BUCK: We mentioned that the city of Philadelphia’s going back with its mask mandate. I’m telling you in New York, I am so highly attuned to this because I hate mask wearing, as everything knows. I have for over two years now. And I’ve been very vocal about that. I am known in my building as the anti-masker.

Clay, there was a whole period of about six months where I was apparently in a building where about 500 residents, from what I understand, I was the only one who was not wearing a mask in and out of the building. And I wasn’t hiding. I was, like, yeah, of course I’m not doing this. I found out I was the only one. There was one, like, German guy apparently who did it for a while, but I think then he went back to Dusseldorf. And here we are now finding out that your own alma mater, Clay, so sad. What’s going on at GW?

CLAY: Well, evidently this has become a trend, people were sending me messages all over D.C., American University, I believe Georgetown, George Washington where I went, they’re all reimplementing the mask mandate. And this is effective today.

And this is what we said, as soon as Philadelphia made the decision to bring back masks, I tell you, only a matter of time until New York City and D.C. do it as well.

So, what’s embarrassing to me is if I were at GW in — you know, I was there ’97 to ’01. So 20-some-odd years ago. I can’t imagine everyone on campus just immediately complying with a demand that you wear a mask on campus, in classrooms. And I think there will be hardly any kids that will say, “No, I’m not putting a mask back on.” There will be almost no civil disobedience, no rebellion against the rule.

The amount of college kids who shut up and comply is downright scary. And even worse than that, Buck, the amount of college kids who beg to be forced to wear a mask, this is — in the space of one generation — and we talked about this before, we’ve gone from kids who naturally kind of rebelled against authority, right, like you were not necessarily willing to listen to what your dorm RA said to do on a day-to-day basis, to a situation where now you are begging to be regulated. It’s crazy to me. Absolute madness.

BUCK: There are people who actually like — when I say “some,” there are a lot of people who like to be told what to do, for whom choice and freedom are scary.

And, unfortunately, a lot of the Democrat leftist ideology, rhetoric, and the way that they push the narrative is rooted in there are a lot of people who just want to be, you know, one of my favorite lines from Solzhenitsyn. “As long as they’re part of the herd and they’re safe and warm and fed, it’s all the same to them, it doesn’t matter.” They just want to be in the mass of the mob with everybody else doing what they’re told to do. Freedom is scary to them. Freedom comes with consequences. It comes with the need to make decisions.

And I do think we’re seeing a lot of that. I wonder what it would take — one of the ways that I will argue — people often ask me, you know, we go out, we do live stuff, you know, Clay, we go out, we speak to people, right, they’ll come up to you — I was just, you know, in Mar-a-Lago with a whole bunch of folks. They’ll say, how do I — you know, “My brother Phil is a huge, you know, Bernie Sanders loving,” they’ll ask me, and one of the things I always say is, figure out what you could present them with that would change their mind, meaning what would have to be true for them to agree that you have a point or something.

With the mask people at this point, I think we’re past that. I don’t even know how many times can they run the same experiment with obvious results and they just say, mask me up, double mask me, N$95 mask me, I need more. I don’t know if it’s possible for these people to come back to reality. I don’t know what it would take.

CLAY: Well, it’s a leap of faith. It’s a leap of faith for them. And there doesn’t have to be any rationality associated with it anymore. It is their political identity. They’re the kind of person who wears a mask. I was at the mall over the weekend. I don’t go to the mall a lot. My kids had an event, and I had parked by the mall out by for people who know the Nashville area, the huge where the Grand Ole Opry is and everything else out there.

And about 10% of people, Buck, inside of this Nashville area mall indoors wearing masks. And I just felt this intense pity for them because to be two years in, two years in, and you live in a red state where there is freedom, you aren’t being required to wear a mask, and about 10%, maybe it was 5% of people were walking around in masks.

And I just wondered, to your point, Buck, what could happen to make these people recognize and realize that, one, what they’re doing is ludicrous and has no impact whatsoever? After two years of embracing it so fully, I don’t know that they ever will. I think we’re gonna see this for a long time to come now. I think there are going to be people who wear masks for the rest of their lives.

BUCK: I’ve been saying this for a few years now.

CLAY: There are going to be a small number.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: Small number of people, but I think for the rest of our lives, indoor facilities, when you get on an airplane or you go to an airport, there are going to be people who wear masks for the rest of their lives.

BUCK: At some level I think they believe it’s like people who say bless you after you sneeze– which I don’t know if it’s true or not. Maybe it’s an urban legend or old wives’ tale, but this comes from — I think it’s — I think people say it either comes from the Black Death or the Spanish influenza. I think it’s the Black Death. By the way, this is one of the things the internet that’s probably wrong. But, you know, people say “bless you” after you sneeze.

I think people believe now that mask wearing is almost a courtesy issue, in their minds. They’ve turned this into “I’m showing consideration. I’m being considerate by doing this.” And so even if it doesn’t actually medically do anything, right, saying gesundheit when someone sneezes doesn’t help when they’ve got, you know, an upper respiratory infection, but you know, they’ve created this notion that it’s a courtesy-based measure, which is gonna be very hard to stamp out. That’s very hard.

CLAY: I think there are people who will do it for the rest of their lives, Buck. I think there are people right now, sadly, who are 35 years old that will be at 60 years old still wearing masks because of what happened in covid.

BUCK: Yeah. They say that it comes to the Middle Ages, fourteenth century Europe, the bubonic plague is where people started saying “bless you” because, you know, you know, that might be — one of those things. Guys, you always gotta remember, it’s like Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”

CLAY: That’s up on my kids’ wall in eighth grade, and I have to say, I went into his history class, and the teacher has been trying to teach kids, which is actually a big deal going forward, how do you know what’s real and what’s not real in an internet age? You know, when we were around, Buck, you probably remember having the encyclopedia or even the card catalog where you had to go do your research. These kids can find anything in the space of about 15 seconds. The challenge is knowing whether or not they can trust it.

BUCK: So many. And some of them are really good quotes, actually, you want to use are — so many good quotes are wrongfully attributed. You’ll come up with quotes that you’ve heard a lot of and everyone says, oh, isn’t that, that’s Voltaire or that’s Churchill or that’s — and it’s actually some guy named Bob who lives in Des Moines who put it on the internet in, like, 1995. But, anyway, people will say stuff like that.