BUCK: To mask or not to mask. That is the question that is posed to Fauci, and we’ll get into his answer in just a second here. Of course, it was a little over a year ago when I started telling people and tweeting out and saying on my radio show at the time, “Just wait. They’ll say the masks aren’t good enough. We need double masking, and we need N95.” This is a matter of public record.

Sure enough, Fauci came out in January of 2021, (doing impression) “We need two masks. If you want to consider three and maybe goggles.” I’m kind of lying about the goggles, but the rest of it was there, and the three. Although if you do a double mask and a visor, that’s three — or a face shield, that’s three — and people have done that to be sure. Here we have Fauci, though, just yesterday, talking. When asked about this, here’s what he says about cloth masks specifically.

REPORTER: Are cotton and surgical masks effective at preventing spread of Omicron?

FAUCI: Yeah. When the CDC says they are effective, in fact, they are.

BUCK: Okay. They are. That’s what he says. Clay, can we just hear a couple days ago here we had Dr. Leana Wen, and can you explain to me which one of these is the smart doctor that we’re supposed to listen to according to the libs?

WEN: Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It was… It’s not appropriate for Omicron. It was not appropriate for Delta, Alpha, or any of the previous variants, either, because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne.

BUCK: Uh, okay. So which one is it, folks? All the people who go, “Wear your mask; pull your mask up”? Every airline attendant who says, “Pull it up over your nose or we’ll throw you out of the plane while it’s in flight” like the psychos they are? Clay, what the heck’s going on here, man? Who do we listen to?

CLAY: Well, this is a bad look, I think, for Fauci, and I think it reflects the pressure that he is feeling when massive numbers of the population are starting to look around and just say, “Wait a minute.” Even if you hadn’t been paying very much attention at all, if we had predicted, Buck… Imagine that you and I had said back in the summer, “Hey, there are going to be a million cases a day of covid in January of 2022.

“We are going to have double and triple the all-time highs of the number of covid cases, despite the fact that we’re gonna have vaccine mandates in many of the biggest cities in this country, despite the fact that we’re going to have, “and I’m putting it in quotation marks, “a vaccination rate of adults well over 70% in the United States, and that people are going to hold on to the idea of wearing masks as if their entire life depends on it.

“And yet we’re going to hit a million or more daily cases!” We would have been probably canceled on every social media platform for that prediction because it would have been considered so outrageous and unacceptable. And here we are sitting on this day, January 4th, and we are now testing over a million positive cases a day. And things are so bad now, Buck, that people are starting to argue, “Oh, we shouldn’t even focus on cases anymore.” That’s the new pivot that’s going to come out of the White House.

BUCK: I also love the science that makes the quarantine go from 10 to five days because they say so.

CLAY: Oh, yes. Totally nonexistent science. That’s predicated on the fact that they recognize that people are not gonna be able to work based on this thing otherwise. I mean, it’s a total sham, a hundred percent.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: I got written up in a hit piece for saying that clinging to masks is a mental health issue at this point. (laughing) People really are —

CLAY: Who wrote up a hit piece on you for that?

BUCK: Mediaite. Not any… Only people in the media actually read Mediaite. But it’s pretty funny because while we were just talking before, I just want to know this is why we need to start having debate and exchange with people on these issues in a public forum in real time, not interviews that people are editing and piecing together. I really want to invite on any of the smarmy libs in media who want to make jokes about, “You’re so dumb if you don’t believe in masks.” Explain how Fauci says they work, but Dr. Leana Wen — and also, by the way, former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb — had this to say a couple of days ago.

GOTTLIEB: Cloth masks aren’t gonna provide a lot of protection. That’s the bottom line. This is an airborne illness, we now understand that, and a cloth mask is not gonna protect you from a virus that’s spread through airborne transmission. It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not something like this coronavirus.

BUCK: It does not work “for something like this coronavirus.” So can we stop, please? I’m just… I’m begging the idiots in the media out there on this one issue. Can they just stop pretending that there is this consensus? They can say masks work and then it goes, “Oh, we don’t know how well.” If you don’t know that it works really well, the idea that you would mandate this for people and act… There was a time, Clay — you remember this — when if you weren’t willing to do it, you were killing people’s grandparents. That’s what they were saying. You were basically guilty of murder if you wouldn’t wear a mask. These libs are out of their minds, and they’re wrong, and it’s sad to watch.

