BUCK: I have to tell you, it is remarkable how quickly a mass casualty terror attack has fallen out of the headlines, not just here in New York City, but across the country. It was just days ago there was a terrorist on a New York City subway who tried to kill a whole lot people just going about their day-to-day lives here in the morning rush hour in Brooklyn here in New York.
He was caught. A lot of reporting about that and obviously the day of the incident it was the dominant news story for good reason. But there’s no aftermath discussion. There are no panels I’m seeing on TV or elsewhere wondering what could have been done to prevent this or what ideology is behind this? What’s the motive?
As I’ve been saying on Twitter and elsewhere, I would ask you right now, “What is the official motive for the killing in Waukesha, that mass murder in Waukesha, the Christmas parade? Have they ever told us?” I think the answer is quite clearly no. They have not. Can any of you — without Googling it — remember the name of the killer in Waukesha?
People lost their jobs for raising money. Kyle Rittenhouse was a hundred percent not guilty, found not guilty in a court of law, was not guilty to any reasonable person, but for months the media ran with the story that he was somehow a white supremacist shooter, even though the people that he shot were also white. Doesn’t matter. This is about narrative, folks.
It’s about what they want to tell you is the storyline here. It’s about what they want to focus on. The biggest editorial decisions that are made every day are not even in the specific words used to describe certain incidents. It’s what they talk about and for how long and what they don’t. So just remember that as we sit here, it’s Friday.
There was a terrorist attack in New York City on the subway, and they use the term — the FBI is using the term — “terror attack.” And there’s no panels on the rise of terrorism in America, domestic terrorism, Clay. None of it. Okay. I wanted to point that out. I also wanted to say that the crime situation in cities is intolerable and ’cause it keeps getting worse and it’s top to bottom.
It’s violent crime — it’s everything you can imagine — quality of life crime, simple shoplifting. The mayor of New York City has come under a fair amount of criticism — and he should get a lot more, in my opinion — for not doing what’s necessary to turn things around. Here is Eric Adams, who is pointing out here there is a hypocrisy among BLM activists and the institutional left.
CLAY: He’s a hundred percent right, Buck. We said the first hundred days for Eric Adams has not gone well, and certainly I believe crime’s up 40-some-odd percent in New York City. I saw that stat this morning as I was doing prep getting ready for the show. Amen, I gotta say, for Eric Adams there. And, Buck, this is something that we’ve been saying on this show for a long time.
It is that people show up for Black Lives Matter protests, and then they leave, and what happens is black lives immediately don’t matter because crime skyrockets in those cities — and overwhelmingly, the victims of those crimes are black. And we talked about this a while back. There are so many young kids — many of them minority — getting shot.
When they are shot by a black person, their life doesn’t matter. The only time that a black life seems to matter is when a white person shoots them. I mean, think about this. In the way that the media covers any sort of significant crime, the only time that a black life really matters is when a white life is allegedly involved in taking it.
And to your point, Buck, I think it’s so well said. You live in New York City. We had a mass casualty event where a guy shot over 30 times inside of a crowded subway car. That guy has got a litany of issues in his past. There are videos proving that he is — beyond a shadow of a doubt — a racist. He has been arrested, Buck, nine times in New York, three times in New Jersey.
Remember we played that Jen Psaki clip just before? Remember when she was mocking the idea of Fox News covering soft on crime? Getting arrested 12 times and being back out on the street and able to just fire 30 gunshots in a crowded subway car? That, Jen Psaki, is the definition of what soft on crime is. That exact thing.
BUCK: And you have these progressive prosecutors who even some of the left-wing residents of cities like San Francisco where Chesa Boudin, I think, is facing a recall. I don’t think that vote has happened yet.
CLAY: June, I believe.
BUCK: Yeah. It’s coming up. But they realize that this is crazy, and there’s an ideology behind all of this. I mean, decisions have been made in Democrat-controlled enclaves — and now from the top down of the Biden DOJ — to treat crime and criminals differently because they view this as a criminal justice matter. That is what’s going on right now.
The whole bail reform effort in New York was premised on its unfair; there’s a disproportionate impact of incarceration on black and Latino or black and Hispanic communities in New York. Therefore, we’re just gonna have fewer people that across the board are going to be held before they go before a judge, right? And what we’ve seen is just more crime and more people suffering.
