Rafael Mangual’s Solution to NYC Crime

27 Jul 2022

CLAY: We are joined now by Rafael Mangual. He is a senior fellow, head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, also the author of Criminal (In)Justice. Rafael, you’re in-studio with us here in New York. Appreciate you being here. Buck and I have been talking a lot about so many of these viral New York City crimes that have been caught on video, that have spread.

Most recently — I’m sure you’ve seen it — a 16-year-old kid fighting with a police officer in the subway. It’s been everywhere, that video. What’s going on in New York City? Based on the research and data that you have, are you optimistic in any way that things are getting better? Are we getting worse from here? How did we get to this place where crime is an omnipresent fear for a huge majority of people in the country right now?

MANGUAL: Well, I’m not optimistic at all. I do think things are gonna get worse for quite a bit of time. And part of that is ’cause we’ve made so many serious structural changes to our criminal justice system, to our policing system over the last several years — everything from bail reform, to discovery reform, to the Right to Know Act, to the real discouragement of proactive policing tactics, stop-and-frisk, what have you — that our criminal justice system no longer has an infrastructure in place to kind of keep up with the pace of crime as it’s gone up.

And so, I think we’ve been caught off guard as a city, and until we make the decision to kind of reestablish those pieces of that puzzle that need to kind of work in concert with one another, we’re gonna find things are gonna get worse for a while. The case you mentioned, the 16-year-old fighting police officers, I think one of the most interesting things about that case is that that kid had previous charges that involved armed robbery, firearm possession. This is someone who arguably probably shouldn’t have been on the street at that time, and what we’re seeing a lot more of are these really heinous offenses committed by people who have 15, 20 prior arrests.

BUCK: Yeah, it’s clear that there’s no fear of the justice system, right?

MANGUAL: Yeah!

BUCK: If you’ve already been caught, we’re not even talking about people that get away with things. And one part, Clay, of the analysis of the Baltimore crime situation that I think didn’t get nearly enough attention is that they’re solving one-in-three murders?

CLAY: A tiny percentage.

So great to see that my new book, CRIMINAL (IN)JUSTICE, was featured in today’s @MailOnline: https://t.co/IGXB7fiJIp

If you haven’t already, make sure you grab yourself a copy! https://t.co/N3YgQjut3a

— Rafael A. Mangual (@Rafa_Mangual) July 27, 2022

BUCK: One-in-three murders solved means two out of three they’re not even solving. So people, even, who are caught, never mind those who are getting away with things, don’t have any fear of the criminal justice system. So, Rafael, I want to know when you dig into this and you’re looking at all the data, the numbers, and how these systems are functioning of criminal justice so poorly that they’re not keeping people safe, that the city numbers are showing New York, San Fran, L.A., Houston… We can’t name all of them.

MANGUAL: Sure.

BUCK: Those too many cities with the crime going up, 50, a hundred arrests. How does that happen? Meaning, like, where are the breakdowns in the system where some guy, they go, “Oh, we found the guy who murdered the liquor store clerk yesterday. Turns out he was arrested 50 times.”

MANGUAL: Yeah.

BUCK: How did he get to arrest 50 without ever serving a long stretch, 10, 15 years in prison?

MANGUAL: Because our criminal justice system is a lot more lenient than people would have you believe, right? There’s this narrative in our country that’s kind of taken hold in the mainstream for decades now, and that narrative says that we systematically denied people second chances, right? We have Second Chance Month in the United States. When you look at the average person in prison in the United States today, they have 11 prior arrests and nearly five prior convictions. (chuckling) We are not systematically denying people second chances.

We are giving them chance after chance after chance. In cities like Chicago, the average person charged with a shooting or homicide has 12 prior arrests, 20% have more than 20 prior arrests. The reality is that our criminal justice system has always kind of used lengthy terms of incarceration as sort of a last resort. Only 40% of people who are convicted of a felony at the state level are then sentenced to a postconviction prison sentence. People think that you get caught with a little bit of weed and you’re going away for 10 years.

BUCK: This is the narrative.

MANGUAL: That’s the narrative.

BUCK: This is the “end mass incarceration,” idea (impression) “Some guy was caught way marijuana cigarette. Now he’s serving 50 years!” That’s not what’s actually happening. How does racism as a fear — or, rather, concerns of racism within the system, how has that shaped the current criminal justice reality?

MANGUAL: Well, I think that’s put defenders of the sort of traditional institutions that constitute our law enforcement apparatus on their back foot because it’s a really hard topic to discuss, especially given the heightened tensions around that topic, and so people have really kind of leaned into the narrative that our criminal justice system is structurally racist in a bunch of different ways by highlighting these disparities of enforcement, highlighting racial disparities and arrests and police use of force and incarcerations. What often gets left out of that conversation, though, is that there’s another side to that ledger, right?

There’s criminal victimizations, and those aren’t evenly distributed either, right? We’re in New York City right now. A minimum — a minimum — of 95% of our shooting victims every single year for which we have data are either black or Hispanic, almost all of them men. It’s one of the starkest, most persistent racial disparities in our criminal justice data, and we hear almost nothing about it from the advocates, right? And so, when you start to take those realities into account, you start to realize two things: One, that we have to sort of take the disparities with a little bit of a grain of salt.

Because we have to control for the realities that that concentration of crime leads to, which is a disproportionate deployment of police resources to communities where they’re needed the most. I remember back in the nineties where the sort of critique of the NYPD was that they weren’t responsive enough to black crime, right? You’d hear it in rap music: They respond in five minutes to a 911 call in a white neighborhood, but it takes 20 minutes to get a response in a black neighborhood. This was the critique.

Well, now, the criminal justice system has become more responsive to crime that has concentrated in low-income minority communities, and that means that we have to accept that the interactions police have are gonna reflect that reality, that the number of people arrested for certain crimes are gonna reflect that reality. And if you’re uncomfortable with those disparities and the enforcement statistics, I ask people, “Why would you be comfortable with the disparities and the victimization statistics,” right?

Like, we know that the homicide decline from 1990 to 2014 added a whole year of life expectancy to the average black man in the United States. It only added 0.14 years of life expectancy to the average white man. So ask people, “Why would a system that you say is designed and operated to oppress low-income, minority communities produce such benefits that are unequally distributed within these communities when the system achieves its stated end, as stated by the people at the system’s helm?” Ask any police chief in America, “What do you want to achieve?” “Crime declines.” “Who’s that gonna help?” Not rich white people.

CLAY: That is a phenomenal analysis, by the way, and an easy analogy to draw here too for, if people out there are having to fight back against the racism argument, we use on this show, “Are police sexist?” They overwhelmingly arrest men. That isn’t because they’re out there trying to arrest men. It’s because men overwhelmingly commit violent crimes and, as a result, are wildly and disproportionately represented in the people who are put behind bars for violent crime. All right. So you have a magic wand.

