NYC Shooting Emblematic of Surging Crime Nationwide

12 Apr 2022

BUCK: Clay, I just gotta say as a New Yorker as we’re waiting to get the police update here on this shooting in New York City subway, it’s heartbreaking when you see how many people have been injured, shot, going to school, going to work, trying to live their lives.

In the background of all this, too, is a city that has gotten a lot less safe in general, like so many others across the country — Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco — crime feels like it just keeps escalating, violent crime. And, for a place like New York, the subway is the artery, if you will, it is the series of arteries that connect us all to each other. To go after this just feels like a kick in the stomach of a city that is already reeling.

CLAY: Well, this is just emblematic of the larger issues with crime that are occurring everywhere. I ran through the list, but I think it’s worth hitting because in addition to the 8.5% inflation, which is just every single day so many people out there feel it. You know, New York City obviously gets a lot of attention because there’s a large collection of media. And the subway itself has had so many viral, unfortunate incidents, it feels like, of late.

But when you look at some of these numbers — and I mentioned them, you know, they constantly are updating here. But, Buck, just listen to some of these cities and the rate of murder, right, because crime in general is sometimes difficult to track down. But when you actually look at year-to-year murder increases that are going on, they’re through the roof. I mean, what’s going on all over this country is absolutely terrifying.

And it’s going to be a big part of this midterm. Atlanta up 43%. Birmingham up 40%.

BUCK: Clay, can I just break in for a second here —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — ’cause they’re starting the press conference right now in New York City live. Let’s go to it. We’ll come back with those numbers, that data.

BUCK: All right. So we’re hearing there from Hochul, who is giving a speech, they didn’t go to any updates on the information here from her, the governor of New York there. Clay, people can get into the technicalities of this, whether or not — we don’t know why this person did it. We don’t have the person in custody. That’s the single most important thing.

They’re saying it’s not being investigated as an act of terror yet. That can change. I think it is likely to change. The range of possibilities that come to mind, obviously act of terror, we don’t know what the idea the ideology is behind it, a just deranged individual, more of a mass shooter incident, you know, something along the lines of what we’ve seen in other times, you know, the Colorado movie theater shooter, for example, someone who’s just completely insane or could be a hate crime situation.

We just don’t know. We don’t know who the individuals are who were targeted, but those seem like possibilities. It was clearly planned in advance. And it’s stunning and a piece of good news in an otherwise very troubling morning here, no one has life-threatening injuries from what —

CLAY: Which is pretty wild. Pretty wild to think about when you’re talking about the shooting taking place in such a closed situation. But to me all this coming together just continues — and I know any individual act of violence is hard to be attributed to any particular incident.

But this is to me, Buck, just symptomatic of larger issues of violent crime that are surging across the country at the same time that inflation is hitting eight and a half percent, a 40-plus year high, that the border is poised to be open, and that on the East Coast they are trying to bring back masks.

It’s just everything that can go wrong since Joe Biden has become president feels like it’s going wrong when you look at every situation, not only in the United States but around the world.

And I don’t know how we get back to a sense of normalcy, but the first hundred days for Mayor Eric Adams in New York City I know many people were optimistic that it was going to represent a substantial change from the de Blasio administration. You can speak to this far better than I can. But things do not seem to be getting better in New York City now.

BUCK: I was deeply pessimistic and everyone in New York who wasn’t is saying that I was right so far, unfortunately, about the new mayor, the new administration. I think that, you know, there’s been really a shift in the Democrat Party.

Until the mainstream narrative of the Democrat Party switches from we need to invest resources in the community to stop crime to we’re gonna back up our cops, look up criminals, and take the threat to public safety as an immediate crisis that we’re going to stop instead of a 10- to 20-year horizon of maybe if we do more, you know, youth programs and outreach efforts, that’s all fine.

I’m not opposed to any of that. But you gotta lock up the bad guys now. It is men who are committing these violent crimes, obviously, over 95% of violent crimes committed by men, it is young man in particular. There has to be a change in the ideology or a change in the approach and the focus.

I mean, Clay, you know, there will be a lot of speculation about this individual before we get more information about it. What are the chances that this person had either a long criminal record of some kind or a clear psychiatric record of people knowing that he, you know, needed the attention of the state shall we say? Very high.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Don’t know for sure, but the probability is high.

CLAY: That’s the problem, right? You are having so many of these people who are engaging in violent acts all over the country are people who should still be behind bars.

And the real amazing thing about the Joe Biden administration and really the 47-plus years that Joe Biden spend in office is probably the best thing he ever did was the 1994 crime bill, and he ran trying to pretend that he hadn’t done it. That’s honestly what we need, Buck. We need people back in jail. We need police back on the streets. We need district attorneys who are actually going to prosecute crimes.

And until that happens, this lawlessness is going to continue to skyrocket. And, by the way, it’s not just shootings. The lawlessness is taking place, the amount of shoplifting that is going on is unprecedented all over the country. I was reading the data on shoplifting is through the roof everywhere.

They’re shutting down stores in San Francisco, for instance, because there’s so much shoplifting they can’t make money in those stores. I mean, that’s unheard of.

BUCK: Redistribution of wealth, by the way. That’s what they think shoplifting is. That’s really if you go to the hard left, they believe that this is, you know, making up for inequity in society.

CLAY: Well, certainly it has not helped that we’ve set so high limits now on shoplifting. We went to start punishing everyone who is committing crimes of a high level.

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Embarrassing! Clay’s Alma Mater Brings Back Mask Mandate

12 Apr 2022

BUCK: We mentioned that the city of Philadelphia’s going back with its mask mandate. I’m telling you in New York, I am so highly attuned to this because I hate mask wearing, as everything knows. I have for over two years now. And I’ve been very vocal about that. I am known in my building as the anti-masker.

Clay, there was a whole period of about six months where I was apparently in a building where about 500 residents, from what I understand, I was the only one who was not wearing a mask in and out of the building. And I wasn’t hiding. I was, like, yeah, of course I’m not doing this. I found out I was the only one. There was one, like, German guy apparently who did it for a while, but I think then he went back to Dusseldorf. And here we are now finding out that your own alma mater, Clay, so sad. What’s going on at GW?

CLAY: Well, evidently this has become a trend, people were sending me messages all over D.C., American University, I believe Georgetown, George Washington where I went, they’re all reimplementing the mask mandate. And this is effective today.

