Dr. Nicole Saphier on Masking the Friendly Skies

21 Apr 2022

BUCK: We have a fantastic guest — an expert, in fact — joining us now, Dr. Nicole Saphier, a full-time practicing physician here in the in New York City area where I am. She’s also a Fox News contributor and best-selling author of Make America Healthy Again and Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against Covid-19. Dr. Saphier, first-time on the show. Thanks so much.

DR. SAPHIER: Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

BUCK: So, what is your feeling on the back-and-forth now on the plane mask mandate? And also, what is it with all these epidemiologists who are wearing loosely draped cloth masks on their faces in the airport and thinking that it’s some kind of protest?

DR. SAPHIER: Yeah, it’s really… We laugh about it because it is such a disgrace what is happening right now in the back-and-forth, but it’s really quite devastating in terms of public health and just our overall trust of our public health entities. Pre-covid I would say that I was a huge supporter and proponent of the CDC and FDA.

Unfortunately, as we have seen throughout the course of the last two years, the political nonsense that’s happened. You know, the big issue with masking, it’s divisive, undoubtedly. But at the end of the day it really should just be scientific. It’s not about being Republican or Democrat or too cautious or not cautious enough.

But the bottom line is we have failed as a scientific community to prove or really disprove that masks work. And just like people who are refusing to fly when there was a mask mandate, the people who are now refusing not to fly because the mandate’s been removed, they’re both being dramatic and certainly not science driven.

CLAY: Dr. Saphier, first of all, thanks for coming on. This is Clay. I wish we could go back in type and sort of make public health decisions more rationally. One of the things that will happen whether we like it or not is 20 years from now there will be big, massively best-selling books likely to be written about the way — and beyond certainly — the way we responded to covid.

What do you think those books will be saying about many of the choices we made, whether it was masking, whether it was taking kids out of school, whether it was social distancing? In your mind — and I know it’s always hard to judge in the middle of historical moments. But is history going to say, “Hey, you know what? The United States did a really good job responding to covid,” or for the most part are we going to say, “Most of the things that we were prescribed to do didn’t really have that much of an impact”?

DR. SAPHIER: Well, as someone who actually wrote a book about the politicization of science and the way that we handled it —

CLAY: In fact, let me give you… Before you answer, let me go ahead and tell everyone out there listening all about this book. It’s called Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against Covid-19 and there’s also Make America Healthy Again. Historically we say what?

DR. SAPHIER: Well, Make America Healthy Again, just so you know, is a pre-covid book. Panic Attack came out during covid. And I wrote about it, and it’s the exact same issues that we’re dealing with. What we have failed to do from an American public health standpoint is we failed to prove that a lot of our measures actually worked.

And actually, looking back retrospectively, when it came to lockdowns and keeping kids out of schools, all of those, we have showed that there’s more damage than there’s actually benefit. And maybe we could have excused some of these measures that were done in haste in the first three months, in six months, when there was an unknown, when we didn’t know much about the virus.

We didn’t have the ability to test for it; we certainly didn’t know how to treat it. In fact, some of our treatments turned out to make things worse. And we didn’t have vaccine for it. Now fast-forward to two years in. That excuse is no longer there anymore. We have over 95% of our country has some level of immunity. Boosters, tests, treatments are all readily available.

Now is the time that we should have been having more freedom and tailor our actions to individual risk. These blanket universal mandates have no place in the United States anymore, and the biggest fumble in my opinion when it comes to how we responded to this pandemic is how we are still continuing to fight to keep some of these mandates when it’s been proven over and over again that they did not work.

BUCK: Dr. Saphier, one of the troubling realities of the pandemic this whole time in terms of the conversation about it and the policy discussion has been the number of doctors that — Clay and I both have this experience — who reach out or have been reaching out now going on two years saying, “I know that this policies is counterproductive” or “I know that what Fauci has said about this is untrue.

“But I don’t want to lose my medical license” or “I don’t want to have my peers or even my hospital,” let’s say, if you have admitting privileges, “turn against me publicly.” Do you feel like that is changing? Because I’m surprised at how few doctors are willing to come out now…? I mean, obviously you do. But how few doctors willing to come out and say a lot of medical establishment was wrong, owe us an apology to the American people, and needs to come clean about what was right and what wasn’t.

DR. SAPHIER: Well, more than two-thirds of physicians in the United States are employed by someone, and that person that employed them tends to be a large entity full of administrators who really kowtow to a lot of political movements. And unfortunately, we did allow a lot of political intervening in health care from when this restricted the elective surgeries in the beginning which resulted in people dying, as well as stuff that we’ve seen with the Affordable Care Act, which have allowed them to just completely destroy, in my opinion, the American health care system.

Unfortunately, what has happened that is that physicians all of a sudden were told that they weren’t allowed to prescribe certain things, we go way back when to hydroxychloroquine because that became so politicized. But it wasn’t so outlandish to think that someone may try hydroxychloroquine for this new illness that we had no means of treating. We had pre-existing data that hydroxychloroquine did have some anti-viral effect and actually it had been studied in the original SARS virus.

So for people to say we have no way to treat this virus, maybe we just try them with a long-standing, well-known, hydroxychloroquine. Whether it works or not, we don’t know yet but there’s always a risk versus benefit. But because President Trump touted it, all of a sudden, physicians were told you are not allowed to prescribe that medication.

Ultimately the data showed that that medication really didn’t work as well as many of the other treatments that we have now for covid-19, but at the beginning we could have at least tried. And now we dealt with the ivermectin and also we’re dealing with… Look at New York and New Jersey where the governors of the states have said health care workers have to be boosted.

Forget just the vaccine mandates, they have booster mandates for health care workers. And if there’s a medical exemption where the health care work doesn’t get the booster, they have to be tested weekly. Well, I can tell you what’s happening right now in these health care institutions. You have nonboosted employees who are having to cover shifts for boosted employees who have covid.

So as soon as vaccinates and boosters stopped preventing infection and their main role was to decrease severe illness and prevent people from being hospitalized, these mandates should have gone out the window. But unfortunately, they couldn’t let it go and they’ve continued to push them and we have seen health care works as well as first responders lose their job over anti-science mandates.

CLAY: Dr. Saphier, one of the moments when… You mentioned early on maybe in March and April, the, quote, unquote, experts — for a lot of people listening right now — that ended when all of these same experts said, “Yes, we need to have lockdowns. Yes, we need to have people social distancing,” and then they simultaneously endorse all of the BLM protests.

After being furious at people from protesting lockdown, they then came out and said, “Well, yeah, covid’s going on, but we don’t have any issue with hundreds of thousands of people marching close together all throughout the streets of America” after they had locked down so many people. That was, I think, for many people the beginning of this being super political in nature. Will we ever trust in this country people listening and the nation as a whole the, quote-unquote, public health experts again?

DR. SAPHIER: I think unfortunately we are going to have a very long road to get back just a modicum of the public health trust. I blame that solely, to be honest, on the CDC and a lot of the advisers to the president, because they had one role. They really had one job in the last couple years. Their job wasn’t to create policy or be spokesperson for the United States or any of that.

What their job was to do was to collect data and put forth good trials to determine what we can do as a nation and as individuals to lessen our individual and collective risk of covid-19. But they didn’t do that. Unfortunately, none of the decisions that have been made have been data driven at all. You’re talking about the Black Lives Matter protests.

Well, what about the fact that people…? They started shutting everything down and they started locking playgrounds so children couldn’t even go play outside. And yet they had to quickly start opening bars and restaurants because, well, that was gonna be allowed, but children still we aren’t allowed to go on playgrounds, and churches we aren’t allowed to open ’cause you couldn’t sing.

Unfortunately there was far too much hypocrisy that went on. None of it was data driven and here we are over two years into it and the CDC still has zero studies to even reference for the whole airplane-mask mandate debacle that we’re dealing with and that’s because they didn’t run any! Imagine if they did. They could have proven or disproven that the mandates work or didn’t work, and a judge wouldn’t need to be striking this down.

