Fox Notices Buck’s Take on Dems, the Border and Ukraine

BUCK: As of now, we still do not have any Russian invasion of Ukraine to speak of. Over 130,000 Russian troops spread around the eastern border of Ukraine in what seems to be a preparation for invasion. Some people are even talking about a Russian blitzkrieg that could topple the government in Ukraine and try to overrun all their forces in rapid fashion. The Pentagon is…

Right now, actually, on Fox, they’ve got Pentagon Spokesman Kirby talking about sanctions and all rest of it. If anything comes of that, we’ll let you know. Got the White House briefing up in just a few moments here. If Jen Psaki says anything — well, I was gonna say “worthwhile.” It’s not… If she says anything we have to either refute or make fun of (or usually both), we’ll certainly bring that to you as soon as it happens. But I saw this, and I was hoping we maybe move a little bit into discussion of where the Biden regime is right now with the economy and a few other topics. But I gotta tell you…

CLAY: Let me… By the way, before you get to that, I gotta give you props. You drove the entire news cycle yesterday with your analyzing the border in Ukraine versus the complete lack of focus on our border on the southern border. I can’t tell you the number of places I have seen it since our show yesterday. For people who were listening, Buck made what I think is a really astute observation that the Biden administration is far more concerned about the border sanctity of Ukraine than they are the border sanctity of our own country, and in fact has given far more attention to what might happen on the border with Ukraine than they have with what might happen in the United States at our southern border. And so you laid all that out yesterday, and then what happens is basically the entire apparatus media discussion follows that throughout the rest of the day.

BUCK: Thank you very much, sir.

CLAY: So props. I hope people recognized it. FoxNews.com picked it up and wrote an entire article about it out of our show — and, by the way, I think that’s great good sign for the show, that we are having influence beyond the audience that we have right here. We love everybody out there listening. But the way that you change things is not just talking to your island of listeners even though it is a Big Island. It’s to influence the overall scope of discourse. And I think as it pertains to Ukraine and the border, you did that on behalf of the show yesterday. It was well done.

BUCK: Thank you so much, sir. I’d say I feel like our mission here continues be to be — I’ve said before — we’re the unsinkable aircraft carrier of free speech, but I really also mean that aircraft carrier analogy goes to I want other conservatives to know that they can stop on our deck, refuel, go take their mission, go do what they gotta do. I want us to be a gathering place, a resupply, a strategic forward operating base, if you will, for all of our fellow conservatives making the case. That’s why we try to, to borrow a term from the left, “platform people.” I prefer my aircraft analogy, but we try to platform people, and we’re gonna continue to do that here because we’re about the movement and the team, folks. We’re about winning. We’re not trying to play any petty nonsense within our own team on the right.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JOHN BERMAN, CNN: Why should Americans care about what’s happening in Ukraine?

DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR JONATHAN FINER: Because it goes to a very fundamental principle of — of all nations, which is that our borders, uh, should be inviolate, uh, that our sovereignty should be respected.

BUCK: “…sovereignty should be respected.” That was the deputy national security adviser the Biden regime yesterday. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. Just want to point out, sovereignty is really important when it is five or six thousand miles away in a country that is not America and is not even close to America. That’s very important, and if we have to send troops…

The Biden regime wants you to know, we gotta send a whole lot of missiles. I’m seeing the photos of more Javelin anti-tank missiles. Remember, the Obama administration actually refused to send Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles. Too provocative. Trump came in — ’cause he’s such a Russian stooge — and sent Javelin anti-tank missiles, Dragunov sniper rifles, and other lethal munitions to Ukraine.

And now we’re sending a whole lot more, it seems, in the Biden regime’s preparation for the possibility of invasion here. But it is fascinating, isn’t it? Sovereignty is important for Ukraine and, Clay, we have an obligation — and, again, I’m speaking from the Biden regime point of view here — to take risks and perhaps even blood and treasure spent to protect Ukraine sovereignty, God forbid.

But that could end up happening here. But our sovereignty? A couple of hundred thousand people coming in illegally every month? A massive wave of illegal migration that the Biden administration’s essentially waving into the country? Every state turning into a border state, ’cause they’re putting ’em on planes; they’re flying ’em from McAllen and from El Paso and from wherever to New Jersey and New York and California and Illinois? You sit there and you say, “Wait. So everyone else’s sovereignty is important, but our sovereignty is racist, I guess.” That’s what we’re told: Racist.

CLAY: Not only that, but the media will actually cover the Ukrainian border issues and not cover the United States border issues! I keep coming back to the Biden presser because it’s such a clear window into what media focus is on. Think about how many questions we got surrounding Ukraine, and how many questions we got about the border. We didn’t get a single question about the murder rate, which has skyrocketed in this country.

I saw a data point out, largest U.S. cities, Buck, up 44%, the murder rate is, since 2019. So in 2020, we were up 30%. We were up again in 2021, such that we are up 44% since then. We didn’t get a single question about murder; We didn’t get a single question about the border. And what that says to me compared to all of the obsession that is there with Ukraine, is very often the media’s focus is far outside of scope of what your average person is thinking about.

