New Zealand and you look at Australia and you look at the Canada — three countries that I think most Americans precovid would have characterized as relatively easygoing, relatively moderate in the politics and the perspectives that they adopt — they all three lost their mind, frankly, in a way we did not. I think to a large extent, that is because of our federalism.

Because we had governors, in particular Ron DeSantis, who were willing to look at the data and take risks. And while that might have upset the Blue Check Brigade out there, what it did was it encouraged the other side of the country. And so we had less of a pervasive anger in the United States compared to I think what happened in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They kind of leavened it based on federalism.

BUCK: This is why the discussion… You’re totally right, and I think you said this a couple weeks ago, and I’ve shared this with other folks too — attributing it to you, of course — that where was the America trucker protest for the most part? Well, the truckers who live in Texas and the truckers who live in Tennessee and Florida and the Dakotas and Montana and Wyoming, they’re like, “We’re kind of okay,” you know?

They haven’t been put through the same degree of what you’ve seen in Canada. As for those other states you mentioned, what we used to call the Anglosphere just for the English speaking nature of it, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, there was a madness that covid unleashed, really a mass hysteria, and I do think that it very much correlated with a degree of socialism in those countries.

Canada is now tear-gassing and beating its people, who are protesting seeking a return to normalcy, rather than simply admit mask and vaccine mandates do nothing to impact the spread of covid. pic.twitter.com/8381ryvw4i

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 19, 2022

We have thought of socialists in the past as, “Oh, they just want free health care,” but there’s also a mentality. Socialists believe in effectively creating a religion of the state and that if you just give them enough authority and power, they will create a de facto utopia. And that means that also in the event of an emergency, the same people that believe the government can create perfection think the government is in a perfect position to deal with a threat like this.

But you just have to give it all the authority that it wants. So I think that’s why you saw the countries… I do like Australia as “East Germany with koalas,” and that’s started to catch on a little bit because I think it’s true. You saw people recognizing that the socialist mind-set in times of duress lends itself… All the sudden the benevolent authoritarianism of a Big Government socialist state doesn’t feel so benevolent anymore.

CLAY: And what’s interesting is England today is effectively ending all restrictions. Australia has now opened back up for tourists. New Zealand is acknowledging that zero covid is no longer a reality, and I believe we were talking about during commercial breaks their covid cases have now surged 24000% or something such as that when they stopped being able to isolate themselves and keep everyone else from coming in the country. And even with Biden as a disastrous leader, I feel in many ways, if you compare us to all of those other countries that we would ordinarily have considered to be our peer group, that things have gone better than we could have hoped relative to places like Florida.

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Biden and Harris Bungle Diplomacy as Putin Preps for War

21 Feb 2022

BUCK: We’ve been watching this now for what feels like weeks and perhaps longer, really. The buildup started before the end of last year, and now what we’ve got is at least what could be some sense of the early phase of the Putin-backed incursion. But, Clay, what’s going on right now is you’ve got Putin, apparently, had a meeting of his security council today which has been describing it as bonkers, in which the decision was made to defend the…

This is in quotes, of course: “defend” the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Now, those are the two parts of eastern Ukraine that have been de facto Russian-controlled separatist regions now stretching back to 2014. Who was president in 2014 again? Oh, that’s right. Interesting. We’ll get into this in a moment. But Democrats are in charge, Putin gets really aggressive. Trump is the Russian agent, they said, and they were real quiet for about four years on this stuff.

But there’s the idea there would be a false flag operation perhaps or some kind of provocation in those two regions where they say that they have been attacked. There are already some efforts to evacuate. Russians are evacuating in Ukraine people in the separatist regions because they say Ukraine, Clay… I know this is confusing, but it’s meant to be confusing and crazy and not really believable and yet creating some fig leaf.

They’re trying to pull people out of these areas so then they say Ukraine is attacking so then Russia will attack, and this is the whole idea of how they’ll then claim to be defending Russian-speaking people. We have a very complicated situation, a lot of people around the border. Here’s the issue. On the outside of this, the only thing that’s gonna stop…

I’m not sure anything can stop at this point. I think if Putin decides to go in, he’s going in. I don’t think anyone can stop him. There’s nothing on the table that would stop him right now, but there’s certainly pressure that could be brought diplomatically and from the U.S. side, and the European ally side of things. You want to know who is in charge. Here is the kind of stuff I think that does not make Putin stay up late night with worry. Play 14.

REPORTER: Can you explain to Americans what exactly will they face if this happens?

HARRIS: Sure. As the president said in his speech, we are aware that, again, when America stands on principles and all of the things that we hold dear, it requires for us sometimes for us to put ourselves out there in a way that maybe we will incur some costs. And in this situation, that may relate to energy costs, for example. But we are taking very specific and appropriate, I believe, steps to mitigate what that cost might be if it happens.

BUCK: Why does Kamala always sound like the student that didn’t do the homework but is trying to answer the question anyway?

CLAY: I don’t even understand her analysis or answer there at all. But this is one of the weirdest stories that I can ever remember, not just Kamala’s involvement, but it is funny, as you pointed out several weeks ago, the idea that America’s more concerned about Ukraine’s border than we are our own southern border is at this point without dispute. But, Buck, to have this play out, this has to be an incredible intelligence world that we’re in.

