BUCK: For those of you who are living in Dallas or something, just wait a few weeks before you invite Clay to come give you a big speech or something there, because all the sudden the mask mandates may be happening. And we have some breaking news on that for you coming out of Nashville.
But first, an argument that doesn’t seem to get made very much with all of this is, “At what point do we just say people have made their decisions and that’s it”? At what point can we just say, “You’ve had a chance to get vaccinated. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s fine.” Clay and I are not vaccinated. So you know that’s it. And you sort of deal with it as you can, because anybody that has a problem with that, they should be fine because they are vaccinated.
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: Here is Governor Spencer Cox of Utah.
COX: The CDC is asking all of you who are vaccinated to take one for the team once again to protect people who are not vaccinated but who have the opportunity to do so. Also, I’m — I’m guessing that the Venn diagram of people who are vaccinated — or unvaccinated and willing to wear a mask is very, very slim, if at all. And so, I’m grateful that there are people who are willing to sacrifice and wear masks again to protect the unvaccinated. I gotta be honest with you. I don’t know if I’m one of those people. I’m really tired. I’m really done with it, and I’m not real excited to have on sacrifice to protect someone who doesn’t seem to care.
BUCK: Yeah, Clay, this is, “Do we live in a free society or not?”
CLAY: Yeah!
BUCK: That’s where we are, ’cause freedom actually means the freedom to choose something that maybe doesn’t work out for you.
CLAY: And make bad decisions. Look, every day people make awful decisions. If you’re walking by on the street and you see a morbidly obese person and they’re eating a big back of M&Ms, you don’t knock the M&Ms out of their hand and be like, “Oh, my God. How dare you!” People make choices for their health that are poor.
That’s part of what freedom allows. So I don’t like the full way that the governor of Utah said it there, Spencer Cox. I think the better argument is the one that you and I have made — and I just want to keep making this. “If you want to be vaccinated, good for you. The data reflects that you will be safer certainly if you are over the age of 65,” and that’s why, Buck, 90% of people who are 65 or older they’ve looked at the data and they made a rational decision.
They have at least one shot. Seventy percent now of people who are 18 and up have at least one shot. But then there are people like you and me who have already had covid, and if you talk to many doctors about covid immunity — natural immunity versus vaccinated immunity — natural immunity can in many cases, in the case of many viruses, be safer. So we can make rational decisions for us like everyone out there should make rational decisions as well.
I think the political argument to make at this point in time is, “Look, we’re encouraging everybody to make good, healthy decisions. But we’re not going to require everybody to wear masks to try to protect people who want to make the choice otherwise.” And, by the way, this also means I don’t think that the media should be covering every single person who gets sick and has said before, “Hey, I’m not really afraid of covid.”
That sucks, but there is so much moral lecturing going on here. To me, at some point rational adults have to be given the opportunity to make rational adult decisions, and we just have to move on. I have been there for a long time, and you know you have, too.
BUCK: I think we’re also at a point where the people who have been willing to do things that now are obviously very either just completely silly and idiotic or almost worthless need to have some feeling of, “Well, I’m right on this one!”
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: You have to think if you’ve been double masking, if you as people in my building where I live here in New York City — and I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. It happened a few times. They were wearing a full head-to-toe hazmat suit to go outside. And they were probably 30, the couple that I saw doing it.
CLAY: Zero statistical risk and they’re wearing hazmat suits.
BUCK: And they’re wearing hazmat suits. If you were wiping down your groceries with Lysol because Dr. Fauci told you to — which he did, by the way — now at least you say, “Well, I was listening to them, but I’m not like those dumb vax deniers who live in the rural areas.” Forget about the —
CLAY: Minorities, yes.
BUCK: — communities in New York and in Los Angeles and everywhere else that have chosen to not vaccinate, and forget about it Clay and Buck who are sitting here as two unvaccinated guys, although they’re twisting my arm and they’re gonna break it pretty soon, it seems, on getting vaccinated or not.
Clay, things that would have sounded like dystopian fearmongering a year ago when it comes to what the Democrats want to do about all this stuff are now being talked about as though it is an imperative. Not even just something that we should consider, an imperative. You have the United States military about to be told, “Every single person must get the vaccination.” There was an editorial — we mentioned it yesterday — and had to change the title because the title was initially put ’em on the no-fly list.
CLAY: Yes. Like you’re a terrorist.
BUCK: Put the unvaccinated on the no-fly list.
CLAY: Like you’re Osama Bin Laden if you don’t have the vaccine.
