CLAY: Buck, you and I were having a conversation, and we kind of hinted at it; we’ll circle back around to it now. I think of all of the failures associated with covid, that the original sin — and let me give you my thesis, and then you tell me whether or not you buy it. The original sin was shutting down schools because I really do believe that ended up cascading and creating issues everywhere that it was impossible to change. Let me just give you a couple of them right now.

First of all, you know and I know that the reason why they shut down schools was based on a flawed study of the flu, the Spanish flu back in the nineteens, and they said, “Oh, well, communities that shut down schools had better results than communities that did not.” Now, the challenge there — and it should be readily apparent why this was a flawed idea — was because the Spanish flu actually impacted young people at a far higher rate than it did the elderly. In other words, what was devastating, even more so about the Spanish flu was that the people who died were very often young and otherwise healthy.

And so shutting down schools might have made some sense there. But with covid, the people who had significant and deleterious health outcomes were overwhelmingly old and not particularly in good shape. And so when we shut down schools — and I think we’re still recovering from this — we know that the kids overwhelmingly were the victims and the poorer you were, the more of a victim you were because “remote schooling” is an oxymoron.

But, Buck, the moms. I think the moms and some of the dads who were primarily responsible for taking care of school-age children effectively had to, many of them, leave the workforce because they weren’t able to take care of their kids, try to get ’em educated while simultaneously doing a job. And so if I could go back in time and point the finger at the number-one flaw to me, it was schools shutting down, because then school shutting down was used to justify many other things shutting down. And schools, even if they’d only been shut down for, like, two weeks, even if we’d come back after “15 days to stop the spread,” or slow the spread, I think we would have recovered much more rapidly. Schools, to me, is the biggest flaw of an overall flawed Dr. Fauci system.

BUCK: So this is definitely a, “What is your favorite ice cream flavor of totalitarianism?” moment because there’s a lot of ways you can go here. The school shut downs, because there was data from European countries early on that showed not only are children of very low risk, but schools weren’t even really primary places of transmission because children were also — and we don’t even really know why; maybe it’s ’cause they’re smaller, less breath, less droplets, whatever — less likely to transmit it than adults were.

For me, though, the moment that we knew we were in for a hellish catastrophe of overreach and authoritarianism was when the apparatus decided — and that’s the CDC, the Democrat media, Democrat-run states, and essentially lib pop culture as well — that the First Amendment no longer counted. That, for me, was when they said, you can’t gather to protest lockdowns; you can’t go outside and you can’t go to a church or you can’t go to your synagogue or your mosque or whatever, place of religious congregation you choose, and they didn’t understand, that was a bright red line constitutional violation. That was bad enough. But as we know, they abandoned basic constitutional protections —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — until BLM wanted to burn down neighborhoods and destroy things and engage in riots and endless riots. And the same health experts — and I don’t mean even just, like, somewhat… I mean in many cases the exact same people who said, “Oh, gathering to protest lockdowns or gathering to protest mask mandates, that’s far too dangerous.” But burning down a whole neighborhood or a store or looting — gathering in the tens of thousands in some cases to protest racial injustice — that was not only permissible, Clay, the blue check health experts said it was necessary for public health.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It was saving lives. That is when you knew. That is what the Stasi showed up to your home in the middle of the night and said, ‘You are no longer allowed to protest this regime. You better celebrate it or else.” After that, everything was to be expected. Everything fell into place, and that’s why I also think we talked about the 2020 election, not only do they use covid to change the rules and effectively rig the election, they also had the threat of BLM riots continuing in the background the whole time. No one ever talks of this anymore. There were businesses all over the country boarding up in preparation for a Trump reelection.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: That affects the psyche, and they did this specifically while everyone was terrified by covid ’cause Fauci’s a little psychopath and he made everyone much more scared than they should have actually been, along with the rest of the public health experts. By the way, Clay, just to put a cap on this — put a top on this — for a second, did you see what the New York Times said over the weekend about monkeypox?

