BUCK: Clay had this great idea that we should just… Look, instead of talking about “The Fauch” and what he’s saying at any given moment, why don’t we get him here to join us? We’ve had former President Trump on the show. We’ve had a couple senators and experts.

And, Clay, usually when we invite someone on to a platform of this size — and we thank Rush for building a platform of this size and now we are entrusted to try to continue the fight in his name, in the house that Rush built. But, usually, when we invite people into Rush’s house, so to speak, they come.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: What happened with Dr. Fauch? We put out “The Fauch” signal, and he’s not answering.

CLAY: Yeah. So, I think this is significant. And if you heard David Zweig on in the second hour of the show, what we want to have on this show is the most honest, fact-based intelligent radio show — and maybe show in general ’cause I think TV shows have gone off the rails a lot of times in the country, right? That’s our goal. That’s a high aspiration.

That is the mantle that Rush handed to us, and that’s the one we’re trying to rise to every single day. Doesn’t mean we’re gonna do it. We’re on 15 hours a week. Sometimes you’re gonna hear us and be like these idiots, what in the world were they thinking for 15 minutes or an hour or even a show? We might not deliver for you every single day.

Doesn’t mean we’re not trying to. And, as a part of that, I think we owe it to all of you if we’re gonna be talking about and the places where we disagree with him and playing clips of his interviews everywhere else in the media. He’s on MSNBC every day. He’s on CNN every day. He’s on every left-wing media outlet you can find.

We’ll respectfully extend an offer to him to ask the questions directly to him that we are talking about every single day. So I said, “Hey, let’s extend an offer to him. Maybe he will respect the audience that we have and respect all of you enough, even if he doesn’t respect Buck and I, to want to address you directly.”

Instead, he has rejected us. So, I am going to bring in Dr. Fauci’s perfect doppelganger here, a graduate of the same high school as The Fauchmeiser himself. This is Dr. Buck Fauci who is here to respond. Now, while Buck is going to be doing a voice here, right?

BUCK: Yes. (laughing)

CLAY: This is an actual email. You’re not faking this email. This is the actual email response —

BUCK: From the Office of Communications.

CLAY: — from the office of Dr. Fauci himself. Here we got it.

BUCK: (impression) “Hi. Thank you for checking in, and my apologies for the delayed response. We appreciate your interest. However, as you’ve noted, Dr. Fauci is currently overwhelming busy, and we will not be available for this interview. Best, Office of Communications and Government Relations” and Mitigation and Droplets, et cetera, et cetera, Dr. Fauch. Uh, Clay, can I just say, in media-speak when they tell you —

CLAY: Oh, gosh. That’s amazing.

BUCK: — not available for this interview, not available this week or whatever. This is the equivalent of when I ask a woman out when she says, “I’m really busy these days.” That means the Buckster’s reach has exceeded his grasp.

CLAY: You’ve outkicked your coverage in the dating world.

BUCK: I’ve outkicked my coverage, indeed. Fauci here, his office just straight up telling us no chance, guys. And, you know, I just think it makes me kind of sad, because if he came on, I give you my word, it would not be a grumpy Buck day (’cause that could happen). I would be — I would be respectful but firm in the questions I would ask, and I really do want to be able to ask him certain questions that I know the media won’t. Looks like we’re not getting that chance.

CLAY: And again, I just want to emphasize what he said. The guy is — and I gotta be careful so that I don’t curse. The guy is full of you know what, right? When he says that he is overwhelmingly busy, I want you to pay attention to how many outlets he will make the time to appear on. The guy does everybody who shows up with a mic and is going to gently caress all of his idiocy.

He’ll make time for anybody at MSNBC. He will make time for anyone at CNN. It doesn’t matter who they are. He will show up. He might well show up tonight after saying he’s overwhelmingly busy. And again, I do think it’s funny that Buck points out, he’s not available ever.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: Like, he’s so busy that he can never speak to you at all at any point in the future.

