CLAY: A lot of discussion about the tornados that swept through the mid-South and Illinois late Friday night/early Saturday morning across much of the country, Kentucky bearing the brunt of that tornado onslaught. And for many of you out there, I know you have seen the videos and seen the tragic results of that tornado line that swept through the mid-South, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Illinois a little bit — all of that area — Alabama and beyond.

I was in the middle of that, Buck, Friday night in bed. About 3 o’clock the storms came through Nashville, which had fairly significant damage as well, and the whole house got woken up around 2:30 or 3 a.m. Everybody, the tornado sirens are going off. Everybody gets out of bed. Put on the television. See where exactly the tornado warnings are. I know a lot of you in our listening area may have ended up in your storm shelter of some form or fashion.

Get the kids sometimes — if the threat’s near you — put the pillows and the beds inside of a pantry closet or wherever, bathroom, wherever you may have been inside the interior of your home. And it’s particularly always… It feels like it’s a high rate of the time, Buck, when you live in a tornado area, that tornado threats come through in the middle of the night which makes it a little bit scarier because you really can’t see what’s going on around you. The lightning flashes are going off.

Certainly, our prayers are with so many people in our listening area who had significant consequences, whose family had significant acquaintances. Friends and family lost lives. There were a lot of people inside at some of these Amazon factory warehouses it appears that were working when the storms hit. And so for anybody who lives in sort of the tornado universe — the Tornado Alley, Midwest, mid-South where tornadoes come through on a somewhat regular basis — it is regularly chilling, terrifying.

Now, a positive, Buck, is that the data reflects that despite all the histrionics, thanks to our ability to forecast tornadoes and severe weather conditions, the number of people dying from severe weather is actually declining typically over time, over the last couple of decades, over the last 50 years or so. You wouldn’t know it by the way the media covers it.

BUCK: They immediately jump to, when there is a tragedy involving a natural disaster, climate change. Almost right away. Here’s the FEMA director. Just understand, this is Biden’s FEMA director. So you don’t get this job — you don’t get any job in the federal government, really — unless you’re always spouting the line about climate change. Here she is.

DEANNE CRISWELL: This is gonna be our new normal, and the effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation. We’re taking a lot of efforts at FEMA to work with communities to help reduce the impacts that we’re seeing from these severe weather events and help to develop system-wide projects that can help protect communities.

BUCK: Okay. Now, let’s just start with, “This is going to be the new normal.” No. That’s not true. This is an aberrant event. Based on all the data, you can see this was a particularly bad series of tornadoes, right? But in terms of tornadoes overall and tornado season you can have data back to 1950 that exists, you can see, pretty consistent. Sometimes you get a really bad one or you get a few really bad ones, but overall, you have a roughly similar number and of roughly similar severity.

There is no trend. Remember when they were talking about hurricanes and climate change after Katrina? It was, “Oh, my gosh!” Okay. Well, then they actually looked at the reality of whether this was making hurricanes more frequent… You know, they say things, Clay, too like, “The colds are colder, the wets are wetter, the hots are hotter.” They’ll say this out loud like that’s not completely absurd.

How do you even measure that? What are they even talking about? But it’s an opportunity to control people and to assert more of the federal government spending and power over your life to combat this the same way that… It’s the same mentality with having kids sit outside to combat covid, right? It’s not gonna do anything but they’re making you do it, so it makes them feel better. I mean, even Biden got in on this right away.

CLAY: Yeah. Look, it is super political. This is my biggest issue I would say with the internet in general. Something happens, and the biggest legacy of the internet so far seems to be there’s a massive rush to figure out the blame. Something happens. It can be an aberrant, unusual aberration of an event and immediately it has to be calculated and analyzed and someone is to blame. We see this every time there is a school shooting, right?

What’s the race of the perpetrator? What did their parents believe? Everything immediately becomes a larger-scale story, and I barely had time to wake up the next morning after we were up dealing with tornadoes during the night with the kids and everything else, before I get on social media and am immediately being told this happened because of global warming.

BUCK: Right. People are upset. People are, in some cases, heartbroken who lost their homes, lost perhaps a family member.

CLAY: Don’t even hardly focus on that.

BUCK: And there’s not even a moment of, let’s all just come together as a nation, as a state, as a community and let’s take care of people. Immediately, Joe Biden starts with the climate change stuff right away, without even thinking about it.

