DeSantis vs. Biden: Battle Lines Drawn in Florida

CLAY: The battle lines are really getting drawn in a big way as it pertains to Ron DeSantis against Joe Biden, the decisions made by the governor of Florida versus the decisions being made by Dr. Fauci and others in the Joe Biden administration. So as we went to break, I was talking about the fact — and I know, Buck, your brothers have spent a lot of time in Florida.

We’ve got a monster audience in the state of Florida. We appreciate all of you. We know a lot of you have traveled down to Florida to get away from the Draconian covid restrictions that may have existed in your states, especially if you’re on the East Coast or in the central part of the country. I’m headed down to Florida tomorrow. My wife, it’s our… I almost blew the number here.

I think it’s our 17th wedding anniversary, and so congratulations to her on being able to last that long with me, which I think no one really anticipated. But we’ve got a place in Rosemary Beach, Florida, down there right on the Florida Gulf Coast. We spend a decent amount of time down there. In fact, when everything got locked down last year, we spent the month of May there.

Our kids were out of school. We just relocated and moved to Florida for the month of May and lived a normal life. Ron DeSantis is under siege because he represents the last, best hope right now of everyone out there who is trying to live a normal life. Kids in school, sports going on, normalcy in America is represented right now by Florida.

And if Florida falls in line with the New Yorks and the Californias of the world, then there suddenly is no control group to be able to compare covid responses. ‘Cause right now you look at the data, Buck, if you compare let’s say Florida and Texas with New York and California, what you see is that the data reflects Florida and Texas have done a better job of managing covid, both from a health and economy perspective, than New York and California have.

But if Florida goes down and if they start masking and if they start restricting, which is what the White House wants — and I’ll play Jen Psaki here — then there is no control group to be able to point out how much this is different and how little some of the responses matter, and suddenly we spiral into Australia. Play cut 8 here, Jen Psaki on DeSantis.

PSAKI: Our war, uhh, is not on DeSantis. It’s on the virus, uhh, which we’re trying to kneecap. Uhhh, and, uh, he does not seem to want to participate in that effort to kneecap the virus. Hence our concern.

CLAY: There you go, Buck.

BUCK: Oh, yeah, that’s right. He doesn’t want to participate. He doesn’t want to fight back against the virus. The things these Democrats say are so stupid and so dishonest at the same time. On MSNBC they have people theorizing, as though they’re being brilliant, that DeSantis doesn’t care about children dying, all he cares about is MAGA.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: All he cares about is what the base tells him. And you reach this point where you just say, there’s something emotionally and psychologically wrong with people that not only will say that but will believe that.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: Obviously Ron DeSantis doesn’t want anyone to die from covid. And beyond that, the fact that we even have to say this out loud? Ron DeSantis has done a better job than the comparable states run by Democrat governors throughout this. But here’s the thing, Clay. They know that not only is DeSantis a challenge for the covid control that they want…

Not only is Florida this outlier as a major state, but beyond that, he’s a challenge to the entire Democrat power apparatus for Biden or whomever’s reelection effort in 2024, and so they’re throwing everything they’ve got at this guy. They used to lie about the data sometimes. Remember there was the woman — I forget her name; Rebecca Jones, I believe — who would just make stuff up at other hiding data?

It wasn’t true at all. And now what they’re doing is they’re just trying to focus in, drill down on Florida and get essentially local officials to defy state officials. Can you imagine if Fox News, let’s say, or if we here on this show were advocating for cities in the state of New York to defy the state quarantine guidelines or mask mandates or whatever? People would have said, “That lawlessness. That’s nullification.” That’s exactly what they’re doing in Florida right now because it’s never about what’s right or what’s fair. It’s just about what they want and what gives them power.

CLAY: And imagine how much different our covid response would have been if Andrew Gillum — who only lost I think by 30,000 votes in 2018 — had ended up beating DeSantis. he would be running Florida right now, assuming that he was still in office and he hadn’t had his ridiculous sex scandal that he had back around the Super Bowl, if I remember correctly.