Because basically you’re playing out in real time everything publicly in terms of, “Hey, we expect they’re gonna go in.” Remember last week we were told, “Hey, we expect that invasion is gonna happen Wednesday.” I think the 16th was the discussion point of when we expected them to go, and then it’s, “Oh, we expect them to go in over the weekend.” Well, Biden is now very sure that Putin is actually going to invade.

And we get all these very specific, detailed briefings and leaks about what’s going on in Ukraine. Now the Olympics is over, which has been one of the questions I had: Was Putin ever going to actually invade while China was hosting the Olympics, given the relationship now between Putin and Xi? But all of this is really a strange gobbledygook for lack of a better way of describing it. So, my question is: Are you more convinced now that Putin is gonna go in than you were last week? Less convinced? How would you analyze all of the different conflicting data sets out there in terms of what Putin’s gonna actually do?

BUCK: I think he’s going in, and I think the question that I can’t — I mean, no one knows, right, but the one that I still go back and forth on is will it be a blitzkrieg style go all in, all at once, multiple fronts of attack against Ukraine to try to not just seize a critical infrastructure and destroy any major military sites the Ukrainian armed forces have but to topple the government as fast as possible. Essentially just make this the blitzkrieg.

We know what the word means, right? “Lightning war.” That’s one option. The other, though, when they’re talking about these separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk and the possibility of officially recognizing these break-away regions, we may have what I would call dynamic incursion where they’re going to escalate and then deescalate a little bit and then escalate and deescalate. So that would mean they put in troops.

But let’s say they just put troops in Luhansk and Donetsk, and then all these other troops sort of sit there as a reminder to the Ukrainian government, “Don’t go into those areas and try to actually take them back. We’re officially seizing them now.” What are you gonna do about it with 130,000-plus Russian troops in the periphery and then they consolidate that area and then maybe take something else?

So I think there are two pathways they can take. But the not gonna do anything military, just want concessions? How could Putin…? This isn’t saber rattling. This is waving your sword around in the air like a crazy person and making demands. People wouldn’t… I think that you can’t go to this length just for diplomatic concessions because Putin will want to do that again in the future on other things, and unless he mobilizes effectively a full invasion army, people aren’t gonna want to pay much attention to him, I think. Again, there are also people that say that Putin maybe has just gone a little bit crazy.

CLAY: Well, and that’s the number one question I hear is, if Russia’s not going to invade, what are they trying to get? It would be easier to understand, to me, if you could say, “Hey, this is the tangible goal. This is what he’s negotiating towards,” and he’s willing to put all these men and materialize right on the edge, the precipice of war in order to do it? It doesn’t feel like there’s some grand gain that he’s going to receive without invading.

BUCK: Yeah. Everyone’s been saying if he could get a guarantee, for example, that Ukraine would never enter NATO. That’s one of the big things people talk about. There’s oil and gas pipelines and concessions and economic things that I’m sure also are already in the picture, but, okay. Let’s say that they’re… What does that promise? The promise of the Budapest Memorandum which said that Russia, England, and America — Russia, U.K., and America — would defend Ukraine, that’s not looking like such a great promise.

CLAY: Well, and telling Ukraine, “Hey, if you give up your nuclear weapons you’ll never have to worry about your defense, either,” which they did.

BUCK: Yeah. Not trying to be smug about this, folks — it’s a very serious issue — but one of the lessons of this is never give up your nukes. We’ve been talking about that. That’s real. Never. You’re seeing this throughout history, don’t give up your nukes. That’s real, and then what would a promise not to have Ukraine and NATO look like when as far as Putin’s concerned what if in five years, they change their mind? So that’s why I think he’s going in. I just don’t know if it’s going to be a step-by-step escalation to seize pieces of territory or it’s the all-out war right away that some people, I think, are very concerned could break out literally any minute at this point.

CLAY: No doubt, and we’ve been sort of on tenterhooks for that entire process throughout.

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"Can you explain to Americans what exactly they will face" if Putin invades Ukraine?

HARRIS: "When America stands for her principles and all of the things we hold dear, um, it requires sometimes for us to put ourselves out there in a way that, maybe, we will incur some costs." pic.twitter.com/L0YC095F3o

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Shameful stuff from the Ottawa police. Imagine how quickly the madness would end if they simply refused to help Trudeau enforce his stupid, tyrannical mandates. https://t.co/9xaoKdFRfa

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An anti-mask parent shows a pro-mask school board member photos of her not wearing a mask in public during a school board meeting and the board member storms out of the meeting. This is incredible: pic.twitter.com/T49apO4zUr

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Who’s More Likable, Hillary or Kamala?

18 Feb 2022

BUCK: Big discussion point among a lot of conservatives I know right now: Who’s gonna be the opposition leader? Is it really gonna be Joe Biden? Do people believe that that’s where we’re heading? It feels like… The reason I’m not confident saying it won’t be Biden is that I made a mistake — and, Clay, I will admit this. I assumed at the beginning of the Democrat primary that they wouldn’t be so reckless as to put a guy who was always submediocre and is now clearly way past his political prime in terms of his abilities and his acuity, we’ll say.

But they voted for him anyway. So the first time around, I got surprised, and wasn’t the only one. I think Tucker also said early on there’s no way it could be Joe Biden. Well, turns out it is. There are a bunch of us who just didn’t think that that was possible. So are they so reckless they would do it a second time?

