CLAY: I know you saw this as well because you are living right now in New York City which is the epicenter yet again of all covid outbreaks.

BUCK: I am your Siberia communism correspondent while this is going on, yes.

American children are starting 2022 in crisis.

I’m not sure that many people fully grasp the depth of it.

🧵https://t.co/blOe9iRbYh

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) January 4, 2022

CLAY: We are over a million cases now, and I was talking with friend who came by the house earlier today. He was like, “Yeah, everybody in my house had it. We just took the home test, and everybody had it.” So we have a million confirmed cases right now. How many more cases are there from people who are just like, “Yeah, I don’t feel that well. I’m gonna stay home. I’m taking a home test,” and they aren’t actually reported in the official numbers? Joe Biden said that he was going to shut down… I’m not gonna shut down covid. I’m gonna shut down the economy. That was basically his entire 2020 presidential campaign.

BUCK: He’s not gonna shut down the economy, he’s gonna shut down covid.

CLAY: Did I flip it? Yeah, well, he’s managed to shut down none of covid. And now we’re dealing with the threat of potential shutdowns and, Buck, you and I were texting about this last night. Toronto — and I know we have a lot of Canadian listeners out there. Toronto, Ontario, the province, has basically just shut down just like it’s March of 2020 all over again. Are you nervous now in New York City that New York, L.A., Chicago, some of these cities that have followed the lead of Toronto? Are you nervous that shutdowns are coming?

BUCK: Yeah. Limited shutdowns, I think, are gonna hit a number of cities across the country. You’re gonna see this with us. The school system here already is under the kind of pressure that has led to some schools to just declare they don’t have staff to be open. But I think what’s interesting is, okay, well, how much of this is really just because of overwhelmed staff because of caseload?

There is some data to suggest — and, remember, this is after we had the citywide mandate, covid vaccine mandates for employees, Clay. Right now, you have in New York… Remember, when we’re talking New York… I know we have a big New York audience, but for folks the rest of the country, what happens here is always replicated elsewhere. Right? New York tends to be the place that goes first, and then it’s L.A. and San Fran and Chicago and Atlanta or wherever, right? It goes all around.

CLAY: Washington, D.C., Philly.

BUCK: Washington, D.C., not as much Atlanta, but D.C., Philly. Here’s what we got. The NYPD has about 5,000 of its 35,000 uniformed officers out sick as of yesterday. Almost 2,000 of those cops had covid, 3,000 experiencing flu-like symptoms. FDNY, which is the fire department for New York, says 30% of its 4,200 EMS staff and 18% of its 11,000 firefighters out sick. So what you have is two things simultaneously, Clay.

You have such a high caseload and such a concern among the Fauciites about how we’re gonna stop this. You have these two factors. So it’s not just, “Are we gonna shut down to stop cases?” It’s there are so many cases that you may go into de facto shutdowns or something close to it of things like the school system. We’ll see what happens with restaurants. What an amazing success vaccine mandates the vaccine mandate program was.

CLAY: That’s what I was gonna say. Can you imagine how many people would be missing work if they hadn’t gotten their vaccines and hadn’t been mandated to receive them? Now, this is where I wanted to go. A guy named David Leonhardt… I don’t want to really tee off on him although it is ridiculous. He works at the New York Times, and he wrote a piece this morning which is being widely circulated in liberal circles, and I know this because of several of my friends who are left wingers.

I’ve got a lot of liberal friends. They texted me and they said, “Man, New York Times is finally saying this.” They listen to our show and, by the way, I think as the definition of what is liberal has just gone so far left wing. We have tons of people right now listening to us who would otherwise consider themselves to be Democrats that are just searching for sanity.

And it’s one reason why I think our audience has been growing so much because the left has gone so far left, they’ve left this massive, huge void of normal, reasonable people that we’re trying to appeal to in the middle part of the country. But this guy in the New York Times this morning wrote, “American children are starting 2022 in crisis.” Welcome to the party, pal, in the immortal words of —

BUCK: Die Hard, Bruce Willis.

CLAY: “I have long been aware…” I know you’re great at all 1980s —

BUCK: Action movies. We might have to bring back Action Movie Quote Friday at some point. But continue.

CLAY: He says, “I have long been aware that the pandemic was upending children’s lives. But until I spent time pulling together data and reading reports, I did not understand just how alarming the situation had become.” This is… I just think this is amazing. Again, he wrote an entire piece, and the headline is, “No Way to Grow Up — For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.”

And again, that’s really defining “harm” broadly in terms of less harm for adults. But, Buck, he acts like this data hasn’t been readily apparent for the last two years and that you and I and all of the people on Team Sanity haven’t been pulling our hair out trying to share all this data.