And this is what we said, as soon as Philadelphia made the decision to bring back masks, I tell you, only a matter of time until New York City and D.C. do it as well.

So, what’s embarrassing to me is if I were at GW in — you know, I was there ’97 to ’01. So 20-some-odd years ago. I can’t imagine everyone on campus just immediately complying with a demand that you wear a mask on campus, in classrooms. And I think there will be hardly any kids that will say, “No, I’m not putting a mask back on.” There will be almost no civil disobedience, no rebellion against the rule.

The amount of college kids who shut up and comply is downright scary. And even worse than that, Buck, the amount of college kids who beg to be forced to wear a mask, this is — in the space of one generation — and we talked about this before, we’ve gone from kids who naturally kind of rebelled against authority, right, like you were not necessarily willing to listen to what your dorm RA said to do on a day-to-day basis, to a situation where now you are begging to be regulated. It’s crazy to me. Absolute madness.

BUCK: There are people who actually like — when I say “some,” there are a lot of people who like to be told what to do, for whom choice and freedom are scary.

And, unfortunately, a lot of the Democrat leftist ideology, rhetoric, and the way that they push the narrative is rooted in there are a lot of people who just want to be, you know, one of my favorite lines from Solzhenitsyn. “As long as they’re part of the herd and they’re safe and warm and fed, it’s all the same to them, it doesn’t matter.” They just want to be in the mass of the mob with everybody else doing what they’re told to do. Freedom is scary to them. Freedom comes with consequences. It comes with the need to make decisions.

And I do think we’re seeing a lot of that. I wonder what it would take — one of the ways that I will argue — people often ask me, you know, we go out, we do live stuff, you know, Clay, we go out, we speak to people, right, they’ll come up to you — I was just, you know, in Mar-a-Lago with a whole bunch of folks. They’ll say, how do I — you know, “My brother Phil is a huge, you know, Bernie Sanders loving,” they’ll ask me, and one of the things I always say is, figure out what you could present them with that would change their mind, meaning what would have to be true for them to agree that you have a point or something.

With the mask people at this point, I think we’re past that. I don’t even know how many times can they run the same experiment with obvious results and they just say, mask me up, double mask me, N$95 mask me, I need more. I don’t know if it’s possible for these people to come back to reality. I don’t know what it would take.

CLAY: Well, it’s a leap of faith. It’s a leap of faith for them. And there doesn’t have to be any rationality associated with it anymore. It is their political identity. They’re the kind of person who wears a mask. I was at the mall over the weekend. I don’t go to the mall a lot. My kids had an event, and I had parked by the mall out by for people who know the Nashville area, the huge where the Grand Ole Opry is and everything else out there.

And about 10% of people, Buck, inside of this Nashville area mall indoors wearing masks. And I just felt this intense pity for them because to be two years in, two years in, and you live in a red state where there is freedom, you aren’t being required to wear a mask, and about 10%, maybe it was 5% of people were walking around in masks.

And I just wondered, to your point, Buck, what could happen to make these people recognize and realize that, one, what they’re doing is ludicrous and has no impact whatsoever? After two years of embracing it so fully, I don’t know that they ever will. I think we’re gonna see this for a long time to come now. I think there are going to be people who wear masks for the rest of their lives.

BUCK: I’ve been saying this for a few years now.

CLAY: There are going to be a small number.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: Small number of people, but I think for the rest of our lives, indoor facilities, when you get on an airplane or you go to an airport, there are going to be people who wear masks for the rest of their lives.

BUCK: At some level I think they believe it’s like people who say bless you after you sneeze– which I don’t know if it’s true or not. Maybe it’s an urban legend or old wives’ tale, but this comes from — I think it’s — I think people say it either comes from the Black Death or the Spanish influenza. I think it’s the Black Death. By the way, this is one of the things the internet that’s probably wrong. But, you know, people say “bless you” after you sneeze.

I think people believe now that mask wearing is almost a courtesy issue, in their minds. They’ve turned this into “I’m showing consideration. I’m being considerate by doing this.” And so even if it doesn’t actually medically do anything, right, saying gesundheit when someone sneezes doesn’t help when they’ve got, you know, an upper respiratory infection, but you know, they’ve created this notion that it’s a courtesy-based measure, which is gonna be very hard to stamp out. That’s very hard.

CLAY: I think there are people who will do it for the rest of their lives, Buck. I think there are people right now, sadly, who are 35 years old that will be at 60 years old still wearing masks because of what happened in covid.

BUCK: Yeah. They say that it comes to the Middle Ages, fourteenth century Europe, the bubonic plague is where people started saying “bless you” because, you know, you know, that might be — one of those things. Guys, you always gotta remember, it’s like Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”

CLAY: That’s up on my kids’ wall in eighth grade, and I have to say, I went into his history class, and the teacher has been trying to teach kids, which is actually a big deal going forward, how do you know what’s real and what’s not real in an internet age? You know, when we were around, Buck, you probably remember having the encyclopedia or even the card catalog where you had to go do your research. These kids can find anything in the space of about 15 seconds. The challenge is knowing whether or not they can trust it.

BUCK: So many. And some of them are really good quotes, actually, you want to use are — so many good quotes are wrongfully attributed. You’ll come up with quotes that you’ve heard a lot of and everyone says, oh, isn’t that, that’s Voltaire or that’s Churchill or that’s — and it’s actually some guy named Bob who lives in Des Moines who put it on the internet in, like, 1995. But, anyway, people will say stuff like that.

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It’s Safe for BoJo to Visit Ukraine, But Not for Biden?

12 Apr 2022

CLAY: Boris Johnson, who had a near political death experience in England and now seems like he is going to survive it, the prime minister there, recently flew to Ukraine and walked in the streets of Kiev with Zelensky. And that obviously received a great deal of attention.

Zelensky has in some way modeled himself on Winston Churchill; so the relationship between Boris Johnson and Zelensky has been quite positive I think for both guys.

But when I watched the footage of Boris Johnson walking around in Ukraine, it brought to mind the fact that the United States said it was not safe for Joe Biden to go to Ukraine. And given the 8.5% inflation right now, the Bidas Touch, which is basically leading to failure in every direction, is the Biden administration going to have to fly Joe all the way back across the Atlantic and go to Ukraine and have him visit Zelensky now that Boris Johnson has done it because it makes him look so weak?