We wouldn’t have to be going and appealing. It would have fallen to the whole scientific consensus. But they didn’t do that! They didn’t do that. They had one job and they failed. And if I were to fail a hundred percent in my job, I would be fired. Why they’re not fired I don’t know.

BUCK: Speaking to Dr. Nicole Saphier. You all should go check out her books, she’s got two of them out there, Make America Healthy Again and Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science and the Fight Against Covid-19. Dr. Saphier, where do you think we’re gonna be as a country when it comes to covid policy? I mean, I think we’re gonna have probably covid cases in the fall, right?

I don’t think anyone believes it’s going away entirely. But going into the election, what do you think the position of the more extreme mitigation, masking, lockdown voices in the medical — and, let’s be honest, the Democratic — community? What are they gonna be saying then?

DR. SAPHIER: Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes I can’t understand what’s even coming out of the president and vice president’s mouth as is right now. But what I can tell you when it comes to the near future with covid-19, these blanket harsh restrictions — as it currently stands with the current variants and the wide availability of testing and boosters and treatments.

Iit does not seem that any of the universal restrictions have any place in our future public health policies. I think that it needs to come down to individual risk assessments, and people who are considered higher risk should talk to their physicians, get boosters, wear high-quality masks when they’re in congregated indoor settings.

But for the rest of the population, especially those with hybrid immunity where they’ve been vaccinated or boosted and have already recovered from covid-19, there’s ample data that demonstrates that that’s very strong protection. And if you want to get stronger protection, get a booster. It’s all risk-benefit. We cannot live our lives without risk.

If we spend every day avoiding risk, we are risking not living our lives. Life is not about getting to zero risk. That’s why we are able to get into cars every day. That’s why we eat fatty foods sometimes or I have an Oreo at night. Everything comes with risk. But that is what life is all about. And when it comes to covid-19, it is about the entire population. It is about determining what your individual risk is.

BUCK: Dr. Nicole Saphier, everybody. Doc, thanks for being with us. Hope you’ll come back.

DR. SAPHIER: Thanks for having me, guys.

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21 Apr 2022

BUCK: Clay, we just got the news. We just got the news that I guess we are not gonna have to worry about competing for our audience’s attention for the three hours we’re on daily with CNN+. CNN+ has been put out to pasture. I guess CNN+ has been sent to the glue factory, actually. It is no longer with us as a network, as of today. We’ve been talking about streaming, Netflix. They’ve gotten crushed. Big changes in the media and political landscape come as a result of all this stuff. But I gotta say: What was CNN thinking?

CLAY: CNN+, rest in peace, shutting down after just 21 days, Buck. I think that’s basically the length of Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries back in the day, if I’m not mistaken. This is maybe the biggest media failure of all time, when you consider that they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the launch of CNN+.

They said, “Hey, what America wants is more Brian Stelter. What America needs is Don Lemon on that wall. What you absolutely, positively will pay for is Jemele Hill and Rex Chapman breaking down the latest in the woke universe.” Buck, they got an average viewership in a day of under 10,000 people. Under 10,000 people for CNN+.

To put that into context, we have videos on OutKick, on our OutKick programming that do infinitely better. OutKick is bigger with the eight shows that we do or whatever than CNN+ was, and, Buck, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars — hundreds of millions of dollars, on the belief that people were committed to CNN, despite the fact that no one watches it for free on their cable and satellite packages, by and large. This is one of the greatest miscalculations in the history of media. I don’t remember… I know the Quibi thing was a huge mess. I think that was Katzenberg, if I’m not mistaken.

BUCK: The Daily Beast, you remember when that launched? Actually, the Daily Beast, in its initial years of publication I think lost a hundred million dollars but over the course of a few years.

CLAY: Of several years.

BUCK: Yeah, over several years.

CLAY: So basically, light this much money on fire. Hundreds of millions of dollars they spent on the launch, and to have this few people respond and to shut the entire thing down after 21 days — effective April 30th CNN+ will no longer exist — is an unprecedented failure in the world of media. And I gotta tell you, Buck, when I saw this, my phone blew up with text messages ’cause I didn’t even see the news breaking and everybody was like, “CNN+ is done,” I just had such a great smile on my face and I bet a lot of people sort of without even intending to smile I bet also a lot of people out there listening to us right now also are smiling.

BUCK: What do you think the over-under is on when Chris Wallace shows up on The Masked Singer or perhaps Dancing With the Stars?

CLAY: (laughing) It’s not gonna be The Masked Singer ’cause that’s a Fox product. Somebody tweeted me. “Worst decision,” and this is fun, you know, from a career art perspective. Back in the day remember Chris O’Donnell? He passed on the Titanic role.

BUCK: Was he Robin in the really bad Batman movie?

CLAY: Chris O’Donnell, Chris O’Donnell turned down the Leonardo DiCaprio Titanic role to play Robin in that Batman movie.

BUCK: Oof!

CLAY: One of the all-time worst Hollywood decisions. Obviously, Leonardo DiCaprio has become a monster star. I don’t even know what Chris O’Donnell does now. So he turned down the role of Jack in Titanic, and somebody tweeted me and I retweeted, didn’t make that choice, could probably get some great responses out here.

BUCK: Chris Wallace joining CNN+ to leave Fox News, better or worse decision than Chris O’Donnell becoming Robin to turn down the Titanic role snickers I think you gotta put that to the people. I think you got a phone a friend on that one as in our audience and put that out in a poll —

CLAY: Open phone lining. Some of you guys — and there may be other things that people think of from a career-art perspective. I mean, some people might say Johnny Depp marrying Amber Heard, given the fact that that’s been on news for the past couple of days. But I think this is going to be sort of a seismic shockwave event, ’cause some people say, “Why do I care about CNN+?”

This is a sign. CNN has new owners in the Discovery/Time Warner merger, and they’re looking at the data now with fresh eyes, and they are saying, “My goodness. To me this is a test of the overall value of the CNN brand and how much it’s liked by the people who consume it — and the answer is: Not at all.”

BUCK: I think there’s a number of things that all come together here that are of interest, of general interest. One is Donald Trump broke CNN.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Donald Trump almost single-handedly — and it was Jeff Zucker pushing it over there — managed to turn what could still front as a journalism first, left-leaning to be sure, and I was a contributor there for a couple years when it was in this phase when it was still in the… You know, Kayleigh McEnany was with me, I was over there, Ben Ferguson was over there. We had conservatives that would — and, you know, Tucker Carlson had his own show.

People forget that at CNN for years and years. That’s where he got his start. CNN in the Trump era went essentially full left-wing activist woke in a way that’s irreparable to the perception of the public about what the brand is. I do think they’re trying very hard now, ’cause it’s really about the Ukraine war.

The whole channel is effectively about the Ukraine war right now. They’ve moved even away from insurrection and January 6th coverage. I think they’re trying to reestablish themselves as a news entity in the minds of the public because they just became a kind of more boring, less honest version of MSNBC.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Which is a lib propaganda network, but everybody knows it. You know what I mean, everyone understands it and agrees that MSNBC is Democrat, is liberal. And CNN I think in a lot of ways, because it’s such a legacy media brand, insulated the thinking of various anchors and executives over there from the reality of if you have to compete in a marketplace when now people have a lot of choices… You know, streaming is very different from the cable news world. Cable news is very difficult to get on, it’s very expensive, and there’s a lot of incumbency protection for cable news networks.

CLAY: Limited actual options.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: Right? Whereas you can sit down on YouTube and watch anything from anywhere from any perspective. There’s three or four options for news if you want to sit down come from television.

BUCK: And for people saying, “Oh, but, Buck, I’ve got 500 channels.” Yeah, but to be in the news spectrum you have to be in certain channels in a certain zone and have to have a certain leverage of coverage in households. Anyway, that may be a little inside baseball but the point here is, this is just a massive bellyflop.

