CLAY: Yesterday, by the way, Shannon Bream was fantastic breaking down the latest on Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings, which are ongoing. The drama not going to be very substantial, it does not appear, unless suddenly Joe Manchin came out and said, “Hey, you know what? I’m off the train here,” and that would be a heck of a reaction to watch what would happen there. But it does not appear that any Democrat is going to oppose this nomination. And as a result, a lot of this is theater, political theater, more than anything else.

Although I think KBJ has been weakened for not being able to say what is a woman. And this will also be a part of the midterm discussion. Because we probably should mention, Buck, in the midterms, if Republicans take back control of the Senate and of the House, this idea of court packing goes out the window. And I think, frankly — now we don’t know there would be a vacancy, because hopefully everybody stays healthy.

But if the Republicans have control of the Senate, I would presume that Mitch McConnell will follow through on the same thing that he did when Scalia died, by and large, and say the election will be a referendum on who gets to appoint the next Supreme Court judge.

BUCK: Arguably the most commendable, smoothest move Mitch McConnell pulled off was the waiting it out with Merrick Garland. Look, Mitch is an established guy. I don’t agree with him on everything. A lot of people in the audience have their fair share criticisms of the Senate minority leader. But fair is fair. We call balls and strikes here. He held the line on the prevention of the Merrick Garland nomination.

By the way, Merrick Garland would have been a doctrinaire lib, slightly less crazy than some of the Supreme Court options. But now we see him as attorney general. Remember Merrick Garland was the guy who had the FBI-looking-into-the-parents situation and the memo from the attorney general’s office. So don’t think that he’s not a wokester.

But also, Mitch… Mitch was very good under Trump in getting constitutionalists on the bench all across the country. So plenty of criticisms you can have, but Mitch had the machinery of judicial nomination working pretty well, and a lot of people have found that having those Trump judges on the federal circuit (chuckling) has made a big difference.

CLAY: Breyer wouldn’t have stepped down. We were talking about it earlier about the runoff elections in Georgia. If Republicans still had control of the Senate, I don’t believe that Breyer would have stepped down. I think that as a result there might not be a single appointment that Joe Biden would get during his tenure.

And, by the way, Merrick Garland to me, Buck, is an interesting example of a white guy who gets to a position of power and is so afraid of the subordinates that have helped him get there, that he ends up not even standing up for what he believes in anymore.

I think you’re seeing an element of that with Bob Chapek, who is the CEO of Disney, who initially said, “Hey, I don’t want to get involved in individual state legislative battles” that were surrounding what was labeled the “don’t say gay” bill in Florida. And his subordinates have basically crucified him over this. And that’s what Merrick Garland is afraid of. You get in a position of power, but if you’re a middle-aged to older white guy, you’re afraid that the people beneath you are going to replace you, and so you end up doing things that are totally outside of your own character. I think you can say the same thing about Joe Biden, by the way.

BUCK: Let’s think about this for a second. If you are, as you said, a middle-aged white guy in a position of power in the country right now — political power, corporate power, whatever it may be — there’s always a way to get at you for the woke activists, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong, said anything wrong. “You don’t have enough of X group. You haven’t promoted enough of Y group.” This is essentially the old Al Sharpton model, which is we’re going to picket you and say you’re racist unless you pay us off, donate to the foundation, whatever it may be. This has now gone mainstream and broad spectrum all across the country.

CLAY: Shake down.

BUCK: And I think to your point, Clay, I think this is why you see, whether it’s CEOs or even politicians now or people that are cabinet members of the Biden administration. If you’re a middle-aged white guy, you’ve got to establish wokeness insurance in some way.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You’ve got to be able to — because then if you come under attack, you can say, “But look at what I did. Look at what I’ve done for the community” or whatever the case may be, whichever community that’s coming after you and attacking you. I think that pushes a lot of them to get ahead of it right now because they realized they don’t have to find anything.

