Australia’s Scary Authoritarian Covid Crackdown

Listen Here:

CLAY: We mentioned this yesterday and I want to keep hammering it, because but for Republican governors and but for our own system of federalism, we would have lost our mind and become Australia. This is the New South Wales premier saying that even when the covid lockdown’s in, unvaccinated people in Australia are going to face total social isolation indefinitely, Buck. Basically, they’re never gonna be able to live as normal people. Listen to this.

GLADYS BEREJIKLIAN: I want to be very clear. Locked-down unvaccinated will be very difficult indefinitely.

CLAY: All right. So that was a pretty quick statement there, Buck. But do you buy this? By next year — let’s say, we get into March, we get into April — do you think this vaccination obsession is still going to be going on in our country, or do you think we’ll have moved on because cases will have come down, so the obsession is not gonna be still there?

BUCK: Entirely dependent upon the caseload, right? Because here’s what’s gonna happen. They’re gonna have to find ways to justify why what they’ve done to this point has — yet again, for the however many times — not worked as they’ve said that it would. And the scapegoats here will be two things. One, the unvaccinated. But, Clay, I also think that depending on how bad things get this winter — and I’m just gonna say this. I’m very curious where you are on this. I’m back and forth in my head —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — over where this is heading in the wintertime. On one side of it, I’ve felt like, “Okay, we know the vaccines fade in efficacy. They still apparently do a pretty good job at keeping you out of the hospital and death.” So far, there is that troubling data out of the U.K., but we’ll see, right? So far, the data…

We haven’t had that breakthrough yet where we say, “Oh, my gosh. They don’t just fade a little bit. They fade almost into irrelevance over an eight-month period or a 10-month period.” We don’t know. But part of me also says maybe we have so much natural and vaccinated immunity this winter that… You’re gonna have cases, no question.

But it may be at that level where people start to feel like, “I don’t have to act like a total lunatic anymore,” because the lunatics are still really calling the shots. The people that are masked up forever… Someone sent me a study today, Clay, that is actually suggesting this. I thought it had to be a joke. To be fair, I haven’t read the study.

But it’s a real study that has been published about how triple masking is actually the most effective form which I used to bring up as a joke about the double maskers. Now that’s the next level. There was a period, you remember that as well, when goggles started to be talked about? Now, you have to wonder, ’cause you can get aerosolized virus.

It can actually… It’s much easier if it comes in your nose or your mouth, but it actually can enter through the eyes, apparently, too, at least theoretically. What they’re doing in Australia, though, they’re not even beginning to calculate the social cost to people, which is when this New South Wales premier says unvaccinated Sydney residents face total exclusion.

Think of the psychological and of course economic and health damage that has been done to people over the last 18 months. And a lot of it is completely unjustifiable based on the numbers, never mind the concept of freedom which comes with risk. And that’s what’s been rejected here. Free individuals are going to be make decisions.

They’re going to drive too fast. They’re going to drink too much. They’re gonna vote for the, quote, “wrong party,” right? You can start to see where this all goes and the leftist authoritarian mentality is we need to stamp out all that freedom, and covid just becomes the great excuse.

CLAY: This is why — we were talking earlier in the first hour about when you see — I walk my kids to school every day. It’s a great luxury. We’ve got a neighborhood school, public school. I can walk my two youngest to school every single day. So I have my fifth grader and my first grader, I look at this them to school.

I pass a lot of parents — I know a lot of them — and most people in my neighborhood. Kids aren’t wearing masks but some of the kids still are and when I see a kid that is wearing a mask or preparing to wear a mask in school, I just think how awful the last 18 months of those people’s lives must have been and how much damage they likely have done psychologically to their kids by convincing them they’re in danger from something that isn’t a danger.

And, Buck, before covid happened, if you had a friend who was a parent and that friend had said, “Yeah, I’m nervous about taking my kids to school today ’cause I’m afraid we’re gonna die in a traffic accident on the way to school” or “I’m gonna walk to school with my kids today but I’m a little bit afraid that somebody’s gonna drive by and murder us” or if they had said, “Hey, it’s flu season.

“I’m thinking about not putting my kids in school because I’m terrified they’re gonna die of the seasonal flu,” all of those things are far more likely to kill children than covid is. If anyone had made those arguments as a mom or a dad, you would have thought that they had significant psychological issues. You really would have. And it wouldn’t have been a crazy idea.

BUCK: And wouldn’t have, by the way.

CLAY: And would have.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: And that’s where we are with something that is far less danger to their children now, and we’ve normalized it, and a country like Australia… I’m thankful that at least we have federalism and Republican governors, because but for that, we would have descended into the insanity that is Australia.