CLAY: We’ve been talking a lot on the program about a reckoning. There have to be consequences when people get things wrong. Democrats overwhelmingly — mayors, governors, congresspeople, senators — they all got covid wrong. They kept your kids out of school. They shut down your local parks. They arrested you if you were paddleboarding out on the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean.

They told you to get fat, sit on your couch, not go outside, you were being a hero. All of that has been proven false. They told you to wear masks. They told you to Lysol your mail. True insanity. Last year, Buck, if you remember, we had just started the show, and I went to my local school board meeting in August, and parents were fed up, and I said it was the most encouraged I’ve been in years in the United States.

And then we saw, frankly, a red wave in 2021, almost swept out the Democrat governor of New Jersey, Glenn Youngkin flips the state of Virginia, many of you out there listening to me right now, you were fired up, you came out, and you made your voices heard. Was still a small minority of the overall American population because most places didn’t have major elections in 2021.

And, Buck, one of the things that’s the most frustrating to me as we get closer to 2022 is it feels like the Faucis of the world and all of his cohorts in the Democrat media that enabled him and encouraged his behavior and locked us down and set us on the path where we have 9% inflation and where we’re still struggling with the consequences and impacts of our decisions that we made during covid, it feels like there’s not gonna be a reckoning right now based on the trend lines.

And I was listening — and it’s crazy. I was listening to Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers talk about the lies. Aaron Rodgers, starting quarterback, Green Bay Packers —

BUCK: My favorite football player. I love the way he throws the football.

CLAY: And Joe Rogan, who’s got a popular podcast. And I listened to their interview, the interview between the two of them over the weekend, and I that you let to myself, how have we reached a place, Buck, where a guy who calls UFC fights and a guy who throws a football for a living are more knowledgeable, more astute, and more honest about covid than Dr. Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, the CDC, the NIH, and the entire Biden administration? I want you to listen to this and then let’s react.

ROGAN: So many people, they just bought the narrative that was being promoted by CNN and MSNBC and wherever that if you get vaccinated, you can’t get covid, you can’t spread covid. That was the narrative. And that’s my thing. I get it. Like, you want to test everybody every day? That’s fine. You know, want to keep people safe if that’s the benchmark for it.

But as we look back now, let’s not revise history on what actually happened and what was said. Because what was said was, “You get the vax, you can’t spread it or contract it.” And no one seems upset that that was a lie, including Birx, who has said that she had always known that it was not gonna stop transmission and it was not gonna stop people from spreading it. Which is wild, she would say we knew you were still gonna get it, even if you got vaccinated.

CLAY: All right. So, Buck, I listened to these two guys talking — and I know you and I talk, and people might say, well, that sounds like Clay and Buck talking every single day. How much of what we’re saying is… Like, when I hear Aaron Rodgers and Joe Rogan having that conversation, I know that there are many men and women out there having this conversation.

How is this not an entire referendum — throw everything else out — on the fact 2022, that Democrats got every single thing wrong on covid, and if there are no consequences — we talk about democracy being at stake — if Democrats don’t wear the consequences of being wrong on everything related to covid, I’m gonna be so upset at the American public because it’s like people are just so busy, they’re just turning the page and they’re over it and there are gonna be no real consequences other than maybe some of the elections we saw happen in 2021.

BUCK: This midterm election is the “will they get away with it” election. And what I mean by that is, will they get away with barring children from school for months on end so that Democrat-connected teachers unions could let their employees pretend to work remotely?

Will they get away with telling people who needed medical care, “Sorry. No medical care for you. You haven’t gotten the shot. You’re too dangerous”? Will they get away with firing people, including cops, doctors, nurses, firemen, military members listening to this program, will they get away with that?

These are just a few of the things — for telling people that they couldn’t hug or even see their dying loved ones in the hospital while then they decided that Black Lives Matter was such an important movement —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — that all the things that it was doing, the mass gatherings and he went, that was all fine. They have not been held to account for any of this. And I understand there are two forces, I think, Clay, that are working very directly against accountability here. One of them is nobody likes to admit they were wrong.

It’s just so much easier, so much easier to say, “But this is what the experts said, and this is what” — a lot of people were fooled by this. A lot of conservatives were big mask fans and, you know, vaccine mandate advocates, you know, early on.

CLAY: I’m sure you got lectured by people —

BUCK: All the time. I had people on the right who were like, “I want to publicly debate on you masks.” Some of them, to their credit, have privately apologized for that now. But I kept saying, you really don’t want to debate me on masks, actually, ’cause it’s not gonna go well for you.

So on the one hand, you have the people — I really should say there are three things. One, Democrats are ruthless. They want power. They don’t care that they were wrong and they ruined millions of lives —

CLAY: I understand that the Democrat perspective, Buck. Like, we could toss that one off on the scrap heap.

BUCK: For independents and everybody who’s center and center right, I think it’s — they don’t want to admit that they were fooled, they don’t want to admit that, you know, oh, but I just thought if I got the shots and masked a little bit, it would work a little bit better, you know.

