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Karol Markowicz on the Lingering Mask Madness

9 Mar 2022

CLAY: Great piece this morning in the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal by a guest who’s been a guest with us a couple of times I think, fled New York City for the free state of Florida. She is Karol Markowicz, and the headline of your opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal is — and we talked about this some yesterday — “New York City Keeps Masking Toddlers: The School System’s Policy Is an Exercise in Senseless Cruelty,” and, Karol, this is crazy. I know you’ve got kids.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

CLAY: I’ve got kids. We finally get kids K through 12 not required to wear a mask in New York City.

MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: But insanely they are still requiring 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds to wear masks who are probably the people who are least able to wear them —

MARKOWICZ: (laughs)

CLAY: — and as you point out, least necessary to wear them as well.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah. And who should have never been wearing them even when we believed that masking perhaps did something, which I don’t know who can still believe that. I don’t think that anybody thought that kids under 5 should be masked ever. I mean, nobody else was doing this. Every time you saw a toddler being pulled off a flight, you could be sure that that video was taken in America because only we were masking toddlers.

And it’s just crazy to me that it’s March 2022, and I’m still writing about masks on small children as if there isn’t a mountain of evidence that they don’t need it. It’s really soul crushing. I don’t have small children. I mean, my youngest is 6. So if you still lived in New York, this wouldn’t affect me, but I cannot imagine that people are okay with unmasking everybody except 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds.

BUCK: Karol, do you come across anybody…? It’s Buck, and thanks for being with us of course, again. Do you come across people that will actively defend this? I find this fascinating. It feels like everything is always just, “Someone else says, I have to do this.”

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

BUCK: Right? Like, I’m just a cog in the machine. It’s always tyranny by committee with these covid idiots.

MARKOWICZ: Right.

BUCK: And I was wondering, honestly, like, do you come across blue checks that are saying, “Masking of children is necessary to save lives”?

MARKOWICZ: No. No, I don’t, because it makes no sense. So even if you believe that this segment of the population should mask because there is no vaccine, it doesn’t make sense because only like 40% of New York City children are vaccinated 5 and up. So what you’re saying is that just because a vaccine exists for the 5 and up, that they get to take off their masks. That makes no sense, and I don’t see anybody defending it. I don’t know who put this bug in Eric Adams’ ear. It’s really shocking to me. I feel like it has to be teacher union related. I don’t know, though, because obviously we don’t have a media that asks this kind of thing.

BUCK: Can I just ask you also like the teachers union thing Karol for a lot — ’cause you’ve been on the forefront of this, and Clay and I both just really appreciate you writing on this and you wrote in your recent New York Post op-ed that you were wrong at the beginning when you thought that schools shutdown should happen.

MARKOWICZ: That’s right.

BUCK: You actually believe in accountability, but you changed your mind when you saw the evidence.

MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm.

BUCK: I thought we would all do that as a country.

MARKOWICZ: Right.

BUCK: I gravely overestimated Democrats’ honesty and basically decency on this stuff. But that only lasted a couple months and I realized they’re completely out of their minds.

MARKOWICZ: (laughs)

BUCK: But, I mean, going forward on this, I just… What is it with the teachers unions? It just feels like they’re doing this ’cause they can. I mean, it’s one thing when they can stay home for Zoom learning. But it seems like the teachers unions say, “We’re all scared, our adults, even though they’re vaccinated and, whatever.” Like, what is that all about?

MARKOWICZ: Right. I feel like it is a flex of power to say, “We still have control.” You’re absolutely right. Like, I got it wrong in March of 2020. And, you know, Buck, I give you a lot of credit for getting it right early on. So I get that people got it right when I was wrong, and I’m sorry that I pushed for schools to close in March 2020. I never believed that the two weeks to stop spread would lead to two years of masking children and this insanity.

And I just think that if we don’t get apologies and contrition and acknowledgment from these people who got it wrong and continue to get it wrong, they’re going to do this to us again. The “pause” right now with the mask mandates in New York City is just a pause. It’s not an ending. They’re just saying, “The numbers are down right now, we can take off our masks. We might put them back on,” and “might” to me means that they definitely will.

CLAY: Karol, I think you’re a hundred percent right, and this is why I keep beating the drum that the 2022 midterms have to be a referendum on the politicians who allowed these awful decisions to be made.

MARKOWICZ: Yep.

CLAY: I think — and Buck said it, and I think he’s right — it’s a single-issue election. Our democracy — I really believe this — demands that we hold people accountable when they make atrocious errors of judgment on our behalf, and the Democratic Party did that for basically two years.

MARKOWICZ: Yep.

CLAY: And you’re seeing, Karol… I know you left New York City, but the New York Times had a piece, I think it was yesterday I was reading —

MARKOWICZ: Yes.

CLAY: — where they said, “Hey, oh, by the way, the people who suffered the most from school shutdowns were poor and minority kids.”

MARKOWICZ: (laughs) Right. Right.

CLAY: We’ve been beating that drum for two years. It was self-evident.

MARKOWICZ: Right. Right.

CLAY: And this morning I wake up and their morning digest or whatever they send out, it effectively acknowledged that none of the mask mandates and none of it worked. I mean, their tiptoeing up to it, right?

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

CLAY: They’re not definitively saying, “We got this a hundred percent wrong.” Will they ever? You’re arguing they need to.

MARKOWICZ: They must, yeah.

CLAY: Do you think we will get that acknowledgment?

MARKOWICZ: I don’t think we’re gonna get it for a very long time. So the piece this morning about whether or not any of the mitigation factors worked, which we know they did not, was by David Leonhardt there, and he’s sort of the… You know, he’s the sanity whisperer at the New York Times.

CLAY: Yeah.

MARKOWICZ: He brings news from two years ago to them. (laughs)

CLAY: (laughing)

MARKOWICZ: And so he… But even in that piece, he still has to hedge it and say, “Oh, you know, but if numbers go up then we may have to go back to masking.” So he admits that masking did not work, only to say that should numbers go up, we should go back to the thing that did not work. And this is what passes for journalism. And it really kills me that he’s the best that we have to even offer. Like, he’s the best at the Times. He’s our only hope at the Times, really is what it is, and that’s scary.

BUCK: Speaking to Karol Markowicz, got a great piece in the Wall Street Journal just yesterday, “New York City Keeps Masking Toddlers: The School System’s Policy Is an Exercise in Senseless Cruelty.” She’s a hundred percent right. She also had a piece in New York Post saying what we’ve been saying here on the show, and I want everyone on the team on this one: We’ve gotta demand apologies and “I was wrong” from the people who were wrong.