He got within whatever it was, 15 or 20 miles, I believe, of the border, and they said, oh, no, no, no, no, it’s not safe enough for Biden to go there and then Boris Johnson — and, by the way, not the first European leader to have done this. Several other European leaders have also made the trip to Ukraine.

Is the United States gonna have to do this Biden now? Because when I saw it Italy, oh, well, go ahead and add a trip. He’s gonna go over at some point this spring or summer and actually visit Ukraine because it looks weak if he doesn’t now.

BUCK: Possible for the optics, to be sure, that they may do something like this. But I also think that, Clay, the U.K. is a player in the NATO and West — an important one, but a player in the NATO and Western alliance. America is supposed to be the leader. And anything that brings attention right now for the Biden administration to war in Ukraine for a lot of us I think is a reminder of the failure to prevent this war, to see this war coming.

Clay, on my TV show over at The First TV, we did a special in December on the coming war in Ukraine. Right? Now, we didn’t know for sure. You know, I’m not the commander-in-chief of national security apparatus. But we had a feeling it was coming. It’s amazing, it’s amazing to see how caught off guard and unprepared the Biden regime really was for this.

So I think at that level, you ask a very interesting question, this is about optics, right?

The Ukrainians have the courage of a lion.

President @ZelenskyyUa has given the roar of that lion.

The UK stands unwaveringly with the people of Ukraine.

Slava Ukraini 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/u6vGYqmK4V

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) April 9, 2022

CLAY: All cosmetic.

BUCK: It’s all perception, it’s all optics. But anytime Biden goes there right now, he associates himself with the situation in Ukraine, it’s a reminder to a lot of us that there’s a failure of the regime here and that we have the biggest war in Europe since World War II under the Biden prance with it’s 8.5%CPI today and it’s wide open border and it’s massive increase in crime.

Am I leaving anything out? There’s a lot.

CLAY: No. It’s well said. I’ll bet that’s the debate they’re having in the White House right now because there’s no doubt that Boris Johnson being on the ground in Ukraine makes Biden look weak, but there have gotta be advisers inside the White House saying, wait a minute. If we go back to Ukraine to put Biden back on the ground in Ukraine for some reason, then it’s gonna draw even more attention to the fact that we aren’t willing to travel to the southern border.

And I think we gotta keep beating this drum pretty hard as Title 42 comes up here in May. Buck, Joe Biden has been president now for almost a year and a half and has not found the time to visit the southern border yet. Hasn’t found the time.

He can fly all the way to Europe. He can go to Europe, and he can go walk around and study the Ukrainian border; but he hasn’t found the time to visit our own country’s southern border. And I think you were one of the first people to point this out, but it’s becoming more and more glaring every day.

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Blake Masters Talks Guns, Border, Inflation, Elon Musk

12 Apr 2022

BUCK: Senate candidate in the great state of Arizona, Blake Masters, is with us now. Blake, thanks so much.

MASTERS: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

BUCK: So, I just want to have you react to on some of what Biden said yesterday about ghost guns as somebody who has actually built a firearm at home on your own. But first, here’s what Biden said yesterday in his speech.

BIDEN: The NRA called this rule I’m about to announce extreme. Extreme. Well, let me ask you, is it extreme to protect police officers, extreme to protect our children, extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people I couldn’t even pass a background check? Look. The idea that someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns is extreme? It isn’t extreme. It’s basic common sense.

President Biden: “Is it extreme to protect police officers, extreme to protect our children? Extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people who couldn’t even pass a background check? The idea that someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns is extreme.” pic.twitter.com/Jc3qAabnbj

— The Hill (@thehill) April 12, 2022

BUCK: Ah. Do you think it’s basic common sense, Blake, to ban these guns and take these actions? What do you say?

MASTERS: I do not think it’s common sense. It’s what Democrats always say, right, common sense gun control. No, it’s actually just about disarming law-abiding gun owners, right? It’s about making it as hard as possible for you and me and everybody listening to this program to own and use and, yeah, make firearms.

You know, most people don’t realize, but for our whole national history, even before 1776, including the Colonial days, it’s been legal for Americans to make firearms at home. You don’t have to ask the federal government for permission. You don’t have to go pass a background check. You can make guns at home. That’s been legal and now it’s under assault because Joe Biden wants to make it harder to do that. You know, it’s about disarming people. It has nothing to do with crime.

CLAY: Blake, why do you think we spend so much time talking about guns as opposed to the people who actually commit the crimes with the guns?

MASTERS: Well, basically, because Democrats don’t care about crime. You know, if they did — you know, we do have a gun violence problem in this country, it’s handguns, and it’s mostly gang violence, right? It’s gangs in Chicago shooting each other. It’s people in St. Louis, right, all these Democrat-run towns.

And Democrats don’t do that, right, they don’t want to clean that up. They like the George Soros funded prosecutors who don’t want to prosecute anybody. Right? By making it about guns instead of about criminals, it gives the Democrats license to go after me, to go after you, to go after any law-abiding gun owner ’cause ultimately they want us to become Australia, they want us to become Canada. They know that a disarmed society is easier to control.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Blake Masters right now, Senate candidate in Arizona. You are in a border state, as you well know, and things look like they’re gonna get even worse than they currently are when it comes to illegal immigration and the overall lawlessness at our southern border which, of course, includes the massive importation of fentanyl into the United States and other opioids which resulted in tens of thousands of Americans dying of drug overdose last year alone.

What are your expectations for how this is going to affect Arizona? And also, at a political level, what is the Biden play here? Clay and I have been pushing that around on the show trying to figure out, how do they think it’s anything other than an abject political nightmare for them to have up to 18,000 illegal crossings a day?

MASTERS: Well, the first thing they do is they tried to deny that there’s a border crisis, right? And they’re just hoping that they can get all these people in and give them amnesty. I really do think it’s as simple as they like the open border, they like the chaos that it causes, they want millions of people to come here so they can import a new electorate. That’s what Joe Biden is thinking to the extent he’s thinking anything at all.

What’s interesting now is, you know, they’re gonna repeal Title 42 and say if you thought we had a crisis now, just wait ’til May and June. It’s about to get a lot worse.

But, you know, my opponent here in Arizona, Democrat incumbents Senator Mark Kelly, he’s voting for all the open border stuff, but he has the audacity to now pretend to be moderate. He’s saying, “No, please, Mr. Biden, don’t repeal Title 42, that would be bad,” and he’s trying to have it both ways.

