CLAY: Last night, you probably didn’t pay attention — I didn’t watch it — but they had the NBA Draft Lottery. You know, the worst teams get the best picks. It really does feel to me — and I think we need to start to get this idea circulating more — that the Biden administration is trying to tank for the number one pick, because it feels like they’re trying to lose, Buck, in everything.

BUCK: It’s like the plot of Major League, which is a movie.

CLAY: Oh, a great movie.

BUCK: Pick the worst team possible so you can relocate to Miami — which, by the way, not the worst plan I’ve ever heard.

CLAY: Not a bad move. Now they’re not even the Cleveland Indians, by the way. They’re the Cleveland Guardians because the word Indians is offensive.

BUCK: Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that. So there seems to be a clear effort underway from the Democrat Party — and it’s a long-standing effort — to control speech. That’s something we’ll be talking about more here, to either police speech or to ban it. They’re quite open about they want more internet monitoring of “extremist…”

So interesting, by the way, Clay, because I come from a counterterrorism analysis background from within the government, and I remember Democrats were always the ones who were saying, “Hold on a second. We don’t want to stigmatize anybody by having certain chat rooms monitored or certain…” They were always —

CLAY: It is wild to think about how much the Democrat Party has changed when it comes to issues of speech.

BUCK: But think about the reversal.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Even in the era of Al-Qaeda and then ISIS when jihadist plots were a relatively regular phenomenon, unfortunately, in America and the West. We had mass-casualty terror plots. I had to work against some of those plots specifically. But there was always this concern about the different guidelines, about where you could put — in the case of law enforcement — an undercover operative and what they could report on and who they…

It was always the Democrats, always the Democrats were saying, “How dare you look at this group! How dare you stigmatize this group!” Even when sometimes it was a bunch of guys sitting around saying, “Let’s get some Stinger missiles and shoot them at planes.” They were always taking a very “don’t surveil” position, right? They were always the ones that were holding back on the state apparatus of that. Now they want to expand surveillance, as if that would stop this obvious psychopath, this true psychopath.

CLAY: Yeah. I know.

BUCK: I mean, psychopathy is a real thing. It’s a real medical diagnosis. This kid was clearly psychopathic. And it just feels more and more, Clay, like we can’t even have a discussion about fundamental agreement areas in America. If we now say to Democrats, “Hey, we can agree that free speech is a foundational principle and that includes speech that offends you and it actually does even include hate speech,” they will say, “No. They will say that’s not true.

“Free speech does not — government-protected free speech — does not include things that are hateful. I thought this was so interesting.” It’s like we’re living in an alternative universe. This was on The View, which, as you know, I don’t even have a clever thing to say other than to say it’s the dumbest show on TV. Here, Clay. React to this one. This is Sunny Hostin telling everybody the Republicans are super extreme. (impression) Democrats, we’re like, so moderate.

The View really is the dumbest show on television https://t.co/TqLRt6aoTo

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) May 17, 2022

CLAY: I legitimately wonder whether these women are even smart enough to realize how dumb they sound. I can speak to this pretty straightforward. I know, Buck, Elon Musk shared the meme where he showed himself and where he stood on the political sort of spectrum in 2008, and then it shows the left wing of the Democratic Party basically running out of control.

And he’s now moved to the right side of the political equation. And I said yesterday or the day before where Elon Musk said he was gonna vote Republican for president for the first time ever in 2024, I think he basically said, or maybe it was vote for Republicans in 2022. I know exactly what that feels like. Because that’s me. We talked about this before. You, when you were 12, you’re like, “Hey, I’m all-in on this.”

BUCK: “I want to dress like William F. Buckley!”

CLAY: Yeah, you were, which is a credit to you ’cause you’re growing up in Manhattan, of all places, where you’re less comfortable, probably, as a conservative, almost in the entire country.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: I grew up in Tennessee where certainly it’s been a red state although it’s interesting to think about using my state as a proxy. Buck, people forget, Bill Clinton won Tennessee in 1992 and in 1996. He won Arkansas. He won Georgia. He won a lot of southern states that he would have 0% chance of winning, and by the way —

BUCK: Wasn’t Al Gore Tennessee? It was Al Gore’s state.

CLAY: Yeah, yeah. Right. And, yeah, obviously Gore was elected multiple times. But my state is kind of a rough approximation for how I have evolved politically, because Tennessee has become a Republican state. Bill Clinton 1992 and certainly Bill Clinton 1996 would be a Republican platform, and so this argument that Democrats have somehow come back towards the center is madness.

Remember Bill Clinton was who rescued the Democrat Party from losing all the time by being a centrist and sort of embracing that triangulation aspect. But the fact that you would even try to argue on The View that Democrats are the party of moderation is madness to me. And I don’t even understand if those women are smart enough to realize how dumb they sound, because if they are, then they’re playing a role. But I think they believe, because they’re all so dumb, what they are actually saying.

BUCK: You have people that are going around on national TV, Clay — and we’ll spend a little bit of time explaining how not just crazy this is, but destructive it is — and they really want to make it where the Republican Party is a terrorist party.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s what they’re trying to do.

BUCK: I mean, as if that is based in any reality whatsoever. But this is how hateful and insane… This is mainstream among a lot of Democrats now, to think that Republicans, because of January 6th, because of Trump-Russia collusion. I mean, just think about it. If they were willing to even say, “We were totally wrong about Russia stealing the election and Trump working with Russia,” that would be…

That admission would be so helpful, I think, in bringing the country back to a place where, “Okay, we can have normal discussions now.” They’ve never done that. They’ve never done it over covid, by the way, and the lockdowns and the mask mandates and vaccines, either. They may on mass mobilizing around what you see on social media as the current thing. They mass mobilize in the Democrat Party. It turns out that they’re wrong, what they said wasn’t true, and they just move on to the next thing. It’s always just about attack the opposition with everything you have. Never, “Maybe we shouldn’t have done that. Maybe that was wrong.”

CLAY: And, by the way, we need to mention covid, too, because the numbers that are coming out… You and I been texting about this some and we need to probably get Alex Berenson on again. I know he was on Friday, but to talk about some of these data in detail. It’s getting increasingly difficult to argue, when you see all of the states that are the most vaccinated and the most boosted consistently have the most people hospitalized and the most people testing positive for covid, that’s getting increasingly difficult to be able to explain away, Buck.

And I don’t… Increasingly what I’m seeing is, there’s almost a refusal to even acknowledge that that data exists, right? Like, remember for a long time what they tried to say was, “Oh, look at all the dumb red state Trump voters! They’re not wearing masks. Look at the covid rates there.” Look at the covid rates right now, and the places that are the most vaccinated, the most masked, the most boosted are overwhelmingly posting the highest numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and, increasingly, deaths.