BUCK: Gotta focus on the midterms. And that means getting the message out. To that end, I’m gonna say, we’ve had Stephen Miller on this show numerous times. Very smart guy, member of the Trump White House, particularly associated with border issues and border security. He was really the architect of Trump’s border policies that found ways to actually shut down the flow of illegal migration to the country. The Biden administration comes in and decides they’re gonna turn it right back in the other direction.

So now we’ve got the worst border we’ve ever had. But also on crime issues we’ve seen Democrats moving in directions that have made everything worse. Here’s Stephen Miller, I believe was on Tucker last night, talking about how GOP’s gotta get out there and push the message about what matters to people when it comes to these issues.

.@StephenM Nails It

“What gets people elected is pushing messages where there is nowhere to hide. I’m for putting violent criminals behind bars, I’m for deporting illegal aliens and you’re not, so I win and you lose. That’s how you win elections.” pic.twitter.com/Pqdfs8Xwx7

— The Columbia Bugle  (@ColumbiaBugle) August 19, 2022

BUCK: Absolutely correct, Clay. And can I just say yesterday we spent a lot of time on the border. I want to spend a little more time today on the situation of crime across the country and how the Democrats are behind so many of these decisions. I was just sending this morning for our team, here’s just a sampling of stories:
NYPD Releases Video of Brutal Beat-Down That Killed a New York City Cabdriver,” named Kutin Gyimah. “San Francisco, Cleveland, and Portland Downtowns the Most Deserted in the U.S. because of crime.” And Frank Grillo, who is a Marvel actor from the Marvel universe, Slams Los Angeles Crime After His Personal Training Boxer Shot Dead in Los Angeles, right out on the streets.

We got a big problem, and we should tell everybody, Clay, who’s behind policies that resulted in all this?

CLAY: Yeah, Buck, we’ve been talking for a long time about how sort of ups and downs can crescendo. And I feel like last year in the midterm preview in 2021 we got a Red Wave. And I think on some level, Republicans have gotten lazy in pointing out exactly how bad Joe Biden has done his job. And certainly there are distractions out there. But I remember you saying for a while, how much worse can it get? Things got so bad and Biden’s approval ratings may well have bottomed out a couple of months ago, but it was inevitable that he would bounce back a little bit. What I think Republicans are doing a really poor job of right now is making the case of why they need to be elected as a check against Joe Biden and his administration. And we talked yesterday, Buck, about how Arizona right now — the Democrat is in the lead, Mark Kelly over Blake Masters, you look at what’s going on in Ohio, I saw where they just had to pour 28 million more dollars into Ohio. JD Vance is probably going to win. But when you’re having to protect a seat that felt very safe, you obviously have got all sorts of troubles going on in Pennsylvania. We don’t know what’s gonna happen in Georgia. Wisconsin is gonna be a battle.

There are so many places out there right now where I feel like we are not focusing on the disaster that is Joe Biden and allowing him on some level to not have to be held accountable for Democrat failures when it comes to basic safety in our cities. And so we missed in 2020 the opportunity to control the Senate with two Georgia elections because the fallout from the 2020 election was still going there. I don’t want to miss the opportunity to provide a clear check on Joe Biden and his power because we’re not focusing on everything that’s going wrong. And crime everywhere.

Philadelphia. I mean, the fact that the state of Pennsylvania is competitive at all with Philadelphia setting the worst crime, murder streak in the history of that city. And there are many people out there listening to us right now, whether you live in Phoenix or whether you live in Houston or if you’re up in Milwaukee, you don’t feel safe. And that is the reality from coast to coast, top to bottom in the United States. And I’m sure you saw, Buck, that flash mob of —

BUCK: Looting a 7-Eleven in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles: @LAPDHQ has released footage of a mass looting of a 7-11 on Aug. 15 at Figueroa and El Segundo. https://t.co/3qoz08OcKc pic.twitter.com/fpca5QwBrU

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 19, 2022

CLAY: — everybody just rolling in, in L.A. When you create disrespect for law enforcement, it festers, and it festers at every possible level. And the fact that we still are not respecting law enforcement — you know this, Buck; we’ve talked to a lot police — the amount of retirements, the amount of talented police officers who are deciding, “I’m not putting up with this anymore. I’m walking away from this profession,” I believe is going to make things much worse in our cities long before it gets better.