You know, they want to deny that their policies are causing this border crisis and then they want to pretend to be reasonable. Most people in Arizona, though, see through it. People are just sick and tired of the open border. It’s literally ruining our country.

CLAY: Blake, you’ve got a lot of experience with companies with running businesses that actually have to make money as opposed to just spend money, which is what our government does. It’s 8.5% inflation today, the highest in 40 years.

What should be done to bring inflation back down where it’s not becoming a tax on anyone out there who is living paycheck to paycheck and isn’t fundamentally destroying many different American lives from an economic perspective?

MASTERS: Yeah, the first thing to do is to just stop the bleeding, right? We cannot keep spending trillions and trillions of dollars. I mean, don’t fund this crazy Biden agenda, right? It’s — you know, Build Back Better, thank goodness they didn’t get it passed but they did get the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package passed, right? Trillions and trillions of dollars. And of course it just makes the problem worse.

They say inflation’s 8.5%, and that’s a high number, but what’s the real number? You know, if they admit it’s 8.5% you and I both know it’s well into the double digits when you actually factor in properly the things that people need like gas, housing, right, food prices, all the stuff that’s double-digit inflation.

And I think as long as you have a Democrat in the White House and a Democrat-controlled Congress, it’s just gonna get worse and worse.

BUCK: Blake, how could this get turned around? I always try to find — especially a day like today, there’s a lot a lot of bad news, a lot of stuff coming in that’s either, you know, awful or disappointing or any number, depending on whether we’re talking about the economy or the violence in New York, there’s so many different things going on at once.

But if we’re gonna turn this around and, you know, the midterm elections are gonna be here before we know it, Republicans won’t be really in a position to pass a lot in the sense that they won’t get it signed by Joe Biden, most likely, but they can at least start to talk about the agenda and hopefully in 2024 be in a position to implement it in a really meaningful way.

On an economic front, what does that look like? I mean, I think it’s clear to everybody the Democrats aren’t good at this. So how can Republicans tell everybody, what will they do that will make them better, that will actually make the situation and the economy improve?

MASTERS: Yep. Well, step one, you know, we retake Congress and make Biden a lame duck and you block his agenda, right? Then you’re just not contributing to the problem. And then we use those two years like you said to really prepare for winning back the White House in 2024 and, you know, present — Trump showed us the way here. His America First economic policies, you know, worked.

You know, not only did we have low inflation, I think it was under 3% every year in the Trump administration, but median wages actually started to rise under President Trump, right? The amount of money that everyday American workers were taking home went up under Trump for the first time in decades.

And so the America First policies, which are pro-business but also pro-worker, right, making sure we have good trade deals, making sure we’re actually making things here in America again and we’re not just, you know, dependent on China for absolutely everything like the Democrats want us to be.

Those sorts of America First policies, you know, they work. They might take two or three years to really get it done ’cause the Dems are causing so much damage, but this stuff work. And if we retake Congress and retake the White House in ’24 I know we can have a successful American future.

CLAY: Blake, we were talking yesterday about the fact that there’s a general consensus now that Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada all will decide 2022 and 2024. You were talking about taking back the House and taking back the Senate.

What are you seeing on the ground in Arizona right now, and how optimistic are you about Republican gains in 2022 in your state?

MASTERS: I’m very optimistic. You know, I do think we’re gonna have some sort of red wave ’cause Democrats, frankly, are blowing it so badly although I always caution people like don’t get complacent, right?

If you think there’s gonna be a red wave maybe you’ll just slack off and not do the hard work that it’s gonna take to create that red wave so we have to act like the underdogs, we have to play like we know the stakes. The stakes that we’re playing for the whole future of the country, right?

But if we work really hard, if we just get so upset and I’m telling you, the voters that I talk to, Republican voters but also independents, they are so upset at what’s happening. If we channel all that and run really strong candidates, I think we’ll be tremendously successful in November and beyond.

CLAY: Blake, I don’t know how well you know Elon Musk, but I know there’s a lot of overlap between Peter Thiel and a lot of the guys that you’ve worked with in your capitalistic career in business. What advice would you give Elon as it pertains to Twitter if he came to you — and maybe he has come to you — and said, “Hey, what should I do now? I’m sitting here with 9.2%. I obviously support,” Elon does, “the First Amendment, Twitter is not a free open marketplace now.

What should be done, what can be done, what would you tell him in terms of Twitter?

MASTERS: Yeah. I love what he’s doing, you know, I hope he increases his stake. Elon came to my book party and it’s called Zero to One, the book that I wrote, you know, one of his favorite books of all time. He’s just a breath of fresh air, you know, and I’m glad, frankly, that Elon decided not to join Twitter’s board.

I think the Twitter board wanted him to join right, it’s kind of like keep your friends close and your enemies closer kind of thing, but now Elon he doesn’t have follow all the rules, right, his ownership isn’t capped like it would be if he were on the board; so now he can just pressure for the reforms he wants and if he doesn’t get them, he’s a very wealthy man, he can buy up more and more of Twitter.

I’d love to see him buy 51% of the country, just control it, and let President Trump back on, right, and free speech. Everybody used to believe in this. Turns out today only conservatives do, only Republicans do. And I think Elon is doing great work here.

BUCK: Blake, if people want to learn more about your important candidacy here for the Senate seat in Arizona, where should they go?

MASTERS: BlakeMasters.com. Very simple, just my name, BlakeMasters.com.

BUCK: That works. Blake, thanks so much, man. Good luck to you.

MASTERS: Thank you. Talk soon.

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The Bidas Touch: Inflation Rate Hits 41-Year High

12 Apr 2022

CLAY: We are continuing to hit new records as it pertains to the overall inflation rate. And CNN yesterday, of course, Jen Psaki tried to say, oh, this is Putin’s inflation, this is the reason, Vladimir Putin is, for why inflation has gone up. Of course, that’s not the reality.

But CNN as soon as the news came down this morning they immediately worked hard to minimize the 8.5% inflation rate, arguing that this is the peak, already probably going down. Listen to what’s being said.

CNN’s @ChristineRomans on the inflation report: “As expected a big number…it is the hottest inflation since 1982…Some economists…are hoping this is the peak, the worst of it, and things begin to moderate into the summer…Big, big increases…continues here…this month.” pic.twitter.com/fUcNwtg6tt

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 12, 2022

CHRISTINE ROMANS: 8.5%, the inflation rate over the past year, that is a big number. It is as expected and it is the hottest inflation since 1982. That’s like a broken record there and you know what it all is. It is gas, it is shelter, it is food. I want to say, though, this is ’til the end of March and, as we’ve been reporting, oil prices and gas prices have been coming down. So in a way, this consumer price number is looking in the rearview mirror. There are some economists who are hoping this is the peak, this is the worst of it and things begin to moderate into the summer.

