CLAY: Dr. Fauci continues to travel around the country receiving honorary degrees and speaking at many different universities and continuing to be hailed as a hero. Here he is at Princeton — and before we play this cut from Princeton, Buck, I want to ask this question. You don’t have any kids yet, but my kids get out of school tomorrow. We were talking off-air, I’m gonna have to duck out and go pick ’em up ’cause they have a half day.

And then the chaos at some point, you may hear me yelling over the next couple of months from my home studio ’cause the boys will be fighting while they’re playing Madden or FIFA or Minecraft or whatever else. And I have to tell them, “Hey, Dad’s upstairs working. Keep it down, down there.” It might happen during the summer season. But, Buck, my kids are getting old enough where we can start to think about what they might do. We had a fifth great graduation, of all things.

I got an eighth-grade graduation coming up soon. Yes, those exist. But when I see Dr. Fauci speaking at schools, I think to myself, “I want to cross that school off as a place that I would ever want one of my kids to go,” and I can’t be alone in this, right? I mean, you would be hailing Dr. Fauci as a hero. We talk about right and wrong sides of history. I’m very confident that if we ever get an honest trajectory of covid, Dr. Fauci is going to be on the wrong side of history for virtual every decision that he made.

BUCK: Fauci at various points during the pandemic made it clear that if the choice was between upsetting the neurotic elites of northwest D.C. or the Upper West Side or so I think in California or —

CLAY: All places basically that you and I have lived at some point, by the way. We know what these people are like.

BUCK: Gotta know the enemy, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And if he had a choice between upsetting those neurotic NPR listeners —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — or letting children sit outside in 30-degree weather with masks on who are 5 and freeze because they weren’t vaccinated, Fauci showed us who he is time and time again. If it was between making the overanxious wine moms who want to mask up little Timmy and little Susie twice over to walk outside alone or say, “Hey, maybe shutting down the parks was a bad idea,” Fauci showed us who he is and the entire apparatus truly that he controls over at NIAID, NIH, CDC. Just a handful of people, really, making all these decisions. They’re all authoritarian Democrats. And now I think the problem we’re gonna continue to deal with is that there are so many people who are complicit in the stupidity and the misery that was enforced against 330 million people.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: There’s not a single thing – I know this might sound a bit radical – not a single thing that Anthony Fauci told you and me and everyone listening to this to do that we did not want to do, that we should have done. Not one. There’s not a single time when he used the force of the state against the will of people who disagreed with his position, and it turned out he was right. This guy is a lab coat Stalinist, and the problem we face now is that the people who went along with this, Clay, their only option is to shower him with awards, declare victory, great job!

Because otherwise it’s, “You mean we were fooled? You mean we, who run the universities, who run corporate America, who run every, obviously, Democrat blue state in the country, we’re just not as smart as we think we are? We were fooled by this little bureaucratic evil Smurf?” There’s so many words I want to use that I can’t say on the radio. That’s the problem. We’re gonna keep pushing forward with it ’cause otherwise they have to admit they’re not as smart as they thought they were.

CLAY: That’s the Achilles’ heel of the left. There are many different things you can attack them for. But the Blue Check Brigade in particular, they derive a huge amount of their own net worth on the idea that they’re smarter than all of us out here, idiot Trump voters. All of these dumb rubes who live in the red states and made the choices that they did. They double masked. They socially distanced. Their kids were safe.

And as the data is coming in, Buck. What is becoming clear even, I think, to some of these people is, nothing that they did mattered. And they have been lecturing us on it. And if you go with their intelligence, they can handle other things; but you who considered yourself to be so brilliant, you allowed yourself to be snookered by this doctor Fauci and all of his conspirators who conspired to shut down this country, they all failed, and you fell for it.

BUCK: So, here’s a moment where I think we should say this because there will be so few places where this is said. People in this audience — and I’m just trying to give a broad swath. People in this audience who are truckers — and, by the way, the American economy and really the whole western economy got a reminder of how important truckers are during this covid pandemic, right? All of a sudden everyone was, “Oh, wait a second. You mean if they’re not doing this job, we don’t have food?”

