CLAY: We are joined now by David Marcus, who has done many things in his life, including being a theater actor. He’s also a Brooklyn-based columnist and author of Charade: The Covid Lies That Crushed a Nation. David, we appreciate you making the time to join the show here. But I wanted to play this audio for you to see what you thought of this. On Broadway, there was fury over a mask not being worn correctly, and I just want to let you react — as a theater guy — to what your reaction would be to this. Let’s play it.

NASTY PERSON AND BAD ACTRESS @PattiLuPone GOING NUTS ON SOME POOR PERSON IN THE AUDIENCE. Somebody tell “Patti” that those dopey cheap DIAPER masks don’t even WORK. Leave them alone PATTI! pic.twitter.com/OyT7stFGMC

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 11, 2022

CLAY: By the way, this is my wife’s biggest fear I think probably, Buck, if she took me to a Broadway play, that I wouldn’t be wearing my mask correctly and I’d just start getting screamed at by an actress on the stage. David, when you hear that, your reaction is what?

MARCUS: It’s amazing. It is the perfect symbol of why theater is basically dead in the United States of America because theaters don’t want to put people on stage who are gonna do an entertaining show for you anymore. They want to put people on stage to lecture you about how you should live, right? Don’t forget the cast of Hamilton lecturing Vice President Pence, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

MARCUS: That’s what this industry has become. I spent 15 years with a New York theater team. And listen, man, Hollywood is progressive, but Hollywood’s the National Review compared to the New York theater scene. And they’ve destroyed an industry. And that was just… That was just a perfect, whiny, screaming example of exactly how they’ve done it.

BUCK: By the way, David, great to have you on the show, man. I live right next to you. I walk past a Broadway theater every time I go to and from my apartment. And there’s a line of people outside. There’s these mask minders that have their masks on — outside, mind you —

CLAY: Oh, my God.

BUCK: — who walk up and down the line. This they also do this for the Colbert show, whatever, same thing. The mask minders make sure you are masked up in line outside before you go in, and then the ushers, from what I understand. I talked to a friend who was to a Broadway show recently. If you’re talking or being annoying, things that actual bother normal people, that’s not the big deal.

If your mask drops down you get one warning and then they come over and basically say, you know, do you want to be expelled from the theater? I mean, why would anyone put themselves through this is what I want to know, like, how can anyone…? David, the people that are going to these theaters in New York — and there’s some other places across the country where I think this still exists, but nowhere like Broadway. They’re going to crowded restaurants in bars before and after they sit in the Broadway theater without masks on.

MARCUS: No. Look, none of it makes any sense, of course. But, again, I think it’s down to an American arts community that are just rule followers, that don’t even make art anymore. They just kind of like pat people on the heads for having the right views about race and gender and masks. When I started doing theater in the 1990s in New York, the last thing we were ever doing was thinking about wearing a mask or not getting sick. We were artists. (laughs) We were dangerous. You know, these people are about as dangerous as Elmer’s Glue.

CLAY: David, we were just talking about off air because Buck obviously is in New York City, Ali, our producer, a lot of our staff are there, and we are we’re doing a one-year anniversary event in New York City soon. And are you concerned as someone who lives in Brooklyn that with covid cases ticking back up, with the Biden White House talking about the midterm variant that might suddenly cause a hundred million more cases…?

You’ve still got 2-year-olds that have to wear masks in New York. To Buck’s point, you got actors and actresses lecturing people from the stage in Broadway productions for not wearing their masks correctly. Are you concerned as the summer comes to a close in the next several months and we move towards the fall that insanity is going to return its full grip of fascist power to in New York City, the place that you live?

MARCUS: Oh, yeah. Of course, I’m concerned. It’s not just the place I live, it’s the place that I love. And, you know, it’s happened too many times. I mean, there were too many times when, you know, I’d see Buck and I’d say, “Buck, I think we turned the corner here, right?” Nope. So, yeah, I am very concerned. I will say, though, that on the basic institutional level, the freak-out for the most part is calming down.

You know, my 11-year-old had covid recently, and a year ago in terms of school that would have been the end of the world and everything shut down, and it’s just not anymore. So I do think that the people who run the institutions and most of the New Yorkers don’t want to go back to that. But look, if our governor says you’re going back, we’re going back, man. We learned that lesson, right?

BUCK: It’s crazy. David Marcus is a columnist for the New York Post, author of Charade: The Covid Lies That Crushed a Nation. David, I don’t know if you saw it or heard it, but Fauci got an honorary doctorate at the University of Michigan — I guess it was over this past weekend — and there was uproarious applause for this guy, like standing ovation.

There’s a part of me that I’m never gonna let this go until the truth about Fauci becomes the overwhelming lore of the land, if you will. Like, I just refuse to let this guy — not just as a New Yorker, a lot of people listening in cities across the country had to deal with the lunacy as well. But in New York it feels particularly personal, the Fauci crap.

MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, it absolutely does. I mean, it doesn’t help that the guy’s from south Brooklyn. But yeah. Listen. Listen. There is a certain percentage of the American people who went to such bizarre, crazy extremes — not leaving their apartment, washing their groceries, not touching their face, all of these things, right — who bought completely into it who are never going to be psychologically capable of admitting that that was a mistake.

Of saying, “I refused to hug my grandmother for two years. Oops.” Right? There’s a lot of people who are just never going to face it. That’s a big thing to have to face. And I think a lot of people are just not gonna do it. We already have the studies guys. We have the Johns Hopkins study. We have other studies. We know that Florida didn’t have vastly more deaths than New York and did way, way better economically. The results of this whole thing are in. There’s just a bunch of Americans who are never gonna accept it.

CLAY: Speaking of that, David, I’m sure a lot of people saw the Bill Gates news where Bill Gates basically — along with everybody else who’s gotten four covid shots — feels obligated to say when he tests positive, “I’m so thankful for my covid shots because otherwise this would be so much worse.” I think most reasonable people out there — and I put this tweet out yesterday, Buck.

If you got a shot for something four times and you still got it, you would think, “What in the world’s going on? How awful is this covid shot?” Will people, David, ever acknowledge that much of what they have done — whether it’s masks, whether it’s getting a billion covid shots (chuckles) — that they really haven’t done anything to alter the risk analysis?

Two-year-olds wearing masks, the requirements in New York have done nothing — you just mentioned the divergence between Florida and New York and all of New York has done and many blue state cities and regions have destroyed their economy with no comparative health benefit?

MARCUS: Yeah, absolutely. And another thing that Gates said — this might have been the same interview, but I believe it was in the last week — was, you know, he said, “Well, you know, we couldn’t possibly —

CLAY: Yep.

MARCUS: “ — have known at the beginning that the infection fatality rate was much lower than we thought.” You know who knew that on I believe March 7th, 2020, was Donald Trump who did an interview with Sean Hannity where he said he had a hunch that that fatality rate was much, much lower. Why? Because we weren’t testing asymptomatic people who don’t show any illness.

CLAY: Yep.

MARCUS: Donald Trump was absolutely right. That was early March 2020. So this idea that Bill Gates with everything he has at his disposal didn’t know this, it really just shows you what was going on here.

BUCK: Check out Charade: The Covid Lies That Crushed a Nation. David Marcus. David, great to have you on, my friend. We’ll talk to you soon.

MARCUS: Thanks, guys. Be well.