BUCK: Bad ideas from people in charge have real consequences. Why is it that we come here and make the case to you day-in-and-day-out about what’s true, what’s right, what’s happening all across the country? ‘Cause we want people to agree. I want you — I want everyone listening — not only to hear about what’s going on, ’cause I spend my life just reading and researching the news, and this is just what I do all the time.

But also to spread the word, to inform everybody who listens, to inform everybody who honors me by spending time listening to this show with what is truth so we can have better ideas that actually come into being through the legislative and executive branch process, essentially, so our government is better for all of us. That’s really the basic idea here.

And of course that means a government that does less, that leaves us alone, that leaves things to the states or even to the locality. This is the process of politics that we’re going through. And the bad decisions that have been made recently on crime have very immediate consequences for so many of us all over the country, for people who live in large cities, small cities, all across America.

And that’s why it was particularly galling, it was particularly aggravating when you have the new mayor of New York City, who has an opportunity to be what Giuliani was on the issue of crime fighting in the 1990s, not just for New York, but for the whole country. New York had over 2,000 murders in 1992. Think about that. The City of New York, not even the whole state, 2,000-plus murders 1991 or 1992.

I forget which one was the specific year. And it brought it down to something along the range of 300, let’s say, by the time the Bloomberg administration was done, but it brought 90%-plus down by Giuliani, by the NYPD, by some excellent police work, from the patrolmen all the way up to the commissioner. We know what works. We learned the lesson.

Eric Adams, who is a Democrat, is someone who I was rooting for not just as a New York City resident, but honestly as an American, because if it works well in New York, then it replicates itself. I mean, there was a time when I was working in the intelligence division, the intelligence division of the NYPD had liaisons and working relationship, with the FBI, with different cities, with Boston, with L.A. Even some international cities, we had coordination with them from the NYPD level.

And you share best practices, you share what’s working. So, there are ripple effects of good policing. There are ripple effects of good policy for the whole country. So, it’s not just about New York. It’s about the proving ground of the largest city in America to be a turnaround story, a miracle of sorts. Well, it’s not really miracle. It’s just straightforward rule-of-law police work supporting the men and women who wear the uniform, having prosecutors who are sane and who are not just pursuing a radical left-wing agenda.

It’s pretty straightforward how to make it happen. So that’s my way of saying Eric Adams comes into office as the mayor of New York City, and I had high hopes, but my expectations were not very high because Democrat, and the Democrat Party is just full of bad ideas now. And even if people don’t believe them, they bend the knee to them because the activist left is so powerful.

And that then brings me to the Met Gala. Isn’t it remarkable? Did you guys see the team here in New York, did you see a single prominent conservative or Republican of any kind at this event? So apparently only libs are invited to the Met Gala. Let’s just start with that. Now, that’s not a surprise, but it is interesting, isn’t it? Oh, half the country, on the basis of belief, is excluded, effectively, from being invited to this.

A lot of you say, “Buck, who cares?” Yeah, fine, but it just goes to show you how closed-minded and how incapable of accepting opinions other than their own, other than the orthodoxy of the left. It’s not even that you can be kinda, sorta, maybe. You better profess that you are all about the BLM movement, you are all the trans agenda. You are all about, of course, now the federal version of Roe v. Wade being passed by the Congress and the make-believe constitutional right to abortion, or else you don’t get invited to these very fancy events.

The mayor, Mayor Adams, was invited, and he went, and he showed up wearing a tuxedo that says, “End Gun Violence” on it at the Met Gala 2022 red carpet. Okay. “End gun violence.” This is very honestly annoying for a lot of us who live in New York, because the reality of the city is that it keeps getting worse and he’s not doing what’s necessary. The focus on gun violence, you see, is a transference of blame away from the criminal.

And I know that that seems like, “Wait. Hold on. Is that really true?” Yes. It is a sleight of hand. The obsession with always saying “end gun violence” because the next sentence that the lib will say is, “It’s time for gun control measures; that will stop this,” and that then diverts away from what we really have to do, which Eric Adams is a former NYPD guy.

Didn’t spend a lot of time on patrol from what I understand but nonetheless he was in the NYPD. He should know that if you want to solve the problem, here’s what you do: You lock up criminals. You enforce the law, and you lock up criminals. Now, I know that involves the prosecutorial side as well. We’ve all probably seen the show Law & Order, right?

The police who investigate primes and the prosecutors who push the cases in court and bring the charges. That’s what has to happen, and that’s it. And you can’t do this, “We’re gonna do some kind of a sifting through. Is there enough social justice reflected in the arrestee numbers?” No. You commit the crime; you do the time. It’s very straightforward. But as you know with the left, a lot of things that are straightforward they fight tooth and nail against.

They’ll do anything they can to avoid the reality. They think that fossil fuels are a threat to our existence. I’m not exaggerating. You know they say that, a threat to our existence, and then we say, “Well, the price of gas is high. You’ve been discouraging exploration.” The left constantly lies to you about the way these leasing permits work. They say, “Oh, there are so many leasing permits out there for drilling for gas. Why don’t they use those?”