It’s stunning to watch this play out, but it’s really not surprising. Like, wouldn’t…? Clay, you sold your business to Fox, you know, successful business with streaming. Wouldn’t you have been shocked in all of a sudden CNN was drawing — CNN+, I mean, was drawing — half a million, a million viewers a night?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That would have been stunning.

CLAY: It would have been stunning. And, Buck, I think you’re right because what CNN not only did under Jeff Zucker before they forced him out during the Trump era was there are a lot of people out there listening to us right now who had CNN pegged as “the most trusted name in news,” right, in the context of back in the Gulf War, I remember being a kid.

You would come home and you would turn on CNN, and they had Bernard Shaw reporting from Baghdad or Kuwait or wherever it was. The first television war was the way that that was characterized. And you would put it on, and you trusted them to bring you the news. And they totally gave up the decades that they had branded themselves to turn into an anti-Trump network. He broke them. He really did.

BUCK: You obviously have a history at CNN.

CLAY: I’m banned.

BUCK: Being banned, which is amazing.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: That is like being banned from North Korea, by the way. That is a badge of honor.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: If North Korea says that Clay Travis and Buck Sexton are not welcome to visit again, you’d be like, “Ah, that’s pretty cool.” But I can just, from personal experience — to give folks a sense — I think I first started doing occasional CNN maybe 2014, 2015. So it’d be like pre-Trump era and Jeff Zucker himself came up to me once and said…

I did some analysis of a Russian assassination that occurred right near the Kremlin in real time on TV and had my… You know, you have a lawyer hat; I had my CIA hat, and he came over and was like, “That was such astute analysis.” They used to have me on with their top terrorism analysts on panels when there was breaking news about major terrorist attacks, I was one of the people they would call…

You know, would be me and Paul Cruikshank and a handful of other folks. Not saying I was the top of the list, but I was one of the people that they would draw upon. By the time Trump was running and I started being a pro-Trump voice on the air, I was told that there were conversations in the control room when I’d be on air about how they really needed to dig into my background because they thought I never actually worked at the CIA.

That was how crazy it made them. That was how… You know, I could show them briefing photos from the Oval Office. I’m sure they still wouldn’t believe it. It’s a deep fake, right? The point is that was how much they were broken by the Trump phenomenon that they would go, even with someone like me, from, “Wow, this guy really knows his stuff,” to, “Oh, my God, he likes Trump? He must be lying about everything!”

CLAY: And it’s well said there too. And to your point earlier from my background in media, what I have found is, people pay, are willing to pay… I don’t mean like you pay for a cable subscription. People pay based on strong brand affinity. In other words, if you’re subscribing to something that you actually directly pay for.

I mean, the cable bundle is such an amazing business because most people don’t realize that they’re paying for 400 channels or whatever ’cause you pay a hundred or $150 a month, whatever you do, and that money gets redistributed to all the channels. When you actually have to make a choice to pay for a brand, what matters more than anything else is brand affinity. Do you like and trust that brand?

So your point, I would have been stunned if CNN+ worked because I don’t really believe there are that many people who are like, “Man, you know who I love? Don Lemon! I can’t get enough of Anderson Cooper.” I mean, you might not like Chris Cuomo, but I actually think he had stronger brand affinity. People aren’t going to pay money for Jake Tapper, right?

I just don’t believe that they are. Now, I think there are people in media. Whether you like it or not, people will pay for Rachel Maddow, right? They trust her on the left; they’ll pay for her. People will pay for Tucker, they’ll pay for Sean directly. CNN doesn’t have any of that. They’re kind of still in the squishy middle where there isn’t strong brand affinity. Nobody’s paying for Brian Stelter, Jemele Hill, or Rex Chapman so I would have been stunned beyond belief if this worked. I did think it was gonna last, Buck, longer than 21 days.

BUCK: You know, they do have some real journalists over there, I mean, to be fair, and some of their anchors are more fair-minded than others. And so I wonder if now, with the massive failure of CNN+ — massive CNN failure — maybe now necessity try to go back to, at some level, the CNN roots, if you will, of being a more… They’re never gonna be objective, folks, okay? It’s a question of where do they go on the scale but, you know, I mean, Clarissa Ward has done some very good foreign affairs, foreign policy reporting.

CLAY: Yeah, she does terrific stuff.

BUCK: She does brave stuff and knows her stuff and she’s the real deal. And, you know, they could be more a network that at least is center left. And I think they may have to go in that direction, otherwise, I don’t know what happens.

CLAY: Well, they may get a bailout because they could just go to the anti-Trump network because I think we both think he’s gonna run, and then they just run the Piers Morgan interview and the outrage and The Trump Show and continue that for basically a couple of years. It will be interesting to see whether they’ll go and take that sugary sweetness high which destroys their brand or stick to, as your point, Clarissa Ward on the ground at Ukraine.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: My phone is continuing to blow up with people making jokes about CNN+ shutting down. One of my friends texted, “Iraq lasted longer in Desert Storm than CNN+ did” as I was reading.

BUCK: I think that might even be factually accurate.

CLAY: Yeah. I think Saddam held out longer during Desert Storm than CNN+ did, and a lot of people want to weigh in, by the way. We’ll take some of your calls here as we — let’s be honest — gleefully tap dance on the grave of CNN+. I just wanted to read this to you, Buck. I thought this can’t be real so I went and made sure that it wasn’t one of those fake Twitter accounts.

CNN+, the streaming service that was hyped as one of the most signifiant developments in the history of CNN, will shut down on April 30, just one month after it launched. https://t.co/K92mv8qBE7

— CNN (@CNN) April 21, 2022

CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account, which has 60 million followers — @CNNBreak tweeted — “CNN+, the streaming service that was hyped as one of the most significant developments in the history of CNN, will shut down on April 30th, just one month after it launched.” That… CNN having breaking news about CNN+ shutting down, I feel like we’re through the looking glass, Buck, when I see that, which is absolutely fantastic. 1-800-282-2882.

BUCK: Let’s take some calls.

CLAY: Who we got first?

BUCK: By the way, I generally don’t celebrate people having professional difficulty. CNN tried to destroy a presidency and wants to ruin all of its media opponents on a regular basis and get them canceled and destroyed. So we will joyride through the wreckage of CNN+. I have no qualms on this.

CLAY: I will tap dance on their grave, Buck, given that they literally banned me for life for saying that I believed in the First Amendment and boobs. So we’ll take your calls some when we come back.

BUCK: You should make an offer for CNN+ right now.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Add it into the OutKick umbrella and turn it around.

CLAY: $28.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Current TV, which was Al Gore and some others funded, they bought, what was it, I think they bought a channel, maybe was it from Al Jazeera or something. They flipped over a channel, gave them a hundred million homes of access, paid lunatic guy Keith Olbermann.

CLAY: Oh, I remember that.

BUCK: They paid Keith Olbermann $10 million a year to sit in what looked like his mother’s basement and do this ridiculous show, and it never got above — I think the highest it ever got was something like 5,000 viewers or whatever, paying him $10 million a year, folks. That completed evaporated. There was nothing left of that when it was done and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy that channel because buying a cable channel and flipping was very expensive. So that’s a pretty… But everyone forgets that. No one even remembers that epic —

CLAY: That also was a slow moving one. Like, what is it, 21 days.

BUCK: No that lasted a couple years, I think, maybe 18 months before they realized this is just a disaster.

CLAY: They basically lit $300 million on fire.

BUCK: How’d they spend so much money on something that…? Where did that money even go? This is the fire festival of media brand launches. I don’t even know how they did this.

CLAY: They hired, first of all, a lot of people and gave them a lot of money and those people probably —

BUCK: They just gave $12 million to Chris Wallace. You could have somebody more compelling and more interesting for a fraction of that cost.

CLAY: So and then they sent people all over the world to do this programing. Like, I was reading, you know, this idiot Rex Chapman. They sent him to, like, three different continents to do an interview show, and I don’t know how they… But the money was ridiculous.

