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Clay and Buck

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Jesse’s Grill: Where Can I Find a Burger Like That?

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: Joined now by our friend syndicated radio host on Premiere Networks of the Jesse Kelly Show, Mr. Jesse Kelly is with us now. Sir, how are you?

KELLY: Well, I’ve been better, Buck. I mean, life is good. Don’t get me wrong. Show’s good, family’s good, but I have these friends, one friend in particular, he goes by the name of Clay. I found out that he went on the biggest radio show in the country — his show, your show and his show — and he besmirched the world-famous Jesse Kelly cheeseburgers last week, so I gotta be honest. I’m feeling a little bit betrayed and hurt, by the way.

CLAY: It’s true. It’s true!

BUCK: Clay called him out, and I said we’re gonna have you back to address. We will put a pit in that — one of those little toothpicks, if you will — and put that to the side, Jesse, we’ll come back to it ’cause we’re also gonna put your best burger in the history of the world recipe up at ClayAndBuck.com so our audience can try for themselves and then we will let the people speak on this. But that’s coming up. First, though, Jesse, earlier this week — and we were talking to Producer Greg, who does a lot of our call screening and pulling a lot of the audio for the show.

We could have done a show for basically all three hours just taking calls from National Guard or former National Guard, recently former National Guard who are losing or have lost their position, serving United States, because they don’t want to get boosters now, it turns out. You served in the United States Marine Corps. What’s going on here?

KELLY: Well, it’s brilliant, to be honest with you, Buck, it’s brilliant by the communists. One, that the National Guard thing, kicking people out for the vaccine, which is what they’re doing, they’re taking away their pay and whatnot as you guys covered, that’s a hard purge. That’s the Biden administration purging the military as they want to do of their political opponents. That’s the same thing communists had done throughout history.

That’s exactly what they’re doing here. It’s a brilliant way to do it ’cause you can sell it as the public health. Now, the second part of it is the soft purge — it’s what I call a soft purge — of the military. They are taking the super studs who are in — and there are many of them. I’m sure they’re listening to the sound of your voices and my voice right now. They don’t want to shower with transgenders. They don’t want to hear about how evil white people are. They don’t want to find out they should paint their nails and use their pronouns.

And they’re going to get out. They’re gonna take all these years of knowledge they have — and these are our real war fighters, they’re getting out. They’re gonna go do something else, ’cause these are talented people with options. And then the second part of that soft purge is that super stud 16-, 17-year-old kid on the high school wrestling team, he’s been hunting since he’s old enough to walk, the guy who wins wars for you? He’s not joining this military. I hear this all the time from actually traditional military families. I know you guys hear this too. “My dad served, my grandpa served, my uncle, my 10 uncles, and I’m not.” We’re breaking a string now of military service, and these are the people who lead militaries. We are watching the destruction of the U.S. military in front of our eyes. It’s maddening.

CLAY: How do we fix it? I think there’s a huge majority of people out there that have the sense that our country is on the wrong track. In fact, the most recent data reflects that something like 10% of Americans like the direction that our country is on. In your mind, how do you fix the disastrous direction that we are currently headed?

KELLY: Well, see, this is a hard question to answer, Clay, because there are two different answers. There’s the answer, truth, the one that your audience will nod in agreement and know it’s true, but then there’s the normal general public, and the solutions will be too radical for them. How would you fix the military, how should you fix the military? The next person who gets in as president of the United States of America should fire every single officer above the rank of 06 — and I do mean every single one of them.

Then walk on the campus of all three military academies and fire every single employee, every professor, every general, every colonel, you find the parking lot attendant and you tell him he’s fired. You have to uproot this kind of poisonous ideological root, and you have to do it in ways that are painful. Now, if you tried to do that — let’s say the next Republican president tries to do that — it would be viewed as insane and radical.

But when it is this deep, when the rot is this deep, the only way to do it is to dig deep and start tearing it all out. But that’s a solution that the general public would find radical. They don’t like the direction, but if you give them solution, they recoil in horror and say, “What are you some nutjob?” No, I’m trying to save the military.

BUCK: Speaking to our friend Jesse Kelly, syndicated host on Premiere radio networks of the Jesse Kelly Show on in the evening time. Should all be checking out his show later on today. Jesse, also you’re somebody who… I was so glad I saw Tucker last night tackle the Dutch farmer situation. And Clay and I have been talking about earlier this week. I want more and more people talking about it. I know you have been on this.

I don’t see this as a, “Oh, it’s a small country in Europe. Why is it important?” First of all, it’s one of the biggest agricultural exporters on the planet, which I didn’t even know until this issue came up, but even beyond that, the notion that for climate change reasons a sophisticated Western, you know, supposedly liberal democracy government would just say, “Okay, farmers, you’re done, too much climate change problem,” that, to me, is a harbinger of things to come.

KELLY: First of all, I think that the Jesse Kelly Show and the Clay and Buck show we should go to Amsterdam to show our support for these Dutch farmers, and we should all spend about a week in Amsterdam celebrating them and their sacrifice. That’s one.

CLAY: (laughing)

KELLY: Two, I think what you’re seeing now is a result, honestly, of covid-19. And this is what I mean. Western governments now, they’re all corrupt and rotted. It’s not just ours. It’s all the Western governments. And during covid-19 they abused people who were supposed to be free in terrible ways. They did. They told you, “You weren’t essential, shut down your business, stand six feet away, show me your papers, you’re not allowed to eat here,” and the, quote, “free people of the West,” they agreed. Now, maybe… I know you guys personally didn’t. Your audience probably didn’t.

But in general, they agreed. Well, after that Western governments have now figured out, they don’t have to wait for the public to consent to government — gigantic government — action anymore. Governments, Western governments looked at how the public complied and they said, “Okay, I don’t have to wait to push through my climate change insanity anymore. I don’t have to wait for consent. I’ll just cram it down their throat,” and that’s what they’re doing. We got cops shooting at Dutch farmers over there now. They’re doing to them the same thing they did to the Canadian truckers. This stuff is gonna be more common now, sadly.

CLAY: All right, let’s go back to the cheeseburgers. So I, on Friday, as a part of our July 4th festivities, Buck brought up your cheeseburgers. I said that I believed I had had them, and I thought they were average. I’m paraphrasing here. Now, first question for you. Were the cheeseburgers present at the Ted Cruz event that we attended in Dallas at the sort of postparty event? There were cheeseburgers there. Were these the Jesse Kelly cheeseburgers?

KELLY: No! hose were the crappy hotel sliders.

CLAY: All right.

KELLY: Did you really think those crappy cheeseburgers were mine?

CLAY: All right. Well, then, you know what? I gotta be honest.

KELLY: (laughing)

CLAY: I’m gonna apologize ’cause I have not had the Jesse Kelly cheeseburger then. I was told… I was told by a member of the Ted Cruz staff, “You need to have this cheeseburger. This is Jesse’s special cheeseburger.” I had it. I thought it was totally mediocre, and I hadn’t really thought about it since, and then we were talking about the cheeseburger, it occurred to me that I’d had one, according to the Ted Cruz staff.

KELLY: (laughing)

CLAY: So I’m gonna throw the Cruz staff under the bus here because they led me astray into taking a shot at your cheeseburger on last Friday. I have not had one.

BUCK: We’re gonna have to invite the senator to join the taste test when we actually make some Jesse Kelly cheeseburgers, I think is how we’re gonna solve this.

CLAY: We’re getting together in Utah with you, Jesse. Is it possible to have the cheeseburgers in Utah? Do you think that they would have all the condiments and all the things that are necessary next month in order for you to be able to have the Jesse Kelly cheeseburgers present there?

KELLY: I think we’re gonna make that happen or I’m not coming. That’s the bottom line. Now that I know you haven’t even ever had them before, now I have to give them to you and… I mean, I have to give your whole audience how to make them. They are… Generally I’m just obnoxious to be obnoxious but they really are genuinely the best burgers I’ve ever eaten.

BUCK: I mean, that is such a bold statement, but I will say that I have Jesse over the years now — ’cause anyone hears that, they say, “To say you have the best cheeseburger,” it’s almost like people who think, “I’m the best driver.” Like, what does that mean? You don’t get into accidents? How do you judge who has the best cheeseburgers? All cheeseburgers are pretty good. But I’ve seen people that say there’s some special magic to the Jesse Kelly cheeseburger.

So, to that end, we will… Jesse, would you mind sending through… It’ll be written about as the Jesse Kelly Secret to Cheeseburger Perfection on ClayandBuck.com, and we will post it so folks can try it and they can write into us. ‘Cause, you know, your audience loves, and our audience likes you, too, but I feel like they’ll be a little down to the nuts and bolts of how good this cheeseburger really is.

CLAY: I also… I’m gonna throw this out to Senator Ted Cruz’s staff. They may have to fire a staffer.

