CLAY: I am Clay Travis, and, as I am speaking to you right now, the Dow is down 830 points. Joe Biden just finished talking to the American public, and there is a massive sell-off going on on Wall Street that is I believe connected pretty clearly to covid fears rising anew, which Buck Sexton and I have told you was going to happen. And I got a provocative thesis for you.

We’re gonna spend a lot of time discussing what exactly is going on with this covid collapse in the stock market, but my fear, what we are going to see in this country — we saw L.A. this week reinstitute their mask mandate, announced they were doing it. It started late Saturday night. I’m actually headed out to L.A. on Wednesday, so I will see what exactly is going on there and report back to you live on the show on Thursday and Friday. But I think where we are rapidly headed, looking ahead, is two massively different covid responses in this country that are going to create a seismic schism, to use an interesting word, between red state America and blue state America where red state America, Buck Sexton, is going to say we’ve already tried the lockdowns, we’ve already tried the masks. There is nothing we can do to stop a virus from spreading. We have to remain open and live our lives as normal as we possibly can.

And I think what’s gonna happen in blue state America — and you’re already seeing it happen in L.A. — is first are gonna come the masks, then are gonna come aggressive social distance arguments, and then I think we’re headed for lockdowns.

Let me give you one example of some people in Wall Street believing that I’m correct right now. Almost every stock is down today, Buck. One of the best performing stocks in the entire market, Peloton, which was also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the stock market crash, I think it’s fair to say, last March, because everybody suddenly had their gyms shut down and they wanted to have a Peloton bike or Peloton equipment at home. Almost everything is down. Peloton up 6% right now as we’re speaking as the stock market itself is down right around two 2.4%. Why that big divergence, I think there are some people right now trading on the idea of lockdowns coming back. And we’re gonna tell you all about this because I think it’s a massive story going on right now. Do you buy into the idea of almost a covid civil war developing in our country, blue state America does one thing, red state America does another?

BUCK: It’s all gonna depend on what we see in the next few weeks from the data. If we see an increase in deaths and hospitalizations, then people are going to really freak out. Right now. it’s about caseload, and the caseload in some European countries. And I think that’s noteworthy because there are so many right now who are blaming explicitly Fox News by name for the surge, as if Fox News is doing gain-of-function research in New York City to try to — I mean, it’s crazy stuff be said by people, and I mean by Fauci, I mean by actual lab coat tyrants that go on TV all the time.

So they’re blaming the right generally speaking, we could say that, without ever specifying why and without looking at the data for who’s not really vaccinated. My worry here is that they’re gonna use a lesser level of vaccine efficacy as a justification not for looser restrictions and more freedom but actually a much bigger push to get every vaccinated, every man, woman, and child and to get everyone to accept boosters as part of this whole situation. It’s not gonna be optional. The left is panicking about this.

Now, if we don’t have the hospitalizations and deaths, this will calm down I think quite rapidly. That doesn’t mean it’s gonna go away, doesn’t mean we won’t go into lockdowns in the winter when we have another surge. But, Clay, my thesis right now is this, and it’s actually something that I’ve been saying for months, and here actually in May of 2020, I wrote, “We’re moving toward eventual herd immunity as a society. We’re just doing it more slowly and at the price of trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and people are figuring this out the hardest way possible.”

That was a year ago, more than a year ago, that I said that. I think more than ever that’s what we’re seeing. If it doesn’t even prevent infection at the rates that we were told, what does that say about how many people are going to be infected? And, remember, they’re gonna say, “Oh, well, it means for a milder form of the virus.” Okay. But there’s a 99 point, what, 7% overall survival rate. And as we’ve said all along, if you are under 65, by the numbers and don’t have comorbidities, this is acceptable as a public health issue. Pandemic is everywhere, right? “Pan” is “all over,” that’s what the pandemic part of this is. This is now an epidemic, meaning it’s going to exist within the population. We’re heading toward covid as a cyclical flu or cold-like syndrome. And I think that’s where the public health authorities haven’t thought this one through other than to say lockdowns, masks, things like that might have to come back. So I’m with you on that as a very high likelihood.

