BUCK: Fauci’s unhappy about the college football situation. That’s for sure. Which is fascinating because there was also the U.S. Open tennis matches occurring over the weekend. There have been huge gatherings for quite some time now. Why is it that college football comes in for special attention here? Here is Fauci on CNN this morning getting the usual back rub they give him over there.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN: I get folks want to go back to normal life. They want to go to games, right? (snickering) I want to go to games. But when you look at crowds like that, do you approve of that, or is that just not smart?

FAUCI: No, I don’t think it’s smart. I think when you’re dealing particularly in… You know, outdoors is always better than indoors. But even when you have such a congregate setting of people close together, first, you should be vaccinated. And when you do have congregate settings, particularly indoors, you should be wearing a mask.

BUCK: Wait. I thought it was… So, BLM riots in close quarters outside, good. Professional tennis matches, good. The big concert they had in Chicago over the summer… I forget what it was even called. Was it Lollapalooza or something like that?

CLAY: That’s right. Yeah.

BUCK: That’s all fine, Clay. College football is somehow — even outdoors — a special superspreader event ’cause it’s a “congregate setting.”

CLAY: Look, here is what’s going on, and I think this is what scares the Fauciites. When Americans put on their television screens and they see millions of college football fans exulting, joyous, having an incredible time all over this country — red state, blue state, it didn’t matter; none of them are wearing masks — this is a declaration of independence, an end of fear, and everything covid has been predicated on fear.

And, Buck, as soon as enough Americans get out and start living their lives, it makes it harder to argue this is an abnormal situation. Think about this for a minute, Buck. Virginia, Friday night, Virginia Tech, they play Enter Sandman, people lose their minds in joy in Virginia. Jump Around plays in Wisconsin. These are two states that Joe Biden ostensibly won, and the people are saying, “We’re gonna go out and live our lives.”

And I think this is significant. There are more covid positive cases right now this Labor Day, Buck, than there were last Labor Day. Last Labor Day they told kids in Virginia, “It’s not safe for you to play high school football.” They told the Big Ten they couldn’t play college football last September. There are more cases now! And I think reasonable, intelligent people — and that’s what a lot of college football fans are — look at the numbers, know covid is never going away.

We’re 18 months in, and at some point, your new reality requires risk and you’re gonna go back to doing the things that you love. I went to college football games this weekend. I took my kid to go see a Marvel movie in the theater. Nobody had masks on, Buck. Nobody in the movie theater. Nobody at the football game. People are over it — large percentages of people are — and I love to see it.

BUCK: In some places they are.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: In other places they are. What I think is happening, Clay, is the polarization of mitigation (impression) “mitigation measures,” as Fauci says.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: The polarization is actually growing whereby people in parts New York and California, they’re clinging on their masks even more furiously than they have in a long time, not since the very beginning of the pandemic. And there’s a backdrop with all of this as well of the Biden administration has failed to deliver on the essential promise they made among many promises that were lies. Normalcy, unity, healing, right? This was all campaign stuff to get low-information voters who are persuadable, unfortunately, to believe the propaganda in the news. The Biden administration is flatly failing at this point on covid —

CLAY: Failing at everything.

BUCK: — based on their own predictions, promises, what they said would happen, where they said we would be. This is why there have been all these reversions. And it’s interesting; some have started to finally ask — I’m seeing more of this now, Clay — the fundamental question in all of this for the whole country, in some ways for the world. “Okay, how does this actually end?” Someone… If we had a real press corps, they would sit down with Fauci and say, “How does this actually stop? When do we get out?”

CLAY: Again, an important question. I think you saw this same article. Vox, which is a super liberal website, has that question, and they’re finally asking the things that we’ve been asking for the last 18 months. Let me just kind of run through some of these: 90,000 people died of drug overdoses in this country in 2020, 40,000 people every year die in car accidents. Around tens of thousands — 60,000 or more — people die of the seasonal flu every year.

And we live normal lives.

How do we assess, as a country, what is a reasonable amount of risk that is going to exist for covid because even though many of them will not acknowledge it, Covid Zero isn’t a reality? It’s never going to exist for the rest of our lives. And so being an adult requires analyzing risk and figuring out what to do. Remember people made fun of us early on, Buck, when people like you and I would say, “Hey, you know what? Forty thousand a year die to car accidents. We don’t insist on a 10-mile-an-hour speed limit which would drive that number down to zero.” We balance risk with life in all things.