I think the answer is they’re reckless enough. Do they think it will work? That’s the big question. And then there’s the other thing, the other options that are out there, right, the other possibilities. Who was at the New York State Democrat convention recently? None other than Ms. Hillary Clinton. Here she is, clip 9.

HILLARY: “They’ll ban books but do nothing about guns. They’ll make it harder for people to vote…and let Donald Trump trash our democracy.” pic.twitter.com/x0NIkCoEj7

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 17, 2022

BUCK: (screeching) “They’ll ban books, but they’ll do nothing about guns.” I cannot believe this woman even got as far as she did in politics. It’s really remarkable. I don’t… I’m gonna put you on the spot right now, Clay. “Who is more likable?” which is something that is talked about often in politics. People always say George W. Bush — other than the fact his dad was president and all that. But that his primary asset in politics was like Bill Clinton. I’ve met Republicans — I’m sure you have, too — who have said Bill Clinton could walk around a room and say (impression), “Hey, what’s up? I want a hug. High five. I want to talk to you. I want to talk to her. I want to bring everybody close.” Everyone says Bill Clinton had this amazing skill set for that. Who is more likable, Kamala or Hillary?

CLAY: A phenomenal question. But let me say about Bill Clinton. I long for the days when all we had to worry about was Democratic president screwing an intern as opposed to screwing the entire country like what we’re seeing with Joe Biden right now, right? So, I would give anything to have some measure of small competence. I would trade Monica Lewinsky for 7.5% inflation in a heartbeat. I’ll tell you that right now in terms of scandals. Now, it is such a great question: Who is more likable? I think it’s Hillary.

BUCK: (screech) Yay!

CLAY: Hillary is more likable than Kamala Harris, and I understand there can be a debate out there. But to me, what is Kamala’s calling card? She doesn’t have any kids, right? Hillary at least has the opportunity, whether you like it or not, she’s a grandma, she had a daughter, she had a family. Kamala Harris is married to a white lawyer. She has no kids of her own.

She seems so wildly uncomfortable in everything that she does, and she has never had in my mind… I mean, Kamala Harris has a 38% approval rating in Cali-freaking-fornia right now, Buck. Do you know how hard it is for a Democrat minority woman who is the first vice president (laughing) in the country to have a 38% approval rating in California?

BUCK: See, this is why —

CLAY: She’s starting way rig job. It’s like she got the exam questions in advance and still got an F — and maybe had an open book, too, and she’s still failing.

BUCK: This is why Hillary’s emerging on the scene.

CLAY: She’s gonna be the nominee.

BUCK: If you’re a normal… See it, folks? He’s calling the shots.

CLAY: I’m calling my shot right now.

BUCK: He’s pointing at the upper deck.

CLAY: I’m telling you it’s gonna be Hillary.

Good question from @BuckSexton today: who is more likable: Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris?

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 18, 2022

BUCK: It’s amazing, man, because you think about this, a normal person which is clearly not but Hillary Clinton is who did not have a hole in her soul that could only be filled with power and prestige, right? A normal person at this point in Hillary’s life would say, “Time to spend time with the grandkids, write the memoirs, do other things. Think about life. Think about where we’re all heading,” you know what I mean? Not Hillary. She is not done, not even a little bit. And you can just tell the kind of rhetoric and the things that she’s saying and the way that she’s out there, here she is talking about the 2020 election and Donald Trump. Play 11.

HILLARY: America is only as strong as our unity and our democracy allows us to be. That’s why New York must be not just the home of the Statue of Liberty. We must be the defenders of liberty. (shouting) Not just a laboratory of democracy but a protector of democracy — and we must reject the big lie about the 2020 election and the cover-up of the insurrection of last January 6th.

BUCK: The insurrection. Can we just stop for a second here, Clay? First of all, she’s horrible. And second of all, the cover-up of the insurrection? CNN is basically the, quote, insurrection channel! Find me a random day and there’s about a 30% chance, if you look up at the screen it will be, “Oh, it turns out one of the people arrested on the January 6th insurrection is a coffee drinker.” What? How is this even a news story?

CLAY: First of all, Hillary propagated the idea that our democracy is broken by arguing that she won the 2016 election but for Russian interference —

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: — for five years and she just recent delivered what would have been her speech if she had won and shattered that glass ceiling in New York. Hillary is a total hypocrite. And this is why I say, Buck, that we need a complete ass kicking in 2022 and 2024. ‘Cause let’s be honest. If you look at the history of elections in the twenty-first century for president, 2000, question of who won. In 2004, Democrats say what happened in Ohio, “There’s no way Kerry lost to George W. Bush!”

In 2008 really, Buck, I would argue is the only election where people have said, “Okay, Obama beat McCain,” where both parties acknowledged what actually happened. In ’12, there’s a dispute. In ’16, there’s a dispute. In ’20, there’s a dispute. You know when there’s not a dispute? When somebody wins by an overwhelming Electoral College majority and just really kicks ass, and I think that’s what we need to do see in ’24. Whoever the Republican nominee is has to win big.

BUCK: The good news is if it’s enough of a wave, any one individual race, right, they may get really contentious — and remember the Norm Coleman, Al Franken race in Minnesota?

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: It was down to a couple hundred votes. I think it might have even been less than that as a margin at one point, and they were magically finding ballots for Franken in the trunks of cars. Oh, yeah, look how that happened! So there might be shenanigans like that. But if you’re talking about, you know, a 20-, 30-vote majority for Republicans in the House and maybe picking… By the way, the Senate map could be a little better from what I understand.

