CLAY: I saw this story, which came out at the end of last week but I haven’t seen discussed that much. Buck, the Boston Marathon is banning Russian runners from being able to compete in the Boston Marathon. This feels crazy to me because, one, they’re runners. They don’t necessarily have anything at all to do with the decision to invade Ukraine.
And we don’t even know whether or not they agree or disagree with the decision of their government. And we just went to China and bent the knee in Beijing and allowed China to host the Olympics, which I didn’t agree with, the winter Olympics.
But I definitely do not agree with the United States not allowing athletes based on their country of origin to be able to compete in the Boston Marathon. This is a poor decision, I think, by the Boston Marathon people. What do you think?
BUCK: I think it’s absurd. It’s absurd. We’ve seen this in a lot of different contexts. They’ve prevented young Russian pianists from performing in places.
CLAY: Singers.
The people who happen to be Russian who are spread all over the world bear no individual responsibility by fact of their Russianness for what’s going on here.
And I just think it points, Clay, to the larger reality that we keep seeing now of there are people and I believe that social media has played a very big part in this ’cause everybody who’s involved in social media feels like they have a personal brand and they get this little serotonin bump from the likes and the clicks and everything else and people that have nothing to do actual media for their business are still obsessed with how they present themselves to the world.
And whether it was people that were taking all the selfies in masks and how they take the virus so seriously and the photos of themselves getting shots, now it’s, you know, shot number four be with shot number five, whatever. Now it’s, you know, your avatar is a Ukraine flag and you’ll do anything, you’ll do anything to defeat — you’ll pay $50 a gallon to defeat Vladimir Putin.
There’s a war going on. We’re not in the war. It’s complicated. There are a lot of things happening. Putting the Ukraine flag up is, you know, — it means nothing, honestly, in the context of social media accounts. It doesn’t do anything. But it makes people feel like they have a part in this fight. And, unfortunately, I think that rush to be a part of the virtuous mob here results in some bad decisions. I mean, you want to put a Ukraine flag up, that’s fine.
I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t really do anything. But barring people being able to run in the marathon or professionally harming people because they’re Russian — I mean, it’s one thing to say this is like Putin’s best friend. Okay, fine. But someone happens to be Russian?
How far back do we take it? If someone’s Russian origin and they’ve lived in the United States for 10 years, are we to go back that there’s some kind of — there’s a need to punish them? At a time when we’re seeing what the state is willing to do to people in Shanghai for the collective good, this notion of punishing people for the collective good without any due process whatsoever should be something that gives everybody a lot of pause.
CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt at all. And one question that I’ve been asking and we’ve been discussing on this show is, to your point, Buck, much of the default social justice support for Ukraine is predicated on requiring people to do as little as possible, right?
You grab am image of the Ukrainian flag and put it up as your social media avatar, I don’t know how much longer that lasts. There’s going to be some new cause that rises up that I think pushes Ukraine, frankly, off of the front pages of the newspaper in the days and weeks and months ahead. Particularly if we end up in this eastern Ukraine, Russian stalemate. There’s not I narrative, right, when you’re just kind of lined up and engaged in a long, protracted struggle. Whether or not Kiev was gonna be taken, whether or not Zelensky was going to be safe, those are store lines that people can follow.
BUCK: It’s also deeply — at some level I think you could argue deeply counterproductive, actually, to do this. What we want is for the Russian people to be furious with their leadership in Vladimir Putin.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Sanctions are really just punishing the Russian population. It’s not really punishing Vladimir Putin. He’s a billionaire many times over. It’s not punishing the oligarchs who are still in Russia who are living the high life irrespective of how many yachts are seized off the coast of England or in Dubai or wherever. Doesn’t actually change anything.
And I’m reminded of a very wise Polish friend of mine who once just quipped, “Nothing brings the Russians together like suffering.” And I’m talking about the Russian people inside of that country now.
If we’re going to create a world where being Russian is something that must be punished, what you actually end up doing is creating a siege mentality within the Russian federation for the population there saying, are we — I mean, am I not welcome nowhere else in the world if I were to visit? Am I gonna be treated like I’m some kind of a criminal?
And given what we’re doing, you could understand how that mentality, we’re making them poor. By the way, the ruble has apparently bounced back substantially. So our whole economic warfare plan so far has been unsuccessful.
And I think it was greatly overstated from the beginning, think of all the speeches that Biden gave, Clay, about the punishing sang, oh, these sanctions and more assassinations and — when have sanctions ever worked? It’s a fair question to ask.
CLAY: That’s what he said before we were implementing the sanctions. They kind of undercut the process. It’s Santa Fe he recognized that they weren’t gonna work and this is to a large extent a virtue signaling gesture on behalf of the larger world. But I think, to your point, Vladimir Putin, when we are canceling runners, it plays into his claim that Russians are being canceled. And so it actually ends up benefiting him in some way. And I saw this yesterday.
I was mentioning to you off air, I guess Russian state TV was running an interview that I did on Fox News where I said, hey, women shouldn’t be competing against biological men who decide to identify as women, and the Keith Olbermanns and some of the left wingers were like, oh, this is why you can’t trust Clay Travis. Look, they’re playing an interview of him on Russian television.
And I tweeted back. I was like, well, I mean, the Russians agree with me like the vast majority of people in the world. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, if you’re in any way interested in fair competition, men shouldn’t be completing with women. But what they’re trying to do is the idea that Russia agrees with any American — and obviously they try to do this with Tucker in a large extent — it’s somehow trying to cancel Americans who are in any way being endorsed for any reason but Russian television.
I don’t have to agree with everything Russia does to agree with Russia that biological men shouldn’t be competing against women. But that’s where we are where they’re trying to cancel people like us in media.
BUCK: I think it’s important to remember what our American goals are here. Number one, that we don’t get drawn into a war with a country with thousands of nuclear missiles because of how that could being dramatically escalate. That’s step one for us. Right? And let’s be honest. That is all our primary goal.
BUCK: And then number two goal, inasmuch as we can try to help effect this, is bring the war to a close, to have the bullets and bombs stop so that people aren’t being killed and people aren’t being harmed.
And you need to think beyond the “Russia bad, Russia bad” context to get us there. Is it Russia’s war of aggression? Yes. Is Russia at fault for this? Yes. But how do we create an off ramp where Vladimir Putin will finally say, “Okay. We’ll stop this so people stop dying”?
That’s how adults think about this, not, oh, they’re gonna push all the Russians out of the country and then we’re gonna march all the way to Moscow mentality that seems to be taking hold with some people. Not a very helpful place for it to be.
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