BUCK: The first year of the Biden administration was a disaster. We saw that. We all saw it; we’re all aware. The polls reflect it. I mean, they can’t even make a strong case otherwise. On the economy, they try to convince everyone that, “Well, when you end a shutdown, that’s like a job created!” So, when you say restaurants are all shut down, you have to fire a whole lot of people and then the state comes in or the federal government or whomever comes in and says, “Okay, now you can open up. Look at us! We’re amazing job creators.”

If I show up and burn down someone’s house and then a month later, I show up with some plywood and say, “I’m gonna build you a new one,” I don’t think that makes me a great builder. But that’s what the Biden administration is effectively arguing right now about jobs. But there are so many places. One of the things I want you to be prepared for on the covid fight, they want to tell you the  story, “Thank you so much, everyone.

“You did everything we wanted you to do and finally we’re gonna let your kids breathe normally in New York, New Jersey, California.” In other places, they’ve already been living with freedom around that issue. But understand this. They’re not getting rid of masks. Clay’s just been on a flight this weekend; I was on a flight this weekend. Until they demask on planes, it’s not gone, it’s not over, it’s just in a moment of recession.

The madness is at a moment of recession, but it has not gone altogether. We have to push until it’s gone altogether. There’s also the issue of crime in the country and what has been happening here. And you can feel it walking the streets of New York City. You can certainly feel it in Houston for all of our people down there in Houston, Texas, where you’ve had more murders — and this was a stunning statistic.

In month of January, there were more murders in Houston than in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, all cities with bigger population and certainly Chicago known to be a place with far too many murders when you look at per capita analysis. But, Clay, this was stunning over the weekend. Biden’s first year in office saw 73 police officers killed, the most deaths since 1995.

The last time… This was analysis in the New York Post, and hat tip to Mark Moore for pulling it together. You had the most cops killed since 1995. The last time this many have been killed in a one-year period, it was 1987. We’re having to go back decades here to see a time when there were this many shootings. It feels like the gains of the criminal justice system and of safety for the American people have been handed away in the blink of an eye, and we all know what happened here.

We all know what caused this. It was a combination, but the real beginnings of it: BLM, which created a moral panic the Democrats used to defeat Donald Trump but also a moral panic that corporate America went along with. “Oh, my gosh. BLM, we all need to have a national conversation.” BLM is rooted — and I’ve been to many BLM protests covering them as a person in the media.

BLM is rooted in the fundamental lie that young black men are killed by police without consequence due to racism frequently in America, and that is representative of law enforcement. Essentially cops are racist murderers. They chant that at some of these rallies. They’ll actually say, “What do we want? No more racist cops! When did we want it? Now!”

This is the stuff that they say, Clay. And then you add that to bail reform, i.e., let people out, including dangerous people, you add it to less prosecution of dangerous individuals to a more permissive environment in the prosecutor’s office for criminals all across the country. A lot of people have been hurt and we’ve lost a lot of law enforcement officers because they were undermined in their jobs by reckless, feckless Democrats who saw political advantage in it.

CLAY: The George Floyd video was treated as if it was representative of interactions between police and black men all over the country. It was not. And again, to your point, the Washington Post database tracks every shooting that has happened by police — and the data reflects that 75% of people shot and killed by police are white, Asian, or Hispanic.

Almost all men, by the way. Nobody ever says that the police are sexist, even though almost all violent perpetrators who are shot and killed by police or killed are being done so because of the violent nature of their actions but the George Floyd video directly led, and the protests, directly led to thousands of innocent people being detailed all over America, both police and civilians inside of many of our cities.

And that was because of the fundamental lie that the George Floyd incident represented what was a reality for many people, even though the reason why it was a news story is because it was an outlier. And, by the way, Buck, there’s still been no indication directly that Chauvin or any of the other officers were motivated by racial animus in their actions.

