BUCK: Clay, you’ve certainly seen the strength… You mentioned the EA Sports, which is a big video game-maker, kicking off the Russian teams from their soccer game. This is a video game, right?

CLAY: Really strange.

BUCK: And vodka that’s Russian being poured out the drain. We’re having a freedom fries moment of moral panic right now over this. The West knows Putin is the aggressor. He’s the bad guy. We all have clarity on that. We have to watch very closely at what’s going on here, though, and how we can mitigate this, how we can limit this to the degree we can — to the degree we can as outsiders — and not get drawn further into it. That’s the big, bright red line we have.

But you can see there’s already an effort to use the political narrative here of good versus evil in Ukraine in ways that should be very concerning to us back here at home. Joe Biden was speaking yesterday. This was right after the State of the Union address, where… Did you feel the country was unified? I did not feel the country was unified after the State of the Union address.

CLAY: (laughing) No, I would agree with you. I don’t think very many people out there at all felt unified. And, by the way, I want to hear this clip. But can we just point out: Monday, mask outdoors for Joe Biden as he walked across the White House grounds. Tuesday, no mask, State of the Union. Wednesday, Milwaukee to go try to sell the State of the Union, mask again. This is so transparently ridiculous, even not analyzing what he’s saying. But the Mask Olympics, the mask oppression, whatever you want to call it is beyond absurd.

BUCK: Democrat politicians have essentially turned the mask into flag pins.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Remember people would say early on in the Iraq war there’s a lot of people wearing flag pins, people would say, “Where’s your flag pin?” Masking for them is not a sign of patriotism. It’s a sign of adherence to “the science,” whatever that actually means, or they’re suffering from an actual mental health disorder. I mean, somebody who thinks that one day the mask is good, the next day it’s bad, the next day it’s good.

CLAY: It’s so crazy.

BUCK: This is entirely irrational, but while that’s all going on you need to remember, Joe Biden just pretended to be “the president for all Americans” earlier in the week and did the whole rah-rah State of the Union address thing. Here he is just yesterday. I think he was up in Wisconsin.

CLAY: Milwaukee, I believe.

BUCK: Yeah, Milwaukee.

CLAY: By the way, where we’re also number one. We’re number one in Houston enjoying ourselves. You went up to Milwaukee recently. Fantastic people there.

BUCK: Absolutely. Appreciate all of you listening on WISN. Here is what Biden said — you’ve gotta hear this, folks — about the invasion of Ukraine. What really led up to this? Clay clip 1.

BIDEN: Vladimir Putin was countin’ on being able to (cough) split up the United States. Look, how you feel if you saw crowds storm and break down the doors of the British Parliament, kill five cops, injure 145 — or the German Bundestag, or the Italian Parliament? I think you’d wonder.

BUCK: Clay, he is equating… First of all, he’s lying about five cops being killed again.

CLAY: One billion percent lying.

BUCK: He just won’t stop. They keep saying this. People committing suicide months after a riot is not the same thing as dying from being beaten to death with a fire extinguisher at the riot. But put aside that lie for a second. The even bigger lie in a sense is that Putin went into Ukraine, according to this assessment from our current commander-in-chief because of the threat to democracy and the divisions created here at home from January 6th. You have Biden straight-up implying that the war in Ukraine is the fault of people walking into the Capitol building, many of whom were just saying selfies and trespassing on federal property during a official proceeding. This is crazy!

CLAY: It’s beyond crazy. First of all, it should be flagged as a huge lie because claiming that January 6th, five people got killed who were police officers is a flagrant lie. But what’s also crazy about this, Buck, is, Biden didn’t mention January 6th in his entire State of the Union address. He talked for 62 minutes to the entire nation in an address that they probably drafted, what do you think, 20 times, 30 times before it was finished?

They made a calculated decision, “We’re not gonna mention January 6th,” and then he immediately goes on the road to try to sell the speech that he just gave in the State of the Union and decides to make this outlandish of a claim. If he truly believed this, why wasn’t it in the State of the Union, and what sort of political calculus is going on that he’s falsely trying to appeal to a big audience, right? Maybe when he thinks Republicans and independents are paying attention in the State of the Union.

And then when he’s back to sell red meat to the far left-wing elements of his party, he’s selling this. I also wonder, Buck, when I hear this: Were they so attacked by members of their own party privately for not mentioning January 6th that Biden felt like he had to kneel at the altar of the left wing of his party and immediately basically apologize and come out and go farther left than, frankly, I ever remember him going as it pertains to directly blaming five different people who are police officers supposedly dying in this January 6th event.

I thought, Buck — and you did as well — that he would try and tie Ukraine into January 6th. But I thought he would do it in his State of the Union address. I wonder if that got the cutting room floor at the last minute and then the Biden White House had such blowback of a negative direction after the State of the Union that they immediately told him, “Hey, let’s put this back that we cut out of the State of the Union into this Milwaukee for the red meat for the left wingers.”