CLAY: I did see that. That kids need to wear masks for monkeypox now too?

BUCK: This is a quote, folks — a quote from the New York Times — from this weekend. “Parents who are concerned about the virus may also be relieved to know that many pandemic precautions and behaviors can be repurposed to protect children against monkeypox. Wearing masks in crowded indoor areas,” end quote. Wearing masks is not going to protect anyone, especially children — I don’t know what the heck they think they’re talking about here — from monkeypox, Clay. This is what the public health experts said.

CLAY: I give credit to my wife for this because her argument as soon as masks started — and I think it’s emblematic of the failure with schools as well is, it’s almost impossible to dial it back to normal once you tell people you have to wear masks.

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: Because many people are never going to give them up. And I saw it this weekend traveling back from Salt Lake City. Young, healthy people still wearing masks on airplanes as if they are in some way making themselves safer.

BUCK: On my flight from Salt Lake City to Miami where I currently am — WIOD, thank you for hosting me — I saw three people who were roughly my age double masked with N95 masks. Now, I know that’s not that many people. There were far more with some kind of mask. Usual the cloth thing, but the cloth thing is a joke; everybody knows it. Clay, to sit on that flight for four and a half hours double masked with an N95, I honestly would have a panic attack, I think.

CLAY: Yeah. And I don’t know how those people are ever gonna get back to normal, Buck. I really don’t. I mean, because now we’re talking about two and a half years after covid. If you’re young and somewhat healthy, there’s almost a hundred percent chance that you’ve already had covid, even if you didn’t test positive, because you’ve been out there circulating, and this thing spread so widely.

It is a psychological disorder. And Dr. Fauci made this happen. And I really believe that he should be charged with crimes — we talked to Rand Paul in the first hour — for lying to Congress. I believe that covid was created in a Chinese lab and partly funded (the gain-of-function research) by our American tax dollars and that Dr. Fauci and his cronies helped cover it up because they didn’t want to be considered responsible for it.

BUCK: If Fauci — ’cause people ask me, they say, why do you — ’cause I don’t usually take it personally or get as angry about politicians even that take horrible positions as I do about Fauci. I mean, for me, of all of the people throughout covid, all the Democrat politicians… There are some horrible ones. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was God awful. Whitmer, Newsom, there were a lot of smug morons that did terrible things to people during covid and didn’t help at all.

But Fauci is the worst. He could still, if he was a decent, ethical human being — and this is so minor, too. He could come out tomorrow and say, “I see a lot of people still wearing masks on planes. I see a lot of people still masking their children outside,” which I do see in New York City. “I’m telling you. You guys trust me who do that, obviously. You don’t need to do that anymore. Go live your lives. It’s okay.” If he was a decent human being, he would do that. But he won’t because he likes the mask cultists because they’re his base, because they’re the people that worship Fauciism, which is why it’s not just about being wrong. It’s about being awful. Fauci is awful.

CLAY: And on top of that, Buck, to your point about politicians, theoretically politicians can be held accountable because you can vote for them or not vote for them when they come up for reelection. And that’s why we need a red wave this fall, to hold people accountable for their failures. Wherever you live across the country, Democrats failed on covid. Fauci, we couldn’t do anything, other than Trump making a decision to fire him, which probably would have turned him into a martyr, even though he deserved to be fired.

Fauci got to just ride this whole thing out, and now he’s stepping down just as he realizes that Republicans are about to be able to aggressively investigate him, and he’s probably thinking — although they can still subpoena him and everything else — that the pressure on him is going to be dramatically decreased if he’s no longer a government employee when Republicans take control of at least the House and maybe the Senate too.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Now, Buck, you mentioned Dr. Fauci, who we all saw stand up in front of a press conference and argue against anybody running out to buy masks. Fauci later said, “Oh, I didn’t want there to be a run on masks,” and said, like, “I wanted to make sure we had enough of them for all the people who were working in health care and whatnot.” Unfortunately, back in February, before all the covid craziness started, Dr. Fauci was emailed a question. Here is what he responded, Buck.