And disproportionately, the people who suffer from this are actually black and Latino people in New York City and other cities across the country where they are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, an armed robbery, a carjacking, whatever the category may be. And this comes from “wrongthink,” if you will, this comes from the wrong ideas.
And Democrats have them and have had them, and now I think finally they’re realizing they can either hide or back off some of this. As we’ve said, defund the police is so stupid that it’s hard to imagine that there was a time when that was the rallying cry around criminal justice for the Democrat Party nationwide and that corporations… I mean, abolish the police is actually what they were saying in some places too. This is lunacy, and we suffered because of and still are suffering because of that lunacy.
When you don’t fight back against something, you are default allowing that to be taken over, and there were a lot of people in the Republican Party who were afraid, ’cause they were afraid they were gonna get called racist — crazily — if they had said, “Hey, you know what? Defund the police is crazy.”
To your credit — and, you know, hate to brag or draw attention here, but to my credit, too — we were actually fighting this from the moment it began talking about how crazy it was and how we knew exactly what the outcome was gonna be, and it happened.
BUCK: I could even retweet this one. Back in June 14th of 2020, there were people throwing rocks and bottles at NYPD cars in broad daylight — this video went viral, and I shared it with, “Just some mostly peaceful BLM protesters here in New York, sharing their policy opinions and being responsible, law-abiding citizens,” by destroying police cars and causing a riot in the streets, of course.
Some of us knew exactly what this is right away. The Trump administration was not good on this, and I’ve had some people that try to argue this with me, and I say, “Go back. Trump was…” He got better. Trump sort of got in the cockpit. You got ready to take over things right around July when it switched more to the statues.
June of 2020, the Republican Party, the Trump administration was really caught off guard, I guess you could say, or just felt like there was too much of a movement against them, and they ceded the ideological bad to the most radical elements of the anti-police, anti-law-and-order left. And that had real consequences that we’re still feeling to this day.
CLAY: He eventually got to the right place, to your point. By July, he was saying, “Hey, we need to call in the National Guard.”
BUCK: Yeah, law and order. Started saying it. Yeah.
Like, he was quoting from a movie or something, “When the riots start, the shooting starts,” meaning like, “Hey, the police need to come in and take more control.” But I think he said it in that way, and it actually made it harder to embrace law and order at that point. But eventually, eventually they got around to it.
The summer of tearing down statues and of rioting and of looting and all the chaos that ensued in the wake of George Floyd is something that I hope our country never goes through again. Now, we probably will because a lot of this is cyclical. But for a lot of us, Buck, I mean for me and you?
I mean, around our age, we’ve never seen anything like this before. We weren’t alive in the 1960s. We weren’t alive during the Vietnam War. We’d never seen protests that occurred like this. Maybe a little bit the riots in Los Angeles, but otherwise there’s not a lot of comparisons historically for people who are 40 or 50 years old.
BUCK: The only thing that came close was the BLM riots under the Obama administration.
CLAY: Well, yeah.
BUCK: People should remember that. That was BLM 1.0 where CNN famously had a reporter standing front of a raging inferno of a whole building that was burning down to the ground, and they said “mostly peaceful protests.” That was one of the great CNN moments of all time. That place has never — should never — regain any credibility with any serious person.
Go down the list. Pick a major city where there were BLM the movements, activists, and progressive prosecutors all coming together — and Democrats either bending the knee or encouraging all of this — and things have gotten markedly worse. In the earliest days it was clear, when you have a movement that is based upon a lie.
Which is that that law enforcement routinely kills unarmed black men without consequence out of racism. That is the founding lie of the BLM movement, nothing good is going to come of that, folks. There is no reform that they will engage in. They will buy a $6 million mansion in Malibu, however, apparently. That we did find out.
CLAY: Yeah. And, by the way, it also leads to more violent interactions. Because police shootings are up 40%, meaning police being shot, this year so far in 2022, off of historic highs in 2021. We’re at up 40%, according to the first quarter data of numbers of police getting shot. So there are real consequences not only on the side of innocent people being murdered but also on blue lives mattering as they try and protect us all over the country.
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