BUCK: And, by the way, does Jeff Zucker avoid this on his resume, because it was all built by Zucker, right? I mean, the run-up to this had to all be a Zucker decision so in a sense him being pushed out over the, what was it, the sexual harassment but also the Cuomo thing. It was kind of a number of things that came together over there. But this was a Jeff Zucker project. Had to be.

CLAY: It’s a great point. I think probably they would not have KO’d it as quickly if he were still there, would be my bet, because there’s no way he could stay on at CNN with this big of a failure, right? But this way with Discovery coming in now, they’re basically bearing the dead body problems of CNN.

BUCK: Yeah. I mean, Jeff Zucker leaving CNN is almost like, you know, the guy in the crow’s nest or whatever from the Titanic getting fired because his cigarette break was too long about two minutes before it hit the iceberg, right, like he just sort of evades being the guy who missed the big one here, messed it up. It’s funny, I would think…

Clay, our lines here lit up, I mean, you know, producer Greg has been… It’s a shame he doesn’t have eight hands and eight phones and ears and everything all at once because we’ve got everyone lining up to weigh in on this. Dave in Scottsdale, Arizona, what do you got for us, Dave?

CALLER: Yes, Clay and Buck. Does CNN+ knock New Coke from the top spot of the biggest corporate fails of all time?

BUCK: (laughing)

CLAY: There’s so many… That’s a great point. New Coke was a disaster. Remember New Coke back in the day?

BUCK: Remember clear Pepsi, was it clear Coke, both, there was a clear version of it they came out with and then SNL had a funny sketch where it was like, “Clear gravy. Clear sandwich bread.” So, yeah.

CLAY: That, by the way, other things for sports fans out there, Mike Price was memorably hired as the football coach of Alabama, went to a strip club. Everything blew up. He was the head coach of Alabama longer than CNN+ has lasted.

BUCK: Was Anthony Scaramucci, the White House communications director longer?

CLAY: The Mooch.

BUCK: Was the Mooch the white comms director for Trump longer than CNN+? No, it’s close. I think the Mooch lasted 12 days. I think he lasted… I’m just guessing, but I think it was 12 days before he decided to call up one of the most anti-Trump hostile reporters imaginable and go on a profanity laced tirade the likes of which I couldn’t even begin to tell anybody about on air.

CLAY: Crystal Pepsi according to Ali, by the way.

BUCK: Was Crystal Pepsi, that was the clear version of Pepsi with somehow having the food coloring in it you’re like, “This isn’t just sugar water that is rotting my teeth and mind.”

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: Not that soda’s bad.

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Nationwide, Parents Are Angry at the Left’s Agenda

21 Apr 2022

BUCK: Here is Jen Psaki when she’s — and I want you to listen closely. We want to play this whole sound bite for you. Listen closely to the White House press secretary, who just a couple days ago was literally sobbing — I’m not exaggerating, sobbing in an interview — about how mean the Parental Rights in Education Bill is. They say they don’t want to teach your kids this stuff.

Listen to what the White House press secretary claims.

PSAKI: The law is not about teaching sex education. It’s about teaching about gender identity, so what do you do if a kid in one of these elementary schools says, “What about Sally? Sally has two moms” or “I’m not sure if I’m a girl or a boy”? I mean, these are kids who are experiencing these moments in their lives! I also think that these are not… There is not a big record of there being either sex education or extensive gender identity education in these schools, and this is creating a problem — or a political cudgel — about an issue that I don’t think exists.

In which Psaki insists it’s essential that gender identity be taught to small children, and a moment later says this is a made up issue and nobody teaches gender identity to small children https://t.co/6RkMtNYdhn

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) April 21, 2022

CLAY: Well, first of all, she just said that the issue exists.

BUCK: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: Okay? So, you can’t say what do you say to a boy or girl who asks whether they are a boy or girl? I have an answer for you. As someone who has had three kids through kindergarten and currently has a first grader, you tell them, “Boys have penises. Girls have vaginas. Go to the bathroom of your gender. You are one or the other!” (laughing) This is not a complicated question.

Anybody who has ever had a 5-year-old has had to say, “Hey, boys go to the boys bathroom, girls go to the girls bathroom. We don’t need to confuse the gender of a freaking kindergartener,” okay? So, the fact that she says this isn’t an issue, like within 30 seconds of saying, “What do you say when this occurred?” the answer is:

You are not in the businesses of telling someone that they are a different gender than what their file purports to show when they are kindergarteners, first graders, second graders, and third graders. And the idea, Buck… I would be furious if my first grader came home and said, “Hey, today at school one of the teachers said that because I had a pink shirt on today that I must be a girl and they sent me to the girls’ bathroom.”

I mean, that is crazy talk. We know what boys and girls are! There was a great meme of Amy Coney Barrett. You know, when we just had the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings, she couldn’t answer what a woman was, and there was that… Remember Amy Coney Barrett memorably had like a note card in front of her and there was a meme where it just says, “Boys have penises; girls have vaginas.” I don’t understand how this has become confusing or complicated for the Democrat Party.

BUCK: That’s one of more memorable statements of fact from Kindergarten Cop, for those who don’t remember it.

CLAY: Yes. Evidently, it’s a hateful film now historically.

BUCK: “It’s not a tumor.” We all remember Kindergarten Cop. And I do want to tie this in, though, Clay to why the Libs of TikTok hit piece also happened now, because you go to Jen Psaki — and that’s exactly the right analysis of this. Jen Psaki says this isn’t a problem after saying it is a problem, because they can’t get the story straight.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You saw this with CRT. You see this with the left a lot. You saw it with inflation. But in the CRTs are closer more analogous situation, say, “That’s not CRT. No one’s teaching CRT in school. Oh, you can’t know what CRT is unless you have a PhD,” to, “Damn it, they’re not letting us teach CRT anymore,” right?

CLAY: Yeah. (laughing)

BUCK: They go through these processes of trying to hide what’s happening and lie and many of you direct. Exact the same thing here. Why does this tie into Libs of TikTok? So everyone understands, Libs of TikTok ends up being on Tucker Carlson’s show and ends up being on Facebook and other platforms, too. So it really was just a feeder for them.

But it was showing people, teachers who were saying how important it is to them to teach 5-year-olds crazy stuff. So Jen Psaki’s life is complicated to lie to you, the concerned parents of America, about what your kids are being taught, because she’s out there saying, “This is just about like what if somebody has gay parents?”

No, that’s actually not what this is about. It’s about teachers who want to have Pronoun-Choice Day and tell a little boy who’s 5 who says, “I feel like a girl today,” “Oh, let’s chase this down and not tell your parents and maybe in a few years we’ll even have a transition for you.” That’s what this is actually about.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And that’s why they were trying to shut down Libs of TikTok because some libs were saying it out loud.

CLAY: No. There’s no doubt. And this is when you know that you are over the target, when you start taking flack. What’s happening to me — and we talked about this earlier in the week, Buck — I really feel like the Democrats — I saw somewhere between this — are trying to tank. I said, “What could they possibly be thinking on all of this?”

And someone sent me an email, and I thought it was an interesting email regarding the masking and decisions that are being made. And they said, “The only thing I can think, Clay,” ’cause I agree with you and Buck, this was the email was saying, “Hey, it seems like they’re intentionally picking the worst argument of every single issue,” right?

If you had to sum up the Biden White House, Buck, you and I even if we were being hired to try to spin for them, there’s almost nothing he could Schwinn in their favor, and the argument was, “I feel like,” and this is his argument but I’m curious whether it might actually be true, “they are trying to set up to be able to have all mail-in ballots again in November by saying covid still hasn’t gone away, and that is their safety net.”

That’s the only thing — and I’m sitting here trying to think, why would they be arguments in favor of the DOJ even appealing this mask situation? That’s the only thing I could think, Buck, because otherwise, everything they’re doing, the Bidas Touch is destroying everything that he touches.