It would be a total mess, and what they’re trying to do now is they are trying to use covid to beat Ron DeSantis in 2022. Because they know if DeSantis wins reelection in Florida in 2022, next year, he is going to be one of the top contenders for the White House, and I don’t think there’s anybody that the Democrats could run against him.

He’ll either be, maybe, Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate — I think there would be a good chance of that happening — or, if Trump decides to sit out the election, I think Ron DeSantis would have to be the substantial favorite to be the standard-bearer right now. If you were buying stock in someone who was gonna be elected in 2024, not named Donald Trump in the Republican Party, I don’t keep there’s any doubt you’d have to go with Ron DeSantis.

BUCK: Yeah. You could throw some other names in the mix. Actually, I think Mike Pompeo has more of a path and higher aspirations than often gets talked about. Nonetheless what we’re seeing in Florida, Clay, is the all-out effort to just convince… They just have to get DeSantis to do what Texas did, because there was the problem with Texas.

Governor Abbott initially went along with the mask mandates and the closures and it wasn’t until what felt like DeSantis Miracle had occurred where you had a state that stayed open and gave sort of safe harbor for those who believe in freedom and living relatively normal lives during the major wave of the pandemic, the initial waves of the pandemic. Now you had Texas come out of it, but here’s the Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler’s talking about masks in schools.

ADLER: The choices that people are making not to get vaccinated for themselves are not choices just for themselves. The choices that they’re making to leave themselves more vulnerable for ending in a hospital is impacting everyone. That’s why it’s important to — to especially protect our children. A parent can make a choice for their child, except that the choice that they make impacts everybody else in the classroom.

And people should have a right to pick a choice to be able to be in a classroom that keeps their children the most safe, and we’re gonna do everything we can. We’re gonna do as we said from the very beginning, we’re gonna follow the doctors and the data, uhh, even when we have a governor that seems to be following the donors and not the doctors.

BUCK: This is the favorite talking point of totalitarian morons all across the country. “We’re not infringing on your choice. We’re just following the data,” as though they’re not making a subjective judgment and often making predictive judgments about what that data tells them and suppressing contravening ideas or contradictory theses about what’s really happening.

CLAY: What’s frustrating to me about this — and I want to play something, ’cause this is emblematic of where we are. (chuckling) I don’t know how many of you guys have heard this, but let’s play cut 5, Oklahoma public school board member Linda Sexton in Norman, Oklahoma —

BUCK: No relation.

CLAY: Do you know what she said?

BUCK: No relation!

CLAY: I think this is Buck’s mom.

BUCK: Hey, hey, hey! You take that back there, Travis.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Those are fighting words, son. Back yourself up. There’s no relation to this Linda Sexton lady.

CLAY: Linda Sexton, the black sheep of the Sexton family, is on the Oklahoma public school board in Norman, Oklahoma. Did you see this? This is crazy. Listen to what she said. This is not data. This is not science. This is not in any way being rational. These are who we are fighting with now. Listen to Linda Sexton.

LINDA SEXTON: It’s just not okay for kids to commit murder by coming to school without a mask. And when it comes down to it, it’s possible they will — they will cause a death of another child because they came to school without a mask.

CLAY: Murderers!

BUCK: It’s possible you’re gonna cause a car accident every single time you get into a car. you might kill somebody by accident; so you’re a murderer, Clay. We actually… We have seen people now get so crazy; so hysterical that the basis of common law, of natural law, of morality no longer applies. These people have no… they’re completely unmoored. They have no way of connecting with reality around them. You’re a murderer if you go in?

CLAY: It’s a level of madness — and I just want to keep hammering home these data points because I think it’s significant. Again, you always have to say this. I used to say this on my sports talk radio show, Buck. Nobody hates death more than me. I hate death more than anybody on the entire planet ’cause people will say like, “Oh, I don’t care about grandmas.” I wish everybody lived forever. Okay? I am more in favor of immortality than anybody you’ve ever heard. I don’t want anybody to ever die.