CLAY: Gonna be a tough battle.

BUCK: But as long as you have at least one house in the hands — or rather one part of Congress in the hands — of the Republicans, it will limit the damage the loony left can do and then we’re just focusing in on the presidential election. There’s definitely one guy I feel like might run on the right as a Republican nominee. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll talk to him on Tuesday. We’ll have a little chat with former President Donald Trump about whether his plans are up. Let’s just say, has he decided or not.

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BLM Bails Out Assassin Who Shot at Jewish Candidate

18 Feb 2022

CLAY: This story in Louisville, for background — for people who haven’t been paying attention — there is a man named Quintez Brown. He is a Black Lives Matter supporter. He has been on Joy Reid’s show in the past on MSNBC during all of the imbroglio surrounding police shootings in the city of Louisville, and this guy, who is 21 years old he walked into a campaign headquarters, I believe, is where it was, and there is a Democrat running for mayor of Louisville.

That man’s name is Craig Greenberg. He is Jewish, running for mayor of Louisville. This guy walked in with a 9mm, fired multiple times. A round grazed Craig Greenberg’s clothing. So he could have easily been murdered. This man, Quintez Brown, fires multiple shots at a Jewish mayoral candidate for the city of Louisville. This would, in many ways, be classified as an assassination attempt.

He only gets, Buck, $100,000 in bail money, which is crazy in and of itself. But Black Lives Matter Louisville raises the money partly through crowdfunding and bails him out of jail within two days. He is now a free man outside of jail, even though he attempted to assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in the city of Louisville. Despite the fact that crowdsourcing has been shut down for all of the Canadian truckers.

Despite the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse — who was rapidly found not guilty — had a $2 million bail that he had to post to get out of jail and was not allowed to raise any money and, oh, by the way, the media showed up knocking on the door of people who donated 50, a hundred bucks to the Kyle Rittenhouse defense fund, and they’re doing the same thing for the Canadian truckers, this man, a clear BLM supporter, who was actually bailed out by BLM Louisville, attempts to assassinate a Jewish politician, and the story is nowhere to be found.

I think it should be, Buck, the number one story in America of a domestic nature. Obviously, Ukraine is going on and the Canadian truckers are going on. But in terms of internal stories in the United States, this should be, in my opinion, the number one story. The hypocrisy, the absurdity, the outright lies that are not being discussed here is mind-boggling to me. Your thoughts, and are you as crazily angry over the way this story is playing out as I am?

BUCK: I think you’re right to feel the indignation about the double standard, but I think you and I both know, Clay, these are the rules that we are supposed to play by now. The rules are two sets of rules. One side, the left, gets to do things a certain way. They can raise money for causes. They can have whole political movements that engage in widespread criminal destruction, rioting, looting, arson, and have some members of that political group, in the case of BLM, who either try to or do kill cops — or in this case, this guy was an avowed BLM supporter.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I believe he had been a guest on MSNBC.

CLAY: That’s right. He was on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show during the story of the BLM protest rise back… It was 2018, to be fair, but he was on her show live from Louisville.

BUCK: This guy’s clearly a member of, as much a card-carrying member as one can be, although I know they don’t actually have cards, of the Black Lives Matter movement. And the media doesn’t want to touch the story, really. They don’t want to talk about it. I’m sure we’re going to be hearing, we already have heard a little bit of, “Oh, there were mental health issues that this individual had.

“Perhaps this was a personal feud; it had nothing to do with politics.” Right away they shift the narrative away from what could be damaging to the overall movement, which is, “Hold on a second. What kind of individuals take up leadership roles in BLM?” Since we’re talking about this, what has BLM done with I think it was $60 million that was raised.

CLAY: Over $100 million I think they raised overall, and they’re not sure what happened to tens of millions of it.

BUCK: Right. But there’s $60 million specifically that Amazon has said its charity platform is not getting answers with, wait, you used our Amazon charity platform, you raised $60 million, what did you do with it?

CLAY: Yeah, you’re right.

BUCK: So they’ve suspended them now as a result of this. That’s a lot of money for a charity that doesn’t actually do charity.

CLAY: (laughs)

BUCK: It’s time we have a reckoning in this country with the fact that BLM as a movement — I wrote about this at FoxNews.com — has a legacy now of more crime, more dead people across the border, young, black Americans, police officers, everything. More murders, more crime. What did this movement actually give the country that didn’t make things worse? And yet corporate America bent the knee, was begging, BLM! “How big a check can I write you?” What does BLM even try to do? What is it trying to accomplish?

CLAY: Well, they’re bailing out attempted murderers is one way they’re using their money.

BUCK: Exactly. You see, what does the movement do? What decisions does it make? Is it actually promoting things that will provide for safer communities? Is it improving community police relations? Is it having worthwhile conversations in high crime communities about why is this a high crime community? What’s going on here? What can we do to make things better? No. BLM, as we know, was the mobilization of the left. It was the mob. It was leftist rage out in the streets in an election year.

And now we find ourselves looking at this saying to each other, what exactly is it going to take before this…? The truckers have the full weight of the Canadian government coming down on them, and so far, all that I have seen a bunch of guys like handing out sandwiches and playing hockey in the streets while, yeah, their trucks are parked in downtown Ottawa and they’ve blocked some traffic. I get that.