Because that’s not how it works. Is there even gas there? Is there even oil there? Do they know? How are they projecting the price will be going forward? What regulations are going to increase the costs of exploration? It’s not as easy as, “Oh, yeah, there’s some land. Go drill! See how that works out for you.” It’s basically what the White House under Biden is saying.

But there are very straightforward propositions that they reject out of hand. And, yes, of course a lot of you are probably saying, “Yeah, Buck, like a man can’t be a woman. I know.” They reject the most straightforward, the most obvious truths. And, unfortunately, that has led us into, as a country, a place where one of our political parties is in a state of intellectual and moral disarray. That’s what’s underway right now.

And on the issue of crime, we’ve tried their way, and it didn’t work. And it’s very obvious it didn’t work. I mean, as Mayor Adams is wearing his stop gun crime tuxedo — sorry, “End Gun Violence” tuxedo — ’cause that’s what we need. We need a mayor who Shows up in a fancy tux at a fancy party saying, “Stop gun violence.” That’s really gonna work.

I mean, this is what we expect from actors. This is what we expect from Instagram celebrities who have clearly – forget don’t read a book, don’t read the newspaper — have no idea what’s going on. They don’t expect this from a mayor who, as I said, I want him to be successful because it means a better city, a safer city, it means more lives saved, more people living better lives.

I want him to be successful, but he’s going to have to, and this is the part… This is where the rubber meets the road. You want to clean up the city? You’re gonna have the left angry at you. You’re gonna have AOC angry at you. You’re going to have Anna Wintour, for whatever… Not Vanity Fair. What’s the magazine? Vogue, right? Yes, sorry. Fancy magazine, same thing.

You’re gonna have the glitterati and the fancy people who actually think about policy except insofar as it affects the cost of their domestic servants. You’re gonna have them angry with anybody, including the mayor here, for taking the actions necessary to turn things around. And they need to be turned around. The data does not lie. Year over year if you look at New York City, major crimes up in March of 2022…

I know we’re in May, but this is the most which has the most recent data: Up 36%. Okay? Grand larceny, auto, up almost 50%. Grand larceny in general, 40% all right, 50% increase in robberies. That’s enormous. If we were in normal times where the left hadn’t essentially embraced crime as something that we have to suffer through as a society because it’s a “collective failure. It’s not individuals who commit crimes, it’s collective societal failure.

“Sorry, they’re gonna walk into your store and steal everything? Sorry, small business owner, we don’t have a good enough safety net.” This is what the left believes. You see it, you hear it all the time. Houston just had its worst first quarter of homicides I know as a city, I think in the city’s history. Philadelphia last year had its all-time high murder rate.

Phoenix has had a dramatic increase in crime in recent years, never mind if you go into Seattle, San Francisco. Everything on the West Coast is just turned into some dystopia of needles, public urination, and broken windows and lunacy, right? That’s what the West Coast, far-left cities have become. How much more of this do we have to suffer through? Well, until Mayor Adams is showing up with a tuxedo on that says, “Obey the Law.

“We Will Lock Up Criminals,” it’s not going to change. In fact, it’ll just keep getting worse, until he and others in positions of authority to make these kinds of decisions are willing to say, “I don’t care if the far left gets mad at me.” I don’t care if the activists and the BLM supporters of the Democrat Party think that what I’m doing is unfair. If you are a criminal, you have to suffer the consequences of your actions.

If you are breaking the law, no more of this, “Oh, we’re gonna give someone 15 chances, 20 chances, 50 chances.” You look at the arrest records of some of these individuals who engage in heinous crimes, it is almost always the case now when you look the recent incidents… Look at the subway shooter. Remember the guy who tried to murder a bunch of people in the New York City subway?

What happened to that, by the way? The terrorist attack on the New York City subway? Not a lot of ongoing media conversation about the threat from individuals who take that action. You wonder what happened there. But he had a long criminal history. The Waukesha mass murderer, the guy what ran over all the people, murdered people at the Christmas parade in Wisconsin? He had a long criminal history.

The guys who attack old ladies on the street, on video and just beat them up. Long criminal histories. So this is not a complicated issue to understand. I’m not saying it’s easy to solve, but the solving of it is straightforward. And it does not involve gestures that should be limited to idiots on social media wearing a tuxedo that says, “Stop Gun Violence” or “End Gun Violence” ’cause that’s not gonna do anything.

New York City is already a gun-free zone, by the way, in violation of the Constitution in a whole range of ways, want to speak about constitutional rights. We’re a Second Amendment free zone in New York City. Wow. What a shock. That doesn’t stop all the gun violence. Wait. You mean if somebody’s in a gang and they’re willing to shoot people and murder them, they don’t care if there’s a waiting period for that firearm.

They bought it illegally out of the back of somebody’s trunk? Yeah. Pretty sure about that one. Eric Adams, huge disappointment so far. And the whole country is waiting to see who steps up and does the right thing and ends the crime wave in a major American city but until a Democrat is willing to say I don’t care about the heat that I will get from this, it will not happen. Hiring more social workers and apologizing more for the injustices of the past is not going to end the crime surge in any American city, guaranteed.