CLAY: I wanted to hit you with credit to the New York Post, because I think sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming to just hear the numbers. And they have a great visual that we will tweet out and you can come see it yourself @ClayTravis. You can share it with your friends. But that front page of New York Post just says, “Insanity” with an exclamation point.

And it says there are right now 161 million vaccinated U.S. residents. Of those so far, 5,601 people have gotten breakthrough covid and were hospitalized with breakthrough covid. And of that number so far, 1,141 have died, which represents 0.0007%. Now, the death rate in general from covid is not very high, as you heard Rand Paul say, for anyone under the age of 50.

We would encourage and continue to say, if you are over the age of 65 you need to get a covid vaccine. But this is getting pretty aggressive. Joe Biden yesterday said — you can play cut 11 here — he’s researching whether the federal government can mandate everyone in the entire country get the covid vaccine.

BIDEN: Well, I — I’d like to see them continue to move in that direction and that’s why I’m… (sputtering) I pointed out, I had asked the Justice Department to determine whether that is — they’re able to do that legally, and they can. Local communities can do that. Local businesses can do that. It’s still a question whether the federal government can mandate the whole country. I don’t know that yet.

BUCK: So we’re at a point where deaths are down a huge percentage —

CLAY: Massively.

BUCK: You know, 80, 90% on a daily basis. It’s completely a different story now than it was; 160 million people have gotten the shot, and 5,000 breakthrough cases is what they’re talking about at this point out of 160 million? I think, Clay, at some level people just have a hard time even thinking, visualizing about what a small number that is, and that’s why that New York Post cover I think is so helpful.

Because this is like saying that you’re looking at a beach and there are a couple of grains of sand and you’re worried about those grains of sand and not looking and enjoying the whole beach. It is just madness on display, but you’re also seeing here what we’ve been trying to warn people all along, which is there’s authoritarian impulse behind all this.

There are people that really believe the power that they have to force you to get the vaccine — to force society to be healthy and safe — is important, is necessary, and they don’t want to give it up. They don’t want to let this go. They’ve convinced themselves that the lockdowners, the Fauci-ites, are the good people and that they make the rest of society safer and better by making sure everyone bends the knee and does exactly what they say. And they’re wrong. And we have to tell them. And we have to fight against this.

CLAY: I heard from some people in Congress today, Buck. I don’t know whether I buy this 100%, but they said the Delta variant sudden panic is about giving the cover to the Democrat wildly crazy budget. They think people will pay much less attention to all the budget process if suddenly we’re back in a battle over covid.

If they were really diabolical enough to use this as an opportunity – to make the battle over masks, to make the battle over vaccinations, to shift everybody’s attention — that would be maniacally duplicitous of them, and I’m not sure that I buy into that because I don’t think they’re strategically evil enough to think of that in this way. But I think what really is happening is people cannot let go of covid. Just like Democrats can’t let go of Trump, they can’t let go of covid because Trump and covid define them as good people.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: This is so elemental to the left-wing thought process. “They wear a mask. They’re not trying to kill my grandma, unlike all those stupid Trump people who want my grandma to die.” This is what virtue signaling writ large looks like, and they can’t give it up. They just can’t let go of covid, and we’ve told you this was gonna happen. But the rapidity with which it has happened is really astounding.

BUCK: And here we are now where we should all just be celebrating a summer of freedom and no more unnecessary worry about covid out there, and they’re clearly clinging to it for reasons of, as we’ve been discussing, power and authority and the collectivist mind-set, the mass mobilizations. The Democrats have always loved that formulation: Governing through a crisis.

The Obama administration liked to govern through a series of crises as much as they could and to leverage it so that you can get people to make decisions based upon the fear that they feel instead of the sense of what’s actually best for the country. And I do think that while there are a lot of… What you’re addressing, I think, Clay, is the people that feel good about this and the cynical authoritarian impulse on display.

There is also a large contingent in this country — no one can really ever say, but it’s clear there are a lot of people — for whom watching too much CNN or MSNBC, reading the New York Times, the Washington Post every day has created a deep-seated psychological and emotional trauma about the mitigation measures and how important it is, and this is why… You walk around. We don’t have mandates yet in New York City for masks again.

I’m seeing a lot of masks out there. So some of the people do it because they think it shows that, “Yeah, I watch Maddow and love Fake Tapper.” But other people do it because they sit there and they’re truly no longer able to think. A lot of them are very smart folks you can talk to about a bunch of things, but they’re lockdowners, and they’re no longer able to see what’s really happening around them. They’re irrational. It is a mass hysteria. It’s on display for all of us.

CLAY: It really is. I’ve been talking about this for a long time, Buck, and I know we’ve talked about it a little bit on the show. But I hope that in the years ahead we get a full accounting for a how much of what happened was madness. I’ll use Vietnam as an example here. In Vietnam, all of the experts told us that we had to do this. They shared the data on why fighting in Vietnam was so important.