But, Clay, they’re using terror finance statues in Canada to seize people’s bank accounts. BLM has had people… There was a BLM supporter in the first iteration of the movement who assassinated five Dallas police officers. Never hear about that anymore. You have this individual who tried to kill the would-be mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, and yet there’s no conversation at the national level about what exactly does BLM stand for.

And why is it that the Democrat got away with embracing this movment wholesale, and now just acts like it didn’t happen? Same thing we’re gonna see with all the covid restrictions, Clay, as we talked about. “Oh, we never did that! We never believed that.” When it works for them they’re all about it. When the consequences are felt by the American people, they change; they rewrite history.

CLAY: This is why I think — and I understand the argument of there are different rules for different people based on whether they have a big D or big R in front of their name, right? I understand that. But this is how you win independent voters. This is how you win people in the middle part of the country. This is how you win persuadable Democrats, by pointing this out. BLM is bailing a man out of prison who attempted to assassinate a Jewish politician, and almost no one…

Are you seeing this story anywhere on MSNBC despite the fact that they had this dude, Quintez Brown, as a guest? Are you seeing this on CNN? Has the Washington Post or the New York Times even covered it? This is, to me, a perfect distillation of the hypocrisy of BLM and also the underlying — and this is a big deal, Buck, ’cause it doesn’t get much attention. The underlying anti-Semitism of much of the BLM apparatus. Remember when they’re out marching, a lot of time times they started chanting anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish chants.

And even this politician in Louisville — and, by the way, we’re number one in the radio market of Louisville. So I know a lot of you people listening right now in Kentucky who have had to see this on the ground — the Breonna Taylor fallout, everything that has to do with the power of BLM — you haven’t felt like you can even speak out about it. This has to destroy BLM to the extent that it still had any moral authority in many parts of the country. BLM is finished, I would imagine, in Louisville, after this decision.

BUCK: And now we see also how “the system” becomes the fallback. I’m sure if they’re pushed on this, Clay, they’ll say, “Well, a judge should be able to set bail.” Okay. Well, what’s the amount of bail? Also, isn’t somebody that tries to kill a politician for reasons that we’re still finding out — isn’t that someone who’s a danger to the public and therefore bail you would think is not something that you would get?

I mean, $100,000 bail for an attempt political assassination as you point out, that’s what this seems to be, that’s pretty low. And beyond that, we’ve seen people who have lost their jobs. In fact, it’s happening right now. People are losing their jobs for giving money to support the Canadian truckers. People lost their jobs for giving money to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: If you donated to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense… I thought we all believed in this country that everybody should get the best defense they possibly can so that justice can be done? Not when it came to Kyle Rittenhouse. The entire national Democrat media pretended like that wasn’t an abandonment of principle.

So they can only get away with these games so much. It’s either everyone gets the best defense at trial they can, everyone should be entitled to a fair bail hearing, or not. It can’t just be, “Well, when there’s somebody who’s tied into BLM we’re gonna have a very different approach to it because of the politics around it,” and I think we all see that that’s what’s actually going on here.

CLAY: And imagine how this story would be covered, for people out there saying, “Well, it’s not that big of a story.” I disagree with you. But imagine how big this story would be being covered if it were a dyed-in-the-wool Donald Trump supporter who had attempted to assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville and then a somehow Donald Trump-affiliated charity had bailed that person out of jail and if that person had only gotten a $100,000 bail that he had to post to get out.

This is, to me, shameful, and it is the essence of hypocrisy. It is defining in many ways the underlying racism, which is characterized by Black Lives Matter and also, frankly, the anti-Semitism. If I’m the Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville, I’m looking around and saying, “Wait a minute. Do Jewish lives matter? This dude walked into my office and tried to assassinate me.” He also, by the way, has a series, it appears, of anti-Semitic posts that are out there. He may well be mentally troubled.

I don’t doubt that. Many people who decide to try to kill people are. But that would be more evidence of why he doesn’t need to be on the street now. Would you feel safe if you’re that mayoral candidate and the guy who tried to kill you is already back on the street and could theoretically show up anywhere, or some other misguided lunatic of BLM is going to maybe just follow up with what he tried to do?

BUCK: One quick thing to add in here, Clay. There were people who were held in solitary confinement —

CLAY: Still are! Still are!

BUCK: — for seven, eight, nine months at a time for illegal parading in a government building, okay? So we want to know what justice looks like in America? Ask the J6 denied bail ’cause they’re such a threat — the January 6th people — versus what’s going on here with an attempted assassination. Ask them about it.

CLAY: Well said, and I donated money… By the way, I want to be clear about this. Everybody is entitled to the best possible lawyer they can get. I’m an old school lawyer in the context of John Adams made the right decision when he defended the people who shot the colonists at the Boston Tea Party, and I donate money to those guys and girls — mostly guys — who are still being held inside of prisons, because I think they need the right defense fund. But I’m consistent here. BLM isn’t. They’re frauds.

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Sen. Johnson on the Fall of Canada and the Durham Probe

18 Feb 2022

BUCK: Right now, there are reports of a full-on crackdown, as in the arrests are beginning right now in Ottawa of the Canadian Freedom Convoy. We’re joined now by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Senator, thanks for being with us.

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, guys, glad to be here.