We cannot allow this I to be a suspension of all this. And to that end, Karol, it was about power early on, and it was about the election. And then I think they created this mass hysteria that they had to just keep feeding.

MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm.

BUCK: You know, a lot of them… It’s tough to tell with the apparatus and Fauci. I’m making jokes all the time ’cause it’s so true. What happened to Fauci? Did he get lost under the seats of a taxicab here in New York and someone has to go find him?

MARKOWICZ: (laughing)

BUCK: Is he locked in a thimble somewhere? Like, what’s going on? And with all this, it feels to me like ego is a huge part of this, that a lot of people who think they are very smart and very data driven were very, very wrong. And they actually can’t — like, psychologically cannot — compute this even though it’s so clear now so they’d rather continue with the delusion.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah. Right. I play poker, so it’s like in the poker they can’t get off the hand, like they thought they had the aces in the beginning but now they’re clearly beat but they do not stop betting into the pot. That’s where we are right now, these people absolutely cannot admit defeat. And it’s really just, again, scary for the future. I don’t even… I wouldn’t care so much about them admitting that they ruined, you know, the lives of children and the lives of so many people for two years.

I wouldn’t care about that as much if they didn’t continue to have so much control over the rest of us going forward, and the fact that they can just bring all these policies back at any time. I mentioned to you I met a couple in Florida who are big fans of this show; I know they’re listening right now. But their business suffered. They described how they didn’t sleep for two years and how painful it all was and how nobody cared, and it was supposed to be these people were at home baking bread and on their Pelotons thinking that nobody else was affected. And it’s just… It’s tragic to me that they retain this level of control to ruin our lives going forward.

CLAY: Karol, I’ve made the analogy of Vietnam, not in the context of obviously this being a war, necessarily. But there was a contentious battle between people who said, “Hey, we need to fight the war in Vietnam; we need not to.” Now if you talk about the history of Vietnam, almost no one will admit to believing that Vietnam made sense to ever fight.

MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.

CLAY: Will we end up with covid where people like you, me, and Buck and many of our listeners out there who have been fighting these anti-restriction, anti-lockdown arguments, where almost everybody just ends up arguing that they were on our side all along and no one will admit, 20 years from now that they ever believed kids needed to wear masks —

MARKOWICZ: (laughing) Yeah.

CLAY: — that 2-year-olds needed to be masked up or that kids should have ever been out of school?

MARKOWICZ: So what’s wild is that’s our best-case scenario, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

MARKOWICZ: (laughing) Because if they don’t admit it then it’s very easily… We can have covid 2028 and have to start all over again.

CLAY: Yeah.

MARKOWICZ: This is not something that just ends. Absolutely have a different pandemic. This happens. And these people, unless they go back and say, “I was wrong,” unless they even internally say that, maybe not even to us, very likely to turn back to the same mitigation factors. I mean, if you look at, like, what the health agencies have been saying, I mean, Walensky said, you know, I think in January that masking… No. It might have been December. Sorry. But that masking provides 80% protection against viruses.

CLAY: Yes.

MARKOWICZ: And she said not just covid. She said also flu and the common cold. Now, if that were true, we would be basically curing the common cold. But obviously that’s not true. And it means that the masks are more effective than the covid vaccine, right? So they’re still pushing these lies today. This is all very… It is still very much in the present. None of this is in the past yet. They continue to lie to us today so it’s in the future, they are ashamed of themselves and pretend that they never believed it, that might be a win for all of us.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: Yeah. It’s not over until they admit they were wrong and they say they’re sorry and they are nowhere near that right now.

MARKOWICZ: That’s right. Yep.

BUCK: Karol Markowicz, everybody. Karol, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

MARKOWICZ: Thanks so much, guys. Thank you.

CLAY: Thank you as well.

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Dems Talk Inflation, Prove They Know Nothing About Business

9 Mar 2022

CLAY: We have not talked a lot about inflation so far today, but it’s not going to surprise you that the Democratic Party who has essentially an entire party now that has never done anything in the world of business doesn’t understand how basic business works. And so I got a couple of Democratic Party all-stars here. Elizabeth Warren says that profit margins are gouging, the oil companies out there are gouging you. Here is cut 16.

CLAY: I mean, the lack, Buck — and I’m gonna play Rashida Tlaib here in a minute. The inability to understand how business works is really the undergirding fatal flaw of all Democratic Party economic analysis. And it used to be that there were at least some Democrats in Congress who were really highly successful businesspeople who had a strong voice, and that’s just vanished, and they turned all into socialists.

So that’s Elizabeth Warren going after oil companies. And then Congresswoman Tlaib came forward and said, it’s not actually inflation that’s going on. That 7.5% inflation that all economic indicators are letting us know exist? That’s not inflation, according to Congresswoman Tlaib. It’s actually just extortion. Listen to this.

CLAY: No, it’s inflation.

BUCK: It turns out, circle does not get to square on that one. It’s inflation. Clay, when you have economic illiterates across the top of the U.S. government in very prominent positions — people who have only either made money by either a paycheck courtesy of the taxpayer or essentially selling their access, their Rol-O-Dex, and their name as a result of that — they tend to not really know how this stuff actually works. Jen Psaki and Elizabeth Warren are not people you want in charge of your business or certainly telling your business what it can and can’t do.

CLAY: And this is why inflation is a tax on the poor more so than anybody else in the country, and there’s still a lot of Democrats that don’t understand this. As prices go up for all goods, the amount of profit that you’re gonna make goes down because of your cost increases. So you have to increase costs as well. And that’s why Biden trying to claim, “Oh, well, wages went up,” I think they said, “5.9% or 5.5%,” something along those lines for average workers according to the most recent data.

Yeah, but when inflation is going up 7.5%, that means that the average person has less money in their pocket. And when the Democrat Party actually represented working people, they at least claimed to understand this a little better. When she’s talking about all the super-wealthy people, many of the super-wealthy people on the East and West Coasts in this country actually vote Democratic.

And the people who end up with the biggest difficulty are people who have to spent all of the money that they make on goods and services because they get hit harder by inflation. They don’t have hard physical assets. They don’t own homes. They don’t have land. They don’t have property to offset the overall rise in inflation. So this is a fundamental failure. Thank God.

