CLAY: I believe the ultimate battleground state in 2022, if I had to just pick one — and I know there are many, but if I had to just pick one — it would be Georgia, because you have a big battle between Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia and Stacey Abrams on the governor’s race, and then you have Herschel Walker going up against the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is currently the senator. So you have a big Senate race that could decide the fate of who controls the Senate, and then you have a governor’s race.

Stacey Abrams, who sits on a board advocating to defund the police, has spent over $520k on private security guards in the past four months. https://t.co/d9rGbz6WFZ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 7, 2022

And if Stacey Abrams were to win, I think Brian Kemp is right: She would use that as a steppingstone to run for president from the state of Georgia. Stacey Abrams sits, Buck, on the board of a group that has advocated to defund the police. This is the Marguerite Casey Foundation. They have supported defunding the police. What is interesting — and I gotta give the New York Post credit on this.

Stacey Abrams’ Georgia campaign for governor has spent $520,000 and change just since December of 2021 to April of 2022. So in, basically, a four- to five-month window of this governor’s campaign, Stacey Abrams has averaged spending over $100,000 a month for private security protection. Your reaction to sitting on the board, defund the police, Stacey Abrams — who, remember, also wanted all kids to be wearing masks and said Georgia is the worst state to live in in the entire country. The fact that she has spent over a half million dollars on private security while saying that others don’t deserve the right to police is what, Buck Sexton?

BUCK: Well, obviously we see the hypocrisy here, which is true of so many of the gun grabbers. Anybody who has made a big show in politics of their desire to make it harder for law-abiding people to get guns on the national level, if they’re a big enough politician or rich enough guy or gal, you find that they have armed security, sometimes privately paid for, but often paid for by the taxpayer.

And it makes you wonder, why aren’t those police, so to speak, defunded? You know, why is it that there are some people who deserve to feel safe as they walk around? Remember, even armed security isn’t a guarantee, right? So we could always say… ‘Cause they’ll tell people, well, a concealed carry permit or being able to open carry isn’t something that necessarily will save you and they’ll point to some case or statistic or whatever. Yeah, but you got a shot.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You got a chance. You have the possibility of it. But Stacey Abrams has built a massive career already on fraud and lies. This is actually completely on brand for the woman who would be the actual governor of Georgia instead of the fake governor of Georgia if Democrats are able to pull it off this fall. I certainly hope that that is not the case. But there’s also something really unsettling, to put it mildly, about the mentality of so many of these Democrats right now who act like defund the police…

Okay, they’re not yelling it anymore. They’re not shouting it the same way. That was a maniacal, civilization-destroying idea. Getting rid of cops in America today would destroy our society faster than almost anything. Maybe getting rid of all fossil fuels would destroy it faster, actually, because we would just all starve. But getting rid of police is crazy. And I will say, it is one of my big disappointments with the way that the American people voted the last time around.

In 2020, instead of being in a moral panic about racial politics, they should have seen that the BLM movement and defund the police was going to be disastrous for everybody, particularly black Americans, particularly minorities who live in high-crime neighborhoods. And it was. And there has been no real accountability for this yet, Clay. You know, it’s almost tough to pick. We talk about covid. What they did on defund the police I would also argue that alone should be enough for them to get destroyed. If there aren’t rivers of Democrat tears on Election Day, we haven’t done our jobs.

CLAY: I’ll even defend the choice between at least initially with covid there was some uncertainty about what was the best choice to make. Defunding the police never had any legitimate basis whatsoever. We knew what was going to happen, right? Because we had seen high-crime America before when we didn’t support our police, and so the fact that there are thousands more people dead as a result is the consequence of the fear.

The fear that is out there of being called racist is so pronounced — especially in highly educated white society in particular — that there is no willingness to even mention any facts that might contradict the idea that American racism is so founded in policing that we have to do away with them in order to make people safe. The perfect distillation of this, Buck, is remember when Senator Tom Cotton wrote on the New York Times op-ed page, we should call in security, meaning the troops.

