CLAY: Big show day, monster show day with the statements that Joe Biden made last night, yesterday afternoon, mandating the covid vaccine for many different Americans. He did so in what I think is a fascinating window into the dual dichotomy of America today. Buck, right now I’m in Fayetteville, Arkansas, getting ready for the Texas-Arkansas game.

We’re on the road with Fox for big games all weekend. You’re gonna come to one as well here in a couple of weeks. But I was out last night at a sports bar watching the Dallas Cowboys play against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. NFL season kicked off last night, and within a couple of hours of Joe Biden speaking, you had 70,000-plus.

The biggest crowd for an NFL game since the Super Bowl in Miami in February or March 2020, coming up on well over a year and a half. No masks in the crowd. I think we have got a fascinating dichotomy here because I’m on the road right now in Arkansas.

They’re gonna have the biggest crowd they’ve ever had for a football game with Texas coming to town. Football fans are thumbing their nose at the president of the United States, they are living their best life, and they’re not responding well to the hectoring from Joe Biden. Let’s play cut 7 and you listen to his tone talking last night.

BIDEN: What makes it incredibly more frustrating is we have the tools to combat covid-19, and a distinct minority of Americans — supported by a distinct minority of elected officials are keeping us from turning the corner! These pandemic politics (sputtering) are making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die! We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part, wanting to get back to life as normal.

CLAY: I just don’t understand, Buck. At its basic level, if you trust the vaccine and if you believe in the vaccine, why do you care what anybody else is doing? I just don’t even understand that? The logic doesn’t add up.

BUCK: There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. You’ll see the cognitive dissonance on display when on the one hand you have neurotic people under 50 who are Biden voters who are terrified at the notion of being around the unvaccinated. They’re vaccinated and they’re masked and they’re social distancing. They’re terrified of being around anybody who they think maybe isn’t all of those things, which goes to:

How effective can you really believe all of this really is? And, by the way, I think that when it comes to the vaccines a lot of them don’t even read the data. They don’t care. This has all become for them, “The good people take it.” It’s posturing. It’s virtue signaling. They don’t get into the actual numbers or the risk factors.

So they get very upset at the notion of there being anyone around who is unvaccinated while they themselves are but then also they celebrate — and we played that Howard Stern clip. There are people celebrating when people who choose not to get the vaccine are dying. Here’s basically what you can’t really…

There’s a circle you can’t square here. There’s something that doesn’t add up. If in fact only unvaccinated people are really at risk of hospitalization and death, which is what is being said and that is what they’ll point out to you right now. They’re not saying it doesn’t spread at all from vaccinated people.

We’ve moved past that, although they’ll say it’s in much lesser numbers than it does from unvaccinated, but Clay, if in fact that’s the point, what are these libs so upset about all the time, right? They’re saying openly that you’re making a choice, and they’ll say, “You get what you deserve if you’re unvaccinated and you get really sick or worse.” But they’re walking around terrified all the time. How does that make any sense?

CLAY: They have to recognize deep down that the vaccines don’t provide the protection that they’re trying to argue they provide. And so you’re asking people — and look, on a broad scale, we have failed in our covid response epically. We are talking about this off the air the other day, Buck.

I hope in 30 or 40 years that I’m alive to see really great books written about all this failure just so, for the historical record, we can start to see it. But all of these actions… First of all, I don’t believe Joe Biden’s actions are constitutional when it comes to this mandate. I also don’t believe — and this is the significant part and I think even the vaccinated recognize this now, too. They won’t say it publicly. Even if we were a hundred percent vaccinated, even if every adult 12 and up who is available to the vaccine, covid’s not going away.

BUCK: Yeah, they reject that and/or they don’t accept that that’s a possibility, Clay.

CLAY: Because we’re at 75% right now.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: You know, three-quarters of people. If it were wildly successful as a vaccine, 75% of people having the covid vaccine would be more than enough to give us herd immunity, right? If the vaccine worked fantastically well.

BUCK: Their belief is that the 25% who can get vaccinated who are not vaccinated, that’s where all the covid spread is happening.

CLAY: That’s the only reason we’re not back to normal.

BUCK: That’s the only reason we’re not back to normal.

CLAY: That’s what they’re saying.

BUCK: And that’s where you got into this tone from the Biden administration, from Biden himself when he says things like, patience… Here you go. He actually said, your patience is wearing thin.

BIDEN: What more do you need to see? We’ve made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine has FDA approval. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing.

BUCK: He’s straight up saying, by the way, anyone who has not gotten the vaccine — this is the president of the United States — you’re killing people by not getting the vaccine. This is what he’s saying. Now, let’s just put aside for a second that, for one, he’s saying that about people with natural immunity, which is just scientifically false.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So start with that. I think it’s also unfair to those who are unvaccinated as well. I’m not saying that but it’s wrong on multiple levels. But this goes right into the mentality that we see now where there are people, Clay, who have prominent platforms, have big followings, and if you were to ask them right now, “How would you feel about Joe Biden…?”

People listening to this know this is true. “How would you feel about Joe Biden setting up quarantine camps,” we’ll call them quarantine camps instead of something else, “where you will gather large numbers of people who are unvaccinated until they are willing to get the vaccine,” they would say, “Fine.”

