CLAY: What’s the opposite of amazing is the absurdity that Fauciism has led to, which is the vaccine mandates. And, by the way, there are reports that the OSHA 100-employee vaccine mandates, all that regulation may come down in the near future. But, in the meantime, the rubber has met the road in New York City where you live, Buck, and we are seeing lots of different employees — policemen, firefighters — all suddenly having to come to grips with this vaccine mandate.

A lot of people are refusing to get the vaccine and as a result, firefighters and police are strained. Let’s play cut 4; then I want to hear from you, Buck, what the word and discussion is like right now in New York City as this mandate becomes a reality. This is the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, Andrew Ansbro, discussing this mandate.

ANSBRO: I’m sounding the alarm that my members are not the kind of people that bend. You don’t want New York City firefighters to be the kind of people that go against their work and don’t stick to their guns. What do you think causes New York City firefighters to fall down that hallway to get through that fire so gets your family and you? It’s that resolve that we have, and everyone’s been ignoring the fact that the reason why people love us is that we put our lives on the line every day for you.

And when we tell you we’re not going to bend and we’re not going to break, you have to take us seriously. And now we have 1,700 firefighters that are basically saying, “I can’t bend. I’m not going to do it.” We need more time. We have lawsuits that are pending that because of this nine-day mandate. They’re not giving us enough time for our day to be held in court.

You know, we’ve been pushed to the wall and they’re pushing around the wrong people. I mean, we’re not the kind of people that break. You don’t want firefighters that break. And right now, the mayor of New York and the department is understanding: This is what happens when you try to push the wrong people around

BUCK: Clay, I can tell you, I just was in contact this morning with a friend of mine inside City Hall here in New York. The latest numbers on firefighters today, is you have 2,000 firefighters on medical leave. They didn’t all just come down with the sniffles. That’s 20%, roughly, of the active fire department here in New York City; 18, according to my contact in City Hall, are out of service right now — 18.

I think it was 16 as of last night and then 18 was the final tally this morning. They’re still figuring out how many of the 40,000-plus NYPD are out. Reminder for everybody: The NYPD is larger than the standing armies of many countries in the world. The NYPD is a vast organization.

CLAY: It’s a lot bigger than a lot of the cities and towns that people listening to us live in.

BUCK: Right. You can imagine, you got 40,000-plus in the NYPD and they’re looking at thousands and thousands. They don’t have the official number yet. They don’t actually have clarity. I’m trying to find out in real time. Those NYPD officers — remember, and this, too. In New York, the figure about FDNY and NYPD, these are the folks — and some of the ones who are going on early retirement or medical leave are literally the ones who are showing up on 9/11.

New York has a very special relationship with its fire and police in this era. We have not forgotten about what happened, and you have now a lot of cops going on unpaid medical leave. The city is totally dug in, again going back to my City Hall contact. They are gonna fire people if they don’t bend. They think the NYPD numbers are gonna be such that they can surge.

So there’s some people who normally would be off; they’ll put them on duty. Because the concern right now. Clay, it’s also sanitation workers. I mean, how long can a city go with 20% of it’s…? It’s an 8 million-, 8.6 million-, 8.7 million-person city. How long can it go without 20% of its firefighters, who knows how many thousands of its cops?

CLAY: Madness.

BUCK: Sanitation workers? The fastest ways to see a city go to hell is stop picking up the trash, stop enforcing the law on the streets — and New York may get a little bit of a lesson in this, at a time when we can hardly afford it right now. And for what? We just had Jen Psaki say over the weekend say she had another incredible rare breakthrough case, Clay, so rare that… I mean, I had to go to a wedding with a breakthrough case guy, right? I mean, ’cause he had to postpone it. It’s happening all over the place.

CLAY: It’s happening all over the place, and Jen Psaki wears her mask everywhere, and she’s been lecturing everybody about wearing her mask and how important it is to get vaccinated. And yet she has tested positive for covid because breakthrough cases are incredibly common. And the idea that… Make no mistake here.

The City of New York and the people that are served by the fire department, by the police department, by the sanitation workers are under more danger by these guys not doing their job than they would be by not having the covid vaccine, right? ‘Cause a huge percentage, I would bet, as you well know — a huge percentage — of all these people that are refusing to get the covid vaccine have likely already had covid because they’ve had to continue to work.

BUCK: At least, Clay, half of the firefighters and cops, let me just say, that’s really almost citywide number, because New York was at 20%, 20% infection in June of 2020. So, I mean, it’s a low estimate that half of these folks… Does in New York City have a…? There would still be the freedom discussion. There’s still the opposed-to-mandates-strenuously component of this.

But absent a natural immunity exemption, this is not about — this is clearly not about — science. It is entirely about control and the policy getting enforced at all costs. And we may see what those costs are in real ways, right now, in New York, the biggest city in the country.

CLAY: Yeah. I don’t want this to happen, but it feels a little bit, Buck, like defund the police where the consequences of your actions are predictable, and we can all sit here and say, “Hey, 20% less police on the streets, the hours that everybody else is gonna have to work, 40-some-odd,” as you said, “fire department houses shutting down, sanitation issues.”

It’s easy for us who are reasonable and rational to sit here and say, “This is not going to end well,” but I feel like rapidly things are gonna start to fall apart and people are gonna say, “Wait a minute. In the name of safety, we have made ourselves far less safe. It feels defund-the-policesque to me in what is likely to be the outcome.” Do you kind of buy into that being an analogy where everybody knows it’s gonna be bad, but it’s as if the vaccine idiots cannot recognize it.

BUCK: No. We can all see where this is going. But remember the same way, Clay… I think this is an important comparison you make. It’s the same way that defund the police wasn’t rooted in the reality of what would happen but the ideology of what they wanted to pretend would happen. They all know it wasn’t gonna result in less crime, “But let’s try it. Let’s run the experiment again! Real communism had never been tried.

“Real defund had never been tried,” right? This is the approach. We’re about to see in New York City what happens when you take a lot of your emergency personnel off the clock, and the answer is, “It’s gonna be really bad,” and we all know this, but we’re gonna have to suffer the consequences because of America’s worst mayor. Who was it last week that said that? Oh, Trump!

CLAY: Trump said de Blasio’s the worst mayor.

BUCK: Yeah, he likes this show so he knows. Trump and I are very simpatico on New York. We’re both New York guys, and he understands what I understand, which is that de Blasio is the worst mayor in the country — I think in the history of America, maybe.