CLAY: Buck, we were right on probably the most consequential decision of the twenty-first century, which was: How do we respond to covid in this country? You, me, a massive number of people that are out there listening to us. And, unfortunately, as we have continued to discuss the fallout of the wrong-headed decisions by the lockdown crowd, by the people who wanted to shut down schools, by the people who insisted that you wear masks everywhere, all of that fallout…

And unfortunately, it’s continuing as young kids in New York City are forced to continue to wear masks. Two-year-olds are still masked up in New York City. But I saw this study, and it gives me some measure of hope that as we continue to move through this there’s going to be a reckoning. And the reckoning needs to happen in November at the ballot box, but also the reckoning needs to happen in terms of people having to acknowledge that their chosen heroes, the Dr. Faucis of the world, failed them.

I am encouraged in some level, Buck, by this because some of the places that are putting out these studies, this is not RightWingNews.com, right? This is not a necessarily outlet that you would anticipate would be coming out with this study. And the one that referencing today just came out, got a lot of attention so far this morning, Harvard did a study into education and the impact of lockdowns and remote learning — that oxymoron of remote learning — and they found that, quote:

“Gaps in math achievement by race and school poverty,” which skyrocketed all over the country predominantly in blue states, “didn’t widen in school districts like Florida and Texas that mostly kept schools open.” Two biggest red states in the country, Florida and Texas — and I’m reading directly from their study — interesting, “Gaps in math achievement” did not widen in school districts in Texas and Florida.

“Where schools remained in person, gaps did not widen.” This is racial and socioeconomic gaps. “Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure we’ve taken for granted. Our findings imply public schools truly are the balance wheel of social machinery and that that was broken by our covid responses.”

So, Buck, one of the things that needs to happen is a reckoning, and I believe that reckoning hopefully will start in November, but also these people who argued, “You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history”? Buck, they are going to be on the wrong side of history in their response to covid. It’s just a question of how long this will take for it to become a consensus opinion.

But for the Ron DeSantises of the world and the Greg Abbotts — both who are up for reelection, if you’re listening to us in Florida and Texas, as many of you are — you need to be sharing this data with your suburban mother friends, with your friends who are willing to be persuadable, and we need absolute landslides in these states to ratify the decisions that were made in these states.

BUCK: You know, I also found this data that was shared on the stats website, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight about trust in science? Did you see this?

CLAY: Yeah, I saw this graphic. Yes.

BUCK: Fascinating. Just so I can explain to everybody who’s listening, I wish I could show you this graphic. But starting in about… This is the share of Americans who said they had a great deal of confidence in the scientific community by party affiliation from 1973 to 2021. The graphic is fascinating because Democrats and Republicans are basically both in the 40% range, up and down a little bit here and there in the 1980s, 1990s. Not a lot of change.

Extreme polarization on “trust in science” is a recent and very troubling trend. pic.twitter.com/jgtYbiqVo7

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) May 8, 2022

It’s sort of Democrats and Republicans roughly call it usually less than half. I’d say, you know, 45% of Republicans had faith in science until about 2000 and then it dropped down a little bit, 40% of Democrats — and it actually dropped down quite a bit lower a few times, but anyway, overall it’s in the forties. You get to the pandemic and people who say they have “trust in science” skyrockets, like hockey stick graph, straight up, a stock going from $1 to a thousand dollars.

That’s what it looks like. All of a sudden, the Democrats go way up to 65% and Republicans start dropping off down into the thirties at the start of the pandemic. And you can see — by the way, the Democrat line is almost a straight line up, meaning that what this is showing you — and this is why I think it’s so fascinating — is that it was a political designation. This was not about what… Because it starts at the beginning of the pandemic. All of a sudden Democrats decided, “We’re the science party” and this became a personal branding issue for them.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: And what I think is so fascinating is if you go back and look at Marxism — which has a lot of similarities with the left and the Democrat Party. If you go back and look at Marxism, it is religion that pretends to be a science, and the language that it uses and the pretense of the Marxists all along was to try to create the notion that that was actually just scientific reality that they’re putting through as social theory.

When in fact, it’s really a religious belief that they are pretending is somehow rooted in reality, fact, and the inevitability of truth. And you see this with the Democrats. It’s the same thing. Science for them became a political rallying cry and the way that they all of a sudden identified with “I believe in the science.” And I’d be fascinating to see. I bet, Clay, that hasn’t dropped off because they don’t want to believe that they were part of this mob mentality of “Fauci is a genius” when he’s really a moron.

