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Clay and Buck

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C&B 24/7 VIP Video: No Justice for the Russia Hoax

31 May 2022

The news broke right before the show began: Hillary lawyer Michael Sussmann found not guilty of lying to the FBI about the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. Watch Clay and Buck react to another disappointing victory for the Deep State.

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Watch Here: No Justice for Russia Hoax: Hillary Lackey Sussmann Skates

 

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Bill Burr Should Stick to Jokes, Skip the Gun Legislating

31 May 2022

BUCK: That’s comedian Bill Burr there.

BUCK: I mean, we’re hearing a lot of policy ideas that aren’t very good ideas. I actually think he’s a pretty funny comedian, but he should leave the legislating about the Second Amendment to people who have some understanding of how these things actually work. Just gonna say it. And the psychological testing, though, that’s what was I think interesting about what he says. People seem to believe that there’s the resources, that there’s the ability, that there’s the efficacy of doing some psych eval. Now, don’t even get started on doing a psychological test before you have a constitutionally protected right that you can actually exercise. Are you gonna do psych evals before people can vote? No.

CLAY: And who’s doing them?

BUCK: And who’s doing them. It’s a total of… Friends, so many of their ideas are either idiotic or totally nonstarters or just so clearly meant to — let’s be honest with this — antagonize gun owners. Because gun ownership in this country has become a culture war issue. The left thinks that guns are icky and gross, even if they own them, they think gun owners somehow… Even if they happen to be one themselves, they think that the mass of gun owners out there — and the NRA is a terrorist organization, all this other absurd nonsense they spew on a regular basis.

If they had ideas on how to fix things, I would want to hear them and we would go along with them. They don’t have ideas on how to fix things. They just want to harass people that don’t agree with them. The only intellectually honest position for the gun grabbers, the only one that really makes any sense is they want to take all of your guns, and that’s a complete and utter catastrophe, absurdity, constitutional violation would probably lead to a civil war. Seizing all the guns — seizing them with government force — I think is a total nightmare scenario that even the Democrats know is not feasible in the least.

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Why America Loves Top Gun: Maverick — And Clay Does Too

31 May 2022

CLAY: Buck, while you were down in Bermuda, I was getting kicked out of Little League games and going to go see Top Gun: Maverick. I took all three boys on Friday afternoon. Top Gun: Maverick has now become the biggest, most successful, most lucrative Memorial Day movie launch ever. It is also the most successful Tom Cruise movie launch ever, and Tom Cruise obviously has been making movies for basically 40 years now, and it’s as good as everybody says it is, Buck. I don’t know what percentage of our audience went to see it or will see it in the near future.

I would bet almost a hundred percent, at least if you still go out to movie theaters at all. It’s so good. All three of my kids loved it. I took my 7, my 11, and my 14-year-old with me. We watched it in the IMAX theater here in our town, and it was so fantastic. All three boys gave it… Well, two of the boys gave it a 10. My youngest gave it a 9, ’cause he said he had trouble figuring out which pilot was which airplane. He wasn’t fast enough. You could read the call —

BUCK: Call signs.

CLAY: — yeah, on the helmets. He’s just a relatively young reader as a first grader so he was like, “I sometimes got confused as to which pilot was which one.” But the other three gave it a 10, he gave it a 9, everybody loved it. People were clapping. It was completely not woke. No political agenda other than, “Hey, the United States is awesome,” which I think there’s a desperate demand for. And it’s a good two hours to go take your family, if you’re looking for something fun to do.

BUCK: That’s great. I already have… Carrie and I are going on Friday. We’re gonna go one of the big theaters here in New York City to go check it out. We’re excited about it. I’ve heard from, as you know, her father is a retired Top Gun naval aviator instructor.

CLAY: You told us that he watched an early version of this and said it was great, like two months ago or something.

BUCK: Well, for a Top Gun instructor to tell you that the flying they do is really next level, that’s really saying something. He says they did not CGI it. They were actually up in those planes. I saw a stat, I think was on Fox this morning, that to fly the F-18s they were spending $11,000, I think they said, an hour, which is actually a little less than I thought it would be. But the Navy had to be reimbursed for the costs. They really were flying those planes is the point. It’s actual flying that you’re seeing. They go very close to the hard top, very low-flying planes.

CLAY: Fifty feet, in some places, from the ground.

BUCK: You blink and you’re in the dirt from what I hear. Again, I’m not a pilot but this is what he said. So that part I think is exciting. But it also speaks to I think, Clay, the broader trend that you’ve identified, we can all feel. Netflix has just gotten annihilated as a stock. By the way, I’m no longer a Disney+ subscriber, no longer a Hulu subscriber, about to cancel Netflix, by the way, ’cause the F1 show is over.

CLAY: You’re not gonna watch Stranger Things season 4?

BUCK: I couldn’t even get through the last season. I loved the first season. I even liked the second season. But the third season was like, “I don’t really see what’s going on here.” So I’m not a huge Stranger Things fan. I gotta keep Amazon Prime ’cause I got my Yellowstone I gotta get through, Clay, ’cause you got me on to that one. By the way, about 150 pages into Undaunted Courage.

CLAY: It’s good, huh?

BUCK: I’m now double timing it with that and the Keegan history of the First World War. It is very good, and I agree with your sentiment — this is what made me think of it — that it would be an excellent series. You could make this into a fantastic series. I think more than a movie.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: You need to do a series with it.

CLAY: It has to be like a multiyear series.

BUCK: It should be. If Netflix was serious about making great entertainment that people would love that would make them subscribe — or Amazon Prime or any of these companies that have so much money to do this stuff — they’d make a Lewis and Clark series and make it really good and really show us what the story is.

CLAY: I think it would be the biggest hit of any streaming ever. Like, I think that’s how popular it could be.

BUCK: People want to see stories that are inspiring, cool heroes, good guys, bad guys, and, yeah, in this country, want to see stuff that at least makes us generally feel good about America and being Americans and everything else. It is for entertainment purposes, right? I just feel like everything has turned into an opportunity for a political lecture in entertainment these days, and it’s tiresome. Enough people view it as tiresome that I hope the marketplace is gonna start to take it in a different direction now.

CLAY: Truly just a marketplace decision. If everybody else is making shows and movies and they just constantly are selling the idea that America sucks, our history is indefensibly bad, and you just pivot and say, “You know what? I want to make an ‘America is awesome’ movie or an ‘America is awesome’ television show,” there’s a desperate demand for it right now. I just… I feel it. I can pick up on it. Even Memorial Day, I’m sorry, a lot of us felt it. I felt like there’s almost more flags out than I’m used to in the past. Like, so many people want to be aggressively pro-America and patriotic and aren’t being served by the marketplace.

BUCK: I’m gonna go see it on Friday and give you my review. This book recommendation thing, Clay, we’re gonna put on ClayAndBuck.com. It’s gotta go both ways here, buddy. So, I got some in mind for you. The Shackleton voyage, Endurance.

CLAY: I would love to read that. I’m, in fact, jotting that down. You talked about that before.

BUCK: It is a crazy story about the voyage of Ernest Shackleton down in Antarctica. I highly, highly recommend it to anybody who hasn’t seen that.

CLAY: I’m buying it today. I just jotted that down. Endurance. I’m gonna buy it today. I’ll start reading it when it gets here.

BUCK: Clay and Buck books. ‘Cause I can say Clay’s rec on Undaunted Courage is fantastic.