Do you remember this email? “Sylvia…” This is Dr. Fauci’s personal email address at NIH. “Masks are really for infected people to prevalent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected, rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.

“It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location. Your instincts are correct. Money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines. Safe travels, Anthony Fauci.”

BUCK: You know, he was even wrong there at the end. I mean, they were wrong on everything. One thing we often leave out here is the obsession with testing. Remember, there was this belief: If only we could get tests done everywhere, we could contain this virus. That was absolutely delusional. And it was delusional from the beginning.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I was mocking in every way I could the stupidity of New York’s test-and-trace program. There were National Guard soldiers who were deployed to airports in New York that were supposed to collect some information about what other states you traveled to, as if… Like, now that we look back on all this, did we just have complete morons in charge?

CLAY: Yes. I think we did.

BUCK: Honestly is the public health apparatus run by a bunch of people with IQs at about room temperature? ‘Cause on the one hand you’d say, oh, it’s all political. Yeah, but some of this stuff there was no political advantage. They’re just morons. I mean, they actually just didn’t know any better. And I think the attitude became, “The more we do, the better it is. The more active we are with our mandates and our dictation to the public of what should be done, the more it seems like the public health bureaucrats who for decades basically did very, very little…”

And if you go back and actually learn about what Fauci did during HIV and a lot of the ways that he got that pandemic wrong, this isn’t really that surprising to you. But, Clay, test-and-trace? I remember people going on TV saying, “Test-and-trace has a history of working well,” and I remember saying, “For STDs, yes, and we all understand why that is.” Right? It’s very different, very different to say, “Who have you had sex with in the last 30 days or two weeks or whatever?” than, “Who’s every human being you breathed in the vicinity of in the last two weeks?” They were so dumb. I figured this out. You figured this out. Fauci and Walensky and Redfield and, what, Jerome Adams — Trump’s surgeon general — these people are all so stupid that they couldn’t figure that out? Clay, there’s still little kiosks on the street in New York giving people free tests. Who cares?

CLAY: I think there was a belief in the public health apparatus that covid was so serious that basic scientific method could no longer be accepted, and everyone had to have the exact same opinion for fear. I’m working through in their heads. They abandoned what science actually was, which is a rigorous challenging of all accepted beliefs. That’s what science is, the scientific method is based on. In exchange for that, we all have to have the exact same opinion for a lot of people are gonna die.

And what is disappointing to me on its most basic level is, it’s one thing to say that in March and April and May of 2020. To me, I wish we could go back in time, Buck, because I think Trump would still be president right now, if Trump had come out starting in June, July, and August and argued as hard as he possibly could that every single kid need to be back in school in the fall. I think he would have won election. Because I think that there, by the fall, was a massive understanding out there, particularly among suburban moms, about the data and who was at risk and everything else.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: And I think he would have won reelection.

BUCK: People don’t want to hear this, but we tell people the truth even if they don’t want to hear this. When Trump says he did the opposite of everything Fauci told him, that’s not true. It’s just not true. I don’t know what else to tell people other than, we all know that Fauci got his way with lockdowns and it was really Fauci and Birx — that was the other name I was trying to think of — who were being horrible on all this stuff. They got their way with lockdowns. They got their way with, remember, mask mandates on planes.

That happened under Trump. A lot was done here by the federal government that answers to Donald Trump. I know people will say, “Well, Trump was relying on his experts.” Okay. But that’s not the same thing as doing the opposite of what they told you. That’s not what happened. Trump was a lot better than the Democrats were, obviously. He was willing to let states like Florida, for example, prove that the Fauciites were wrong. So I’m not… This isn’t like, “all sides bear equal blame here” nonsense.

I’m just saying that it early on should have been clear to of people, including on the right, including to Trump administration, that Fauci and Birx were an absolute nightmare. And it’s disappointing that it took as long as it did. And we need to have better systems in place next time around so that when the people start saying, “Oh, but this is what the experts say.” What does that even mean, Clay, “the experts”?