JOHN BERMAN: It’s crazy to think, though, that the market might be okay with it because it’s exactly in line with what they were expecting today. It’s not worse than what they expected.

CHRISTINE ROMANS: Most economists don’t expect a recession in the U.S.

CLAY: They are covering for everything here, Buck. 8.5% is unheard of for most people out there who did not live through the Jimmy Carter era. This thing is not going to go away, inflation, that is, all the way through the midterms.

Thank God Joe Manchin is there and at least we didn’t pass the, you know, multitrillion additional spending that Joe Biden wanted as part of Build Back Better. But I hope this is the peak. I hope it’s going to come down from here. I’m not confident of that being the case.

BUCK: A lot of our covid policy led to this, folks, just so we understand.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: We were sending people checks and then encouraging them to keep staying home, we’re gonna keep sending you checks. Less productivity, more money flowing around. Some of us warned about this at the very beginning, and we were told stop killing grandma. Well, here we are.

Now you’re gonna see — by the way, it had nothing to do grandma being safe or not. It is having a lot to do with our economy and the future of this country. So a lot of bad decisions were made.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Honestly, I sit around and think how close did we come to passing another $5 trillion government spending bill? We obviously spent way too much money. Anyone with a functional brain could have told you, giving people thousands of dollars not to work was going to be a poor situation for the country going forward. But we came close, Buck, last year to Joe Biden adding another 5 trillion in spending.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Build Back Better had passed?

BUCK: Can we just take a step back too? People like you and me — we can go back to the tape — and not to say we were alone. Anybody on the right who was sane and had the most basic understanding of economics was saying we’re going into a period of inflation here.

You’ve already spent trillions of dollars beyond the trillions that was the 30 trillion we currently have in the national debt, and your idea — Clay, the argument that the Biden Democrats were making — and maybe we should go find this — was that it would reduce inflation.

CLAY: That’s exactly what they were saying.

BUCK: To spend 2.5 trillion more dollars. These people are out of their minds. And I mean Joe Biden ’cause he just is a puppet who says whatever the people he advises around him tell him will poll well with idiot Democrats who don’t understand how the economy works at the most basic level.

We’re going into inflation, and their answer is 5 trillion more in spending? And they tell us that will reduce — Clay, it is the economic equivalent of saying, “I know how to put out this fire. Throw gasoline on it.” It is that stupid.

CLAY: It’s exactly what it was. And the only person really who stood against that happening was Joe Manchin, which, I mean, again.

BUCK: He may have saved the Democrats, by the way, by doing this, in a we’re way.

CLAY: He may well have brought some sanity. And I know Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona did as well.

But I don’t think Biden should be able to skate on the fact that he argued — now they’re trying to blame certainly Vladimir Putin. But, Buck, that was his primary argument. He said inflation will come down if we spend 5 trillion more dollars. And, by the way, 5 trillion is actually low because they limited the cost to 10 years. Was actually more than $5 trillion in government new programs that he wanted to put in place.

BUCK: The Biden economic approach is the equivalent of having Joe Biden sit down with somebody who is ruinously in credit card debt and saying, (impression) “I got an idea. Max out all the rest of your cards too. That’ll take care of it.” That’s what he wanted to do. It’s completely crazy.

CLAY: Well, and what should happen is our politicians should just stand down right now. Right? They should not try to pass any more bills that involve substantial government spending or substantial changes to the tax code. They’ve screwed things up enough. They need to just get out of the way and hopefully allow some form of moderation to return to the economy as that money flushes itself out.

But what I’m concerned about, Buck, is a lot of trillions of dollars that we spent last year hasn’t even fully washed through the economy yet. So I think we’re still gonna be reaping what we’ve sown in the early days of the Biden administration going forward. It is economic suicide that we have created. It is a disaster.

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Post Office Stops Delivering in Crime-Torn Santa Monica

12 Apr 2022

BUCK: This is in Santa Monica, which if you don’t know, Santa Monica is a beautiful place that has been ruined now by Democrats like so many others. It’s right along the Pacific Ocean. It’s incredibly expensive real estate, I mean, a nice house, a nice apartment in Santa Monica you’re talking millions of dollars. And the U.S. Postal Service, according to local news reports, has suspended delivery of mail because they had so many mail carriers assaulted, harassed, and attacked. Listen.

USPS has suspended mail service in parts of Santa Monica, CA because the mailmen kept getting assaulted and attacked. They say it’s not safe for people to be delivering mail. Unreal. California is a hellhole. pic.twitter.com/q97kYYTT1s

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 11, 2022

BUCK: Not safe, Clay, to be delivering the mail in a 95% leftist Democrat enclave of millionaires, basically. Yeah. Good luck with that.

CLAY: For people out there who do not know L.A., Santa Monica is a super high-end neighborhood.

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: Right? And this is one particular area of Santa Monica. But I have lots of friends in Los Angeles, and I have a lot of friends in Los Angeles who are thinking about leaving.

And one reason is, Buck, L.A. is a mess everywhere. You can live right now in Orange County, you can live in the South Bay, you can live down close to the water, and there are homeless encampments everywhere. And the amount of filth and lack of safety is something that it is connecting across all different income groups, it’s connecting across all different political parties.

I mean, again, the fact that Gavin Newsom won his recall election is unfortunate because I believe he’s up for reelection this year, right, in 2022, and I don’t think that Gavin Newsom is gonna be able to be beaten, which is why we talked earlier this week, he may end up being one of the candidates in 2024, believe it or not, for the Democratic Party.

BUCK: These blue states, unfortunately, New York and California, I’m as New York as any person, you know, anywhere. I mean I grew up here, born here, lived here for decades. I mean, it’s not my fault, it’s not your fault, if you’re listening to this and you vote for whatever Republicans we can try to put forward in a state like New York, but we just have crappy leadership. I mean, that’s the reality is bad leadership.

Today you see the lieutenant governor in New York indicted on a bribery scheme for $50,000, by the way. I mean, not even really swinging for the fences in the bribery sense?

CLAY: I wouldn’t even think that you could bribe the lieutenant governor of New York for 50K, by the way.