I gotta give him credit, that Joe Manchin stood up against this, Buck, because without Joe Manchin, think about how bad inflation would be even now? Because Build Back Better, they would have spent trillions of more dollars even than they’ve already spent. It’s crazy to think about how close we were to one of the biggest expansions in the history of the federal government on top of all the covid spending.

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Shackleton’s Lost Ship Found (Plus C&B Recommend Books)

9 Mar 2022

BUCK: I get all excited about this. Clay, if you’re gonna recommend one weekend read nonfiction book to somebody, what is it? Like, weekend nonfiction and something that you just… You can’t even tailor it to the person. You’re just giving them one book that’s nonfiction to read that you think they’re gonna like.

CLAY: I read a… I mean, first of all, that’s a broad category —

BUCK: It’s a a tough question, I know.

CLAY: — ’cause I’m kind of a nerd. So I be like, “I’m reading a book about Pickett’s charge,” you know, and I’m like, “Ah, you know, third day Battle of Gettysburg,” I’m not sure every person out there is gonna love it. One of the best nonfiction books that I have read — and I came to this one late — The Lost City of Z. Have you read that book?

BUCK: No, I read the… I think it was the City… (sigh) Oh, gosh. I’m forgetting. Anyway, you liked that book? I haven’t read that one. The Lost City of the Monkey God was the book.

CLAY: Oh, I read that. That was great too. I’m kind of like, you know, explorer, but you’re hitting on this because of the Ernest Shackleton?

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: I have not read this book at all we were talking about off the air.

BUCK: So they just found… It’s been over a hundred years since the ship sank, two miles beneath the surface of the water in Antarctica. The book Endurance is incredible. It’s about the Shackleton voyage. The Shackleton voyage at the time, 1914, right at the early stage of World War I. I think it might have been a few weeks before, a few weeks after, I forget.

But, anyway, 1914, the whole world was watching this thing, Clay, supposed to make their way across all of Antarctica, and they get stuck in an ice pack on this ship and you gotta assume these guys are in Antarctica. This is pre-cell phone, pre-battery, pre-phone, and these guys, man? I don’t want to give stuff away. It’s just a great read.

Whether you’re cuddling up next to the fireplace with a glass of scotch or you’re on a hammock on a warm day, reading about what these guys went through, you’d be like, “At least I don’t have to go through that.” So Endurance is the book, and they just found the ship. It’s actually well preserved. I’ve never recommended this book to anyone, Clay, who wasn’t like, “That’s a great read.”

CLAY: I need to read it. You were talking about it off air with me. I also love reading those books because, to your point, you’re hanging out by your fireplace or you’re in a hammock; it just brings home how small — and this is why I think studying history is so significant in many ways, because it brings home how frequently we get obsessed with relatively small challenges when we’ve overcome massive challenges as a country.

BUCK: Yeah. Imagine trying to chase an elephant seal with a harpoon across an ice floe. It’s month four, and you’ve dropped 30 pounds already. You know what I mean?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Like, that’s a tough day.

CLAY: Yeah. It’s a little bit tougher than some of the challenges that we are told every day are overwhelming in this country when you look back.

BUCK: My iPhone freezes, Clay, and I have a panic attack.

CLAY: Yeah. (laughs)

BUCK: It freezes for five seconds, and it’s five seconds of hell.

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WARNING: This Is a Trump Impersonator

9 Mar 2022

CLAY: I know gas prices are skyrocketing everywhere, although small positive: Gas prices have come off about 10% from the all-time highs they have hit. So maybe there was a little bit of speculation going on early in the energy sector. Maybe it’s not going to be as bad… I don’t want to try to sell false positives here, but at least coming back off 10% from the 13-year highs is a positive, even as prices continue to go up across the country.

But we’ve got a Trump impersonator. I want to make sure that everybody out there in the news media who is listening and covers this show understands, this is an impersonator. This is not Donald Trump himself. He has not called into the show. This is a Trump impersonator, Shawn Farash, talking about gas prices. Enjoy.

BUCK: That is —

CLAY: That is unbelievable.

BUCK: He’s the best Trump impersonator I have ever heard. There might be others, but I’ve heard a lot of them. That guy is the best Trump… First of all, it’s great content, too. It’s very well written. He’s not just sounding like him, but he actually is saying funny things about everything. I think Trump would say everything. That was all Trump, stuff that Trump would say.

CLAY: That’s why I say, ’cause if you just got in your car and you didn’t hear my introduction and you just turned that on, you’d be like, “Oh, they’re playing a clip from Trump,” or he’s on the show again. Maybe I shouldn’t have teased that up. I should have just played it.

BUCK: Yeah, I would have let you play it to see if people picked up.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: Clay, if that guy called you and he was like, “Clay Travis, I want to be on your show, the best show,” you know, if he did the whole thing, I would be like, “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

CLAY: I a hundred percent would think that was Trump.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: If that guy called Saudi Arabia right now, I bet they would talk to him.

BUCK: He could get a deal done!

CLAY: They won’t talk to Biden, but I bet they would talk to the Trump impersonator.

BUCK: He could probably do an international deal as the former president right now on the phone. That guy is amazingly good.

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Jack Carr on How Far Putin Could Go and How to Stop Him

9 Mar 2022

BUCK: “How America Can Help Ukraine Cripple the Russian War Machine.” That’s a Fox News opinion piece that I co-wrote with our guest coming up right now, Jack Carr, the man himself. He is a former Navy SEAL sniper and number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Devil’s Hand, which you should all go check out. Jack, thanks so much, sir, for joining us. Appreciate you being here on Clay & Buck.

CARR: Oh, thanks for having me. What crazy times. Who would have ever thought that in 2022 we would be talking about a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia, especially for those of you who grew up in the Cold War era and saw it come to end in the early nineties. It’s quite surreal.

BUCK: Jack, right now there’s a discussion about no-fly zones. Clay was talking about some great questions. I don’t know if you heard some of it right before you came on about what could we do. First of all, Russian military doctrine when it comes to a nuclear first strike is what, as far as we know, and what are the chances we could even counter it before it went off? What can you tell us about this component of the equation, the most terrifying component of how things could go terribly wrong in Ukraine and in the region?

CARR: Sure. So, the Russian military doctrine does integrate the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which means they have them and they could be employed, and they also have this policy of escalating to deescalate. So, either a threat or maybe an attack not on a major city but on a minor one just to show what they could do to a major city or to infrastructure. So, that’s all part of the playbook.

But when we’re looking at this, we often look at all of these things through a Western lens. That continues to come back to bite us. We have a history of doing that and we’re doing that in this case as well because the Russian population has been on the steep decline since the end of the Cold War, and Ukraine has the largest ethnic population, ethnic Russians outside of Russia.