People who are truckers, people who own the local hardware store, people who are general contractors, people who just are doing the jobs in towns all across America, they looked at a complicated problem set and many different variables and issues of what should happen during covid, and then you have on this other side the Faucis, the Walenskys, the blue check MD, MPH.

“I’m an epidemiologist! I have a master’s in seven different things including gender studies,” and the folks who are the general contractors, the truck drivers, and the stay-at-home moms and the core of our people, our audience, they were right. And all the Faucis with their degrees and their CDC, they were wrong. And that is like water thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West. It melts them. They cannot handle it.

CLAY: Yeah, one reason why those people were all right is — and I really believe this — so much of your ability to make smart decisions on a day-to-day basis is about risk analysis. People who put their bodies on the line are better at-risk analysis for physical health than people who don’t. I really do believe this. And so, you had all the blue check journo brigade saying, “Hey, just stay home,” and they’re sitting around watching Netflix, thinking about how brave they are while they send Twitter messages. But they’re ordering their food from somebody who makes less money than them to bring their food, right?

BUCK: Disproportionately minorities, by the way. They were ordering around minorities making less than minimum wage to bring them their food while they were turning into the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man sitting on a couch on home tweeting at how evil you and me were. That was the reality of the pandemic.

CLAY: That’s right. And same thing they are ordering everything from Amazon. Who do you think is fulfilling those orders in Amazon factories and then delivering them? People who make a lot less money than you do. And they were then convincing themselves that they were being virtuous because, by the way, their jobs were overwhelmingly able to be done remotely from home.

They got all the money, they got more convenience, and they got to sell the idea that they were virtuous. And if you look at the data, Fauci got everything wrong. I just want to play this audio because some people say, “Well, I don’t know.” You hear this every now and then, Buck. I’m sure you do because sometimes I do. You know, you still talk a little bit about covid and you still talk a little about masking. And I say yes, because it isn’t gone. They will bring it back at the first opportunity that midterm variant is going to emerge. Philadelphia kids are back in masks. They aren’t going to let it go. We have to keep fighting them.

BUCK: I’ve never been to Bermuda. I haven’t left the country during covid. The last time I was outside the country before covid was rolling with Secretary Pompeo in Argentina.

CLAY: Oh. Big time.

BUCK: No big deal. No big deal. Stop in El Salvador. Nothing going on there. But I hadn’t been outside the country since covid, and I’m going outside the first time, and the whole… I’ve been saying I’m not doing it ’cause I will not deal with the stupidity. And I thought we were kind of in the clear. Do you know that…? I didn’t know this. I actually have to go and adjust this on some forum. America is, like, one of the only countries that requires a covid test for citizens to come back in the country.

CLAY: To get back in.

BUCK: So, I’m gonna go to Bermuda for the weekend with Carrie – girlfriend. We’re gonna come back, and I have to test and if I test positive, they’re not gonna let me enter my own country? They’re letting 10,000 illegals a day swamp the southern border. I mean, just overwhelm all the resources we have at the southern border, and I’m not allowed in my own country because I have what is a glorified cold maybe? Who makes these rules? Why? How?

CLAY: It’s indefensible.

BUCK: How is it possible that someone doesn’t push back? There’s like this weird worship around Fauci too. No one even pushes him on anything. If they ask him a question that’s an actual question, he goes, “Well it’s complicated and a lot of factors and the data…” It’s the same song and dance with that vile little turd all the time. Why doesn’t someone actually push him and say, “How can you defend such a stupid policy?” Europe doesn’t do this. America does this?