BUCK: I gotta say I hope — I really hope — that every Democrat running for office in Michigan, Wisconsin —

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia. I hope that they really dig in. I hope they really get as deep as they can on the issue of, “It is a core foundational right in society to have publicly funded bureaucrats telling your 5-year-old that it’s time for gender transition talk!” I want them all to run on this. Their party believes it.

They should have to defend it. I want them to explain why the White House is putting out, “We need preadolescents to be having gender-transition surgery as well as hormones and that that is standard of care — and if you don’t believe that you’re a bigot.” Let’s have them run on this. Go for it, guys. Go for it.

CLAY: Amen. It’s child abuse! It is without a shadow of a doubt in both of our opinions — and almost the vast majority of the American public as well. It’s child abuse to be trying to change someone’s gender when they are under 18 years old. It’s shameful. Indefensible.

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Leftist Mayors Should All Face the Mayor Lightfoot Question

21 Apr 2022

BUCK: People are recognizing that, not only is Joe Biden bad at his job, which we have to point out here ’cause it’s the president — and you’re noticing everything is getting more expensive, more dysfunctional, and the lies don’t even make sense anymore. But beyond that the leadership of major American cities — and I can speak to that from personal experience here in New York City. But how is the mayor of Nashville, by the way?

CLAY: Not good.

BUCK: Not good.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Okay. Fair enough. I had a feeling. But the mayors of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago — just go down the list of major American cities that come to mind here —

CLAY: Who loves their mayor? That’s a good question. Who’s out there right now?

BUCK: Mayor Suarez in Miami, I will say.

CLAY: Yeah. Yeah.

BUCK: A lot of people, including conservatives I know, actually are pretty pro-Suarez. But, anyway, the mayor of Chicago has had a really rough go in the job, right? It’s not been going well. Lori Lightfoot has had… (laughs) It’s not been a good tenure in this position, so much so that you just had some random journo — I don’t even know who this guy is — ask, “Hey, since you’re so bad at your job, you’re not running for reelection, right?”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Play clip 1.

REPORTER: “How could you possibly even consider running for re-election as mayor of the city of Chicago after all the harm you’ve caused?”

LIGHTFOOT: “I don’t think I need to dignify your comments.” pic.twitter.com/aD5uN6Q1nx

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 20, 2022

BUCK: Can I just say, first of all, she’s clearly rattled.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Because I can say from the New York City municipal-cover, City Hall press corps, you come at the mayor with something like this, you find yourself getting the cold shoulder from all the administrators and bureaucrats. Clay, he’s just saying what’s obvious: You’re so bad at your job, how could you possibly think you should run for reelection? I hope Joe Biden’s listening.

CLAY: Yeah. By the way, I also think that’s a hundred percent a fair question. I mean, I’m thinking about it from the context of let’s take it outside of — and I understand, I think you’re right, that many times people pull their punches when they cover politicians ’cause they’re worried about whether their officials are gonna continue to speak to them.

But when you have a bad coach, the coach gets questioned all the time about why he deserves to keep his job, and that’s basically what Lori Lightfoot is, right? I mean, she is, in theory, the coach of Chicago, right? When you’re the mayor, you’re supposed to build up the city into something better than it was, just like you’re the coach of a team.

So I think that’s a hundred percent a question that’s well within bounds. I would think a huge number of people in Chicago would want the mayor to have to answer the question: Given how poorly you’ve done, why do you deserve reelection? That’s the very essence of the question she would have to answer to get reelected.

BUCK: I think in a lot of ways, in general, national-level politicians, people identify with based upon values and narrative and the storyline, right? The president or even the senator from your state. When you get down to that local level, if you live in a city or a town, the mayor, it really should just be all about results, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Is the trash being picked up? Are your streets safe? Are they clean? And is everything functioning, you know, are the traffic lights working, are they getting fixed, are the poet holes being filled in and, you know, that’s why Mayor Bloomberg, for example, in New York, guy’s an anti-gun lib. I disagree with on some things, very competent.

He was a very solid mayor of New York City. I know people don’t like that when he ran for president but I’m just saying he was a good mayor for the city of New York which obviously was a Democrat enclave. Lori Lightfoot is just not good at the job, Clay, and this is what… Just not good at this.

CLAY: Actually, atrocious at her job would be a way to describe it. And that’s the essence of what media should do, in my opinion. Speak truth to power. You’ve done a really bad job, why do you deserve an opportunity to run again?

BUCK: It’s results.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: When your town council, when you’re the mayor of your city and really the governor of your state, too, these days; but when they are bad at their jobs, you feel it and you see it and you know it — and major cities with Democrat leadership all across the country are just a mess. Real kind of a sad laughingstock.

CLAY: Well, I mean, this is how we got Giuliani and Bloomberg in New York City, right? The Democrats had so failed for so long that people finally threw up their hands and said, “We gotta try something different.” I’m curious whether that might start to become a prevailing narrative at many different big cities across the country where they’re all failing.

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Mouse Slap! Florida House Passes DeSantis Bill

21 Apr 2022

CLAY: This just happened and is going to turn into a big story. Florida Republican House lawmakers just approved a new congressional map. Remember yesterday the Florida State Senate did this. So there will be four new Republican seats in the House based on this map. They also — and this going to get a monster amount of attention. They also have stripped Disney of its special powers, and they ended Disney’s Big Tech exemption. On now to the governor’s desk. Ron DeSantis will be signing this.

Let’s talk about each of these and why they are significant. First, Buck, let’s talk about the congressional map. We talked yesterday… Ryan Girdusky was fantastic. Encourage you to go listen to him breaking all this down. But effectively, Florida has added four Republican seats, which will count out the additions that New York, Illinois, and California — cancel out, I should say — have tried to do to add seats to the Democratic tally. So, assuming that this is upheld by the courts and a lot of these battles, a lot of these redistricting battles end up in the courts, four more seats to Republicans.

And you go to that in context, we are five seats from a Republican-controlled House from Kevin McCarthy taking back the gavel from Nancy Pelosi. So, Florida by itself is almost flipping that. Obviously, other states are making their own move. But this is big, number one, for the larger national political landscape.

BUCK: It’s one of the few times I can think of where a Republican politician anywhere has done something other than just talk a big game about pushing back on woke corporations. Woke corporations — understand this, everybody — were really the vanguard of both BLM propaganda and of covid lockdowns over the last two years.

Woke corporations, yes, they’re trying to indoctrinate your kids and trans ideology and all the stuff that’s going on. They support all that. Clearly, Disney does. But they have been used and really in concert with the White House. I mean, let’s understand: The White House openly says, “We’re telling Facebook to get rid of more disinformation online,” ’cause that’s more powerful than any other platform of information dissemination out there.

The White House is straight-up using these corporations. The Democrat Party is using companies as political weapons. So we can either sit there and say, “Well, we would like a neutral space where commerce and capitalism,” or we can say, “You know what? There are gonna be consequences for this too.” You can go back… I’ve talked to people in the ad industry about this for many, many years — and this is before things got quite so woke.

I remember having conversation with somebody at a big ad agency years ago and said, “You know what the difference in left and right is? The left doesn’t even have to boycott. They just do enough that the companies are always looking over their shoulder, always concerned about the possibility of one.” When was the last time the left really organized a boycott against a conservative company?

They’ll do it, but generally speaking, it’s just the threat of that’s enough to get companies to try to preempt. Think about how tilted the battlefield is in their in favor of on that circumstance. Now with Disney, we’re seeing real action taken — and, Clay, if Disney doesn’t like it, they can just build their own Florida.

CLAY: Yeah, I saw you tweet that out, and so that’s the second part of this. This is really significant, and certainly social media has made that worse. Because, Buck, I’ve been there; you’ve been there, but a lot of companies haven’t. When suddenly you have 500 or a thousand people angry and tweeting at you, it feels like everybody in the world the first time you go through this cares about whatever your issue is.

