CLAY: The federal government is investigating five different states that have allowed parents to make decisions about whether or not their kids wear masks. Among those states: Florida, Tennessee, Texas, I believe Oklahoma, and also a fifth state. Obviously, not a surprise. Red states are being investigated by federal Civil Rights investigators at the Department of Justice. This is pure madness designed to try to make everybody make the exact same decisions.

So, when, Buck — as happens and is already happening — this curve, that now the cases are diminishing in Florida, in Texas, and they’re starting to diminish in Tennessee, already happened in Missouri and Arkansas. When this happens, what usually occurs is the blue check brigade and all the mask mandate losers out there say, “Oh, well, the reason cases started going down,” they’ve been arguing this for 18 months, “is because people started wearing their masks.”

Well, the data doesn’t work if there’s no mask mandate. So Ron DeSantis is now in the middle of a mask fight. We talked about this, on Friday, I think it was, Buck, when a local court in Tallahassee, Florida, said the governor had exceeded his authority. They now are going to appeal. The Department of Justice is involved. Here’s Ron DeSantis on the mask wars.

DESANTIS: Well, it’s going to be appealed. Obviously, it’s problematic. If you look at the ruling, he’s basically saying that it had… It violated the school board. The Parents Bill of Rights violated the school board. But in reality, the school boards weren’t even parties to the case. So I think we can have really good grounds to appeal in terms of the First District Court of Appeal. And look, at the end of the day, what the Parents Bill of Rights requires, in our judgment, is that parents be given the right to opt out.

BUCK: That’s all of the authoritarian impulse. They will always find some way. I remember when the first wave of lock downs was happening, people were very rightly at the time arguing that plenary powers for the states under our constitution are very broad, that essentially if you don’t violate a federal constitutional right and you don’t violate federal law, states can do all kinds of things.

There’s a lot of areas where they have a tremendous amount of leeway. And under health policy, they also have a lot of leeway. And here we are where finally you have a state like Florida where they’re pushing — and by the way, there’s some talk in GOP circles there, with a narrow — a much more narrow majority — about trying to get through an end to employer mandates for vaccines —

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: — which we talked about before. They have already banned at the state level vaccine passports in Florida for customers. So they can’t say, “Show me your vax or you can’t come in.” But they can right now say, “Get the vacs or you get fired.” The legislative session in Florida doesn’t go into effect until January.

But they’re thinking right now about how they could maybe get ahead of that, because it’s kind of like how some of us are worried that if we wait and don’t take action, everything turns into New York City. And, Clay, once everyone gets the shot, then they’ve gotten their way. That’s the whole point. Delay is not on our side here. Time is not on our side.

CLAY: Again, I think the appeal here is significant. I just want to keep emphasizing this. There’s a constant talk from the Fauciites out there that what Ron DeSantis is doing is denying people from wearing masks. That’s not what’s occurring.

BUCK: Yeah, that’s a lie.

CLAY: It’s a lie. He’s giving parents the opportunity to choose whether or not they wear masks. If you are convinced that masks are going to save your children — by the way, the data says that is 100% not true. But as a parent, if you believe your kid needs to wear a mask, they have the right to wear a mask to school in Florida. All this does, right now, Buck — as I think is important to keep emphasizing — is give parents the choice about whether or not their kids should be able to wear masks, and that’s not being allowed.

BUCK: I think a lot of the so-called mitigation measured and the lockdown mentality, Clay, all along has also been infused with… There’s an insecurity that people have. They want you to have to suffer along with them because of their anxiety around covid. Let’s take gyms, for example. If you’re going to go into the gym and you’re going to get onto a treadmill and sweat through your stupid cloth mask that does nothing — which, I’m going to tell you the truth. I had to do that for a while. I’ll never forget.

CLAY: Yeah. My wife lost her mind when they tried to make her do that. Remember we had this conversation.

BUCK: Right. People will say, “Oh you should not comply.” Well, it’s private property and they could evict me from the building, which is what they were threatening to do if you didn’t comply. But if you’re that person, and there’s a person next to you who is roughly the same age, same physical condition who is not wearing a mask and enjoying their workout, you start to think.

“I don’t know, man. “Is this really…? Should I really be doing this? Is it really worth it?” Ah, but if everyone has to suffer together — if the collective can override an individual’s common sense — then you don’t have to worry about being the idiot choking on your mask as you’re on the elliptical machine.

CLAY: Yeah, and this goes, by the way, Buck, to what is so frustrating to me is the fundamental misapprehension of risk. That’s the essence of this in general, right? Covid has been turned into something, where there’s a huge number of 24-year-olds out there who think they’re going to die if they get covid. There’s a lot of 14-year-olds who think that.

There’s a lot of parents who think that that is the truth. And the reality is, again, if you haven’t been wearing a mask for the seasonal flu in your local elementary, middle school, or high school, then you have been taking a bigger risk in your entire life than you are under from covid.

And all of this is… What’s so frustrating is, policies should follow facts. That should be what happens in this country. “Here are the facts. Let’s craft a policy considering the facts that makes logical sense,” and what we’ve ended up with is science is now so political, that if you even talk about facts, you want somebody’s grandma to die, how dare you!

BUCK: And isn’t it funny how the people right now who are complaining about the politicization, early on were the ones who politicized it and insisted that it was just the science.

CLAY: Oh of course. Yeah.

BUCK: And now they’re saying, “Oh, the whole thing has become political.”

CLAY: We’re the party of science.

BUCK: This is like how the mainstream, or — I don’t like that term, actually — the corporate, Democrat media, now decries, “Oh, media has become so partisan.” No, it’s just because we’ve realized that they’re partisans and now there’s some answer to it on the other side. But they were partisans all along. The covid lockdowners were the original politicizers of this.

And as you and I discussed many times on the air — and I don’t want to go down into this, because we have other news and things to get to — but all you have to remember is the lockdowns with BLM and how they treated them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s it. That’s all you need to know. And the way the blue check brigades and the Fauciites made excuses for protests that not only were useless, Clay, but were counterproductive for the purpose of making people safer and having their rights respected in America, that led to more misery, destruction and death. Congrats, BLM 2.0! That’s what actually happened — and they were willing to change the covid rules for that. Anyway, so we know where the politicization came from.