BUCK: Fauciites have normalized and actually mandated child abuse. If you were a third-grade teacher and you didn’t like what Little Bobby or Little Sally said in the classroom and made them strap a cloth around their face and sit outside in the freezing cold as punishment, you’d get locked up. And, by the way, you should.

CLAY: So, that’s a hundred percent true.

BUCK: But when you do this because you’re so scared of the covid, even after you’re vaccinated and, oh, all the things we’ve been told? Even after all these months of social distancing and masking up, that’s considered normal. Children have been sacrificed on the altar of neurotic libs who watch too much CNN, who believe Fauci, who are caught in this echo chamber of social media making them crazier and crazier about this all the time.

And what I think you’re beginning to see now is the concern that, remember, we’re going into a midterm year. And as much as the neurotic 30% of America, unfortunately, that still thinks we have to mask up and double mask and… I mean, the photos of the secretary of defense with a mask on and a shield in front of his mask looking like a total moron are absolutely hilarious.

CLAY: And he still got covid!

BUCK: The guy just got covid. So he’s vaccinated, masked up, shielded up, and just got covid and is telling everybody, “Oh, it could be so much worse.” He doesn’t know that. All this stuff they say is unfalsifiable. But, Clay, here’s, I think, the fundamental challenge they have right now as we’re talking about lockdowns and everything else. Their power is going to be at risk if this keeps up.

The 30% of lunatic libs are starting to see reality, but they know that there is this middle portion of the country that they’re gonna need to go along with them, the people that believe Biden would “shut down the virus and not the economy.” The leftist loons understand that they may get annihilated unless they come up with a coherent narrative here. Because what did we have with Biden so far, the regime on covid? Abject, undeniable failure.

CLAY: I want to build on the idea that you just laid out ’cause I hadn’t really thought about it in that context, and I bet there’s a lot of parents out there that are gonna be thinking about this now, ’cause it’s a great analogy. In 2019, if you had your kid in elementary school and the kid came home and they said, “The teacher was really upset with me so the teacher made me go outside in the cold and sit on a…”

BUCK: A bucket. They’re making them sits on buckets.

CLAY: A bucket. Sit on a bucket. “It was sleeting outside. They made me wear a mask. They stood near me and made me pull my mask back up in between each of my bites and/or drinks as punishment for the way that I had behaved in class,” that teacher would be charged probably with child abuse and would probably lose their job. And if there was video of it or if there were photos of it, it would have gone viral and everybody would have said, “What in the world is happening at our public schools?” Yet that has become a standard operating procedure for many left-wing communities all over our country and people are trying to treat it like it’s normal. It’s child abuse.

BUCK: There’s this thing that keeps happening, and it’s been happening for a long time. You’ll see photos of covid measures somewhere. Schools are the worst and it’s because the teachers unions are communist-run loony bins where they just are really about adults. They pretend to be about kids. So the schools — and they’re right now advocating, as we know, for remote learning ,which means teachers get paid to stay home and do whatever they want all day long.

CLAY: Virtually no learning actually takes place.

BUCK: Exactly. But when you see these photos of people or of children in the class and you always have to stop and say, “Hold on. Has this been Photoshopped?” Because are they really putting kids… I mean, you might have… A lot of folks listening might have seen this last night on Tucker’s show. He had that photo of the children doing band practice. It was like high school kids all in individual plastic pods, and they’ve had this in Germany, too, where it’s like, “Oh, looks like a Plexiglas beach ball.”

CLAY: I’ve seen this. Yes.

BUCK: And you see these things, and you say, “No intelligent person could believe this works.” But, Clay, I just went this morning. I walked past the coffee shop on my corner. They’ve redone all the Plexiglas dividers as if that’s going to do anything.

CLAY: It actually makes things worse.

BUCK: It limits airflow and creates pockets of greater viral concentration, according to the actual studies they’ve done on this. Friends, the only way this ends, if we can give you one takeaway — because if you’re hoping that there’s a level of lunacy that’s going to make Randi Weingarten, the chief commissar of the teachers union… If you’re hoping that she’s gonna put your kids’ interests first, you’re gonna be hoping for the rest of your life.

Never gonna happen. The only thing that turns this around is an absolute repudiation of the party behind all this, and that means annihilation of the power that the Democrats have. And just on the Fauci point with the institutionalizing — and I will defend this to the hilt — of child abuse that has been pushed by Democrats, if Dr. Fauci was not an immoral coward… I’m not expecting him to be right on everything, right? I was even…

A few months ago I said, “I think the winter could be bad. I don’t know.” Right? We don’t know everything. We don’t get everything right here. But we tell people we get right and wrong. Put that aside. Fauci not speaking up about children masking up between bites outside in the cold as excessive shows you that he is a coward. He is immoral. The people who support him are complicit in it, and all he really cares about is what the CNN producers and greenroom think about his pronouncements. That is it. Your kids don’t matter.