BUCK: Crime is still on the rise across the country, as you know, and this is very much like the way we’ve seen some of the libs figuring out all of a sudden, “Wait. Wait a minute. You mean that all the stuff we’ve been told by Fauci when it comes to covid and stopping the spread, and ‘We don’t know how to stop this virus’…?” Think of how many times they’ve said that, and they say it without irony now. I mean, they’re laughable.

These people are out of their minds. They do not know how to stop this aerosolized virus. We’ve never been able to just stop an aerosolized virus of the level of contagiousness that we’re talking about with covid, right? This is absurd. This is absurd. And yet here we are, once again, with crime. All of a sudden, Democrats are finding out, “Wait. You mean if we don’t arrest people who break the law — if we let them get away with stuff, if we let them out of prison early or don’t even have them serve any jail time before they go before a judge — not only do they feel like the system is soft.

“They will exploit more and they will act in a more criminal and predatory fashion against their fellow human beings, but you’re gonna see this happening all across the country. You’re gonna see a whole crime wave. In fact, some of them will even engage in crimes while they would have been held in jail but they’re out on bail because of no-cash bail rules.” We see this all over the place, and over the weekend there were some horrific incidents.

I believe there’s a cop who was shot in Washington, D.C., and two NYPD officers — one killed serving his city and another one grievously wounded. There was a domestic dispute call, and some career criminal who should have been in prison came out and, yes, he had an illegal firearm — and, yes, he had an illegal ammunition drum that he had put on. It’s already illegal, and he shot two cops.

And people are starting to say, “What the heck is going on? What’s it gonna take to get things under control?” Governor Kathy Hochul — who I really do think is one of the least capable and dumbest governors in America — is saying that it’s the gun, Clay. She actually gave a speech over the weekend where she said, “A gun killed…” They separated out the human agency from this entirely. It’s the inanimate object’s fault. It was an illegal gun that shot these people, these two cops, not a career criminal. Her she is saying they’re gonna stop the guns.

HOCHUL: We have to do more to fight the scourge of illegal guns on our streets —

CROWD: (smattering of applause)

HOCHUL: — and we need Washington teaming up with us, teaming up with locals to get it done. Guns, despite our tough laws in the state of New York — and we’re proud of them — they’re coming in from other states. They’re flooding our streets. And I have pledged the resources of the New York State police to become embedded with NYPD and others to help them. In fact, we’ve actually tripled funding for the gun-interdiction effort because they’re coming in from Virginia and Maryland — and coming in from Pennsylvania — to our very streets and we have to do whatever we can to protect our neighborhoods.

BUCK: How about locking up criminals, Clay?

CLAY: That would be one solution. This reminds me of when the car that was driven by that murdering —

BUCK: In Waukesha.

CLAY: — guy in Waukesha. Yeah. When they said, “A car mowed down six people,” and you’re like, “You know, I don’t think the car was driving without somebody behind the wheel.” Remember those headlines in CNN and Washington Post, “SUV Mows Through Parade.” Really? Was it the car or was it a murdering, racist rampager in Waukesha that did this? It wasn’t the gun. It was the idiot murderer who pulled the trigger of the gun.

And, by the way, to your point on Kathy Hochul and what an embarrassment she is, she’s definitely dumber than Andrew Cuomo. Whatever you might think about Andrew Cuomo, I don’t think he’s an imbecile. I think he’s one of the worst governors in the (chuckles) history of America, but he’s not an imbecile. I think Kathy Hochul might actually be an imbecile.

Did you see, Buck, she also compared making kids wear masks to making them wear shoes? We need to get the audio of that because I listened to it and my jaw dropped over how stupid it was. She said her daughter used to hate to wear shoes but then she got used to it, and that’s really what students are gonna have to do with masks too.

