On Covid, Corporations Impose Big Government’s Will

BUCK: On the covid front, you’re seeing there are a lot of people out there who very much want to keep in the background the apparatus of control under the guise of this is what’s necessary for your health. “We’re gonna keep you safe. Just let’s tell you exactly what to do, what your freedoms are, where you can go, and how you can be.”

I am a big fan of what Rand Paul — Senator Rand Paul — has been doing by speaking the truth, calling out Fauci, all this stuff. You know that he’s got a bill he’s introducing, which is not gonna go through, but I like the effort — A for effort — to lift the federal mandate on masks on airplanes.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Not everyone rolls with Spirit like I do.

CLAY: I fly Southwest everywhere, which is now A Boarding Group, you know, sort of raise the roof on the A Boarding Group. But ’cause I’m in Nashville, and that’s the airline that’s most common, if I want to get anywhere this country, that’s the easiest way for me to go. So it’s a cattle call every single time. So I’m very familiar with the coach class life, trust me.

BUCK: I asked him. He wasn’t sharing them with me. I said, “Take some video,” but there were… “Attendants” is the preferred nomenclature?

CLAY: I don’t even know what we’re supposed to call ’em now.

BUCK: Now it’s like the 30,000-foot-in-the-sky Stasi.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Now all they do is mask-mandate enforcement. He said they were actually enforcing the between-bites level of it.

CLAY. Oh, my God.

BUCK: And in first class where you figure if you’re a fancy… If you have to take off your top hat and your monocle and put your mask on, what’s the point of being in first class?

CLAY: I’ll tell you this, Buck. I was starting to think, “Have I found a loophole?” My kids… Do you remember, back in the day, Ring Pops?

BUCK: Oh, yeah.

CLAY: Do you remember? For people out there who may have forgotten, these were popular, I would say, in the eighties. Very much nostalgia is factoring in for kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties like me who now have kids, and so whatever we liked is starting to cycle back up because companies are smart and they’re saying:

“Oh, if you liked it when you were a kid, you’re probably gonna give it to your kid too. So I had my niece, who’s 8 years old, and my 6-year-old running around the house like crazy yesterday. And they both wanted Ring Pops and we gotta a big collection of Ring Pops — and those things, by the way, they end up stuck to everything.

From a parent perspective, anything that you have in your house, the Ring Pops is wavin’ around on the kids’ hands, ends up stuck on everything. But I actually am thinking to myself, we’re flying next weekend. I’m taking my family up to Michigan, the whole crew.

And I was thinking, I wonder if the Ring Pop is a loophole on the mask wearing because you basically can just suck on the Ring Pop the entire time. If I put Ring Pops on my kids’ hand, in theory, that’s kind of eating, right? Where does the lollipop or the Ring Pop fit in the overall mask-wearing requirement? Is this a loophole?

BUCK: I’ve heard that you can’t do the gum-chewing thing because that would be an easy one.

CLAY: The lollipop, you basically can keep it in your mouth the whole time, take it in and out, and the Ring Pop works. And this is where we are that I’m sitting around thinking, “Instead of the mask police being able to constantly go after my kid for inevitably not being that excited about having his mask on, can I Ring Pop my way out of the absurdity here next weekend?”

BUCK: So, while a lot of folks are living these normal lives, relatively speaking — and I understand if you’re in the red state of Tennessee or Texas or Florida —

CLAY: Good bless ’em, yes.

BUCK: — you’re probably thinking, “Unless I fly, this is not really my problem.” But I’m sorry to be the one that has to keep pointing this out. There is a very insane federal bureaucracy that is completely willing to impose itself on anyone in any of the 50 states. You see this with what’s going on in the airlines, you see this with the planes, and they’re not done with the vaccines as we know, pushing them on people.

I mean, look, people… That’s a whole other thing, should you get a vaccine, should you not. When I say they’re done president vaccines, I mean with the drive to possibly mandate them. Here is a doc on CNN, of course, who’s telling you, maybe we gotta actually make this stuff mandatory.

