BUCK: Our friend Karol Markowicz from the New York Post, where she’s an opinion columnist, she’s got a piece out, Continuing Covid Craziness Shows It Was Never About the Science. Karol, no, it was not. Tell everybody how we know this now more than ever.

MARKOWICZ: Hi, guys.

BUCK: Hey.

MARKOWICZ: You know, how many of these pieces have I written and have been on to discuss and yet we’re still in this insanity in so many of these places? It’s September, 2022, and yesterday New York City lifted its private vaccine mandate, the vaccine mandate that was for private companies. And the rest of the country is like, “Wait. They had a vaccine mandate for private companies?” It’s such a baffling and backwards way of living, and it so disappoints me that more New Yorkers don’t speak up about it.

CLAY: Karol, you’re in Florida now.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

CLAY: And obviously the news today about Trump and the civil charges but the fact that there’s still criminal allegations pending and everything else. DeSantis is going to win comfortably in 48 days, reelection, in Florida.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

CLAY: Do most Floridians that you talk to want DeSantis to run for president or do they want him to stay as governor?

MARKOWICZ: So, it’s interesting because I think that Floridians have a completely different consideration. It’s not so much the Trump-DeSantis thing down here. It’s the, “Can we lose our governor?” So it’s like, in the rest of the country I feel like the conservative question is, “Which these two guys do we want?” whereas in Florida it’s like, “Wait. We really don’t want to lose our governor?” Even though everybody kind of thinks that he would make an amazing presidential candidate.”

So, ultimately, yeah, I think people like him and want him entire office. I think they’re concerned about what happens to their state. It’s a really kind of perilous time, they feel, and it can go either way. Like, the state has been trending red and it’s been pretty deep red in the last few years. But, you know, anything can happen. DeSantis only won by a very small margin the last time. So a lot of affection for the governor, I would say, down here.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Karol Markowicz, New York Post columnist. Karol, crime is one of the big issues that Democrats know they got a real problem with the public ’cause the crime numbers are terrible. And when you look at this as an increase… You know, people say, “Oh, it was worse in the nineties.” Yeah, well, that was 30 years ago. So when you look at a — not just a 30, 40, 50% increase, some places have had shootings, homicides increase a hundred percent, 150%. But you share this story — I know it was written, I think, about somebody else — about the Park Slope Panther.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

BUCK: Can you just tell everybody a little bit about the park — ’cause you used to live in Park Slope in New York City.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

BUCK: What do people need to know about this Neighborhood Watch group that apparently couldn’t get past whether to call people crazy or neurodivergent when they were throwing bottles at old ladies?

MARKOWICZ: (laughing) So Park Slope is an insane place. And for a long time it was a really beautiful, very, very safe place to be. And growing up in New York City, Park Slope was a dream, especially for somebody growing up in Brooklyn. It was actually the dream. But what’s happened in the last few years is it’s gone from liberal to leftist. And it has really lost the plot. This story by Susie Weiss on Bari Weiss’ Common Sense page was about a group that had formed because a homeless person had killed somebody’s dog, and that finally moved Park Slopers to say, “We have to start taking this crime thing more seriously.

“It’s finally here. It’s happening now.” And a side note to this, in 2020 when people were saying, oh, crime is getting bad, all the people in Park Slope were saying, “That’s very racist to say, actually, and we shouldn’t be talking about crime getting bad because, you know…” And so it wasn’t really affecting them. But now it is. And this group formed, and it’s hilarious story. It really made my day. It was so funny and so well written. I don’t know that it was supposed to be funny, necessarily, but it was amazing and how these teenagers came up to them and said they basically checking their privilege — and of course these teenagers live in Park Slope, grew up in Park Slope, are the most privileged people possible, et cetera. Highly recommend the story.

CLAY: So, Karol, in 2021, suburban moms said, “We’ve had enough,” and they went and they got Glenn Youngkin elected in Virginia and nearly flipped New Jersey. I mean, that’s how much of a red wave we saw in that first year after the Biden administration.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah.

CLAY: What do you think we’re going to see in 48 days? How are those suburban moms going to react? How much did abortion change the political calculus, in your mind, in terms of those suburban mom decisions? And the reason why I’m pointing out suburban moms in particular is there’s lots of people who know we know how they’re gonna vote. That was sort of the impetus, the charge that changed things in ’21. How are these moms gonna vote in your mind in ’22?