So, they need those people to continue to survive. They need that to field an army if they want to continue to field an army at its current level. So, they really needed to do this, not for energy, not for anything like that, but so they could continue to survive. So, what we look at that through that lens that means that the Russian people, the Russian government, Putin in particular, feels like they’re backed into a corner and they need this ethnic Russian population to survive, which means that they will probably do anything to get it.

And that means that they could use tactical nuclear weapons. So that is something that is on the table and it is a scary proposition, and that has to be factored in to the U.S. calculus when we look at what is in United States’ best interests, which at the top of that list should be avoiding a nuclear confrontation with Russia. They have about 6,000 nuclear weapons. I think we have about 5,000. Regardless, we both have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world, and we want to do everything we can to avoid using them ’cause no one wins in that scenario.

CLAY: No doubt, Jack, and I appreciate you coming on, and this is kind of the questions that I have that don’t seem to be discussed that much in the media or the larger discussions surrounding these issues. So a couple things building off what you just said. A tactical nuclear weapon has the capacity — I’m sure there’s different loads, for lack of a better term, in terms of the damage that they can do.

What kind of damage are we talking about a tactical nuke being capable of creating? And what kind of defenses, what is the likelihood that in Europe, let’s say, Russia deploys a nuclear weapon, that it could be shot down before it actually is allowed to explode? Do we have any sense for that? And who would be doing that? Is that a NATO defense? Would they just allow it to land in Ukraine? How would this be handled by the larger universe of geopolitical actors?

CARR: Right. So those are all great questions. They have a variety of nuclear weapons. So they have everything from nuclear weapons, obviously ballistic missiles on submarines, to tactical ones to if you go back, looking back in the eighties and even seventies, they called them “suitcase bombs” back then. They’re a little bigger than a suitcase, obviously, but you can see those online, see pictures of them. So they have a variety of ways.

They don’t even need to launch a missile. I would guess that they still have those two case bombs somewhere after the end of the Cold War and they can certainly drop those off in the middle of the city and leave just to show the world, “Hey, this is a smaller city. We destroyed the entire thing. Do you want us to do this to one of the larger cities?” And of course, the implied threat there is that, “If we can do it here, we can do it elsewhere in Europe.”

And of course we want to avoid triggering Article Five of NATO so that we don’t have to get into a nuclear conflict with Russia. So the good thing, I think, if you look at weather patterns — quickly scanned weather partners and using them right now — it doesn’t look like it’s beneficial because the winds aren’t quite right for that ’cause you use one of those missiles and it blows back on you?

Then it’s obviously, you know, that’s not doing you any good. And right now, we have some… The winds are in our favor, but those winds will shift at some point. But I would think that our intelligence services are looking at this extremely closely right now and figuring out the best way to counter and avoid a nuclear confrontation.

BUCK: We’re speaking to former Navy SEAL sniper Jack Carr, also author of The Devil’s Hand about the situation right now in Ukraine. Jack and I co-wrote a piece on FoxNews.com. You can check it out at ClayandBuck.com on how America can help Ukraine cripple the Russian war machine. Jack, let’s dive into that for a second here. In terms of the ground combat, it has been mostly ground combat so far.

The Russian aerial advantage has been substantial but not totally dominant the way that some had anticipated. So what is allowing the Ukrainians to put up a stronger fight than anticipated, and what do you think the American hand in this…? We’ve already made the decision that we’re helping them; so how should we help them, what should we give them with logistics and support?

CARR: Right. So it’s interesting that the Russians are not dominating the skies right now, ’cause you would think that that would be one of the first things they would do because I think they can. They have that capability. So how do you counter that? Well, you can counter that with Stinger missiles and we know that because we looked at the Soviet experience in Afghan from 1979 to 1989.

And when we got those Stinger missiles in there and trained the mujahideen how to use them, that turned the tide of the war. And that was September 26, 1986, outside of Jalalabad when they shot down three Soviet Hind helicopters. And after that — up to that point from 1979 until 1986 the Soviets dominated the skies over Afghanistan. After those Stingers were introduced three years later, they were out.

They lost that dominance in the sky. So that’s one, and you can look to history for that. And then you can look at our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And you could see the IEDs, specifically the EFPs that came over from Iran and how that weapon — tactical-level weapon — really gained a strategic importance because it defeated the most technologically superior armor in the world and undermined support for the war effort.

So those on the ground that studying warfare in Ukraine can look to both of those examples and also look to the other things that are working for them right now namely the Javelin anti-tank missile right there. So you get Stingers, you get javelins, you get homemade essentially IEDs, EFPs on the ground there and you’re in for a pro refracted fight and again that Russian army wasn’t really built to invade countries.

It was built to occupy countries where governments had been installed by the Kremlin and then there’s an intelligence apparatus that is more actively described as a secret police that silence and eliminates dissidents. But on to invade and then battle a well supplied decade long insurgency as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s difficult. And it’s even more difficult when your army is less prepared for that than we were in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CLAY: Jack, you learn from every conflict and every struggle. What has surprised you the most that you were not anticipating so far in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

CARR: I thought… Well, I thought that they would take over Ukraine in about three days. They massed their forces, and I thought they would roll through. But I think what really turned the tide and really what prevented that from happening is leadership. We saw leadership at the top. Of course, we offered to bring the president of Ukraine out and he said no, and the world got to see that.

And they didn’t get to see that through our press secretary. They got to see it real time on social media. So the messaging at this time is extremely important, that leadership is extremely important and that really rallied not just the Ukrainian military but Ukrainian citizenry as well and most of the West. So I think that is something that surprised me the most because had the Russians just rolled through in three days, we would be in a different position right now.

They’d probably be holding Ukraine. Maybe there’d be an insurgency, maybe there wouldn’t be. But the government would be decapitated and there wouldn’t be that leadership at the top. So it surprises me. That’s one. And then two is that they didn’t assassinate the president of Ukraine and have that be the trigger for the situation. So those things were the most surprising I think thus far.

BUCK: Former Navy SEAL Jack Carr. Go check out at ClayAndBuck.com the op-ed we co-wrote on how, essentially, the ground war can be turned against Russians with U.S. armaments. And, Jack, appreciate it, also check out The Devil’s Hand. Jack, thanks so much for your time today.

