BUCK: The back-and-forth between Governor DeSantis of Florida and President Biden and all the Democrats and all Biden’s handlers and enablers and all the rest of it throwing down over the covid issue. It’s almost like this is really political and they don’t care what the actual numbers are.

We’ll get into that. Plus, Representative Cori Bush wants to defund police while demanding that she continue her own private security detail. The McCloskeys in St. Louis. You remember them during the BLM riots? They’ve been pardoned by the governor of Missouri and some people are saying that’s not enough. They’re gonna go after them still.

Plus, fallout from not just one Cuomo but the Bros Cuomo: The governor facing impeachment imminently; plus, you have the other one, the Bro Cuomo over at CNN, who is facing an ethics issue. (But Jeff Zucker will probably catch his back.) But let’s first, Clay, start with how all of a sudden it’s Texas and Florida’s fault that there’s this Delta variant situation, according to Joe Biden.

BIDEN: Florida and Texas account for one-third of all new covid-19 cases in the entire country. Just two states! Look, we need leadership from everyone. If some governors not willing to do the right thing to beat them pandemic, then they should allow businesses, universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it. I say to us these governors, “Please help, but if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way of people that are trying to do the right thing. Use your power to save lives.”

BUCK: You know what this, Clay? This is the president of the United States, who runs the federal government, complaining about red states — at least with Republican leadership right now, red states — that are trying to frequent the rights of people and end the covid tyranny, Biden is saying, “Step aside so we can have the private sector do our dirty work. Step aside so the federal mandates will be easier to put through without states trying to block us.”

CLAY: Yeah. And not only this, remember this goes back a ways, right? There has been a desire, I think, for Joe Biden to shift the blame for anything covid related to anybody in a red state. Remember what happened when Texas opened up. He said it was “Neanderthal thinking” that the state of Texas would in any way be opening up.

And there was all the discussion about all the craziness that was going to happen, all the virus that was going to spread. Governor Greg Abbott opened up, and, for the most part, what we are seeing is this new Delta variant has come in. But if the Delta variant didn’t exist or hadn’t made its way into the country, there was virtually no covid left in the old variants, if you want to call them that.

So this is Biden who ran his entire campaign predicated on, “I will keep you safe,” who ran his entire campaign from the basement, now looking around and trying to figure out who he can blame because covid has reared its ugly head again. Now, the data doesn’t reflect that anybody should be panicked. But I think what Republicans are looking for is somebody who can fight back. I actually think this plays really well for Abbott and DeSantis to be able to go head-to-head with Joe Biden, and that’s what Governor DeSantis down in Florida just did.

BUCK: Exactly right. Here he is, the governor of Florida, lightin’ up Biden on this one.

DESANTIS: Joe Biden suggests that if you don’t do lockdown policies, then you should, quote, “get out of the way.” But let me tell you this. If you’re coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I’m standing in your way. I’m not gonna let you get away with it.

CROWD: (applause and hoots)

DESANTIS: If you’re trying to deny kids a proper in person education, I’m gonna stand in your way and I’m gonna stand up for the kids in Florida. If you’re trying to restrict people, impose mandates, if you’re trying to ruin their jobs and their livelihoods and their small business — if you are trying to lock people down — I am standing in your way, and I’m standing for the people of Florida.

CROWD: (applaus)

DESANTIS: So why don’t you do your job? Why don’t you get this border secure? And until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about covid from you.

BUCK: So he’s got ’em nailed on the border issue, which is a total mess as we’ve discussed here before. Wide open. And it’s wide open, Clay, notably because of specific decisions made by the Biden administration starting in January of this year like ending the Remain in Mexico policy, the destruction of interior enforcement against illegal aliens all across the country. So that’s been a choice that’s been made. But don’t you remember, Clay, when the states were asserting rights back when Trump was in power? We were being told by places like New York, first of all, Cuomo was gonna have his own vaccine testers. You remember this?

CLAY: Yeah. Yeah.

BUCK: That you couldn’t trust the vaccine that there were gonna be state authorities overriding the federal authorities. Now you have a federal government that’s saying, “Oh, the states don’t get to actually use quarantine powers or decide not to use them as they see fit.” Top-down federal tyranny. That’s what it feels like.

CLAY: Can you imagine if they decide — and we don’t know how it’s gonna play out — to bring Joe Biden back because they’re terrified about Kamala Harris having the lowest approval ratings of any vice president in many of our lives? Can you imagine Ron DeSantis against Joe Biden on a debate stage? I mean this honestly.