BUCK: I want to understand: They have normalized and politicians have mandated child abuse. This is child abuse. This is wrong what they are doing to people. They are actual — and I think at some level some of them may be aware in the back of their minds this is deeply embarrassing for them if they ever move into a normal society again, if we ever move back to a normal place where we can have honest conversations about how stupid all this is.

One of the reasons — and I feel like this gets lost in this, Clay. One of the reasons why you and I have known masks don’t work, it’s not just a function of doing a spray bottle test. It is in actual real-world trials. Does anybody think that a child in a classroom is maintaining the seal that would be necessary for any actual reduction? Otherwise you’re just breathing in the same wear as everybody else without any filtration! Does anyone think kids are maintaining that? Only a moron would believe that, but this is where we are.

CLAY: Even if you don’t think about it from a kid perspective, just think about it on an airplane. When you’re taking off your mask to eat or drink, it’s obvious that it’s not going to work. And, Buck, to your point on the child abuse, I think that’s an angle that we need to talk about more. I’m sure you saw the viral video of the kid having his masked taped to his face by a teacher.

Just take a step back and pretend that you had been asleep Rip van Winkle style since February of 2020, and you suddenly woke up and you saw videos and people were applauding a teacher using tape, affixing a mask to a child’s face and that that teacher thought they were the good person. You would just… Your mind would be blown. And I think to your point, Buck, a lot of these steps get taken, and you sometimes in the end in a thoroughly ridiculous place where you can’t even go back and retrace your steps to how you got there.

It’s why I always say, it’s like golf if you golf at all. One bad shot often leads to multiple other bad shots if you don’t acknowledge that you just hit a bad shot. What we’ve done in the United States is hit, like, 24 consecutive bad shots in a row. And you’re now so far removed from the initial bad shot that you’re not even cognizant of how you got into the position that you did.

And, Buck, you said earlier in this hour, and I think it’s a hundred percent right, masking is so important because it was one of the initial bad shots by our nation, and they are fighting so hard to avoid having to acknowledge that masking was wrong because if they acknowledge that, then people start to ask… It’s like you’re peeling the onion back pulling the thread. People start to ask questions about so many other choices as well.

BUCK: This is one of the — as I was telling you, ’cause, you know, I rock out. I know how to party. Was reading about pre-Soviet revolutionary era Russia, which also ties in, if you want to know more about some of the thinking that even goes to today with Russia and Ukraine which we’ll talk about Russia, Ukraine a little bit next hour. But, Clay, the whole premise was the people in the Soviet Union… This isn’t the pre-revolutionary period.

But in the Soviet Union it became, “We know they’re lying. They know that we know that they’re lying. Everybody knows that everybody’s lying.” But the whole point is you have to go along with the lies, and that then a destroys everybody’s ability to not only politically organized but it destroys sense of belief in self and your own consciousness and your understanding of the world around you. When you have to celebrate lies that everyone knows are lies, it disorients you and makes you very easy to control as well.

Fauci said masks don’t work. Never forget it, okay? This guy was in public health for 50 years, and his first reaction was, that’s stupid; it’s laughable. Within a month it’s, “Oh, my gosh. You don’t mask you’re a monster, you want old people to die.” No studies. No change whatsoever. That’s all you actually have to know that that was the initial moment. By the way, I’ve had a lot of people write, say like I’m an anti-mask fundamentalist.

They think that I almost focused on it too much and I keep trying to tell them this is the foundational lie of Fauciism. This is the basis of all of it. This is when it was up is down and down is up. You know, this is the sky is green, this is some other universe we’re living it — and the moment you get people to go along with one lie that they know is a lie, it becomes easier to make them go along with everything else. And it’s also why all Big Tech and all these other people they recognize that if you break that initial moment of control, that collapse in what we know to be true, the rest of it all starts to fall apart too.

CLAY: It’s the red pill.

BUCK: It is. It’s the red pill.

CLAY: It’s a perfect metaphor.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: Once you start to recognize how much around you is false and built on lies, you see it everywhere just like taking the red pill in The Matrix.