CLAY: Here where we’re gonna trying to be honest with you on this show. We’re gonna look at the data. And if you look at the data, there are several different hypotheses that you can put forward. We can’t know because we don’t have a month into the futures data where we would look like geniuses right now. What I would look at and look toward is England and Israel, countries that have the most percentage of their population overall vaccinated. Right now England’s overall number of cases is approaching their all-time high. That’s despite having one of the highest rates of vaccination in the world. So what does that tell us? There are several different hypotheses you could draw from that, right, Buck? One is –this is where people like, “You can’t say that. Oh, my God. How are you.”

BUCK: We’re on radio so we can. Sorry, Facebook.

CLAY: One hypothesis that is a legitimate one you could put forward because, again, we don’t know a hundred percent what the future it looks like is that the vaccine is way more ineffective in the months ahead than it initially appears to be, right? In other words, you’re gonna need a lot of boosters, and it’s not necessarily going to last forever like some vaccines. One hypothesis.

BUCK: Just to be clear, it could be that it quickly recedes, the protection of this.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Or it could be the delta variant — we kept hearing about the variants that would evade the level of protection or it could be both of those things at some level.

CLAY: Yes, that’s one thesis. That’s well said, too, because even people out there who usually get the flu shot know that all the different variations of the flu means sometimes you’re protected against the version of the flu that isn’t ascendant, right? So we don’t know. That’s one hypothesis that could be out there.

Another — and this is a more positive version — is that there’s still gonna be a ton of positive covid tests. But as you said, Buck, hopefully the hospitalizations and deaths do not follow, in other words, as the vaccine is spreading and as we have more and more natural immunity — that is, people who have already gotten covid, our bodies have protected us to such an extent that the number of people dying with covid and being hospitalized with it is going to remain at a low enough level that we don’t have to have any concern.

BUCK: You’re looking at this as someone who’s going to follow the data —

CLAY: Rationally looking at the science.

BUCK: And I think what we have to do is look at this in the context of what is clearly — and I felt this way all along — Fauci-ism — and we should call it that. We should have a name for it. It is a mass mental illness now. It is an anxiety disorder. And if you want to know what the symptoms are, I can describe them to you. I mean, I’m not a doctor nor do I play one on radio but the symptoms are double masking outside alone, which I still see people doing.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Thinking children on the playground right now outside should be masked or in schools or honestly anybody who believes that the airlines should — we’ll talk later about your experience in the airport and airlines over the weekend — but anybody who thinks that that stuff isn’t crazy is suffering from or is being — having Fauci-ism imposed on them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And we have a collision that has happened in American society over the last 18 months between unprecedented mass media and unbelievable mass hysteria, and so as long as there is some degree of covid in the general population, what we’re going to be hearing is, “Oh, but the next variant, or we need to get those boosters ready now, or we need to get locked down.”

I think one debate we’re gonna have in the country is preventative lockdowns because people are gonna say, well, it’s too late if you wait ’til you hit the numbers in December or January; so some places, California and New York, are gonna say we have to do prevention. And remember everybody for all of our — all of our friends right now in those red states — Clay’s in Tennessee so he’s feeling like he’s gonna be okay. I’m here in New York in the belly of the beast. As this is happening, there will be federal government mandates they try. The Biden administration will try to eliminate protections in the redder states. So no one will be safe from this stuff.

CLAY: So I think both of those hypotheses that I just laid through are legitimate, you know, broad hypotheses. Hopefully the vaccine is gonna work and deaths and hospitalizations will be down. That’s the hope. The other one is that basically virus gonna virus and that the actual protection that will be provided from the vaccine is going to be of a limited duration and protection. And so, to your point, buck, what we’re gonna, Buck, continue to talk about here when we come back is I think we need to break down, where are we headed?

I believe the canary in a coal mine moment was LA saying we’re gonna bring back masks, and there are going to be a lot more places that are starting to follow that lead. You thought there was a divide between red and blue America over covid before. I think this fall and winter has the potential to be far more explosive where you’ve got protests in the streets over the ideas of whether kids are in school or not, whether there is going to be — whether we’re gonna keep everything open, whether lockdowns are going to exist. And I think it is going to be a massive, unbelievable mess. And I think that’s why Wall Street is selling off right now, because this hope that covid was just gonna disappear I think has started to take some major body blows based on the evidence that is out there right now.