Covid Hypocrisy Will Drive Angry Red Tide in November

CLAY: I know we don’t talk hardly at all about British politics, but we were just talking about during the break one thing that has been true across state lines, across country lines, is politicians have consistently — especially Democrats here, whether it’s AOC down in Miami, whether it’s Gretchen Whitmer traveling down to Florida, I think the governor of Illinois basically relocated his whole family to Florida while he shut down his whole state.

The hypocrisy has been pretty staggering, and really what they’re saying is, while they’re telling all of us, “Hey, you’re in tremendous danger,” their actions, by and large, don’t reflect that that is true — and sometimes that hypocrisy blows up, and it may end up costing Boris Johnson his position in England. I don’t know how many out there have been following this, but this is pretty funny.

So they had a gathering in May of 2020 where Boris Johnson’s private secretary sent out a notice to people telling them, “Hey, bring your own beer and we’re gonna have a party here at 10 Downing Street,” which is where the prime minister resides in England. Some of the details on this are pretty crazy because they lied about, effectively, it appears, whether they knew it was going to happen or not.

And now the way this situation is going, Boris Johnson has come out and said that he’s sorry about the way things went. He now has admitted that he attended the party. He said he thought it was a work event. So he lied about attending the party. But they were restricting all gatherings, and then they reportedly had a alcohol-infused party for a hundred people at 10 Downing Street, Buck.

So this is bad enough that a massive percentage of people in England now are calling for Boris Johnson to resign, and Boris Johnson has been a guy who historically has always been in hot water and then kind of wriggled his way out of trouble. But he says he understands public fury, took responsibility, said he believed it was a work event even though around a hundred people were invited and urged to, quote, “bring your own booze.”

He says, “I bitterly regret it. I wish we could have done things differently,” and the rules at the time in England said that no gatherings of more than two people were allowed. This is… It’s amazing the fallout that has occurred for people in positions of power during covid, whether it’s Andrew Cuomo — and I know it was technically #MeToo that took him out, not covid — Gavin Newsom gets recalled. Yes, he won the recall election.

And we know what happened in Virginia and nearly happened in New Jersey. And Buck, all of this tying together, I think there’s gonna be an angry red tide that is going to sweep out politicians — and some of the politicians that end up losing, Buck, I think it’s gonna be such a red tide that we don’t even talk about the possibility they might lose. Like Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, almost lost his reelection bid this past November, and all of the focus was on Virginia and whether Youngkin could pull off the upset, and nobody even talked about Murphy.

BUCK: Isn’t it remarkable when you think about how some of the biggest advocates for lockdowns, the most publicly in favor of them — and by “lockdowns” we mean everything, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The policies of masking and mask up between bites and six feet of social distancing — maybe three feet, maybe 20 feet, who knows? They keep changing, right? All of those things, you look at the people who were the most sanctimonious about it in public life, and time and again they are caught being huge frauds, really almost without exception.

Find me a prominent Democrat who is really at the top of the heap, whether it is former governor Cuomo or Newsom or Pelosi or AOC recently. You look at all these different individuals, and it just goes to show you that it’s not just the hypocrisy. It’s the notion that a true tyranny is not the strict enforcement of laws for everybody. That’s actually not what you had in the Soviet Union. That’s not what you have in North Korea.

It’s very strict and capricious enforcement of laws. So some people get crushed by the machinery of the state and in this case by the machinery of the Fauciite lockdown madness. Other people get to live by different rules. When that’s possible, you don’t have the universal burden across society. And so of course it’s much easier for people to be advocates for this who are at the top. The same thing we see with the, “We’re all in this together.”

We had all these upper-middle class libs in Santa Monica, in Brooklyn, and whatever the fancy parts of Chicago and Atlanta, Buckhead, whatever, right, in the fancy parts, having their food delivered to them at home doing Zoom in their pajamas talking about “we’re all in this together,” while the truckers, the grocery store workers, the postal delivery people, et cetera — go down the list, the cops, firefighters — they were all doing their jobs.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: We weren’t all in this together. It was always a lie. Because, Clay, if we had been all in it together and if Boris Johnson had to be in it with everybody in the U.K. and Pelosi and Schumer and all the rest of them here, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to stomach this stuff as long as they did.

CLAY: And it is interesting because do you agree with me that the tide of anger is unlikely to subside? I know you’ve talked about it a little bit, Buck, where you feel like things are so bad for Biden, they can’t possibly stay this bad. But I think it’s highly unlikely, if you look at the Senate, that there’s anything that’s really gonna get passed in the Senate for the next several months.

And then once you get into the summer and the campaign season for 2022, barring some sort of crazy surprise — and there could be a crazy, surprise, right? Russia could invade Ukraine. China could invade Taiwan. It sort of upsets the overall applecart of expectations. Certainly, if we’d been having this conversation in January of 2020, we’d have been saying, “Hey, things like pretty good for Trump to win reelection overwhelmingly,” because covid hadn’t yet hit.

We’d just hit a new… If you go back and read the newspapers in January and February of 2020, we still haven’t gotten anywhere back to the same number of people who were employed. Right? They talk about the unemployment rate, but there are millions of people who just have decided not to go back to work. And something crazy could happen, but I tend to think this red tide is gonna be overwhelming, and I think it’s gonna be fueled in many ways by covid anger.

BUCK: I think there are people who are beginning to see for the first time that there is no exit plan from the madness. There is a big chunk of the country who, unfortunately, I think that they are emotionally incapable of handling real life right now — of just handling the risks that are out there with covid and from everything else — because, as we’ve talked about, they ramped up the fear so very much because it was useful to defeat Donald Trump.

But you have that middle 10 to 20% of the country who are open to persuasion one way or the other, and they are seeing… Fauci can whine and moan all day about how people are mean to him and everything else. This has been the CDC. I think actually Scott Gottlieb, who is the former FDA chairman — who is one of these guys who appears on MSNBC and CNN. He’s pretty well known; he’s also on the board of Pfizer, by the way.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s convenient.

BUCK: I think it’s interesting to point out that he says the CDC is just needs to basically be scrapped and rebuilt, which is funny, ’cause I actually wrote an editorial at BuckSexton.com (laughing) about that a few days ago where I’m like, “Yeah, it does. The CDC is a giant failure.” Anyone who’s looking objectively at the last 12 months would have to say that decision was made after decision with poor results and in some cases disastrous results. But here’s my problem with all this, Clay.

I think that the Democrats — as a result of this — they just run the scorched-earth, insurrection, Republicans-are-racist, the unvaccinated-are-murdering-people playbook. They just go… Oh, and they try to change the election laws wherever they can. ‘Cause what are they gonna argue, right? What’s actually the case going to be? Joe Biden’s a clown. Everyone listening to this radio show knows it. Even the Democrats listening to this radio show know it. They knew it before they voted for him.

CLAY: Yeah, it’s a great point.