CARR: Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

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C&B 24/7: Clay & Buck’s Show Prep

9 Mar 2022

Fox News: How America can help Ukraine cripple the Russian war machine-Buck Sexton and Jack Carr
National Pulse: EXCLUSIVE: Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Led an Effort To Build a Ukraine-Based BioLab Handling ‘Especially Dangerous Pathogens’.
New York Times: It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading
WSJ: New York City Keeps Masking Toddlers: The School System’s Policy Is an Exercise in Senseless Cruelty – Karol Markowicz:
NY Post: Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize – Karol Markowicz
Daily Mail: Putin sinks to new low: Maternity hospital is bombed
Daily Mail: Shackleton’s lost ship is FOUND
NY Times: Do Covid Precautions Work? Yes, but they haven’t made a big difference.
Former Keystone Pipeline Worker: “We Tried to Warn You.”
The Hill: Biden to request $2.6 billion to promote gender equity worldwide
Washington Examiner: Iran plotting assassination of John Bolton, others, even while Biden negotiates nuclear deal
Washington Examiner: Pentagon shoots down Polish plan to provide MiGs to Ukrainian air force
OutKick: Deshaun Watson Will Plead The Fifth In Civil Suits As DA Plans To Present Case to Grand Jury
The Blaze: Joy Reid says the world cares more about Ukraine because of, you guessed it, racism
Washington Times: China engaged in largest nuclear buildup in history, preparing ground to take Taiwan
Daily Mail: Hundreds of palm-sized Joro spiders that are the size of a child’s HAND and can ‘fly’ up to 100 miles by turning their webs into parachutes will ‘colonize’ the entire east coast this spring

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Buck Dissects Delusional and Tactical Leftist Propaganda

9 Mar 2022

Biased, leftist journalists have a conclusion — usually that everything is racist, even support for the war in Ukraine — and they twist facts to support it or ignore those that debunk it. Buck breaks down the sad state of the Fourth Estate.

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Biden Bans Russian Oil and Gas

8 Mar 2022

CLAY: Big news that we’ve been arguing for here since certainly last week, maybe even the week before. The Biden administration — under pressure from a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate that was demanding it — has officially decided to sanction Russia as it pertains to oil purchases, meaning that we will no longer purchase Russian oil and gas. What that will do to gas prices remains to be seen.

Whether or not — and we talked about this a lot yesterday — we are able to replace that 600,000 or so barrels of oil that we were buying a day from Russia, in particular with either United States domestic oil production increasing or potentially Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, we don’t know where that money might be coming from exactly. But that was just officially announced.

And effectively that was Biden trying to get ahead to look like he’s making that choice as opposed to Congress forcing him to make that choice. But it took almost two weeks for those sanctions to officially be put into place. And to kind of put it into context for you guys, given the fact that we are giving billions of dollars to Ukraine to fight Russia while simultaneously giving Russia billions of dollars to fight Ukraine, we were effectively funding both sides of the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

This will, in theory, create a one-sided side. We’ll be on Ukraine’s side going forward. Now, the challenge will be, how do we make up for the oil and gas that we’re not going to be getting from Russia? How quickly will the rest of Europe follow? Much of Europe, it sounds like, is saying, “Well, we can’t get to this until the end of the year,” and one would hope that this battle between Russia and Ukraine is over far before then.

We have a new all-time high in the cost of a gallon of gas. For all of you out there driving around, I believe it has now hit an average price nationwide of $4.17. If you heard us talking with Trish Regan yesterday, she said possibly the cost of gas could be going to $9 a gallon. So big takeaway here. The question is, what will this do to the price, I would say, of average gallon of gas for the average American out there driving around filling up his or her car all over the country? We don’t know the answer to that officially because we don’t know how much of this gas we’re gonna be able to source elsewhere.

BUCK: You know, they sneered at Trump, Clay, in 2019 when he said that Biden could drive the price of gas up to $7 a gallon. That was just, “Trump is so full of it. He doesn’t know anything!” They all sneered at him. They sneered at Mitt Romney when he said that Russia was a geopolitical threat. I just want to note has a single of the commentariat, the journos, the foreign policy establishment who are all just laughing, wearing their top hats and their monocles drinking their lattes at the think tanks…

They don’t actually wear top hats, but you get what I’m saying. They were laughing at how foolish Mitt Romney was. Do any of them feel chastened by the reality of geopolitics and also by the reality of electing Joe Biden, who part of his pitch, we have to remind ourselves, was, “I’m not gonna shut down the economy. I’m gonna shut down covid.” Remember how many times he repeated this?

CLAY: Oh, yeah. That was his pitch.

BUCK: That was a big line. Turns out, he didn’t shut down covid at all. We reached all-time high covid cases while Biden was president, and now we’ve reached an all-time high in the national average gas price, Clay, and I’m worried that we may reach an all-time high in the U.S. inflation number and that we might start seeing unemployment ticking up and we might start seeing the beginnings of a recession.

And this is where I think everyone has to be very clear-eyed as we look at this because I can tell — and as we’ve said, it’s getting uglier in Ukraine, as it was inevitably going to. More civilian casualties, more awful things happening. People are starting to say, “Would Putin really fire at us if we had a no-fly zone?” He wouldn’t fire nukes at us. Would he even fire at U.S. jets?” You’re hearing this talk more out loud. That’s one thing you have to keep a very close eye on here, and the other is, “Okay, everyone thinks like Stephen Colbert said that, you know, I’ll pay a dollar or so more.” Did you see this, Clay, last night?

CLAY: Yeah, he said he’d pay $15 a gallon if he needed to.

BUCK: Stephen Colbert is worth close to $100 million for everyone listening to this, so it’s not a surprise that he takes that position, Clay. But I want to know, is it worth it if there is a recession that means that millions of Americans can’t pay their bills; that the drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and suicide rate goes up noticeably in this country? Is that worth a clean conscience, as he says? We really have to look at what the possible costs of this will be. This is not “give a penny, take a penny” at the local grocery store.

CLAY: Well, remember Mayor Pete yesterday said that the solution to people who have struggling with high gas prices was to buy an electric vehicle. We should be calling him Mayor Antoinette, because that is very Marie Antoinette of him, that your solution to the tens of millions of people out there, when gas prices go up, that represents a massive default tax increase on the average American family out there.

And when you’re talking about $4.20 a gallon gas and way over that, way over $5 for many people out there, this is money that comes out of the overall ability to take care of your family. This might be money that I don’t have the opportunity now to take your kid to go get a pizza, right? You don’t have the opportunity to go out and eat at a restaurant. You don’t have the opportunity to live the life that you would like to be living if gas prices were normal.