BUCK: You’re a border state — a different border — and not too far from the state that you represent, Senator, you’ve got a situation unfolding right now with the Trudeau government calling in for the police to just start making all the arrests of the trucker convoy. This comes after the news broke that they were seizing people’s bank accounts as well as some of the Democrat corporate media were naming and shaming people after a hack of those who had tried to donate money. What do you make of all this especially given that this might be the day of all of it coming to an end?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, you’re right, we are a border state. We speak kind of speak semi-Canadian, eh? But there’s such a simple solution here. Why don’t they just respect their freedom and their personal health autonomy. Doesn’t have to come down to police cracking down, turning Canada into a totalitarian state. Just respect people’s freedom. Just blows me away. Our response to covid is just insane. I was listening to you earlier in the hour.

There’s so much about how we respond to covid that makes no sense, and this is just the latest example. Just acknowledge their freedom, their personal health autonomy and let ’em live their lives — I mean, particularly truckers. They work alone. They’re not in contact with too many people; they’re not a danger to anybody. This is just bizarre, what’s happening in Canada. Now, I am 100% behind the freedom fighters, those Canadian truckers in Canada and anybody who’s willing to fight for freedom.

CLAY: Senator Johnson, I don’t know if you paid attention to the story that came out of Louisville about the BLM member who tried to assassinate a mayoral candidate in Louisville. The reason why I’m bringing it up with you in particular is in Kenosha we saw Kyle Rittenhouse not allowed to raise money for his own defense, even though obviously a jury thankfully saw the evidence and said that was legitimate self-defense. Should we have a real investigation into these crowdfunding platforms and the choices that they make?

Because they allowed BLM to raise $100,000 and bail out this guy who tried to assassinate a mayoral candidate in Louisville. We’re seeing what happens with them in Canada. Obviously, that’s a different country. But to me what they’ve tried to do and what they are doing in terms of the way that they’re using their platform is crying out for an investigation from the government into how they are applying their policies in what would otherwise seem to be very similar situations where people are trying to raise money to be able to provide the best defense in a criminal context.

SEN. JOHNSON: You’re not saying there’s a double standard, are you?

CLAY: (laughing)

SEN. JOHNSON: Again, I was listening earlier, and you’re exactly right. What keeps our financial system together is just confidence. You have to have confidence that if you deposit something in a bank and it gets turned into digital bits, that when you go back and need that money, you’re gonna get that cash back ,or those digital bits aren’t just gonna disappear. So, these platforms that are — you know, these GoFundMe and those types of things.

Now people don’t have the confidence that if they deposit money for a particular cause…? I think they’re slitting their own throats, quite honestly. But, yeah, I’m happy to investigate all this stuff. But guys, we are faced with double standard after double standard whether we’re talking about the Russian collusion hoax and the way that the press is not covering the Michael Sussman indictment — whether we’re just talking about so many things — there’s a huge double standard.

But we’re up against people that have the power to maintain that double standard. It just, we have the truth on our side. We have policies that actually work to maintain freedom and create opportunity but they’ve got the power of the media, of the Big Tech social media, those giants. As conservatives we are facing many, many challenges.

BUCK: Speaking to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. And, Senator, I mentioned that it is true you’re a border state of course with Canada, but every state in the era of the Biden administration in a sense becomes a border state because of the wide-open southern border that we currently have. DHS just reported earlier this week 153,941 “migrant encounters,” apprehensions in January, that is about double what it was in January of 2021, quadruple what it was in January of 2020.

And DHS reported that just for the month of January alone, 62,573 migrants who entered illegally were released into the interior of the United States with no real tracking mechanism or anything else going on there. How is this sustainable? They had the worst year ever for illegal immigration in this country last year on Biden’s watch. They’re advocating in so many ways, it seems, for illegals to come into the United States. Are the American people is it just…? They’re hoping that we don’t pay attention? We don’t notice? ‘Cause probably gonna be worse this year, Senator.

SEN. JOHNSON: It’s sustainable because the mainstream media’s covering up for Joe Biden. But you used the word they’re using now, “encounter.” It always used to be apprehensions. But they’ve gotten so efficient at basically encountering somebody, processing them, and distributing them all over the country, they’re actually using the correct term, “encounters.” So last year is about over two million encounters. They did return about 1.1 million people due to the covid restrictions.

But in terms of who they process and disperse, plus the 344,000 known got-aways, there is about a million and a quarter people that somehow got in this country illegally. They’re not document. We don’t know where they are. But put that in perspective, guys. That’s a number that’s larger than the population in eight states. That’s the extent of this problem — and of course we don’t talk about the human depredations of the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the drug trafficking, hundred thousand overdoses.

How about the gang members that are getting in, MS-13 and other just vicious gangs? No, the news media, let’s face it, they got their candidates elected, even though he campaigned from a basement, they got Biden elected. Now they’re gonna cover up for all the disasters that his policies are creating for Americans. But, again, I’m somewhat hopeful that they really can’t find 7.5% inflation, rising gas prices, the rising crime brought about by their low bail policies their defund police. They can’t hide that from the people that are devastated from the results of their policies.