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Tyrant Trudeau Restricts Guns in Wake of Uvalde Shooting

31 May 2022

BUCK: We have much to discuss with you, including — (sigh) ugh –Canada’s action to freeze all handgun purchases, and this is gonna be something the Democrats are pointing to to say, “See? They’re taking action. They’re doing something.” We’ll discuss the specifics of that in a moment, and then also I know Clay spoke with you all on Friday about the latest revelations, the latest information about the response to that horrific shooting in Uvalde, and it is clear beyond doubt…

I was on Sean Hannity’s show, Clay, on Thursday right before I left for the weekend speaking about this. The response timeline is unacceptable. There was a clear breakdown here, and they’re gonna be looking at this from the perspective of law enforcement command failure on the scene and, even I think for many more distressing, the possibility here that there were some of those sworn law enforcement officers who were not willing to charge in knowing that there was a shooter with children in a school building just feet away behind that classroom door. That’s very troubling to hear. I know you said you spoke to a lot of law enforcement on Friday, Clay, and they were pretty uniformly outraged.

CLAY: Furious.

BUCK: Furious. Tell me a bit, just by way of review before we talk about Canadian response.

CLAY: Yes. So, I mean, obviously I know a lot of people were traveling on Friday. Right as we started the show, they were having the Texas Department of Public Safety director address the situation. And he admitted it was the wrong decision to wait. But, Buck, we opened up phone lines and we had people calling from all over the country. I said, “Hey, if you’ve been trained for these school shooting, active shooter, mass shooter events,” all them called in and they were curious at the way that the Uvalde police department responded.

And again, for people out there who missed the timeline, at 11:33 this shooter entered the school, Buck. By 11:35, there were multiple police officers also in the school pursuing this shooter. And then they did not breach the door until 12:50. So they left that madman inside of those school classrooms — 111 and classroom 112 — for 75 minutes. Sitting outside of that room for 75 minutes they allowed him to be in there alone. And so I know there are a lot of people who are furious about the way that police responded.

And look, we support police on this show, overwhelmingly. But it doesn’t mean that every police officer and every police department gets every incident right. And in this one, I don’t think there’s any doubt. In fact, they’ve already admitted that they got it wrong, but how in the world they allowed 75 minutes to pass with that guy armed inside of that room and who knows how many additional lives were lost with 9/11 calls coming in, Buck, with —

BUCK: Yeah. They knew there were kids trapped. They knew there were kids trapped in a classroom with a mass shooter. That has to be, “Go!”

CLAY: No matter what.

BUCK: Everyone who’s stacking up against that wall who has a vest on and has a gun, they’ve gotta enter that room and they’ve gotta deal with the threat. Full stop. Otherwise, what do we have law enforcement training for these situations for? Now, I know there was that are BORTAC, effectively Border Patrol SWAT team that went in there, thank God, and ended the threat. But they weren’t there two minutes after the situation.

CLAY: And there were reports, Buck, that they got so fed up being held from being able to go that they finally said, “Screw it, we’re going,” ’cause they got there at 12:15 and they didn’t actually breach the door until 12:50 because reportedly the local police was not allowing them to do it, and there’s some report that they finally just said, “Screw you guys. We’re going in.”

BUCK: Yeah. By the way, that is the sentiment that I think the whole country shares, which is, “You gotta go in. What are you doing? How could you wait? How could you allow this situation?” If you’re a sworn law enforcement officer and you’re not gonna risk your life in a situation where there are children being massacred inside of a school building — and there’s one 18-year-old shooter inside without tactical training, proficiency. By the way, not that that should really even matter to the response all that much. but if you’re not gonna go in then, you shouldn’t be carrying a gun and a badge.

CLAY: I agree.

BUCK: Just ’cause you’re not willing to do what is necessary.

CLAY: And this you would think would be the ultimate situation, right, where you have a clear case of awful evil that you are the good guy being able to combat. There are relatively few situations in most police officers’ lives where you would ever have the opportunity to save young kids lives from a madman in a situation like this. To not do it? This would seem to be the exact reason why almost everyone would become a police officer, to protect the innocent from the violent and the evil.

BUCK: Yes, and let’s be clear. We’re also very supportive of military on this show, you are, I am, this audience is. We have a lot of active military listening. Military wouldn’t be okay with it if you came under fire and somebody in the unit threw down their gun and said, “Ahhh, I want no part of this,” and deserted.

CLAY: Might get shot.

BUCK: Made a run for it. The military wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, that’s…” Of course not, right? There are certain expectations. Of course, we have the greatest military in all history, but the point here is that there are expectations that come along with these roles. So there was a massive law enforcement failure on the scene by local law enforcement. I think that’s clear. The DOJ, Department of Justice, is conducting a review of this now.

I don’t think they’re gonna let us know anything more than we already know. Kids are inside, kids are dying, kids are making panicked 911 calls — little kids — and there’s 19 officers in a hallway and they’re doing nothing. Unacceptable. Full stop. Somebody can say, “Oh, you don’t know. You weren’t there.” Wrong. This was unacceptable.

Okay. Now what do we do from a legislative perspective, if anything? Right? This is what the big political debate always turns into in this country after a mass shooting. First off, now, I know this is Canada; it’s not the U.S. So I bet we… I’ve never really looked into this. I bet we have a lot of Canadian certainly podcast listeners, and some of our signals must extend into Canada from radio, I would assume.

CLAY: Yeah, we have a lot of Canadian listeners.

BUCK: I know we’ve got a lot of Canadian podcast listeners on the terrestrial side, I bet some of our stations reach to them. But here’s what they’re doing in Canada. They don’t have a massive gun violence problem, and they already have a lot of gun regulations, gone laws in place. Justin Trudeau — who is, remember, willing to use state force to bludgeon truckers for opposing a vaccine mandate for a vaccine that failed.

I just want to remind everybody of this: It was all about vaccine mandates. The vaccine didn’t stop the spread. We’ll talk more about that data later on this week, as we all know. But here is Justin Trudeau, oh, so self-satisfied and smug announcing what they’re gonna be doing to our Canadian brothers and sisters up north.

BUCK: Okay. There’s so much that’s wrong, bad, idiotic. There’s so much here, Clay. First of all, the five-round limitation in the magazine, bullets in the magazine, rounds… Don’t yell at me. I know it’s not the bullets; it’s the rounds, but in the magazine. That’s just going to make people much happier to have their previous magazines. You’re not gonna be able to get people to put changes in magazines they already own in Canada.

For the bad guys, for the people who want to commit violence, commit crimes, they’re gonna know. “This is great, I’m gonna have a 30-round magazine, and even if I come up against somebody I’m gonna have an advantage against them if it does come to a gunfighter, I’m gonna know that somebody defending their home is limited to five…”

Now, this is unworkable, unenforceable, and moronic, but they’re doing it because they think that guns are the problem when really actually criminals and the criminally insane are the problem, which is something else we gotta talk about. But Democrats are gotten point to this and say, “See? Canada is taking action.” But they’re not gonna do anything in this country which I think is so interesting.

CLAY: Well, this just is a big-picture question. We’ve got 400 million guns in the United States, 400 million. I don’t know what the number is in Canada, but there are more guns than people in the United States. I would imagine that Canada has 10, 15, 20 million at least guns as well.

BUCK: Twelve million legal and illegal is the estimate they have.

CLAY: Okay. So they have a big percentage of people who have access to weapons there as well. Tell me why I’m wrong in this, Buck. All this is going to do is, if this were to pass, create a monstrous black market in the guns that everybody is going to want, which are far better than the guns that you can buy now. I don’t understand how this is going to solve anything at all.

BUCK: Well, Clay, there’s also the problem of they pass these gun laws, and all it does is agitate the law-abiding. People like me, for example, who live in New York City… Now, we’re expecting a Supreme Court ruling to come down any day now.

CLAY: This month.