The more you drive — and again, this is significant. Lots of people don’t think about it, but many people live substantial distances from where they might have to work because they can have more affordable housing further outside of the city. So overwhelmingly the cost of gas increases is borne by the people who can least afford to bear them.

So when you have Mayor Pete saying go buy an electric vehicle, or you have Stephen Colbert — patron saint of left-wingers in comedy — saying, “I’ll pay $15 a gallon gas, yeah.” You’re rich! Both of you guys are. You have luxuries that others do not. It is a level of tone deafness that is remarkable for a party that used to define itself by representing the working class.

BUCK: You also see something going on in the background and you step back from all this, Clay, we have government policy right now that is driving down through Treasury spending, right, through federal government spending, driving down the value and the purchasing power of the dollar. That’s what inflation is. That’s what’s actually happening. So they’re making the dollars that people work for and have less. Now, in Russia they call them “oligarchs.”

Here, we have very successful billionaires. But if you’re in that situation — worth $100 million or $50 million — it doesn’t matter to you. But to 99%, maybe 95% of the country, something like 7% inflation matters. But they’re driving down through government policy the value of the dollars that you’re earning in your bank account while simultaneously artificially reducing the supply.

And this is why the Biden administration, because of their climate change religion, doesn’t want there to be more drilling, doesn’t want there to be more fossil fuel production at home. They’re driving down the supply of what is most necessary for a modern economy to function. So through decision-making in D.C., they’re making your dollars’ worth less.

And they’re making less energy supply for everybody, which means that everything is getting more expensive on both ends. And, by the way, you’ve got a supply chain issue. And, by the way, you’ve got market-based issues that are gonna get worse and worse as people realize, “Is it even possible for me to operate my business this way? Is it even possible for me to continue?” And this is because of government policy.

CLAY: Yes. And, Buck, it’s going to get really tense for Joe Biden as we get closer and closer to 2022, because you look at — and I’m putting them in the moderate Democrat camp — Joe Manchin, the senators from Montana, the Democratic senators from New Hampshire, Georgia, Nevada, the people who are going to be in really tight reelection fights, they are going to be desperate to get energy independence. And this is wild to think about.

But all of Joe Biden’s agenda, to the extent that he still has an agenda, I think is gonna boil down to a large extent to the price of gas and to overall inflation. And, Buck, we don’t know how high this is gonna go. I would encourage people… I don’t want there to be a run on gas, but sooner rather than later, the way that gas is moving… We talked about this yesterday. The price of gas went up 40 cents in a week last week.

It was the second highest weekly increase in the history of American gas prices. I can’t imagine that the numbers are going to be coming down in terms of what gas is gonna cost you a week from now based on the decisions that we are making. And I hope we don’t get here. But remember — and you and I were too young. I think you weren’t even born. You missed the Jimmy Carter era.

I was born in the last year of the Jimmy Carter era. But there are a lot of people listening to us right now who remember the oil crisis of Jimmy Carter. And the more and more you look at the Biden administration, I think we owe an apology to Jimmy Carter because Biden is far more incompetent on far more different levels than Jimmy Carter ever was. I mean, I would…

In terms of being able to understand complex issues and make the right choices, I would rather Jimmy Carter in his day, maybe Jimmy Carter today even at his age, be making decisions than Joe Biden. In fact, it’s just an utter disaster where we are right now. And I don’t see it getting any better when it comes to what gas is gonna be costing the average American out there.

BUCK: How could it get better? Think about this. What are they doing that’s gonna make it better? Tell us to use less energy? Go get an electric car? These people are imbeciles.

CLAY: Yeah, the only way it could get better is if we got a resolution in Ukraine sooner rather than later and you had an inflated gas price —

BUCK: I meant better economic policies. Still —

CLAY: There’s nothing the Biden administration is going to be able to do I don’t think that’s going to make the price of gas better. And that’s why I feel for everybody out there, ’cause I think we’re headed toward $5 gas, $6 gas, $7 gas. I think it’s almost an inevitability unless the situation in Russia and Ukraine ends. But I don’t have any sense that things are getting closer to a conclusion here.

If anything, it seems like we’re getting to even more of a dangerous era in this conflict where we talked about this before, Buck, and we probably should talk about it more today. I’m worried that Putin, because things are not going well enough for him, is going to accelerate what he’s willing to do. We’re already seeing that to a certain extent. But the analogy I would use is the guy who loses the fistfight sometimes comes back with a bigger weapon. And everybody out there who’s been in high school and seen this kind of thing happen. Knives, guns. I feel like at some point, the fistfight turns into a knife or gunfight.

BUCK: The Russian Air Force is either incapable of doing complex operations, complex strikes — which is possible — or has been held back in reserve for the next phase. It’s one or the other.

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Poll: Majority of Dems Won’t Fight U.S. Invasion

8 Mar 2022

CLAY: Unbelievable poll numbers that came out from Quinnipiac dealing with how Americans would respond in the event that we were invaded as Ukraine has been invaded. I tweeted about this. I saw you tweet about it, too, Buck. But I bet a lot of our audience has not heard this. So what percentage…? Again, this is a Ukraine-like situation in the United States.

What percentage of Democrats would stay and fight versus percentage that would leave the country if we were invaded like Ukraine is being invaded? Just 40% of Democrats said they would stay and fight; 52% said they would leave the country. That compared with 68% of Republicans who said they would stay and fight, 25% who said they would leave the country. Independents, 57% said they would stay and fight; 36% said they would leave the country.

So the idea out there — and, by the way, for women, 40% of American women said they would stay and fight, 70% of men. So there is, not surprisingly, a male-versus-female difference in whether people would leave, as you are seeing in Ukraine, many women and children are leaving the country. So this is alarming in many ways, as you break down the overall data. But what’s even more alarming than this data, Buck, is age ranges.

The younger you are — 18 to 34-year-olds, which are typically the foundation of any military force. Only 45% of 18 to 34-year-olds would stay and fight versus 48% who said they would leave the country. Now, substantial majorities of 35 to 49-year-olds and of 50 to 64-year-olds said they would stay and fight. Even senior citizens were more likely to stay and fight than 18 to 34-year-olds.

This confirms, I think, what many of us would believe, which is the younger and more liberal you are, the less you’re willing to fight for America. But it’s still pretty staggering to see these numbers actually out in the public arena here. And again, remember, it’s if we’re invaded. This is not would you go overseas and fight. This is if someone came to our shores, the majority of Democrats would flee the country.