CLAY: Senator Johnson, what did you think of the Durham revelations and of the fact — and this is not gonna surprise you, I know, but how quickly — many in the, quote– unquote, mainstream media ran to help cover for Hillary Clinton? She emerged and made her speech and claimed it’s the fevered dream of Fox News deplorables, basically. What do you think about the significance of what has been laid out so far, and where are we headed as it pertains to the Clinton apparatus spying on President Trump?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, first of all, it’s just Exhibit A of the double standard, the grotesque double standards of the media and literally we don’t have journalists in the mainstream, we have advocates, advocates for the Democrat Party but it’s really confirming what I always expect. We uncovered the Lisa Page, Peter Strzok texts, and I made those things public. The email that I — or the text that I — always used to highlight, still do, was written by Strzok to Page in December 2016, between the election and the inauguration of Trump.

It said, “[O]ur sisters are leaking like mad. Scorned, worried, political. They’re kicking into overdrive.” Now, what did Peter Strzok know they were worried about? Could it be their involvement in the wrongdoings, in the 2016 campaign, the Russian hoax, the Steele dossier that was Russian misinformation which they knew as early as October 2016? Could it be they knew about Michael Sussman and what he was doing with highly sensitive government contracts to allow them to track the internet traffic from Trump Tower as well as then later on the executive office of the president?

I’ve always felt that the Russian hoax was an intelligence community — and Buck, you’re from the CIA. They’re good at this. This is a diversionary operation by the people in the intelligence community. Remember when you had, what, 50 intelligence agency professionals come out and say, “Oh, that’s disk drive? That’s Russian disinformation.” They had no evidence of that. It’s just all part of the diversion operation. That’s what I’m fairly convinced about, and I think that’s really what the John Durham indictments are showing.

I just hope he’s gotten his hands on a lot more evidence than we were able to get our hands a hold of from the FBI even though we subpoenaed Christopher Wray. So he’s gotta reveal all this. Merrick Garland has to make his entire report public. Gina Haspel. Here’s an example. Chuck Grassley and I wrote a letter just kind of laying out all information we need from the CIA. This is in June of 2020.

We couldn’t even get her to give us a phone call to tell us why she wasn’t responding to our legitimate congressional oversight requests. That’s the contempt that these people have for the American public, the contempt they hold for the people’s elected representatives. This is an enormous scandal and the silence in the mainstream media is deafening but it’s very revealing.

BUCK: Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Senator, always appreciate you coming by to hang out with us. Thank you, sir.

SEN. JOHNSON: Have a great day. Stay well.

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Hannah E. Meyers on the Truth About Crime and Race

18 Feb 2022

CLAY: We bring in now — she wrote a fantastic op-ed piece — Hannah E. Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, and she recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that said these policies were supposed to help black people; they’re backfiring. It is up right now at ClayAndBuck.com. You can also go read that at the New York Times. Hannah, we appreciate you taking the time to join us here. A fascinating piece, and it’s one that is hardly being analyzed at all. What are the impacts as you found them and saw them of the Black Lives Matter movement and what has happened in their wake?

MEYERS: Thank you, Clay. And this is more broad than Black Lives Matter but certainly a lot of overlap with what their policy goals were. We look at criminal justice reforms over the past few years, and we’re here in New York so we focus on our 2019 statewide bail reform and discovery reform. They look at the Less is More Act that passed just this last September that has fewer parole violators in jail, and also we look at policies since around 2016 in New York City that have gradually and intentionally decreased the number of people held in jail on a variety of crimes.

And what we find is these reforms were put in place very explicitly to improve black lives, to reduce the amount of interaction between black New Yorkers and the criminal justice system. And what we find is looking at the data any which way you see that these policies have actually contributed to making black lives much harder and actually increasing the amount of interaction between blacks and the criminal justice system, the extent to which they’re touched by the criminal justice system.

And this is both by contributing to an enormous increase in violent crime that impacts black New Yorkers more than anything else. If you look at 2020, murders went up citywide a horrific 41%, shootings about doubled. But if you look at a neighborhood like Brownsville, Brooklyn, that is predominantly black, you see that murders went up over 127%, and shootings went up 191%, which is unthinkable. But violent crime, very disproportionately victimizes black New Yorkers who make up only about 24% of the city.

And similarly, the goal of decreasing the extent to which blacks are arrested, convicted, incarcerated, it’s had the opposite effect. If you look at, for instance, the inmate possibility at New York City’s Rikers Island jail, about five years ago it was about 50% black. Now it’s 60% black. All of this pointing to the reality that criminal justice policies, for everyone’s sake but even to a greater extent for the sake of black New Yorkers should be based upon the goals of public safety, law and order, and not around trying to engineer a particular racial outcome.

BUCK: Hannah, it’s Buck, and I want to dig into that a bit some more. This piece was I think so well written and brought together so many important pieces of data. You wrote in it, “[T]his strategy is harming black New Yorkers. By aiming for racial equity in criminal justice rather than focusing solely on deterring and responding to crime, policymakers seem to have neglected the foundational purpose of law and order.

“What has followed — a sharp rise in victims of crime, who remain disproportionately black, and a slight increase in the percentage of Rikers Island inmates,” you just mentioned that, “who are black — is a racial imbalance of a more troubling kind,” end quote there. So the social justice movement, which we often hear of in the context of criminal justice as criminal justice “reform,” they explicitly claim — and this is part of your research, what you find, that because there are disproportionate numbers of the black community in prison the system is racist and therefore we have to change the system. Is that a fair assessment of what they’re pushing for?