BUCK: Yes. Any day now, that will invalidate, most likely, on concealed… Well, it’s may issue with regard to concealed carry, right? It gets complicated. Basically, you can’t carry a gun in New York unless you’re connected, unless you really have some in within the system.

CLAY: For people who don’t know, getting a gun in New York City is almost impossible.

BUCK: Clay, the rules right now are — and I know people, I have friends who have gotten their license here for a handgun. You can get a premise permit. The premise permit takes about six months to get. You have to go out to some office in Queens, New York, somewhere to get fingerprinted for it. You have to go down to One Police Plaza. I think it costs three or four hundred dollars. It takes 6 to 9 months to get.

And that only allows you then to buy a handgun that you keep in a lockbox, and you have a trigger guard on it in the lockbox and in a separate lockbox. I am not making this up. You must keep your ammunition so that when a burglar or a home invasion happens, you can throw your lockboxes at that home invader and know that maybe you’ll give them a concussion. Because you’re not gonna be able to get to your firearm in an expeditious or a fast enough manner. New York is probably gonna have its gun laws invalidated here pretty soon.

CLAY: And Washington, D.C., as well, right? I think that Washington, D.C., is also tied up in this ’cause there’s so many people listening to us right now who go across to Virginia or Maryland and every time you drive into D.C. you become a felon basically, based on their rules, if you just have a gun in your car.

BUCK: And my friend Joe Borelli who’s the city councilman from Staten Island here in New York had a great piece recently in the New York Post where he talked about how… New York’s Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t talk about guns, doesn’t talk about bad guys, doesn’t talk about criminals, “We’re gonna crack down on the strident, the proprietors,” it’s always the gun. The inanimate object is the problem, right, the thing that tens of millions of people legally own, constitutionally protected, commit no crimes whatsoever.

But somehow that object is a thing that we’re fighting. We’re not fighting against criminals; we’re fighting against guns, that’s the mentality. There were over 3,000 gun arrests in the 2021. Over a thousand of them the district attorney here dismissed, basically. I deferred prosecution agreement, Smith & Wesson dismiss. So here’s the problem. They make these really onerous and annoying gun rules for people.

And then the people who flagrantly violate them and carry a loaded handgun say on the streets of New York City are actually not being aggressively prosecuted. Why? “Because the laws disproportionately affect young minority males,” and so the calls of social justice is not served by the new laws meant to disarm people because they have disproportionate violation of the statutes that they’re pushing. That’s what we see in New York City.

CLAY: And in Mayor Bloomberg’s defense — ’cause I was fascinated by stop-and-frisk in genera — what he said was, ‘We’re stopping and frisking based on the percentages of people that commit crimes,” right? So if you have violent crime involving guns, and then stop-and-frisk suddenly became unacceptable, and guess what happened? Crime started to skyrocket again.

BUCK: It’s actually “stop, question, and frisk” is the way the process would actually work. And by that you would have NYPD officers who would walk up… First of all, there were a lot of… You see somebody walking and they walk with a certain gait. They’re favoring one side, you see a bulge, you want to go talk to them, what is that you have. People that have an illegal gun on the streets and have a cop come up to them, guess what?

They usually start to panic, and they sound a little bit nervous because they realize that it’s very, very illegal. But they got rid of stop, question, and frisk. They got rid of so many… They made it so you can legally smoke weed on the street, urinate on the street. They turned this place into an open sewer on the streets, and they wonder why…? This is the true of every major city where Democrats are in charge across the country. They wonder why we have all the crime problems that we do. Gee. I wonder, everybody. It couldn’t be any more obvious. Democrats have to pay a price for this one too.

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Who Cares What This Guy Says? Men Cannot Become Women

31 May 2022

CLAY: Buck, this morning — in what felt like sort of a calculated attempt to take over this story — I woke up to Good Morning America in cooperation with ESPN. They’re both part of the Disney universe. They did a sit-down interview with Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer who set an NCAA record, won an NCAA championship in swimming. Is a biological man who decided to become a woman, would have never been able to win a swimming championship in college as a man.

Becomes a woman, and goes and wins a women’s swimming championship, dominates much of the Ivy League swimming season. So I want to play a couple of cuts for you from this interview. There was also a front-page story in the New York Times about Lia Thomas and everything surrounding this story, and there’s some unbelievable quotes inside of this. I think all of you out there understand — and this is rocket science, but it’s unbelievable that we even have to say it — biological men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women.

And as a result, if biological men — if men — are able to compete with women, they’re going to win lots of women’s titles, which is why we have a separation between men’s and women’s sports. But Lia Thomas is trying to argue — and got almost no pushback from Good Morning America or anyone at ESPN — trans women competing doesn’t threaten women’s sports. Here’s the first cut.

CLAY: Buck, if you can’t win as a man, and then you decide to identify as a woman and you win, how is there any other conclusion other than men who decide to become women are a direct threat to women’s athletics? And how does Good Morning America not push back here?

BUCK: There are some problems with this. First of all, you cannot become a woman.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is actually the fundamental problem. Before we get into anything else, I keep reading these stories even on some websites that are like they say, “She spoke to GMA…” No, actually. You’re actually not a woman. If you want to say you’re a “trans woman,” that is a designation that would be accurate, but you cannot become a female. You cannot. You do not have a uterus, you do not have ovaries, you cannot have babies, you are not a woman.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You are not. Based on your chromosomes, you are not a woman, and so this notion of “I became…” This is the foundational lie, unfortunately — and I know that this is very traumatizing for some people, they don’t want to hear this. But the foundational lie is that you can become a woman. You actually cannot become a woman. And everyone should be treated with decency and basic humanity and rights. But reality is still reality, and the motivation issue here doesn’t make a difference.

It’s still an advantage. There is still a biological advantage in athletic competition for trans women over biological women or just women. And I think the Democrats have finally started to realize that the country is just not with them on this. The activist left is willing to go out there and terrorize people who speak out against this. They’ll deplatform you on social media. As you know, if you make a comment about… Who’s the admiral in the HHS?

CLAY: Rachel Levine.

BUCK: If you say Rachel Levine is a man on social media, you can be banned from social media, and I wonder also when we’re gonna start seeing more of this adjudicated in courts under… I guess it wouldn’t be… Is it a Title IX violation or is it just…?

CLAY: Great question. It’s actually… Yeah. I mean, I would argue that women, that is actual women, have a lawsuit under Title IX against men because here’s what’s gonna start happening, Buck. Men who decide that they’re women are gonna start getting scholarships because if your goal is to win, then men who are relatively mediocre male college swimmers can become the greatest women swimmers on a women’s swimming team.

So you’re gonna start to have biological women — that is, actual women from a scientific perspective — have their scholarships taken by men who are identifying as women, and here’s the other quote on this that I want to play. Listen to this about whether there needs to be permission on this advantage over real women. Listen to this quote.

CLAY: I disagree. You do need the NCAA’s permission here, which is the regulatory body. This is crazy to me. You should compete against your biology. If women, Buck, were competing in an open category against men, no woman would ever win a gold, silver, or bronze medal in virtually any sport that exists in the world. The very reason why we decide to split up people is because women are not as big, as strong, or as fast as men.

And that’s not sexism. That’s biology. And there’s a great quote in this New York Times piece, Buck, that I wanted to share with you. The fastest woman of all time is a woman named Allyson Felix. Allyson Felix was incredible in terms of I believe she’s the fastest woman that has ever existed in the history of mankind so far as we know — and womankind evidently since man-made is sexist. She ran a lifetime best 400 meter of 49.26 seconds. In 2017, 275 high school boys ran faster than the fastest woman of all time — 275 high school boys in the United States beat the fastest woman ever all time in one year alone.