KELLY: (laughing)

CLAY: I’m not telling you what you should do, Jesse, but if I made a big deal about how good my cheeseburgers were and then there was a staffer walking around telling people they had to eat them because they were the famous Jesse Kelly cheeseburger, and it’s just a random hotel cheeseburger? I’m not telling you how to do your job, but I would be on the warpath.

BUCK: This might be a Beto O’Rourke staffer false flag now. I’m starting to think, you know, trying to seed dissension or seed —

CLAY: It’s possible! It’s possible they were trying to divide us. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a mole. Maybe Cruz has got an employee who is really anti-Jesse Kelly and he’s trying to seed disunion, discord without even anybody being aware.

KELLY: We’ve got a saboteur. Look, I will say to your audience when they go to ClayAndBuck.com and they see the recipe, you’ll see Chipotle Tabasco sauce on there. Just understand this: That is the star of the show. Use a gargantuan amount of it! The second you think you’ve used too much, pour more into it. So go enjoy the greatest burgers ever.

BUCK: Jesse Kelly, everybody. Check out the Jesse Kelly Show later on today, Premiere radio networks all across the country. Mr. Jesse, good to talk to you, sir. We’ll talk to you soon, we’ll have some burgers soon.

KELLY: Be good, boys.

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Clay Wishes His Wife Happy Birthday at Double Speed

8 Jul 2022

CLAY: My wife might well be listening to the podcast right now at 2.0 speed, so Buck and I are talking very fast. I want to tell her happy birthday today. We’ve been married 18 years, almost, and today is her birthday.

BUCK: Do we sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks when your wife listens to the show.

CLAY: Yeah, we do. I actually have listened to it. I said, “What do we sound like when we go 2.0 speed?” because she says she can listen to the whole show in basically the time that she drives to and from work. I don’t know what that total distance is, but like an hour. Yeah, 2.0 speed. So, yeah. “Happy birthday” faster.

BUCK: So, Mrs. Travis… Are you taking her out to Chez Fancy Place tonight or something, Clay? What’s going on here, buddy?

CLAY: We are having Italian food at the house, and we are gonna have a romantic evening. I’m not making this up. We are finishing Stranger Things season 4, episode 9. We’ve got one episode left tonight. So that’s gonna be the wild activity for the birthday girl. A little Italian food and Stranger Things 4.

BUCK: Sounds great, by the way. (laughing)

CLAY: I’m pretty excited about it.

BUCK: Gonna be great food, relaxing, good show. I have a new show for you.

CLAY: Yeah. What is that?

BUCK: Not for the kids, so the kids cannot be in the room for this one. But The Boys on Amazon, have you seen this?

CLAY: No, I don’t know anything about it.

BUCK: Oh, man. It’s a very… Now, I want to be clear. There are clear anti-right-wing — themes. More anti-Hollywood and famous people themes. It is super… I can’t really explain to you. Like it’s violent but at a level that is cartoonish, almost, in some places.

CLAY: I’ve never even heard of this.

BUCK: Very well done. Have you guys heard of The Boys on Amazon? It’s on Amazon Prime. It’s very good. It’s about… Imagine if superheroes were all like Hunter Biden basically, in their private lives.

CLAY: Oh, interesting.

BUCK: Imagine if Superman was actually like a crack addict who was impregnating strippers, and they work for a corporation almost like Disney but they are actually these horrible people and they’re trying to control them. It’s actually… It’s very entertaining, I find, for what it is. So, I’m just throwing that out, ‘cause you won’t watch my Peaky Blinders.

CLAY: Well, I’m going to get to it. I was just saying, we finished Stranger Things. We’re now home for a while. We’ve been on the road a lot. So, Lara has not watched Peaky Blinders, either, but she has similarly heard it’s phenomenal and we are preparing to start it.

BUCK: That’s a better show. Peaky Blinders should be higher in your queue, but I keep talking about this one, and, you know, I’m wearing myself out on this.

CLAY: We’re gonna start it. This has been an agreed-upon, and the challenge is — and I’m sure a lot of people out there understand this — when you already started a show, you want to keep up to date on it. But then when you dive in, there’s like five seasons of Peaky Blinders, right?

BUCK: Six now, actually, it’s so season 6.

CLAY: So, we’re talking about like 60 hours of commitment here to dive in.

BUCK: It’s gonna fly by. You’re gonna come on the show in a few weeks, be like, “Hello to Peaky Blinders.”

CLAY: (laughing) I can’t do accents. You’re the accent guy.

BUCK: Yeah. Great, man.

CLAY: I can barely pronounce anybody’s name correctly.

BUCK: It’s such a good show. Very dark, but very good for what it is. You’ll enjoy that one. I’ve actually… I’m actually… Carrie’s got me watching The Time Traveler’s Wife, just so you know.

CLAY: Man, you’re engaged and married already.

BUCK: I’m really putting in the work here, team.

CLAY: I didn’t even know men watched The Time Traveler’s Wife.

BUCK: I don’t feel like a man while I’m watching it, I can tell you that.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I don’t know what I feel like.

CLAY: Are you tearing up sometimes?

BUCK: I sit there, like, “Oh, it’s all so romantic!”

CLAY: I’ve not watched any of this.

BUCK: Lara’s not gonna make you do that, but when you’re still in the trying to get the ring on it phase, sometimes you gotta watch the show. So, there you go.

CLAY: Everybody have fantastic weekends. We love you, we appreciate you, and we’ll be back with you on Monday.

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Julie Kelly on the Jan. 6 Political Prisoners

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: We have not forgotten here about the January 6th defendants and the right they have to be treated fairly under the Constitution, and not to be the tools of a politicized Biden DOJ. Julie Kelly is with us now. She’s a senior contributor to American Greatness and author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right. Julie, thanks for joining us again.

KELLY: Hey, guys, thank you for having me on. Happy Friday.

BUCK: Happy Friday to you. Tell us, Julie, what is the status right now? We don’t hear much about January 6th defendants. How many are left, are some still in solitary, what have some of the sentences been like, and what are we expecting?

KELLY: Well, thank you so much for continuing to bring attention to this because it’s completely — almost completely — forgotten by Republican leadership with a few exceptions in Washington. Well, 850 Americans have been arrested so far in what the DOJ called the Capitol Breach Probe. They are arresting new people every week. Here we are more than 18 months later. Roughly 80 men are being held in pretrial detention orders. That means that the Justice Department is asking federal judges and the D.C. District Court to deny these people release based on the fact, as you just said, comparing them to 9/11 terrorists.

Many of them have been held for more than a year as the same DOJ delays their trials until later this year. In one situation, the Proud Boys — this alleged militia group, accused of no violence, by the way, on January 6th, no violent crime, no violent charges — some of these men have been held since February and March of 2021. Their trial just got moved to December, the end of December this year. That means these men will be held almost two years — not convicted of any crime, none of them has a criminal record — housed in jail awaiting trial simply due to their involvement in protesting Joe Biden’s election on January 6th.

CLAY: Julie, what’s wild about this — and thanks for coming on again — is some of these people are going to face less severe punishment, potentially, than what they’ve already been serving in time or prison, right, or jail?

KELLY: Right.

CLAY: Just to kind of contextualize this, very few — you know this better than me, very few — of the January 6th defendants are getting more than a year in prison. In fact, the vast majority are getting far less perform some of these guys, as you just said, 80 of them, some of those guys, some of those 80 are going to be in prison for almost two years before they ever go on trial. I mean, this is this is pretty crazy stuff.

KELLY: It’s insane. It’s unconstitutional. It’s inhumane. These prosecutors and this D.C. U.S. attorney, Matthew Graves, who is the one driving this train, a Biden campaign adviser, his wife is a far-left radical activist, a women’s activist in Washington, D.C. They have open and public contempt, not just for Trump but for his voters. And so, you have political prisoners here in the United States. You have Biden’s DOJ punishing, prosecuting, and imprisoning people who protested his election. This is like banana republic-type stuff.

And what’s even more upsetting is these D.C. judges — Trump appointees believe it or not down to Reagan-appointed judges who are still on the court — who are going along with this Travis and holding these men, denying them bail, denying their release, denying motions to move trials out of Washington, D.C., because there is no way for these men — any of these defendants — to get a fair trial before a jury. We’ve already had six or seven jury trials. All guilty verdicts on every single count in record time.

One juror joked in one trial, “It took us longer to order lunch than it did to find this particular man guilty.” You know, they’re chomping at the bit to throw the book at these January 6th protesters and throw them in jail. Societies really a Travis. And, you know, there’s just… There’s no really legal way out for almost all of these defendants, which is why so many are pleading guilty, taking prison time, and trying to get it over with and get on with their lives that have been almost destroyed.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Julie Kelly, author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right. Tell me more about this, the concept of the “War on Terror against the political right.” I mean, I think that this is something that people need to be mindful of because the Democrat media treats all of this stuff like it’s so normal. Meanwhile, there was a Trump administration lawyer who they just leaked the footage, I think, of him in his underwear during a raid —

CLAY: Early morning raid.

