BUCK: I know we have listeners in cities all over America, so you know what I’m talking about. Crime rate’s way up. We often focus on the violent crime issue. We’ll get to some of that in a moment but also the day-to-day quality-of-life crimes and the cleanliness of streets, the ability to walk down the street and not step over needles that have been used for illegal drug use, to not have to step over human waste and refuse, to put it in polite terms.
Places like San Francisco have had major problems with this, and you might have seen over the weekend — this video was up on the Daily Mail, was up on FoxNews.com — elementary school kids getting off the bus and having to walk through a crowd of homeless drug addicts. It was in broad daylight, just shooting up. Ricci Wynne, who is a recovering addict, self-described recovering addict posted this video of San Francisco’s open-air drug market.
Now, I know people are gonna say, “Well, what are we supposed to do?” or, “What should they do about this? You know, we don’t want to lock people up forever.” There is, in fact, a middle ground between putting someone in prison for decades for drug use and not encouraging them to shoot up heroin in broad daylight in front of school children. There are middle grounds. There are things that can be done.
I think one of the big lies that was told by the defund the police, end mass incarceration Democrats was that your choices are lock somebody up for 30 years for nonviolent crime and do nothing. You’re seeing this in San Francisco. I even, Clay, I tweeted about this last week. It was a fascinating exercise in how there is a left-wing mind-set that they want to go and defend any kind of criminality as just suck it up, deal with it, why is it a big deal?
In New York you have these… They’re not even really biker gangs because they’re on ATVs, like the kind some you do off-roading ATVs in rural areas. On New York City streets. And they have illegal dirt bikes that they’ll get a hundred of them together, it makes an incredible amount of noise, shakes the windows of everyone they drive past, and they get into these mobs and they drive around.
And it’s illegal, in fact, to do this. You’re not allowed to do this. But people say, “Oh, what’s the big deal? What’s the big deal?” The big deal, Clay, is as we know, criminality and the decay of major cities has been encouraged by a Democrat Party that sees these things somehow as — I don’t know — what we deserve, what we need to suffer through collectively as a society. They’re facing real political consequences for this now, and I think people have finally decided enough is enough.
CLAY: Yeah. It is. And ultimately, to me there are three probably main issues that the 2022 midterms are gonna be decided on before all is said and done: inflation, gases prices, you can roll all that in together, crime, and I still think covid is going to be a underlying vote for a lot of people. Now, there are other issues, foreign policy certainly failures of the Biden administration, what happened in Afghanistan combined with the Ukraine-Russia war, the border.
What’s happening more and more — and you see it in New York City because there’s so many of these stories that go viral. But New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, L.A., basically every city in America now, middle of the day, totally innocent people, victims. And that didn’t happen after we got the crime wave under control in the nineties. We drove… In New York City, it’s a great example, Buck. You said, what was it, 2600 murders a year that were happening in New York?
BUCK: About 2200 in 1990, 1991.
CLAY: And it went all the way down to under 300, right?
BUCK: Yes. Sub-300.
CLAY: Which is an unbelievable success story. And then the success became so pronounced that people started to feel so safe that they said, “Oh, now the police are racist. They’re stopping and questioning and frisking too many people.” And there’s an onerous sense that security is here and now — and I’ve been saying for years, Buck, being concerned that the police are too onerous is a luxury of a low-crime environment. And we don’t have that luxury anymore, and every American all over this country, just about, is starting to say, “We’ve gotta fix this mess.”
BUCK: We started to have a criminal justice system in the last few years, really BLM took this into a new stratosphere, exponentially expanded upon this or pushed the momentum even further, we had a country where all of a sudden in all of the blue enclaves which includes cities in red states, I would note. I mean, you talk to people in Houston, talk to people in Dallas and Austin, they’ve had terrible crime problems in recent years; so, this isn’t just a blue state phenomenon.
It’s really a city anywhere phenomenon. But the Democrats run, effectively, every large city in the entire country, I mean, maybe with one or two exceptions. I think Fort Worth is like 50-50 Democrat/Republican. But you think of another city that is a quarter of a million, a half a million or more and overwhelmingly they’re all Democrat run. But what they decided was that social justice and virtue signaling were gonna be running the prosecutors’ offices and the police commissioner’s office.
And we see how that has played out all over the country. It has been misery and despair for the law-abiding. And that brings me to this case in New York of Jose Alba who is a 62-year-old bodega worker, employee, and now it turns out there’s even some audio, Clay, where he says he was assaulted by this individual, now deceased, who is on parole for attacking a police officer and had other — I believe other — criminal arrests beyond that. You see it all on the video. He thinks that he has a right to manhandle a person, to assault a person.
CLAY: Come behind the counter.
Yeah, there’s crime happening in all these cities across the country. In this instance, now, there’s clear video. It’s a national news story. What message is Alvin Bragg, the district attorney — the progressive, Soros-backed district attorney of the City of New York — showing by charging Jose Alba, a hardworking, law-abiding, Latin-American — you know, Latino-American — family man?
What is the lesson that is being taught to America by this guy being charged with second-degree murder? You’re not allowed to defend yourself? Do the dictates of social justice now extend to, if a criminal, if a thug attacks you, you gotta let it happen? I’m sorry, but there’s too much oppression in the country and you gotta let it happen to you in this case because, what, I can’t even… I don’t even know what Bragg thinks he’s doing here, other than criminalizing self-defense.
