BUCK: We would have these cheering moments where everybody would bang pots and pans and honk horns and just shout out their windows for first responders. Now, that was mostly (in people’s minds) doctors, nurses, hospital staff, EMS, people like that. But let’s remember that law enforcement, cops, are also first responders.

Cops weren’t able to call in sick. They weren’t able to say, “Somebody else mask up and go outside and deal on the wall stuff.” Not that masking outside makes any difference, but you know what I mean. No. They had to keep doing their jobs. And we had so much love and respect for them, right? In the beginning of the pandemic. And then the defund the police movement came about because of what happened with George Floyd in Minneapolis.

And all of a sudden cops were not getting support anymore, almost like they weren’t first responders. And now we’re dealing with that reality. Those two things were really playing out in major cities: The huge spike in homicides and shootings across America and major cities. What was it, Clay, 30%, the FBI said, right?

CLAY: The biggest single increase in recorded history. I think it was 29% increase from the FBI, an unprecedented number. (crosstalk)

BUCK: They’re been crunching these numbers. And I bring all this up because right now in a number of major cities — Seattle, Portland, Chicago — they’re figuring out what are they gonna do, because there are hundreds — altogether, thousands — of cops who don’t want to get the shot, right? There are different policies depending on the city, but they don’t want to get the shot. And in a place like Portland… I couldn’t even believe this. Portland has about 600,000 residents. I went to Portland and Clay pointed out, I’m wearing a flannel today, by the way.

CLAY: You’re ready.

BUCK: So (crosstalk) is alive with the Buckster over here. I’ve got to start putting on the Soundgarden, maybe start watching some MTV videos. All right. So, Portland is a city of 600,000 people, give or take. Not a place you’d think of as high crime. It’s turned into anarchy downtown. Clay, they had a thousand shootings in Portland this year so far. A thousand! I had to check the number. I said, “That’s not possible. A thousand shootings in Portland? That sounds crazy.” I checked. That’s what they’ve had. And they’re thinking about firing what a lot of cops. How could this be tenable?

CLAY: It’s not in any way. It’s an untenable position that they’ve put themselves in. And I was talking about this I think yesterday on the program, that on one of my flights, I was talking with the flight crew, and I said, “Hey, what city do you guys like to be boarded up in, right, so that you stop and you spend overnight?” The guy said, “Portland used to be my favorite city in America to visit. Now the entire downtown is impassable. There’s no way that we can actually interact and walk around in the city of Portland.”

And what’s ironic, of course, about Portland is, Buck, they virtually had no crime to begin with. So this is an area where they wanted to defund the police even though the police were doing an incredible job. And the results have been disastrous for them, and now the same thing is happening in Seattle and all these Pacific Northwest places that had traditionally been very, very safe, not having to deal with any levels of high crime.

Now their crime is skyrocketing, and simultaneously they are going to lose a huge percentage of the police that are still on the force., and we talked about this yesterday: A lot of these police officers are veterans. A lot of them are people who have spent years and years training and working their way up for everybody else, meaning this is gonna be an even more substantial loss than, say, if you were just losing some new recruits, people who had just signed up, which would still be bad. But this… I don’t understand how this is going to be anything other than cataclysmic for these cities. I really don’t.

BUCK: You know, in Chicago — we’re speaking about shootings — it’s just a headline that you’ll see. Not in most of the Democrat corporate media, but you will see it. Dozens of people shot over the weekend in Chicago. It’s become far too commonplace, a city with several times the violent crime rate of other large cities like Los Angeles and New York.

It’s much more violent, Chicago is, than Los Angeles and New York, the other large cities — and I believe much more so than Houston as well, which is another city of roughly comparable size. Here is the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, who not only is getting rough with the police verbally but is willing to use the I-word! That’s right: Insurrection.

LIGHTFOOT: The contract is clear, and it’s been known for along time. Uh, the police unions are not authorized to strike. It’s in their collective bargaining agreement. It’s a matter of state law. What we’ve seen from, uh, the Fraternal Order of Police, and particularly the leadership, is a lot of misinformation, a lot of half-truths and, frankly, flat-out lies in order to induce an insurrection.

Um, and we’re not having that. And so we want to make it very, very clear that, um, the law’s on our side. I feel very confident about it. (sputtering) And what he — what he said even after what I heard that he said even after, umm, the lawsuit was filed, and we notified them is urging members of the department to ignore the chain of command!

BUCK: Gonna say, we’ve been talking all along about how the purpose of the January 6 narrative is to create a… The same way Russia collusion was the storyline for everything anti-Trump, if you stand athwart the Democrat machinery, you’re an “insurrectionist.”