And then I think there are also a lot of people — and this is probably the biggest part of it — they’re just exhausted with it. And that’s the one I have the most sympathy for. I’m still — I’m not okay with it, but I understand that mentality the most. You’re just like look, man, you know, if you live in not even just a deep blue state.

There were a lot of — you know, places like Pennsylvania, places like Georgia — you know, we’ve been through all the stuff, man. Can we just move forward? I can’t handle it anymore. If you take that approach, they got away with it.

And what’s worse, they’re gonna do it again, maybe for the next virus, maybe for a climate emergency if we have a really bad drought or really — you know, whatever it may be, they will put this playbook into action again unless they are thumped in this midterm election.

CLAY: It’s just super frustrating to me because this election should be a referendum. Look. Biden has been awful at everything. But in particular, there is now no doubt that what we were telling you for the past two years was right. Your kids should have been in school. Your business shouldn’t have been labeled essential or nonessential. We should have never locked down.

We should have never shut down. You certainly shouldn’t have had to have been wear masks all over the place. And to your point, Buck, it feels like so many people are just going to say let this pass, maybe because they’re so tired of covid questions and discussing covid and everything else.

But Democrats not being held responsible for the biggest public policy failure in our country since Vietnam is an indictment of democracy itself because the will of the people is supposed to hold leaders accountable when they make poor decisions that end up impacting people’s lives negatively.

Now, you can say, well, Ron DeSantis is gonna get re-elected comfortably and it looks like Brian Kemp and Greg Abbott, these red state governors who at least governed somewhat decently certainly compared to the blue states. But the blue state governors are getting rewarded too.

Gavin Newsom has been a disaster on everything related to covid by any statistical measure. And he’s going to get elected in a landslide in California. And so, Buck, on some level, this makes me wonder, are we so polarized that being right or wrong on an issue doesn’t even matter.

Because how else can you explain Gavin Newsom cruising to a 20-point win in California when, by any objective measure, no one who is currently in office today as a governor handled covid worse with the possible exception of Gretchen Whitmer, who looks like she may well win in Michigan too, that there are no consequences for getting it wrong on a state or federal level feels to me like a fundamental failure of our democracy that we can’t hold leaders accountable.

BUCK: There’s something wrong with people who felt good about voting to keep Gavin Newsom as the governor. And I mean, Democrats — to keep him as the governor of California. If pushing for lockdowns and lecturing everybody on mavericks and — I mean — we could do a whole three-hour show just on all the stupid decision-making of the Democrat Party in the state of California and others too, but those two states — I certainly know the New York scene very well.

If what he did during covid is not enough to warrant him no longer being in power, I really worry. Like, what is the red line? Is rounding people up and putting them in camps like they did in Australia, by the way, is that okay? Would Democrats in California said, “Oh, you know, the unvaccinated have to go to the special quarantine camps.”

You know, California has a very bad history of rounding people up for the purposes of keeping them in camps. I’m just wondering. At what point would they decide that it’s too far. At what point would it be, you know what? This guy is a psycho and was totally cowardly in the face of the frightened Democrat mob.

To your earlier question about, does being wrong matter? No. I think we’re in a state of ossified political tribalism now where it’s just my team and my team has to win and the other team can’t gain any ground and if that’s someone’s opinion on this, unfortunately — and I understand, they’ll say, “Well, what about you? You’re Republican.”

What are the things the Republican Party has done in the last two years that are so horrible? I love asking people this. What exactly — you’ll get something like Trump. They’ll start yelling about Trump. I said, Trump isn’t the president —

CLAY: He hasn’t been in office for two years. Yeah.

BUCK: What have the Republicans done that’s so awful in the last two years? Maybe just slapping down the Democrats for their crazy ideas would have the effect of making it a better Democrat Party? I don’t know.

You can’t get it — I mean, the fact that you have any independents right now thinking that Joe Biden is their better bet. I mean, look, even some of the numbers in Arizona right now are very troubling in that Senate race. I think the governor’s race is looking a little better.

I would love to sit down with some of these voters and I’d be very curious to hear, what do you not get? I mean, the streets are overrun with crime, the border is an open sieve, and everything in your life is more expensive because of Democrat decision-making.

CLAY: Yes. And it is such a fascinating question because I feel like on some level people maybe are so overloaded with information that they’re just sticking to whatever choice they made in 2020 without even comprehending all of the failures since.

But if this is not major referendum on covid, if Democrats don’t bear significant consequences — I mean, Buck, other than Andrew Cuomo, who was forced out for sexual harassment — he wasn’t forced out for handling covid poorly — maybe we’ll think about this when we go to break — who is the Democrat official who’s been held accountable for awful decisions on covid?

BUCK: Who’s been held responsible, Clay, for the pullout of Afghanistan, which was just a year ago now, people are starting to remember? Did the Democrats ever hold anybody accountable? Just wondering.

CLAY: Ultimately, it’s the voters. And I can’t even think of a voters’ group out there. Maybe you can. We’ll talk about it when we come back. Who has been held accountable for covid, for what they did to this country and for what they did to your kids and for what they’ve done to you and your family? Who is the politician that’s been held accountable? I think it’s an interesting question.