They come to you — we’ll use New York City as an example ’cause we’re sitting here right now — and they say, “You get to implement three policies that you believe, or a couple of policies, what should we be doing to drive down violent crime?” You’re given a magic wand; you don’t have to worry about the political attacks, everything else. What would happen that you could implement as a result to lower violent crime in your mind?

MANGUAL: One thing that people don’t mention nearly enough is that I would drastically increase the funding directed at our criminal justice system. One of the reasons we talk about issues like bail reform, et cetera, are largely a function of how long it takes a case to get from filing to disposition, which influences how long peopling stand to spend in (crosstalk).

BUCK: I just want to tell you, I have a longtime friend in the district attorney’s office in New York who said, one thing that no one focused on at all was that in response to some of these anti-police, sort of pro… I don’t know. “Pro-crime” is how you describe it, but that the “cops are too rough” groups, was that they changed the requirements for how much… Like, they essentially made the burden, paperwork and bureaucrat burden of bringing every prosecution so high that it dramatically dropped down the number of actual cases ADAs can bring, just in terms of man-hours.

MANGUAL: Right. Right.

BUCK: They just said, “We need to do so much paperwork and so much stuff that we can’t even spend the hours to bring the prosecutions we want.”

MANGUAL: And on top of that there was no additional funding given for them to comply with that additional burden, right? We see this across the criminal justice system. You know, lots of people complain about overcrowding in prisons. Every time try to spend money on increasing our carceral capacity, what do you hear? “No new jails!” Right? Lots of people complain, want to impose new requirements on police to file all kinds of paperwork, comply with corporate monitors, et cetera. Again, no new funding added for that.

The idea is, I think, is that we want to starve in beast by giving it all this additional work to do and then we’re not gonna fund that effort at all and even though we’ll get less policing, we’ll get less prosecutions, less incarceration because that’s what we really want. Fine. I wish they would be a little more open about that, but fine. But then let’s have the debate about what that means for the communities you claim to represent. Because, again, crime is not evenly distributed. In New York City 5% of streets segments see 50% of all crime: 3.5% of street segments see 50% of all violent crime.

Right? If you live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a nice building with a doorman, the police can reduce stops and frisk by 90%, your life is probably not gonna change. But if you live in Brownsville Brooklyn, Washington Heights, Mott Haven in the South Bronx, it’s a very, very different story, and I think we need to tell that story more. So, one thing is additional funding. There are a couple of… The discovery reform, the bail reform I think should certainly be reexamined. Police funding needs to go up. The recruitment and retention crisis is real. But the main thing is that we need to get all these institutions back on the same page.

We could count on in the 1990s what the police, the prosecutor, the judges, the correctional system, parole board, they were all on the same page. They all wanted to do the same thing, and that was take dangerous criminals off the streets and give communities room to breathe. Now we can’t really count on that. Oftentimes the police are working at cross-purposes with prosecutors, at cross-purposes with judges, with the judiciary, with the parole board. And so when you see somebody who’s got 50, a hundred prior arrests, what that tells you is the police are actually still doing a pretty good job of focusing their resources on the people that pose the biggest dangers, but the rest of the system is not doing its job.

BUCK: I can say that does hurt. From the cops, I know from my time with the NYPD, that hurts morale a lot.

MANGUAL: Absolutely.

BUCK: Cops really don’t like having to wrestle someone to the ground and go, “Oh, this is 50th time we’ve had to do this.”

CLAY: Same guy.

BUCK: Same guy.

CLAY: If people love what you’re saying, Rafael — and I bet there’s a ton of people out there in our audience who do — how can they find you, what can they do to read more about your content?

MANGUAL: Check out all of our work at the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, Manhattan-Institute.org. I’m also contributing editor at City Journal, which has been covering this issue for decades, doing an outstanding job — City-Journal.org — and my book is Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.

BUCK: I’m gonna buy a copy today.

MANGUAL: Yeah, yeah, sweet.

BUCK: We’re gonna have a copy here on the shelf after I read it, added to the list.

MANGUAL: Fantastic.

BUCK: Thanks so much, Rafael.

CLAY: Fantastic, man. We appreciate the time.

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Jim Harbaugh Doubles Down on Heroic Pro-Life Belief

27 Jul 2022

CLAY: This is interesting. Jim Harbaugh is a coach at the University of Michigan, and he came out in a pro-life statement recently, started to get some criticism. The Big Ten conference — of which Michigan is a member — is having their media days, and Harbaugh was asked about those comments, and he doubled down, tripled down, maybe even quadrupled down on them. He said he tells any player or staff member that has an unplanned pregnancy that if they don’t want to keep the babies, that he and his wife will raise them.

Listen to this.

“We got a big house, we’ll raise that baby.”

— University of Michigan football head coach Jim Harbaugh, who spoke at an anti-abortion rally last week, offers to adopt any players’ or staff members’ unplanned babies pic.twitter.com/ZuqOspr1N0

— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2022

CLAY: So, Harbaugh stepping right out there letting you know what his opinion is on abortion. Now, this is somewhat revolutionary because, as Buck and I have discussed, the world of sports regularly left-wing opinions are allowed, promoted, praised. But as soon as you say anything other than something far left wing, you get ripped to the high heavens and usually guys or girls who step out there like Jim Harbaugh come running back with their tails ticked between their legs. I thought this was interesting because Harbaugh went aggressively behind his opinion that he’s already shared, and credit to Sage Steele, who is one of the actual sane people who works at ESPN, she tweeted this:

I love that Jim Harbaugh was brave enough to go on record with his stance on abortion, despite the predictable social media criticism he’s receiving.

Have the conversation.

Respect the opinions of others, even if you disagree.

Diversity of thought, right?! @CoachJim4UM https://t.co/gDAvp2UovU

— Sage Steele (@sagesteele) July 26, 2022

Well, so, Buck, there you go. Jim Harbaugh — we talked about the fact that he had come out pro-life — doubled down on it, said, “Hey, you work at the University of Michigan, affiliated with our football team and you don’t think you’re able to take care of a baby, my wife and I will raise it.” He says he tells everybody this associated with the team, and I love that whatever his opinion is, he’s sharing it, he’s owning it, and he’s not running in the other direction from it.

BUCK: Well, he’s a true pro-lifer. He stands behind his principles, and he means it. It feels almost heroic these days for somebody in the public eye to come under that kind of assault and go all-in on it, you know? Matt Gaetz doubled down on something funny. Harbaugh is doubling down on something real.

CLAY: Significant, and I think he’s sending a message that if you own whatever your opinion is, people ultimately back down because truth is its ultimate defense.

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Trump Triggers Journo with Hilarious Transgender Sports Joke

27 Jul 2022

CLAY: We’re mentioning Trump, by the way, Buck. Tomorrow Trump is going to be out at Bedminster. Yesterday he was in Washington, D.C., I believe for the first time since he left Washington, D.C. And he has an intuitive sense of what connects with his base and what connects with his audience, and it’s not a surprise the same arguments we’ve been making on this show that Democrats have gone insane. And one way to point out how they have gone insane is on the transgender-related issues, particularly as they pertain to sports. And Trump — we said this a lot, and Trump is scheduled to join us from Bedminster right now on Friday, live on the program.