BUCK: Early morning raid, they pulled this guy out of his home in his underwear all having to do with “the insurrection” and “the election” and all this other stuff. Speaking about Third World dictator style tactics, this is madness, Julie.

KELLY: It’s madness not only that Jeffrey Clark who is the man who subjected to the raid on his home early morning. This was last month. They searched his house for three and a half hours. They didn’t arrest him. He’s still now almost a month later faces no criminal charges but yet someone — probably in the Feds, DOJ, not the local Fairfax County Police Department — apparently was captured on someone’s — on the officer’s body cam, body camera, leaked it to CNN so they could plaster it on social media and try to humility Jeffrey Clark.

A DOJ attorney who did nothing more than write a letter, a draft letter asking Georgia to take a look at its election irregularities the 2020 election. He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t kidnap anyone. He didn’t rob a bank. He wrote a letter, and they’re destroying this man’s life. He’s got four children. They’re humiliating him, bankrupting him, simply because he was part of trying to uncover what happened in that election.

And this has been happening to hundreds of Americans for now 18 months. These are horrific stories of what this FBI and DOJ are doing to people, now threatening some with life in prison if they don’t accept plea deals, threatening life in prison for the seditious conspiracy charge — a rare charge no American’s ever been convicted of, but nonetheless got 20 or-some-odd January 6th protesters who face this charge that the DOJ compares to treason and saying they will ask for life sentences if a D.C. jury convicts them on that charge.

CLAY: Julie, I donated money to help these guys have defense attorneys because a lot of them don’t have very good legal representation. If you’re part of our audience and you’re out there listening right now and you think it’s not American, regardless of your politics, to have 80 people behind bars like this for this long without being able to stand trial, what would you tell people they could do to help?

KELLY: Thanks for asking. So the fund is called Patriot Freedom Project, PatriotFreedomProject.com. This was started by the adoptive aunt of one of the detainees. There was no legal resources available to any of these people — and to the extent that lawyers were available, they wouldn’t touch these cases. So now we’re getting a little bit — she’s getting a little bit — more attention raising money.

This goes to help retain lawyers and also help these desperate families who are being bankrupted. People have been fired from their jobs simply for being charged with misdemeanors like parading in the Capitol. These people are pariahs in their communities, to their families. It’s really heartbreaking to hear some of what’s happened to some of these people.

BUCK: Julie, I just have one more for you. Republican leadership. If you don’t want to shame those who are being cowards, maybe at least name those who do care about this issue. If we believe in the Constitution and due process and equal justice under the law, clearly that’s not happening here for these individuals, right?

There’s a difference between saying that what they did is all fine and saying, “Well, they deserve to be treated fairly and have their rights respected and misdemeanors shouldn’t get you locked up in solitary, for heaven’s sake.” Which Republican leaders, who among the Republican leadership is on this?

KELLY: Well, I’m not even gonna bother with the Senate. We’ve heard a few things here and there from Senator Cruz and Senator Cotton but nothing really about these detainees. House Republicans, there are a handful, luckily. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Andy bigs, Matt Gaetz. They’ve actually visited “the D. C. Gulag,” I call it, the jail that’s holding at least four dozen of these men languishing in mostly solitary confinement conditions, being abused by prison guards. So that’s it.

Where’s our Republican leadership talking about this? Why are they not in front of this jail or in front of DOJ every single week screaming from the rafters threatening to cut off funding ’cause this DOJ, this FBI, this D.C .U.S. attorney’s office. Where is Kevin McCarthy, where’s Elise Stefanik, where’s Steve Scalise, where are heads of these committees that oversee this department? The silence is deafening. And I’ll tell you what. The base is very aware of this.

And they are not gonna let Republican leaders just wash their hands of this if they take control of Congress. There was an article in Axios that said the base wants blood, and that for sure because the base understands what’s happening, and they want retaliation and they want to expose what happened on January 6th, and they want justice for these people who have had their lives destroyed at the hands of this Biden, Garland, Matthew Graves, DOJ.

CLAY: Julie, we appreciate you coming on with us, sharing this story. I’d encourage you guys out there to join me in donating money to help these guys get the legal defense they deserve. Can you give us that website one more time?

KELLY: And thank you so much for that donation. PatriotFreedomProject.com.

CLAY: PatriotFreedomProject.com. Thanks, Julie.

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Macy Gray Dares Say Only Women Are Women

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: Sometimes we on the conservative side of things, we get a little bit wrapped up for a moment in, “Oh, wow! Look! A celebrity said something that made sense,” you know? A celebrity that maybe we weren’t expecting to get political at all or perhaps it’s just somebody who hadn’t heard much about in a while and you had this moment where you go, “Oh. I wonder how this will be handled!”

So just a few days ago — and by “handled,” I mean by the lib media, by the Democrat apparatus. Macy Gray is a singer, recording artist. One year — am I right on this one, Clay? — she won a bunch of Grammys. She had a really big year some years ago. Maybe 10 years ago? Does that sound about right?

CLAY: Yeah. I was gonna look her up. I know the name, but I was similar to you in that I was like, I don’t really remember why she became famous or a when it was, but, yes. She had a couple of songs that were super famous.

BUCK: She had a couple of big songs about a decade ago. Those of us like me celebrate the movie Training Day for which Denzel Washington actually received the best actor award that he should have gotten for some other movies, including Malcolm X. Training Day is a great movie. Macy Gray actually makes a cameo in Training Day, and if you haven’t seen that movie, you’re just looking for a good watch… Have you guys all seen that one here in New York? Have you seen Training Day? Very, very good movie. Ethan Hawke very good in it too. Gotta give credit where due. Anyway, Macy Gray is in that. She was on Piers Morgan’s show, and she said something that had a lot of us go, “Oh, this is gonna be interesting.”

CLAY: Good for her.

BUCK: Play 16.

BUCK: Can I just…? What she said there is the most basic of fact imaginable. What she said is 100% true. It is as true as 2 + 2 = 4. There can be no dispute. You’ll never find anybody who can credibly claim that the changing of the parts actually makes the parts what they would be for the other sex. That actually can’t do that. They can try to make it somewhat similar in appearance, but they can’t actually make that transformation to make somebody a woman who is in fact a man or a man who is in fact a woman. Clay, I know we saw this and said, “Uh-oh!”

CLAY: I thought to myself, “Good for her,” but anytime I see a quote like this… I actually sent this to me wife because my wife is super fired up over the idea that you could decide to become a woman and that makes you a woman. No, that’s not possible — and this is why I always say, “Hey, you can’t be transracial,” right? Buck, if you decided tomorrow or I decided tomorrow, “Hey, you know what I’m gonna be? I’m gonna be an Asian man from now on because I feel like even though I’m a white guy, I’m actually Asian.” I’ve been trapped in a white body. I’m gonna become an Asian man or a black man or a Hispanic man. It would be super racist. It wouldn’t be allowed.

BUCK: Transracialism would actually make a whole thing more sense because we have people, for example, who self-identify as black, and you’ll find out that, “Well, they have a grandparent of four who are black.” So there are actually multiple ethnicities that are coming into play. You have people who… My own nephew is south Asian and Caucasian. So he is multiple ethnicities. He is not actually one. He’s absolutely adorable, by the way.

He’s so great. He already knows all of his ABCs. He’s counting to 10. I’m gonna tell you this. This is like getting me… I gotta have kids soon, Clay, ’cause he got me all excited. I walked in recently to visit my little sister, was amazing, and her little nephew, he’s 20 months old, and he’s at that age where he’s just running in circles constantly. He’s just running anywhere.

CLAY: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: And he runs all the way up and he just looks at me and he goes, “Buck!” and I was like, “Yes.” He said my name. I was very excited. Okay, everyone doesn’t need to hear this all across America, but I was very excited. Point being, let’s take this back to Macy Gray situation.

CLAY: We all have way more in common, to your point. If you had to choose right now, do you have more in common with someone who is also a man even if they are a different race or do you have more in common with someone of a different gender. I think men and women have far more in common with their own sex than they do with their own race.

BUCK: You can be a person — and we all are actually, when you really get down to it, right? I mean, just ask Elizabeth Warren. But we all are the product of many different ethnicities, actually, and so identification along racial lines, that is a much more mutable characteristic in the sense that you can have genes. You can’t actually be a man and a woman at the same time. You can have a black father and a white mother or an Asian father and et cetera, et cetera, all the way down the line. And many of us do. So, you’re right, though. That’s because of the political implications of the racial what the Supreme Court calls the racial entitlement state in this country and racial identification. Okay. But back to Macy Gray.

CLAY: It’s actually offensive, right, if you change your race whereas it’s “brave” if you change your gender. The minute when you said, “What did you think?” I said, “She’s a hundred percent right,” but I didn’t want to praise her because I said, “I wonder how quickly she’s gonna backtrack on it.”

BUCK: We had the same thing. You’re saying, “Yeah, it’s amazing she spoke the truth.” My first thought was, “Oh, they’re about to J. K. Rowling here. Oh, here it comes! The left will not tolerate this.”

