The Popular New F-Word Frightening the Libs in Canada

CLAY: I want to talk about the Canadian truckers here for a moment. CBC News, which is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, have a headline that they put up yesterday. The headline… I’m not making this up. Go check it out on my Twitter feed right now. “The word has become common among far-right groups, experts say.” This word? Oh, my! A lot of you out there are thinking, “Oh, my gosh. What could the word be?” “The word has become common among far-right groups, experts say.” The word? “Freedom.”

BUCK: The F-word!

CLAY: The F-word. The new F-word in Canada is “freedom.” Now, some positive news here; then we’re gonna unpack Bill Maher just destroying Justin Trudeau. But I saw right before we came on you were giving us an update on Washington, D.C. Ontario, which I believe… Again, my Canadian knowledge is not very good. I apologize to all of our Canadian listeners. I believe Ontario is the most populous of the Canadian 13 provinces.

BUCK: Look at you with the Canadian knowledge.

CLAY: I could be totally wrong on that. Look it up and see if I’m correct. But Ontario has announced that they are going to be removing many of the restrictions that exist — (interruption) I am correct on that — in Canada, which is yet another win for these Canadian truckers as they continue to fight for the big F-word, “freedom.”

BUCK: Before we… Yeah, I just want to go back to the F-word, “freedom,” for a second here, and how the CBC unironically is like, “There are all these bad people using the ‘freedom’ word.” This is not new. One of the things that the left does very well and people on the right, because we believe in individual agency and choice — and, dare I say, “freedom” — we’re much less likely to try to police the language that others use.

They police language all the time, and they’ll even get to extremes where they’ll take terms that are entirely innocuous and try to make them problematic, try to make them something. So they’ll not only change their language to hide… We went from “illegal alien” to “illegal immigrants” to “undocumented,” right? That’s one of the most clear examples of this. There are tons of political speech examples.

But you remember, Clay, when they were doing the targeting — and this was a real thing, everybody, I try to remind folks of — when the IRS was targeting opponents of the Obama Regime, you know what one of the primary things they looked for when they were doing their, you know, stopping of essentially the Tea Party groups? “Patriot.”

If you had the word “patriot” anywhere in your nonprofit application, you are getting dinged. You were getting held up. You were getting audited. So “patriot” became a signifier for bad people, and now in Canada “freedom…” Isn’t it fascinating? “Freedom” is becoming a signifier for bad people. Just like, by the way, anyone who uses the term “undermining our democracy” ever also puts their pronouns in their email signature and also walks around with two masks on outside alone. These things all go together.

CLAY: Unless they’re at the Super Bowl, in which case they don’t wear masks at all.

BUCK: Good point.

CLAY: Bill Maher… Did you see also, Buck, by the way, Bill Maher went out I think was in San Francisco to do a comedy routine and got heckled by the crowd because he’s willing to challenge prevailing left-wing orthodoxies?

BUCK: I would say he’s really kind of a libertine. He’s kind of a maximum liberty guy on a lot of issues. Not on everything, but a lot of issues.

CLAY: Here he is blasting Justin Trudeau. Tthis is from Real Time, whatever that… I think it’s Real Time, right? His show on HBO, blasting Justin Trudeau for sounding like Hitler.

BUCK: First of all, what he’s saying is so obviously true that that’s accuracy. That was Marianne Williamson. Remember when she ran for president?

CLAY: She’s gonna run for president again, I think.

BUCK: I just did Greg Gutfeld’s show with her, which was interesting.

CLAY: Oh, really. She did Fox News? I didn’t even know that.

BUCK: She did. She went on there. She is a nice lady with some loony ideas. She’s got some loony ideas. But she’s a nice lady. I am cordial to her, and she’s cordial to me.

CLAY: I give her credit for doing Fox News because, look, it’s the biggest audience out there —

BUCK: — in late-night TV, which is crushing the Colbert show in a lot of nights, a lot of the demo. But, Clay, on the point about Trudeau, can we just take a step back? We had Dr. Marty Makary on the show last week. They’ve been making people take the shot in this country and in other countries like Canada, irrespective of natural immunity, which means that in millions of cases they have been forcing people to do something for which there is literally no good-faith medical argument whatsoever to do. None. Put aside the individual agency and freedom from vaccine argument as a separate argument. I just mean making people who already had covid — like making people who just had Omicron get another shot or get a booster — is outrageous.

CLAY: It is totally crazy and there’s no scientific basis to support it at all which is why when we’re talking about Ontario lifting its restrictions, many of them — and Washington, D.C. doing it as well, starting on March 1st — my question is, how quickly is the idea that you have to show a vaccine passport to, for instance, take your kid to get Chicken McNuggets at McDonald’s going to vanish?

I say that because for all the people out there who are arguing this is necessary, never in any of our lives have we ever had to show proof of vaccination, to my knowledge, Buck, for anything other than maybe going to school, right, and/or maybe going to college. But to enter a business, the idea that you would have to show that you had been vaccinated has never existed.

That very idea itself, it’s radical, and we need to talk about it as being a radical proposition and a personal imposition on so many different people as it pertains to their individual freedoms and their health rights. Regardless of what you think about covid, the idea that you have to show your vaccines to go to McDonald’s is crazy.

BUCK: They’ve also never wrestled with the concept that I think is really important, and this is where you get into the epidemiology. I rely on doctors just like you do that I know to bring me up to speed to these things, right? I have no medical training, and I just sit here, and I want everyone to understand that when you’re talking about measles and mumps and rubella and smallpox and these other vaccination campaigns in the past.

Those are stable viruses. They do not mutate, and they do not mutate with anywhere near the speed that we’ve seen with covid. To try to get herd immunity for a virus that seems to mutate about every, what, at least every six months so far, you’re gonna be playing catch-up forever because the last version of the vaccine doesn’t protect you from at least getting it.

It may help your body fight it off, but from getting the most recent variant. This was wrong-headed from the very beginning, and there’s animal reservoirs for this virus, too, which means that it can mutate and spread from the animal population to the human, and American, population.

CLAY: We’re never going to get rid of it, right? And that’s why anybody who’s trying to compare this to measles or mumps, it is more akin, frankly, to the flu shot.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: That what it is.

BUCK: Have you been saying this for about 18 months? I feel like I’ve been saying this for about 18 months, and here we are now.

CLAY: Well, if you ever mention covid in relationship with the flu, they would censor you back in the day, with the idea that you could even compare the two was completely unacceptable. That’s where we are. Covid has become a new flu, and it’s never going away — and sooner or later, we have to get used to living with it.