BUCK: I think we’re kind of joining Trump considering we are gonna be at Bedminster. But, yeah.

CLAY: Well, that might be a better way to phrase it, but it’s our show; so he’s joining us on the show —

BUCK: Good point.

CLAY: We’ll be joining him at his golf course; so, we’re mutually joining together. Trump’s sense of humor always has not been able to register with a lot of the media that cover him. Yesterday we played the Matt Gaetz —

BUCK: Can we just…? He’s hilarious, and they have no sense of humor is the problem.

CLAY: Well, we played the Matt Gaetz yesterday where he said, “Be offended,” and it was legitimately hysterical about the people who are protesting all the time.

BUCK: The follow-up was great, too.

CLAY: Yes. It was phenomenal. So, Trump is speaking yesterday, and Trump is so insane that he said, hey, maybe we shouldn’t let men play in women’s sports. Listen to this.

President Donald J. Trump speaks at the AFPI Agenda Summit: “By the way, we should not allow men to play in women’s sports.” Join us on Rumble for the full speech: https://t.co/BsS0fRLTOR pic.twitter.com/WwU3zw7rcD

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) July 26, 2022

CLAY: I think 90% of Americans agree with him. And then he went on to say — and this is very funny — that he could be the greatest women’s basketball coach in history. How? Listen to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump compares transgenders in women’s sports to him asking NBA legend LeBron James to identify as a woman to play on his team:

“I’d be the greatest women’s basketball coach in history… they’ll never lose.” #AmericaFirstAgenda

MORE: https://t.co/VLgFvV3Yx7 pic.twitter.com/90Up4AncqM

— Newsmax (@newsmax) July 26, 2022

CLAY: Accurate. It’s funny, Buck. This got your friend llama Shea —

BUCK: Yamiche.

CLAY: Yamiche. Yamiche was really upset.

BUCK: Just to be clear, I’ve never even met Yamiche. I just know how to pronounce the name.

CLAY: You know how to pronounce her name. I had no idea how to pronounce her name, I’ll be quite honest, so I had to ask Buck who’s much better at pronunciations than I am. Yamiche Alcindor decided that this was… You just heard the jokes, you just heard Trump kind of mocking the ridiculousness of trans…

BUCK: — literally violence? I’m just wondering. Did she get close?

CLAY: Close, Buck, very close. She said this was transphobic language that Donald Trump used. This is their argument. Listen.

NBC’s @Yamiche Alcindor: Trump “used transphobic language. In particular, he was talking about transgender women competing in sports, and said they were men trying to compete against women, which of course is not the right way to talk about that issue.” pic.twitter.com/zq8DoePLpd

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 27, 2022

CLAY: I just want to stop that. How else would you talk about men competing in women’s athletics other than to say these are men competing in women’s athletics?

BUCK: This is something that the left loves to do. They attach “phobia” to terms. Now, “phobia” is an irrational fear of something.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: No one is afraid of… Trump’s not afraid of trans people, right? Arachnophobia, fear of spiders, right? Hydrophobia, fear of water. Whatever, right? People come up with all these things. No one’s afraid of trans people. No one has a problem with people who are trans who are, you know, human beings deserving of respect and dignity and kindness like everybody else. He’s just talking about sports.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And he’s saying we shouldn’t have six-foot-four dudes competing against women in swimming or basketball or anything else because it’s unfair, and I feel badly for so many of these women who grew up thinking, “Oh, you know, the pro-women party is the left and the Democrats, and they’re the feminists and they’re the ones that really care about us!” They’re abandoning you. The Democrat Party has abandoned you. They won’t even admit that there’s anything particularly special about you. In fact, being a woman is effectively a superficial physical costume that one can don, one can put on and take off at will. That’s effectively what they decided being a woman is.

CLAY: Buck, you rowed at college in Amherst.

BUCK: I did. I would have been the best female rower in — and I was not a… Let’s be very clear, ’cause if anyone from my rowing team is listening, I was not a very good rower. I was better at other sports. I just wanted to try to be less fat in college. I was a decent enough high school athlete. I would have crushed… I would have been —

CLAY: You would have been the best women’s rower.

BUCK: I would have been an all-American female rower, yes, no question about it. And, by the way, that’s based on your erg score. I mean, it’s actually… It’s like a track meet where they can do a time — they’ll time you. You do a 500-metre, thousand-metre, 2,000-metre, 5K, and they’ll do times on the erg machine, the rowing machine. I would have been like a national… By the way, it’s not even just me. Any male rower would have been at the top. If you could compete at the college level as a man, you would have been a top female rower as a man. I don’t even know how to say this. Yes.

CLAY: Yes. Which is the point of anybody who understands athletics. So, Trump intuitively understands what the American public thinks on many issues. And I just would echo what we said earlier. If you think men can get pregnant and if you believe that gender is basically a construct and you can, to your point, just try on whatever gender you want to try on at any given point in time, you’re a Democrat, and the vast majority of the American public — white, black, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, everyone — rejects overwhelmingly this idea except Yamiche out there is arguing this is transphobia to say men should compete against men and women should compete against women.

BUCK: Pretty close with Yamiche, by the way. Pretty close. It was good. You’re right there. You’re right on the edge.

CLAY: I even wrote down the pronunciation here, and I can’t even read my own pronunciation.

BUCK: And the other area you’ve heard, it’s a little bit quieter on this issue now, but on the trans agenda as it pertains to indoctrination of children in schools, Libs of TikTok, the account that’s out there, keeps on finding all of these teachers and, you know, youth counselors who are saying, you know, my — or even just parents, parents, too, are saying, you know, “My child came out as trans at age 4 or whatever the case may be.” There are a lot of Americans, whether it’s on the issue of trans competition in sports or on trans indoctrination for kids, they may not be that vocal about it because they don’t want the psycho left to come after them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But when they have an opportunity to vote based upon candidates who either embrace this stuff or recognize it as crazy and destructive, I think there’s gonna be a huge silent majority effect here against the insanity, quite honestly of the left on these issues.

CLAY: Yes. I think you’re right.

BUCK: I think people are gonna say — it is a huge part — yes, the economy, fine. That’s first and foremost. But a very big chunk, I think, of the swing in Hispanic sentiment right now is, what do you mean we can’t have men and women as men and women and we’re just gonna pretend that that’s the same thing or different things when we decide it’s different only and that children as young as, you know, kindergarten should be exposed to gender identity ideology? I think people realize, it’s pretty crazy.

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Malaise Days: Fed Raises Interest Rates Again

27 Jul 2022

CLAY: Buck and I are both up here together in New York City. And, as we told you would happen, breaking news for those of you out there in the market for a home or just borrowing money in general, the Fed has raised its interest rates by another three-quarter points, the biggest raises back-to-back since the early 1990s to try to combat 9.1% inflation, 75-point-basis-point-increase as was widely expected. The stock market basically unmoved as that was just announced in the last five minutes. But your borrowing cost increasing as there is a desperate desire to try and bring down that 9.1% inflation.