MARKOWICZ: Yeah. I still think that that demographic is fired up and really wants to go to the ballot box and punish the people who had kept schools closed for as long as they did, kept their kids masked for as long as they did, kept them in the vaccine mandates for as long as they did. I think that that demographic bloc is still very significant. The problem is I don’t see Republican candidates speaking to that bloc in the same way that Glenn Youngkin did.

CLAY: Yep.

MARKOWICZ: Glenn Youngkin made himself the education guy. And that is so powerful. It’s not just these issues that we’re dealing with right now. Education on so many different levels has just collapsed in cities all across the country. And I think that candidates that can speak to these concerns collapsing standards, removal of merit-based anything, all of this is very important to parents. And I just don’t see the same kind of Republican contact to these people. I think that a lot of these people are still fired up on their own, but it would be best if the Republican Party could maybe craft some messaging around this, target this demographic specifically. Because I think that they want to vote, they want to be courted, and the Republican Party should do that.

BUCK: You know, Karol, also on the issue of transgender indoctrination and now even surgery for youth, I do think that Republicans… Look, I just think this is a critical moral issue. I think this is about truly defending children and saving them from making life-destroying decisions because this is fashionable on the left now. A lot of this stuff has become just it’s fashionable to push this and tell kids, “Change your pronouns and change your name and have your breasts cut off if you’re female,” all this stuff that’s going on.

And one thing that I just find is on the one hand, you know, we’ll see let’s say like a drag queen story hour with children there, and — or drag show with children there — and the left will say, “Oh, it’s bigoted, it’s, you know, why are you pointing this out? This isn’t representation,” and then a few weeks later there’s another one. And then — how hard is it for them to not do this? I mean, it really does seem like whether it’s pornographic books in schools for children or highly inappropriate sexualized shows for children, the left doesn’t want to give this up.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah. I fully agree. And the fact that they are having these kids keep secrets from their parents, I think that would be such a powerful line for parents to understand, that it’s not just that your kid is using a different pronoun in school. It’s that they’re encouraged to keep that a secret from you. And, like, I’ve said this before, but, you know, in New York City, my, you know, preteen daughter had so many kids in her class declare themselves trans. It really was, like, a contagion, and it was only happening among girls, and it was happening at such a clip that it couldn’t possibly be.

Like, there just aren’t this many trans people in the world, let alone in, you know, one-sixth grade class. So I think that parents have to be kind of more aware of what’s happening in their schools and what their rights are. And again this could be something the Republican Party speaks to these parents about, which I don’t see that they’re doing that great. I think that they could say, like, you know, we all want to be sympathetic to kids who feel, you know, the wrong — they’re born in the wrong gender or whatever. But the way that we handle this isn’t to let, you know, secrets be kept from parents at school or to let them have hormones or any of this. And I think there’s a great way to make parents understand what the problem is.

CLAY: Karol, Buck’s been making fun of me for 10 days now because I care about the British royal family and pay a lot of attention to all the drama and everything else. And, you know, 10 million people watched the funeral and he confessed that his fiancee is also in my camp and agrees that all the palace intrigue is fantastic. Are you Team Buck in that no one should care in America about the royal family or Team Clay in that maybe you agree with that but you also desperately pay attention to all of the drama?

MARKOWICZ: No, I don’t pay attention to all the drama, but the New York Post is obviously pretty into the whole, you know, royal family thing. It’s a major topic at the Post. So I read the Post coverage. You know, I didn’t watch any of the funeral. I lived in Scotland which I should maybe say that I, you know, would be more interested in the royal family, but nobody is less interested in the royal family than Scottish people. So —

BUCK: I gotta move to Scotland, apparently.

CLAY: Edinburgh is an amazing town. Where did you live in Scotland?

MARKOWICZ: In the north, in a small town called Forrest.

CLAY: Oh wow. Well, I’m putting you down on team Clay in the royal family.

BUCK: Ehhh!

CLAY: That’s a win for me.

BUCK: Thanks. Karol Markowicz, New York Post. Go read her stuff. She’s brilliant. Karol, thank you.

MARKOWICZ: Thank you, guys. Thanks.