BUCK: Wait a minute, Clay. You’re talking about a majority of Democrat commies who double masked at home while watching MSNBC and CNN, and rage-tweeting about how racist the country is all the time?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They wouldn’t stay and fight? They actually are cowards when pushed on the issue of whether they would defend their hometown, their homeland? Juxtapose it, because obviously there are… We have a lot of people who have fought in multiple wars, including those in their twenties and thirties right now. There are people out there who feel very differently. We meant to play this yesterday. This was 27-year-old mixed martial artist and UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell on how he feels. He was asked about Ukraine, and this answer went virile.

BUCK: Two levels here. We can get into the going to Ukraine or not issue, but just the sentiment of, “If the war came to America, I would dig my heels in to Arkansas soil and fight to the death for everything I love.” By the way, I have zero doubt that Bryce Mitchell would in fact do that, and we think that that’s the America that we all know of and share, but there is a real portion on the political left in this country who actually kind of hate America.

And it’s not the America they want it to be, and so if push came to shove, maybe some totalitarian dictatorship from abroad would be better on issues of the rights of minorities or the trans agenda, whatever. Anything would be better than the evil racist country this currently is, according to the left. That’s what they actually think.

CLAY: Yeah, and I think we need to be clear here too. By the way, incredible comments from Bryce Mitchell. The UFC… If you’re one of those people out there that is of the opinion that sport professional athletes have lost your trust over the way that they’ve responded to a variety of different political issues over the years, the UFC guys and girls are… It’s hard not to like ’em. It really is when you hear.

First of all, they’re putting everything on the line when they step into those octagons, right? But when you hear the way that they think, the raw individual power while combined with love of country from so many of them — they’re anti-cancel culture — I love everything about most of these guys and girls. I do think what is alarming is we’re aging out of people who are true patriots, right?

You can talk about Democrats versus Republicans. But I’m even more scared, ’cause it doesn’t surprise me that Democrats are basically total, complete wusses — and that’s not the word that I want to use. But when you have the majority of 18 to 34-year-olds in this country, Buck, that would not stay and fight if the country was invaded, typically the 18- to 34-year-old population…

And let’s be honest, the 18- to 34-year-old male population, ’cause I’ll give a pass here for women and children. Remember what they’re doing in Ukraine. I love the rule that they put in place in Ukraine: If you’re male between the ages of 18 and 60, you can’t leave that country. I love that. I’d want my wife and kids outta here. But the idea that 18- to 34-year-olds…?

The people who are the youngest, the healthiest, and the most capable of fighting in a war are willing to abandon the country more than senior citizens are, Buck? There are people over 65 who are far more likely to take up arms to defend the country than there are 18-year-olds? That’s everything that’s wrong with America today, and it’s scary for where we’re going in the years ahead.

BUCK: Yeah, there’s a bulge in the polling for the younger age-group that said they would leave the country. Clay, a majority, overall, of Democrats. A majority.

CLAY: Yes, 52%.

BUCK: For me that was the takeaway.

CLAY: But 18 to 34?

BUCK: Yeah, but that’s because that’s the greatest concentration of the furthest leftist ideology in the Democratic Party. But as they get older and they pay taxes, this is what always happens. I don’t think we’re aging out, necessarily, of patriotism. It’s young, naive people who have been brainwashed by the academy and Hollywood.

CLAY: So you’re more optimistic than me. My concern is these people are going to become awful human being leftists as they get older because of the way they’ve been indoctrinated.

BUCK: No, a lot of people will stay that way.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: But 18 to 34 versus 34 to 55, what’s really the difference, Clay, in this poll? Do we have the percentages?

CLAY: Yes, it’s wildly different.

BUCK: Tell me the difference.

CLAY: That’s what jumps out at me. Yes. The Democrat angle is crazy. Only 45% of 18 to 34s would stay and fight, 57% of those aged 35 to 49.

BUCK: That’s not much that much better.

CLAY: Well, 57% to 37% as opposed to 45% to 48%. It’s a 20-point margin to stay and fight over a negative three-point margin to stay and fight. Usually what I’m looking at is, 18-year-olds… Like, who gets in fistfights? Eighteen-year-olds, right? The younger you are, usually the more prone you are —

BUCK: Hot-headed you are, yeah.

CLAY: — especially if you’re male, to be willing to fight, right? So the fact that we’ve ended up there… Another one that jumps out is the 65 plus. We’ve got a lot of senior citizens who would be more likely to take up arms to defend America than 18-year-olds.

BUCK: Oh, seniors have seen more. They know more. They understand. Bernie Sanders is kind of the exception. You have fewer seniors in this country definitely — even talking just in the Democrat Party — who are absurd commies, basically.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Bernie Sanders is a caricature of absurdity in so many ways. But you have fewer people that have lived through life and actually experience things. There are 18-year-olds or 22-year-olds — look, you see them in college campuses now all the time, and it’s been going on for years this way — they think America is an evil, imperialist, colonialist, racist place, and that’s why they’re effectively being brainwashed into acting like little revolutionaries.

Who want to either control the system as it is now, to stamp out all dissent — you see this at the Big Tech and everywhere else — or create a cultural revolution of sort (something like what they had in China under Mao) to purge all “undesirable elements” from our culture because it’s imperialist and racist and sexist and transphobe you can and all this stuff.

CLAY: See, my concern is when I was 18, I was not around very many people who thought America was a bad place. Like, I think when I was 18, most people who were male would fight.

BUCK: The Democrat Party has moved left overall.

CLAY: Yeah. And that’s my concern that we’ve got now this generation that truly does believe that America is a voice for evil as opposed to greatness, and that’s scary because I wonder whether those people are gonna age out of it or not.

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Steven Mosher on China and Russia

8 Mar 2022

BUCK: What is China going to do as U.S. sanctions escalate against Russia and as the conflict in Ukraine continues to become more violent and threatens to bring in further outside actors? What is China doing in the midst of all this? We’ve got somebody who’s thought about, written about this a lot. Steven Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and author of a dozen books on China, including his latest, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order. Steven, thanks so much for being with us.

MOSHER: It’s good to be with you guys.

BUCK: So, you had a piece in the New York Post just a couple of days ago: With U.S. Distracted by Ukraine, Xi Is Plotting His Own Invasion. We’ve been talking about this possibility for months. How sure are you that is the Chinese strategy in response to Ukraine, and what indicators are we seeing?