They’ll make something a problem for you, and that just goes to show how much power the organized institutional left really has in this country. I mean, the fact that Disney has walkouts going on in California. It’s California right? I always get Disney World and Disneyland confused. They have walkouts in California about the “don’t say gay” bill. Nowhere does it say you can’t say gay. I also think, I think the right needs to lean into this. I think the GOP needs to lean into this.

They hate it when we talk about CRT because they lose, because most of the country actually doesn’t think that an 8-year-old should be told, based on your skin color, you’re an oppressor or oppressed. Most of the country is not with them on that. I think most of the country is not with the activists on we need to be able to teach gender-identity norms to 5-year-olds. I don’t think the country is with them on that.

CLAY: The data says they aren’t. The Politico, I believe it was, had a pretty substantial poll, which showed that Republicans win on that issue by a large margin. I think what happens, Buck, there’s such a massive dichotomy between what the real world thinks and what Twitter thinks, that so many people out there follow what Twitter thinks. I’ll tell you this, Buck, my phone has blown up almost more than it ever has before from people out there who are saying:

“Thank God that you guys and OutKick are talking about this ridiculous Penn transgender swimmer story, because if you guys weren’t talking about it, it wouldn’t have even been discussed,” and there’s so many people who agree 100% with everything that we are saying that are terrified to say it themselves because they’re afraid they’re going to end up being targets.

BUCK: Who has cultural power these days?

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: Think this through. Who is directing and creating the narratives? Amazon. Netflix. Twitter. Facebook. Disney is a legacy company, but obviously still has a massive catalog and reach and owns a whole lot of different companies. They’re shaping the culture. This is why part of what we have to do on the right is not only to push back but also have our own machinery of love of country, individual rights and liberty, treating everybody as an equal, as an individual.

We have to have these institutions of cultural diffusion that we’ll have to build, quite honestly, because somehow the conservative movement in the last 20 years or so, I would say, came to this idea that we need to fight to have neutral spaces within these entities. Now what we’ve learned is there’s no neutral space.

There’s just what the left can get away with, the authoritarianism they can make us all endure, and what we have the power to push back on and so, “No. You can’t teach that, you can’t show that, you can’t cancel us. We’re gonna have…” It’s early stage. This stuff almost sounds crazy to people but we’ve got to do it.

CLAY: Look, if Fox News didn’t exist and the Wall Street Journal didn’t exist, imagine what our cultural discussion would look like in this country right now.

BUCK: Look, if Rush hadn’t been on the air for 30 years.

CLAY: That’s true.

BUCK: We sit here in the footsteps of a giant who created this. Without Rush, would there really have been a Fox?

CLAY: Fox News. I think Rupert Murdoch would have still had his influence. But really what we’re getting at is, there’s like three or four people that basically are standing up against an onslaught, an absolute avalanche of left-wing woke absurdity.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: And it’s disappointing to me, Buck, when I look at — we talked about this a little bit earlier, but maybe we need to mention this to close out — the governors in Utah and Indiana aren’t willing to stand up and say, “Hey, transgenders,” that is grown men, “shouldn’t be able to compete in women’s sports.” It seems like you compete in the biology on your birth certificate. Seems like the very essence of sports.

BUCK: For politicians who have no next level that they plan to go to, I think the calculation, meaning they’re not going to run for president; they’ve topped out at where they’re trying to go politically. They realize there are issues… You can be on either side of a tax issue. You can be on either side of a border issue, even. There are a lot of things you can take either side of. If you’re called a bigot, you’re not getting put on those boards, even when you’re done. You’re not getting those speaking engagements or book deals. The wokeness translates into dollar and cents for people.

CLAY: I think that’s true. But guess what? There ain’t two sides to “Should boys and girls compete against each other and should grown-ass men get to kick the crap out of girls in women’s sports?” There just aren’t. The fact that there are governors who won’t take that position, I think, frankly, they’re cowards.