BUCK: One thing that’s been fascinating to watch play out as we’ve seen the facts in this trial shatter the initial media narrative about “Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, Kyle Rittenhouse as a active shooter, as an evildoer,” is that somehow the narrative of racism continues. He shot three white guys. He’s a white guy. They all attacked him. They all have extensive criminal records — and yet it’s a story about racism.

Here is Joy Reid, who does manage… It is actually something of a skill. She does manage to take anything and somehow make it about white supremacy, white racism. Here she is taking the Rittenhouse trial, which anyone who’s been watching understands is in no way, shape, or form about Kyle Rittenhouse being a racist, but she still thinks — and, oh, by the way, for good measure, brings in none other than the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh into the discussion.

REID: (melodramatic music) This Kyle Rittenhouse trial. It reminded a lot of people of something, something that can’t remember what it was. Oh! The Brett Kavanaugh hearings in which Brett Kavanaugh — who had been accused by a high school friend of committing (pause) sexual abuse of her cried his way through (pause) the hearings. In America, there’s a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears, particularly male white tears, really white tears in general.

(snickering) They “Karen” out, and then as soon as they get caught (blubbering) it’s supreme water works. White men can get away with that, too. And it has the same effect. Even as the right tries to politicize the idea that masculinity is being robbed for American men by multiculturalism and woke-ism, they still want to be able to have their tears.

Joy Reid compares #KyleRittennhouse to Brett Kavanaugh.
“In America… there’s a thing for white male tears… as soon as they get caught… they bring waterworks” pic.twitter.com/NnkJvHfl4c

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) November 17, 2021

BUCK: Clay, can I just ask, do you think there is an extent of anti-white rhetoric that MSNBC would not be okay with at this point? I just wonder, is there an outer limit to viciousness and sadism from the anchors over there? I’m curious.

CLAY: Buck, pretend that Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham did the exact same bit Joy Reid just did but they said instead of white men, black men, Hispanic men, Asian men. Is there any doubt that all of the woke vigilantes out there would immediately demand that they be fired for racism? This is the thing that I think is significant here.

We have created a world where white people can be attacked based on their race that is not allowed in any way anywhere else. These are the peculiar rules of identity politics. And, Buck, what it does is corrode everything. Because if you’re not applying consistent standards… First of all, if you’re basing anything… Let me just be clear on this.

If you are basing anything — success, failure, significance, insignificance — on someone’s race, you are an imbecile, because that is the definition of racism to say somebody did this because of the color of their skin or someone can or cannot do this because of the color of their skin. And this is the sort of convoluted, circular logic that we have arrived at where now modern-day left-wing wokeists are the most racist people in America.

And there’s not even a close second to them, Buck, and so Joy Reid is not intelligent. She doesn’t make ever-strong arguments. All she does is embrace identity politics and cancel culture, which are the twin pillars of Democratic Party association now, which are going to destroy the Democratic Party, and she is going to be leading them right off the cliff into oblivion.

BUCK: You see this with even the left’s approach to CRT and the parents who are upset about CRT being taught to their kids. You’re supposed to submit to a leftist, Democrat narrative of anti-whiteness — of whiteness, white supremacy as bad things, inherently oppressive. You’re supposed to say, “You’re right,” and the game is, that in and of itself is evidence of your racism as a white person. If you won’t sit there and say, “White Fragility is a great book. It’s not idiotic, it’s amazing!”

If you won’t sit there and say, “You know what? I should teach my kids that somehow the sins of their ancestors fall upon their heads today in America, and they are guilty just because of their white skin color…” This is the kind of rhetoric that is all over the place among Democrats. They put these people on TV who will speak about this as though there’s some kind of PhD in anti-whiteness.

They create these pseudo-academic frameworks for the discussion. And, Clay, some people on the left are finally realizing — even irrespective of whether there’s any truth, veracity, any reality behind some of these different frameworks for analyzing race in America — if they stay with the CRT is either a fiction or parents who don’t like it are bad, they’re going to get annihilated in the midterm election.

I think Bill Maher… We’ve brought him up several times — again, definitely a liberal but does have… You can have a rational discussion with him. I’ve done it before on certain topics, and he even admits that on this issue of essentially anti-white racism —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — which the left says does not exist, by the way; it’s impossible to be racist against white people. (They’re wrong.) Bill Maher, Clay, says this is a big problem.

MAHER: We learned about the Civil War. I mean, they mentioned racism. We understood slavery and Lincoln and blah, blah, blah. But they didn’t really go into it any more than Gone With the Wind goes into it. It was there, but you didn’t feel it viscerally. Now we’re doing that, and I think that’s a good thing. People should understand that. That’s different than teaching that racism is the essence of America.