BUCK: It’s a very brave stand you’re taking against death and against the Grim Reaper. We might lose some Grim reaper listeners, Clay. You’re a brave man.

CLAY: I hate death more than anybody who has ever talked on the radio in the history of the world, all right? But data matters, and we can’t stop death. The worst death of all is young children dying, and we have the data that 40,396 kids under 11 years old died in the past year. That’s a tragedy for all those parents. That is an unbelievable, incredible difficulty.

We wish that did not happen. But part of being an adult how to assess risk. It’s a huge part of being an adult. Well, 40,396 under 11 died since the start of 2020. Fewer than 200 of them are from covid. That means if you are a kid out there or you have kids… I think these are important data points to share with kids to try to make them understand risk.

There is a 99.5% chance that the kids who have died in America in the last year have died from something other than covid. What percentage of the time that we have talked about kids have we spent focused on those under 200 deaths from covid? There are more, by the way, seasonal flu deaths.

BUCK: It’s mostly not about protecting kids. It’s hysterical adults who are terrified that they’ll get infected by the kids, who are demanding this stuff. It’s the soy-drinking, CNN-watching, latte liberals who are, even after double vaccinated and double mask, they’re worried that if they have to go into school that they’re near children somewhere — ’cause remember, kids can’t be vaccinated. So it’s actually mostly hysteria adults, I think, that is right ones that are insisting that children be masked up ’cause they can’t actually… No one could look at those numbers — it’s impossible —

CLAY: I don’t think they know.

BUCK: — that you cited and say you’re really worried about kids from this. Although they’re trying to run these stories about pediatric ICU wards are very small in terms of beds for good reason, obviously. So when they say, “Oh, my God. It’s a hundred percent!” well, if you went from six dices 12 cases, yeah, that’s bad as we discussed.

CLAY: They’re also run, Buck, to be always near a hundred percent. It would make no financial sense for a hospital to have an ICU ward that is only 25% full. They are run to be near capacity at all times.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: In the same way that they’re going after DeSantis with everything they’ve got to try to destroy him even if they have to inflate numbers, misrepresent things, the apparatus of Democrat control is reliance upon people not really understanding how disastrous covid response in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in particular have been. They don’t want to dig into this.

CLAY: No. And it goes to data. We can all have… my mom like to say when I was a kid, “Opinions are like butts; everybody’s got one.”

BUCK: I’m pretty sure someone else said that before your mom, but yeah.

CLAY: Yeah, she probably didn’t…. (laughing)

BUCK: I don’t think she came up with that one.

CLAY: She did not come up with that first. But it’s a good mom line, right? Gets your attention when you’re a young kid, makes you aware. The inability to distinguish between fact and opinion in American society today is at an endemic level. It is everywhere that people can’t distinguish between the two. And it’s important because you can’t have good opinions unless you have reliable facts to cite. And so knowing what the data shows us can help to drive our response.

And that’s why I’ve been so favorably impressed by Ron DeSantis because he’s smart enough to trust his ability to understand data, and what you find, Buck — and you know this to be true — in media and in politics, there’s a lot of sheep. There’s a lot of people looking around to go and follow someone else, even people in high positions of power.

A lot of governors decided to shrink from this challenge of covid. Others, like DeSantis, looked at the data and said, “Let that guide us,” and it’s still staggering to me how few people are actually looking at the data.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Governor Abbott along with DeSantis is getting a ton of pressure from the press, mask mandates, mask mandates, mask mandates. So then you answer you do that then whole thing — then you bent the knee, you’ve caved. But Clay just pointed to me, big breaking news. I keep saying this ’cause you know, Clay, before we joined up, before we joined forces here I was doing a show on hundreds of stations.

I talked to people all across the country about this, and they would say, “Oh, that’s a New York problem,” and I kept saying, “I’m telling you it’s coming for you, too,” in terms of these lockdowns. What’s the latest? We’re on a great station in New Orleans, WRNO. What’s the latest down in New Orleans?