BUCK: The biggest radio show in the country, and he doesn’t have time to speak to us. I just would say, you look at CNN and how often he’s on there, you have to wonder, do they have a cot for him in the greenroom?

CLAY: Basically.

BUCK: Does he have, like, a place where he can sleep? ‘Cause he’s there so much, it would just make sense for him to at least have a place to stay. You know, maybe they set him up with his own bathroom and a washcloth for those long days. It’s crazy, Clay. But he’s a political operative posing as an infectious disease, nonpartisan policy adviser. That’s what “The Fauch” really is.

CLAY: And, by the way, CNN is coming after us. This is not really a surprise, but when we pointed out that Fauci said that college football games were gonna be superspreaders and that covid-19 was gonna be “feasting,” is the word that was used. Oliver Darcy at CNN said, “Where did Fauci say these games would be ‘superspreaders’?

“When asked earlier this month on CNN about the scenes of maskless fans in packed stadiums, he said he didn’t believe it was smart, but that’s not the same as declaring the games would be superspreaders.” So then we had to share with Mr. Darcy here the clip from MSNBC where he said that it was going to be a feast, and this is when he had time to appear on Joy Reid’s show. Let’s listen to this.

REID: What was your, uhhh, sort — sort of immediate thought when you saw all of those fans packed into stadiums in Texas, Wisconsin, and elsewhere? As soon as I saw it, I thought, “Covid’s about to have a feast.” What did you think?

FAUCI: I thought the same thing. I think it’s really unfortunate. I would hope that most of the people in that stadium were vaccinated. And if they were, the close congregate setting, they should have been wearing masks.

BUCK: Fauci, meanwhile, doesn’t wear masks at baseball games for very long. We’ve all seen those photos, right? But he was outdoors. Clay, when he’s agreeing so heartily with honestly one of the more ignorant cable news host — there are a lot of them that would be up for the role of most ignorant, but one of more ignorant ones — it tells you something.

CLAY: Not only that, but the fact that he’s totally wrong about this, we’re gonna be almost the only news outlet out there — I think Fox News will pick up on this, ’cause I work at Fox. But this is a big deal. And people say, “Well, why do you use this?” Because when you’re wrong about this, you are wrong at a minimum about massive outdoor crowds, right?

So this idea that you need to have vaccine passports or you need to have negative covid tests, the data reflects that all over the South cases have plummeted in the two weeks since hundreds of thousands and millions of people went to games.

BUCK: Could it be a seasonal effect that we are seeing like the one that happened last summer before the vaccines as well? Gee, maybe if we paid attention to this or were allowed to in the media pay attention to this without being shouted down or ignored all the time, we would get further in the national conversation.

I’d also say — Clay, I know you feel the same way. On this show I was talking about how a book, The Old Breed, and I said it was the basis for Band of Brothers, I meant The Pacific, the other great World War 2 HBO show. That has still bothered me to this day. Saying one thing that would… It was just a brain slip.

Band of Brothers is great, The Pacific is great, watch them both. But with the old breed for the Pacific, obviously, not Band of Brothers. But that’s been obviously bothered me still now. Fauci goes on TV and says wrong crap all the time. Have you ever seen him go on TV and say (impression), “Mea culpa. It was a late-night at MSNBC, and I was tired, and my eyelids were getting droopy, and I misread the data?” No. It’s always, “I am science.” That’s what he says.

CLAY: And I think that’s important. And I think one thing that our audience has already learned about us is we’re far from perfect. We’re gonna screw up all the time. We may call for a clip and it doesn’t show up. We may call for a clip and it’s a different clip. We may try to go to a caller and the caller might not be there. We may, as you mentioned, talk about something and get a fact wrong.

But when we get something wrong, we are going to be honest with you and say, “Hey, it was a screw up. We’re not gonna be perfect. This was 15 hours a week of live radio, and we’re here with you guys, and we’re trying to get things right.”

