BUCK: Lori Lightfoot is right behind de Blasio in terms of being an awful mayor. She’s really pretty terrible, and she’s also now lecturing people on civility. Here is Lori Lightfoot just calling out the “toxic discourse” yesterday in Chicago, Illinois.
LIGHTFOOT: The toxicity in our public discourse is a thing that I think we should all be concerned about, right? And it’s ironic, obviously we were having this conversation and what happened on Independence Day. You know, we’re not like a lot of other countries who are — their version of Independence Day is marked with, you know, troops and tanks and… No. What we do in the United States is we come together as a community.
BUCK: It’s just interesting, Clay, ’cause she’s calling for civility in our discourse, and this was last week the mayor of Chicago not sounding so civil.
BUCK: “[Bleep] Clarence Thomas!” That was the mayor of Chicago talking about a Supreme Court justice a week ago. But, you know, she wants everyone to be nice to each other when speaking about contentious issues, apparently.
CLAY: It’s perfect. It’s perfect. One week ago, “F… Clarence Thomas,” Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, on the stage in front of a massive crowd. Two days ago Lori Lightfoot, “Hey, we need more civility in politics.” How about you actually practice to some level what you preach? Just a little bit of individual responsibility! There will be relatively few media out there that will even bother to point out this alarming hypocrisy from Lori Lightfoot. Is she gonna get reelected? Surely the city of Chicago can find someone more competent than her, right?
BUCK: I think that there’s a problem that was described to me once by a hedge fund manager that I knew. He called it repeat surprise. I don’t know if that’s a real thing or if it’s just something that he made up so I’d have to check that out, Clay. But it’s essentially when a stock is going down —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — and all the indicators are the stock is gonna keep going down, but because you had previously convinced yourself, “I’m so smart, I know the stock is going up,” you’ll then the next quarter get more — you know, another earnings report, bam! Stock goes down again. He calls it repeat surprise because you should have known this but you’re almost surprised for the second time and it’s because you think that you’re right and you ignore the actual indicators of what’s going on.
CLAY: Covid policy for Democrats.
BUCK: Perfect. Exactly right. Covid policy for Democrats and also I would say voting for a lot of these Democrats. I think that for a lot of people, a lot of leftists and Democrats — same thing — they’re much more psychologically comfortable with, “I’m going to be right. Just wait. I’m going to be right.” Ignore everything that they’re seeing with Biden, with Lightfoot, with name a Democrat politician or policy, for that matter. “At some point I’ll be right,” and then they’re surprised again because they’re rather believe than look at what’s real.
Now, you and I both know ’cause we’re big history nerds, a lot of times you don’t know the right or wrong side of history for 50 or a hundred years because that’s the way history works. Most of us don’t know if we’re on the right side of history for everything sometimes ’til well after our lives are over. I’m very confident, Buck, that you and I are on the right side of history as it pertains to covid. We’re seeing more and more people come on and even in the shift of Joe Biden saying, because of covid, kids have fallen behind.
They’re trying to argue that it was covid. No, no, no. I had seen were never in danger from covid. It was our policies. That’s a pretty significant shift that they’re trying to make right now. I believe that Democrats who have been arguing against Trump that they were on the right side of history actually elected Joe Biden, who is the worst president in a hundred years. They’re, by definition, on the wrong side of history about almost everything, and they aren’t cognitively aware of it because they refuse to acknowledge the data.
BUCK: I was just talking to a family member the other day about how one of the ways that people will say, “Oh, you’re so…” I’m not talking about the great Asheville mask kerfuffle of 2022. Put that aside. But why was I so confident that I wasn’t being politicized in my thinking about covid? It’s because when I had the opportunity to meet with President Trump in the Oval Office in May of 2020, the thing that I was most vociferous about, the thing that I shook the president’s hand — we weren’t wearing masks, by the way.
I shook the president’s hand and said, “Mr. President, please, no more lockdowns, we gotta stop this, no more mask mandates. We gotta get out of this.” And he said, “Buck, I agree. We’re gonna do everything we can” — and, by the way, he did allow the states to reopen. And he could have locked everything down to the end of the year if he had wanted to as we’ve discussed. It was about what was right. It wasn’t about, “Oh, Trump liked this then, I liked this then.”
CLAY: You have to be willing to challenge your own thinking in order to succeed is a high level. For me, it was always about the data. If you can provide data to show me that my belief is factually inaccurate from a data perspective, I’m open to it on virtually any subject under the sun. The data on covid, it was so clear.
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