CLAY: The Democrats have failed, I think, with dumbest argument that has ever been made in the twenty-first century from a political perspective. It was “defund the police.” Joe Biden is having an all-hands-on-deck meeting at the White House today with a lot of big city mayors to discuss overwhelming increase in murder and violent crime. Included there is the winner of the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Eric Adams. And he basically came out and said: Hey, we blew it as a party talking about defund the police. Play cut 8.

VOICE: In terms of laws, in terms of state or city or national gun laws to try to stop gun violence, what do you think would work? And do you think the priorities of national Democrats, uh, may have been misplaced?

ADAMS: Yes, I — I do. I believe those priorities, they really were misplaced. And it’s almost insulting, but we have witnessed over the last few years, many of our presidents, they saw these numbers. That they knew the inner cities — particularly where black, brown, and poor people lived, they know — they knew, they were dealing with this real crisis.

And it took this president to state that it is time for us to stop ignoring what is happening in the South Sides of Chicagos, in the Brownsvilles, in the Atlantas of our cit — of our country. And so it is extremely important that just as we became energetic after we saw mass shootings with assault rifles in the suburban parts of our country, which we should have, we should have also focused on the handgun, the numbers —

CLAY: That is, by the way, Eric Adams talking about failed Democratic policies. And, look, he’s a 22-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, Buck, you’re a New York City native, all this talk about the energized left wing of the Democratic Party? Who ended up winning the Democratic mayoral nomination for New York City?

The guy who emphasized safe streets, bringing back plainclothes police officers. May not have stop-and-frisk coming back yet, but I think you are seeing what two Republicans, Giuliani and Bloomberg, did back-to-back to make New York City safe again, what is the right call, and Democrats are panicked trying to put out the fires that they created.

BUCK: I’m also not willing to give up or just move past on what happened a year ago in the 2020 election with this issue. Clay, my argument here is that the Democrats were willing to go so scorched-earth in order to capitalize on whatever they could to defeat Trump in the 2020 election, that things that were obvious to rational, reasonable people…

And things that should have been truly, as issues, at least, beyond politicization, became weapons used against Trump. We saw that with certainly covid. I mean, the Democrats made it seem in 2020 like Trump made covid in a lab at Mar-a-Lago or something. I mean, they were always, always exaggerating how he was so terrible and it’s all his fault and hydroxychloroquine.
But on the crime issue, they saw the BLM Movement 2.0 after the death of George Floyd as an opportunity to mobilize the left-wing base, to create chaos and disorder, which really suppresses the conservative base in this country ’cause I know people who said, “Well, why isn’t Trump, why isn’t the administration doing more about this?”

So it really hits at two levels there. The Democrat left-wing activists like what they see with the riots and the attacks in the cities, and it’s just a reminder that they were willing… The mainstream Democrat Party was willing to pretend to be run by abject morons who couldn’t figure out that by undermining police and defunding them, more people — and disproportionately more minorities — were going to be shot and to be killed. We shouldn’t let them off. I know they’re coming to the right conclusion now, Clay, but they should pay a price politically for what they put the country through for the last year.

CLAY: I think that’s true. And moreover, it’s so frustrating and so self-evident that this was going to be the result. Buck, I feel like we’re also seeing into the future. You know what’s gonna happen in 2024? BLM 3.0. Every four years, in an effort to terrify their base of black supporters, they need to sell the idea that American is a fundamentally unsafe place and that police officers are the reason why America is a fundamentally unsafe place. They are selling an opposite version of reality. For those of you who are Stranger Things fans, it’s like we are in the Upside-Down.

BUCK: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: They are creating a fundamentally different world that is not in any way constrained by reality or facts, which we know the end result’s gonna be. And, unfortunately, the result here, Buck, is, there are thousands of people that would otherwise be alive today if we had simply allowed police to do their jobs. That’s the reality.

BUCK: And it’s even worse because then police in response to that political abandonment — and it’s very real, because elected officials… Remember, law enforcement at the state and local level in particular is overseen by and run by, as I said before, the political class. So in a major city, the mayor is like the commander-in-chief of the police force.

So when defund and the activist Democrat left comes along and says, “Cops are the problem,” and you have all these different mayors’ offices and prosecutors, too, in these major cities — Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco. Go down the list. Prosecutors want to make a name for themselves and they want to ride the political wave too.

So now what are they looking for? Opportunities to crack down on cops’, quote, “abuses,” which in many cases are just whatever happens to get uploaded onto the internet and looks like a police officer using force in a way that can make people uncomfortable, absent the context of what’s actually happened in that situation. Clay, this is a lesson we shouldn’t have had to learn again because we’ve already learned it many times in the past. But Democrats, you know, right now, all of a sudden they’re trying to act like they’re reasonable on this.

CLAY: Data was clear, transparent, and self-evident, Buck. There was no uncertainty about what was gonna happen and yet we found ourselves here again.