CLAY: A lot of people would.

BUCK: They see what’s going on in Australia and New Zealand and a lot of them would say, “That’s not an overreach. That’s not a problem.” Forget about Korematsu and that Supreme Court decision, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Forget what we’ve learned about taking people without just cause and throwing them into a camp. We have gone all the way to that point now where there are a lot of individuals in this country who they think it’s completely justified who will lose their jobs over this, they think it’s completely justified and celebrate openly when people die.

They don’t know if that person had or thought they had natural immunity. They don’t know the circumstances of their health were. But they’ll celebrate it if they were opposed to vaccine mandates. Remember, opposition to vaccine mandates is not the same thing as opposition to the vaccine. Trump got vaccinated and tells everybody who is at risk to get vaccinated every time he speaks!

CLAY: Well, not only that, Joe Biden himself — as we started off the show by saying — said that vaccine mandates wouldn’t happen. Nancy Pelosi said the federal government can’t do it. The two-part thing that is so huge here is, one, this is unconstitutional, and there are lots of people out there that are not going to care that this is unconstitutional, and they’re going to allow their rights to be trampled.

BUCK: How much faith can you really put in the court system to save you from this one? They didn’t save from us Obamacare. I know we got a different court now — thank you to Trump, by the way.

CLAY: Not only the court, by the way, but people have to file lawsuits in order for the court to get the right to make a decision, and I think what’s gonna happen is, many of these big corporations are going to acquiesce to Joe Biden’s demand even if it’s not constitutional. They’re gonna send out emails.

They’re gonna let all their employers know that they’re following the mandate, okay? So that’s one. But two — and I think we gotta keep hammering this home — even if every single person who is in this country had the covid vaccine, covid’s not going away —

BUCK: But they don’t agree.

CLAY: — and there would be still be a lot of people.

BUCK: You’re right. I’m saying you’re right, but this is the point that they miss.

CLAY: They won’t acknowledge it. They say no. Which is why I think, Buck, this is so far, Joe Biden hasn’t come off the top rope with the restrictions. And I think deep down… I’m curious what you think about this idea. I think deep down, the reason why he’s not, say, mandating the vaccine for airplane traveled, for instance, crossing state lines…

I think the reason why he’s not done that is because if he does everything — if he mandates covid vaccine, everything else — and the numbers don’t really change that much, which is what I think would happen, right? ‘Cause we’re already at 75% of adults you’ve gotten one shot or more. Then, what else do you do except have to acknowledge that your entire anti-lock covid battle is basically gonna come down to natural immunity?

BUCK: Oh, man. I feel like I could see the enemy’s steps a few steps ahead of them. Clay, they’ll just say that it’s a variant that was incubated by the unvaccinated in the time period that we had to play catch-up on the vaccine. I know people, their heads are gonna explode.

CLAY: And that’s one of the arguments we should acknowledge because some people will say… If you say, “Okay, you got vaccinated, why do you care whether other people are vaccinated or not?” they will say, “Well, if you’re not vaccinated, you’re allowing the variants to spread, which could be of more danger.”

The challenge with that is the variants aren’t coming out of the United States. The variants are coming from around the world where almost no one is vaccinated. Delta came out of India. The odds of there being a variant that emerges in the United States are very, very low compared to the odds of there being a variant that emerges somewhere else in the world.

BUCK: The variants for the flu —

CLAY: We’re not gonna vaccinate the world.

BUCK: Yeah, the variants for the flu emerge out of China pretty much every year. This is known. This has been known in epidemiology for decades now, and it’s largely because of the huge numbers of livestock, particularly pork — like swine flu — and fowl — people eating geese and chickens and things like that — are in close proximity to human beings in China.

That’s how that zoonotic transformation that occurs, and this is how you get swine flu and bird flu, and these things tend to come out of China as a result. But they can pop up wherever. Clay, we haven’t beaten the common cold. We haven’t destroyed the flu. If we could with one shot, I have a feeling…

CLAY: We would! I’d love for the common cold to be gone.

BUCK: There are hundreds of different versions of the common cold that people regularly get. There are new versions of the flu, of influenza, that come out every single year. And we know, one, we can’t defeat those entirely, and two, you can’t avoid them entirely. It’s almost like we’ve gone back to the very beginning of the conversation here.

And it’s remarkable to me, too, people are now acting like, “Oh, we’re all done. We have turned the corner.” What, almost 700,000 people have died, almost 100 million have been infected? This is success? This is the upside of all these policies that we’ve seen? You have to ask, “How different would this have been if we just told sick people stay away from healthy people,” which is what we always do, “and other than that, wish for the best”?

CLAY: Yes. Live your life.

BUCK: Get vaccines for those who are at high risk as soon as you can go but understand that our flu practice is basically, “Get senior citizens vaccinated or people with immune-comprised,” and other than that, we go forward with life.

CLAY: We have to live life normally. By the way, Buck, I’ve got a clip I just saw. Dr. Fauci has been asked about those with natural immunity and why they should be vaccinated.

BUCK: (impression) “Oh, you’re giving me heartburn already. I’m upset.”