BUCK: Can we make fun of the libs with their stupid masking problems now, please?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: We made a promise to this audience. We need to keep it, ’cause Psaki is completely out of her mind on this as is Fauci. Which is worse for you, Clay, the Fauci basically telling all the parents to be scared or the Psaki saying…? Look at this, Fauci and Psaki! It sounds like fancy Italian shirts or something. She’s saying that it’s no big deal that…?

CLAY: I want to tee off on Psaki. I’m more angry about Psaki now. Fauci, we know, is a lying hypocrite. It’s hard to rank it, but Psaki is like me. She has young children, okay? Fauci’s kids are all, like, 60 years old now or whatever. But Jen Psaki has young children. Parents who in any way are defending the idea that you should be outside in the cold sitting on — like they were in Portland — on buckets socially distanced?

BUCK: They do it in New York all over the place.

CLAY: They’re doing it New York, they’re doing it in D.C., because Jen Psaki defends it. Any parent… To me, any parent that is defending kids being outdoors forced to wear masks and take ’em off between bites? All of this is madness, and she defends it? So I think she should be ashamed because she’s helping to propagate these issues.

BUCK: Let’s actually hear Psaki when she was pushed on this one. This was Friday’s White House press conference, but this is one of those ones… Look, she’s got a tough job. Anybody would have a tough job with the Biden administration because, let’s be honest, this is a slow-moving train wreck with a guy as the lead engineer who doesn’t know where he is and forgets his pants sometimes. It’s not a good scene for this White House, bottom line. But Jen Psaki —

CLAY: (laughing) If he showed up without his pants on for a press availability it would actually be amazing, right?

BUCK: You know he’d have those socks, like, the black socks hiked way up.

CLAY: Hiked all the way up to the knees.

BUCK: Stirrups at the top, whatever they are, the old school ones.

CLAY: Yes, yes, yes. “Boxers or briefs?” I don’t know. Remember, that was the big deal back in the day.

BUCK: He’s a tighty-whitie guy.

CLAY: You think he’s a tighty-whitie guy?

BUCK: Yeah. Anyway, here is Jen Psaki on children. Remember, they’re not just outside. They’re outside in freezing cold weather being forced to mask up between bites.

PSAKI: Schools are taking steps, especially since we’ve only recently approved, uh, through the CDC and the FDA vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds — they’re not approved for kids younger than that — to keep their kids safe and keep students safe. I will tell you I have a 3-year-old who goes to school, sits outside for snacks and lunch, wears a mask inside, and it’s no big deal to him. I’m not saying that’s the case for everybody, but these are steps that schools are taking to keep kids safe, and I think the vast majority of parents appreciate that.

BUCK: It’s no big deal to the 3-year-old? Can we just unpack that for a second, Clay? Adults are making them do this thing. My friend Karol Markowicz — formerly of New York who is now moving to Florida — has been talking about how her child has been put on recess time-out because the mask fell beneath the nose outside. Think about that. Now have to sit in the corner outside.

What is the basis for making a single child in America…? They’re indoors all day long in school. What is the basis for making them eat their lunches outside? I would defy anyone to come up with a reasonable explanation. Parents who do this are abusing children. Administrators and teachers who go along with it are allowing that abuse — or maybe it’s the other way around: The administrators are abusing, and parents are going along. But it’s child abuse. Where is Fauci, that feckless little coward, saying, “This is crazy”?

CLAY: Again, I have a great deal of contempt for this argument by Jen Psaki because, first of all, as any parent of a 3-year-old will let you know, 3-year-olds don’t know what is or is not normal.

BUCK: A 3-year-old! You’ve got kids. Don’t they think they’re like a dinosaur sometimes?

CLAY: Yes! Yes! “My 3-year-old doesn’t even mind wearing a mask.” Well, your 3-year-old doesn’t know any better. I’ll tell you this. Before I went and talked at the school for my kids to argue against masks — and thank God they haven’t had to wear masks all year long in my school district where we are in Tennessee, okay? And they have totally normal lunches in a cafeteria, sitting next to their friends, indoors.

They can go through the cafeteria. You can even have your grandparents or your parents go visit the kids at my school, public school. They can eat lunch with the kids. It’s totally normal. They are in a totally normal lunch environment. And, by the way, the rate of covid in my state of Tennessee is far lower than the rate in most of the Northeastern states where they are requiring kids to sit outdoors and eat on buckets in the cold without being able to interact with each other.