Decades later, most people look at all the data on Vietnam and say we made a bad mistakes. There’s a consensus. Will that ever happen with covid, or are the masked imbeciles out there so committed to their version of the truth that they’ll never acknowledge what the data showed and the people like you and me, who said all the way back in March of last year, “Here’s what we need to do.

“People who are under 65, based on the data, need to pretty much go on living their lives as we do now, and people who are over 65 or have severe health related-issues, we need to protect and isolatele, particularly in nursing homes the best we can.” That’s what should have happened for the post 18 months. We’re still there. That’s what the data has told us. And it’s like people won’t acknowledge what the facts are because they’re so caught up in what I call covid fear porn that they won’t allow rationality to win.

BUCK: And we could look at a hundred years ago with the Spanish flu, Spanish influenza, and the usage of masks and a lot of the fights over how to deal with this. They didn’t wear masks afterward for flu season. We have run the experiment before, but we — in a moment of panic, in a moment of just mass hysteria — were no longer able to look at what we have known up to this point.

And that was true of the entire lockdown process. This is not often spoken about these days, for obvious reasons, but the CDC and other public health bureaucracies have looked at the possibility. Because there have been people raising the alarm especially after the first SARS outbreak and swine flu.

They’ve looked at where we are now where you have a pandemic and a highly transmissible aerosolized virus, and they always came back to the same conclusion, which is lockdowns probably won’t help very much and will have enormous costs. And then when we were finally faced with the issue, we were at a point where they said, “You know what? Everything we’ve known up to this point, let’s throw it out.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: You have De Blasio, the mayor of New York, America’s largest city. I know if you live in Texas or Florida or a red state you’re saying, “Yeah, it’s your problem.” True, but it’s being replicated in other places. He’s actually saying, “Forget about Biden and the federal government mandating it,” which, by the way, would affect all of you. (chuckles) I don’t think they’re gonna do it, but they’re talking about it. In New York City, though, Clay, they are crazy enough to do this. They do not care about the facts, the data, the science. If they want to make you, they will. Here’s the mayor of New York.

POPPY HARLOW: Should we take this, uh, to mean, mayor, that you are going to try to move, uh, to have all restaurants in New York City do the same, to mandate vaccinations?

DE BLASIO: Look. A-a-a-at this point, Poppy, given everything we’re learning about the Delta variant, all options are on the table.

POPPY HARLOW: All right.

DE BLASIO: I keep saying we’re climbing the ladder in terms of more and more mandates, tougher and tougher measures to make sure that people are vaccinated. What’s gonna happen, bluntly, is that folks who are vaccinated are gonna be able to experience all the things that they loved in the life of this city and this country. And folks who are not gonna — not vaccinated are gonna find that too many things that they want to do they can’t do unless they are vaccinated. That has to be the reality, because people will respond to that. We all understand human nature.

POPPY HARLOW: Sure.

DE BLASIO: Especially younger people who are the group that are most unvaccinated, if they can’t do the things they want to do, they will find a way to vaccination.

BUCK: First of all, Clay, all those young New York City Trump voters?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Yeah! They’re really the problem, right? It’s all the Trump voters. Sure.

CLAY: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: I live here. There’s not a lot of them. The other thing I just want to tell you. You know what the seven-day average in New York City for deaths is right now from covid? Three. Three.

CLAY: What…? It’s just… It’s hard to say anything other than we are in the grips of covid madness that has spread across much of the country. I don’t know that there’s any comparable situation that any of us have ever seen in our lives. Can you think of anything, Buck?

BUCK: No.

CLAY: In all honesty, anything like this? It’s difficult. We’re both history guys. It’s difficult to even go back through American history and point to anything like this. I’m a big believer that history oftentimes cycles through, as I know you are, and that you can learn a lot about where we’re going by seeing where we’ve been. But even when you talk about the 1918-19 flu, none of the stuff that we’re doing now was at all similar to what happened in ’18 and ’19 with the flu. And that flu, by the way, was far more deadly than anything covid.

BUCK: Yeah, a 5%-plus fatality rate including in the second wave of the Spanish flu going after people age 20 to 40 specifically.

CLAY: Young. Yes.

BUCK: People were dying in hours.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They were dying quick. They would get it and they’d be dead within six hours, eight hours. It could rip through a population very quickly, and then the Roaring Twenties came afterwards, right? America just moved back on with life after it went through and now, here we are still dealing with just utter madness.

I honestly, Clay, thought it would be a little higher. I’m looking at the New York Times update of the CDC data right now for New York City. De Blasio is saying you can’t go to a restaurant unless you’re vaccinated. They’re infringing on liberties, freedom, individual choice in mind-blowing ways. Three people dead. Honestly, I wonder how many people… I really mean this: How many people have been shot in New York City in the last seven days? Probably more than three.

CLAY: Way more.