CLAY: A part of me thinks Biden is waiting to sign the bill so that the House will pass the Build Back Better bill, the budget bill. In the meantime, Mayor Pete may be the least qualified person to ever have a cabinet-level job in the United States. What I mean by that is, he knows nothing about transportation. He was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s never made big decisions about anything.

He’s been on parental leave for a couple of months even though he didn’t have a baby himself. Now he’s back and we passed this huge infrastructure bill. He’s already failed in terms of supply chain, and now we’re going to give him a trillion dollars and say, “Hey, buddy, go build some roads”? What do you think he’s focused on? How racist bridges are! I swear to God this is real. Listen.

REPORTER: …how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into roadways. Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?

BUTTIGIEG: One of that is defining those investments that are eligible. As to where we target those dollars, you know, I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if an underpass was constructed such that a bus of carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices. I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality, and I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it. That’s why the reconnecting communities, that billion dollars, is something we want to get to work right away.

BUCK: So can I…? Have you read The Power Broker, Clay. The Power Broker is a book by the biographer Robert Caro. My dad’s actually a big fan of the Lyndon Johnson book.

CLAY: He’s an amazing writer, Buck. The Lyndon Johnson books are incredible.

BUCK: You and my dad like the same books.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I read The Power Broker many years ago, and it became very popular among the McKenzie, Ivy and pseudo-Ivy League set. Everyone’s reading The Power Broker. And about a guy, Robert Moses, in New York City… There’s actually kind of a pretty good band named Bob Moses, too, named for him, believe it or not, randomly. I’ve seen them in concert. But Robert Moses was the guy who was the great builder of New York in terms of roads and Jones Beach and all these different things.

And he’s referring to a belief based on the papers and the statements of Moses from the time, that there were decisions that were also class based, mind you, to try to keep certain areas from having folks who are not the ones that Moses desired to be there for whatever reason. But, Clay, that was a hundred years ago. Right? So communities, transportation, all these things have changed.

So what Robert Moses may have said about why a certain overpass or underpass or whatever was a certain height a century ago doesn’t really matter all that much to right now. This is just another time where you find… When we say that they believe “everything is racist,” they really think that everything is; you can find racism in everything. I mentioned this briefly in the break.

There was a whole period of time about five years ago… Remember it was during the latter part of the Obama administration. “Food deserts.” We kept being told that it was racist that there wasn’t enough access to healthy produce — and by that I mean kale and beets and whatever, those kind of things — in low-income and predominantly minority neighborhoods. So the federal government created a bunch of programs.

The National Bureau of Economic Research got into this, and they started looking at if we subsidize it — if we actually provide people with greater access to and subsidize the, quote, “healthy food,” basically veggies, a lot of veggies and fruits — will we change buying patterns? You know what they found out, Clay? No, it did not.

CLAY: People like unhealthy food.

BUCK: Stores were not racist. People were buying the food they wanted to eat and the stores were providing them with the food that they were choosing to purchase.

CLAY: Which is how market-based economies work. Which ultimately is the answer for almost everything. Business is in the business of serving as many people as they possibly can the largest amount of their product. I know this is revolutionary to people like Bernie Sanders. It’s why capitalism works, because the market is more reliable than a government entity telling us what the market should be. And in the larger context here, Buck, “everything is racist” is the entire Democratic platform.

And I don’t know how they ever leave that platform behind until they get more and more ass kickings by voters, right? And while everybody out there is trying to say now, “Oh, all those people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and flipped to Glenn Youngkin, well, they’re racist. All those people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 in the Midwest that had voted for Barack Obama in 2012, well, they were racists.”

No. What is happening is “everything is racist” doesn’t work. It works on Twitter with a small segment of the woke — primarily white, liberal — regime, which wants everything to be racist, and for them to be the people who see through the racism, the Mayor Petes of the world. But it doesn’t work with Hispanic voters; it doesn’t work, really, with black voters; and it certainly doesn’t work with Asian voters. And the only way this changes, Buck, is if we get such thorough ass kickings in 2021 (which we just had), in 2022, and in 2024, that there is no legitimate basis for Democrats to continue to follow the “everything is racist” parade.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Buck, I want to circle back around again for a moment here on that bridge. Let’s say that whoever made that bridge is racist. What do you do? Is the idea that you would tear down that bridge and build it a little bit taller so that buses could fit their way through more easily? Are we going to spend billions of dollars tearing down perfectly good bridges because somebody 80 years made them a foot shorter than they otherwise would have because they were motivated in some way by race?

Even if you accept the objective facts pattern here — which I’m not sure that I do — what is the conclusion that makes any kind of sense from an equitable basis? You tear down the bridge and build it higher? So you have a perfectly fungible, functional bridge that’s paid for by taxpayer money, and you tear it down? The reason why I bring this up is ’cause I think it’s a metaphor of a larger context here.

There’s a difference. I’ll give an example here, Buck, in my backyard. We have a Confederate statue in Franklin Tennessee in the roundabout where I live. They added a new statue to represent black soldiers that also fought in the Civil War near the same roundabout. That to me seems like a reasonable solution, right? Instead of tearing something down, you make a change to something else going forward if you’re concerned about the message that you are sending historically.

But it seems to me very much that to best of my knowledge, what Democrats are focused on — and tell me where I’m missing this, Buck — is tearing things down and not having anything to replace them with that is anywhere near as good as what they tore down. That bridge example — when you’re trying to call a bridge racist or when you’re saying you have to vote like your life depends on it for climate change — these are pleas to emotions without any logical basis in fact underlying them.

BUCK: That was also just Mayor Pete who knows nothing about infrastructure trying to show off.

CLAY: Correct. He’s way over his head.

BUCK: He’s trying to show off that he read The Power Broker.

CLAY: He’s had all sorts of issues with black people not supporting him. There was the shooting in South Bend. There’s obviously —

BUCK: Yeah, he’s Mr. I’m Ponna prove That I’m So Concerned About Racism. IT’s racism all the time. But they have reached a point, I think… The Biden administration is running very close against that phase in people’s thinking where they talk about race and play the race card so much as a political ploy that I do think it’s losing.

CLAY: It’s the boy who cried wolf.

BUCK: People are at a point now where people are starting to say, “Hold on a second. Why is it that everything with these Democrats somehow always comes down to race?” You’ll notice that when they look at data on masks county to county, all of the sudden it’s, “Well, there are many, many, many factors.” In fact, there are so many factors because what is in one county, another county, doesn’t matter. Mandate, no mandate.

CLAY: The masks don’t work.

BUCK: But they go with the many-factor analysis, as I was mentioning before. But somehow if they can find any tie-in either historically or at present to race and racism in a subject, Clay, that is far and away always the most important point of focus for Democrats because they feel so self-righteous about it, right? They feel like, “Well, we’re the ones who are identifying this. Therefore, we’re the good people in this equation and it doesn’t matter where…”

Even on infrastructure. There is a full-on plan, as you know. “Tree equity” is a real thing. They’re gonna make sure that there are neighborhoods that have trees, because they say, “Well, some neighborhoods have more trees than other neighborhoods, and there’s a socioeconomic dimension to it.” Well, okay. I also think that the people in those neighborhoods without enough trees would like safer streets, less gun violence, more jobs, better options to live.

If they want to move and not have to deal with all the regulations for their businesses, that would be more important. But “tree equity” makes people feel good, you see. The people at the top, they can talk about how they’re making sure that everyone has the same amount of trees in their neighborhood.