BUCK: Trans female competition against women in sports is all rooted in lies.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And this is the problem, and this is why we keep coming back to this . This is why it doesn’t make sense to people and why they’re so ferocious in trying to force you, trying to force you. They don’t try to convince you that there’s not a physical, biological advantage. They shout at you that there isn’t. And when you say, “Hold on a second, we all know…” They say, “You shut up!” You’re talking about quotes.

Theodore Dalrymple. I came across this over the weekend. He is a conservative English cultural critic. He wrote, “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

They want us to go along with the most blatant, obvious, absurd lie because it demeans your ability to discern truth, discern fact from fiction. It demeans your ability to stand up for what is right on all things because you are part of the lie. And that is why we cannot go along — and again, be kind to everybody, be decent to everybody, treat everybody with respect. Anyone can change their name, et cetera. But to say that women don’t have a problem here on their hands with trans women competing against some in sports is a lie built atop more lies.

CLAY: You have to make a choice. Either you believe that women’s sports should be for women or you don’t. That’s the question. And I would point out that if you question the biological difference, women who decide to identify as men are zero chance of competing in men’s athletics. Doesn’t mean they can’t try. Doesn’t mean they can’t try out. But if you are a woman when you identify as a man?

You have zero chance of ever being competitive at the highest levels of male athletics. When men decide to identify as women, they immediately become, if they are talented men, potentially the greatest women who have ever played the sport. And you’re hearing from people like Martina Navratilova, Caitlyn Jenner — people who are in women’s athletics and are willing to actually speak out about it — becoming significant issues.

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Biden Has No Clue How to Stop Inflation

31 May 2022

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck.

BUCK: You know it’s true. If you go to the store and you buy groceries, you put gas in your car, the economy is in rough shape, and there’s overspending at the heart of this issue, government action. This isn’t just a thing that happened, despite the cleanup on aisle Biden the media is trying. But beyond that, Clay, the more I read about the coming global food shortage… Now, in America it won’t be really as much of a food…

Rather, it won’t be a famine, it’ll just be a price issue ’cause we’re a wealthy enough country that we’ll still be able to afford it, but it’s gonna be really expensive. It’s gonna hurt budgets. It’s gonna mean people are running up credit card debt. It’s gonna mean that stress of trying to pay the bills is up. But around the world — and this is in part because of what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, as well as the supply chain issue that continues to snarl shipping all over the world — you’re gonna have some places where there’s just no food.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And this is, unfortunately, going to result in a lot of suffering, and you’re gonna see the price of everyday goods and everyday food in this country, Clay, I think go to levels that people are gonna be shocked.

CLAY: Yeah. You know, Joe Biden’s got an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today talking about the fact that he’s trying to get inflation under control. I don’t think anybody else out there feels like this is likely. But they had a Google search of midterm issues. Jobs and taxes, two most searched topics. Abortion was 14th. So kind of putting into contextualization there: What are people focused on? The economy.

It’s the economy every single time, and Biden doesn’t have answer for the economy because, unfortunately, Buck, not only is Biden incompetent. Everyone around him is incompetent. And it doesn’t feel like they have anybody with a basic level of business knowledge who is going to be capable. I know he’s got Jerome Powell and the Fed, and he’s saying the Fed is gonna handle inflation and everything else. The Fed also allowed inflation to get out to 8.5%. I don’t feel good about them getting it done quickly, in the meantime.

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The New York Times Admits Mask Mandates Don’t Work

31 May 2022

CLAY: Buck, we’ve been running on this platform, you and I, for years now, which is kids don’t need to be in masks at school. You don’t need to be wearing masks on airplanes. By the way, what percentage of people would you say, Buck, on your airplane flight over the weekend were wearing masks?

BUCK: I actually tell you for a moment about this? ‘Cause this was fascinating, Clay.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So, I flew from New York to Bermuda and back. Bermuda is a beautiful island, lovely people, can’t say enough good things about the island of Bermuda. Great place. Okay. It is in fact the rule there that you have to mask up on your way to the plane and then you can take your mask off on the plane. Meaning when you are in line and in the airport, you must mask up. You take the mask off when you take your seat inside these airplanes.

CLAY: Aren’t there some New York City rules like that too if you’re at LaGuardia?

BUCK: I think. I will tell you, I just walked through JFK. I was at JFK, I walked through JFK yesterday.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Nobody is enforcing mask wearing inside the terminal, nobody, ’cause I think they realize New Yorkers maybe would finally say, “I got one finger for you, buddy.” That’s what we say here in New York.

CLAY: So on the airplane flight, because everywhere that I fly, nobody basically is wearing masks. I’m curious in New York City is it starting to fade or did a large percentage of people flying to and from Bermuda still have masks on?

BUCK: There was a person on my flight who had on — I’m not kidding — double masks with an N95 and a face shield, triple masked, Clay. Now, I just want to be clear. I was going to take a photo because whenever I talk about this, people say, “You’re lying!” Why would I lie about this, number one, and number two, I don’t want to shame anyone.

CLAY: Yeah, right

BUCK: Clearly this is a person who has been emotionally destroyed by Fauciism where they can’t assess risk and they live in a prison of fear. And now finally because the rest of us are living free lives we can look at them and say, “What are you doing? What is happening with you?” But I’d say about my flight there, 20% of the flight from New York to Bermuda was masked.

CLAY: Okay. So I’m continuing to be fascinated by that and also by how people are going to tiptoe up to the data that has been clear for years now, that kids in schools with masks versus kids not wearing masks. Remember you were labeled a domestic terrorist by the Department of Justice if you showed up — like I did back in August — to argue against kids having to wear masks in schools?

Now that the data is all out there, and it’s impossible… If you truly were the party of science, it’s impossible to argue that mask mandates work. And so the New York Times this morning, Buck, one of the first things I read when I woke up, Tuesday morning, I get an email, the morning edition early kind of breaking down where the stories are going from the New York Times. One of their reporters named David Leonhardt who has actually been probably the most rational and realistic associated with covid relative to New York Times standards.

The entire lede in his email this morning was that masks don’t work. And, by the way, the headline was, “Why Masks Work But Mandates Haven’t.” That’s the headline of the whole piece, which is the way that they’re trying to tiptoe up to it because the conceit of this argument is, masks work, but the way people wear masks doesn’t actually work so that some hypothetical universe where you have a super tight N95. You never have to take a drink; you never have to take a bite to eat. That’s the way they’re trying to tiptoe up to the mask argument. Mandates don’t work, they’re acknowledging, but masks themselves theoretically would.

BUCK: This goes to human usage, actual usage of the product versus what they say in a laboratory study would be the use. There are a couple of problems with the mandates from the very beginning. First of all, you’re really lying to only get one covid variant one time, right? I know there have been people who have been reinfected. But generally speaking, you get covid once, right, the first round of it.

Just like you got the flu, you get that strain of flu, you probably won’t get that again, but you might get the next strain of flu. The point being if you are dealing with let’s say a six-month window of high level of infection for a certain variant, that you’re wearing a mask maybe 5% of your life is moronic beyond words because you’re going to get it in some of the other aspects, in some of the other moments of your life. This is why on planes, for example, Clay, was always mask up between bites.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It was never a mask policy. It was a mask-up-between-bites policy, which meant that it was absurd. This was a submarine with screen doors, to borrow from the old joke, right? This is, “Well, submarines work!” Not if you have screen doors, right? Not if you actually are going to keep breaking the seal of the mask all the time. It doesn’t actually work for you. And then it would almost be like you had a mandate… Are you an ice cream guy, by the way? ‘Cause I’m trying to cut down on ice cream.