BUCK: National Guard. Call the National Guard.

CLAY: Call the National Guard in to help deal with the rioting that was going on all over the country, and they fired the New York Times editorial page leader for even allowing that to occur. And then what’s the first thing that they did after January 6th happened? They called in the National Guard and used them to help provide security. But that idea — they said — calling in the National Guard, was racist because it would put minority lives in danger to allow our National Guard to work.

BUCK: I’ll be very clear with everybody. And I want everyone to remember this. You won’t hear this, I don’t think, anywhere else, and it’s important. The defund the police ideology that the left espouses is always actually situational. They want to defund local law enforcement so that they’re unable to protect people from rapes, assaults, murders — ’cause we need to suffer through that as a society because the left views all crime as a collective problem. It’s not individuals who are suffering. Oh, hey want to do that. But, Clay, they don’t actually want to defund the police when it comes to using the FBI —

CLAY: No they want to more fund it.

BUCK: — to raid the homes of the political enemies of the regime.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: They don’t want to defund police, not in the slightest, when it comes to wrestling pastors out of their churches for “exposing peopling to covid!” by actually trying to exercise their First Amendment constitutional rights. They have no problem with police coming in to arrest people for failure to show a vaccine passport in New York City, which happened.

They have no problem with people being wrestled to the ground on airplanes by cops for not wearing a mask. So they’re actually not even consistent among the defund the police crowd. They want the force of the state. They want the boot on your throat when they want it. They just don’t want there to actually be authority that is armed and capable of enforcing the law to protect us from everyday crime. That we all have to suffer through.

CLAY: Yeah. They’re fine with people being tackled and arrested for not wearing masks appropriately, but they’re not okay with police pursuing violent criminals aggressively or with district attorneys bringing heavy levels of charges against constantly cyclical, violent criminals. It really is a mind disease that is without any sort of justification at all.

In fact, I think defund the police is the single dumbest political slogan of our lives in that there is zero argument in favor of it. Buck, you could say, “Hey, we need higher taxes ’cause we want to pay for X or Y.” I think climate change is all bunk, as do you. But you can argue, “Hey, as a part of the Green New Deal we need more windmills and solar energy or whatever.” We can dispute that. There is not a single argument that defund the police in any way makes sense.

BUCK: I want to also remind everybody, Clay, that “defund” was the workshopped phrase. Defund was the one that they actually were pushing, the anti-cop left, which at its core just racial Marxists. They want to use the same tactics of the radical Marxists of the past, but instead of class, it is along race lines. That is exactly what they do. That’s the whole game. But, Clay, they’re looking to pull apart our society, and to do so they actually want to abolish police.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And you heard AOC, remember. She wasn’t saying defund ICE originally. No, she parrots. That’s her job. She just spouts the slogans of the far left, and she was saying, “Abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” and if you speak to people who are truly in the leftist movement, they’ll say, “Well, actually I want to be an abolitionist of police.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Now, notice they use the term “abolitionist” because of the connection of the righteous cause of the abolition of slavery. And then you look at the 1619 Project, for example, which had this whole connection of, “Where do police come from? Slave patrols!” This was the argument the left was making. So it was actually the abolition of police that they were hoping to get to, and defund was a midway stop. And you and I are sitting here saying, defund the police is insane.

CLAY: And it’s directly leading to thousands of people who would otherwise have been alive being dead. The rate of violent crime —

BUCK: And majority in the black community. The majority of people who were killed as a result of the undermining of cops are black. Young black men have died because of this.

CLAY: Black Lives Matter has led to more young, black deaths than any political movement in the twenty-first century by far. Not even close.

BUCK: Folks, we’re just telling you what you know is true and what you can see is true in the data. But they’ve got probably another January 6th hearing coming any day now over on the left. That’s what they’re focused on.