I always said on my old show — and I know you talked about this, too, Buck — the reason why facts matter for our purposes is, one, we don’t want to ever be factually inaccurate with you because we don’t want to spread inaccuracies. But also, we have lots of opinions.

And if your opinion is based on a fact inaccuracy, then you are going to end up with worse opinions, right? And so this is significant. Own when you are wrong. Will anybody hold Fauci accountable? This is significant, too, because what he’s trying to do is keep a lot of you from being able to go to a college football game or a high school football game or an NFL game. He doesn’t want you in a store without a mask.

BUCK: This is why I don’t feel sheepish about really trying to take Fauci to task on stuff, because the stuff that he’s doing, his bad ideas and his dishonesty are hurting people.

CLAY: A billion percent yes.

BUCK: I know he thinks he’s saving people, but the data does not support him. The actual numbers when you line it up on a timeline with his prognostications and his statements Fauci ex cathedra, right? When that happens, when you see this, you know this is a guy who people have lost their businesses because of him, people have had to get shots they didn’t need because of him.

CLAY: They haven’t been able to go to school.

BUCK: They haven’t been able to go to school. I was gonna say, have been alone and lonely and overdosed on drugs because of lockdowns which never should have happened to this country — never should have happened in any country, by the way. You see the dehumanization of the people of Australia by their own government.

They have police officers now; they should be resigning before they even think about the stuff they’re doing. Thee deploy and start firing rubber bullets at people who were just protesting — not destroying anything, not attacking anyone, protesting — against the lockdowns because the protest act itself is a violation of the lockdowns. This is what they’re willing to accept in that country.

Do you ever hear Fauci, by the way, say, “Look at the excesses! We would never do that here.” No, I think the people who really understand Fauci know that if he can see push for those things or could have, he would have, and he would sleep soundly at night knowing that he was arresting anyone listening to this with their 3-year-old screaming and crying for failure to wear a mask.

CLAY: That’s where we would be. I 100% believe we would be Australia if we didn’t have Republican governors, if we didn’t have federalism country, there would be no checks on the power of Joe Biden, the Democrats, and Dr. Fauci. They would have us locked down. I really believe that they would be arresting people for protesting the lockdowns. I think that’s where we’d be.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: “The Fauch” has emailed us again!

BUCK: What?

CLAY: Look down at your phone. After we read the response from “The Fauch…” I’m not kidding. Look at your phone. I’ll read it.

BUCK: Hold on.

CLAY: Do you want me to do it or do you want to read it in the Fauci voice?

BUCK: This is breaking news.

CLAY: Breaking news for the show.

BUCK: This is mind-blowing! What have we got here? I don’t… (laughing) Clay, I’m —

CLAY: We got a new email. So for people out there who are just tuning in, we have invited Dr. Fauci on the show. After we read The Fauch’s denial of our invitation, Fox News reached out to us and said, “Hey, we may do a story about Fauci declining to come on your show. Is that okay?” and I said, “Sure.” We read you the email that we got and now the Fauchster, his people have already reached out anew. Do you want to read this one too?

BUCK: Was this in my text or in my emails?

CLAY: You should have gotten the text too.

BUCK: Oh, wow. Hold on a second. “We received your request…”

CLAY: There you go. I need to hear it in the Fauci voice.

BUCK: (impression) “We received your request for Dr. Fauci to appear on the show. Ideally, what date and what time would he appear? I presume it will be live. But would you take caller questions? What is the total amount of time Dr. Fauci pre- and post-interview included would need to do the show? This information will help as we consider the request.” Oh, looks like the blanket we’re-gonna-ignore-you maneuver ain’t gonna fly from the NIAID, NIH comms shop.

CLAY: Sounds like… I mean, I think what’s happened is they probably are now recognizing, “Oh, this show’s kind of a big deal, and we’re getting media questions about your rejection, given the fact that Fauci appears everywhere.”