Also creating, potentially, a larger issue as we’ve been discussing throughout the course of today’s show, it’s very rare to be raising interest rates in a recession. And tomorrow morning, we will officially get news, at least for purposes of this show, despite what the Biden administration is trying to argue on the contrary, we expect that the economy will have shrunk again, a negative growth rate in the second quarter, which will be back-to-back negative growth rates which suggest that we are essentially already in a recession. So, that news breaking, Buck, during a commercial break there. And again, those basis points rise going to cost you more to get a mortgage, going to cost you more to borrow money in an effort to try to slow down the economy and bring back inflation.

BUCK: Yeah, man, this is what happens when you spend too much money or, rather, put too much money into the economy. It’s as though we were running an experiment over the course of covid and then even accelerated into the Biden administration where we said, let’s really reduce economic productivity for a little while, let’s make sure we go into an artificial, temporary recession, flood the country with money without any underlying economic activity to support it or, rather, reduced economic activity to support it and see if we can create some really bad inflation.

That is what has happened here. And the fact that the Biden White House is the least capable crew on economic matters to have been in charge of the country certainly since the Carter administration isn’t confidence inspiring at this moment. I think that’s fair to say. And I believe we’re just at the beginning of this. Things are gonna tighten up. There’s gonna be… You know, the forest fire is gonna burn for a while before the undergrowth and the new growth can come about.

I think this is gonna be a real challenge, it could be a real challenge honestly for any administration. But it just so happens that we have the worst possible people making the decisions right now at the highest level of government in a variety of posts, and Joe Biden is not up for this. He wasn’t up for being president. He’s certainly not up for being president of a country that is going into it looks like the roughest economic period it seems certainly since the 2008, but that didn’t last very long. Everyone says, “Oh, in 2008, the entire economy was melted down.”

Part of that narrative, I think, was so that they could bail out the banks like Goldman Sachs which got a hundred percent on the dollar for its counterparty risk with AIG. It’s good to have Paulson being the Treasury secretary as a former Goldman Sachs guy. Too bad for Lehman Brothers, though. But if you look at the more structural economic issues, I think you gotta go back to periods of stagflation, you go back to the Carter era, you go back to the seventies and the high price of gas, the gas lines, all the stuff, inflation, obviously. We’re revisiting some of the things in the past that we were hoping we’d never see again economically.

CLAY: Unfortunately, everybody seems to have a working memory of about two generations. And then whatever happened 40 years plus ago, people convinced themselves that it could never happen again. And that’s why I thought last week when we had Art Laffer on was so interesting because he was there at the inception of the Reagan revolution when they managed to defeat the inflation that was brought to bear by Jimmy Carter.

And where are we? I think historically you can draw an analogy that much as Jimmy Carter was an accidental president, Joe Biden’s an accidental president. He’s an accidental president because he happened to run during covid. They were able to hang that around Donald Trump’s neck, and they got Joe Biden into office. And just like Jimmy Carter, Democrats have control of Congress and inflation runs out of control because they are awful at all economic issues.

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Garland Sets Table for Trump Prosecution

27 Jul 2022

CLAY: You thought that my prediction on Hunter Biden getting indicted was maybe aggressive, Buck. How about Julie Kelly right there: 99.9% chance, she said, that Donald Trump will be indicted for this seditious conspiracy charge, in her mind, that the Washington Post wrote about last night, if you haven’t read it? That’s pretty aggressive. She’s been right — let’s be honest — on a lot of these January 6th-related stories.

BUCK: Well, let’s just think about what they’ve already done. They managed — and are unrepentant about it — to push a Russia collusion narrative. That was the dominant news story from 2016 really basically up until the pandemic. The biggest news story in America and really in the world was the complete and utter fabrication — the lie — that Donald Trump worked with Putin and the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election from Hillary.

And what we’ve seen since then is that they are just upset. Not that they destroyed their credibility in places like CNN, engaged in journalistic self-immolation. But that it didn’t work quite as well as they had hoped. They did manage to use it as a weapon against the Trump administration, that big lie against Trump. So, Clay, we have to stop and look at this and say to ourselves, “They’ve shown us who they are.” If you’re really willing to believe that Donald Trump was part of some Russian conspiracy to change…

People believe that they changed votes in the voting machines! Remember, questioning elections when Democrats win is “literally treason,” but when they were saying that Trump didn’t win the election — and Hillary was even still months and months after she had lost saying that she didn’t really buy it — that’s just fine, man. That’s just safeguards our democratic processes. The thing with Democrats you always have to remember is they have no integrity to protect on these things. Gives them a lot of movement, a lot of latitude.

CLAY: I was surprised that Merrick Garland sat for this interview. Lester Holt questioned the attorney general, Merrick Garland, about the idea of prosecuting Trump and what it would do to the country. Listen to Merrick Garland’s answer right here.

“You said in no uncertain terms the other day that no one is above the law. That said, the indictment of a former president of perhaps candidate for president would arguably tear the country apart. Is that your concern?…”

Waiting for Holt to ask about Hunter Biden! pic.twitter.com/Opeff9LRMi

— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) July 26, 2022

CLAY: I think he’s setting the table, Buck. I’m just gonna say it. Hunter Biden’s gonna be the fall guy for Democrats. It forces Joe Biden, potentially, out of running; creates a mess, and then they are able to argue, “No favor.” You just heard him say this there: “We’re gonna go after the truth no matter who the defendant is.”

BUCK: So, to be clear, you think that the Biden — or, rather, the Democrat — apparatus wants to take both these players off the chessboard? Biden — because if his son gets indicted, he’s gonna have to pardon him or commute him and he’s gonna be too wounded as a political candidate to go forward — and Trump?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You think they don’t want to just clear out the chessboard a little bit; they want to flip it over and knock all the pieces off?

CLAY: Well, I think Democrats know that Biden an awful candidate; so, I don’t think they have any issue now with throwing him to the wolves and Hunter Biden is testimony to that, testament to that. And then you look at Trump, they definitely still want Trump. I think the only way you can charge Trump is if Hunter Biden gets charged first.

BUCK: I think your odds of a Hunter Biden prosecution are one in 10. I think the odds that they actually try this thing against Trump, I’m feeling like it’s a 50-50 at this point, man. They might just be crazy enough.

CLAY: That’s interesting. I think Hunter Biden’s more likely to get charged than Trump. I really do.

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Julie Kelly Is 99.9% Sure DOJ Will Indict Trump as October Surprise

27 Jul 2022

BUCK: We have Julie Kelly joining us right now to talk about the situation of the January 6th protesters and also the possibility of a DOJ criminal charge being brought against former president Donald Trump. Julie, thanks so much for being with us.

KELLY: Hey, guys, thanks for having me on.