BUCK: Yeah, at a weird level I’d like to think that it would cost more to bribe the lieutenant governor, you know? It’s gotta at least be seven figures.

CLAY: Yeah, at least have some basic day before basic economic…

BUCK: Go to prison, you know, public corruption cases, Clay, they take very seriously.

CLAY: Well, they should. But, I mean, when you’re willing to sell the city out for 50K, I mean, you know, you can’t even get a car these days for 50K.

But here are the numbers I started to hit in the first hour of the show as we were discussing the shooting in the subway — and that, by the way, perpetrator is still on the loose, right, Buck, for everybody out there listening in New York City, the shooter of the subway early this morning has yet to be captured.

These are because in that are up this year compared to last year. Remember we saw a historic rise 2020 to 2021. We’re now into 2022. Atlanta, murders are up 43.3% on the year. Birmingham, murders are up 41% on the year. Cincinnati, 31.6%. Houston 21%. Milwaukee 93% increase in murders in Milwaukee. New Orleans, 40%. St. Louis, 20%. Now, I just tried to grab a cross-section of cities out there to give you a sense.

Buck, these are numbers that are up off what are often all-time highs for murder in 2021. The situation’s not getting any better. And to me the shooting that happened in New York City which is receiving a lot of attention is emblematic of that larger absolute lack of law and order of lawlessness that has taken over that many of you, no matter where you’re listening to us right now feel in your cities, your states, and your communities.

Most of you out there, I bet, have not felt this unsafe in a generation. And the data reflects that basically that’s not some sort of artificial feeling. The data reflects that that’s about the highest it’s been in 20 years many places.

BUCK: But, Clay, to be fair, Biden has a plan to address the violence in cities across the country by going after homemade firearms that he dubs ghost guns which are used in less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of shootings and homicides, tens of thousands of shootings nationwide.

That’s the focus here. Not on the increasingly broken criminal justice system that does not keep people safe and does not punish criminals early and sufficiently enough to deter them. Here’s what Biden wants to say.

President Biden: “Is it extreme to protect police officers, extreme to protect our children? Extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people who couldn’t even pass a background check? The idea that someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns is extreme.” pic.twitter.com/Jc3qAabnbj

— The Hill (@thehill) April 12, 2022

BUCK: I’m serious. Think about it. I think Biden’s a moron. I mean, I honestly think he’s not a very smart man. The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. He must know that at some level.

CLAY: Well, and, by the way, how about the connection between Ukraine and the Second Amendment right now? What’s the first thing they did when they got invaded? They started passing out guns to as many people as they possibly could. The focus on guns is what is the wrong focus. We should be focusing on why people are using these guns and how to keep them from doing so as opposed to the gun itself.

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Former Democrat Bryan Dean Wright on What Drove Him Away

12 Apr 2022

CLAY: We’re joined now by first guest of the day, Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA ops officer and host of The President’s Daily Brief, a new podcast debuting this week.

Bryan, you used to be a Democrat. I certainly know how that feels — and you feel like the party lost its mind. What was the tipping point for you in deciding that the Democrat Party no longer made sense for you?

WRIGHT: You know, in the past couple of years I saw a few different things. One was a bunch of very anti-American or un-American talk, I remember very vividly Governor Cuomo of New York saying that America has never been great. Well, that’s not really the right thing that any political party should talk about in the country unless you’re a trying to destroy it.

Then I saw a lot of bigotry-based commentary coming out of folks who are elected at our national level, Ilhan Omar and some of the Squad members who were very anti-Semitic in their views. But, moreover, they represented and embraced things like socialism and communism.

And that kind of stuff, going back to the roots of my family’s connections to the Democratic Party, we were Jack Kennedy Democrats who of course stood up and said “no” to the radical left — in the party and country and in the world.

So, I just saw a very, very consistent drift away from what I understood to be classic presentation and embrace of the Democrat Party, particularly for workers. We’re now seeing Democrats embrace Big Tech and big corporations, some of those woke agendas. And so me and a lot of other conservative Democrats, particularly in rural areas, said, ‘All right. We’ve had enough. We’re becoming independent or we are becoming Republicans.’

BUCK: Hey, Bryan, it’s Buck. I’m wondering how you assess one year in to the Biden presidency. One thing Clay and I talk about a fair amount is how it doesn’t seem like there’s anything they can point to that is a success. Is this in your mind, as somebody as you said used to vote Democrat, is this a moment of awakening for a lot of people who maybe were on the fence in 2020 and now see through results just how ruinous a Biden presidency is?

Basically do you think there’s a lot of voters’ regret out there for people who were independents or who just barely broke for Biden?

WRIGHT: You just hit the nail on the head. If you look at the polling for independents — and I’m sure we all know anecdotally and friends and family, they’re all saying, look, President Trump he did a lot of great stuff, maybe some of his personality just couldn’t stomach so either I didn’t vote or I did go ahead and pull the lever for Joe Biden but my goodness, I regret it. My father actually falls into this category.

So there are definitely people in this country who I think are very gettable by smart people, smart politicians who were the thoughtful policies. I hope that those people choose conservatives. But I think we have to get this man Joe Biden and this wing of his party out of the office because they don’t believe in the goodness of America.

Now what I will tell you is on the left, they’re not seeing a lot of degradation of progressives, that wing of the party. They’re pretty tight still with being both Democrats and identifying and supporting Joe Biden and his administration. So I don’t see the drift from the left and the far left yet. They may stick at home and not vote.
Let’s see.

But I think that they’re into this thing, that this is a revolution on the left that we’ve been experiencing really for the past 20 years. The woke stuff, the emphasis on racial identity, divisions, the tribal parts of politics, especially racial tribal politics, Democrats have bought that hook, line, and sinker. And that is not a hysteria that they’re going to abandon anytime soon.

CLAY: We are talking — appreciate him making the time for us — we are talking with Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA ops officer. What do you think when you look at what’s going on in Ukraine?

You mentioned that some people are questioning their decision to support Biden over Trump, including your dad. How much do you think of what’s going on in Ukraine right now is begged to Biden’s weakness, particularly in Afghanistan and also just around the world in general? We haven’t talked about it much, but Saudi Arabia’s got their version of SNL making fun of Joe Biden in a way I never remember them ridiculing a president before. How much of all that is connected?

