BUCK:  I just mentioned de Blasio. This is continuing to play out. It’s almost… It’s a showdown. It’s a game of chicken, which I feel like no one ever makes that reference anymore where the two cars are gonna smash into each other and who’s gonna pull off the road first. Here’s de Blasio, the mayor of New York, saying 9,000 city employees — that is a lot of city employees — are on unpaid leave.

DE BLASIO: We’ve got now approximately 9,000 city employees on leave without pay today. So let’s do it again: 9,000 city employees on leave without pay status at this moment out of a workforce of almost 400,000. So that’s less than 6% of the entire workforce. Now, again, every one of those 9,000 is welcome to come back; get vaccinated.

We’ve got about 12,000 who’ve applied for a religious or medical exemption. That will be worked on over coming days, and they’ll get their answer. Either they get the exemption or they don’t, and they should act accordingly. If they don’t get the exemption, come back to work. If they do, then they do.

CLAY: What are you hearing about this exemption idea? Are they going to be granted leniently, or are almost all of them gonna be shut down? The reason why I’m asking is, when you don’t already have a ruling in place for these exemptions, it makes me think that this may be the back door that allows pretty much everybody to continue to work; we’re gonna grant a lot of these exemptions.

BUCK: Yeah, I think that the exemption in some cases they’re put in place in some states for the Clay Travis plan, if you will, which is let people keep going. In New York? Oh, no. No. They’re doing it because now there are legal challenges. You may have seen, Cook County in Illinois, huge county, obviously a lot of people, Chicago.

In Cook County, a judge there just said that the vaccine implementation program for their police force is on pause; so that’s actually a pretty big win for the people here. They suspended the requirement that all Chicago police officers be vaccinated by the end of the year. So if there’s a legal challenge, that’s where the exemptions, I think, are coming in from New York.

They’ll say, “Oh, we’re allowing exemptions,” but I think to answer your question is they’re gonna be very tight on them because, Clay, how many of the 9,000…? If, say, now they start hearing about all the exemptions the 12,000 are getting, they’ll say, “All right, fine. I want an exemption.” Right?

CLAY: Well, that’s the way they solved the issue in Williamson County where my kids are in public school.

BUCK: They wanted to solve it in Williamson. They want you to bend the knee in New York.

CLAY: Well, there’s a lot of truth to that. But they granted every religious or health exemption that any kid’s families put in, right? It’s a one-page form. You click a button and all of them immediately got granted, which I think was the right call.

BUCK: I would agree. I would say in the case of the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio here, you can tell the way he set this up, he’s basically saying this is a war of attrition and saying, “I’ve got more ammo and more MREs. We’ll sit here and you’re gonna not get your paychecks and we’ll see what blinks first.” So it really is a standoff situation.

But I think you’re gonna see cops and firefighters right now who are on leave who are gonna say, “All right, maybe I’ll take that DeSantis $5,000 check bounty to come down and join a police force in the state of Florida. Maybe…” Oh, by the way, we have Governor Ron DeSantis joining the show at 2 o’clock today. So I think everybody has definitely stick around for that, 2:05 Eastern, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

We’ve obviously been talking about the Florida situation a lot, the Florida miracle for many years, the feel of freedom here during the covid era. But, Clay, the people that I’m hearing are saying that — the people who I’m talking to are saying — they will not bend to get the shot. Those who are out, they’ve known this is coming and they’re gonna exhaust legal challenges.

And we’ll see. The only thing that turns the tide against de Blasio and this could play out in other cities across the country too depending on how it goes. Does the city start to feel like it can actually keep the train on the tracks without those — what is it — 21,000, I think, in total is the number we’re talking about right now?

CLAY: And it just takes a couple of anecdotes. Somebody calls 911, nothing happens, someone dies, and you start saying, “Wait, the vaccine mandates about saving lives!” When police aren’t working and when firefighters aren’t there and when sanitation is piling up, that has a direct quality of life and sometimes life direct impact. And those anecdotes, those viral stories, New York Post, local media, will be covering them, even though the New York Times of the world try to cheerlead for the vaccine mandate.