CLAY: Thank God for Ron DeSantis —

BUCK: Thank God for Ron DeSantis. Of course. True.

CLAY: — because he was willing to look at the actual data and make decisions based on that data as opposed to almost every other politician of both parties out there who were willing to follow wherever the lead was going. One of the things that is really disappointing to me, Buck, is how many politicians — in both parties, really — are terrified of getting noticed. (laughing)

Like, why do you want to be a politician if you’re not willing to stand for something that you really know to be true? There are an awful lot of people in life in general, but there are an awful lot of politicians who get elected to the House or the Senate or you’re a governor, and they are terrified that they’re gonna look down at their phone and find out that they’re trending one day. If you’re saying what you really believe, like, why the heck do you care?

BUCK: It’s ego driven, because for most politicians they like being called congressmen or senator. They don’t like accountability, a lot of times, when they come in to the public spotlight… It depends, right? There are people like Adam Schiff where he would run over a toddler to get in front of a TV camera. He do not care, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: There are some people for whom the public appearances — and particularly video cameras and TV appearances — seems to be their real job. Fauci was one of them, by the way.

CLAY: Oh, why do you certainly.

BUCK: People ask me, how do I know that Fauci was full of it early on. I’m like, there were people… We’re going through a pandemic. There are people — a lot of people, a lot of elderly people in particular — dying, people are really scared, and Fauci’s going around, you know, doing the celebrity tour. It’s appalling. That they’re talking about this like it’s a war. Could you imagine if we were actually at war? Let’s say we went to war with China, I mean, a really big war. And we’re losing a lot of people. And our, you know, theater commander, the four-star general is doing Vanity Fair covers and going to fancy cocktail parties talking about how awesome he is. I think people would have a problem with that.

CLAY: Well, and remember, the only media outlet basically that Fauci didn’t have time for during all of his media outlets was this show. Maybe when he’s retired, Buck, maybe he’ll find the time to be actually able to come on as a guest on the show. You think?

BUCK: I mean, I just… The problem with Fauci is I know what his little song and dance is gonna be for the next, you know, however many years Fauci is still making the noises about this stuff. He’s just gonna say, “You know, it was complicated, and under the circumstances of the metadata, transsubscribiated through the mediative mediums, it was very… “You know, he’s just gonna use a bunch of words that make no sense and talk about how, “Fog of war. We did the best we could. We saved a lot of lives,” ’cause this is how this guy’s kept that job, Clay, as long as he has. Because it’s never… He always wanted the authorities — and so many of these things are just tip-offs. He wanted the authority to make the decisions while always leaving himself the out of, “This was a collective decision.”

CLAY: Imagine you spent 50 years in the government desperately wanting to be the center of attention because you believe you’re uniquely skilled to handle that job. It all happens for you, and you end up destroying science, the foundations of freedom in America, and arguing that you are still a hero. It’s really an unbelievably awful story when you think about this. This is what the guy dreamed of for his entire life, and he destroyed America to a degree worse than any bureaucrat I can ever remember.

BUCK: The kryptonite for little tyrant Fauci’s argument — so that everyone has this in the back of their minds — is he’s going to say, “We did the best we could with the information we had.” That’s going to be his out for everything. ‘Cause now it’s indefensible, folks. The vaccine mandates, the mask mandates, the lockdowns, the school closures. Only morons know what happened here, know the data, and think that any of this was a good idea. That’s where we are. So he’ll just say, “We did the best we could,” but that’s not what they were saying, and you know this, Clay. At every phase it was, “We know.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: “This is science. This is like the temperature at which water boils. This is like 2 + 2 = 4. We have the answer. So shut up and do it,” and they do that over and over again. And now we know that they were actually telling us 2 + 2 = 5.

CLAY: And also, Buck, we know that there were other countries that made choices different than ours — how about Sweden? — that didn’t have anywhere near the deleterious effects, the same level that we did.