BUCK: So, first off, I just think it’s so important ’cause you’ve been on this from the very beginning. You keep on it. You are in this fight to get fair treatment and justice done for those who are accused of crimes, including many accused of entirely nonviolent crimes on January 6th. What is the latest that everyone across the country, Julie, should know about the status of these January 6th defendants?

KELLY: Right now there are about 850 Americans charged in the Justice Department’s unprecedented, abusive, vengeful prosecution of what happened on January 6th. The overwhelming majority of those people are charged with low level misdemeanors such as parading in the Capitol. Nonetheless the DOJ is still requesting jail time for those people. We saw this week Dr. Simone Gold, who is also an anti-lockdown activist was arrested on January 6th.

She pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. She just started a 60-day prison sentence. So, even for the lowest charges, DOJ’s requesting prison time, and these judges are signing off on it. We still have these 70 to 80 people who remain detained without bond, some of whom have been behind bars for 16, 17 months awaiting trial, have not been convicted of anything. And so, now we see the Washington Post confirming last night what I’ve been predicting for months is that the DOJ is moving — working with a grand jury and moving to indict Donald Trump on at least one felony count, possibly seditious conspiracy, which is insane. But that’s where we are. Things are getting worse for these defendants and targets rather than getting better now more than 18 later.

CLAY: Julie Kelly, political commentator, senior contributor to American Greatness, author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right and Disloyal Opposition. You have some breaking news here for us, I believe, earlier today. A man named George Tanios is one of two men accused of the attack on Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer. He spent five months in jail over this. What exactly is going on? And what does it signify in your mind what the Department of Justice is doing associated with George Tanios?

Plea hearing set to begin for George Tanios, one of 2 men accused of assaulting Officer Brian Sicknick.

DOJ just dropped all assault, weapons charges as well as obstruction of official proceeding. Tanios will plea to 2 common misdemeanors.https://t.co/N73QTeD9hF

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) July 27, 2022

KELLY: You know, it’s pretty stunning because, as you both know, the idea that Brian Sicknick died as a result of what happened on January 6th has been an animating feature of the January 6th narrative. We still to this day, even this committee continues to lie that Sicknick somehow died as a result of the Capitol protest. Of course, in April of 2021, after months of stories including the New York Times account claiming he was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher, a story they later retracted, in April 2021 the coroner came out and said unfortunately at age 42 he tragically died of natural causes, two strokes caused by blood clots.

That hasn’t stopped the media and DOJ itself from perpetuating the lies. So, two men were charged — arrested and charged — in March of 2021. They were both denied bail. George Tanios, they both face identical felony accounts including assaulting an officer with a dangerous or deadly weapon, pepper spray. And George Tanios has been in jail for five months, denied bail, lost his business, bankrupted him, of course, almost destroyed his family.

His detention was overturned by the D.C. appellate court, a very rare move to overturn these pretrial detention orders. Anyway, he still faced charges. He refused to plea. And then today suddenly DOJ filed — drops all the assault charges against him and instead filed two low-level misdemeanors restricted — trespassing on restricted grounds and disorderly conduct for which he will plead guilty later this afternoon.

BUCK: So, just to be clear, Julie, for everybody in the Tanios case, if that’s where this goes, how long will he have been held, and are they keeping — were they keeping — Tanios in solitary or administrative segregation in the jail system in D.C.? And how long would he have served for what are effectively, as adjudicated, misdemeanors?

KELLY: Right. So, he was in jail for more than five months. And even when he was released, Judge Hogan, a Reagan appointee, if you could believe, a man who should have retired long ago, still sentenced him to home detention. He couldn’t even leave his house, so he could not work after being detained for five months additionally. But I believe it’s only six months — up to six months — for each of his two misdemeanors, so I’m assuming that DOJ or the judge will just, after they sentence him — which won’t be today, but — for time served.

That doesn’t change the fact his life has been destroyed, the media describes him as a cop killer, I’ve been in contact with George, really, since before he got released. And, you know, he got out of jail and started looking up his name and could not believe what he was reading. That he is now considered a cop killer. And as you know, even DOJ has dropped all those charges related to him, this will still be part of his life’s story and considered someone who contributed to the death of Brian Sicknick no matter what the facts are.

CLAY: Julie, the New York Times will not cover a lot of the January 6th political prisoner angle, but I was telling Buck, I think it was the Monday edition of the Times, they had a big article about how media was covering January 6th. And you were quoted, they talked about you, we threw Buck and I in there, Tucker Carlson. What did you think of the New York Times article, and what kind of feedback, if any, did you get? Because you were a big part of their story, what was supposed to be a hit piece on the way that so-called conservative media is covering January 6th. But I actually thought the way it read, it actually sounded super-logical on many different levels.

KELLY: I think so too. And it was great to be in such good company, including you guys and Tucker and others.

BUCK: Thank you.

KELLY: You know, we — because we have been running counter to the official regime narrative and in many instances, and the Sicknick case someone, unfortunately we have been right.

CLAY: Yep.

KELLY: And I knew the reason, I knew that these new charges, dropping the charges were coming, and I knew that that’s why the New York Times tried to smear me as somehow downplaying what happened to Brian Sicknick. Well, now we’ve been proven right again. So, that’s part of what the New York Times does. So, that was their predicate for publishing that.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Julie Kelly, political commentator, contributor to American Greatness, author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right. Julie, to that end, about the weaponization here against the political right and disloyal opposition from the government, you saw that Washington Post piece, I’m sure, that is trying to at least create the perception, maybe the belief that Donald Trump himself may be charged.

You mentioned the possible insurrection — seditious insurrection — charge against him or conspiracy to commit insurrection, whatever it is, however they’re going to phrase it. Do you think they actually might do this, Julie? That’s what… Clay and I are going back and forth on this. Do you think they’ll pull the trigger on this and come what may from just what this would do to the country?

KELLY: Well, first I want to know who’s thinks the DOJ is gonna charge them.

CLAY: Okay. So, Julie, my argument is, if the DOJ charges Hunter Biden, which I think they will, that they’re going to use that as political cover to potentially charge Trump, and they’re say whether you are the son of the president or the former president, justice demands that we pursue it no matter who the defendant might be. So, my theory is they may use Hunter Biden charges as cover to charge Trump with conspiracy.

KELLY: Interesting.

BUCK: That’s what I said. Interesting.

KELLY: I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought about it.

BUCK: But what do you think about them just charging Trump, period? You think they might do it under any circumstance?

KELLY: 99.9%, absolutely confident this DOJ is going to indict him.

BUCK: Wow.