That’s why I glad to live in a place like Nashville ’cause I think sometimes you get seduced by whatever your environment is, if you’re in New York or L.A. where there’s lots of media. You know what people ask/talk about here? Inflation being up massively. Masks on their kids in school. They talk about whether or not they feel safe being able to go out into cities.

All of those things are what is going to decide the election in 2022. Whatever happens in Ukraine is unlikely to be a major story, but for the fact that much like Afghanistan, Buck, it can reinforce the overall perception — which is accurate — of incompetence. Usually, foreign affairs don’t dictate local domestic politics. But when those foreign affairs, like what happened with Afghanistan, reinforces a level of incompetence that resonates with all of the issues that are going on today with inflation and the murder rate and the border failures and everything else — covid failures — that are going on, that’s when it has a significance, and I think that’s what’s happening right now.

BUCK: I think we’ve learned a lesson over the last 20 years, not just about why we don’t want to be building other societies thousands of miles away for other cultures and other groups of people that are not America. I think we’ve learned that lesson in ways that I can barely begin to express here on this show right now. But everyone knows what I’m talking about — Iraq, Afghanistan. But beyond that, one of the aspects of Trump’s populism that really caught on initially was this revolutionary idea at the time of focusing on us.

That the government of the American people should focus on the interests and protection of Americans first. That was all of a sudden like, “Wait a second. What do you mean? Don’t we have to ask the U.N. for permission before we think about Americans? Don’t we have to go to the IMF and wonder what our domestic policies should be? Maybe we could have some U.N. observers for our elections and tell us how to really do it.”

The rejection of that ideology was one of the key factors in Donald Trump’s rising to what they thought was the impossible win in 2016, right? And still the Trump movement continues on, and we may very well have another Trump presidency going forward, as we know. But that’s something that I think you’ve seen the so-called intelligentsia — a word taken from the Russians, by the way, and if people learn about the original Russian intelligentsia, they’d have a very different feeling about it all. But, anyway, that’s a conversation for another day. You can see, Clay, I’ve had some late nights reading about pre-Soviet Russia. It’s very instructive about our current times with authoritarianism and the Democrats.

CLAY: You’re one of the only people in America reading about pre-Soviet Russia in any part of your day —

BUCK: (laughing) Yeah.

CLAY: — other than Russian history professors somewhere. I do think, to the point on Ukraine, when we went into Afghanistan, there was at least the argument directly connected to 9/11, “We’re going in to advance American interests because these people attacked us.” If we could go back in time, the right time to leave Afghanistan, in my opinion, and declare victory — which would have been a much stronger American foreign policy perspective — was right after we killed Osama Bin Laden.

If Barack Obama, I bet, had it to do all over again, that’s a clear line of demarcation. We went into Afghanistan, we have caught all the people responsible for attacking our country, now we’re gonna leave. It would have avoided the disaster that Biden got there. But with Ukraine right now, the American public, the narrative of, “Why we should care?” there’s no connection there.

So, the idea of going in with American interests associated with Ukraine, I think, doesn’t pass the smell test for most Americans who are even more skeptical after the failure in Afghanistan, after we went into Iraq on the presumption of weapons of mass destruction. This was another thing that Trump was willing to talk about, which was almost verboten in Republican politics. It was saying, “Hey, I don’t think the decision to go into Iraq was the right one.” Remember? I mean, that was a revolutionary thing for him to say that I think a lot of people responded to that and connected to this idea of American exceptionalism. Let’s focus on America. We don’t need to be the world’s police.

BUCK: We have a Republican — a conservative — base in this country roughly age, let’s call it, 20 to 45. Well, 20 would be a little… Well, until recently we were still in Afghanistan, but let’s say roughly 20 to 45. We have a conservative base of people who — and maybe my math is a little off. You could say into their fifties but I’m talking about over the last 20 years, we’ve had people that have experienced the realities of an overactive and overreaching foreign policy from the smartest minds in D.C.

By the way, on a bipartisan basis, Republican and Democrat. But the people that are listening to this now who served — the millions of Americans who served — in those countries I think saw a reality up close and personal in the clearest possible ways of what it means when you take the conversations about sovereignty and universal human rights from a think tank near Capitol Hill or in Foggy Bottom and turn it into, “We’re gonna send a bunch of other people to fight a war in a far-off country.

“And we’re not exactly entirely sure, not only what the mission is going to be in the end, but why we’re there in the first place,” and certainly in the case of Iraq. That’s been the conversation and with the extension of the Afghanistan mission too. This is why I’m pretty confident that the American people don’t want anything in Ukraine, Clay, don’t want us to be in Ukraine in any way that would get us involved in that conflict. It goes back to just your point about what does this show us about the Biden regime? They’re floundering. They’re having real problems. And one way to get the country mobilized behind you — if you can pull it off, if you look back at the realities of our past — is have a war somewhere, and that’s what really concerns me.