When the reality is, for 24 hours people are gonna get fired up, there’s gonna be a tempest, and then that tempest almost always passes. What DeSantis has done here to Disney is let it be known that there are consequences for left-wing, woke Disney politics, and the consequences are going to be pretty significant. And the reality is, despite what Governor Jared Polis might be trying to say in Colorado which got some attention…

“Oh, why don’t you just move here.” Yeah, are they gonna pick up Disney World and relocate it from Orlando, and all of the hotels, and put it in Colorado — and, by the way, has awful weather where nobody is gonna be want to be outside? Even if they could relocate Disney, I don’t think they would be picking Colorado, but they can’t.

They can’t relocate Disney World. They’ve got all this land. They’ve built all the hotels. Disney needs Florida at this point more than Florida needs Disney, and so what they have done is when Disney bought all this land back in 1969. Basically the state of Florida said, “Hey, you get to be judge, jury, and executioner over all of the decisions that are going to be made with these tens of thousands of acres. You want to build a new lakes…?”

BUCK: When it comes to development, right? This isn’t like they’re setting up —

CLAY: They don’t get to put somebody in prison. But in terms of the… In terms of the master plan, you want to build a new hotel? Good. You want to build a new lake to have right in the center of Epcot? Good. You can do that. But what, reportedly, Buck… They also get tax abatements and all sorts of benefits from this.

It’s hard to know the exact dollar value of this, but there’s a story in the Wall Street Journal, I believe, saying it’s worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Disney doesn’t like to talk about it because of the benefits that they’re getting, and now that’s gone. As soon as Ron DeSantis strokes his pen when this bill gets to him right there with the House and the Senate bill that they have passed.

So when he signed this, boom, this just disappears. And so this is a different level of battle. And the ultimately calling card on this, the referendum on it is going to be what happens in this election in November? Because if DeSantis wins by seven or eight points — and I think he probably is going to win by seven or eight points — that’s gonna be seen as a seismic shock wave in what was considered to be such a battleground state just a few years ago.

BUCK: I just also have to ask, why there aren’t more Republican governors — I posed this question earlier on in the week — who see what’s going on in Florida? Look, let’s be honest. There have been articles written about this. People have been saying leadership of the Republican Party right now — or I should say, the sense of the Republican leadership’s base of power has moved a bit from Texas —

— which has been the stalwart red state that people felt like they could go to for freedom — to Florida over the course of the pandemic. Now, Texas is still great, and there’s still a lot of obviously fantastic stuff going on there as a state even with Governor Abbott in charge. But you have to wonder why aren’t more of them seeing what’s going on and following here?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Because it’s not like Ron DeSantis… You know, think about what could have happened. He could have gone against the consensus on covid and he could have picked some of these battles and been politically destroyed over them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He could have. If they had a much higher percentage of not just covid cases but covid fatalities per capita than comparable states, if they had had economic ruination because they wouldn’t go along with the wokeness, if 80% of Floridians or whatever had disapproved of the parental rights bill. He keeps taking risks, he keeps throwing it out there and hitting home runs.

And you wonder, why aren’t these other Republican governors — some of whom probably listen to this show or at least their staffs do — follow in his footsteps. Corporate money for their campaigns? I really don’t know. Are they just…? They don’t have the stomach for the fight? Yeah, they don’t have the stomach for the fight.

CLAY: Because it’s hard, Buck. Initially the natural reaction among I think Republican politicians is, when the mainstream media comes for you, you curl up in the fetal position and hope they leave. And what DeSantis is natural instincts — and I think this is Trumpian in nature and I think that’s where the most lasting legacy of Trump may well be.

So many Republican politicians were terrified when the New York Times or CNN or the Washington Post or MSNBC came for them. And they would beg for forgiveness and/or run from whatever policy was getting a lot of attention. What Trump did was say, “No, I’m gonna own it,” and DeSantis is, I believe, a particularly politically adroit and skilled individual who has, along with his staff, correctly diagnosed that most of the outrage that exists in this country is not representative of the masses.

So if you just withstand a little bit of outrage and own your opinion, most of the time it fades. They’ve gotten used, the left wing has, to being able to bully people into doing exactly what they want. And when you don’t do it, you suddenly realize there ain’t a lot of power behind the punch of the left wing when you stare them down. It’s a lesson that everybody should be taking. Certainly, it’s one that we’ve been trying to instill in people with this show by saying exactly what we believe and owning it no matter what the reaction is.

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Bumbling Biden Dazed and Confused Over Title 42

21 Apr 2022

CLAY: We got some wins, Buck. The mask mandate dying, thanks to that great decision from the Florida judge. We’ve got CNN+ shutting down. Elon Musk furthering his battle to win control of Twitter. Unfortunately, we still have Joe Biden as president, and I wanted to play this cut for you because Title 42 is scheduled to end on May the 23rd. We have been talking about this for several weeks on this program.

That’s going to lead to the southern border opening up, people being able to flood across at a level that has never been seen before in American history. This is a big topic of discussion. Joe Biden was asked about this at a press conference earlier today, and I want you to listen. He answers as if he has been asked about the mask mandate. This is not a man who is doing very well in terms of his physical health from just a dementia perspective.

Listen to this and tell me whether this is a person who should be leading the Free World. Play cut 4.

Joe Biden gets asked about Title 42 at the Southern border. Answers question about mask mandates on planes. Seriously, this man has full fledged dementia. What a total mess. pic.twitter.com/pV5RS7cWCb

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 21, 2022

CLAY: Okay. So, he got totally confused there. The White House, as they always end up doing, had to issue a point of clarification. They said, “I want to clarify…” This is Joe Biden theoretically speaking: “I want to clarify that in comments at the conclusion of my remarks this morning, I was referring to the CDC’s mask mandate, and there is no Department of Justice action on Title 42.”

So, Buck, Title 42 is not some unexpected question that Joe Biden was going to get at the press conference. This is something that has been among the most widely discussed storylines in all of political talk for the past several weeks. The fact that he got that confused with the mask mandate is just evidence of how out to lunch he is in terms of being able to manage on a day-to-day basis.

BUCK: I honestly… You know, I’m mad at the people who keep propping this up. I’m mad at the people who keep saying the emperor has clothes on when we know because Joe Biden, yeah, he should also have known better. He should have. But the guy… This is who he is: The guy who runs for office, says what he has to say, gives the same speech, gives the same canned — kind of sleazy, cheesy — politician lines all the time.

He’s always talking about “the folks” and “no joke” and the whole thing. But, Clay, I mean, he’s deteriorating, and it’s obvious, and we all see it, and I get angry at the people that… I don’t want to sit here and have to point this out but he’s the president, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: If Joe Biden were, you know, the manager of a local Home Depot, I’d be saying, “Well, maybe he’s not so good at the job but let’s not criticize him.

CLAY: Home Depot wouldn’t allow him to run a random Home Depot.

BUCK: Absolutely true.

CLAY: He would not be good at the job.

BUCK: But I’m just saying, you wouldn’t want to point this out or make a thing of it. You want to be… This guy has the nuclear codes, everybody! I mean, this actually — and they said this about Trump all the time and they talked about the 25th Amendment and removing him from office. There were whole news cycles, remember this?

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: They would bring on, you know, Dr. Von Left Wing and he would go on TV and say, “Oh, I’ve seen Trump and he clearly needs to be removed. He’s clearly not of sound mine. The 25th Amendment needs to come into play.” They would do this based on nothing.

CLAY: Yup.

BUCK: Based on Trump like making a joke they didn’t like. Joe Biden actually forgets things in real time, stammers, stutters, and looks like he doesn’t know where he is. We just see him physically he’s too old for this, and, Clay, they’re gonna run him again. And this is why we have to… They’re gonna run this guy again. They’re so shameless.

CLAY: They had to issue a statement. This is not — ’cause some people say, “Well, that’s what politicians do. They answer the question they wish they had been asked instead of the one that they were.” No. That’s not this. Biden was confused. He might have thought Title 42 — clearly he did — referred to the mask mandate, which is a glaring red flag.