BUCK: And there’s also a difference in the way a lot of officers approach their job and, honestly, the skill set. I mean, there’s some officers who do a good job in very safe neighborhoods, and that’s their contribution. That’s fine. But what you really always gotta make sure you hold on to are the equivalent on the what you have in the military side of the door kickers.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You know, you need the guys and gals who are gonna chase down people down that dark alley when they think there’s a serious felony that just occurred and they’re gonna wrestle somebody to the ground, and they’re gonna know that the city and the prosecutor and the mayor’s office is gonna have their back as long as they’re doing their job in good faith. One of the huge changes — and it’s why — downtown in San Francisco, Cleveland, Portland — one of the huge changes in recent years largely because of the BLM movement but not entirely; was also progressive prosecutors — Democrats have been planning and, really, plotting shift in our thinking about law enforcement for many years now, was that cops no longer knew — or could no longer believe reasonably that in a close-call situation the apparatus of the city would have their back.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They no longer could say, “You know what? You know, it was a dark alley, guy pulled on me, he had just robbed a store, you know.” And obviously there should be accountability. I’ve written whole editorials and talked about times when there’s excessive force by police officers. That’s wrong. They should be punished. Other cops hate excessive force, too, because it makes their jobs harder. It makes their profession look bad. But when you see San Francisco, Cleveland, and Portland in this analysis that the New York Post shared of the most deserted in the United States, the more blue the city in so many of these cases, the more abandoned downtown actually is, which tells you something about not only the policies with regard to violent crime, but in the case of Portland, you’ve got flight from the city now — people are all moving to the suburbs because they don’t want to be stepping over heroin needles, they don’t want to be worried about — they just seized yesterday at the border, Clay, I think it was a couple hundred thousand fentanyl pills that look like candy, literally made to look like it’s candy. They send that stuff all over the country. In Portland people are taking that in broad daylight. Their overdoses have skyrocketed.

“For sale signs line” the Democrat-run city of Portland while residents try to escape homelessness and crime “that’s taking over the streets.”

“It makes living in the neighborhood harder.” pic.twitter.com/fpcTTwYg5b

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 18, 2022

So you’ve got homeless people, a lot of people with drug abuse, a lot of people with severe schizophrenia living in the streets, and, you know, you only need one with or two, you know, ugly incidents if you’re a regular in one of these cities walking your kids to school or going to the grocery store where you go, “I don’t want to deal with this anymore.”

Democrats — and this going back to the Stephen Miller point — are the reason why this is happening in so many of these cities in the way that we’ve seen over the last few years. And I think every Republican politician needs to make the case. It’s actually for everyone’s benefit. Even for the libs.

CLAY: Well, you talked about you live in what should be a fairly nice area of New York City.

BUCK: Center of Manhattan.

CLAY: And you walked out of your building recently and there were needles all over the ground.

BUCK: Yeah. People were shooting up on my block, on my street. And I’ve seen open air heroin usage, although less recently, during the pandemic that was going on. But, you know, there’s this fundamental misconception that goes in cycles among libs, particularly — I was gonna say, elitist, white liberals who, you know, are running the Democrat Party, basically, at the national level, they get this idea in their heads, “You know we should just let people live on the streets ’cause that’s the kind thing to do. We should let people publicly urinate and other things because that’s what — you know, we don’t want to be too strict. We’re not authoritarians here. Let’s let people camp in the streets. Let’s let them pee in public.” And there’s other things I can’t even describe on radio that people end up seeing that people do out in public. And that’s not kind. You’re actually letting people that are in severe duress themselves to put other law-abiding and, you know, just day-to-day folks trying to go about their lives, put them in positions where they feel like they can’t do this down the street safely. There’s no kindness in this. It’s actually deterioration and destruction of cities.

It’s like we’re watching a Batman movie and, you know, Gotham is descending and we all know why it is, ’cause the criminals are running rampant and lawlessness is everywhere. And Democrats think somehow this is a good thing.

CLAY: George W. Bush got this one right. He said that very often Democrats were guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations. And that is what is going on with the white, woke community right now. They believe that minorities can’t get ahead because they believe — I really do believe this, at their essence — the white, woke liberal is the most racist person in America because they believe that racism is keeping everyone who is not a woke, white liberal from being able to succeed. And they don’t believe in the individual excellence of black, Hispanic, and Asian minorities. And so they think that they need to be the person who is lifting them up, who is combating systemic racism.

I know there’s lots of talk out there. But really the number one enemy, the number one enemy that is creating, as I think everyone out there would recognize is a disastrous situation during the Biden presidency, is the woke, white liberal. They are destroying America. They are hate everything that America stands for. And ultimately they are the cause of almost every issue. Because, Buck, when you look at the data, do you know who wants more cops in inner cities? Black, Hispanic, and Asian residents and white residents who actually live in these inner cities. It’s the white, woke liberal who lives out in the suburbs somewhere and is convinced that America’s a fundamentally racist and awful place that is making things worse for everyone in those cities. They’re the people who show up and march in the BLM protests, the white people, and then vanish and don’t say anything when Minneapolis falls apart, when Milwaukee — they’re having a Bucks game and people are getting shot like crazy. This is who is causing the issues in America. We have to reject, repudiate, and destroy their arguments.

BUCK: There’s a huge game of distraction that Democrats play in all these cities, too, which is why it has become so ingrained in the left and in the minds of so many people — San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., all the big lib strongholds, Portland — and it’s that, you know, if that actually enforce the law more, things will get better. What they believe, though, is that they’re going to be in a position where the only way forward is going to require less law enforcement, where the only way forward would be racist, if they actually enforced the laws more. Right? They tell people this, they say, if there’s going to be greater law enforcement, it’s going to harm minority communities —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — when in fact, this is what we saw in New York City — it will disproportionately benefit minority communities where there is a higher or elevated level of crime. And this is a huge lie the Democrats tell all the time. They say, “Oh, it’s gonna be — you can’t let the racist cops do more policing. We need more social workers.” That was the argument. Remember that? They actually remember making that argument openly.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: When in reality, law enforcement would prove the situation in so many of these — so many of these places.