Saudi Arabian comedians are ridiculing Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/iVnqWDn30C

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 12, 2022

WRIGHT: Yeah. So two things. One, if you look at a very stark fact, which is the people the Pentagon and the White House are the same folks who designed and executed our 20-year war in Afghanistan and lost. They are all still there, and they are now putting together our plan and executing it for a war in Europe against the Russians, a nuclear armed state, not a bunch of sheep herders or goat herders in Afghanistan.

All right, so that’s kind of a big deal. We should probably be talking about that more and figuring how, hey, should we have a change of our own regime in this country both in the Pentagon and at the White House, maybe even the CIA, some of that intelligence leadership, the ODNI’s office?

So I think that’s what we have to first clean house. The second question is, how does the worldview us, right? Is that important? At some levels it can be, but ultimately, you know, we lead from the front, from not behind. So I think that the world is seeing failure on our part and the West in terms of the run-up to the war in Ukraine. Everybody knew it was coming, or should have. And then we sat back and we just let it happen. If you recall, Joe Biden told President Zelensky that basically he should step down, he should look at, you know, asylum in other parts of Europe or even the United States.

So I think that what you’re seeing in Ukraine is really a failure of leadership in Europe and it’s a failure of the United States, of Joe Biden in particular. And now we’re left with a mess. And there is no good way to anybody to get out of this.

BUCK: Speaking to Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA operations officer. Got a new podcast that just launched, The President’s Daily Brief. You should go check that one out.

Bryan, to that end, you were CIA, I was CIA. That name, that brand, that entity, institution, along with many others in the intelligence world, has taken an absolute beating in recent years. And people ask me, do you think it is something that can be reformed or does it really have to be rebuilt, give an all the stuff about Russia collusion, the deep state, have former director signing that letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation. What do you think, rebuilt or reformed?

WRIGHT: I think it has to be rebuilt, and I think that we start with the same approach that we took back in the 1970s when the CIA and the intelligence community was out of control, a number of committee investigations into exactly what was going on. And there was actually decent leadership at the time that said, yeah, we acknowledge that there’s a problem.

Let’s put it all out on the table, let’s be honest with the American people, and then let’s fix it. So you have to have a change in the White House because the president of the United States of course appoints the person that sits at Langley and then that person has to understand that a problem exists and then be dogged in trying to fix it and then of course you have to have oversight both in the House and in the Senate to recognize there’s a problem and want to fix it too.

So all the levers of power have to be in unison and have a uniformity of belief that things are bad. The data or the stories or both are pretty clear that things are really screwed up in the intelligence community. From my view, I think from a lot of us who’ve been former officers and watching the politicization of our intelligence community, our brothers and sisters who damn well know better, they know that they shouldn’t be doing this but they’re doing it.

So I think can be fixed. The question is what kind of leadership do we have to do it? Not gonna happen now. And let’s see if a Republican or conservative gets into office next time, if they have the backbone to get it done.

BUCK: Bryan Dean Wright, everybody. Check out his new podcast, The President’s Daily Brief. I’ll be giving it a listen. Bryan, great to have you, my friend. Come back soon.

WRIGHT: You got it.

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DeSantis Signs Legislation to Support Fatherhood

12 Apr 2022

BUCK: I’m gonna take a minute here to talk about something positive that is going on, positive steps, building things up, making things better in this country.

As feels like is often the case these days, that directs our attention toward the great state of Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis has signed legislation, signed a bill now a law, HB7065 which will direct millions of dollars to support men in the role of fathers, helping people be dads, assigning case managers to help fathers find jobs, assigning case managers to help dads transition if they had to serve time in prison, helping out dads.

Isn’t this an important and remarkable thing? Here you go.

Governor DeSantis signs legislation that will provide more than $70 million to support fatherhood. https://t.co/uXDPga790v

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 11, 2022

DESANTIS: I’ll be signing HB765, which helps support — 7065 — which helps support fathers and encourage their active participation in their children’s lives. Not only are they good initiatives, this comes with funding that will help make those initiatives effective. So, this bill is tied to $70 million in funding to provide a wide array of family and youth support through out Department of Children and Families, as well as our Department of Juvenile Justice, and they will be working very closely to support fatherhood throughout our state.

BUCK: We have a fatherlessness crisis in this country, Clay, and all the social science points to how that affects crime, drug use, dropouts, all of it.

CLAY: Yeah. There’s a great quote. One of the people that at that law being signed is Tony Dungy, who is a former Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneer coach.

A lot of NFL fans will know Tony Dungy well. He lives in the state of Florida now. One of the beneficiaries of that $70 million will be Tony Dungy’s “All Pro Dad”, and he spoke at this event and said, I asked how do these young boys, 19, 20, 21-year-olds end up in prison? This is a quote from Tony Dungy.

And he said the data reflects it’s not socioeconomic. It’s not racial. It’s not education. It’s none of that. Ninety-five percent of these boys didn’t grow up with their dad. And the data reflects that if you do not have a father or a father figure in your house, that boys in particular are particularly susceptible ill influences in their communities.

And so when a father is not present, when a father figure is not present in the household, 95% — it’s a staggering stat that Tony Dungy shared at the DeSantis press conference — 95% of the boys, young kids in prison there, are there because they may not have had a dad in their house.

So that’s money that’s being well spent. Credit to Ron DeSantis and Tony Dungy for coming together yesterday for that in Florida.

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Cancelling All Russians Is the New Leftist Virtue Signaling

12 Apr 2022

CLAY: I saw this story, which came out at the end of last week but I haven’t seen discussed that much. Buck, the Boston Marathon is banning Russian runners from being able to compete in the Boston Marathon. This feels crazy to me because, one, they’re runners. They don’t necessarily have anything at all to do with the decision to invade Ukraine.

And we don’t even know whether or not they agree or disagree with the decision of their government. And we just went to China and bent the knee in Beijing and allowed China to host the Olympics, which I didn’t agree with, the winter Olympics.

But I definitely do not agree with the United States not allowing athletes based on their country of origin to be able to compete in the Boston Marathon. This is a poor decision, I think, by the Boston Marathon people. What do you think?

BUCK: I think it’s absurd. It’s absurd. We’ve seen this in a lot of different contexts. They’ve prevented young Russian pianists from performing in places.

CLAY: Singers.

BUCK: They’ve prevented people from being Russian — they’ve blocked Russian singers even from, I believe, Metropolitan Opera here in New York City. I mean, they’ve been doing this — it’s completely insane. It’s immoral. There’s no basis for this.