KELLY: This is the purpose of the January 6th committee, is to build a public and political case again Donald Trump, especially related to two alleged militia groups. This DOJ has not been held accountable for repeatedly lying in court and to a grand jury about what happened on January 6th. These judges in D.C. are letting DOJ get away with anything. So, I’m confident that Matthew Graves, the D.C. U.S. attorney and Biden’s campaign adviser is presenting information to a grand jury made up of D.C. residents of course that voted almost 94% for Joe Biden, they’d be chomping at the bit to indict Donald Trump for anything, including this exceedingly rare charge of seditious conspiracy, a charge no American has ever been convicted of. And the last time DOJ even tried to prosecute anyone with seditious conspiracy in 2011, federal judge in Michigan tossed the charges out of court. That’s how unusual and rare this count is.

CLAY: Julie, what do you think the timing would be on bringing… If you’re 99.9% certain which charges are going to come, when do you think the DOJ would bring them?

KELLY: I would guess sometime September. I believe this will probably be the October Surprise. It will be the latest DOJ October Surprise to interfere in an election, and there’s nothing to stop them.

BUCK: Julie Kelly, Clay, calling a shot here in the upper deck, my friend. She’s about — swinging the bat too. That’s a big call to make, October Surprise, Trump gets indicted.

CLAY: Julie, we appreciate you. How can people who want to…? And I’ve done this myself, so I would encourage everyone out there listening to do it as well. How can people donate so that these January 6th defendants can have legal representation to help them fight the charges that they are all facing? How can people help them get better attorneys?

KELLY: Well, Clay, thank you for that. As you’ve donated to Patriot Freedom Project, it is a fund that is helping to pay for lawyers and the financial burden of families who are ensnared in this abusive prosecution. I also would ask people to check out George Tanios’ GiveSendGo account, because he’s really been destroyed, to support this narrative about Brian Sicknick, and so those are two places people who want to help financially or even if they can’t send a letter to some of the detainees, I know that it’s greatly appreciated.

CLAY: Julie, fantastic work as always. We appreciate the time, and we will keep you on the dial here as these January 6th prosecutions continue.

KELLY: All right, guys. Thank you so much. Talk soon.

BUCK: Thanks, Julie.

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Fair Warning, Dude: Don’t Steal a Car a Month in Colorado

27 Jul 2022

CLAY: Buck, we talked about the viral video of the 16-year-old kid throwing punches at the police officer. Certainly, we talked about Lee Zeldin — we’re both in New York City right now — an assault on Lee Zeldin that got basically no time, immediately released. Now, there have been federal charges brought since then. Colorado. Colorado’s got an interesting Senate race that is going on there, possibility of a big Republican upset, and if that happens, it’s gonna be because of things like what Attorney General Phil Weiser is saying. You don’t really want to punish car thieves until they’ve stolen cars three or four times.

I’m not even making this up. Listen.

NEW: @pweiser reveals his hard line on car thefts.

Once someone has stolen “3 or 4 cars” within “say 3 months,” THEN it’s time for consequences.

No wonder Colorado is #1 in the nation for car theft. #copolitics pic.twitter.com/Tlhxn7bLTW

— Kristi Burton Brown (@ColoradoKbb) July 26, 2022

BUCK: Wow!

CLAY: Three or four! First couple of car thefts, you get a free pass. Pass go. Go ahead and drive ’em wherever you want.

BUCK: Is this guy Attila the Hun? Let’s be kind. Let’s be nice. After the 15th car you’ve stolen, I think they can assume you’re a car thief who needs to be punished. Three or four cars? Oh, that’s JV stuff right there.

CLAY: Maybe I’m in the minority here. I’ve gone my whole life without stealing a car. Evidently, in Colorado I’ve gotta buy one, get one free on the car theft because nothing will happen to me ’til I get to three or four. I got a crazy idea. Can we play that one more time? Because people won’t even believe that’s real. Hey, they’re getting tough on crime in Colorado. Once you get to three or four cars, they’re gonna throw the book at you. Listen.

WEISER: After someone commits a third or fourth car theft in, say, three months, they should be kept in with a really high bond because you got a sense they’re gonna get out, they’re gonna commit more crimes.

CLAY: You got a sense, Buck, when you’ve stolen a car every month for three consecutive months, you’re probably gonna steal another car — and then, they gotta get really severe with you.

BUCK: Yeah, I mean, what is this guy? It’s not part of the Taliban here. I mean, they shouldn’t be getting so strict with people, Clay. Three or four cars? Like I said, folks, you gotta understand something. There are arrests being made every day in New York City — I’m sure in Colorado, too — of people who are doing bad stuff who have been arrested 40, 50, even a hundred times, okay?

The fact that the system gets to the point where you have people who only finally get locked away when they murder somebody after being arrested 30 or 40 times, it’s clearly failing, and this isn’t failing because of what was passed even necessarily at the state legislature. It’s, a lot of it, because of prosecutors who are deciding to just give the sweetest deals possible to people — not even deals, to just say, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t do it again.”

CLAY: Buck, what did we talk about yesterday, Baltimore? The study that was done about who’s committing murders. One of those stats was 90 out of 110 murders that that guy had tracked down, if the people who committed the murders had been serving the actual sentences that their violent crimes would have required them to serve, those murders wouldn’t have happened. That’s where we are right now.

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When Is a Recession Not a Recession? When a Democrat Is President

27 Jul 2022

BUCK: The question we have to address today is when is a recession not a recession? And the answer is, when a Democrat is president. That’s when all of a sudden, a recession is something else, it’s a recovery, it’s a transition, it’s a mitigation measure, whatever, it’s something else. It’s not actually a recession, especially when you’re almost at the August recess and you got a midterm election coming up.

Here is just a sense… I mean, they’ve got Brian Deese, the economic adviser in this White House who’s out there trying to make the case — there are few people you’ll see popping up on TV not making a compelling case or even a coherent one, trying to tell everybody about how this is not really a recession. Here is what they say sometimes versus other times. Do we have it?

Then vs. now: What is a “recession?”

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

We are living in a George Orwell novel. pic.twitter.com/Woa3i9evNn

— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) July 26, 2022

BUCK: Clay, to be fair, if they can redefine the word “woman,” redefining the word “recession” is pretty easy in comparison, but I think everybody sees the game here.

CLAY: If you wonder what the number is going to be, about a week ago this argument began to be trotted out, that it wasn’t a recession until it’s officially called a recession by the grand pooh-bahs in charge of economic analysis. And, Buck, oftentimes they don’t even make their official statement on recession having arrived until a year after the recession has already been here. So, what seems quite clear is Republicans are going to argue, rightly, that the traditional definition of recession is two straight quarters of declining GDP growth.

We already were down 1.6% in quarter one. We’re likely going to be down tomorrow early in the morning when this number comes out for the second quarter. And what that happens, we’ll be in a recession. And what Democrats are afraid of is we’ve already got 9.1% inflation, we’re sitting at a little over three months until the midterm, and in addition to the worst inflation in over 40 years, two generation failed inflation numbers, you’re now gonna also be able to argue that Biden has led the country into a recession.

And so, they are desperate to try to adopt this technical version of recession that won’t be officially analyzed and determined until after the midterms. So, sometime in 2023, all of these… I think it’s like eight guys who are sitting on an economics board that analyze all the data and determine whether we’ve officially hit a recession, then it’ll happen in 2023 when we’re likely already moving through the recession and it’s not an election year. They don’t want to give this ammunition to Republicans.

