sCLAY: Chuck Schumer just tweeted in the last 30 minutes or so:

.@TuckerCarlson invited me on his show tonight to debate the letter I sent to @FoxNews.

I’m declining. Tucker Carlson needs to stop promoting the racist, dangerous ‘Replacement Theory’.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) May 17, 2022

And then he goes on to make his argument. But really, he’s a coward, right? And if you weren’t willing — and, Buck, we said this for a long time. If Chuck Schumer wanted to come on this show and make the case that we were making America an awful place, I think we’d probably have him. We’re not running from people who want to make arguments. We will debate with him. We’ll have a conversation.

But Democrats are terrified to actually have to answer for their questions in a free and open forum. And so I’m not surprised that Schumer declined and is running in the opposite direction from Tucker Carlson — who I, frankly, think would mop the floor with Chuck Schumer if they debated any issue under the sun, by the way.

But this one certainly in particular, which is effective that Chuck Schumer is trying to argue that Tucker Carlson is responsible for the shooting that happened in Buffalo, without any real evidence at all. Moreover, should you be responsible for anyone who commits a felony? Why should, Buck…? We have millions of listeners. Why should we be responsible if someone who listens to us sometimes does something heinous? It’s not a standard that should be applied, frankly, to anyone.

BUCK: This is a long-standing tactic of the left and of the Democrat Party. It’s not new. It’s grotesque, but the keep doing it. Remember, they blamed Sarah Palin, if you recall, for the Gabby Giffords shooting.

CLAY: Oh yeah.

BUCK: Very, very directly. Sarah Palin actually went and sued the New York Times related to that incident. But there was very clear blame from the New York Times on Sarah Palin. I believe in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh there was blame by the Clinton. Bill Clinton decided that the problem was talk radio, actually.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Conservative talk radio, of course, and even went after certain hosts by name. So this is what they do, and it’s wrong and problematic on many levels. One is, you could have a moment here of national unit, support, grieving, and solidarity over something that every decent and moral American knows what happened in Buffalo was an atrocity and a terrorist attack. You could bring people together and say, “We stand against this kind of hate,” and really just do that. You could just bring these people together.

Instead, Joe Biden takes it as an opportunity to place blame on people he doesn’t like, who are not deserving of blame in any sane universe. And also to push for policies that wouldn’t have stopped this thing in the first place. This is what Democrats do. They politicize every tragedy like this. The Sandy Hook shooting. I’ll point out someone on the show yesterday mentioned the SAFE Act in New York.

So after Sandy Hook where a semiautomatic rifle was used there as well, New York State decided that you know we’re gonna do? We’re gonna pass a ban on assault rifles. That’s what they said. And then they had to create these cosmetic changes, and so you know what they started doing quarterback Clay? Selling rifles that function exactly the same way, but they don’t have a foregrip and they don’t have a pistol stock.

But fires the same bullets at the same speed. They were New York compliant assault rifles. It’s idiotic beyond words, and in Connecticut they also passed a similar ban, and I remember seeing at one point they estimated that — ’cause you’re supposed to hand in your AR-15 or similar rifle in Connecticut — a hundred thousand residents of Connecticut were likely in violation. This is years ago now. It might have challenged.

Likely in violation of that order. Didn’t do anything. So they just used this as an opportunity for politics and they wonder why doesn’t actually change, why we don’t actually have — and they won’t defend their crappy ideas about how to make things better, that aren’t gonna make things better. I mean, assault rifle ban, for example, comes to mind.

And that Chuck Schumer, if you’re gonna be a member of the Senate and you’re gonna blame an American citizen in public for being responsible for atrocity like what just happened in Buffalo, you damn sure should have the backbone to actually stand behind your words and have it out and explain why you think that’s a fair thing to say. But Chuck Schumer is a coward and a fake.

CLAY: And he’s gotten used to an era where he doesn’t actually get any hard questions. CNN and MSNBC just take whatever he says and run with it, and we don’t have any actual debate that’s going on. So credit to Tucker Carlson for inviting on a guy in Chuck Schumer who, effectively, is demanding that he be fired.

And credit to Fox News for being open to that debate. I don’t think they would do that on MSNBC. I don’t recall MSNBC ever inviting on any of their staunchest critics. I don’t certainly recall CNN do it. Hey, I’m banned for life from CNN right now, so certainly they’re not gonna allow me on.

BUCK: I used to gon on. Believe it or not MSNBC on me on a few times to debate — we can go find this in the archive — terrorism issues and I’d just… I’ll be honest with you: I just smoked some of their so-called experts. They never had me back and then at CNN they were okay with me for a while until all of a sudden it turned the politics away from counterterrorism and then they actually…

If you want to see right now or hear, obviously radio side, a debate among relative equals in terms of stature with their sides, where do you go? Doesn’t exist right now, in our national conversation. Not really. One off here or there you might see something. I mean, I remember even, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, Clay, you would say people; they would actually throw down. You know, Bill O’Reilly in his day on Fox News would have, you know, big name Democrats. Michael Moore, Bill O’Reilly throwing down, I mean, I remember this used to happen. It doesn’t happen anymore.

CLAY: Tucker had a show on CNN called Crossfire for years with a left and right prognosticator who would argue about the issues of the day — sometimes agree on something, oftentimes disagree — and that’s vanished. Tucker, to his credit, has extended the opportunity to Chuck Schumer to come on his show, Tucker’s show, and call him a racist who led to a mass murder, and Charles Schumer, Chuck Schumer won’t do it.

BUCK: I don’t want to be mean, but, you know, if The View invited me on and Joy Behar was like, “You called me stupid in the past,” I’d be like, “I do think you’re not a smart person and you do a disservice to your audience.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I don’t want to be rude, but if she’s gonna ask me, I would say that to her face.

CLAY: I would love to go on The View and just say that. Yeah, I mean, look, I don’t think that there’s anything that we say on this program that I wouldn’t say on any program in America. And obviously they wouldn’t have us on because can you imagine if The View had either of us on with those panelists that they have?

BUCK: You’d just get shouted down.

CLAY: It’d be the red wedding of talk shows. (laughing) We would just come out of there just having totally eviscerated them in all respects. I would like to see the crowd reactions ’cause I also think it would be fun. We’d get jeered a little bit, which I kind of welcome, you know, the hostile audience. I’d play up to it WWE style. But I would absolutely eviscerate all of their arguments.

BUCK: I honestly believe… I think if you put someone… you know, I mean, if you put someone like Ann Coulter on The View —

CLAY: Oh, that would be funny.

BUCK: But, I mean, as a host, not as a guest, as a host.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: If I think if you did, you would double the ratings of that show. I think you’d double the ratings of it, for a period of time. Eventually the libs would all flee because they would hate to see the ideological massacre underway of their ideas getting destroyed constantly. But for a while, it’d be great TV.

CLAY: I think it’s a fascinating point because I think what would happen is Ann is so smart, it would expose the stupidity of the other panelists and they would have two options, either cancel the show — because she would win every argument — or you would have to go out and actually make the overall intelligence of the show grow ’cause you’d have to find people who could talk at an intelligent level with her.