BUCK: Instead of standing up and yelling, “I have a suicide vest” or something, you stand up and say, “I am unvaccinated.” That was like the big fear they were gonna have of somebody on a plane. And here we are talking about this because people in power actually want to do these things, and we have been warning and warning and warning because the incrementalism is obvious, the second you understand the mind-set of the left. It’s just two weeks. Just two masks. Just do whatever we say. Until we finally say “no,” it doesn’t stop.
CLAY: It’s 18 months now since “two weeks to stop the spread.” And, by the way, last segment we were talking about how there are different decisions that are being made on a county-by-county basis as it pertains to. My hometown. I was a public school kid K through 12 in Nashville, Tennessee. While we’ve been on the air, the school board voted 8-1 to require all students to wear masks. And I think what you’re going to see, Buck, is major battles developing over masks, which, by the way, have been proven (chuckles) — it’s to disappointing — don’t work.
BUCK: I got told yesterday in New York City in a restaurant again. Remember now I said I was gonna make people tell me.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And they called me beforehand, and I thought, “They can’t be serious.” They said, “We have a policy where you have to wear a mask when you walk in, but that’s it.” So really, I just want to know. It’s really very much like genuflecting now in church.
CLAY: Yes. True. It’s a good analogy.
BUCK: It’s really bending the knee to the authority. Not celestial relationship with Jesus Christ your Lord authority, which you do when you genuflect. I’m talking about genuflecting to the government authority here or just kind of the apparatus of covid control, because it is actually impossible to make an argument that there is any epidemiological or health benefit whatsoever from doing this.
And yet yesterday, in my hometown, in my own city, I was told, “Excuse me, sir…” We’re already having the conversation face-to-face. “Excuse me, sir. Can you put a mask?” Then I had to do the whole, “I don’t have a mask. Can you give me…?” “Oh, okay.” “Now I’ll put it on for you.” People that think this is normal either want to control you beyond any reason — that’s a lot of them — or they actually are suffering from an anxiety induced mental illness. There’s no third option.
CLAY: Just think about it. When we finish the show today, I’m going back to the airport. I’m going out to the airport. I’ll have to put a mask on in order to enter into the airport. I will be… As I walk down the concourse there, if I decide that I want to stop and have a beer, Buck, I can stop and have a beer, take my mask off and be in a crowded bar in the New York City airport.
If I decide that I want to eat, I can stop, I can take my mask off. Several of these bars, when you’re walking down the concourse, they have bars that look out into the concourse where like you can reach out and touch somebody who’s walking by. You can sit there for hours if you wanted to, if you had a long layover — drink, eat as much as you want — permissible. The minute that you are moving and you’re not drinking or eating something, you have to have a mask on. What sense can that possibly make?
BUCK: From the very beginning of this, stretching back to when I had to move my… I was doing the radio show in New York down in Tribeca, down in Lower Manhattan. I had to just in 24 hours set up a home studio and do this whole thing and everything was locked down and New York.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Clay, I was sitting at my desk doing radio as the hospital ship sat there. I could see it right from my window. The hospital ship went up the Hudson because we were gonna be overflowing, I had friends next to Central Park where they lived sending me photos of the field hospitals!
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: There was all this panic. But from the very beginning, I had a concern and tried to spread the word as far and wide as possible about the challenge of conditioning people to just obey. And now my worry is that as we see, we’re at the end of this process here of the actual pandemic. The people who have been pushing for all these restrictions and all these demands and all these commands are looking to use this for other things.
They have a cowed and obedient populace that is so now conditioned, trained, really, Pavlovian style to do whatever they’re told If the government can convince you that you have…? Even if not the government, but it really is a function of government brainwashing, that you’re safer by putting a mask on when you walk up to somebody; then you sit down and you have it off the whole time? They can convince you of anything. Men are women. Abortion is just a choice. They can convince you of anything.
CLAY: I’m with you in that what’s scary about this is the lack of organized pushback. In Europe, there are a lot of organized pushing back against the ridiculous rules. We’re not seeing that in the United States. It’s scary.
BUCK: Gonna come in here in just a little bit with our friend Alex Berenson, who has been on the forefront. This guy takes more heat than anybody else on this one and has been very influential in a lot of the thinking of the Trump administration and, gosh, do I wish we had Trump and Dr. Atlas and some of the people who were seeing this more clearly. I’ll never forget, Clay, Trump told me in the Oval last May, “We will never do another lockdown,” and now it’s Biden so now that doesn’t count anymore.
CLAY: And I think Biden wants a lockdown. They’re table the table for it. They really are.