BUCK: And the reality that the Democrats don’t want to discuss is rates are going up even higher and the recession that we are in right now, whether it is a technicality or not, is probably going to get worse. You’re going to see likely a period of stagflation; so high inflation rates and rising unemployment. That’s likely to be the case. So, they’re trying to do this slow roll, boil the frog in the pot slowly approach to the economic reality we are all in. Here’s an economist over at KPMG saying, “Look, the reality here is that the Biden economy’s not good, and it’s gonna get worse.”

KPMG Chief Economist Diane Swonk: Biden’s economy is “between a rock and a hard place and there’s no way to extract ourselves without there being some pain” pic.twitter.com/vtoZlM342e

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 26, 2022

BUCK: Now, if the Biden administration was staffed with serious people and if Joe Biden had the energy, cognition, and clear synapses in the brain necessary to really understand what’s going on here, Clay, I think that they could say to everybody, “Look, we were in a pandemic, we spent trillions of dollars, and we were in an emergency situation, and we need to get ourselves out of this now, and that is going to require some difficulty, but we’re gonna make smart decisions.

“We’re gonna bring on some business leaders into this White House.” There are things they could do. What they have been doing all year is saying, “Look at all the jobs we created. We’re great. This is a great economy. What are you talking about?” And the American people are looking at them saying, “Can’t afford my gas, my groceries, or my mortgage, buddy. It’s not so great.”

CLAY: They’re in a really tough spot in this respect, Buck. Two-thirds of the American economy is consumer spending. So, if consumers recognize that we’re in a recession, which I think consumers have, what happens? People start to spend money less. And this is what you’re seeing with the earnings numbers that are coming out. Walmart is always a good approximation of the larger national economy. Remember last year when Walmart came out and said, “Hey, we’re starting to see people trade back to generics a little bit.”

Instead of buying the expensive brand of peanut butter they’re buying a Walmart version, they’re saving a little bit of money. They came out and said that. That was last year, last quarter, I believe. Most recent quarter for Walmart, stock dropped 10% because they said people are dialing back spending in a big way. First thing you do is go to generics. Next thing you do is start buying less. And when people are buying less from Walmart nationwide, we’re in a recession, Buck. And people are behaving like we’re in a recession. We talked about this last night at dinner. I’m really nervous about the housing market.

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: Right? Because just think about it out there. We talked about this last week with Art Laffer, too, economic genius, but there are a lot of people out there, probably many of you listening to us right now who have 15 or 30-year mortgages in the two and a half to 3% range, and you might have been thinking, hey, we just had another kid. Maybe it’s time to move.

I’d like to be in this other neighborhood, or maybe you’re downsizing and you’re like, it’s time to move. But then you think, wait a minute. In order to move, my overall mortgage gonna go to 6%. Why would I move when I’ve got a two and a half or 3% mortgage locked in? And you’re starting to see housing prices come back substantially all over the country, even in hot markets.

BUCK: This is supply and demand. You’re gonna have fewer possible buyers for all of these houses because they won’t be able to afford the financing as the rates rise as well as the challenge of paying all their other bills, right? Most families are living within a pretty confined budget space month to month, and you see these numbers about how many people even have the savings to deal with a $500 emergency nationwide it’s pretty small.

But when you have fewer possible buyers in the housing market, you’re going to have the effect on price. A lot of people obviously also have seen their equity go up dramatically in their houses in the last couple of years. And now the question is, what are they going to do, right? Those prices are gonna be coming down, the housing market could slow down pretty dramatically. And that obviously affects building, that affects —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — the broader economy in a lot of really important ways. And they keep pushing us on this idea, well, unemployment’s really low. Yeah, but not for the reasons they want people to believe. Because of low labor force participation, because a lot of people retired during covid. And I also think that they’re not measuring… I think there are a lot of people that are just out of the job search right now because they’ve decided that they have better options or they’d rather just move in with family. So, when you’re looking for some kind of an upshot in this economy, I think it’s really hard to find one, and the people in charge are both dishonest about this and incompetent in the handling of this. That’s a big challenge.

CLAY: And let’s talk about this potential basis point rise which we anticipate’s gonna be a three-quarter basis point rise. They did this last month, which was the biggest interest rate rise since 1994. The expectation is the Fed is gonna raise another three-quarter basis points today. When and/or if that happens, Buck, think about the challenging dynamic that we’re in. We may be in a recession and rising interest — raising interest rates simultaneously, which almost never happens. Usually, you’re cutting interest rates during a recession to try to stimulate demand.

So, you’re doing something that actually could add more fuel to the recession fire, and the reason we’re having to do it is because they so mismanaged things that they allowed inflation to get out of control. So, they could destroy the recession simultaneously getting worse while maybe not even being able to address the underlying inflation, which is why we’re in one of the most difficult economic markets in terms of just trying to handle it, and we’ve got maybe the dumbest, least business-centric management that we have ever seen in our lives in the White House right now.

BUCK: This is all ultimately cause and effect. The Fed, the government put too much money into circulation. This was a problem of monetary policy. They overstimulated the economy. They artificially kept rates too low, they spent too much money, we’re at 30 trillion, roughly, now in the national debt. Joe Biden comes in after a period of overspending — let’s be honest — during lockdowns, that happened. Trillions of dollars spent. He spent $2 trillion more and wanted to spend another $5 trillion over 10 years after that for Build Back Better.

The cause and effect here economically is clear. You spent too much money, you manipulated the economy too much, and so now there’s going to be the pendulum swing in the other direction. The political cause and effect should be the people that wanted to do this even more than they already did and have no idea how to actually operate within a free-market economy to make things grow and improve and get better for all of us, they need to be held to account in this midterm election, otherwise you’re gonna have more of this. They still think if we could spend more. Remember the stimulus package under Obama? Remember what the criticism was when the Obama economy?

CLAY: Wasn’t even a trillion.

BUCK: Wasn’t even a trillion. And their whole thing, though, was, “Oh, we didn’t spend enough.” That was always the thing. It’s always more spending. Right now, if Joe Biden could, would he spend $5 trillion for Build Back Better votes?

CLAY: A hundred percent.

BUCK: One-hundred percent he would do it. They think they know how to put the money to work better than the American people do. They have to be taught a lesson. We’re just talking about how it’s gonna be an interesting day the next 24 hours or so you’re gonna see the markets get really choppy because you could have another big interest rate rise from the Fed, you know what that means. You know that’s going to spook the markets a lot. Interest rates going up, dollars gonna be affected by this, the GDP report tomorrow. We got a recession, friends.

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Kamala (She/Her) and THE Question That Will Win Any Election

27 Jul 2022

BUCK: Uh-oh. Welcome back to Clay and Buck.

