BUCK: There is no need to be afraid, except of Bill de Blasio, who is so awful that he is ruining my hometown of New York City. Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. One of the happiest things… I am turning 40 on December 28th of this year. So if you want to send me birthday wishes on the day, I will be off. I’ll be on a beach somewhere. I’ll be drinking something, maybe with alcohol in it. Probably not ’cause I get too tired. I have to take a nap if I drink before 5 p.m.

CLAY: Also, because you have celiac, you can only drink vodka, right?

BUCK: No, I can… Tequila and wine are the go-tos. I cannot drink beer, which is a huge, huge bummer. But anyway, I’m just saying one of the things — a baked-into-the-cake, so to speak, present — is that Mayor de Blasio will, when I get back, no longer be mayor of America’s largest city. Now, keep in mind he wants to be president still. And I know for some of you are thinking, “Oh, I live in Phoenix.

“Buck, I live in Portland. I live in Tampa. It’s not my problem.” By any means, Bill de Blasio wants to be everybody’s problem, and there are lessons learned that we all have to have here from him. This is what this guy is saying on his way out the door, just about, for example, crime, something I know in the city very well. Play.

DE BLASIO: Look around the city right now. The city is thriving. We’ve come back strong from covid, and the bottom line is that there is today in New York City a much safer city than we were eight years ago. There’s no question about that. We’re getting guns off the street. We are gonna turn the situation around. I have confidence and the NYPD has confidence that we’re gonna get back to the prepandemic levels soon and then surpass and become even safer.

BUCK: His propaganda is not even consistent. Are we turning it around, Clay, or is it much safer than it was eight years ago? I would note that. Nobody was saying this city was unsafe and dysfunctional, including all the conservatives in the city, when, for all of his flaws, it was Bloomberg as the mayor. De Blasio takes over eight years ago.

Everybody now — every Democrat I know — will say that this city is worse. The crime has gone up. We’ve seen a big spike in homicides last 18 months. This guy… But see, this is what they’re doing now. They’re just going to lie to your faces, folks, and challenge you. The lie is so aggressive that it’s meant to unbalance you, make you think, “They must be telling the truth.”

CLAY: It’s a hundred percent what it is, Buck. If you’ve ever been in an argument with somebody and they said something that was so flagrantly untrue, what it makes you do is pause for a moment and reconsider, “Wait a minute. Am I the one that has got everything totally wrong?” That is a flagrant lie that he told about the city being safer. The data doesn’t support it at all. But there’s so few people who are willing to step up and say the truth that that kind of lie gets spread. It propagates and metastasizes.