CLAY: Buck, I watched the Super Bowl — and congratulations to the L.A. Rams and Matthew Stafford — but the biggest takeaway I had from the Super Bowl is you had 75,000-ish people inside of SoFi Stadium. There was a mask mandate in place, and when they showed all the celebrities on television — whether it was Jay-Z, whether it was Ben Affleck and J.Lo, Charlize Theron, LeBron James, again with L.A. Mayor Garcetti getting caught without his mask on — no one in the entire stadium wore masks.

And so for every American out there who watched — and something like a hundred millionish Americans on average watch the Super Bowl every year, which is twice as many people as virtually watch any other televised event anymore in this country — I don’t understand how you could watch that game, which was played in an utterly normal fashion, and then be forced, after seeing all those tens of thousands of people inside of the stadium, after seeing football players tackle each other left and right…

And I know a lot of people don’t watch football every weekend so it’s a little bit of a jarring moment to see that big of a crowd — depending where you live — all unmasked. I don’t understand how any parent in America had to, this morning, put their kids in a mask and send them off to school. It is child abuse. There is no way to defend it. It is without any basis in reality.

Here’s the video of every celebrity without a mask during the Super Bowl. But every kid in California will have to be wearing them tomorrow in school. They must all be holding their breaths the entire game. pic.twitter.com/Dc9yVd7RPf

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 14, 2022

And when you see something as normal as the Super Bowl that went on in L.A. — and I can speak to the scene in L.A. all week, Buck, because I was there. I was asked for a vaccine passport to show proof of vaccination, which I didn’t have, one time. Otherwise, I could go in to any bar. I could go in to any restaurant that I wanted to all throughout L.A. How in the world are the kids — who are at the least danger from covid based on scientific data — the only people that are still being required, in many parts of the country, to wear masks?

BUCK: There is a final recognition that’s coming upon so many people I think now, Clay, that mandates — mandates and restrictions — were arbitrary and useless, and that’s gonna be a hard thing for many people to swallow over time when they realize this. That’s a different thing from saying that for some people getting the shot, as we’ve said all along, lowers their individual risk. But as a means of stopping the virus…

Remember, Biden didn’t say — his promise wasn’t — “I’m going to give you the ability to protect yourself from the virus.” It was, “Shut down the virus and not shut down the economy.” That was the big line, right? Shut down the virus means it’s done. It’s not spreading. It’s gone. That didn’t happen even a little bit, despite all the mandates and all the madness that they put everybody through.

And in the case of schools and children and the mask mandates that continue on to this day, you have to ask yourself: How could this even be possible? Anybody with even a passing familiarity with the risk data would know and would tell you right away adults are at much higher risk from this. You know, 10X, maybe a 100X, depending on the age of the adult.

Twenties, thirties, forties, is different than fifties, sixties, seventies. But I’m sure there were plenty of people that were in the high-risk category who were in that Super Bowl event last night, and our point is not to say everybody should be masked up, of course. It’s to point out that this is all just arbitrary and capricious and stupid, and there are more and more people, I think, that are recognizing this, and it’s just turned into…

There’s a few different mind-sets, right? So we can’t say there’s one thing. The people that were at the Super Bowl last night, some of them maybe go home and mask their kids today for school, thinking, “Well, children can’t make decisions for themselves so we have to do this for them.” Others maybe go home and say, “I’m an adult, I’m important, so I don’t have to go through this.”

But for a lot of them, Clay, it’s just they don’t want to take a step that would make them recognize that what they’ve been doing all along was just a joke and what they’ve been yelling people for and shaming people for. I told you there’s talk about the no-fly list now being expanded maybe to include people that get rowdy on planes, get a little bit violent on planes.

People are getting violent on planes because they’re in a very stressful, uncomfortable, hyper-vigilant environment in so many ways — you know, “Do this, can’t sit, must stand, must sit, must” — and they can’t breathe normally. And there’s no scientific basis for this, and we’re seeing it all. It’s all slowly falling away. But, Clay, they don’t want it to fall away on anything except their own terms, and they also don’t want it to be permanent. That’s the big problem I see.

CLAY: I think the challenge here — and look, you’re right. If you want to send your kid in a mask to school for the rest of this year and you want to start off next year doing it, I think you should have the right to do so. But what is ridiculous is the idea that you should be mandating it. I can’t even imagine… I was just in California all last week.

I can’t even imagine being a California parent who just watched the Super Bowl take place in my city who just saw that there were virtually no masks present inside that entire stadium, and then you’re going to be make me put my kid — my 5-year-old — in a mask and send them off to kindergarten? I mean, it is the definition of child abuse.

