CLAY: I think some of the data coming out, the tide is turning pretty rapidly against some of these vaccine mandates and mask mandates. Monmouth came out with a poll yesterday — I think we may have hinted at it, but I don’t think we mentioned it — 70% overall of Americans are ready for covid to be over and to get back to normal, 89% of Republicans, 71% of independents. Think about how big those numbers are: 89% of Republicans ready to be over with covid, done with it, back to normal; 71% of independents; 47% of Democrats, Buck.

Almost half of the Democratic Party. Now, you can say it’s crazy that 53% still want there to be covid restrictions. But this is a big tidal wave that Joe Biden is staring down, which is why I am of the opinion that what they’re going to try to do — and I think your May date is not an awful one. I think sometime in the late spring, early summer they are going to try to declare victory over covid and have it recede into the background. Now, this is presuming that there’s not a brand-new variant, that Omicron is going to crest.

Probably the deaths attributable to Omicron, if you look at the data, it appears that Omicron overall positive tests crested right around January 15th, which is interesting because I believe January 14th was last year’s crest of covid. So January 15th of this year — three weeks, three weeks to a month — is when typically the overall deaths crest. So we’re talking about right around Valentine’s Day as being the time when we would potentially peak in the number of deaths that are being attributed to covid.

All right. So also tying in with that 70% of people who are getting ready to get back to normal, we know that Gavin Newsom is a liar. We know that he is one of the most consistent liars anywhere in politics — that even for politicians who lie, Gavin Newsom is in a different category with the ferocity with which he lies, even when he is caught in blatant lies. I want to play this for you. We talked about this yesterday. Gavin Newsom. Magic Johnson gets a picture taken with Gavin Newsom.

By the way, the mayors of L.A. and also of San Francisco, not wearing masks. They were all together at the game between the 49ers and the Rams — 75,000-80,000 people in L.A. watching the NFC Championship Game — and Gavin Newsom was caught without wearing a mask. What did he say when he was actually questioned about it? Here is his response.

NEWSOM: You’re correct. I was very judicious yesterday — uh, very judicious. And you’ll see in the photo that I did take, um, where Magic was kind enough, generous enough to ask me for a photograph. And in my left hand is uh, the mask, and I took a photo. Uh, the rest of the time I wore it, uh, as we all should, when I had a glass of water or anything, uh, and encourage everybody else to do so. And that’s it.

CLAY: All right.

BUCK: No one believes him, Clay, and there’s video, right? You tweeted out the video showing that he’s lying. So just so everyone understands, he’s lying. But let’s also be clear Democrat voters the state of California they had a chance to show that they think this guy’s a clown. They didn’t take it. So they don’t care I think even now. If they didn’t care then, why would they care now that he’s a fraud? Because he is part of their team.

Gavin Newsom is very much a big lib, and so they’ll excuse his hypocrisy; they’ll excuse this nonsense. I know London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco… Remember, she got caught on video partying in a nightclub indoors. If you’re trying to get covid, like, that’s a pretty good environment for that. You’re in close quarters and everyone’s packed in there, and her response was, “I felt like partying!” That was basically it, right?

And did she get…? Did anyone actually come after her for that in media? Not really. I mean, we did, people that care about some consistency and don’t like hypocrisy. But for the libs now and for Democrats this is a political tribal matter. And so whoever is on their side, “Yeah, they break rules. Yeah, they don’t really mean it. But they’re not those misinformation anti-vaxxer Republicans,” so they get away with everything. That’s what’s really, I think, troubling at this stage is that there is a mental illness that has really grown. There’s a derangement. We used to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome.

CLAY: Yeah, that was real.

BUCK: That was real. There were people for whom there was nothing to crazy to say — and I’m talking about not only random, you know, people in the comments section of websites. I’m talking about people going on CNN! You could say Trump was the reincarnation of Jefferson Davis through a time machine and space lizards and they’re gonna take over and Russia, and on CNN they’d say, “That’s really astute analysis. You’ve really pulled it all together for us today.

“Thank you so much, sir. Maybe we should give you a contributor contract.” Like, they’re completely insane. And that’s what Trump did to them. And I think that same inability to separate oneself from the political tribe, if you will, of the left that was so acute in the Trump era is now with covid, it’s the same thing. I mean, how…?

Clay, look at the people — adults — walking around with masked children, and they’re unmasked. Someone explain this to me. I’ve never heard anyone explain how this is anything other than a virtue signal that, “Oh, I mean, I don’t want to breathe through an N95 but, you know, little 6-year-old Petey over here, he’s gonna breathe through an N95 all day long ’cause I’m a good person.” It’s child abuse.

CLAY: Yes, all of that — and, by the way, I just want to hammer Gavin Newsom here specifically, ’cause maybe some people who are potentially gonna question him on listening to our show, ’cause obviously Gavin Newsom won’t answer any questions from us. We played you what he said. There are videos, Buck, of him from the Fox broadcast not wearing his mask. And this one I think is the funniest.

So they have, like, a Bud Light photo, Bud Light camera where they take a still photo of the entire stadium. And then you can zoom in and look and see and find yourself inside of the stadium. And somebody out there tracked down Gavin Newsom inside of that photo. You can zoom in in 4K to see everybody. What do you think they found when they found the still shot of Gavin Newsom? Not wearing a mask.

Gavin Newsom claimed he took his mask off for just a second at 49ers-Rams. The Bud Light fan cam proves otherwise. This dude is a complete and total liar: pic.twitter.com/sdRMt3MD2I

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 31, 2022

BUCK: He’s a double mask and goggle situation, Clay, ’cause he takes the virus seriously.

CLAY: Nobody in his suite was wearing a mask, either. There’s no water near him. I wish we had a camera on him full game to actually see. When he says he took it off for a few seconds, the reality is he was likely not wearing it very much at all. And if you were truly, in theory, afraid of covid, you wouldn’t be in a stadium with 75,000 or 80,000 people, right? And you certainly, if you were there, would be basically wearing your mask at all times. You wouldn’t be taking it off to take a photo with Magic Johnson who — it’s worth mentioning — has HIV and would theoretically be the very definition of an immunocompromised individual.

BUCK: Let’s remember that in the early days — which Clay and I remember and refer back to. It’s almost like the precovid is now becoming a new date system, if you will.

CLAY: PC!

BUCK: Yeah. That works pretty well. If you look back to what was going on in the earliest days of covid, they were telling us not only is it two weeks to slow the spread — which, as we know, that was just the camel’s nose in the tent. That was the beginning of the end of our freedom. And then beyond that it was always wear a mask because we need to make sure hospitals don’t get overwhelmed.

The masking idea wasn’t that this will protect you forever from covid. That’s not how they sold it to people. It was, “Right now we need to slow this thing down.” We are two years into this. Anyone who thinks that intermittent masking — not intermittent fasting, which is what the Buckster needs to do these days, intermittent masking — is going to protect them from covid is living in a fantasyland, Clay. Right? This is like with you in Tennessee. They make you mask when go to the airport. You’re living your life otherwise outside of a mask. The chance of you not being exposed to covid under those circumstances is basically zero. I mean, you’ve had it twice. So have I.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The whole masking idea isn’t that this is gonna stop from you getting covid. It was meant temporarily, and incorrectly, to slow the spread. But it’s endemic? What are you trying to slow? It’s always there. It’s always going to be in circulation. Anyway, it just doesn’t make any sense, Clay. I’m getting frustrated.

CLAY: Oh, getting frustrated? I think the vast majority of the American population is with you — Democrat, Republican, and independent — if they have functional brains.