CLAY: You want to hear me fired up. If Laura Travis, my wife, were here. We went down to Mexico in February of ’21 or March of ’21, last year. And — before we were doing this show. We went down there. You have to test negative to be able to get back in the country, and I was furious about this. I said, “Wait a minute. In order to get on an airplane as an American citizen and fly back from Mexico, I have to test negative. But if I’m coming across the border on foot — same country, from Mexico — into the United States, they’re not testing anybody to be able to enter the country that way?”

This has been going on for over a year. When you go to Mexico, though, as an American you’re like, wait a minute. You’re holding me as an American citizen to a more stringent reentry to the country requirement than you are illegal immigrants streaming across our southern border? Someone make any logical sense of that to me at all. Now, this also funny is, the Mexican resorts, they’re like “Nobody tests positive here.”

“What do you mean, ‘Nobody tests positive here’?” The woman kind of winked and like, “Nobody tests positive here.” So, I think, if you run a Mexican resort, the last thing you want to do is anger Americans and make them have to quarantine so they can’t leave the country, so they go back and convince people not to come down to Mexico. But the fact that this policy exists at all is indefensible on any kind of logical basis whatsoever. It really is. Shall we play the Fauci or are we all so fired up —

BUCK: We’re so fired up we actually overran the Fauci here —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — which will happen whenever that guy — I think Fauci’s name should be an epithet, like when someone cuts you off in traffic, you should say, go Fauci yourself. But we’ll come back —

CLAY: I agree a hundred percent with that, by the way.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Fauci is a cacophony of lies, Clay. How about that one?

CLAY: How can you be so incredibly lacking in self-awareness to be arguing that other people are embracing cacophony of lies when you are the number one spreader of a cacophony of lies surrounding covid?

BUCK: Notice how they don’t even talk about… We’re two years into this and we can reason through all this, right? You don’t have to be an MD, M.Ph., MA, Ph.D., blue check.

CLAY: Where is your degree in epidemiology?

BUCK: Triple mask, six Ukraine flags. Yeah. All that stuff. You don’t have to do that to just sit here and think to yourself, hold on a second. What happened to the data? What happened to the fact that we’re now two years plus into this —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — and we’ve run so many real world experiments on something. For example, we were talking about vaccines before, but even on masking — the data on masks. All you have to do is look at the Madrid study, or the Spain study, where they had children… I might mess up what the age-group was, but I think it was 5-year-olds did not have to mask, 6-year-olds did, I think. For an entire school year, they decided to do this. And does anyone want to guess?

Not only are the children who masked not safer, in fact, the curves move in exact lockstep for the masked and unmasked children in school. So, this is like if you did a big trial of giving someone a pill that’s supposed to stop their hair from falling out and everyone’s hair fell out, you would say, “That pill doesn’t work very well.” They just ignore it, Clay. They pretend like this doesn’t happen. Otherwise, could you imagine? If we were wrong, we’d hear about this every day. CNN would be running, “Oh, the anti-maskers!” You didn’t hear about this anymore. People say, “Oh, ’cause we’re masking less.” Yeah, ’cause they can’t keep a lie going anymore.

CLAY: Well, and really… Again, I’m kind of fascinated by this idea of the right and wrong side of history. I really believe in 50 years, right? Take away the passions of the moment. You and I are both history buffs, so I feel like, I majored in history. I did my thesis on all sorts of American history-related issues.

BUCK: You actually use your degree for your job like me. I majored in political science, which, everyone’s like, “Oh, what are you gonna do with that?” Apparently, a political talk show.

CLAY: Yeah. And history kind of matters a great deal because what it teaches you is to not get overwhelmed by the passions of the moment and that in 50 or a hundred years when people actually assess history in a broader context, I really believe that Dr. Fauci is going to be one of, if not the greatest villains of the twenty-first century. Because I think people are going to look at everything that he did in dispassion.

When a lot of people who around today are no longer here and when the politics of the moment is not particularly involved and they’re going to say this is the most disastrous bureaucrat in the history of the United States. He cost this country an enormous amount. He is the villain of covid. I really think that’s where we’re gonna end up.