MEYERS: Correct. And what we argue instead that this is not a criminal justice… This is not something you can correct with criminal justice policy. This is a much broader issue. In New York City, pretty consistently shooting victims are about 71% black — again, city residents are about 24% black — murder victims are about 65% black, and crime is very intraracial, especially violent crime. So shooting suspects are black — about 71% black. Murder suspects and arrestees are about 65% black.

This isn’t something… You can’t dismantle the criminal justice system to try to correct for why this is happening. And, in fact, when you do, you only hurt the same communities that are the main victims of these crimes — and that when you stop incarcerating people and prosecuting them for crimes, these are the communities that they are returning to and victimizing people and you are in fact hurting the population you’re trying to help by creating streets that aren’t safe for kids to go to school, businesses that suffer by having a greater degree of disorder and crime.

And so even if you don’t foundationally believe, as I think you and I do, that criminal justice policy in all fairness and rightness should just be based on who is committing crime. Even if you are setting out very explicitly to improve the lot of blacks relative on others in New York, it’s just the wrong way to go to do that. You’re much better off by just trying to ensure public safety for everybody and letting the chips fall and who that ends up arresting and convicting and incarcerating, as long as those are the people whose actions have landed them there, for whom those are the consequences.

CLAY: Hannah, so much of media attention — I’m glad you brought that up — is focused on one race perpetrating a crime against another race. That is a very substantially minority act. As you said, most racial crime — or most crime, I should say — is within the same race, right?

MEYERS: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: So a black person is likely to victim use a black person, white and white, Asian and Asian, Hispanic and Hispanic, that goes across the board.

MEYERS: Correct.

CLAY: Why do you think…? This is a couple-part question here: Why do you think the media overwhelmingly focuses on crimes that involve a minority of overall crimes and are external in nature, right, outside of the race? And a second part of that, even to write this piece and/or discuss it, I’m assuming that you are in some sense terrified that you’re going to be called racist for sharing actual facts and data — even though, again, they’re actual facts and data. How much does the fear of racism keep legitimate conversations like this from taking place?

MEYERS: I think there’s a lot of nuance there. I think in the past few years many people have been very genuinely concerned about the extent to which blacks are arrested and incarcerated, involved in crime. The relationship between police and the black communities which is inherently fraught because police respond to crimes in the neighborhoods that it happens, and, as we just discussed, violent crime very disproportionately happens in black neighborhoods, which is why it’s so important to build trust and partnership and a sense of community between police and black communities.

I think the narrative has gotten incredibly polarized, and I think it’s very easy to simply say, “Well, look, these numbers are so skewed. Obviously, it’s a racist system. This is all about the criminal justice system itself.” I think also people have… We’ve had such a reduction in crime in New York City over the past few decades and nationwide, but if you look at New York where it’s particularly stark — where we went from 2,200 murders in around 1990 to 230 murders, something like that, a couple years ago.

People become very lax about the reality of violent crime. They think you can dismantle it. “Why should we be prosecuting anyone or arresting anyone? Crime doesn’t really happen,” and I think the problem has been worse because there is a population of people like we were talking about these skewed numbers in New York City. About 1% of shooting victims are white and 1% of shooting arrestees are white, same for Asian. It’s very easy to not grapple with the reality of what it feels like to live in, to be a potential victim of a shooting, to live in a neighborhood where you’re scared to let your kids go out.

And I think it’s actually made the narrative worse if you look at, for instance, a Gallup poll at the height… In August 2020, when things were really very volatile around this issue, a nationwide Gallup poll found that 81% of black Americans wanted the same or more amount of police in their neighborhood. And I think the media narrative, politicians, they have not wanted to accept the reality of people on the ground and their lived experience of crime and victimization and disorder.

My own institute did a poll this past fall in the 20 fastest growing cities nationwide that found a majority of black residents wanted more policing of quality-of-life issues like public you’re gonna be and littering and graffiti. And I think it’s very easy to paint this big image of, you know, cops versus blacks and not accept the reality that blacks, like everyone else, need police to reduce — you know, to maintain order and peace and allow individuals to thrive. And even if that relationship can be fraught because these numbers are skewed, that has to be something that’s built on and upheld and looked at as a partnership and you can’t just dismantle policing and call it racist, and I think —

BUCK: Hannah, we’ve got about a minute. I just want to ask, Hannah, are you seeing the beginnings, at least, of what buildings like the turning of the ship in the other direction? Are you seeing not just New York, but Chicago, Houston having a really rough year and had a very bad 18 months or so with shootings? San Francisco. Los Angeles. Do they realize that bail reform, not enforcing smaller crimes, not arresting people for shoplifting, not punishing people severely for shootings…? Are they changing the tune, or not so much?

MEYERS: I think there has certainly been more attention to the correlation between cities that have these so-called aggressive prosecutors wand ho focus on nonprosecution of crimes, reducing sentencing, reducing charges and record homicide increases and record shoplifting increases. And whereas prosecution, I think, gets less attention than policing ’cause it feels a little bit more obscure and less and people see when their eyes on the street. I think there is a gaining of attention to it but we need to have a lot more of that such that policymakers actually feel like they might not be reelected if they don’t change some of the policies that are undermining public safety, prosecution policies.

BUCK: Hannah Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute. Go to ClayAndBuck.com to read her latest op-ed from the New York Times. Hannah, my friend, good to have you on. Thanks for being with us.

MEYERS: Thanks so much. Take care.

Clay and Buck

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