BUCK: Here is Anthony Fauci. I can’t… As much as my voice is a little bit more raspy now, I don’t think I can do the Fauci impression today, Clay, unfortunately. It might sound a little too much. Here is Fauci telling everybody that he doesn’t actually like mandating —

ANTHONY FAUCI: “I don’t like mandating things, I don’t like punishing people for not doing something.” pic.twitter.com/wBtPQ3utQV

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 17, 2022

BUCK: I’m just gonna say, I don’t believe him.

CLAY: Yeah, I’m gonna call the lie on that.

BUCK: I think he enjoys the power to mandate things because here’s how we know. He never says it’s too much. He never says we’ve gone too far.

CLAY: Good point.

BUCK: He never says take off that second mask. It’s crazy. Live your life. It’s always you want to be as careful as you can be, even if it doesn’t do anything, even if it’s oppressive, stupid, and damaging, in fact. We don’t talk as much now about the learning loss situation, but we absolutely should.

CLAY: Front page today, Buck: 1.2 million public school kids have disappeared since the covid shutdowns — 1.2 million nationwide.

BUCK: In the breakdown, where are they saying those 1.2 million have gone?

CLAY: They really don’t know for sure. They think some of them went to private schools; they think some of them went to homeschooling. They think some were just lost, right? They just decided to drop out because they weren’t being pursued as a part of the remote learning aspects. And they think that’s kind of a mix of all three of those categories.

But you talk about the loss potentially future income for kids who don’t graduate from high school and just kind of got lost in the shuffle, this is going to be a calamitous, asteroid-strikes-the-public-school system event. There are around 50 million in school, and they lost 1.2. They just don’t know.

BUCK: There is a remarkable increase — and I think it’s a very good thing, very positive development. If you look at homeschooling over the last 20 years —

CLAY: Skyrocketing.

BUCK: — skyrocketing. And I know you got three kids, Clay, but you got a very — you know, good school system where you are. I think when I have kids I’ll, depending on where I live, but I think I would very seriously consider homeschooling. If I were in a circumstance where that was possible with my wife, I think I would give that a shot.

CLAY: Yeah. And I think there’s some also sort of pod schooling that ended up being popular; and so homeschooling in small groups.

BUCK: When I say homeschooling, what I understand — from what I know from people on the right who do homeschool their kids — there’s a lot of community. You know, there’s other parents, there’s the pods, there’s material online, there’s volunteers, it’s not like you sit there just teaching your kids the ABC’s for eight hours a day. I think people —

CLAY: A lot of people had to do that in March when schools shut down, and that was not easy.

BUCK: Yeah, I can imagine.