CLAY: You remember the reaction from some people who were furious when I went to the local school board and argued against kids having to wear masks here in my local public school district where my two youngest kids go. And fortunately, they’ve not had to wear masks here all throughout this entire school year. And, by the way, that’s one reason why you can’t buy a house in good school districts right now in Florida and Texas and Tennessee and places like this.

It’s because there’s such an overwhelming demand right now from people who are fleeing New York and California and the Chicago area. And Illinois in particular, if you look at the net migration numbers, that’s where people are leaving from. And we had that great conversation with Crystal Menkowitz, who’s one of your friends, who —

BUCK: Karol Markowicz, yes, the New York Post.

CLAY: Karol Markowicz. And that is becoming a trend line if you look at the Census data beyond a shadow of a doubt the amount of people fleeing. They’re voting with their feet. And, by the way, if they thought they were safer in blue states than people from red states, they would be moving there. That’s not occurring at all.

BUCK: But I’ve learned something important this week, Clay, and that is from now on when there’s any major news organization or even minor one that takes a swing at me and you could do this one, too, I’m just gonna respond. Clearly, they have hair envy and have some sort of weird attraction to me and that’s like what this is all about. I think that was finally AOC getting a little ahead of herself in a way where even her own side couldn’t cover for it.

CLAY: No. I don’t think there’s any doubt. By the way, I keep expecting for people to rip me for say the same things that you do and it’s like they won’t even take a shot at me. It’s not like you said something on the show yesterday about masks not working that I disagree with or that I haven’t tweeted myself.

BUCK: I don’t know. I guess they figure it’s just if they get at one of us, they’ll put pressure on both of us but all the data and all the actual information —

CLAY: The science is clear!

BUCK: — coming out now is supportive of what we’ve been saying. I sit here and I want to know. Think about some of the debates that you could have right now. If we lived in a society that still valued free speech and if the corporate, legacy Democrat media made any real effort to get to the truth instead of having a narrative that, remember, we always say it’s about control, but it’s about control in the context of power. These people want to be in charge.

They want their team in charge, and so covid then becomes a proxy for everything else, too, because if they aren’t backing them on this, they worry that then you won’t have transgender athletes that are men competing against women, and they won’t have abortion in all 50 states. You go down the list. So for them, it’s all interconnected which means they can never have any fundamental honesty even about this issue that’s supposed to be nonpolitical.

Remember when that was the talk in the early days? People like Fauci would say, “This isn’t about politics, it’s science,” and people were saying, “Yeah, yeah, sure it is,” and then Cuomo would give his speeches. Oh, yeah, remember that guy? Clay, they don’t have anyone who could stand up and defend their positions on masks, who could defend the “stop the spread,” who could defend lockdowns as worthwhile. They would get annihilated.

CLAY: We’ve offered, we’ve offered those people, Buck, to come on the show. We reached out to Fauci. We would have Dr. Leana Wen on. Any of these people that are trying to make the argument, you can come on. You can speak to the largest radio audience in the country, and you can make your case, and we will push back because we’re not just gonna allow somebody to come on and spread things that are not true. But we can have a legitimate debate. They won’t do it.

BUCK: I mean, Fauci, you could ask him these questions and know that he does not have the answer. And that’s a big deal. How long does the actual vaccine booster protection last? He doesn’t know. They have a guess. Okay. So how many more shots are you gonna have to get? He doesn’t know. How well to masks protect people even if they wear them, cloth masks, properly, 100% of the time they’re exposed? He couldn’t even ballpark a number, Clay. He does not have answers to these things. If people know, if they would hear him go, “It’s about mitigation and the measures,” the usual dance and crap that he does, they would realize this guy doesn’t even know what he’s doing, but they protect him all the time.

CLAY: They protect him all the time, and they don’t even allow him to be questioned. And that, to me, is the biggest failure of so much of our media, is they decide what’s an acceptable opinion to have and then they rigorously police anyone saying anything else until the acceptable opinion moves and you’re starting to see the moving occur right now. Happened with defund the police. Same thing’s gonna happen with masks and kids in schools.