CLAY: Well, you and I have talked about before, Buck, the thing that really gets these left-wing people really triggered is the idea that they’re dumb. Right? Like they can handle almost in you other criticism, but the idea that they are a sheep, the idea that they are dumb, the idea that they have behaved in an anti-science manner — and I thought there’s a perfect metaphor. I was watching Saturday night Golden State Warriors playing against Memphis Grizzlies.

The NBA playoffs are on my kids are big John Morant fans so we’re sitting around watching this game, one guy in a 20,000-seat arena in San Francisco just about, Buck, is wearing his mask. You know who that was? King NBA lib Steve Kerr. He would wear his mask… He’s the head coach of the Golden State Warriors. In a 20,000-seat arena, virtually no one you could see wearing a mask, Steve Kerr as the head coach is wearing his mask, and what’s he doing? Constantly pulling the mask down to yell out instructions to his team and then pull the mask back up!

There is no way to justify wearing the mask. And I thought to myself, “This is Steve Kerr making it clear to all of the left-wing lunatics out there that he is their champion, he is their ride-or-die,” because I’m sitting there watching this — and I’m gonna watch it again Monday night and I’ll probably tweet about it ’cause I didn’t tweet about it on Saturday night, ’cause I want to take a picture of it.

There’s no one that you can see around him, Buck, wearing the mask. And he’s regularly, constantly pulling it down ’cause you can’t hear what anybody says when they’re wearing a mask, right, especially in a crowded arena where everybody’s yelling. And I’m thinking to myself, “He thinks and he is sending the message of, ‘I am doing what the science dictates,’ even though he looks like an absolute and complete moron by doing this.”

BUCK: This is like people who — this is the same scientific mentality, you could say — as somebody who thinks that they’re protecting themselves effectively from a very contagious venereal disease by taking the prophylactic divice on and off many times over the course of their, uh, session.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: You know, take it on, take it off, take it on, take it off. I’m protected, kind of. No, you’re not, absolutely. You’re wasting your time with this, which is the same thing that you had with planes and the mask up between bites. I mean, I am still almost in awe of the stupidity of the Delta Airlines flight attendant I had just a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, who was saying that people were taking… It wasn’t just me.

So people say, “Oh, it’s ’cause she knows you.” No, no, no. Anybody who was taking too long between bites, she thought she was keeping us safe by saying, “Sir, that’s enough. That’s enough time between bites. You need to mask up in between bites.” These are people who are mentally ill. They actually have a… This is like people who will not go outside, like agoraphobia. They will not go outside. They almost have a fear of breathing fresh air and not having the mask on their face. In fact, I think we should come up with some term of phobia without masking because that’s what this really is. I’ll have to look at what the Greek would be on this, the ancient Greek.

CLAY: Well, and to your point, did you see…? We need to talk about this, too, ’cause it’s just so ridiculous but I’ll give a little bit of a tease here for later in the show. Did you see the idiot MD online who said as soon as masks are removed on airplanes…? I want to read her tweet here as we get ready to go.

BUCK: Oh, the cancellations everywhere, everyone’s gonna get canceled.

CLAY: Everything on the planet, basically, is going to get canceled. You’re not gonna be able to fly anywhere. All of this ridiculousness, and it completely fell apart.

BUCK: Can I just throw this out there? I’m sorry. Go ahead. I thought —

CLAY: Should we tease it? Should we play the tease game and I’ll read this tweet when we come back?

BUCK: Let’s play when we come back, but I just want to say: It’s nice, right? You and me and this audience can sleep well at night knowing that we were not the jackasses for two years who thought that all this stuff was a good idea. I’m just gonna say, there should be some real solace taken in, “We were right, they were wrong,” and that does have its own feeling of satisfaction.

CLAY: It has its own reward. But I want the scoreboard to reflect it. And that’s why November needs to be big. I want CNN and MSNBC —

BUCK: Crying. I mean tears.

CLAY: — literal tears rolling down their cheeks.

BUCK: I want Stelter curled up in a ball in the corner asks mommy, to make it stop, as those election returns come in.

CLAY: And I want — and I know you’re in New York City. But I want all those people living in New York and L.A. who have no idea how the rest of the country is living to be trying to explain what the national electorate is saying, when I feel like living here in Nashville and traveling around for college football games — which, to me, is the heartbeat of America — I feel like I have my finger on the pulse of America really, really well. And this destruction that is coming in November, I think it is going to blow the minds of the East and West Coast libs, and they’re not gonna be able to really understand what the message is.

BUCK: It’s the only way to restore balance.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s the only way to restore sanity, actually. If it doesn’t happen, we’re in trouble as a country.

CLAY: No doubt.