CLAY: I do love ice cream. Not to the extent that Joe Biden does, or even Ali. Did Ali ever admit that she was getting ice cream at 8:30 this morning when she texted us about the show?

BUCK: I think she’s pulling some audio right now because she might be getting some ice cream.

CLAY: She didn’t respond to those texts about it. She had a picture of herself.

BUCK: Getting ice cream at 8 a.m.? That was hero stuff right there.

CLAY: That is like getting it out there. What’s the earliest you’ve ever had ice cream in your life?

BUCK: Oh, man. I don’t know. Probably lunchtime. I’ve probably snuck in a couple of scoops, two scoops at lunchtime.

CLAY: Morning ice cream is like morning alcohol. It just doesn’t happen that often.

BUCK: But just imagine the government… I gotta say there’s a lot of morning drinking going on in Bermuda on the beach around me, but that’s a different thing.

CLAY: There’s a lot of morning drinking in the world of sports, by the way, for tailgating, as you found out.

BUCK: Oh, yeah. That was fun.

CLAY: You could break the seal early in the morning when you got a football game.

BUCK: You did break those very friendly fraternity brothers in Tuscaloosa, the red cup full of that elixir.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I felt kind of funny after I drank it. Anyway, imagine the government had a mandate that everyone had to lose weight so they’re going to ban ice cream eating in public places. But then you go, “Well, hold on a second, no one’s actually losing weight,” like, this isn’t really working, right? ‘Cause you’re only banning it in restaurants.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You’re not banning it at home, and so in the aggregate people are gonna eat ice cream if they want to eat ice cream. Mask mandates were essentially that. It was when you’re in certain situations you’re going to wear this mask that’s not highly effective anyway. You’re not even gonna wear it if the whole time but there are gonna be all these other situations where you’re not mandated to wear a mask and you’re just gonna get infected. You’re effectively gonna be eating the ice cream behind closed doors and the scale is not gonna budge. You know, this was the mentality all along was this was for show and for compliance. It wasn’t actually rooted in the science.

CLAY: But this was interesting. I’m gonna read to you from the New York Times ’cause I do wonder when people in the New York Times read this, their audience, are they all still unaware of what the data actually says? Because it only took a little bit over two years. And here’s what I’m reading directly from New York Times. “You would think communities where mask wearing has been more common would have had many fewer covid infections, but that hasn’t been the case.

“In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst covid outbreaks. Advocates of mandates sometimes argue they do have a big effect, even if it’s not evident in population-wide data, because of how many other factors are at play, but this argument seems unpersuasive.”

Buck, you got banned, as you well know. Your articles, as you tried to share them, you got banned. If you dared to say what the New York Times is now saying two years after the data had been quite clear for some time on masks. So, mask mandates don’t work, as acknowledged by the New York Times. What is the next step here? Because what they’re trying to say is, as we just talked about, your analogy of the screen door on submarine is a good one, “Oh, well, masks might work but the way that we wear them might work,” which is tiptoeing up to masks don’t work, right?

BUCK: Right. The point is unless you’re going to have a no-facial-hair rule with a fitted N95 that you maintain 100% — you don’t touch it, you don’t move it, you don’t take it off — all bets are off. The moment that you are breathing the air like everybody else, the previous thousand hours of mask wearing that you have does not matter. You only get infected one time. You don’t get infected every day. So if you’re ever exposed, the notion of limiting your exposure over months or at this point even years is absurd.

This makes no sense, and he actually… In the piece he goes to what I was saying about, you know, banning the public eating of ice cream and then wondering why no one is losing weight from the change in the ice cream habits. “Airplane passengers remove their masks to have a drink. Restaurant patrons go maskless as soon as they walk in the door. School children let their masks slide down their faces.

“University of Michigan suggests between 25 and 30% of Americans consistently,” meaning basically always, “wear their masks beneath their nose,” which means they might as well not be wearing a mask at all, which just goes to the whole point: This was always a joke. This was always stupid. People that were relying on this thing were relying on it as an anxiety napkin. (whining) “I’m scared so I wear the mask.” Or a political, as we know, a political sign. “I’m a good, smart person who believes Biden and Build Back Better and wants all of the greatness of the Biden regime to continue on, so I wear my mask.” Actually, two! Actually three of them, as we know sometimes.

CLAY: So, yeah, and I think the question becomes now… So, by the way, we were right. Everybody out there listening to us, we took a lot of slings and arrows over whether or not —

BUCK: Did you get more heat on this issue, did you have more ill will online over this…? I’ve never gotten as many people saying horrifying things to me as I have for the last two years over masks. I’m right-wing, man, crazy.

CLAY: It’s wild because I was arguing, obviously, through the prism of sports for much of this. I mean, think about how stupid this is, Buck. You had guys playing football and basketball, tackling each other, running into each other for the entirety of the game, and then when they were on the sideline, they put a mask on. You had guys running full speed, tackling each other throughout an entire game, and then after the game they told them they couldn’t shake hands.

And when they were on the sideline, they were wearing masks. You still see it. Right now, the NBA Finals are who don’t start, and both head coaches are going to have a mask on on the NBA sideline. Now, they’re gonna it down around their chin for most of the time ’cause in order to be heard, you have to pull it down and yell at your team. But they are still doing this, and so I looked at it through the prism of sports.

Like, hey, explain to me why a linebacker with flatten a running back but they can’t shake hands after the game or why be there has to put a mask on when he’s standing on the sideline but he doesn’t have to wear a mask when he’s on the field. It was always stupid and nonsensical. So, yeah, and people would get mad at me when I pointed this out.

BUCK: Yeah. I wonder who’s gonna do the first in-depth study of the amazing correlation between ostentatious mask wearing, pronouns in bio, and Ukraine flag emojis in your social media. These are three. You wouldn’t think these things all go together, and yet they do.

CLAY: And, by the way, how about pushing Biden on this, ‘cause he’s still wearing masks halftime time?

BUCK: Clay, he wears a mask outside and takes it off. He does what I had to do in Bermuda on the plane: Wears the mask in like the at least important place. Now, to be fair plane other is cleaner than the other air but they had that wrong for so long. But it’s so dumb. The whole thing makes no sense.

CLAY: Did you see him when he landed in South Korea? He put a mask on to walk down the stairs, immediately took it off when he started shaking hands with everybody! But the reason why I bring this up is, this is an easy question, and I know Peter Doocy listens sometimes to the show. I think it’s a straightforward question, if Biden ever took a question. By the way, he almost never takes questions now. But you claim to be representing the party of science. Given that all the data reflects mask mandates don’t work. Why is anyone in the White House still wearing a mask?

BUCK: Look at the Justin Trudeau anti-gun ceremony, all of them standing in the background saying, “We’re wearing masks, eh?” Yeah, give me a break.

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New Poll Registers All-Time Low Biden Approval Rating

31 May 2022

CLAY: Civiqs has a brand-new poll out. Just came out, Buck. Approve or disapprove of Joe Biden as president? New low — I believe this is an all-time low for Joe Biden, at least all-time that I have seen — 34% approval rate, 55% disapproval. The things that are interesting the most about this, Buck, to me, at least, are he is in so much trouble — meaning Joe Biden — in the states that are going to potentially be deciding this election, in particular the states in 2024 that they have to be looking at. Here is the approval rating for Joe Biden right now in Arizona.

Hello, Phoenix. We’re number one in your market. Thirty-two percent approval rating. Nevada. Hello, Las Vegas. Number one there. Thirty-three percent approval rating. And how about Georgia, Buck, where you have got Reverend Raphael Warnock trying to hang on against Herschel Walker? We talked a lot about this primary. Joe Biden has a 31% approval rating, 31% approval rating in Georgia.