BUCK: And here’s why I think you have to pay close attention to this. You can’t just say, “Well, this is Joe Biden being the reckless demagogue that he always is.” We are seeing now in this era of covid and the pandemic — and also, reading into that I would argue four years of the Russia, Russia, Russia/Putin stole the 2016 election for Trump hysteria — hysteria as a tool of political mobilization is being used all around us in the west, in America. Look what just happened in Canada.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You had Justin Trudeau stroke effectively a National Security Act which is close to mayoralty law, the Emergencies Act there, which is only supposed to be if there’s a threat to after we go to and the security of the overall nation, because people parked their trucks in downtown Ottawa and had cookouts on the street. But he thought they were neo-Nazis and I lied about them, and he undermined them in the public as much as possible with those lies.

We’re seeing the usage of tools now that will be used against us here, and I think that’s why it’s so concerning when you have all these things being done against Russians abroad — I’m not talking about even what’s going on in Ukraine — they’re saying we should seize the assets of. People who think of themselves as wise, Clay, and think that they’re brilliant about how to deal with it, want us to punish the children of wealthy Russians who are in America.

You’re seeing this talked about. You know, “We should seize their yachts, seize their cars, keep them out of Harvard,” or whatever. Based on what? What is the legal principle for that? Some of them aren’t even in Russia. You’re just gonna…? Now, that hasn’t happened yet, but you can see the overreaction from the perspective of a moral hysteria that means that people have to do all these things. “We’re all gonna do everything we can! We’re gonna forget about principles.

“We’re gonna forget the rules of law and constitutional precedent and constitutional protection.” People don’t think that’s gonna be used against us here to suppress dissent too? You’ve seen it in Canada. You’re seeing… I’m not talking, again, about inside Ukraine. We’ll get into that a second. I’m talking about what they want to do to Russians all over the world including here in America. We’re in a moment of hysteria right now. People need to slow down, take a breath.

CLAY: This is the challenge in general of social media, because everybody feels the need to one up the next person. And the moral indignation meter — the outrage meter, as I would put it — is constantly in need of being accelerated, of being advanced. And so there’s a moral panic — and I’ve seen this for a long time — in terms of who can be the most outraged by something, right?

And sometimes that can initially be very positive, because I do think the overall outreach of the democratic process to try to stand up against Russia has been very powerful and positive. But at some point, you tip over into the hysteria realm — and I just think it’s kind of outlandish. You mentioned it a moment ago, but sports is often an interesting window into this outrage meter.

Does it really make sense for EA Sports to pull Russian soccer teams off of their FIFA video game? Does it really make sense that your 15- and 16-year-old kids or grandkids who might play FIFA and might have a game where they’re playing occasionally against a Russian team shouldn’t be able to do that? This, by the way, the flip side of this is, same thing when they put Colin Kaepernick in Madden, right?

He’s a quarterback in Madden right now, even though he’s been out of the league for years, and they rated him — inside of Madden where the quality of the player supposedly matters so much — as better than many starting quarterbacks in the NFL. It’s nonsensical. And to your point, Buck, there is an element of hysteria that I believe is manifestly more advanced because of social media than it ever was in the past. Sometimes that can be good, but it rapidly gets out of control and spirals into absurdity.

BUCK: Rules for Radicals, Clay, Saul Alinsky. This is from Rules for Radicals, you want to know how the left thinks? It is essentially their handbook. “Once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it’s a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution,” and then to whatever else you want. So you get everybody with all this indignation about Russia which is, again, agreed upon.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: But once the people are mobilized, now you have people that feel activated, energized, and they want something, they want to feel like they have power, they have some way of affecting the outcome. And what concerns me is we’re in a time we’re coming out of the pandemic now; people are finally, I think, starting to realize what’s gone on here, and there’s a trauma from…

There’s really a post-pandemic syndrome that we’re all suffering from here in America and places all over the world. But in this elevated time of anxiety, hysteria — when you’re talking about a military conflict going on overseas where one power has thousands of nuclear weapons or over a thousand nuclear weapons, whatever the official number is, Clay — we all need to be very cautious about how fast we are pushed into believing a certain narrative, into accepting, a certain pathway forward because I think the elites are rattled, I think people are overanxious, and I think the Biden administration is desperate for a narrative of, “This is why we should be in charge.”

CLAY: I think that’s well said. I would also point out that this directly undercuts what has been a moment of unity. Most people in America — Democrat, Republican, independent — are united in believing that Russia should be stood up to for invading Ukraine. When you’re Joe Biden and you go to Olympia, Wisconsin… By the way, I believe it’s Olympia, Wisconsin, as opposed to Milwaukee. Sorry. Superior, Wisconsin. Eventually I’ll get it right. Superior, Wisconsin.

But when you’re Joe Biden and you go and say, “Hey, this Russia invasion is directly connected to the Republican Party in the United States,” you dilute the support that you already had and the unity, to some extent, because then you start arguing over why this is occurring as opposed to trying to combat it, which directly dilutes and destroys the unanimity of opinion as it pertains to Russia invading Ukraine. Just another failure of Joe Biden when it comes to trying to draw everybody together.

BUCK: I’ll just throw this out there too, Clay. We didn’t even go a day between the State of the Union — we didn’t go a full 24 hours — before the sentiment was, “Why don’t you guys back Biden up in his righteous pushback against Vladimir Putin?” which we are, actually, backing up Biden.

CLAY: Everybody is.

BUCK: Everybody is. But they went from “Why aren’t you backing up him up?” to, “Well, actually the insurrection caused this; it’s your fault.” They didn’t wait very long with that pseudo-unity message.