BUCK: Well, Clay, Fauci and the gang want you to know that’s all gonna change because now the governor of New York — the elderly governor of New York who goes around constantly without a mask on and has up until this point frequently in crowded places, indoors in public, no mask. She’s, I believe, in her sixties. She makes sure that 5-year-olds at zero risk from covid are masked up for eight hours a day, losing developmental opportunities, behind in school. She doesn’t care about any of that. Now she’s instituting — you guessed it, folks — a statewide mask mandate.

HOCHUL: I today am announcing that we are enacting a statewide indoor mask mandate unless a business has a vaccine mandate. Many people in New York City are already dealing with this. They’ve been doing it for a while. They’ve been doing great and that is why your hospital capacity is good. That’s why your vaccination numbers are high, your infections are not as high as the rest of the state. But the rest of the state now has a wake-up call. I’ve been warning. I’ve been saying. If we can’t get more people vaccinated, boosted, I have to protect people but also the economy.

BUCK: Clay —

CLAY: She’s an imbecile.

BUCK: She’s an imbecile, absolutely. Top headline, she’s a moron.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Number one. Number two, this is now in the realm of straight up superstition. We talked about our mutual friend Ian who has a really great Twitter account — all he does — and they can’t ban him ’cause he’s using the CDC data. He just shares cases on a timeline with when the mask mandate goes into effect, when the vaccine passports went into effect. And what you see everywhere, without fail, is there is zero — zero — evidence to support that a mask mandate brings down the curve, full stop. It does not exist.

CLAY: Yeah. Does not exist. And, Buck, what I would say in response to New York and also in response to Psaki is, “Before I talked to my school board, I sat down with my first grader and with my fifth grader, and you said, ‘Listen. Dad is gonna talk about masks. I think they make no sense, but you guys had to wear them last year.

“‘If you don’t want me to go speak because I understand that some people are gonna react you’re gonna hear dad went and talked and everything else.'” My first grader and my fifth grader said, “Dad, please go talk. Nobody wants to wear these masks in school.” Right? Nobody does.

BUCK: Yeah. By the way, I think when your wife said to you it’s like when you’re at this sporting event and you’re calling things out and people are hearing a voice that they may know from what is the largest radio show by audience in America right now. Can you imagine being, folks, on the other end of a Clay tirade if you’re one of these school bureaucrats who’s like, “I’m gonna make up your kids…” I’m just saying, man, you know? Sometimes you gotta throw some haymakers, Travis.

CLAY: I coached basketball. I said I was gonna have to step in. We got absolutely destroyed. I was the coach, and this is fifth grade basketball. I feel like some of the kids we were playing against drove up in their own cars, and one of them may have had his own kid.

BUCK: (laughing)

CLAY: These were monster kids like that we were playing against over the weekend. I don’t know. I wasn’t in the parking lot, but I think some of them had driver’s license, and I think at least one of them may have hid own kid.

BUCK: Clay wants his fifth graders tested for performance-enhancing drugs.

CLAY: All I’m saying is it’s like 12 and under and these kids looked like they were 16 and we got run — I mean, just absolutely run. I didn’t know what to do standing on the sideline.

BUCK: I was 22 when I coached high school soccer the kids were actually my size and weren’t that different in age. So I remember what that was like. We have credibility beards.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You actually still have yours. Mine’s just growing in now ’cause I shaved it and, by the way, the feedback from whatever ladies have seen the photos from the show and everything? “Grow that beard back, Sexton.” I was like, “All right. Okay.”

CLAY: By the way, I’ll also say this, the age that I’m starting to coach: The impact of puberty? We were talking about like testosterone, the kids that have armpit hair or have a mustache. They’re like a different species. When you start coaching, like, 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old boys (chuckling), the puberty impact just among other boys, like, it makes me think even more about these girls that are having to swim against biological men.

I mean, just coaching Little League, anybody out there who knows the kid that has the mustache they’re like fully grown 13 and 14-year-olds out there. It’s crazy how much difference it makes just a tad bit of testosterone in terms of being able to impact the overall outcome of this game.

BUCK: We have Fauci… Speaking of kids, Fauci trying to terrify people about their kids, can we bring the ruckus, Clay, to Fauci, please?

