BUCK: The school board battles are back with masks on the front lines. Mask mandates in places like Virginia, New York. People are fightin’ this one out. We got the Clay and Buck show back now with you. Thanks for being here. This is a moment where we have to ask, “What is the plan?” because we have Fauci and the rest of them now saying the same stuff they’ve said all along which is, “We know how to control this virus.”

No, they don’t. Okay? Clearly, they don’t. Clearly all the stuff that we’ve been made to do — all the stupid nonsense — didn’t actually work. The mandates didn’t actually work, and they can’t stop the spread of the virus. That was a fantasy to begin with — and a very dangerous one from the perspective of liberty and the rule of law in this country. So parents are upset because here’s what’s happened. In some places, the people voted, and they put individuals in charge — Virginia notably, but there are other places as well — where they have now been told, “You don’t have to have kids masked up in schools.”

You will not be surprised to find out that the neurotic parents who have been masking their children willingly the whole time — which is just now state-sanctioned child abuse, to be very clear on that. The parents who have been willingly doing that and say, “Oh, this is great…” There’s a lot of them here in New York, a lot of them other places across the country. They are outraged at the notion that another child might be sitting next to theirs without a mask on. “Oh, my gosh! They’re putting Little Timmy and Little Sally in so much jeopardy.” That’s the idea.

Parents are completely outraged about the way that not only some of these school districts are reacting to the new rules — which rely on, Clay, what we’ve established, which is cloth masks don’t work, everybody. Sorry. Sorry, it’s a surprise to not the listeners of this show but to the libs who mask up their kids. Here is one in Loudoun County, Virginia. Once again we live situation, a circumstance where parents are speaking out.

MOTHER: It has been 686 days since our kids have had a normal school experience. We know things now that we didn’t know 686 days ago, namely, that children are not at high risk for serious illness from covid. That is a fact. Masking is a psychological stresser. It disrupts learning and the ability to communicate. It interferes with happiness. Masks are particularly detrimental to young children, those with autism, and those who are struggling with anxiety. To those who say students don’t mind or they’re used to it, I encourage you to ask them. So why do we mask kids who are factually at an extremely low risk? The answer is simple. To make triple-vaccinated adults feel safe.

Northern VA school board meeting https://t.co/2gxTY0m4oc

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 26, 2022

BUCK: So, Clay, you know, the mask is just a part of the overall debate right now. You might have seen over at MSNBC one of their lib anchors did this whole thread on Twitter about how… What is everybody complaining about, Clay? Schools are open. It’s fine. Shut up, peasants. What’s the problem? Schools maybe open but they have insane mask restrictions in place.

My own high school has kids on the basketball court masked up. I have a friend in Baltimore who just emailed me last night to tell me that her children — about your kids’ age, by the way — have to mask up during all sports. They’re masked up by the school while they’re playing sports! No field trips. No after school for a lot of different kids, all kinds of crazy restrictions. It is not normal, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s normal.

CLAY: Well, and there still are a lot of kids that are not in school, Buck. This idea that everybody is back and everything’s back to normal? No, no. Even Joe Biden himself in his press conference pointed out that around 5% of schools were not actually in session right now — and, by the way, that’s one out of every 20 kids two years, nearly, after we shut down for the first time, and those numbers are continuing to grow. There’s still lots of kids being quarantined.

There are still all sorts of issues associated with everything surrounding masking in schools. And, Buck, remember I went and talked to my school board back in August, I believe it was now, of 2021. And that was, to me, sort of the moment that crystallized how much of a rebellion is brewing in the suburbs that helped to set the table for what took place in November in Virginia, right?

And it nearly took place in New Jersey. Suburban parents in particular, the swing voters there, are fed up. Moms are furious about the fact that their kids still have to wear masks — and, by the way, covid policy is still a mess. My kids right now are home today because if a number of teachers test positive, they are allowing individual schools as opposed to school districts…

This is the first day they’ve missed all year. They’re gonna be home Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then be back on Monday. But it’s based on the policies that are in place as it comes to teachers testing positive. And I would imagine, Buck, with all of these people who are super nervous about covid, the overwhelming number of the tests — which we didn’t talk about but guess where those tests are from that Biden is sending out? China, right? We bought like a billion dollars’ worth of tests from China to send out to all of the American householders which many Americans are getting and being like, “Oh, the irony here.”

BUCK: Florida, as we know — always gotta talk about Florida when we’re talking about freedom — has a ban on mask mandates in schools. That doesn’t mean you can’t wear a mask. It means you cannot force, as a function of school policy, children to wear a mask. To me, this isn’t all that different from a Florida had an anti-corporal punishment rule — like, you can’t hit kids with rulers.

Because I think that masking up kids is abuse, but if parents are choosing to do this because they’re neurotics, that’s up to them. The point here, though, is that we have an enormous state with tens of millions of people living in it that has a no mask mandatory rule in schools. And it’s fine. Kids aren’t dropping dead. They don’t have outrageous covid case numbers in the schools.

CLAY: Hundred percent right.

BUCK: Everything is fine. But what you have is California and New York, they don’t care about the evidence, they don’t care about reality. And, by the way, in Virginia they’re fighting this out now, the school boards. Loudoun County school board is saying that they’re taking this to court; they gotta mask up all the kids, Clay. This is what CNN’s Jim Acosta said. So sad for Jim and the ratings these days over at CNN. Here’s what he says about what Virginia’s like now.

ACOSTA: The new culture wars are impacting our laws, and some experts fear they could be weakening our Democracy just as badly as the Big Lie. Here to discuss, Molly Jong-Fast, contributing writer for The Atlantic, uh, and author of the newsletter, “Wait, What?” Molly, I seem to remember Glenn Youngkin campaigning in a fleece vest in Virginia. He was running as a different kind of Republican. I was told there was going to be a vest, not a Soviet-style police state across the Potomac from Washington.

CLAY: It’s amazing, Buck, to think about the way they would classify giving parents a choice as representing “a Soviet-style police state.” See, they have tried to turn freedom into a form of authoritarianism. Again, I think we have to keep echoing and reinforcing this, Buck. They’re not banning masks. They are letting parents choose whether they want their kids to wear masks or not, which is the very definition of freedom. It’s the exact opposite of authoritarianism. The government mandating that you do something is what a dictator would do.