Because everybody knows that has been paying any attention to major politics for weeks or months now about the significance of Title 42. This wasn’t some gotcha question that kind of came out of nowhere. This is alarming. And to your point, Buck, I legitimately don’t believe that Joe Biden could run a McDonald’s. I don’t think that he could certainly run a Home Depot.

He couldn’t be in charge of your local Kroger. He certainly couldn’t be in charge of a gas station. I really believe this. I don’t think he could manage a gas station right now, and we’re supposed to have him running the entire country? I mean, think about that. Would you, if you owned a gas station, would you hire Joe Biden to be the manager of your gas station? There’s a zero percent chance that Joe Biden gets anybody’s gas station in this country.

BUCK: The Democrats are effectively going to be asking people, after seeing — at that point — four years of what is now so obvious to vote for an empty vessel that is a brand.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Vote Biden so the Democrat people that have their jobs and in the various federal agencies and the people that are at the CDC. You’re just voting to keep all of them in place. You’re not actually voting for a leader of the free world because he can’t lead. That’s what we’re actually faced with right now.

CLAY: And it’s happening every day it’s getting worse. We’re gonna have more and more of these episodes in public. God knows how many there are in private that don’t see the light of day. This guy’s not there. He is not there. He isn’t functioning at a high-capacity level. We wouldn’t let him run a gas station, and he’s the president of the United States running the free world? It’s crazy.

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Leftists Act Like Wearing Masks Is Defiance

21 Apr 2022

CLAY: The left-wing Blue Check Mark Brigade — Buck, I’m sure you’ve seen this too — has gone into hyperdrive, posting photos of themselves wearing masks in airports as if that’s somehow barred. I saw one woman who was saying, “In defiance of the mask mandate being lifted, I am gonna wear a mask!” But a mandate doesn’t mean that you can’t wear a mask. It just means that you don’t have to wear a mask! So, you’re not really protesting by doing something that you were already doing before and that you aren’t being prohibited from doing, but they don’t seem to really understand that.

BUCK: Yes. They also think that, if they have multiple Ukraine flags in their Twitter bio, then their mask is actually even more effective. I don’t know if you’ve caught on to that. Also having little syringes to show how many vaccines you’ve gotten. For those of you who don’t spend time on Twitter like we do, this is so commonplace among journos, quote “epidemiologists,” and other medical experts now.

There’s this interesting correlation between “I will double mask defiantly forever” and not one, not two, a lot of Ukraine flags. Preferably replace the photo of your face even with a Ukraine flag to show what a great person you are in defense of Ukraine. I mean, what’s amazing to me is I’ve had people come after me saying, “You’re not pro-Ukraine enough!” I’m like, ’cause I don’t put little flags everywhere? Like, they hold the same positions, they believe the same things I do, but this is, Clay, everyone now is all about personal branding.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: Masking is so tied in with personal branding for these people. And you know the old jokes about like, you know, such-and-such get a personality, like, that’s not a personality, you get a… Masking is not a personality, folks. I hate to tell you. You’re gonna have to actually show your face to people now and be normal and just deal with it.

CLAY: It also doesn’t work as all of the data has reflected for years now. I feel like we need to keep hammering that home over and over again still, which is ridiculous.

BUCK: This is why the… So another thing that comes up a lot now is they talk about, what if you’re next to an elderly person or what if you’re next to an immunocompromised person, or a person who has an immunocompromised family member? To this I just want to say, “Hold on a second. I mean, I have an autoimmune disorder. That’s actually what celiac disease is.”

So do I get to do the, “Well, I have an autoimmune disorder”? What are we really talking about… I know there are real things that would be real concern. Obviously if someone has, you know, cancer, going through chemotherapy. That’s a real immune deficiency, immune certain. I think some of the blue checks, though, who are out there are extending this a little too far.

And also I’d want to ask, what are you doing in effectively a giant sardine can with 130 other people traveling 500 miles per hour? Are you not…? Is your deficiency or your immunodeficiency such that you don’t go to restaurants or bars or offices or churches or anything else? No. There’s just a dishonesty behind this now. People are looking for these rules.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And more to the point I would say the immunocompromised or elderly person sitting next to me on the pipeline ’cause this is a theoretical they keep doing exactly what you said, Clay. Masks don’t work. I should explain to them that it’s very clear now that this does not actually keep them safer so I am not going to bend the knee to a neuroses, no matter what someone’s health status may be, because this is now a mental health issue.

CLAY: I mean, just think about it. Take it outside of masking. If the government suddenly mandated that everyone had to wear baseball caps to keep people from getting Alzheimer’s disease, you would say, “Wait a minute.” “Well, the brain is inside of the baseball cap, and we believe that if wear a baseball cap, Alzheimer’s is not going to happen. Do you not care about all the people out there that are getting Alzheimer’s?”

And you say, “Well, wait a minute. The baseball cap doesn’t actually do anything.” “Stop, stop, stop,” they would say. “You need to wear a cap. You don’t care about people who are getting Alzheimer’s.” So take it outside of masking. You tell someone that they are mandated to do something that has nothing to do with combating the underlying issue.

And so if you just took it away, like, “Oh, the brain is inside of the baseball cap.” Yeah, but it has nothing to do with whether somebody gets Alzheimer’s disease or not. Then people take a step back and they’re like, “Yeah, why should the government be mandating something that we all have to do that has zero impact on what they claim that they are trying to impact,” right? Just take it outside of masking because it’s become so political. Just say okay, you’re wearing a baseball cap, if you don’t you don’t care about Alzheimer’s, that’s how ridiculous the mask mandate really is.

BUCK: Imagine if the federal government mandated MAGA hats for everyone to wear. That’s essentially what they’ve done with masks now. Masking is supposed to be compliance to the Democrat apparatus. Here is, just, for example, a journalist over at ABC, Gio Benitez, doing a report on plane air quality.

GIO BENITEZ: So, Robin, the science actually shows that 99.99% of the particles are filtered out, that includes viruses. Let me go ahead and show you how that works right here. So the air comes from here above the overhead bin, it wraps around under the feet, it’s actually filtered out under the seat — and what happens is that it’s refreshed every three minutes. Half of it is filtered air, half of it is new air coming in from the outside. And that’s why JetBlue and the other airlines actually say that the air here on board in an airplane while it’s in flight is actually as clean as a hospitals room’s.

ROBIN ROBERTS: Hmmm! All right.

Something I wish we’d hear more from in the press — great explanation from ABC’s @GioBenitez on @GMA about how air filtration on large airplanes work and why the air is actually both clean and safe. pic.twitter.com/j7XJvwI1Tz

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 21, 2022

BUCK: From an epidemiological standpoint, airplane air is the cleanest air in any indoor setting that any human being is going to be breathing anytime soon — unless you’re maybe, you know, doing open heart surgery.

CLAY: That’s pretty remarkable, right?

BUCK: But, Clay, let’s think about this. The last two places for the mask battles are the two craziest most anti-science ones. They want to mask up children in schools, who are at the lowest risk and the least likely to comply effectively with any kind of a mask mandate. I’ve got a adorable almost two, 18-month-old nephew. Trying to get him to stay in one place for 30 seconds is impossible.

Dr. Risch: There’s No Adequate Evidence That Shows Masks Work

“I think we be living two years under the guise of plausibility and not science.” pic.twitter.com/CDO8TeiMNV

— UngaTheGreat (@UngaTheGreat) April 21, 2022

Trying to mask him up in six months would be completely insane — and then on planes. So the people at least risk, there’s the most deadender attitude about masking them — and the place of the least risk is where the libs are the most dead end about masking! They’re completely insane.

CLAY: That was fantastic. I mean, that’s actually interesting information that should be spread widely. We’ve talked about this for a long time. And it’s why the airline CEOs themselves as well as a substantial majority of flight attendants and pilots are all opposed to this continuing. So that battle has continued.

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BUCK: An update as well, important news update here from one of our VIP subscribers, Julie, who is pointing out that Chris O’Donnell is in fact thriving on NCIS Los Angeles, which is one of these shows. I don’t watch NCIS, just saying this. Have you ever looked at the ratings of these shows?