CLAY: We are. We love our people down in New Orleans. This has broken in the last 25 minutes or so. I’m reading from NOLA.com, the New Orleans online newspaper. Mayor LaToya Cantrell is planning to announce — this is the opening paragraph, that people will need to show proof of a covid-19 vaccination or a recent negative coronavirus test before entering New Orleans restaurants, bars, and other venues, including the Superdome.

The Superdome is where the New Orleans Saints play. This is a monster deal. Now, look. Bourbon Street is not exactly known for its cleanliness or its safety. So the fact that this announcement they say is coming as soon as Thursday afternoon, it would make New Orleans one of the first cities in the United States to mandate vaccinations. And again, I’m reading from this article which is saying that it is going to come out in later this afternoon —

BUCK: Clay, do you see this now coming to other cities across the country? It’s New York in effect next week, New Orleans in effect. Do we really think that Los Angeles, do we really think that Denver, do we really think that Minneapolis, you know, go down the list. They’re not gonna have —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And so then it turns into, okay. Maybe you don’t live in the city, but do you ever go into the city from any reason? Are you gonna have to have a work dinner or a wedding in this whatever it may be? Clay, they’re turning the screws, man. It’s happening all over the place.

CLAY: Well, what’s gonna be interesting is the interplay between the governor and the mayors, right? We’ve already seen this tension in particular… now, remember, New York, blue state, blue governor. California, blue state, blue governor, blue city.

BUCK: For now.

CLAY: But New Orleans, a lot of people aren’t aware the governor of Louisiana is a Democrat, John Bel Edwards. So there’s not somebody to push back in Louisiana or in Kentucky where they have put in place a mask mandate for all kids because they have a Democratic governor.

What I’m interested to see will be what we’re seeing play out in Florida a little bit when you have a Democratic mayor and a Republican governor, because that is mini-red states, rights? Where I live in the state of Tennessee we’ve got a Republican governor but Nashville is very often a Democratic mayor.

So how will the tension and interplay play out here? Because as you point out, Buck, for something like the Superdome, which is where the Saints play in the NFL, a huge majority, I would imagine, of people that are coming in to watch the Saints play aren’t residents — maybe not a majority, but a large percentage are not residents of New Orleans.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: So when you have these — yeah, right. When you have these big venue events —

BUCK: This is the back door mandate that we’ve been worried about all along is they’re gonna get national chains and big places where people congregate that are technically private to say, “Sorry, you know, you have to get the vax or else.” It’s happening right now.

CLAY: Now, some states have been forward thinking here. I believe Texas and Florida, for instance — and they have already banned vaccine passports. So the state itself has banned it so something like what New Orleans is trying to do would theoretically not be permissible, but the governor of Louisiana is a Democrat. Is he gonna stand up to the mayor of New Orleans, probably not.

BUCK: So you better be not only a state with a Republican governor, but a state that’s red enough in general where you’re not gonna have people who cave to this at the business level.

CLAY: No. Yeah, Buck. My thing is, just think about this from a procedural perspective, all right? This is a big deal. When you try to get into a stadium or a concert, any kind of big venue like the Superdome… For people who haven’t been there, the Super Bowl’s been there. It’s a 70,000-seat indoor football stadium. Are they gonna have —

BUCK: They’ll have code scanners. They’re gonna have QR scanners like they would for your ticket but for your vaccine passport as well. That’s what’s gonna happen.

CLAY: With random people who can barely… Let’s be honest. The people scanning your ticket are not medical professionals. This is going to be, I think, a massive mess in terms of getting people checked. Regardless of what you think about vaccine passports — and obviously I’m against it — just getting in and out of a stadium is already supremely difficult because of crowds. Now you’re gonna have ’em checking multiple things.

BUCK: They had a vax bouncer at a wedding that I gotta go to next week. They’re gonna have somebody outside from the venue checking that you’re vaccinated. This is insane 37. Obviously people are fired up about this ’cause they know that this is gonna be a big problem.