JONATHAN REINER: I do think, uh, it’s time to start, uh, mandating vaccines. And I think that private industry and private organizations will do that. You know, at GW University where I work, uh, starting, uh, this fall, you can’t be on campus unless you a “fully vaccinated.” Look. I think that we’re at — in the part of the pandemic now where the problem in this country is that 150 million Americans are not vaccinated.

Now, half of that, uh, uhh, number, uh, is less than 18 years of age, but let’s look at the adults. Seventy-five million adults have chosen not to get vaccinated. And that choice has consequences. Now, we can’t force you to take a jab in the arm, but there are many jobs, perhaps, that can prevent you from working if you decide not to get vaccinated. So I think we need to be more proactive, and I think we will see, uh, industry take the lead in this.

CLAY: What I’m troubled by when I hear this, Buck, is this is, I think, what’s also going on with Big Tech. This is government recognizing that mandates from government are not permissible but waving their arms as widely as they can and screaming for companies to do what the government feels it legally cannot do.

Which then means that many of these companies are acting default at the best of the government. In other words — and this ties in with my Big Tech argument, too, and I see a lot of this, Buck, and it scares me because I think most people out there listening to us right now would acknowledge that if the government said, “This website is not permissible for the United States citizens to visit”?

Websites, whatever it is. That would be a violation of our First Amendment law, right? But if the government — and that’s what China does. The Great Wall of China is set up so that the Chinese government controls what its citizens can and cannot see.

But what we have created with Big Tech and with these big companies and what you just heard in that clip, is we’re now having the collusion between Big Tech and government where government is allowing the same Chinese wall to be built, but it’s occurring at the behest of the government through Big Tech as opposed to government acting itself.

And that’s what I’m starting to see. That’s the entire clip that we just played. That gentleman is saying, “Oh, government can’t mandate vaccines, but schools and companies and all these other large entities should be able to be doing it.” That’s a default state action. It’s kind of what Donald Trump is suing under the First Amendment for with Big Tech.

And there’s an editorial up at the Wall Street today about it. And this is what scares me, Buck. Do you see what I’m talking about here, what’s going on, where the government is basically letting other big entities occupy a role that they couldn’t take and encouraging them to do it?

BUCK: Yeah, of course. It’s the apparatus of coercion in the private sector that they’re using to do what they know they would receive political blowback for and that’s why they’d rather have it be coming from these other places. But, as you know, the government also has a lot of sticks and carrots that it can deploy against private companies. And so that means that just because you’re a corporation, doesn’t mean the government can’t say to you —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — nice business you’ve got there selling whatever it is you’re selling. So perhaps you have to be in a place where you understand — you know, everyone should be in a place where they understand — that this is a mechanism of coercion outside of just the government mandating something to you.

And by the way, Big Business and Big Government love each other. They absolutely love each other. They work hand-in-glove. And what you see here I think is gonna continue to play on that way. I did actually want to note that the guy from CNN a few minutes ago who was talking about the vaccination rates leaves out. When he says 150 million people have not been vaccinated in America, does he not know that over a hundred million people have clearly gotten infected based on all the data?

CLAY: You and me.

BUCK: And that’s never taken into the actual results when they’re looking at vaccines and how the numbers are playing out, and that’s why when today… Just this morning before the show, Clay and I were talking about how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have new guidance for schools.

They’re saying they have to fully reopen and they say, “Even if they cannot take,” this is New York Times, “all the steps agency recommends to curb the spread of the coronavirus, a major turn in a public health crisis in which childhood education has emerged as a political flash point…” They’re still supposed to open fully, but you’re still supposed to maximum up if you’re not vaccinated.

CLAY: Which leads to this question as part of it. So this is breaking news. First of all, this news should have come out last year. This guidance because we know that the threat to kids is virtually zero. There was a big study, Buck, that came out of England, and they looked at all the kids that they knew had been covid positive, and almost none of them…

I think I did the math. If a kid got covid, what were the odds that that kid would actually die of covid? It was .0000127%. In other words, there’s like a 99.99999% chance if your kid got covid they would be okay. Your kid’s more in danger driving to and from school.