In other words, if George Floyd had been Hispanic or if he had been white, there hasn’t been any suggestion that the treatment would have been any different at all. And so many people — and this is the great struggle that we see across all of social media life now. Buck, so many people are terrified of being called racist if they don’t stand up and say, “Hey, you know what?

“I think that the officers deserve to be put on trial, but I don’t think that all police officers are evil.” So many companies — every company that you’ve ever spent money with — sent you out an email about BLM. Everybody got in line behind the idea of BLM. Even all of the lockdowners, the Dr. Faucis of the world totally threw away the idea of lockdowns and said, “Hey, you know what? These protests are legitimate!

“I know we’ve been telling you to stay at home and not gather in crowds, but this is such an important incident that we’re going to throw away every aspect of lockdown-based decision-making in favor of this,” and the result has been that we spun, basically since 1994 the idea that people who commit crimes of violence need to be in prison. We totally turn them into the victims, and we turn police into the perpetrators, and the natural result is crime has skyrocketed, murders have soared, and many innocent people are dead because we failed in our societal response as a nation.

BUCK: There are murals, in fact, all over the world where George Floyd is represented as effectively a civil rights hero, a martyr, an icon for justice. That’s how they depict him. George Floyd, just for starters, was guilty of — and served time for — a home invasion during which he pointed a loaded firearm at the belly of a pregnant woman. But there are murals depicting him as a martyr and as a hero.

And so you have to sit around and ask yourself, “What are law enforcement officers really to think of a situation where they’re so undermined in their work and the people who rely on the protection — and even the very wealthy enclaves that Democrats control, the line of protection law enforcement provides them — just feel like, “If it doesn’t affect me, if it just affects people that I pretend to care about when I’m going on TV and making my millions of dollars or doing my podcast and getting paid all this money by sponsors,” whatever these libs are doing, they don’t care, Clay. They don’t care what’s happening in minority majority neighborhoods where shootings are through the roof. Doesn’t matter to them.

CLAY: It also points to a larger fallacy, which you just mentioned as George Floyd’s criminal history. Many people if you even suggest that say, “You can’t even bring that up! Because of what happened to him, his history doesn’t matter.” Yet look at what cancel culture is rooted in? The same people who are saying, “You can’t talk about George Floyd’s criminal history” as a part of the larger context of understanding what his behavior may or may not have been influenced by, are simultaneously saying Joe Rogan can’t have his podcast on Spotify because of something he did years ago.

So you’re willing to cancel a guy for what he might have said on his podcast years ago, but you aren’t willing to even allow a discussion of the past criminal history of George Floyd. Think about that. We’re not saying… Imagine if Joe Rogan had previously been arrested multiple times for violent acts. That, to me, is a distinction here. You’re saying actions don’t matter as they pertinent George Floyd for his past history, but you’re saying words for Joe Rogan do matter. It’s a flaw of logic on a seismic level.

BUCK: The Democrats’ narrative of criminal justice over the last 18 months — and coinciding, really, largely with the pandemic. It started in June of 2020. The George Floyd incident set so much of this in motion — George Floyd’s killing — and remember, that officer is now decades in prison for that, but the narrative is still, “Cops do this all the time!”

It’s clearly not, by the way, by the numbers. It’s actually quite rare for law enforcement to shoot an unarmed black man in America today, if you care about data and numbers, which the Democrats — whether it’s on masks or police-involved shootings or whatever, the numbers they don’t actually look at. They make it up as they go along but they decided somehow as a society — or I should say, the Democrats decided as a society — cops are the root of violence in cities, which is crazy.

Letting violent felons out more frequently with less punishment is going to result in safer streets, which is crazy. You go down the list of everything that they did as well as the riots that went on for months creating a sense of lawlessness in these cities. It’s honestly a shame, and the American people who didn’t see this for what it was in the 2020 election should feel some shame — at least with regard to their judgment — that they didn’t see what a big, pandering atrocity the Democrats were engaged in in that year. It was just all about defeating Trump and all about getting the vote out, and a lot of racism virtue signaling.