BIDEN: All that I know is that the intensity of the weather across the board has some impact on the consequence of the warming of the planet and the climate change. The specific impact on these specifics storms I can’t say at this point. I’m gonna be asking the EPA and others to take a look at that, but the fact is that, uhh…

BUCK: Clay, they can’t tell specific impact on a specific storm. Are we all supposed to be idiots? One weather event they’re gonna give you the specific impact of climate change on this? And notice how he starts out with the “All I know is that climate change, the warming of the earth…”

Can we just get clarity? Is it warming or is it changing? Because they did the whole changing thing because they didn’t have the warming that they needed to show over a period of time, and this goes into my basic thesis when dealing with the American left today: They’re just wrong about everything. They’re just wrong about everything!

CLAY: It’s just particularly frustrating to have things that cannot be directly correlated immediately correlated and made political. The focus here should be on helping these communities to get cleaned up — and we know, ’cause many of these communities are listeners of the show. We would encourage anybody out there to be able to do whatever they can to help with the entire cleanup process and everything else.

But I live sort of in a tornado alley, and I will say this” They have gotten incredibly good — incredibly good in terms of weather — at notifying you exactly where tornadoes are, exactly what you need to do to try to help and make your family as safe as they possibly can be, and this has been going on my entire life. Tornadoes have been sweeping through the country.

And again, what I would point to is, thanks to the technology that we have developed to a large extent — and probably to homes being built to higher standards on some level (I would imagine that’s also helped) — the number of people that die from tornadoes and severe-weather-related events are down substantially in the past several decades. Do you think that the average Democrat out who hears about climate change all the time is aware that fewer people are dying from hurricanes, from tornadoes, from earthquakes, from whatever cause out there?

BUCK: All natural causes.

CLAY: They’re down precipitously. I don’t think most people are aware of that. There is a sign of strength here. Here’s the other thing, Buck. Do we really think that we’re going to stop tornadoes from happening by something that we do? I mean, that seems to me to be an outrageous claim. If you are arguing that we are responsible for climate change, you’re also arguing that based on things that we do, we can diminish the number of tornadoes that are existing? That seems to me to be a rather outlandish claim that whatever we are doing is going to somehow diminish the number of tornadoes. I just… I flat-out don’t believe that —

BUCK: It’s absurd.

CLAY: — in the same way —

BUCK: You’re being gentle about it.

CLAY: — we’re not going to change how much rain is going to happen.

BUCK: It’s crazy. It’s crazy. We all know it’s crazy. This is nuts. This is the same line of logic they use to say that we have to have all this money in the Build Back Better plan. We have to spend all this money in the Build Back Better plan for things like “tree equity,” because that’s part of the combating climate change agenda that is inserted into this, the Green New Deal aspects of it. They want to spend a tremendous amount of money — essentially use the climate as an excuse for wealth redistribution.

It’s just green Marxism instead of a red Marxism and this is a central tenet now of the Democrat Party. You have people at the defense department who are talking about climate change as the primary threat we face. We got Russia maybe about to invade Ukraine. We got China thinking long and hard about what they can get away with in regard to Taiwan, and we have the leadership of the United States military talking about the trans agenda and the Green New Deal and climate change, as if that’s something they need to be focused in on.

I actually was speaking to friends of mine in the military over this weekend and I said, “Is this real?” They said, “Yeah, this is absolutely real. It’s from the top.” Barack Obama gave a speech when he was still commander-in-chief — I think it was the Coast Guard Academy, not Naval Academy — where he said the biggest threat the military faces, the biggest national security, was specific, national security threat was climate change. This is a lunacy, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But it’s the same mind-set of people that think that the apparatus of the elites is on their side so it doesn’t matter if basic common sense can allow you to see through it right away. And this is what we have here. And it’s also just gross. Something horrible has just happened and we should all just take a moment to say, “Let’s find everybody, get everybody help, get everybody back on their feet.” It’s your community, Clay, right? It’s right in your backyard.

CLAY: Yes. Well, and it’s also emblematic of larger human failures. Throughout history, mankind has tried to in some way influence the weather. Throughout history… If you look at the way that Stonehenge may have been built, if you look at what the Mayans did, it was all related to celestial heavenly events and very often needing more rain, needing less rain, and how the climate overall impacts their ability to have a normal harvest and a normal life.

And there’s a lack of human control that is embedded still in the idea that we can control the weather, and we can’t. And so the concept that if we spend more money on Green New Deal, somehow tornadoes and hurricanes are going to become less likely is, frankly, absolute balderdash if you look at what the data is reflecting.