The people who happen to be Russian who are spread all over the world bear no individual responsibility by fact of their Russianness for what’s going on here.

And I just think it points, Clay, to the larger reality that we keep seeing now of there are people and I believe that social media has played a very big part in this ’cause everybody who’s involved in social media feels like they have a personal brand and they get this little serotonin bump from the likes and the clicks and everything else and people that have nothing to do actual media for their business are still obsessed with how they present themselves to the world.

And whether it was people that were taking all the selfies in masks and how they take the virus so seriously and the photos of themselves getting shots, now it’s, you know, shot number four be with shot number five, whatever. Now it’s, you know, your avatar is a Ukraine flag and you’ll do anything, you’ll do anything to defeat — you’ll pay $50 a gallon to defeat Vladimir Putin.

There’s a war going on. We’re not in the war. It’s complicated. There are a lot of things happening. Putting the Ukraine flag up is, you know, — it means nothing, honestly, in the context of social media accounts. It doesn’t do anything. But it makes people feel like they have a part in this fight. And, unfortunately, I think that rush to be a part of the virtuous mob here results in some bad decisions. I mean, you want to put a Ukraine flag up, that’s fine.

I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t really do anything. But barring people being able to run in the marathon or professionally harming people because they’re Russian — I mean, it’s one thing to say this is like Putin’s best friend. Okay, fine. But someone happens to be Russian?

How far back do we take it? If someone’s Russian origin and they’ve lived in the United States for 10 years, are we to go back that there’s some kind of — there’s a need to punish them? At a time when we’re seeing what the state is willing to do to people in Shanghai for the collective good, this notion of punishing people for the collective good without any due process whatsoever should be something that gives everybody a lot of pause.

CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt at all. And one question that I’ve been asking and we’ve been discussing on this show is, to your point, Buck, much of the default social justice support for Ukraine is predicated on requiring people to do as little as possible, right?

You grab am image of the Ukrainian flag and put it up as your social media avatar, I don’t know how much longer that lasts. There’s going to be some new cause that rises up that I think pushes Ukraine, frankly, off of the front pages of the newspaper in the days and weeks and months ahead. Particularly if we end up in this eastern Ukraine, Russian stalemate. There’s not I narrative, right, when you’re just kind of lined up and engaged in a long, protracted struggle. Whether or not Kiev was gonna be taken, whether or not Zelensky was going to be safe, those are store lines that people can follow.

A bogged-down, trench warfare battle situation in eastern Ukraine is not. And to your point it eventually leads all of this, hey, Ukraine is the good guys, Russia is the bad guys, to really poor decisions, whether it’s not allowing somebody to sing as a part of the Metropolitan Opera because she happens to be Russian or I believe it’s 60, it’s Russian and Belarusian, over 60 runners are not being allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon.

BUCK: It’s also deeply — at some level I think you could argue deeply counterproductive, actually, to do this. What we want is for the Russian people to be furious with their leadership in Vladimir Putin.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Sanctions are really just punishing the Russian population. It’s not really punishing Vladimir Putin. He’s a billionaire many times over. It’s not punishing the oligarchs who are still in Russia who are living the high life irrespective of how many yachts are seized off the coast of England or in Dubai or wherever. Doesn’t actually change anything.

And I’m reminded of a very wise Polish friend of mine who once just quipped, “Nothing brings the Russians together like suffering.” And I’m talking about the Russian people inside of that country now.

If we’re going to create a world where being Russian is something that must be punished, what you actually end up doing is creating a siege mentality within the Russian federation for the population there saying, are we — I mean, am I not welcome nowhere else in the world if I were to visit? Am I gonna be treated like I’m some kind of a criminal?

And given what we’re doing, you could understand how that mentality, we’re making them poor. By the way, the ruble has apparently bounced back substantially. So our whole economic warfare plan so far has been unsuccessful.

And I think it was greatly overstated from the beginning, think of all the speeches that Biden gave, Clay, about the punishing sang, oh, these sanctions and more assassinations and — when have sanctions ever worked? It’s a fair question to ask.

CLAY: That’s what he said before we were implementing the sanctions. They kind of undercut the process. It’s Santa Fe he recognized that they weren’t gonna work and this is to a large extent a virtue signaling gesture on behalf of the larger world. But I think, to your point, Vladimir Putin, when we are canceling runners, it plays into his claim that Russians are being canceled. And so it actually ends up benefiting him in some way. And I saw this yesterday.

I was mentioning to you off air, I guess Russian state TV was running an interview that I did on Fox News where I said, hey, women shouldn’t be competing against biological men who decide to identify as women, and the Keith Olbermanns and some of the left wingers were like, oh, this is why you can’t trust Clay Travis. Look, they’re playing an interview of him on Russian television.

Keith, first, congrats on your @outkick woke title, the first title you’ve won in your life. Second, do you believe biological men should compete against women & win titles in women’s sports? Because I don’t. Nor do the vast majority of sports fans, in Russia or rest of the world https://t.co/aSHCEJyT8Y

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 11, 2022

And I tweeted back. I was like, well, I mean, the Russians agree with me like the vast majority of people in the world. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, if you’re in any way interested in fair competition, men shouldn’t be completing with women. But what they’re trying to do is the idea that Russia agrees with any American — and obviously they try to do this with Tucker in a large extent — it’s somehow trying to cancel Americans who are in any way being endorsed for any reason but Russian television.

I don’t have to agree with everything Russia does to agree with Russia that biological men shouldn’t be competing against women. But that’s where we are where they’re trying to cancel people like us in media.

BUCK: I think it’s important to remember what our American goals are here. Number one, that we don’t get drawn into a war with a country with thousands of nuclear missiles because of how that could being dramatically escalate. That’s step one for us. Right? And let’s be honest. That is all our primary goal.

CLAY: That is the number one goal.

BUCK: And then number two goal, inasmuch as we can try to help effect this, is bring the war to a close, to have the bullets and bombs stop so that people aren’t being killed and people aren’t being harmed.

And you need to think beyond the “Russia bad, Russia bad” context to get us there. Is it Russia’s war of aggression? Yes. Is Russia at fault for this? Yes. But how do we create an off ramp where Vladimir Putin will finally say, “Okay. We’ll stop this so people stop dying”?

That’s how adults think about this, not, oh, they’re gonna push all the Russians out of the country and then we’re gonna march all the way to Moscow mentality that seems to be taking hold with some people. Not a very helpful place for it to be.

Clay and Buck

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