CLAY: Well, the funny thing is, she said she knew she was gonna get criticized, so it’s not like she walked into the statement blindly.

BUCK: I know, and now this is where we have to go, “Womp-womp!” It gets a little sad. Macy Gray, what, about 48 hours later an after her recitation of the most basic and straightforward fact, here is Macy Gray saying, “I am super, super, super sorry.”

BUCK: No, you are not actually whoever you believe you are.

CLAY: I’m not Spider-Man.

BUCK: Yeah, I could walk around saying I’m Batman and it doesn’t make it true. This bend the knee, beg forgiveness from the woke mob thing? It’s so both tiresome and also so pathetic, and when are people going to realize that we should not live in a country where the statement of basic fact results in groveling apology?

CLAY: Also, I just am so disgusted at the idea that you have to apologize. I understand if anybody has to apologize because, otherwise, they’re gonna lose a job and they can’t pay their mortgage or they can’t take care of their family. I understand when people have to make apologies because, economically, they have other options. If you are fortunate enough to be wealthy as I would think that Macy Gray certainly has to be, why do you care if people are mad at some of your opinions? I just fundamentally reject the idea. I just don’t care, and maybe —

BUCK: A lot of very rich, very influence and famous people, as you know, Clay, are also deeply insecure.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Which is a surprise to a lot of folks who haven’t spent time around people who are in that milieu, shall I say — but it’s true even in media, it’s true in Hollywood — you get people that are deeply insecure. And the thing that they actually crave — because they have money, they have prominence — more than anything else, is the acceptance of their peer group. And that’s why it’s, “Oh, my gosh! The other fancy music or Hollywood or news media people are mad at me, so now I have to grovel.”

CLAY: My wife says to the extent that I have a talent, it’s that I legitimately don’t care. And some people say that, but I’m the kind of person who if 10 people tell me I’m awful but one person is like, “Hey, you’re pretty cool,” I remember the one positive. Most people remember the one negative. But to me, this is what disgusts me on so many levels about these false apologies. If you have — and in people out there do, Buck — FU money? I think this is a quote from the great show — before it lost its mind — Billions, “What’s the point of having FU money if every now and then you don’t say ‘FU’?”

BUCK: It’s so interesting that you quote that show —

CLAY: Which also went off the air

BUCK: — that became unwatchable because it really just became a show about a gender-neutral transgender 22-year-old finance genius who everyone had to refer to as “they.” That became a central conceit of the show. And you’re just watching this, like, “No. What is this? Why am I being subjected to such politics in this way, in this show?” It just became unwatchable.

CLAY: You’re right.

BUCK: So they have a lot of money. They have what you call loose-leaf money.

CLAY: And I just say, again, I feel the same way about people who had to get the covid shot. I understand if you had to get the covid shot because you had to keep your job, you had to make your mortgage payments and everything else. There are a lot of people who don’t have financial considerations at play. And to me, Buck, those are the people who need to stand up for the people who aren’t fortunate enough, they don’t have the privilege to be able to say no, this is wrong.

So when I see Macy Gray, she went on Piers Morgan’s show and said, “I know I’m going to get criticized for this,” and then totally changed her tune by the time she went on the Today show. Why? I agree with her. You can’t just decide that you’re gonna change your gender, and that makes you a new gender. That’s not possible. That’s biologically not real. You can basically decide that you want to identify in that way.

If you’re an adult, I think that’s your right, but I certainly don’t think that you can change your biology. In fact, Buck — I don’t know if you can see this — the shirt that I’m wearing right now that we are now selling on OutKick just says simple “biology is real.” We have ended up in such a crazy place where these transgender activists now say, “Sometimes doctors get it wrong when a baby is born.” That’s their argument they make.

BUCK: This is fascinating, by the way. There was a Substack that has been making the rounds. I’ve been some people on the right. I’d hat tip them but I forget who was retweeting it earlier today — a Substack with this headline: “When a Quarter of the Class Identifies as Trans,” and let me just read to you folks a little bit of this. A quarter of the girls in my daughter’s class identify as transgender. Seven out of 28.

“When I said that on Twitter recently¸ I was roundly attacked for being a TERF,” which is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, I’ve learned this term “who makes up ridiculous stories to harm trans people. While I may be a TERF, I did not make this up. A quarter of the girls in my kid’s class identify as boys. One of them has had four names this year, all from anime series.”

CLAY: How old are you are these kids?

BUCK: They’re like 12, I think. I gotta check. “Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans Teens,” is this Substack, and it goes on to talk about… It’s interesting, actually. I’m not even seeing the author’s name here, probably ’cause she’s scared to actually write this stuff down. But I know about this from other people where they’re telling me the 10, 15, 20% of their 8-year-old or 10-year-old class in school all identifying as trans and all want different names and things.

They just come up with a new name, a new pronoun, and everyone’s supposed to use it — and the teachers are all encouraging this. And parents find out about it and say, “What’s going on?” It’s like, “Hold on a second, parents. Do you want us to call Child Services on you?” This is the America we’re living in now, folks. I know people don’t want to believe this, but this is happening.

CLAY: Well, and it’s also an indication of how sort of the thing spreads and becomes popular. Right? If you’re talking about 28 kids in a classroom like this author did and 25% of them are identifying as transgender, this is absolutely crazy — and the pushback on this is, when we’re starting to see it take over in the world of sports and become more and more common, there’s a difference between saying:

“Hey, you have decided that you’re going to make a life choice” and then allowing that life choice to implicate everybody else who is let’s say trying to compete in women’s sports and suddenly has a six-foot-four swimmer who used to be a male college swimmer kicking all the women’s asses. Biology is real, and I think we just have to keep hammering home on this because we’re getting to absurd categories.

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NPR Laments WNBA/NBA Pay Gap

8 Jul 2022

CLAY: NPR yesterday sent out this tweet, Buck:

It was a story about Brittney Griner and why she was in Russia in the first place. How quickly do you think every NBA player would start voting Republican, Buck, if they said, hey, you’re all just playing basketball, all men’s and women’s players, NBA and WNBA make equal salaries?

BUCK: That would be fascinating.

CLAY: It would be amazing to see how quickly all of these NBA players would say, “Wait a minute! The reason I’m getting paid is because way more people would like to watch me play basketball than would like to watch women play basketball.”

BUCK: This was like left-wing woke hero Rapinoe of women’s soccer who was complaining about this as well, and when they actually crunched the numbers, women’s soccer, based upon their draw — as in how many people go to watch and their revenue and the TV, women’s soccer — is overpaid — women’s national team soccer — and is in fact subsidized by the men’s team. But it is still unfair, in their minds, they should be making the exact same amount of money. I do think some of the tennis — the sport I probably know best. Some of the tennis majors pay men and women the same prize money now.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: So there is a trend moving in that direction. But it would be fascinating. And also what’s the explanation, Clay? Why shouldn’t LeBron James take a much lower salary so all of the women in the WNBA can be paid equally? Why shouldn’t he?

CLAY: It’s a really funny question. But, I mean, the fact they’re trying to argue it’s based on inequity as opposed to interest, talent, market, and basic business.

BUCK: Just to be clear, we think it’s crazy that they would be paid the same, but the point is, Democrats do not, actually. They think that this is the way it should go.

CLAY: And remember Megan Rapinoe — who got the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday from Joe Biden — said transgender athletes should be able to play in high school, and you should get used to your high school daughter’s team getting wrecked. They don’t really matter that much. Also, the U.S. women’s soccer team lost to a team of 15-and-under boys in Dallas, Texas, that played against them. These women’s soccer players in America win at such a high level ’cause most women around the world don’t even get to play soccer because they don’t have equality in their countries. That’s why our women’s soccer dominates compared to our men’s, frankly.

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Biden May Trade Brittney Griner for the Merchant of Death

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: ClayAndBuck.com if you want to read some of our transcript stories. We also put our TV appearances up there. Clay and I were together last night, Tango & Cash style. Do you have a preference, like are you more Sylvester Stallone in that one or Kurt Russell?

CLAY: I liked Kurt Russell I think a little bit more in that one than I did Sylvester Stallone.

BUCK: Fair enough.

CLAY: What about you?

BUCK: I don’t remember the movie that well, but, you know, I’m generally a Kurt Russell fan because of Big Trouble in Little China, which I also think is a movie you probably could not get away with making today —

CLAY: A lot of movies you couldn’t make.

BUCK: — among a lot of other movies that you couldn’t make. But we have it up at ClayAndBuck.com. But one story we were talking about was Brittney Griner just pleaded guilty yesterday.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: So for everyone listening, she’s a WNBA player. She’s a big deal in the WNBA, right? Is that fair? She’s a better known… The WNBA is not the NBA in terms of renown and money, but she is a WNBA player. She had a vape pen with, like, cannabis oil so I guess it’s like marijuana. I don’t know much about this stuff. Marijuana oil. It’s illegal to have. It would seem like a very, very small amount and now she’s pleaded guilty. I think she faces up to 10 years.

