CLAY: We’re joined now by Senator Rand Paul from the state of Kentucky. Senator Paul, do you fill out a bracket? Buck had never filled one out in his life before this year.

SEN. PAUL: Where has he been? Under a rock his whole life?

CLAY: I know.

SEN. PAUL: I mean, my goodness. Well, see my bracket, I haven’t looked at it lately, but it would include Baylor, UK, and Kentucky, but I don’t know if all three of these, though, can make the Final Four. Somebody has to beat somebody somewhere.

CLAY: Yeah, Baylor and Kentucky could end up going head-to-head before all is said and done.

Let’s dive in. We just played a cut, Doctor, of Dr. Fauci, who appears to be in a bunker by the Biden administration — they’re trying to hide him, but he did an interview — I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet — with a local San Diego news station where he said it may be necessary to reimplement masks and all the other restrictions if we have another surge. Your reaction when you hear that?

SEN. PAUL: If there ever was one American who would have a pessimistic approach to, you know, the pandemic going away, it would have to be Fauci. I was hoping that he was in the witness protection program and we would never see him again, but, you know, he keeps creeping back up. But, no, that has been true every — every — at every stage of the game. When we talk about kids going back to school he’s like, “Well, we just don’t know.” When we talked about whether or not you get immunity from the disease, you know, when you’ve had covid, do you have immune protection, “Well, we just don’t know.” But his conclusion would all —

BUCK: Did we just lose the Senator? Oh, there we go.

SEN. PAUL: You still there?

BUCK: Yes, sir.

CLAY: We got you.

SEN. PAUL: At every turn, though, Fauci his inclination is towards authoritarianism, his inclination is towards taking our liberty away. He’s even said when asked, you know, is individual liberty important? He said, “Well, not so much.” So — but, no, I think we should quit taking advice from him. And I think the American people are ready. I mean, we had the vote this week where 57 of us voted to get rid of the mask mandate on planes. We had eight Democrats joins us, which is a first.

BUCK: What is wrong with — I mean, I’m just gonna ask you, Senator. The Democrats in the Senate, do they actually believe this? I mean, I would like to think that at some level they’re smart enough to understand that just masking on planes is idiocy but that this is just about the political optics for them, or are some of your Democrat colleagues in the Senate so emotionally damaged from the covid and the masking and Fauciism that they really somehow think that masking for less than 1% of a person’s life is going to keep them safe from the virus.

SEN. PAUL: Very few of them have ever had a science course. I mean, about 80 years ago when they were in high school they might have had some basic science, but we’ve got very few on the other side that are scientists, physicians, chemists, engineers.

We have people that are not very knowledgeable on science but there are also people who have a tendency to like collectivism, to like the collective judgment, of somebody telling them what to do and the idea of submission. And this is a real problem, I mean, there was a poll about a month ago that asked Democrats if someone is unvaccinated, would you be fine with incarcerating them. Over half of Democrats thought it’d be fine to indefinitely detain people who chose not to be vaccinated.

So this is the kind of people we’re dealing with, and we’re just on, you know, opposite sides of the coin on this. But I think what they’re finally discovered, eight of the Democrats who voted to get rid of the mask mandate this week, four of them with are in competitive races; so — and the other couple are in Republican states.

So I think it’s pushing forward. I think there are moms and dads who are Democrats and independents that see the hypocrisy of, oh, yeah, my 2-year-old has to wear a mask and yet I see 80-year-old senators, you know, having a chummy conversation with the president Biden, you know, in Oval Office. So there’s no consistency or any science to any of this. And I think people are just tired of the submission just for submission’s sake.

CLAY: Senator Paul, I’m assuming you saw the New York Times has acknowledged that now, oh, these Hunter Biden emails in the laptop, it’s real. I know we’ve talked with you about the possibility of getting an investigation going of Fauci and also of everything surrounding covid in general. It’s imperative that people vote for the House to be taken back and the Senate to be taken back to give you guys the power to ask these kind of important questions, isn’t it?

SEN. PAUL: I can tell people for certain that if the Senate is taken over, I will have a chairmanship, and I will use subpoena power to get to the bottom of this.

In particular, I want to know the origins of virus, and I want to know if Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins covered it up. We have a great deal of evidence that they did, but we still have several emails that were redacted, and I want to know what happened there, and we’re gonna find that out. Some of that information does exist, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of it.

We’re also gonna get to the bottom of the CDC that is leaving out large segments of studies to try to bolster their conclusion. So should a 20-year-old get a booster, which I think is crazy on the surface of it, well, they studied the question and they found in a large study that those between 18 and 49, which is 132 million people, that there was no benefit of a booster. So what did they do? They left it out of the study.

See, if you were in charge of a scientific journal, you should be fired, but if you’re in part of government and you’re, you know, picking and choosing the different parts of the data and leaving it out if it doesn’t fit your conclusion, that’s a fireable offense. And yet they’re doing that on a routine basis, and they’re destroying the reputation of the CDC and government in general.

CLAY: Senator Paul, thank you so much for joining us. We’ll talk to you again soon.

SEN. PAUL: Thanks.