CLAY: They’re great.

BUCK: NCIS gets like 15 million people. It’s crazy how many people watch it. So, Chris O’Donnell’s doing quite well. Maybe we’ll get invited to the hacienda some time.

CLAY: Yeah, not Leonardo DiCaprio well. Just tossin’ it out there.

BUCK: Good point. He didn’t fade off into total obscurity.

CLAY: How much different would Chris O’Donnell’s career have been if he had played Jack in Titanic? Also, how different would the movie be.

BUCK: I’m not sure he would have been that good. I don’t think that’s really his sweet spot.

CLAY: I’m wondering how much different DiCaprio made that role, for everybody out there, spoiler, yes, the Titanic sinks. But it was Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and that movie became so massive… That’s still the most-watched Oscars ever. That year when Titanic won Best Picture, that is the most-watched Oscars that has ever existed. I think like 1998ish.

BUCK: Oh, it was in the nineties, Clay?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Not the eighties. I’m saying. You know, nineties movies…

CLAY: You’re nineties movie argument?

BUCK: I think you’ve given short shrift to the nineties movies a little bit. I’m just gonna throw that out there.

CLAY: I’m not anti-nineties movies. I’m just saying I’ve got kids now, and we don’t watch that many nineties movies compared to eighties movies.

BUCK: Yeah. Well, just wait ’til the teen angst age.

CLAY: They have more lasting power in the eighties.

BUCK: They’ll start wearing a lot of, like, oversized flannel shirts. You know, all of a sudden, they’ll be watching — what was it — Frasier. There you go.

CLAY: They’ve gone back, by the way. They’re not oversized. When we were young everybody wore the oversized jeans and the saggy pants and the huge flannel shirts. Nowadays, kids wear clothes so tight, you can barely breathe. I don’t know how some of these guys… You’re still single. I don’t even know how you try to compete out there on the streets. I see these boys…

I say boys, ’cause they’re like 16, 17 years old. Their jeans are so tight, I don’t even know how they breathe. They play in the John Stockton shorts for basketball. That’s why we’ve got all sorts of issues with sperm count. Guys can’t even wear jeans anymore and be comfortable in them anymore.

BUCK: How did we end up talking about this?

CLAY: (laughing)

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Jen Psaki gets ROASTED over Biden’s historic lack of transparency with the press.

“Why has President Biden been so sheltered from the press?” pic.twitter.com/EOmMs9WkFb

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 21, 2022

OutKick: Warner Bros discovery to cancel CNN+

HotAir: Bidenflation comes for your burger

New York Post: Ditch the masks and breathe easier already — it’s time to ‘face’ the facts – John Tierney

WCVB: New video shows juveniles brutally attacking woman in Boston’s Downtown Crossing

WCVB has published video of the Boston woman being beaten to the ground by a group of black youths. The youths accused her of being a “white bitch with braids” who appropriated a black hairstyle. She was taken to hospital. Read the shocking police report: https://t.co/NstvTe0IsH pic.twitter.com/AfORFq4nS6

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) April 21, 2022

Breitbart Business Digest: Beige Book Destroys Peak Inflation Narrative

UK Daily Mail: Jen Psaki CLASHES with Chris Wallace over Biden being ’sheltered’ from press in heated moment on CNN+: White House Press Secretary also explains why she sobbed over ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill

UK Daily Mail: Biden will stop Ukrainians getting in at the southern border under Title 42 in FOUR DAYS and force them to apply online with only 15,000 fleeing Putin’s war crossing into the U.S. in the last three months

Joe Biden gets asked about Title 42 at the Southern border. Answers question about mask mandates on planes. Seriously, this man has full fledged dementia. What a total mess. pic.twitter.com/pV5RS7cWCb

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 21, 2022

CNBC: Legacy media has disrupted Netflix. The consequence may be mutually assured destruction

Wall Street Journal: Florida Senate Passes Bill to Eliminate Disney’s Special Tax District. Republican-led House expected to approve measure, as state takes aim at company’s opposition to gender and sexuality legislation

HotAir: Isn’t the Florida bill stripping Disney of its special tax district a case of simple viewpoint discrimination?

Breitbart: Deceptive Edits: Audio Contradicts Piers Morgan, Shows He Warped Trump Interview Ending in Promo

BizPacReview: Trump releases own audio of ‘doctored’ interview refuting Piers Morgan’s ‘unlawful’ edits

Peter Doocy: “Does the president still have confidence that the vice president can get to the bottom of root causes of migration?”@PressSec: “He absolutely does and is grateful for her work in doing exactly that.”

Peter Doocy: “Why?” pic.twitter.com/7YpUYDuOf1

— The Hill (@thehill) April 21, 2022

UK Daily Mail: Elon Musk unveils $46bn financing package to fund Twitter takeover and uses Tesla as collateral

Daily Wire: Musk Hammers Home The Issue Most Painful For Biden: ‘I Think The Official Numbers’ Are Much Worse

NewsBusters: Protecting the President: Big Tech Censors Biden Criticism 646 Times Over Two Years

BizPacReview: Fmr. ‘Lie of the Year’ award winner Barack Obama announces crusade to stop ‘spread of disinformation’

LA ended their mask mandate in early March and vaccine passports a few weeks ago and shockingly, there’s been no surge or dramatic increase because none of these policies ever mattered at all pic.twitter.com/K8x2yipqDT

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) April 20, 2022

PJ Media: Biden and the CDC Just Proved Masking Is About Control, Not Public Health

Daily Wire: Delta Allows Passengers Banned Over Mask Violations To Return To Flights

New York Post: DOJ to appeal ruling striking down mask mandate after CDC gives OK

AP: Feds will appeal mask ruling only if mandate still needed

City Journal: Maskaholics. Wearing a mask may still give some people a sense of security, but they could breathe more easily if they’d face the facts.

Bloomberg: Mask or no mask, FAA sticks to tough stance on unruly flyers

The US Sun: Unsettling footage shows children in Shanghai wearing HAZMAT SUITS on way to school amid bonkers zero Covid regime

Bloomberg: Covid-19: Elderly Shanghai woman’s quarantine ordeal sparks outrage

Federalist: The Spell Is Broken: How The White House’s Mask Play Finally Exposed Covid’s True Culprits

New York Post: ‘Masked Singer’ judge walks off after Rudy Giuliani revealed as contestant

UK Daily Mail: January 6 committee is considering rewriting the 1807 Insurrection Act that lets President deploy military to respond to a rebellion after the Capitol Riot

In which Psaki insists it’s essential that gender identity be taught to small children, and a moment later says this is a made up issue and nobody teaches gender identity to small children https://t.co/6RkMtNYdhn

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) April 21, 2022

PJ Media: Against All Odds: Mother Tells How Her Daughter and Every One of Her Friends Are Suddenly Trans

Gateway Pundit: It Was Barack Obama Who First Pushed Teaching Sex Education to Kindergarteners Back in 2007 – He Even Pushed Sex Ed to Kiddies Legislation

New York Post: Science shows transgender education doesn’t belong in schools – Betsy McCaughey

Daily Wire: Trans Golfer Says Biological Males Competing In Women’s Sports Is ‘A Slap In The Face To Women’

NewsBusters: CBS Insists Parents ‘Trust…Teachers’ on Sex Ed, ‘Don’t…Call Your Politician’

BREAKING: Second theater cancels “family sex show” after social media backlash. The show advertised full nudity for 5 year olds. This is the second theater to cancel it this week 👏🏼 https://t.co/JaXO0ITguA pic.twitter.com/Mh9RxmdyX4

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 20, 2022

New York Post: Civilians continue to face horrors as Mariupol becomes Ukrainian Alamo

UK Daily Mail: Left to starve in their tomb: Putin orders troops to seal Mariupol’s last defenders – and thousands of civilians – in steelwork catacombs and ‘not to let a fly escape’ as Vladimir declares city ‘liberated’

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