I’m not sure that I can think of any matchup we’ve ever seen in a presidential election that would be more of a slaughter than DeSantis going head-to-head with Joe Biden. Right? Biden left himself open for one haymaker after another. Trump was a mess in that first debate. Second debate, he clocked him. Imagine what DeSantis would be able to with 82-year-old Joe Biden if they tried a Weekend at Bernie’s Part 2-style drag Joe Biden across the finish line again.

I think there’s nervousness in the White House because when they have these back-and-forths, DeSantis is destroying the logic underpinning any of the criticisms from Joe Biden, and he’s doing it as the governor of Florida not even really on an equal footing. This is a bad, bad, I think, calculus by Joe Biden to try to blame some of these Republican governors ’cause I think it blows up in his face.

BUCK: Well, what’s really happening here is the Democrats are trying to take the first step to the permanent covid health/security/theater state. They’re trying to keep this in a theater where it’s gonna be here together because if you start to put mandates in places, if you have people that set up vaccine passports. L.A.’s thinking about it. They already have an L.A. city councilman thinking about it.

CLAY: I saw that story. Yes.

BUCK: New York is still on the line for it, the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, is expected to make mandatory for you’ll active-duty military personnel mandatory covid vaccine. Which then you have to ask, “Doesn’t that have to be mandatory for all federal personnel, too?” This is the incrementalism of the permanent covid state. It’s happening right now.

When we should be talking about how we get to full normalcy, instead, they’re trying to enshrine aspects of the apparatus of control in the bureaucracy that would linger forever. More variants. Another upsurge in the wintertime. It will all be there already. The whole system will be there in order to assert levels of control against us. That’s what I saw the Democrats doing right now.

They’re trying to do it while people are still concerned up, the numbers are high enough that they can get away with some of it. Because otherwise, what are we really even talking about with them at this point? They’re not gonna actually get to zero covid. They want to put this apparatus in place so that they can have a lot of control over our lives for a very long time to come.

CLAY: And the larger context, I would say, is the variants aren’t gonna stop coming, and vaccination isn’t going to end the variants because again, look at what’s going on around the world. The percentage of vaccinations around the world are very low. Where did the Delta variant come from? India. Where are the future variants going to come from?

Third World countries that have not been able to vaccinate their people, and there’s always going to be a new variant of covid-19 — it would seem to me — for years and years. This is becoming as we talked about on the show endemic and flu-like in that this isn’t going to be — at least not based on anything that I’m seeing so far from the vaccines, this isn’t gonna be — polio that basically ceases to exist.

This isn’t going to be a measles or a mumps where it almost doesn’t exist anywhere. This is gonna be endemic. It’s gonna be like the flu, and there’s always going to be, at least in the short term — until people start to act rationally and reasonably — evidence out there of why you should be panicking and the evidence of panic allows the continued capturing of freedom. And that’s what we’re seeing happen right now is all over the country, this expansion which we had hoped was going to start to diminish with the vaccines. It hasn’t. Freedom continuing to be gobbled up.

BUCK: DeSantis spoke about how, by having an open border, to your point, Clay, about the variants and how they’ll be continuations of these iterations of variants. That’s what’s gonna end up happening, and let’s also not forget that Fauci said just yesterday we could be heading for vaccine-resistant covid this fall. So he’s essentially saying even we might get to a place where variants completely evade the vaccine, which is fascinating, almost like what happens sometimes with the flu but that’s a whole other conversation we’ll get into which we have not been able to conquer and eliminate entirely.

But here’s Governor DeSantis saying we’ll just bring it all in.

DESANTIS: He is bringing in people from over 100 different countries across the southern border. Every variant on this planet — some we don’t even know about — are absolutely coming into our country that way, and what they’re doing is, people are coming and then they’re farming them all over the United States — putting them on buses, putting them on planes. And so when he’s lecturing people about imposing covid restrictions and lockdown policies and not only doing nothing to stop the border surge but actually facilitating it on the other hand, he just loses all credibility when it comes to covid.

BUCK: If you want to fly into the U.S. from the U.K., Clay, and the Democrats get their way it’s gonna be mandatory vaccination; there’s gonna be a whole bureaucracy around it. If you just walk across the U.S.-Mexico border and read off the little sheet of paper that the cartels give you to say, “I want to claim asylum in your country,” you get released.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You get let go.

CLAY: Not only that, if you go to Mexico on vacation, you have to have a negative test to come back from Mexico. I did that in February. But if I had been — and I’m a citizen, obviously. If I had been walking across the border, it would have been an issue at all. And DeSantis is right, that there is a strong argument that can be tied together.

And I think it’s a really potent one for the Republican Party to tie border insecurity to covid variant spreads because they’re gonna be coming from somewhere outside of this country, by and large, and that’s where the danger comes from. So are you going to secure the border or not? It’s a tough response for the Biden White House I think there, given the failures they have at the border right now.