CLAY: And I think couple of details here, for people who may not have paid attention to this, Buck. This guy was working behind the encounter, woman comes in to buy potato chips, a bag of chips for her kid, tries to pay and her card is rejected so the guy says, “You’ve gotta put the chips back. You didn’t pay for them,” and she gets upset; says, “I’m gonna go get my boyfriend,” flashes — to your point, Buck — a knife as part of this disagreement. The boyfriend comes back; this guy’s, what, 62 years old, 61 years old? I mean, close to a senior citizen, small guy. The boyfriend, 37 years old, I believe, as you mentioned, violent felon, comes around the counter, corners the owner of this —
BUCK: Employee. The owner is another guy. By the way, he’s now not allowed to go back to his job because the owner is so terrified that the friends of the deceased felon will come after him.
CLAY: That doesn’t surprise me at all. I think we talked about that. I said I don’t know how he goes back to work after this. Comes around the counter, corners this employee, who has nowhere to go, he’s already had a knife flashed at him, he’s shoved and pushed into this corner, and he reacts by grabbing a knife that happens to be behind the counter, stabbing this guy. And he gets charged.
Initially, Buck, he had $250,000 bail, and they tried to get $500,000 bail before that, and you can watch the video yourself. Even Mayor Adams, New York City, has already come out… I don’t necessarily think this is the right move for politicians in general when there are criminal cases proceeding, but the mayor already came out and essentially said, “Hey, this looks like self-defense to me and said that it was wrong, the situation that was in play here.”
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And it is all on video, the entire exchange. And now there’s audio of it too. So, there’s no doubt as to the facts here. So, again I come back to this question. What does the district attorney of America’s — you know, in Manhattan, of America’s largest city, what does he think he is teaching the people of New York, or what is he showing them by charging this guy with murder? What is the point of this other than to say, “When thugs come after you, when criminals assault you, you let it happen or we will lock you up. We will send you to prison.”?
Anybody who lives in a city with Democrat Soros porters has gotta think, this is now apparently the new normal. I am to be physically violated and hope that I’m not choked out to death or stabbed by the knife, that this guy had already — they had already — flashed the knife at him. He had every reason to believe the boyfriend had probably taken the knife from the girlfriend and now was coming after him behind the counter. What are we to say, other than we are no longer in a society worth defending if the people in power who are supposed to have a monopoly on the use of force by the state will not allow you to defend yourself in these circumstances?
CLAY: And remember where all of this started. They wanted to buy a bag of chips and didn’t have the money to buy it; and so, he told them they needed to put the chips back, which is what employees are supposed to do in retail establishments when people don’t have the money to buy. And she was furious over the fact that that had occurred and brought her boyfriend in to try to rough up this employee over 60 years old who happens to work in this little corner convenience store —
BUCK: What do you think, by the way, what do you think the — how do you think this case goes if the guy who gets stabbed. Because, again, anybody could get upset at a in a moment and, you know, right? The guy who gets stabbed is a white guy who works for a big investment bank, and he assaulted this guy. Do you think there’s second-degree murder charges brought by Alvin Bragg?
CLAY: No, the identity politics plays a big role here. And I think, honestly, if the employee had been a white guy, it would be far more explosive than it is. I believe he’s from the Dominican Republic, Latino.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — hardworking —
CLAY: Citizen.
BUCK: — people come here through the right process, through the right way, work hard for years. He had already been assaulted and had guns pulled on him and knives pulled on him previously in this store, kept showing up, kept doing his job. If we won’t stand up for Jose Alba, who do we stand up for?
CLAY: And doesn’t have massive resources. That’s the other thing here. So, when they throw the book at him and try to get $500,000 in bail effectively what they’re saying is, you aren’t able to leave Rikers, the prison, where he was. And as you mentioned, Buck, he was stabbed multiple times by this woman as a part of the fallout from this fight.
And so, he has wounds that I believe have since become infected after he was put in the prison ’cause he didn’t get the medical treatment that he needed as a guy in his sixties based on getting knife wounds. And I believe we said it last week when we were discussing it, the other thing about this is, the guy’s… What does he do for employment now?
BUCK: That’s reprisal violence. When she came in, it wasn’t an imminent threat against her or the boyfriend.
CLAY: She should be charged.
BUCK: She should be charged. But she has not been charged. Why is that the case?
CLAY: This poor guy now who didn’t unleash any of this, all he said was, “Hey, put the chips back. You can’t pay for them,” now this guy is unable to go back to his job, Buck, and where is he gonna be able to work? I don’t know how many other convenience stores… Most of these guys don’t own a lot of them. How is he gonna be able to make a living going forward? This is just… It feels like a total miscarriage of justice.
BUCK: And GoFundMe pulled down his defense fund, of course.
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: Not allowed to raise money for your defense for this country. Innocent until proven guilty does not count when wokeness is involved.
BUCK: No, no. But I was gonna say, one other thing to add into this is that on the legal side, Lee Zeldin — who is the Republican candidate for governor who’s a good guy, a good candidate, has been a good congressman. He keeps making the promise he will fire Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, on day one when he becomes the governor. I think for a lot of people that’s compelling. I think it should be compelling.
CLAY: Oh, I hope somebody out there who’s listening to us right now in the New York area would reach out and be willing to give their legal representation for free to a man who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it.
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