Woke Wars: Sage Steele, Dave Chappelle, Bill Maher

CLAY: Buck, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to this story, but I think it’s a fascinating one, and I’ve been on Fox News a couple times talking about it. Sage Steele is a longtime, I think it’s fair to say… She’s been at ESPN for a long time. She went on Jay Cutler’s podcast. Jay Cutler is a former NFL quarterback, and we had Jay on the show a few weeks ago.

He said he’s gonna run for the school board and we live in the same county here in Tennessee. He’s so fired up about the mask mandate. But she went on with Jay, and she said that she was really upset that her employer, ESPN, mandated all employees get the vaccine.

And so she decided to go ahead and get the vaccine, but she didn’t think that was the right choice for her employer. She then got the vaccine, but has already tested positive for covid, Buck, in another one of these “wildly rare,” according to the Fauciites, breakthrough cases that seem to be happening a great deal.

BUCK: At what point do they stop calling them through breakthroughs? I do wonder, if it’s gonna be 50% protection, is it breakthrough…?

CLAY: What is the word that you would — again, we talked yesterday — I don’t even know that it’s appropriate to call the covid vaccine a covid vaccine. It’s a covid shot. But we typically — and a doctor was mad at me. He said, “I call it the flu vaccine; I don’t know why you and Buck wouldn’t.” I don’t know anybody who calls the flu shot the flu vaccine, do you? Have you ever heard anyone?

BUCK: Maybe that’s just kind of in the parlance of our times people say the shot. But no one has his ever thought, “Oh, you get the flu shot and you’ll never get the flu for the next 50 years.” No one thinks that.

CLAY: So I think we should start calling it the covid shot, because the idea that it’s a vaccine… To me, a vaccine has to be something that guarantees pretty much for most people that you’re not going to be getting this virus. But I think it’s interesting, Sage Steele at ESPN, because she’s suspended now for at least a week because ESPN was angry about her criticizing the vaccine mandate.

So it’s an interesting question that I thought that rose up, because there’s so many people out there that mandated — forced — to get the vaccine. We talked about the decision people, Buck, has to make, are you gonna keep the job or not keep the job? And most people are gonna have to keep job because that’s how they make the living.

They pay their mortgage. They take care of their kids. But what is the response if you decide that you’ll get the vaccine but also want to speak out about the fact that you don’t think it makes sense? Shouldn’t you have the right to do that? If you are staying employed and your employer now has a vaccine mandate, and you disagree with that, but you also don’t want to walk away and get a new job…?

BUCK: Look. I agree in principle, but then you get into, well, what other things? Can you speak out against a specific diversity and inclusion policies of your company ’cause you oppose those on ethical grounds? You start to get into how much criticizing of your own employer are you allowed to do in general. I agree with you that in principle you should be able to say this.

You should be able to speak out on this issue because it is of such public important, it is of importance to all of us, but to give a sense of how… There’s really a vindictiveness now about this too. I believe it’s going on today in Oregon. They have some kind of a board in the state of Oregon; we haven’t talked about Oregon a lot.

We’ve got some great listeners in Oregon, a lot of people of our people are sort of more eastern Oregon away from the cost, but I’m sure we got Portland listeners too. They are looking to pull the licenses for nurses who are fired or at least suspend their licenses. So, it’s not enough to get you fired from your job as a first responder during the pandemic because you don’t want your shot.

And, by the way, there’s no exemption for natural immunity. They want to make sure you can’t get a job elsewhere too in your profession ’cause that’s how nasty and vindictive they want to make this whole thing. Again so you can get a shot that you need to the bet another one in six months or else you’re basically like, “Do you even have protection?” and you can’t have natural immunity to prove that. It’s just crazy.

CLAY: Not only that, Buck, have you seen some of these companies are now not only mandating that you be vaccinated but your spouse, if you are on the health care! Have you seen this? They’re questioning whether your spouse is vaccinated, and if they aren’t able to provide proof of vaccination, they’re increasing what the charges are for health care.

BUCK: Yeah, premiums. I’ve seen the premiums increasing for sure.

CLAY: Not even for you, though. For your spouse they’re now, like, going into your whole family to check and see what you’re doing.

BUCK: There’s no end to this stuff. They’re never going to be tired of it. They’re never going to decide, “You know what? Maybe that was a little too extreme,” because they make all these decisions thinking that they inherently the people pushing this stuff think they are smarter than everybody who oppose it, who has a different point of view.

CLAY: There’s no doubt about that.

BUCK: They don’t think there’s a balance between freedom and public responsibility. It’s, “We are the smart people who listen to Fauci, and everyone who doesn’t listen is dumb, so we don’t care what they think.” That is the mentality encapsulated here. This is why I say, “Hubris is one of the original sins of the left and of the Democrat Party today.” They gotta really dumb people who are Democrats who think they’re really smart, but they are not.

CLAY: You know what I’m gonna do tonight? I’m gonna watch this Dave Chappelle new Netflix comedy special. Everybody’s demanding that it be canceled ’cause it’s not positive enough towards transgender people, and I’m fascinated to see it.

BUCK: It’s great advertising, by the way, for a comedy special to be so controversial at this level. So you know what? I might not watch it tonight, but I will watch it this week too.

CLAY: I’ll give you review of it a little bit for you tomorrow, but this is part of my brigade, right? I think that comedians are going to end up crushing partly the woke universe because they’re just all getting fed up with the idea that every joke has to be analyzed by the faculty of your school at Amherst. They all gotta sit around, “Well, is this appropriate humor for the young people to be experiencing?” Bill Maher, who I contend is somewhat red pilled —

BUCK: You can say “somewhat.” He’s not red pilled, though. Red pilled means that he’s on our team. He’s not on our team. I like Bill, by the way. He’s an interesting guy. He’s a fun guy to talk to. But he is a liberal, folks.

CLAY: He went after the woke. I haven’t even heard this clip yet but I’m curious. Let’s play cut 15.

MAHER: For the first time in my life, I am playing to a mixed audience. I was in Nashville about a month ago, and the audience was about 60-40, I would say, liberal to conservative. That never used to happen. Never. And I think it’s because, you know, 10 years ago — in my opinion, anyway — the left did not have a crazy section. (laughing) There was no such thing as woke. And now they do have a crazy section, which I call out. As a liberal, there’s a hunger to hear that. I think traditional liberals have had it with the far left of their own party.

BUCK: Clay, this was not an overnight thing. This has been growing for a long time. So this, “Where did the woke crazy come from?” The difference since that there is a woke left. The difference is that they now run the Democrat Party and call all the shots in corporate America. It’s a power shift. It’s actually not an ideological shift.

They didn’t really get crazier. They’re just in a position to impose their craziness on the rest of us. At least that’s the debate that I would have with bill over this. He sounds like, “Oh, we used to all be fine.” No. We can go… Remember, we talked about it, the movie PCU?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This stuff has been around for a long time. But we all used to laugh at the crazy at least a little bit more and now the crazies are running the HR departments of every major company in America and often are the CEOs too.

CLAY: Or the CEOs are so afraid of them that they might as well bend to their will. It’s crazy. We’ll talk a little bit more about that, ’cause I’m fascinated by identities colliding and I think traditionally left-wing comedians are suddenly realizing that their actual enemies are on the left wing.