And what we’re essentially saying when you look and see what adults are able to get away with, is adults are able to make their own decisions and flout rules that they feel don’t apply to them or shouldn’t apply to them. And we don’t have any issue with it. But kids if your child refuses to wear a mask in northern Virginia, they don’t get allowed into the school.

If your kid refuses to wear a mask in California, the parents get called and eventually it turns into a major issue, and I just don’t understand. To me, I don’t understand how every Republican in the country right now isn’t standing up — it’s past time to have done so — aggressively against the idea of masking kids and that particularly is the case when you consider it in the context of the larger issues that are at play out here where I think it’s spinning quickly in the opposite direction.

But people say, “What’s the impact of the Super Bowl?” The reason why people pay $7 million for an advertisement — even though, by the way, the ads have become increasingly woke and boring and not that good because I think the brands are afraid of offending anybody out there, and so humor is mostly gone and they’re sort of antiseptic. But it’s impossible to reach this big of an audience at one time anywhere else in America.

Even the debates which were as popular and sought after and exciting for so many people have a fraction, oftentimes, of the audience of the Super Bowl. So this, seeing all these people in California flouting the mask rules, it should be a moment in time, I think, for Republicans to say, “Masking is done. This shouldn’t exist anywhere in this country,” and there should be a drumbeat. It should happen every day, every moment, all the time now.

BUCK: It has been more than five minutes since I’ve seen Fauci on TV. I would love… He was kind of like a 10-a-day guy on the TV screens it felt like and now all the sudden —

CLAY: They pulled him out of the repertoire.

BUCK: He was doing some podcasts from the woodshed or the basement and wherever. He was popping up on some stuff. Haven’t seen him in a while, ’cause I would love to get an answer from him about what we see going on here and on the masking kids issue, ’cause this is really their last stand. I have talked to doctors recently — friends of mine who were MDs — about this and they agree.

Until we get them to say that this didn’t work, it’s all just suspended; it will come back, and particularly in schools. This has become a fixation. It’s like a virtual signaling fixation on the left. “We mask our kids because we care!” It’s like people who think they’re better than you because they recycle. Now people who think that advocating for mask mandates for children are better than you because they’re protecting the children. DeSantis points out no other country in the world — that we’re aware of, at least — is as crazy about this as America is.

DESANTIS: If you look at what CDC and Biden’s administration did, they are outliers in the rest of the world. You look at all the other industrialized countries, not one country was as absolutely insane about force-masking kids as the United States government was. And I’m proud to say in Florida, you know, we stood up to the Biden administration, we stood with the parents, and we stood with the well-being of the kids.

I can tell you these kids are so much happier being able to go to school without having to wear masks for eight hours a day. So when you start to see them kind of reevaluate or say all this, just understand this: The science didn’t change, or the medical science didn’t change, the political science changed. They feel the heat.

BUCK: They have to fight against this realization, Clay, because every one of these decisions was actually rooted in politics. Every one of these decisions was privilege politics over what “the science” was actually saying about risk and about reality.

CLAY: We had a caller either last week or the week before who said that Biden wanted to make a grand pronouncement about covid again in his State of the Union address. And it feels to me like he’s waiting and now going to be behind in terms of making a grand pronouncement. And the population, the public in general has moved on — and to a large extent, it is signature events such as these that are back to 100% normalcy.

Remember last year’s Super Bowl wasn’t really that normal even though we started to have crowds present again. They were making sure know making sure they were vaccinated, health care workers, all these things. This year it felt normal if you were in a football stadium — and look, the reality is February in L.A. …

I didn’t need to see the Super Bowl be normal, ’cause I was on the road, Buck, you were with me for one of those games, but every SEC football stadium was packed throughout the entire fall. And many NFL stadiums were packed as well and there was no requirement that you had to have a covid shot or something like that in order to get in.

BUCK: Let’s just look at some really obvious things that never get talked about because it doesn’t go with the narrative, and the apparatus hates it when people just think for themselves. If what Ron… They haven’t had masks in schools all year in Florida, okay? We’re now, it’s mid-February, we’re getting into March. No masks in schools. If that was dangerous — if children were at substantial risk and spreading it everywhere and everything else — don’t you think that the almost 50% of Florida Democrats out there would be making constant reference to the failed policy of it’s not even you can’t wear a mask, it’s just choice masking.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: Wouldn’t we be hearing all the time, Clay, about what a massive failure that was? Remember when they used to do that? Georgia reopening too early back in 2020 was “an experiment in human sacrifice.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: That was the headline. We never hear about it from Florida, from Democrats in Florida, from anybody, because it didn’t happen, ’cause it doesn’t matter.

CLAY: They totally have abandoned that argument.