MOSHER: Well, we’re seeing for the last few years, of course, multiple indicators. We have repeated incursions — I think we’re up to a couple thousand incursions — by Chinese fighters and bombers into Taiwan airspace. We have repeated threats from Beijing that if Taipei were to move in the direction of independence, declare independence, that would be a red line that would trigger an invasion, and we see the building up of an amphibious force for the first time in China, which is what they would need to invade Taiwan on the beaches.

So, there are all kinds of signs, and actually, Xi Jinping is behind schedule because the emperor of China said he was going to retake Taiwan by 2020. It’s now 2022. It seems to have been — the attack seems to have been — delayed by his releasing a bioweapon on the world killing six million people. So, he’s pushed back his timetable, but make no mistake: He wants to be the great unifier.

Just as Vladimir Putin wants to reestablish the old Russian Empire, so the leader of China wants to take back all of “the lost territories,” first and foremost Taiwan, but also there are lots of territories around China’s periphery that once belonged to the Chinese Empire that I think Xi Jinping would like to get back. Some of them are in Russia, by the way.

CLAY: Would we see a major national response — international response, I should say — akin to what we have seen with Russia invading Ukraine if China invaded Taiwan? Or is China’s position in the global stratosphere of economic relationships so much more significant that there would not be an ability to isolate China and impose sanctions on them?

MOSHER: Well, that’s a very interesting question, because Xi Jinping is looking at Ukraine as a test case and judging from the reaction of the West, what sort of reaction he’s likely to get if he moves into Taiwan. Now, I would argue that Taiwan has much more strategic significance than Ukraine does, right, ’cause Ukraine is a grain basket. We feel sympathy for the people of Ukraine, but look: 94% of the chips in the world are made in Taiwan.

If you lose Taiwan, you lose the vast majority of the chip-manufacturing capability of the world, and China engages in economic warfare. Look at what they’ve done to Australia. They’ve banned 16 different Australian products. So they would not hesitate to use their control of chips to dominate other countries. And then if Taiwan falls, you give the Chinese navy open access to the Pacific.

And the next stop is Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. Right now, the Chinese navy is hemmed in by what? By South Korea, by Japan, by the island chain down to Taiwan, to the Philippines, and into the South China Sea. If they get Taiwan, they have deep-water ports.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Steven Mosher. He’s president of the Population Research Institute. He’s got a piece, With U.S. Distracted by Ukraine, Xi Is Plotting His Own Invasion, in the New York Post. Steven, how do you think…? I mean, we’re watching right now a contest between a relative superpower with Russia — certainly a regional superpower — against what had been and is an outgunned and outmanned Ukraine.

But Ukraine seems to be, by most analyses — although there’s a lot-of-back-and-forth on this — punching considerably above its weight and causing real problems for the Russian invasion. How do you foresee an actual Chinese invasion of Taiwan going? Is it possible the Taiwanese could also put up a very stiff resistance that might not just complicate things but even thwart China’s ambitions?

MOSHER: Well, I think we ought to complicate things with China right now. I think we ought to clearly arm Taiwan and to the point where it becomes a kind of porcupine and any invading force that comes across the Taiwan Straits would wind up with a bunch of quills in their face and a bunch of ships on the bottom, troop transports on the bottom of the Taiwan Straits.

So what’s in Taiwan’s favor is that 77% of the people of Taiwan said they would take up arms and fight against the communist Chinese invaders, number one. Number two, they’ve got 90-mile-wide moat — which is a pretty good moat — and amphibious landings are not easy to carry off. We did it in World War II. We’ve had a lot of practice. China has zero practice in that regard. So it could go badly very, very quickly.

So I think those things are weighing in Taiwan’s favor. Against that, of course, you’d have to say, as you pointed out, China has a population 10 times that of Russia. It has an economy 10 times that of Russia. It has a much larger navy. So that weighs in China’s favor. But if things go badly for Putin — and I kind of suspect they will, that he’s going to reach some sort of compromise; withdraw his troops — then Taiwan is going to be safe for some years to come.

Make no mistake: Xi Jinping has much grander ambitions than Putin does. I mean, Putin wants to be the reincarnation of Peter the Great. He wants to reestablish greater Russia, you know, striding ruthlessly over greater Russia’s imperial domains. But Xi Jinping, like Chinese emperors past, is pursuing a much more grandiose vision. He wants to rule over “all under heaven.” That’s what “tianxia” is, which is how you say it in Chinese. “All under heaven” means literally everything.

So he doesn’t want… He won’t be satisfied with just Taiwan. He wants to extend his reach throughout Asia. And I wouldn’t be surprised, now that Putin is the supplicant in the relationship — now that Putin and Russia are the junior partner in the relationship with China — that he wouldn’t want to encroach on Russia at some point as well. So Putin ought to be careful. In dealing with Xi, his frenemy, right — his frenemy, friend or enemy — can switch from day to day. He has to be very careful because China has global ambitions.

CLAY: Steven, would we commit troops, actual boots on the ground troops to defend Taiwan in your opinion, because we have the “strategic” ambiguity policy, which is constantly being sort of hemmed and hawed on. We have never really said, and if we did, would South Korea, would Japan, would Australia, with any European countries, and how quickly could we get there in the event of an invasion? Kind of take me into China begins the invasion and the United States does what?

MOSHER: Well, I wrote a book about this called China Attacks back 20 years ago, and (chuckes) of course it was a novel. But I sort of imagine how the attack would take place and how we might get involved. The best way to defend against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is simply to put the Seventh Fleet in the way, have the Seventh Fleet patrolling the Taiwan Straits.

That’s what we did in the Offshore Islands Crises in 1958 under President Eisenhower, a former general who knew what he was doing. He was asked about an invasion of Taiwan, and he said, “Any invasion of Taiwan will have to run over the Seventh Fleet,” and it never happened. Australia and Japan have both said that they would distribute to the defense of Taiwan. So there’s already a kind of alliance forming, which has upset China.

China’s foreign minister just said yesterday that he’s very upset about the fact that the U.S. seems to be creating a NATO in Asia. Well, we’re not creating a NATO in Asia. My goodness! The Chinese Communist Party is creating a NATO in Asia by being constantly aggressive against its near neighbors, forcing them — countries like India and Japan and Australia — to join together and ask us for help. So they’re forging the alliance that they claim to be threatened by.

BUCK: Steven Mosher. Thank you so much. His piece is up on ClayAndBuck.com about how Xi Jinping is preparing for his own invasion as we’re all focused on Ukraine. Steven, appreciate the expertise. Thanks for being with us.

MOSHER: Good to talk to you.

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