BUCK: We have been thinking here for a while that we need everyone to see what’s coming the way that we do down the road a little bit here because the mask mania, the lockdowners… I call them the Fauciites. Do you have a term you like? I call it the Fauciite consensus.

CLAY: Yeah, Fauciite is not bad. We sold a bunch of, at Outkick, Faucism T-shirts. But what I’ve been focusing on is the bigger picture, I would say. This is all fear porn, right? “Coronabros” is the phrase that I have used because early on… I don’t know how much you paid attention to social, but it felt to me like there were many people rooting for covid, right? Like they were…

Everything was terrifying. They were all-in. As soon as there was the least negative story, they were spreading it. They wanted everybody to be stuck in their houses. The people who are triple masking driving in their cars by themselves, the people who were the most afraid of corona, I called the coronabros because they wanted to shut down sports they wanted lockdowns to continue forever.

BUCK: And they also engaged in a tremendous amount of virtue signaling.

CLAY: Oh!

BUCK: With social media, this became a cheap way to show how much you “believed the science,” which has now, as we all know, turned into a laugh line. You say, “I believe the science,” and everyone thinks that you’re wearing a mask in the shower at home alone and dreaming of the next time there’s going to be a Fauci appearance on MSNBC.

So here’s, though, why we’re talking about this, ’cause this is the problem. A lot of people… We’re here. I’m here in Nashville with Clay right now in Tennessee. A lot of states that feel pretty normal. But there’s still the vestiges of the crazy in parts of the country — certainly from the federal government, the Biden regime on down — ad right now, you’re hearing the beginnings of the Delta variant. Everyone is supposed to be paranoid and freaked out about this Delta variant that’s coming. And so you’re being told to mask up again. Play 18.

ERICA HILL: The WHO saying if you’re vaxxed, you should continue to mask up. I mean (sputters), are masks coming back?

BRIAN WILLIAMS: WHO came out today and said, “Masks back on.”

GAYLE KING: Now recommend wearing masks at indoor public places whether you’re vaccinated or not.

STUART VARNEY: …to wear masks indoors even if they’re vaccinated.

ANTHONY MASON: Recommendation that fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors again.

DAVID AGUS: It’s a recommendation. I think it’s a reasonable recommendation. You know, we have two Americas: Those vaccinated and those not.

BUCK: Why should any vaccinated person…? Never mind if we want to get into the effectiveness or lack thereof of masks, masking as a policy. Why should any vaccinated person think that they should wear a mask at this point? It defies numbers, science, logic, and reason, and yet now you already have the calls for this from media outlets and from some of the scientific establishment all over again.

CLAY: Yeah, LA County is now saying that they want people indoors to be wearing masks, and we talked about this on the show. I know that you and I have talked about this for months. The stat that is out there, Buck, that is terrifying: 4% of Democrats believe covid is over, 4% — 96% of them are unwilling to allow the rest of us to move on.

And what has not been talked about enough, in addition to the people who are super afraid that can get vaccinated, we have got a ton of people like you and I who already had covid and have natural antibodies to covid. And it’s like those people never get talked about, but we know probably over a hundred million people…

That’s a reasonable number, I think, at this point ’cause we know 35 million confirmed cases or whatever. Three-to-one seems very, very reasonable based on all of the other data out there. If you combine the hundred million people who have already had covid with all of the people who are now vaccinated, either one shot or two shot… I know it’s like a phrase that you can’t use.

But all of the numbers would reflect that herd immunity is coming down and is becoming a reality, and also the Delta variant is likely to be still, according to all the data that I’ve seen, handled by the vaccine and also probably handled by natural immunity. So the fact that so many Americans have already either gotten the vaccine or already had covid, it’s like you can’t talk about those two things or even discuss herd immunity. They’re editing and censoring herd immunity discussions in this country when it seems to me, the most rational thing we should all be talking about.

BUCK: We live in a time where the left and the Democrat Party seem to have abandoned what should be nonpolitical or above political issues, things that you would believe you could get agreement with just the American people in general on. Things like, “Don’t we all want there to be safer streets, less crime, less violent crime, and don’t we all understand that law enforcement plays a critical role in that?”

No! Democrats don’t agree with that. “Don’t we think that politicization of a virus is something that doesn’t make any sense?” I don’t want anyone to get this. I don’t want anyone to suffer the ill consequences of covid and, God forbid, pass away from this. I act on the assumption that my fellow Americans…

Well, I had been acting on the assumption that all my fellow Americans just felt that way. But when you look at the way that this has been so deeply partisan — and really from the very beginning it was used as a club against Trump in the election year. We know that. There was reckless propaganda from the media suggesting that Donald Trump was handling this so badly; he was opposed…

No, I would criticize the former administration a little bit more going along too much and too long with many of the recommendations, but we’re at a point now where you say to the statistic you brought up, only 4% of Democrats believe that this thing is really over. What we’re starting to see, Clay, is that’s because there are a lot of Democrats for whom this is normal now. This is actually the way the future looks: Booster shots, mask mandates; the government in control of everything: What you can breathe, where you can go, who you can see. If you’re a true authoritarian collectivist, that’s actually the vision of America that you have.