You talk about Georgia, Arizona, you start looking at the all these states that are going to decide 2024, I don’t see any way that you can elevate Biden to the point where he is competitive. But even worse, all these Senate seats, the toss-ups? This is a unmitigated disaster for Joe Biden that is only getting worse. One other data point that I wanted to hit you with, what is Joe Biden’s approval rating for independent voters, Buck? Twenty-three percent approval for independent voters right now. Even women, talking about losing space with suburban women, women are usually a strength of the Democrat Party, 40% approval, 48% disapproval for women. And men, 30% approval. Biden’s losing on every front right now.

BUCK: If you look at the Cook Political Report, there are congressional seats where Biden won by double digits upwards of sometimes 15, maybe even 17, 18 points, in danger of losing this time around, which is a huge swing, right? When you’re talking about a district that Biden won by 15 points, by almost 20 points, that that could go in the other direction? But you look at it and you see that there’s also about three-quarters of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: Now, obviously that includes a whole lot of Democrats. But for a fair number of those numbers, it’s, “It’s not Biden’s fault. It’s a really hard job! The Republicans are really mean. They stand in the way,” and we all know that’s just self-justifying nonsense, right? At least they’re aware of the fact, this is not the way things are supposed to be going.

We’re not supposed to have record-high homicides in all basically of the top 25 American cities by population. We’re not supposed to have the worst inflation in 40 years. We’re not supposed to have 70% of baby formula out of stock, a war raging in Europe still that Biden says things that makes everyone going, “Oh, my gosh. You know, hit the deck, what is he doing?” This is not good, Clay. Even the Democrats know it’s not good.

CLAY: And, by the way, even for black voters in this, 65% approval. You may say, well, that’s high. Obama was 95, right? Basically every black voter was going to have Obama’s back no matter what. When a Democrat president is down to 65% approval in black voters, if 20% of black voters voted Republican, the Democrat Party collapse. It doesn’t work. And so these numbers have to be setting off alarm bells, which is why the big discussion not only is about what’s gonna happen in the midterms, it’s really, Buck, about when will Joe Biden announce whether he’s going to run for reelection? (laughs) And I’m laughing because I can’t imagine a weaker incumbent in any of our lives than what Joe Biden is likely to be facing if he decides to run.

BUCK: Only the mercy rule is acceptable, Clay. The mercy rule! I want kids in the dugout crying on the Democrat side.

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NBC News Publishes Devastating Takedown of the Biden Regime

31 May 2022

BUCK: Biden’s baby formula shortage. Welcome back to Clay and Buck.

BUCK: This is the kind of thing that you would expect a government, particularly one full of activists who really want to control every aspect of your life — one thing — they gotta do. We say, “Oh, they need to make sure the trains run on time.” This is even more important than the trains running on time. This is making sure there’s baby formula on the shelf. Government had a hand in creating the shortage. FDA, which is the federal regulatory authority, was asleep at the wheel, took too long, didn’t coordinate, didn’t figure this out.

And people have figured out — as in the American people — that the Biden regime was slow on this one, to put it mildly. They went from, “It’s not our problem. There’s nothing that we need to be doing here” to, “Oh, gosh. We’re so sorry. We’ll go get military planes full of baby formula because we realize parents are rightly furious about this.” And it just keeps on piling up. The Biden administration hasn’t had anything to tout, hasn’t had any good news — I don’t know — this year you could probably argue.

It’s basically June. We’re halfway through year two of the Biden presidency. And it’s a mess. And, Clay, that brings me to this NBC News report. NBC News, one second, they’re telling you politics and then it’s, “Great summer kale salads,” and it’s, “Oh, look at this video of a baby seal that we found somewhere!” It’s not for in-depth news consumers, to put it mildly. It’s kind of just the casual news consumer — and, of course, Democrats.

Even NBC is saying, “We got a problem here. They had this piece where they said — this is a quote, Clay; I love this — “Any assessment of Biden’s performance needs to take into account the epic challenges he faced from the start.” Aww! Maybe we should throw a blankie over Biden’s knees and bring him a sippy cup ’cause it’s so hard to be president. Clay, this is not what we were promised — meaning “we, the American people.”

And it is exactly what you and me and this audience said and knew was going to happen, which is you put a bunch of incompetent zealots in charge who don’t even seem to understand the cause of inflation, don’t even seem to understand the downsides of an open border, are effectively economic illiterates. And don’t even get me started on the vice president the czar for the border, the czar for baby formula, whatever. It’s a mess, and they realize it’s a mess ’cause Biden’s upset ’cause his numbers, Clay, are worse than Trump’s.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s a big part of the story. Another big part of the story is that Biden was furious at his own White House for allowing the baby formula shortage to emerge, right? And I think this is one of those situations where it’s hard — you know this, Buck… When you are inside of the White House it’s hard to know what’s going on in the larger country. So that’s one where Biden can justifiably be furious at his own administration because unless he has family members who are coming to lunch and dinner in the White House.

And saying, “Hey, you know, we’re having trouble going out and finding baby formula,” there’s just so much noise out there on a day-to-day basis it’s hard for him to be — certainly of all people — involved and aware of what’s going on. But I thought that was one of the most interesting parts of that NBC expose, whatever you want to call it, inside of the Biden White House, was Biden’s furious at his own administration.

And the other thing I thought was interesting is there are now reports that Ron Klain is on his way out, that Biden’s gonna have to have a new chief of staff, that they’re basically just throwing up their hands and saying, “We have no idea what to do at this point,” and that entire article just furthered what I think the national consensus is of an administration that is completely lost.

BUCK: I also like… The article is pretty devastating, folks.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s supposed to be an explanation, and it takes just the notion of, “Biden had all these challenges when he came into office!” They’re trying to message and massage the message, if you will, because the numbers are terrible. Biden is also upset. I thought this was really interesting. He saw polling that indicated he had dropped among suburban women, which we’ve been talking about a lot.

CLAY: That’s who we’ve trying to talk to every day, Buck, the moms, the impact that we thought he was gonna have — and, by the way, he claims he never looks at polls so this story would obviously directly contradict how much he’s paying attention to the polls.

BUCK: We gotta make Clay and Buck Mom Brigade T-shirts in time for the election –

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — because the mom brigade is out in force, folks, they’re upset about the lockdowns of schools the Democrats pushes pushed, they’re upset at looking at those gas prices the pump, a lot of households, maybe the mom is a co-earner, maybe she’s the sole earner, but in a lot of houses she’s often just in charge of making the budget work one way or another.

CLAY: She’s driving the kids around, a lot of time pumping the gas herself, you know, the minivan bomb brigade out there, I mean, taking the kids to camps, taking the kids to school, being obligated and responsible for all these trips all over her city.

BUCK: So Biden’s taking note of the fact that suburban women are turning on him, which is a nightmare. The only thing scarier for Democrats than that is losses in the African-American community politically, right? If they start seeing that drop down dramatically then they think they know it’s all over for them. But suburban women are very high on their list of key constituencies here.

And it’s interesting, Clay, because suburban women are turning on Biden; Biden is turning on his own staff. He’s upset that they are having to do cleanup on aisle Biden every five minutes. So his claim is apparently to his staff, “Stop contradicting what I say. I’m Amtrak Joe, and, meanwhile, some of us are sitting here, “No, no!

“Joe, they’re trying to prevent like a nuclear war from breaking out because you say something stupid about Russia or whatever. And for the moms they’re looking at this all, Clay, and they’re saying, “What am I getting in this bargain of the Biden regime? Price of gas way up, price of food way up, harder to pay my mortgage — and the Democrats and their media are all-in on drag queen story hour for my 8-year-old at the local library!” It’s not working out so well for them.