President Donald J. Trump speaks at the AFPI Agenda Summit: “By the way, we should not allow men to play in women’s sports.” Join us on Rumble for the full speech: https://t.co/BsS0fRLTOR pic.twitter.com/WwU3zw7rcD

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) July 26, 2022

BUCK: Former president Trump. If they’re not gonna get him for “seditious conspiracy,” “misgendering” could also be a crime — a high crime and misdemeanor — they go after Trump for. Notice on the one hand you have the former president saying, “Yeah, we shouldn’t have men playing in women’s sports,” and then on the other side of the aisle you have Kamala Harris deciding that at the beginning of a meeting, she needs to tell everybody the following.

This is the future they demand for us all: mask strapped on for all interactions with other human beings even though it does nothing to stop COVID, announcing pronouns as an absurd virtue signal. It’s all about compliance. Bend the knee.
pic.twitter.com/AAIGs9XdPq

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) July 26, 2022

BUCK: “I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are she and her.” That’s the vice president there, announcing pronouns. By the way, big mask on her face. Gotta make sure you’re masked up now, apparently. Joe Biden’s speaking today; tested negative for covid. He’s fine, everybody, exactly as we said he… When I say he’s fine, we knew he was gonna be okay in the grand scheme of things. But he wasn’t really sick. He had a cold! It was a huge national news story that he had a cold. But, anyway, Clay, in the contest between men shouldn’t play in women’s sports the NCAA or pro versus, “Hi. I’m the vice president, here are my pronouns,” I think the American people are very solidly on one side of this.

CLAY: I have made the argument consistently, and I’m just gonna keep hammering it home, Buck, because there are so many people that listen to this show that work in Senate campaigns, that work in congressional governor’s campaigns — and also, the candidates themselves sometimes are listening as they’re outer campaigning. You can win every purple-state election, every one where it’s a toss-up by just arguing two things: “One: Men can’t get pregnant,” and try to get your Democrat opponent to be willing to say it. None them will say it.

And the other one is, men shouldn’t compete against women in women’s sports. Democrats won’t argue either of those things with you. They will pretend that the question doesn’t exist. So if you’re out there and you are in a candidate debate, just continue to drive home that question: Can men get pregnant? They will not answer that question! Should men be able to compete against women like we just saw in the Lia Thomas situation where you have an NCAA champion who is a man.

They won’t answer those questions, and I understand there are way more difficult and complex and integral questions that may go into your campaign. But, Buck, the essence of the battle between Republicans and Democrats — sanity and insanity — is summed up by that question: Can men get pregnant and should men be able to compete against women? Every single person understands it, and to your point, overwhelmingly is on the side of, “Hey, men can’t get pregnant, and men and women’s sports should be different.”

BUCK: And the reason that Democrats won’t say it. Of course there are gonna be Democrat politicians running who know.

CLAY: They all know. They all know it’s a lie.

BUCK: But they won’t do it. They won’t cross the activists, the donor class, and the vanguard of the Democrat left that is effectively running their party now. It’s hijacked the party and is now calling the shots. So they understand that that’s not a risk that they are willing to take, even if it means it politically causes problems for them. So that’s why I would love to see — I mean, we were talking about this in general’ we’ve been pushing this. Herschel Walker it his first opportunity should ask the reverend “Raphael Warnock,” Reverend! “Do you think that men can get pregnant? And let’s hear the answer. Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania should ask Fetterman, “Sir, do you believe that men — sorry to guess you’re a sir; I guess you haven’t announced your pronouns — do you believe that men can get pregnant?” See what the answer is. A lot of them will be evasive.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They will try to evade, but they will not say, “Only women can get pregnant.” They won’t do it.

CLAY: It’s all you have to do. Herschel Walker I saw is with right now hanging out with Brian Kilmeade. They had an interview with him this morning on Fox & Friends. I was in studio; I was watching it. They’re down in Gainesville, Georgia, spending the day with Herschel Walker. You need to make it a “yes” or “no” question, and you can even give your answer beforehand. “I don’t believe men can get pregnant. Reverend Warnock, do you believe men can get pregnant? Yes or no.”

And to your point, you will get an evasive answer. But when you have that clip of you just saying yes or no, this is not a complex scientific question. This is really easy for everybody out there. The voters overwhelmingly in Georgia, the voters overwhelmingly in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin — everywhere where there are going to be battleground Senate elections which decide who controls the top chamber in Congress — that will decide this election if you just lean on it and make Democrats answer that question.

BUCK: We are not a free people in a free society if the dictates of the party are that we all have to say that the sky is red or water is not wet.

CLAY: (chuckles)

BUCK: We cannot allow ourselves to be a country where the party, the apparatus can force you to say things that are the most obvious and the most obviously untrue.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: If we concede on this, you’re giving away a fundamental part of what it means… You’re essentially giving up your right to think freely and to believe in truth. Truth is only what is fed you, which is so interesting because you may have seen… We didn’t play it yesterday. We did have the clip. I think we can find it. The prime minister of New Zealand… Did you see this?

CLAY: Yes, I saw —

BUCK: She’s like, “Truth comes from us,” and you’re like, “Wait a second. The only truth?” She’s like, “If you don’t hear it from us, it’s not the truth.!” You’ve got her clip? If you find it yesterday, we’ll play it. But that really is the mentality now, all these massive bureaucracies and these government bodies, that they can determine not only what truth is on complicated issues for everybody, which, of course, they’re often wrong as we saw during covid, almost always wrong, but that the opposite of what you believe truth to be is what you actually have to affirm. And that’s what the “men can get pregnant” thing is all about.

CLAY: A hundred percent. Particularly, Buck, to combine it with the Democrats tried to argue to all of us for the past couple of years, “We are the party of science!” Remember that was what they would trot out anytime somebody like you or me said, “Hey, I don’t know if we should lock down. I don’t know if masks make sense. The data don’t support it.” They would immediately try to shoot you down. Remember, Dr. Fauci memorably said, “I am the science,” which is chilling the same way that Jacinda Ardern’s comments down in New Zealand were. But when the “party of science” can’t even say men can’t get pregnant, it’s kind of a big deal.

JACINDA ARDERN: WE ARE YOUR SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH – trust us

Sounding like Chinese Communist Party, Iran regime and North Korea, with a mix of a George Orwell novel.

My article "Lies, damn lies and coronavirus" is here https://t.co/QUbeBIG9UZ pic.twitter.com/62i8DXt4ZW

— Dr David Adler (@DrDavidAdler1) July 27, 2022

BUCK: Somebody should ask Fauci. My old friends Hill TV, Robby Soave and some others, had an interview with Fauci recently. I don’t know if he’ll do that show again soon. But… I launched that show years ago.

CLAY: Good for you.

BUCK: It was… Yeah. It’s doing very well now. But I want them to ask Fauci.

CLAY: I’d love somebody to ask.

BUCK: “Can men get pregnant?” He’ll be like, “It all depends on the mitigation measures.”

CLAY: Congregate settings!

Clay and Buck

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