CLAY: Yes, we’re gonna bring the ruckus like the battles in Twilight.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: So Dr. Fauci, we invited him on the show. I want to keep reiterating that ’cause we’re trying to be fair. Fauci said he didn’t have time to do the show. That was the actual response of Dr. Fauci to an official invite to the Clay and Buck show. He continues to do virtually every media outlet in the world. He will not do it anywhere where he might get asked interesting questions or something outside of the bounds of how awesome are you on a scale of nine to 10, Dr. Fauci?

BUCK: You I see him like, “Well, it’s great to be here on Bob’s Basement Podcast with your dozens of listeners” with his mother yelling downstairs that the meatloaf is ready.

CLAY: He does everything.

BUCK: Fauci will do that, but he won’t do this show.

CLAY: he won’t do the biggest radio show in the country. All right. Well, by the way, let me just go ahead and say this. I tell you, hate to brag or draw attention to the show, but we are right now number one in San Diego, Sacramento, Houston, Phoenix, and I might miss one or two.

BUCK: Milwaukee.

CLAY: Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Raleigh, Louisville, and Birmingham just off the top of my head. If you’re not listed in that number, you got some work to do in your markets. But that’s basically 10 different cities all over the country, I believe, where we are presently number one in our time slot. We appreciate all of you listening. So one reason we’re number one is because there are so many lies out there in so many other parts of the media.

He may not agree with Buck and I on a day-to-day basis, but we are Team Reality. We are for you working for sanity in an insane world. I’m fired up anytime kids get brought into covid because one of the real positives here — and I just want to keep slamming this home — is that kids have virtually zero risk from covid. I say “virtually zero risk from covid,” contextualizing. So far in the two years that covid has existed, more kids have died from the seasonal flu, more kids have died in traffic accidents, more kids have been murdered, more kids have drowned than have died from covid, right?

BUCK: The actual number is approximately 150, right? So, if you do covid cases — and of course, there’s proven cases versus expected cases, ’cause you’re only catching a portion of the overall caseload. Maybe one in ten you’re actually testing and catching, especially with kids, because they were getting sick and didn’t even notice because don’t have any symptoms. Remember asymptomatic transmission, Clay. We were told 40% of cases were asymptomatic. That was the official CDC line. You do some basic back-of-the-napkin math on this and children are at roughly one-and-a-half-in-a-million to one-in-a-million risk of death from covid, something like that.

CLAY: Virtually zero. Just to put it in context — and I want to keep slamming this home — if you had a friend and they were saying, “Hey, I’m super worried about my kid’s health,” and you say, “Oh, yeah, for what reason?” and they said, “Well, I’m really afraid that today they’re either gonna be murdered or die in a traffic accident, so I don’t want them to leave the house,” you would believe, I think rationally, that that parent had a psychological issue and was unable to analyze risk.

Both of those — murder and car accidents — are far more likely to kill young children than covid is. Here is Dr. Fauci trying… We want to play this audio for you, and again, this is why… There are many reasons that Dr. Fauci drives me bonkers but the number one reason, I think, Buck, honestly is when he tries to scare parents of young children into the idea that those kids are at risk. Listen to Fauci over the weekend.

FAUCI: If your child is 5 years of age and older, please get them vaccinated. We need to protect the children. This idea that children are not vulnerable at all is not so, George. I mean, certainly statistically children do not get as severe disease as the adults, particularly the elderly. But if you look at the number of cases of children, now well over 2 million children from 5 to 11 have been infected. There have been over 8,000 to 9,000 hospitalizations and well over a hundred deaths.

BUCK: Okay. In average flu year, which we all live with our entire lives —

CLAY: And done nothing virtually to combat in terms of requirements inside of school.

BUCK: You keep sick kids home. That’s what you do. And that’s reasonable, by the way. Totally rational, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I missed a day of this show ’cause I was too sick and had a negative covid test. You’re sick. You stay away from people. Okay, fine. Clay, you have a hundred kids die of the flu. It’s anywhere from 50 to 150 every single year and about five… This is from the CDC. This isn’t from BucksCrazyFriends.com. About five to 15,000, depending on the year children go to the hospital with the flu. Society has clearly established that those are acceptable risk parameters and numbers for us to allow children to live entirely normal lives.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: Fauci needs to be asked — and he won’t be — how this is any different when it comes to children. Fauci also should be asked about children being forced to eat outside in freezing cold (which is also not good for them, by the way) as well as the psychological and anxiety-elevation effects of all of this. And the fact that he won’t speak out on this… This is what I keep saying. There are really only two things… I’ve said one of them before, but there are two things you have to remember about Fauci. He never says, “This mitigation measure is too crazy.”