That’s what people get upset about. Or involving children who are probably not old enough or sophisticated enough to understand this very complicated issue. Kids are taught and sometimes separated into groups: Oppressor and oppressed. Again, does a kid even know what those words mean?

CLAY: I think this is so well said by Bill Maher, and what we should say also while we played the clip of Joy Reid, some of the foremost proponents of anti-white racism are white. In fact, that’s the primary cadre of woke liberals. It’s typically not black, Hispanic, or Asian people that are embracing anti-white tropes as much as it is “the woke.”

Your Brooklyn brethren in New York City, you can kind of look at ’em and feel like, “Okay. This is the kind of person who is going to come out and say, ‘White people are awful.'” The number of white people that run around on social media talking about how awful white people are and propagating modern-day racism, that’s the legion that I see, Buck.

Those are the people that are desperately to sort of advance this woke ideology is people who are driving the Democratic Party, like I said, right off the cliff. Most of them are not black women like Joy Reid. Most of them are white men and women of extremely liberal bent who have convinced themselves that America is a fundamentally awful place, and they define America entirely based on slavery.

And this is important, too, in a larger context, Buck. Slavery existed everywhere. We have this idea in America that uniquely America was a proponent of slavery and almost nowhere else in the world had slavery. It’s a flagrant misunderstanding of world history. Look, slavery is a stain and a sin on American history.

But in America — I think this is significant — slavery was only legal for 80 years, from 1783 when we gained our independence, to 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This country had legal slavery for 80 years. Pre that, you should be angry at England which allowed slavery in the colonies when we had no actual independence.

And you can argue, “Well, we didn’t have the full fruition of equality in 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation happened,” but for the vast majority of kids that are in school today, the idea that they’re responsible for something that happened 150 years ago is fundamentally, to me, barbaric and insane.

BUCK: Yeah. What are we actually supposed to do based upon this framework of whether it’s critical race theory or essentially the rhetoric coming out of the left today, which is that white supremacy is infused in everything about America? It’s infused in capitalism and free markets and the Constitution, our government. If everything around us is racist, well, then, what exactly are we supposed to do? The only answer to that — the only real answer to that — is to submit to and obey and give power to whomever is making that argument.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The whole purpose of this is essentially is to deconstruct —

CLAY: It’s about power.

BUCK: It’s about power. It’s about to deconstruct America as we know it, the society all around us, and allow the people that are pushing this movement to reconstruct it in whatever way they see fit. It’s essentially — and this is why I do think the term “racial Marxism” is very apt here, because they do view this as a beachhead of sorts into creating an internal revolution.

Certainly, a cultural and political revolution from within America to undue so much of what has been built and kept this country together for a very long time and create a new image of America that is rooted in intersectionality and essentially oppression studies. And as you point out, Clay, if you actually know the history…

If one knows the history, they would know that there was a massive slave trade in the Mediterranean of white Christians by the Muslim slave traders. There were African tribes enslaving other African tribes, the Aztecs enslaving all the tribes around them here in the Americas. We can go on for literally hours.

CLAY: The Greeks. The Romans.

BUCK: There was slavery in Egypt. The Bible. We go back all over the place. What does that have to do with how we can make schools better today for everyone’s kids by adopting school choice, right? What does that have to do with the principle that we’re all equal in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the law in this country as individuals, human beings irrespective of skin color?

They are pushing constantly, the critical race theorists, a different approach — and, by the way, they keep doing this, “It’s not CRT.” Whatever this version of America as a white supremacist state, which is the narrative from the left now, is so destructive. And it’s also going counter to the best things about this country which are rooted in individual equality in the law and in the eyes of God.

CLAY: Meritocracy. The best man or woman wins.

BUCK: They’re creating what the Supreme Court has referred to — at least I believe it was in a dissent by Alito — “the racial entitlement state,” and who gets to make the determinations? This is where the Marxist revolutionary comes into play. Who makes the determinations about what’s “fair,” what’s “right”? Who gets what? Where do Asians fit into the hierarchy?

CLAY: They don’t. They’re too successful.

BUCK: Yeah. Does the LGBTQ community? Are they to be put in a place of greater hierarchy in the oppression studies than the black community, or how do we figure that out? If you’re trans…? It’s dizzying, and it’s incoherent. It’s just meant to frighten people. It’s moral blackmail against America by people who are either ruthless in their pursuit of power or idiots — or both, actually. A lot are both.

CLAY: And I also think a lot of it comes from China. They’re taking advantage of our social media openness, and our enemies in the world recognize that the way to destroy America is not to attack externally. It’s to get us so roiled up divided based on our diversity in this country that we’re throwing punches at each other in the country instead of recognizing that we’re getting punched in the back of the head every damn day by China.

BUCK: KGB was doing this in this country with direct operations against us trying to pull at our seams. They don’t teach that in the schools, though. They don’t teach about the communist penetrations of this country, either.