She wrote this big letter to Biden about how she only voted for him, she never voted before, she was so pleased to vote for Joe Biden. I think a lot of Democrats are having this moment of reality strike them in different ways, and I think for Brittney Griner it’s, “Joe Biden is not the person that the oh-so-smart media and intelligentsia in this country do the bidding of the Democrats pretended that he was.” He is an incompetent, and he also honestly doesn’t…

He has neither the strategy nor the stomach for going up against Vladimir Putin. We may see a trade — this is being rumored — for the Nicolas Cage character from Lord of War is based on, Viktor Bout, a well-known arms dealer known as the Merchant of Death. It was floated by Forbes yesterday the Russians are already kind of whispering, “Yeah, you can have Brittney Griner if you give us back the Merchant of Death.”

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Lisa Boothe to Biden: You Suck. Resign!

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: Our friend Lisa Boothe from Fox taking out the flamethrower for a second.

BUCK: She’s not messing around on Sean Hannity’s show last night with Jason Chaffetz guest hosting.

CLAY: Were you in the chair yet listening to that when she said it?

BUCK: I was. I saw her and then she walked out ’cause she was here in New York City before we went on together. Gonna say, it was a fact hour of television last night.

CLAY: Amazing hour of television.

BUCK: A lot of wisdom, a lot of handsomeness on the screen, a lot of great hair. It was good.

CLAY: No, it was a lot of fun. For people out there who don’t know how television works, you sit down 10, 15 minutes before your segment is on. So I had the earpiece in, and I heard that question, and then I heard her response, and it was great live television. I don’t know if she knew that she was getting that sort of tossed alley-oop dunk question, but she was devastating in her response.

BUCK: I think you can argue it both ways. If, for some reason, I got invited to the Biden White House and the president wanted to speak to me the only way I’d take it is if I was able to tell him in advance I’m going to be very critical and I’m going to push him on some things. You know, that’s… I think you have to show the president, the office respect, and if you can’t do that, you don’t go. You don’t go. But I would not sit there and be like, “Oh, thank you so much, Mr. President,” and then I would be like, “Why are you messing everything up?”

CLAY: I understand their arguments on multiple angles here. I would always go because I respect the office of the presidency. And also, I don’t think there are that many people… Let’s presume that Joe Biden could understand us if we were in a meeting with him, which I question. You sit here, some of the instructions that we’ve seen are embarrassing for him. We played some clips earlier. So I’m not sure that he would. But I don’t think there are that many people speaking truth to him on a day-to-day basis.

BUCK: I think either one of us would come away from a sit-down with Joe Biden… I had sit-downs with George W. Bush when I worked for the CIA and sit-downs with Donald Trump when he was the president — obviously as a media person, not a government employee. I think we’d come away from a sit-down with President Biden — and I’m not trying to be funny — deeply concerned about the future of the country. I really do. I think we’d say, “I cannot believe this guy. He’s clearly not up for this.” Notice all the 25th Amendment talk from the Trump era —

CLAY: Vanished.

BUCK: — is absent when it should actually be talked about.

CLAY: If we had him on for an hour with us like we had Trump on for an hour, I think the country — the people who listened — would say, “This guy can’t be president anymore.” I really feel like he couldn’t talk to us for an hour.

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After Assassin Failed, Leftists Attack Kavanaugh at Steakhouse

8 Jul 2022

CLAY: Now, there has been a lot of discussion on this show — not that much in the mainstream media — about the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It’s amazing how stories like these just disappear. He lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is just north of Washington, D.C., for people who are not that familiar with this area of the country. But increasingly, increasingly what you are seeing is Democrats saying…

Remember back in the day when Maxine Waters said it, “Go get in their faces! Make sure they are aware that you are furious with them.” Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court term is over. He’s got a couple of young kids. He is out for dinner at Morton’s. Pretty good steak at Morton’s, Buck. Not gonna… Of the chain steak restaurants, right up at the top of the line. I’m a big Bourbon Steak guy if you ever been to a Bourbon Steak.

BUCK: The D.C. Morton’s is an institution. A lot of heavy hitters go there.

CLAY: So, the word gets out that he is there, and so he is eating in that restaurant, and I’m gonna read from Daniel Lippman, who I believe broke the news. “Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had to exit through the rear of Morton’s on Wednesday night after D.C. protesters showed up out front. A Morton’s rep,” and, by the way, thank you to Morton’s for actually being willing to speak out here, “said, ‘Politics should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner.’” Here’s the official statement:

“All other patrons at the restaurant…” I’ll read the full statement here: “Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other our patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protesters while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant. Politics, regardless of your side or views, shouldn’t trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There’s a time and place for everything. Disturbing dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.” Bravo, Morton’s, for actually teeing off here on these protesters. Again, I’m reading directly from their statement. Does this surprise you at all, Buck?

BUCK: No. This is a tactic that the Democrat left, the activists in it, have been using for years, and this is one of these times we get to say, “This isn’t a both-sides thing,” you know? If we were sitting here and there was some, you know, angry mob that chased Nancy Pelosi out of a restaurant when she was having dinner, I’d say, “Hey, guys, knock that off.”

CLAY: Don’t do that.

BUCK: That’s loser stuff. That’s what they do. That’s what the left, the crybabies, the whiners, that’s what they do. And people say, “Oh, but we need to be able to fight.” We need to fight intelligently, okay? We need to fight where it matters. The people who are doing this who are chasing Kavanaugh are only doing it because it makes them feel powerful and better and important. It’s not gonna do anything. It’s not gonna change Kavanaugh’s mind.

He’s not gonna all of a sudden give them the decisions that they want, which is why you see a need for Democrat leadership to say, “Knock this stuff off,” but they won’t do it. They won’t do it because we saw even when the law says they can’t do it they’ll make excuses for it. The protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes were illegal. It was illegal what was going on. It was a violation of the law, and it’s just so interesting.

That law doesn’t count because of Democrat politics. (mewling) “Meh, it will make us feel sad if we have to enforce that law.” Meanwhile, we’re waiting to hear about a possible suspension without pay for Border Patrol members who were on horseback who were alleged to have whipped migrants based on Democrats being unable to look at a photo and interpret it correctly. That, somehow, is the application of the law. That is somehow justice in their minds, ’cause Joe Biden is an imbecile who jumped on the politics of it and said, “They’ll face consequences!” Clay, the law either matters or it doesn’t. We write these things down for a reason in plain English.

CLAY: I’m glad you brought that up because I wish we’d hit this earlier in the week, and I had it flagged, and it fits perfectly here. The marshal of the Supreme Court, Gail Kirley — she’s in charge of the safety — wrote to Virginia and to Maryland saying, “It’s time to start enforcing these laws to limit protests outside of the justices’ homes,” and two of the justices live in the Maryland suburbs. This is unbelievable.

The Montgomery County executive — who would theoretically be partly charged with implementing the actual law, whose name is Elrich, last name Elrich — said, “If the court majority thinks these theatrics will distract people from their shredding of the Constitution, they don’t understand how seriously we take our rights” and he basically said that police shouldn’t be doing anything and they should be able — and then he continued. Buck, I thought this was crazy.

He said, “I think all you’ve gotta do is look at Putin’s Russia and get an idea of where you don’t want to go. This idea where people can’t gather together, and if you gather together, you’re gonna be arrested and taken, that’s not happening here. We need to make sure people don’t use protests as an excuse for silencing opposition.” He compared this to Vladimir Putin’s Russia! That’s where we are. Montgomery County, Maryland, otherwise great community.

I believe that’s Chevy Chase, Maryland, for those of you who have spent time in that area, Rockville, Maryland county very high and very left-wing community, bedroom community of Washington, D.C. You won’t be enforce the law and he compared a request that he enforce the law — Buck, for a Supreme Court justice who already had an assassination attempt against him in his county, he compared the request from the Supreme Court to enforce the law — and protect the justices, Kavanaugh in particular who can’t even go to Morton’s right now, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

BUCK: This is why every Democrat lecture we get about “our sacred democracy” and “the rule of law,” they suspend the rule of law on a whim whenever it interferes with the emotional needs of their politics. They do this all across the southern border and with illegal migration and illegal aliens continuing to flood across the border and stay here once they’ve gotten across the border. They did this with the riots of BLM in 2020. How many real serious prosecutions were there, for people engaged in riot violence, destruction?

CLAY: Virtually zero.

BUCK: Because they didn’t want to, because it didn’t really matter. And you see this all the way down to the level of individuals —

CLAY: They bailed ’em all out. Kamala Harris and company.

BUCK: Yeah, and then with the Supreme Court, you know, they’re saying, for decades they got so just shout at everybody, “It’s a constitutional right!” Well, now it’s not anymore, and what are they doing? Angry mobs chasing Supreme Court justices until they get what they want. How about they just learn to live like adults with the fact that they don’t get to have that anymore? “Sorry. Your favorite little legal toy has been taken away from you.