CLAY: Yeah, and, by the way, in reading that NBC article, Buck, I can’t believe that it’s not getting more attention. You are the president of the United States. Is he not signing off on the official statements that were being made by the White House? ‘Cause it specifically talks about that speech where he says, “Go get ’em,” at the end — or, sorry, not the State of the Union.

But he said something like, “My God, he’s gotta go,” or whatever he said at the end of the speech about Putin and the Ukraine situation. The White House puts out a statement saying, you know, trying to clean up what he has said. Multiple times they’ve done this. Is Biden so out of commission in the White House that they are putting out statements from the White House that he’s not even seen… Because I think about how… I think the answer is yes.

BUCK: Yeah. Yeah.

CLAY: Think about if you were president or if I were president — heck, Buck, if the Clay and Buck show put out an official statement that neither you nor I saw regarding something that we said — imagine how furious we would be on this radio show. Let’s pretend that Clay and Buck has a spokesperson, you or I say something on the show and then later on there’s a media quote from Clay and Buck, and we’re like, “Did you see that quote? Did you sign off on that?” The fact that Biden is even able have a White House that disrespects him to such a degree that he’s not even signing off on official White House statements about his own comments raises the question of who the actual president is.

BUCK: I think there’s also probably a scramble going behind the scenes right now to get — the Democrat playbook here is going to be, in terms of personnel White House staffing, who can we bring in — from the Obama administration to take senior roles? Now, there’s already talk of Susan Rice possibly being chief of staff. They’re gonna try —

CLAY: It’s gonna be a black woman. Let’s just cut through the noise, it’s gonna be a black woman, Buck, because Joe Biden is gonna say, “This is the first black woman to ever be chief of staff,” and that identity politics arena is the only one he knows how to do at this point.

BUCK: And here’s the problem with just going back to the Obama administration personnel, shall we say?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And your point about the identity politics —

CLAY: That’s the only thing he’s gonna have. Ron Klain’s a white guy. He’s stepping down. “I’m gonna put the first ever black woman in as the chief of staff, this is a huge deal!” He doesn’t have any regard for talent. It’s all about optics.

BUCK: But I’m not sure at this stage that some of the bigger names… I don’t know if some of the former Obama personnel, Obama administration personnel who’ve now gotten all happy with the book deals and the contributorships and sitting on the boards of companies, you want to go join… You’re gonna join this after a midterm wipeout? You’re gonna try to join this administration? I gotta say that’s gonna be tough duty: Join the administration of the least popular president in living memory who’s in clear cognitive decline and now he’s shouting about how his staff is having to clean up his mess, because he’s rather it just be a mess. That’s a tough job posting. I’m just saying gonna say it.

And remember, you’re probably gonna have a House that is Republican, and the Democrats are gonna lose control there, and you probably are gonna lose the Senate too. In fact, when we come back, Buck, new numbers that are out state by state approval ratings. I’m gonna send you this link. I’m not even sure if you’ve seen it.

BUCK: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen it.

CLAY: As bad as it is nationwide, it’s actually worse in the places that are gonna be deciding control of Congress.

BUCK: In sports, has there actually ever really a mercy rule — you would know — or is that just a thing that we talk about in the schoolyard?

CLAY: It exists in Little League.

BUCK: Okay, exactly. This coming election, Clay, has to be the mercy rule invocation election where Democrats lose so badly that they’re going to claim that we’ve got college kids playing on the Little League team, you know?

CLAY: Look at you with all the sports analogies!

BUCK: That’s right. Sports. I like the sports.

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No Justice for Russia Hoax: Hillary Lackey Sussmann Skates

31 May 2022

BUCK: We just got some breaking news that is discouraging but not surprising, not surprising at all. And it’s, in fact, really worth us discussing here for a second. It’s that the lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign, Michael Sussmann — who pretty clearly lied to the FBI to get the Russia collusion thing going — the verdict just came down, and he was found not guilty. So, it turns out… I just want to say to everybody, this should not surprise you.

This is why I don’t believe Hunter Biden is going to be criminally charged, although there are some rumblings about that maybe happening so Clay and I can continue to have that discussion here. Clay, look, there’s the deep state in the judiciary. This guy clearly misrepresented in a critical way his intentions and the basis for the Russia collusion lie. This just came down, folks. As we came on air, the verdicts came down. Not guilty. Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who got the FBI and the media all fired up on the Russia collusion lie. Clay, how does this happen?

CLAY: I think it’s gonna be, first of all, the jury made this decision, right? So, in general the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is a difficult one to reach. And my proposition is that juries tend to get things right. I think this was a complicated case. And let me explain why I think it was complicated. My understanding is there was a text message that basically let it be known that Michael Sussmann was lying to the FBI but then the notes that existed from the actual meeting that he had with the FBI was more complicated.

And, again, the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” for a criminal prosecution is a high one. Here’s what I would say is significant regardless. There were a lot of facts that came out of this case under oath that are very, very significant, leaving aside Michael Sussmann’s role here. First of all, Robby Mook, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, directly testified under oath that Hillary okayed this leak of information to the FBI, meaning her fingerprints are all over Russia collusion, under oath and testimony in this case.

What will be interesting to see is how this is played – ‘cause, remember, the New York Times is of the world where basically pretending this case wasn’t going on. They weren’t covering it on the day-to-day basis. They were not maniacally focused on it. Compare it to, say, the way that they covered January 6th, every little nuance of January 6th is front-page news. Very little of the Sussmann trial was treated as front-page news.

What I will be curious about from a narrative perspective is whether this is trumpeted as evidence that Hillary Clinton and her campaign did nothing wrong, right? Because there is a difference between what they did, which was clearly pollute and create the Russia collusion narrative and a criminal finding of wrongdoing. I wanted Sussmann to be found guilty because it would then be impossible for the Hillary Clinton campaign to argue that they did nothing of a criminal nature or even wrong nature.

What’s going to immediately half, I think, Buck, is this is going to be taken as vindication from many that Hillary’s campaign did nothing wrong and anybody who argued otherwise that Trump, when he said that they were spying and all these things, I think the not-guilty verdict will receive far more attention than any of the facts that came out during the case.

BUCK: It will be amusing, Clay, to watch as all of a sudden, the media, “Oh, look!” CNN, breaking news, right, all of a sudden. And for a lot of their audiences, for the CNN audience, for the MSNBC audience, I think they’re gonna be like, “Wait, wait, there was a Sussmann trial? Hillary Clinton’s lawyer was facing federal criminal charges for lying?”

CLAY: For lying to the FBI. Yeah.

BUCK: New York Times readers are gonna be fascinated to read about this for the first time tomorrow. That’s one piece of this. But going back to the beginning of the Russia collusion, the giant lie — honestly, the whole thing was such an obvious fabrication to anybody who was being intellectually honest about this from the start, Clay.

I worked in a federal bureaucracy, CIA, and spent some time at the intelligence division of the NYPD, and one thing I can tell you is that so much of government power within the bureaucracy, within the federal agencies, is based upon good faith that the people that are doing the investigating, the people that are doing the subpoenaing, the people that are pulling your bank records, pulling your phone records, they’re doing so in good faith.

And part of good faith is what you believe to be credible, right? So if somebody comes in, let’s say, and if they say, “I want to be an FBI informant and I’m gonna tell you where the number two in Al-Qaeda is,” and he’s totally not credible and you say, “You know what? Fine. We’re gonna give you that justice for rewards. We’re gonna give you the $10 million” or whatever the bounty is. That person would be fired because that person is being an idiot, right?