BUCK: Some folks remember that I had you on my show, not ’cause I’m hugely knowledgeable about sports, but I’m getting better.

CLAY: You’re going to go to a college football game.

BUCK: I’m going to a college football game, folks. It’s happening. But I had you on because there were so few of us in the beginning who were willing to take the perspective. It was a small group of people us that had platforms that could reach across the country who from March of 2020 were saying, “Hold on a second. What is this? What are we doing?” and now we’ve seen all of our worst fears about zero covid —

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: — or forever mitigation, zero covid, however you want to put it. Clay, Australia has straight up quarantine camps. Some people are using other terms for it, but quarantine camps. You have to go… You could be a healthy 25-year-old and you test positive for covid. You cannot stay at a hotel. If you’re traveling, you must go to one of these camps and stay for 14 days. You can’t see anyone, you can’t do anything, you can’t go to your job. And there are libs in this country who see the news reporting out of Australia and say, “Oh, they’re really doing it the right way.” I look at them like, “You people are out of your minds!”

CLAY: When have camps ever ended being good? There’s just the big picture here, let’s go back through history. When have the people who said, “Hey, we need to separate people and put them in camps different than everybody else” ever been on the right side of history? When have people who have said, “Hey, you know what? That book is scary. We need to burn it and make sure other people can’t see it.

“That idea makes me uncomfortable. That person needs to be canceled for having it.” When have the people that have ever argued in favor of these things — in retrospect, when sanity returns to society, and it always does…? People talk a lot about the right and wrong side of history, Buck. Most of those people have read very little history. Because what you would learn is, very often in the moment itself the right side and wrong side of history isn’t self-evident. Sometimes it takes hundreds of years. But book burning, censorship, internment camps, all of those things in the moment are always on the wrong side of history.

BUCK: And when you see the change in the thinking from people in the last six months, even, who have been… I think Fauciites is the best way to describe them. There are a lot of ways we could refer to them. Clay, it went from a sort of gentle pitch, “Hey, guys, just do this. Just get the shot,” and we all know about the “just two weeks to slow the spread “and all this.

But in particular with the vaccine, it’s gone from, “Oh, come on. Everything’s gonna be fine! Just get it; we’ll all go back to normal. But we’re not gonna make you!” to “Oh, no. We’re gonna coerce you!” Now it’s not only they want to coerce you, they want to punish people for not just covid wrong-think, but covid wrong-do in a sense, right? Covid violations of the new passports we’re supposed to carry or travel you’re not supposed to do.

They’re arresting people over this stuff. I mean, you look in Europe; they’ll actually send in police head to toe, you know, looking like storm troopers… You know what storm troopers in Star Wars look like. You know what I mean. The sort of jackbooted thugs in the gear going in there beating people with batons because they don’t agree with some of the vaccine policies.

When you say that vaxxports should be mandatory this is what you really mean:pic.twitter.com/NWwiss6LAu

— Matt Kibbe (@mkibbe) September 6, 2021

CLAY: Yeah. And, again, I think the big question is — and this is what reasonably intelligent media who were actually doing their job would be discussing is, how does this end? How do we get to a form of normalcy? And that’s why the college football crowds, to me, were a big part of this. My argument for how this ends is people just return to being normal. What can we do? We get that question all the time, Buck.

“What can I do?” You can be normal. You can go to a college football game and sit in a crowd. You can go to a movie theater. You can go out to dinner. You can argue against your kids needing to be required to wear masks, and you can get exemptions for them as necessary. Fight for normalcy! That’s how we win. And the more normal people see things occurring…

People may be terrified in their basement in New York City, Buck, but when they flip on their television and they see 90,000 people in Wisconsin jumping around to a song and they see Enter Sandman coming on at Virginia Tech and they see a hundred thousand, millions of people all over the country going to football games, they definitely have to think in the back of their mind, “Wait a minute. Why do I have to show a vaccine passport to go get a beer in my city?”

BUCK: There are some stadiums, right, that are gonna require it. Not college football stadiums but there are some pro stadiums that require it. So the fight is still very much underway, folks, for freedom. We’ll come back into more of this in a moment plus back of the line for ICU access. I mean, the things that are being said now… Oh, and ivermectin! I know Clay mentioned some of this yesterday. We gotta come back to it because there are updates how ivermectin is “overrunning” the ER of a hospital.

CLAY: Total lie.

BUCK: Total lies. Total lies.