“The Supreme Court isn’t just a super legislature for you anymore,” and they can’t handle it. And their leadership is feckless and just full of cowards. I mean, they just simply do not care what people do in the name of a Democrat Party on a regular basis. This stuff is all normalized, by the way. They were doing this under the Trump administration. They chased Ted Cruz out of Fiola, a restaurant I know in D.C. By the way, Fiola also stood up for him, invited him back, said they were sorry. He chose to leave. So some of these restaurants do the right thing. They chased Sarah Huckabee out of a restaurant in Virginia. I forget the name. I don’t want to say it was the wrong name.

CLAY: I believe it was in left-wing, Virginia, which is a place you would think would not be — where Washington & Lee is. That’s where VMI is. If I remember correctly, I think that’s where they chased her out of.

BUCK: This is like the social media ban that happened with Twitter and Facebook. It only happens to one second, folks, okay? They do this, they have a culture of “We’re really upset so we’re gonna just chase and scream and act like savages.” Do the Democrats say, “Hey, guys, knock that off? We can beat them in the battlefield of ideas. We can actually make our case”? No. Nancy Pelosi, you know, has the servants probably send them a little letter of applause.

CLAY: We would be having continued discussions about the right-wing violence if there had been an attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice on the left wing. The Montgomery County executive, even after an assassination attempt outside of Brett Kavanaugh’s house in his county, isn’t even willing to enforce existing law to help protect Kavanaugh and his family? Buck, you know this. I just… I can’t even imagine for Amy Coney Barrett, who has I think seven young kids, for Brett Kavanaugh, who has two. It’s one thing when you are the justice to get used to the fact that you might be harassed over it, but even the mob doesn’t come after families. Democrats will.

BUCK: You know, you heard so much about the January 6th riot — we need to — we really need to be focusing on using that word ’cause they use “insurrection” and we use it sarcastically but they used it so much that now I think it starts to slip into language. It wasn’t an insurrection, okay? Was a moronic… No intelligent person really believes that a bunch of angry protesters who started a riot were gonna overthrow the entire U.S. government, all right?

They need to get a grip. But you compare not just the outrage, the media coverage over that, the way that this has dominated the functioning of some parts of Congress and the federal government now for, what, 18 months? This is such a big deal for them. Clay, there was an attempted mass assassination of conservative members of Congress on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, where congressmen were actually shot, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Steve Scalise almost bled out on that field.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: It was a Bernie bro. This guy tried to kill, it was like a dozen members of Congress. Thank God there were a couple of Capitol Hill Police who were actually there who were able to respond. But we never hear about that anymore. That would have been the biggest… We have suffered nothing like it. You want to talk about sins of Civil War? Nothing like that in 150 years. We could have lost a dozen members of Congress in one day from left-wing political violence. Do you ever hear about that anymore? No, of course not.

CLAY: No. Because it’s not an honest discussion. But I just thought those quotes about asking someone to actually enforce the law to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, after an assassination attempt? That was beyond the pale from Montgomery County, and the executive who lives there. I mean, it’s disgraceful comments from anyone.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Yes, that’s right, that’s the White House press secretary when asked about intimidation of a Supreme Court justice by an angry mob of lunatic Biden voters chasing, effectively, the Supreme Court justice out the back door of a restaurant because of the possibility of a full-on confrontation. She, the White House press secretary, wants you to know, “Yeah, you know, that’s just democracy. This is what Democrats believe,” even apparently when there are federal laws on the books to prevent, say, mobs from outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes, those laws don’t count. Meanwhile, you take a photo of yourself inside the Capitol Building at the wrong time you could be held in solitary confinement for, what, over a year. You could be treated like an Al-Qaeda terrorist.

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Sen. Hagerty, Former Ambassador to Japan, on Shinzo Abe

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: The former prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, was assassinated early this morning in Japan. And we have somebody now who knew him and who understands the political situation and — in this tragic day — can explain to us a bit of what’s going on here: Senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee, who was also formerly the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Senator Hagerty, thanks for joining us again, sir.

SEN. HAGERTY: Certainly. Certainly, it is a sad day, though, I must say. I was called right after the prime minister was shot. We were all just in shock, praying that he would survive. It’s a tragic day, not only for Prime Minister Abe, his family, for the nation of Japan, and, frankly, for the U.S.-Japan alliance.

BUCK: He may have been the best-known prime minister of Japan on the world stage since World War II, Senator Hagerty. What do you think people should know? When they’re thinking about Abe, his legacy, and what he did for that country, what should we all know?

SEN. HAGERTY: Well, I agree with you. I think he’s the most consequential leader that Japan’s had since World War II. Interestingly, he’s the first prime minister of Japan that was born after World War II. He’s also the longest serving prime minister to Japan. I was very fortunate to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan starting in 2017 when President Trump appointed me to be his representative to Japan. And I worked very closely with Prime Minister Abe. If I look at what we accomplished from that point forward, as you recall, North Korea had really ratcheted things up.

It began back in 2016 with multiple tests — and, you know, back at that point in time the Obama administration was deploying what they called “strategic patience.” I guess that means looking the other way. So, North Korea completely ramped up during that period. We were left to deal with that. In fact, President Obama warned President Trump that North Korea would be his biggest challenge coming into office, and he certainly delivered on that promise. Prime Minister Abe was an incredible ally at that point.

We put in place three consecutively stronger sets of economic sanctions on North Korea, stronger sanctions than North Korea had ever seen. That was the Maximum Pressure Campaign, and you remember how heavily it ramped up. But we pushed it, pushed it, pushed it, got that to a place where we had no more tests and really went from the position of maximum tension in the region to one where we had the first-ever leader-to-leader meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un.

But I could imagine that happening without the leadership and support of Prime Minister Abe because his help on the United Nations Security Council meant that we were able to impose those sanctions right away — bringing along Russia and China, I might add — and putting those sanctions in place was terribly important.

CLAY: Senator, appreciate you joining us. I know it’s tough for anyone who had known him well. He seems to have been an incredibly well-liked and respected figure, certainly in the Pacific Rim. But also now, when you look at the challenges that China is attempting… I think I saw this morning that they were continuing to basically fly planes more and more — China — into the Taiwan space.

When you look at the strategic imperatives that are in play here, what does Abe’s death mean in the larger context of United States-Pacific relations, and what do you think China’s goal is here? Buck and I talked a lot about MI5 and the FBI joint press conference and statement that they put out. What should Americans know about China’s perspectives and intent right now?

SEN. HAGERTY: Well, I think the prime minister saw this earlier than most world leaders, Clay. When you think about it, he was the one that articulated the free-and-open Indo-Pacific strategy long before others were talking about the real threat that China posed. And if you think about it, President Trump was the one that changed that entire dynamic back in 2015 when he began to talk about China in a way that I certainly appreciated but few Americans would have thought of at that point.

And if you’d asked the average American in 2015/2016, you know, “Is China our friend or is China our adversary?” they probably would have said, “T-shirts, things at Walmart that we get, China’s our friend.” In fact, President Trump changed that dynamic here in America, but Prime Minister Abe started that conversation before that, when he articulated the free and open Indo-Pacific strategy. That was the foundation of what we now call the Quad. That’s the alliance that we have between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India.

Abe put a tremendous amount of time bringing India into the fold. I was with Abe and Prime Minister Modi of India in meetings watching the personal relationship that those two gentlemen built. I saw the relationship that Prime Minister Abe and President Trump had. It was the strongest relationship, I think, President Trump enjoyed with any world leader, and I did everything I could in my power to make certain that that relationship got stronger every time. So, as we look forward, I think we need to give a lot of credit to Prime Minister Abe in terms of his vision of the need to keep the Indo-Pacific free and open and away from and clear of the sort of influence that China is trying to impose throughout the region.

I was just with Prime Minister Abe in April of this year, and he was very clear with me that the policy of “strategic patience” (chuckles) that had been deployed by the Obama administration was bankrupt. He was also questioning whether our policy of “strategic ambiguity” relating to Taiwan was one that was going to work going forward, particularly given what’s happened in Afghanistan, the fact that many of our allies now don’t trust us. The Biden administration has caused many people to wonder after Afghanistan, I think, where we stand.

I have encouraged this administration to stand strong in Asia. The Biden administration is pushing forward. They’ve actually elevated the Quad to a higher level now where it’s leader-to-leader level meetings. I’ve encouraged that. I want to support them where I can because it’s in our national interests to do this, but we have got to be strong at this point, and the Taiwan situation with respect to China is gonna be the biggest flash point we may experience. So, what happened in Afghanistan I think precipitated this massive step-up by China in the Taiwan Strait. They’re watching very carefully what happens in Ukraine right now. This is all a matter of great concern, and going forward I think we’re gonna miss Prime Minister Abe.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, former U.S. ambassador to Japan under former President Trump. Senator Hagerty, you may have seen this. Right away there were some efforts from left-wing media outlets to take political stances or to frame this assassination in a very specific way. The one that got the most attention, I think, was NPR. They initially, from their official account, said “former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, a divisive archconservative.”

