CLAY: One guy who has been a stalwart defender of freedom and liberty and American virtue through all the last 18 months is Governor Ron DeSantis.

BUCK: I thought you were talking about me.

CLAY: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: I’m a little disappointed now, but okay.

CLAY: You and me both obviously fit that criteria. But, Governor DeSantis, there’s a lot of lecturing and ridiculing. You’ve probably seen some of these studies, “Oh, this guy said he would never get covid and now he’s got covid, and here’s a picture of him in an ICU ward.” And you’re saying, “Is that really the kind of media that we want?” DeSantis talked a little bit about that. Let’s listen.

DESANTIS: We obviously have some people that are not vaccinated that have been admitted to hospitals. Are you gonna sit there…? Are you gonna sit there and…? Are you gonna sit there and criticize or are we gonna try to treat and try to help the folks? You know, I just sick of this judgment. I’m sick of the judgmental stuff on some of this stuff. Nobody’s trying to get ill here, okay? It’s a very… You can… There’s people there were hermits for a year and a half that wore six masks and did that and still contracted it, okay? So let’s just be real here and let’s just… Let’s not indulge these things that somehow, it’s their fault for not doing it.

BUCK: He illustrates two really important things here, Clay. One is that the media is on a straight jihad against DeSantis because Florida has become the beacon of freedom. It’s in the middle of the pack in covid deaths per hundred thousand, despite staying open. If lockdowns were so good, Florida should be far and away the worst. But you know that Sweden has basically no covid tests happening right now? Sweden never locked down. Remember we used to talk about Sweden a lot?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They also lied about how he had some special deal with Publix which, is a very well-known chain all across Florida that didn’t even get first access. So they’re trying to smear him. But, Clay, there’s another part of this, too. There’s this very weird, “Oh, if you get covid now, it’s your fault” thing, and that’s been around for a while.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And it just goes to show you that virtue signaling can eat away at some parts of the human brain. No one’s getting covid because they’re a bad person or they did something wrong. This is luck or bad luck of the draw. Even when I got sick with covid, I remember people asked me, “What’d you do?” Like I was in a drunk driving accident. “Why didn’t you know you’d had too many?” or something.

I’m saying, I was walking around. I got sick a year into covid, and I was walking around doing the stupid crap that de Blasio’s been making us do and all the lockdowners have the whole time. But they need to create this moral “us” and “them,” and they do it with DeSantis, of course, for political reasons, but they do it with everybody.

CLAY: It’s never existed, to my knowledge, in the history of a virus. A virus. Let’s talk about the influence, you never sit around, by and large, and you’re saying, “I got the flu! God, I blame so many other people who got me the flu.” First of all, you usually don’t know where you get it. That’s how viruses work. You may be exposed multiple times and not get it, and then you get a short dose of sudden exposure and you get it.

We all know how viruses work. But there is a moralizing going on now that didn’t exist before, and I think DeSantis is hitting on that. Every time I pull up Twitter, it feels like there’s somebody trending and the trending story is, “This person said that he wasn’t gonna get the covid vaccine and now he’s got a covid and he’s really sick, and here’s a picture of him in an ICU ward,” and the responses, if you look at ’em, are, “Good for him. He deserves to die,” and I’m looking at this saying, “What is going on here that this has ever been created?”

BUCK: And there are breakthrough cases. There are people who, for truly and universally understood medical reasons can’t really get the vaccine.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s rare. That’s very, very rare, but it does exist.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And you do see it this. You see this, “Oh, well…” and particularly if it’s somebody who’s maybe a little bit on the younger end, they say, “Ha! See? It’s not just elderly!”

CLAY: It happens to you, too!”

BUCK: I had a friend who years ago — very healthy young woman, I think she was 26 years old. She died in 24 hours from the flu.

CLAY: Yes. It happens.

BUCK: This can happen to anyone in any number of contexts, but there is this psychosis that the left has with, this is about being good or bad people.

CLAY: It’s morality.

BUCK: And the good people are the ones that wear the two masks. They mask up the kids at home. They get the shot, they get another shot, they get a shot every six months after that. They’re terrified all the time. They don’t want to leave their homes. They don’t want live their lives.

CLAY: They mask with their kids in their house.

BUCK: And if you’re not one of those people, you know what ultimately it comes down to? You make them feel — at some level — really insecure, because, at some point, this does just turn into lack of an understanding of risk and cowardice. There is a cowardice to masking up little kids in school. There’s a cowardice to being unwilling to speak the truth about what we’re really seeing.

CLAY: Not only that, it’s just mindless insanity on all of these levels right now.