CLAY: It’s a great point.

BUCK: He never says it, and he never, ever upsets with any of his pronouncements the MSNBC-watching, New York Times-subscribing, lunatic, woke libs. Never. They’re never angry at Fauci. How is that possible? This guy has been you-know-whating me off since the very beginning. I’ve been losing my mind on this guy because everything he says, you say, “Hold on a second.

“That seems a bit extreme. That’s not really fair. Are you balancing this out? Are you making any adjustments to what the real risk numbers are?” Every time, folks. He never upsets libs. He never says, “It’s too much restriction.” That’s all you have to know about him.

CLAY: Just think about this — and this is a great response. I know some of you out there, as it comes in the holiday season, you’re gonna be interacting with parents of other kids. This is something that I would just say, if there’s trepidation, nervousness associated with holiday gatherings. If you are a parent — and I got three young kids. If you’re a parent, ask another parent, “Have you ever thought to make your kid wear a mask during cold and flu season at any point in your life?”

The answer is no. I don’t ever remember seeing any American kid, certainly no mandates. But I don’t even remember seeing any American kid wearing a mask at any point in my life prior to the last 18 months. And so when you then ask them this question, the data reflects that the seasonal flu — on average — for young children is a bigger threat than covid has been.

If you are so concerned about covid that you’re mandating your kids wear a mask, you have been negligent as a parent in all of the prior years ’cause of the greater risk to them of the seasonal flu. You’ve done nothing, and that’s because we were rational and reasonable in assessing risk. Look, if your kid is wearing a bulletproof vest to school every day, then that’s probably unnecessary, right?

BUCK: Yeah, the way Fauci argues, they take the attitude of “if it saves one life, it’s worth it for every kid to wear a Kevlar vest with plates, weighing them down, chafing their skin all day long, agitating them all day long.” Every person in America… This is what we’ve said all along with head injuries and cars. What’s the number one way you die in a car accident?

A head injury. Why don’t people wear helmets in cars? We wear helmets on bicycles. Well, because it’s just too annoying and we don’t want to do it. Fauci is essentially… He’s like the great czar of constantly annoying you — with no attendant benefit, by the way. We look at all these mitigation measures. We’ve had plenty of time to go through all of it now.

The fact that they’re still mandating masks in New York from the government level on down…? How much dumber is this going to get? Who still believes this? What is…? You said the New York Times editorial is telling people we have to start living with covid and understanding it’s gonna be here forever. Yeah. We’ve been saying that for, like, a year now.

CLAY: I’m glad you mentioned that, ’cause the New York Times editorial on Sunday… Let me just hit people with this as we go to break. The lead headline in the newspaper… I couldn’t believe it when I was reading the Sunday Times. Yes, I read the Times so you don’t have to. The headline, the main editorial: “Covid isn’t going anywhere. It’s time we started acting like it.”

And the opening paragraph (I nearly fell out of my seat): “Nearly two years into the pandemic, it is clear that the coronavirus is not going to disappear anytime soon. … Yet too many Americans are still paralyzed with doubt and fear over each new uncertainty, as trust in government and other institutions to manage the virus ranges from shaky to nonexistent. It is past time to ask ourselves, as another Covid winter begins, if we have to keep living like this…” That’s crazy. Even the New York Times has finally caught up with us.

BUCK: The answer is no. Now, they will never admit, “Oh, wow, Clay and Buck have been right for so many months,” of course, right, because this is also about power and control. People are going through now, on the left, a mass anxiety disorder, and we are here to invite them into Team Reality. You’re welcome. Anyone is welcome to join Team Reality whenever they like.

There’s actually no admission requirements other than understanding what reality is and living your life accordingly. But Fauci is the single biggest impediment, along with — if you read the Atlas book, which I’ve seen some excerpts of going through it over the weekend — Dr. Birks. Remember, she left as soon as the hypocrisy was exposed? She’s like, “I’m out.” She told everybody, “Don’t travel for the holidays;” then she went to her fancy house with her whole family for Thanksgiving. This has been true all along, folks. The apparatus has lied to you. They’ve lied to you. We tell you the truth.