And there were others, too, who seem to be taking this position that Abe was an “ultraconservative.” There was something concerning to them about what he did when he was in power. Why do Democrats have a problem…? Why did they have a problem with this man? They didn’t even let any of this… There was no mourning period, there was nothing, they immediately sought to pass some judgment. What is it we need to know about how he upset Democrats, some left-wing Democrats in this country?

SEN. HAGERTY: I think it’s reprehensible. Anytime the word “conservative” is used you’ve got the left wing and their allies in the media that just want to condemn it and jump on it. If you think about Abe, he was a great uniter. He’s the one that brought together the Indo-Pacific strategy. He’s the one that brought India into the fold. He’s the one that pulled Australia and his own nation together with the United States, strengthening the relationship there. In one of the most vital, one of the most strategic areas in the world!

Prime Minister Abe’s been a leader, and he’s done that by uniting, not by dividing, but bringing allies together. I think, you know, they’ll point to, you know, particular issues. There have been political issues between South Korea and Japan for years. That’s a difficulty that has persisted through leader after leader in Japan, and I have put a lot of time and effort into trying to get stronger economic ties between those two nations — that’s South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Similarly, I think we have an opportunity with stronger military ties.

We get along very well with militaries of both nations. The political history there is challenging, and I think it’s regrettable upon the death of strong world leader like this that we’ve got these news outlets that want to jump on the politics immediately, trying to take sides, and not stand back and recognize the incredible impact. As I said, this leader, Prime Minister Abe, will be viewed as, I think, the most consequential leader in post-World War II history for Japan, and the impact of it’s gonna be felt for generations going forward.

CLAY: Senator Hagerty, we appreciate the time on short notice, reacting to the death of Prime Minister Abe, and we hope you have a fantastic weekend. Thanks for the time.

SEN. HAGERTY: Great. Thank you so much. All the best.

CLAY: That is Senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee.

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Biden Feeds Base with Abortion Actions

8 Jul 2022

BUCK: We have right now Joe Biden actually speaking. We may pick up some of this live as it happens here in a moment, but you have Biden, first off, telling everybody how the economy is great. It’s not, but he’s gonna go with that ’cause what else is he gonna say? “I’m bad at my job”? But it’s really supposed to be about signing executive orders, this speech which is going on as I’m talking to you right now, to protect abortion, although it’s so interesting.

They always call it “abortion access” or “abortion rights” or “reproductive rights.” Why not just say “abortion” if there’s no problem with abortion? We all know why. But an executive order they’re talking about here to try to give more ease of abortion all across the country, at least do whatever they can at the federal level. We’ll discuss that. We’ve also got the shocking and really sad announcement of the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe.

He was killed early Friday morning in western Japan. He was on the campaign trail for other candidates in Japan. Somebody who did a lot of great things for his country. Some of the media reaction to this, of course, shows you how politicized and insane NPR and other news outlets actually have become. This isn’t new, but they’ve been for a while. We will have Senator Hagerty joining us at the bottom of the hour who is a the former ambassador to Japan to talk about the legacy of Shinzo Abe and what this means, what can we take away from this.

Anytime there’s an assassination of a figure of this magnitude, globally known, there will be reverberations. There’s a shock wave that goes through the psyche of certainly all of our allies and all of the rest of the world along with it. Oh, and we have an update for you to the bodega worker who was being held in prison here in New York City for what it seems to be on video a clear case of self-defense. We’ve got that story for you. But as Biden is addressing the nation right now — actually, you know what? We’re just gonna pick this up for one second. Here’s the president talking right now.

BUCK: You get the idea. Clay, it’s like the legal analysis of an ignorant, spoiled child, and he’s the president of the United States. Doesn’t even address, first of all, the undermining of the Supreme Court from the White House itself is deeply troubling. We’ll talk about Kavanaugh, who was just chased out of a restaurant last night in D.C. because of lib fanatics, and here’s Joe Biden. I thought he was supposed to unite the country!

CLAY: Well, 75% of people, Buck, in a recent Harvard-Harris poll, said they do not believe that the Supreme Court should be deciding abortion. What I would say in general about the way I believe this should be talked about is first, if you truly believe in democracy — which is what we are constantly be lectured surrounding January 6th: Our Democrats is under attack, our sacred institutions are no longer able to represent the people — this is the very fruition of democracy:

Returning Roe v. Wade to the states and saying, “Hey, we have 50 state laboratories. Let’s allow this debate to actually be engaged in the political process” is the very fundamental essence of democracy, which is why I think 75% of the American public in a Harvard-Harris poll is saying the Supreme Court shouldn’t be making this decision. Second part of this — and I think, Buck, you elucidated this well when the initial leaked opinion came down — what this does is turn the conversation from, “Should Roe v. Wade be the law of the land?” in the Supreme Court, to:

“What should the rules and regulations and laws look like as it pertains to abortion?” Not, “Hey, we’re ending this conversation,” because the Supreme Court has said in Roe v. Wade this is a constitutional right but instead of putting it back to the states and saying, “Let’s have some difficult conversations. When should abortion be legal? When should it not be legal?” And what we’ve seen, Buck, is Democrats, in the space of 25 years, have gone from, “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare,” which was what Joe Biden used to argue, certainly what Bill Clinton said, to now trying to codify nine-month abortions where, if you decide two days before you’re scheduled to give delivery that instead you want to have an abortion, you can do it in many of these states.

BUCK: They have codified it, by the way. In Colorado, for example, they recently made sure that the law explicitly says all nine months of a pregnancy, anytime you want. It’s clear in the text of the law that it’s for any time, any reason.

CLAY: Ninety percent of Americans believe that that should not be permissible, and a substantial majority believe nine-month abortion is murder. I agree with them, and that’s why I believe that even people like Tim Ryan who are running for Senate in Ohio and Stacey Abrams down in Georgia and certainly the Reverend Raphael Warnock running against Herschel Walker, these guys and girls who are running on the Democrat platform should have to answer the question: Do you believe nine-month abortion should be legal? Do you believe that should be the case? Because the vast majority of the American public in every state and all over the country does not believe that.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: The conversation has to happen.

BUCK: I can tell you what they will say, and you know what they will say, and everyone here has heard what they will say, which is, “I will be it should be a woman’s choice.” It’s as though they’re part of a cult and this is the slogan that they know they’re just supposed to say. You’re being asked a policy question, right, to your point, Clay, “Do you think it should be legal at nine months?” That is the question. They will not say, “Yes, I think it should be legal.” They’ll never say it.

CLAY: Although Tim Ryan did say it.

BUCK: Oh, okay. He did.

CLAY: He did. He was with Bret Baier and he got destroyed for it.

BUCK: He got destroyed for it. Right. But I’m saying, the smarter ones will say, “Well, I believe it should be a woman’s choice,” which is another way of saying, “Yes, it should be legal.” Joe Biden playing this game, it’s really… It’s hard to listen to these people, even some of them, people that went to, you know, Harvard Law School and they’re supposed to know so much about the law. They act like because it was decided, that decision can never change, even though that is actually the history of the Supreme Court itself. Put that aside, what do they think of Dred Scott? What do they think of Plessy, right?

CLAY: Plessy v. Ferguson.

BUCK: “Oh, it was decided”? Their argument is decided, and they know it. But even someone like Joe Biden. He says, “Oh, we’ve all settled this. We all know.” We can play video of him 10, 15 years ago saying, “Well, an abortion’s a tragedy. We want as few of these as possible.” Now it’s “abortion’s health care.” It’s like having your tonsils looked at. They want the power, they want to achieve the power through lying about this to continue to make us all live under lies about this, and we just have to fight. We have to fight them on this, because when people know what’s really going on, the Democrats lose on this. They lose.

CLAY: Well, and I think that’s why the debate over the specific details of abortion is now occurring in a way that it was not occurring when the argument is, “Should Roe v. Wade be law?” And that’s why I think Republicans, far from running from this, should focus on the fact that this is being sent back to the states and then on the nine-month abortion on the third trimester abortion where, if you’re like me and you have been fortunate to have kids, I will tell you, Buck — and I hope one day you get to experience this as well.

When you go through having kids and you get to find out the sex and you get to see the heartbeat through the sonogram and everything else, it changes it from a philosophical debate for many people which I think a lot of people out there — if you’re young, you’re in your teens, you’re in your twenties and you’re listening to us talk about issues like these. Until you actually go through the process of having a baby and hopefully get to go through the process of having a baby multiple times — and by “having a baby,” I mean the person that you’re with has the baby.

All I did was stand and watch the delivery three different times. But I got to be in that hospital room when the baby is being born. It’s such a miraculous experience that it’s hard to even explain if you haven’t been through it. Getting to go in, finding the sex out, being so concerned about all the testing that is being done to make sure that your baby is healthy, and that the mom is healthy all throughout that process. It will change you.