CLAY: And I think it’s important for some people out there who live in red states that may have embraced freedom now to understand that while you may believe we are finished with this — and I do — we are not finished with this because the power that is incarnate in covid restrictions and regulations has come to define the Democrat Party. And so they are going to embrace this because what else do they have, Buck?

Defund the police has gone up in smoke. We don’t know what’s gone on exactly with the infrastructure package. The budget is basically going to be the end — however it gets reconciled in Congress — of what Joe Biden is able to accomplish. And what actually unites the Democratic Party? We talk a lot about the Republican Party and the media and the civil war over Liz Cheney, but what actually unites AOC and Joe Manchin?

That scope of the Democratic Party is more expansive in terms of what they represent, all these different interest groups. So I think they’re desperate to find something that everybody can latch or not, and it’s wearing masks. We talked about this at the border, Buck. Kamala Harris went to the border (“border” in quotation marks); she wore a mask! Why is anybody who is vaccinated outdoors still wearing a mask?

BUCK: Outside!

CLAY: Outside.

BUCK: By the way —

CLAY: And all of the people with her wore a mask.

BUCK: — that has never made sense, has never been rooted in actual data and a serious look at the epidemiological risks here. But it is virtue signaling and political signaling too. “The good people wear the masks even outside. They wear two masks!” I am on record. People can see from my Twitter timeline. So this isn’t just, “Oh, I made some prediction.”

I was saying for months before Fauci came out in January of 2020, they’re going to tell you it has to be two masks — oh, and, by the way, they’re gonna finally come clean on the fact that N95 masks are substantially more serious, at least, as a tool of epidemiological control under certain condition. Wearing that Biden-Harris bandana across your face or wearing the kerchiefs that people are draping?

There’s no epidemiological purpose whatsoever against a virus like this. And they won’t admit that, though, because that would be telling the CNN watchers, the New York Times readers, who “took the science seriously,” that they’re not as smart as they think they are. And that’s fatal to the Democrats. They have to believe they’re smarter than they actually are.

CLAY: Not only that, if you acknowledge that, you have to be able to spread that message! And this is, to me, the most terrifying thing about all of it. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you’re not allowed to even question, quote-unquote, “the science.” I mean, remember, the lab leak theory would get you banned off of Facebook for a year and then suddenly all these emails come out and all the data comes out.

And people are like, “Yeah!” You know, Jon Stewart now can joke about it. We’re seeing that now with herd immunity. We’re seeing that with discussions about masks. Science is supposed to be messy, right? The scientific method, for everybody out there who’s forgotten about it is about rigorously tossing out hypotheses and testing them, and all of a sudden we demanded a certitude that doesn’t exist.

And, Buck, this is important, I think. Very much science is as much of an art as it is a science. Right? Anybody who has ever had a medical condition that they can’t figure out what’s wrong with them and you go and get a second and a third and a fourth opinion, doctors often disagree, even when they’re looking at the all of the same data sets. And so this idea of certitude that we demanded is actually the antithesis of what science represents.

Science is messy. Science is argumentative. Science is contentious. What we have created is a totalitarian view of science which only allows one particular idea to dominate, and guess what? That idea’s often wrong and also destructive for the country. And we’re not yet through that battle yet. And some of you out there, I know, are frustrated about this. But I think it’s a battle we have to keep fighting, Buck.

BUCK: Yeah. It’s not over. We haven’t had the repudiation. You still have people who believe that lockdowns and mask mandates —

CLAY: Made sense.

BUCK: — were highly effective, despite the fact that we lived through the second wave, (which is exactly what it was) despite the fact that the predictions about how that would all play out based on the early promises from a year ago, in August of 2020, “If only we mask, we’ll be okay.”

That was the promise, and then you had people all across the country doing this as well as the lockdowns. And then there’s all the absurdity that you weren’t allowed to even bring up anymore, places where you saw all of a sudden, “Hold on, that makes no sense. Mask up between bites is idiotic. Does Fauci think we are all morons?”

Well, apparently, he thinks he can get away with acting like we are. And there has not yet been a real accounting of this. And we’re just here to tell you, I know for a lot of people listening — you’re in Florida, you’re in Texas, you’re in places unlike New York and California that have really embraced freedom and normalcy — this isn’t over.

Covid, you could say the pandemic is largely over. But the lockdownerism? It’s not gone. There is gonna booster shots. They are going to have a push — you watch — for forced vaccination from the federal level in every way. Every tool they can use, they’re gonna try to force people to vaccinate this fall. That’s my prediction. That’s my belief.