You need to do verifications, there has to be good faith this that process. And with the Hillary Clinton, Russia collusion campaign situation, my concern from the very beginning is that whether it’s Comey or Sussmann or… Well, Sussmann was a private lawyer. You know what I mean. Whether it was Comey or Lisa Page or Peter Strzok or any of these individuals, they could always fall back on, “Not our fault!

“Not our fault we are so stupid that we actually believed this. We really thought this maybe happened,” even though no person could credibly think that, and so with Sussmann I think it falls into that category as well of, “How could this have gone…? How could he have ever believed this? He should have been lying to the FBI, in his own mind, from day one.” But there’s no penalty for stupidity, and the deep state’s got a whole lot of stupid.

CLAY: Yeah, and look, to me this evidence also is — we talked about this, I think, last week with Andrew McCarthy, if I’m not mistaken, Buck, and he was skeptical that we were gonna get a conviction and we dove into this based on the jury pool.

BUCK: He was. He kind of called this.

CLAY: Yeah. Right? You’re talking about a jury pool that overwhelmingly believes that Donald Trump is Satan, and that Hillary Clinton was robbed of the 2016 election. That’s what the jury pool in Washington, D.C., is going to believe. And so their pre-existing biases I think factored in here making it a more difficult forum than say having this case in Wyoming or West Virginia or someplace with a really high predisposition to believe what I think is the truth, which is that Hillary’s campaign helped to spread Russia collusion.

The other thing, Buck, from pure evidentiary perspective I think this is complicated for a lot of jurors to understand, and obviously we didn’t watch this on a day-to-day basis ’cause we’re live on the air. But what you have to do is drill this down to make it understandable, and to me as a lawyer, when Michael Sussmann is billing Hillary Clinton for his meeting with the FBI — which his billing records reflect that he did —

— it’s really hard for him to argue that he’s not meeting with the FBI as a representative of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. When he sent the text message saying that essentially he he needed to go meet with them, the evidence, to me — the evidence, to me — is clear that he lied to the FBI. And, by the way, this is what almost everybody day before, now, to his credit, he refused to plea; he went on trial, and he beat the trial.

I’m sure he has incredible lawyers. He had a good forum. But this is what almost everybody in the Trump embouchure, the Trump scope, the Trump penumbra got in trouble for, not actually Russia collusion but lying to the FBI when they were suddenly hauled in and harangued by FBI officials about all this different issue and they’re just panicked, right? So this is intriguing in some ways just FYI from a walking through the legality perspective.

BUCK: First of all, I think you’re up in the ante a little bit with embouchure and penumbra just by tossing that in there. Clay was tossing off the legal books this weekend.

CLAY: What’s crazy is the penumbra is basically where the right to abortion came from in Roe v. Wade, right, and it’s always been crazy. That’s the phrase. The phraseology is that there are certain rights that are encapsulated within the penumbra of other rights which is the right to privacy and everything else.

BUCK: It was intellectual nonsense, but yes. (laughing)

CLAY: That’s the expansiveness, but in the same way, there are so many people that got in trouble for Russia collusion, not for actual Russia collusion at all but for the FBI questioning them about Russia collusion and this all started with Sussmann and Hillary Clinton’s campaign being involved in helping to create.

BUCK: Yeah. This is why from the very beginning some of us were saying — I can speak for myself on this issue, ’cause now, Clay, we’re going back, what, five/six years now.

CLAY: Years. Yeah.

BUCK: I was saying anyone who thinks, “Oh, just wait; there’s going to be justice,” how? How is there going to be justice when the process was the punishment? This was used… The special counsel, the Mueller probe, investigation, whatever you want to call it, that was used as the primary political weapon against the Trump administration to slow down that White House, to put the fear of God — well, the fear of Mueller, I suppose — into all those people working in that White House, working for it.

Made it harder for them to get legal representation. Made it harder for them to get people to come to work for Trump for all four years. I mean, you had friends in the White House, I knew people well in that White House. So, they were successful in the dirty trick and now what you find out is that the ultimate fail-safe that the deep state has is, FBI guys, for example, like Peter Strzok, “I’m so stupid I actually believed that Donald Trump did this and that we just couldn’t prove it.”

That was their fail-safe. And then for anybody on the private practice side of this, a lawyer like Sussmann or in the private sector, it is, “Oh, I can just count on a D.C. jury to bail me out,” because the actual chance that you have Democrats who believe Russia collusion on a D.C. jury is over 95% based on the population. Those are the actual numbers based on the political affiliation of people in D.C. So how are you gonna get justice in this case? And people are saying, “Oh, just wait for it.” We waited for it, and now we’re seeing it.

CLAY: Well, again, I would say the under-oath testimony is at least helpful. It wasn’t covered very much. But now all of a sudden, the not-guilty verdict is going to be covered as a clarion call. And it also makes it more difficult. We’ll talk about the impact. Again, this news just breaking as we’re coming on here. It also impacts, potentially… Look, you got a statute of limitations issue in terms of when you’re able to charge people for criminal violations.

Given the fact, as you mentioned, Buck, it’s been five years since a lot of this stuff happened back in the 2016 presidential campaign. And also, when you lose a case it makes it more difficult for you to feel like you should charge someone else, not to mention Sussmann himself could have ended up under fire, potentially, if he had lost this case, and maybe he rolls over on somebody else in the grand scheme of things associated with that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Buck, we were talking about as we went to break, again breaking news just as we came on, the fact that Michael Sussmann, Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, has been found not guilty of lying to the FBI. This means, I believe, Buck – when you really look at the larger picture — there will be essentially no one ever found guilty of collusion or conspiracy of a significant nature with Russia obviously in the Trump campaign, and almost everybody was charged ultimately for lying to the FBI.

And for starting the collusion rumor and having years of investigations, no one inside of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going to suffer any consequences either. In fact, many of these people on Hillary’s campaign are now working in a Joe Biden White House, and Michael Sussmann has managed to avoid conviction here for a criminal charge of lying to the FBI, despite the fact that I believe he lied to the FBI.

Now, this is a hard case sometimes to prove, which is why I’m sure he rolled the dice. Proving knowledge of who he was representing, proving direct lying to the FBI based on this meeting — when my understanding is, Buck, there are not great contemporaneous records of exactly what was said. Unfortunately, this initial tip meeting, Buck, was not recorded, meaning there’s no audio or video of that conversation that all of us could just watch and it would be almost impossible to prove or disapprove.

It would just be the tape itself would prove whether or not he was lying. Text messages and legal records seem to suggest that he was clearly working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. But what exactly he said in that meeting, I think that’s the challenge of proving it beyond a reasonable doubt exactly what he said. If this were a civil case, I think it’s more likely than not. But “beyond a reasonable doubt,” a criminal statute’s a high standard.

BUCK: So, think of all the times in the Mueller probe people were charged, and in some cases pleaded, for very minor — for what I would argue are trivial —

CLAY: You’re exactly right.

BUCK: — and actually the kind of lies — not every lie, right? If you lie to the FBI about what you had breakfast in the morning because of whatever, if it’s not material to an investigation, they’re not supposed to charge that. But any lie that was told in the Russia collusion investigation by Mueller, any mistruth… Look what they did to Roger Stone. Look at the treatment Roger Stone got and look at the treatment that Sussmann gets. Stone, his defense was, “I was kidding. It was a joke in a DM. No one actually thinks this is…” They didn’t care. They lock him up, send dozens of guys with long guns to his house.

CLAY: Yes, and tipped off I think it was CNN or whoever —

BUCK: Yeah, CNN.

CLAY: — watch and record it live when he was arrested.

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