And I think the conversations are complex, they’re difficult — and look, I think people who are of good spirit and good mind can come to different opinions on a variety of different aspects here. But to me nine-month pregnancy, seven-month, eighth-month, when the baby can survive outside the womb, that’s murder.

BUCK: I think the Democrat leadership is monstrous on this issue. Honestly, the morally monstrous.

CLAY: Well, they’ve moved really wildly in their position.

BUCK: I’m talking about where they are now, where they are today.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: What will Joe Biden say on this? When will Kamala Harris, what do they say? What are they saying right now? What does Elizabeth say, what does Chuck Schumer say, what does Nancy Pelosi say? These people on the issue of life in the womb are moral monsters. We just have to face up to that, folks. Elizabeth Warren thinks that Crisis Pregnancy Centers wish women harm.

CLAY: Yeah, I saw that.

BUCK: Like a psychopath.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: This is what the Democrat Party — and I know it’s hard for people to process this, to think about this. We’ve only got two major political parties in this country. Sorry, Libertarians. How can people actually process that one political party has been so monstrously, morally in the wrong on this issue for decades and in recent years just to the point where like it’s psychopathy on display.

Well, now we finally have a chance to fight back against this and to change the law, to at least reflect what you’re talking about, which is a basic sanity, right? It may not be life protected everywhere always, as the pro-life movement, by the way, wants it to be, but at least it will be a lot closer to something where there can be some discussion about this. There’s no discussion about whether a baby that has a heart and fingers and a heartbeat and a brain is a baby. We gotta get past that.

CLAY: Third trimester is, to me, not a real debate that should exist. And that’s why I take it outside of abortion because it’s so charged. And yesterday I think I used the analogy, Buck.

BUCK: The baby that gets shot in the womb and they treat that as homicide.

CLAY: You have to treat that as a murder. I don’t understand how you wouldn’t, and a double murder if the mom and the baby who would otherwise survive are killed. And that becomes a really difficult, I think, argument for Democrats to make.

BUCK: There’s an incongruity with the way they talk about this as just a “health care procedure” that’s no big deal. If somebody were to slip a woman an abortion drug — this has been something that has come up before — against her wishes, I do believe there are jurisdictions that will prosecute that as manslaughter. Right? You think about it.

CLAY: You are the mom, and you are the dad who are sitting around, I can just tell you how devastating it is if you… I’ll give you an example, Buck. When I was in the delivery room for my second kid, everything was going smooth and suddenly the obstetrician there who was delivering the baby said, “His heart rate is starting to drop. We think the cord might be caught around his neck,” and they said, “We need all the NICU people rushed in here.”

So when you are there and you’re expecting a totally normal birth and suddenly they bring in the entire NICU squad, I have never experienced a fear like that ever before in my life, and so when you have — and I know a lot of people out there are listening to us right now have probably been through far worse than this associated with deliveries and everything associated with that, but you’re expecting a totally safe, normal birth…

We were fortunate because everything ended up being fine. Our obstetrician handled it, he came out, he’s a hundred percent healthy. Everything is great. But to have that moment from, “Everything is fantastic,” to, “Oh, my goodness, this baby’s life might be in danger. This might be a really fraught delivery where the NICU is involved,” it’s terrifying on a level that you can’t even comprehend until you suddenly find yourself in the middle of it. I just… I can’t conceive of anybody who’s gone through a pregnancy in the third trimester in any way being able to believe that’s something other than a baby.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: So Joe Biden spoke. He’s probably about to hop on a plane or helicopter or whatever and hop to the beach in Delaware would be my expectation, which is why they have him talking earlier in the day. Also ,earlier in the day, he’s not having to go to bed and get this. This is just embarrassing, Buck. I want to play these couple of cuts for you guys. First of all, we’ll play the short one. Joe Biden tries to say “District of Columbia and 50 states” reading off of a teleprompter — remember, they had the monster size teleprompter to make sure he can see it. This is what Joe Biden sounded like reading how many states we have and where he is located. Listen to this.

BIDEN: Right now, in all 50 states and the District of Combia. (sic)

CLAY: I mean, come on. Buck, I know that people misspeak. Certainly, everybody out there listening to us does. Can we play that one more time? I misspeak all the time, you misspeak all the time, aware on the air for three hours plus; we were doing Hannity last night together. But at least we were not dressed in the exact same outfit —

BUCK: I I’m always excited when I see that we have not shown up in our twin outfits.

CLAY: I chose a crazy colored jacket a little bit ’cause I was like, “There’s no way Buck’s gonna be wearing plum.” But let’s listen to this. Let’s listen to this one more time. Joe Biden talking about the country. Listen.

BIDEN: Right now, in all 50 states and the District of Combia.

CLAY: Only 30 more months. All right. So that’s ridiculous. He’s reading off of a teleprompter. You can’t even read. But now, Buck, we need to put together an unfortunate list after you will the different times he’s done this. He’s reading the commands that they are writing to him in the teleprompter!

BUCK: (laughing)

CLAY: Remember what he said at the end of his State of the Union? “Go get ’em,” and everybody’s like, why is that randomly there? Because I think it was a statement that somebody needed to go get him off of the rostrum there in the House of Representatives.

BUCK: In the news business where we do have to read off prompters sometimes or at least people who are anchors and do their shows on TV, we call this, “Going with the full Ron Burgundy” where he’ll just read whatever’s in front of you, you know?

CLAY: “You put in the prompter, Burgundy will read it,” which is really funny if you haven’t seen Anchorman, I don’t know what we’re talking about, but we found out, by the way, that Ron Burgundy podcast that they active sometimes during our show? They, Cowherd, and us are like the three most downloaded podcasts at iHeart, and evidently there’s a lot of you out there that love the Ron Burgundy voice. So here is Joe Biden reading… Listen careful. He is reading the instructions that they are giving him inside of the teleprompter. They want him to read what he just said again for emphasis. Listen.

BIDEN: It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who registered to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so, end of quote. Repeat the line. Women are not without electoral and our political (sputters).

CLAY: All right. When you hear him say that, “end of quote,” which is weird in and of itself that he’s reading “end of quote,” right? That is a strange behavior. But then, let’s listen to that first like six seconds again. This is a sign — this dude, he’s gone full Ron Burgundy but at least Ron Burgundy in the Anchorman days was being played for laughs. He wasn’t the leader of the free world. Just the first, like, six or seven seconds again so you can clearly hear what he’s doing. He’s reading “end of quote” and then “repeat that line.” These are instructions to him.

CLAY: I mean, this is sad and embarrassing. I would think that he would have read this beforehand and they would have said, “Hey, we want to you emphasize what you just said.” Repeat the line. This is a quote.

BUCK: Clay, you know, there was a really good piece in the New York Post as well that I’m trying to track it down. Who’s our friend from Fox usually comes on to talk about all things Biden? It was a different author but it’s about how —

CLAY: Miranda Devine.

BUCK: Yeah, Miranda Devine’s great. She’s on with us a lot. It was a different author. This was Maureen Callahan? Does that sound right?

CLAY: Okay. Maybe so.

BUCK: But I read the piece this morning, and it was all about how the Biden family — very much like the Kennedy family — is an absolute mess —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — of corruption and kind of really unethical, gross behavior and all. Joe Biden… You never hear that Joe Biden had a staffer when he was a senator — a person who worked for him, not a person who made believe that she saw him 50 years and had no contact with him whatsoever — accused him of sexual assault, never hear that anymore. You look all across the Biden family, Hunter Biden? Did you see this stuff yesterday about he’s in like a deprivation tank as part of his therapy, and he’s smoking crack in the deprivation tank, which is like the opposite… This is like going into rehab and bringing your crack pipe with you. And the media has no interest. He’s getting millions of dollars from China. Apparently, we sold oil to a company —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — that is tied to —

CLAY: That’s affiliated with Hunter. Yeah.

BUCK: Tied to Hunter Biden and the company that he set up and billions of dollars.

CLAY: From our Strategic Reserve. And, Buck, we played that audio of Joe Biden calling and saying, “I think you’re in the clear.” How many times have you ever said to somebody who didn’t do anything wrong, “I think you’re in the clear”? But ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC, none of those networks even covered the Biden voice mail to Hunter Biden saying, “I think you’re in the clear.” It is almost as if the stories don’t exist — and if you’re a left-wing voter, you might not know that they exist. This is why our audience keeps growing ’cause at least we tell you what’s true.

BUCK: The president of the United States has a crackhead son who takes millions of dollars from our biggest global enemies under the pretense that he has business advice for them, and this is when he’s not impregnating strippers and pretending that he’s not the father!

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Clay, we could go all day with this stuff, man. Media doesn’t care. Just go with the Biden mythology, just like they did with Camelot except this is seedier.

CLAY: How about we can’t even have Supreme Court justices get steak dinners!

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