CLAY: The battle lines are beginning to form on the new mask mandate. As it is rolling out in some ways across the country, all of the conflict is coming to a head, I believe, and the conflict may be the most pronounced in the state of Florida, where Ron DeSantis has effectively laid the gauntlet down, and said:

Florida will not be acquiescing to mask mandates or any other restrictions on his state while he is governor down there given all the time that he has spent branding the state of Florida as an oasis of freedom. And I want to play for you — this is last week — DeSantis standing up against the idea of all of these restrictions, which are coming down on all of us. Let’s listen.

DESANTIS: If anyone is calling for lockdowns, you’re not getting that done in Florida. I’m going to protect people’s livelihoods. I’m going to protect people’s right to go to school. I’m going to protect people’s right to run their small businesses. We have a situation where we have three vaccines that have been widely available for months and months now.

And people need to make decisions what’s best for them. But to have the government come in and lock anyone down or restrict anybody is totally unacceptable. And it’s easy for some people to advocate that because it doesn’t affect them. It does affect the people in this state. So we’re going to lift people up.

We’re not locking people down and we’re going to make sure that folks are able to exercise their decision making, what’s best for them. And I think millions of Floridians have obviously done that for the last year and a half. So we want to continue to support their effort.

CLAY: So, Buck, the question here — and I do think that DeSantis is maybe going to lead the Republican opposition at this point to the overreach that we’ll see — from the Biden administration, from the Fauci-ites, from the CDC and all these different places that as we’ve been telling you about — as we move into the fall, the Draconian restrictions are going to become more and more apparent on a day-to-day basis.

So the question that I think many of our listeners have, and certainly you and I have debated both on and off air: How do we respond? What is appropriate? What is potentially effective? And there’s a little bit of a story out of St. Louis that we can touch on associated with that as well.

BUCK: I think it’s a panic spasm. I think that it’s probably not going to last more than a few weeks. But that doesn’t mean that we should do what we’ve done in the past where we concede, where we go along. We say, “Okay, fine.” Just two weeks, Clay. Right?

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: Look what “just two weeks” got us this time around. It’s remarkable when you look at the way this is covered. Let’s be honest: Lockdowns and Democrats go hand in hand. That’s what’s happened here. This has become an almost entirely politically affiliated, politically tribal issue for people.

You know what someone is going to think, by and large, based upon their party and their political beliefs when it comes to covid. It shouldn’t be about this, but it is. When you look at the numbers — and I did some of this deep diving last night on the New York Times website. That’s right, Clay.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: We go and root around in the bowels of the New York Times website —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — so our folks today don’t have to spend their time sullying themselves and their eyes with what they’re doing there at Commie Central. The reality is you look at cities like New York and Los Angeles. Just take those. People might think right now, “Oh, my gosh. We’re a mix of a surge.

“Mask mandates have to come back.” In Los Angeles, they already have. In New York, they haven’t made it official. It’s more of a vaccine than a mask push. Clay, there’s a few hundred people — 200 to 300 people, depending on the day you look at it — in the hospital for covid in New York, in Los Angeles.

This is not a moment that should be inducing panic in people. But I really think the brains of people on the left have been altered in such a way that it’s not really possible for them to judge and adjudicate risk in a reasonable fashion. They should all be wearing helmets when they get into a car and wearing a snorkel when they get into a bathtub, because they can’t handle the normal risks that all the rest of us can.

CLAY: It’s interesting that you point that out, because I made the argument in the past year that one of my number one tests for adulthood is, “Can you adequately assess risk and adjust your behavior accordingly?” Certainly a large percentage of the population have failed this mantra — and if we are correct, Buck…

And the data reflects, frankly, that we’re months ahead of where everybody else is going to be, and that covid is basically going to become a chronic, endemic, seasonal attribute, unfortunately, that rises every fall. We have to, at some point, recognize that and stop treating covid like it is a disease that is unprecedented in the history of mankind.

And I just don’t know, what is that pivot point? Because I think Democrats bought into the idea that the vaccine was a panacea, that it was a magic bullet, that it was going to cure everything — and, frankly, that’s partly what Joe Biden sold to everybody, and it just hasn’t taken.

BUCK: And you and he I both know that if Donald Trump were still the president, there would be so much more willingness among the Democrat-aligned media to question the vaccines.

CLAY: Zeroed out.

BUCK: You would be seeing reports all over the place about the vaccine — VAERS, I believe, Vaccine Adverse Event Reaction System. You would be seeing people talking about this and saying, “We’re just asking questions,” but it’s become so utterly and deeply political. I just feel like at this point, there’s something that people need to know.

Which is the people that have been pushing this all along have done so with the idea that if we only listened to them, we would be in a better place. Now we’ve all seen that they go back on what they’ve told us was certainty a couple of months ago.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They’ve never said, “This is just a judgment call,” because if they say it’s a judgment call, we can fight back. It’s “the science,” Clay. They’ve been doing this all along. The real red pill moment here is not recognizing the Democrat’s mandatory vaccine and mask policies are overreach. That’s certainly true. It’s that this cloud of authoritarianism has been obvious all along, from the very beginning.

CLAY: And this is what the White House tweeted, Buck, on May the 13th. It wasn’t that long ago. I think most people can think back all the way to May the 13th, a little bit over two months ago. This is direct from the White House Twitter account: “Big news from the CDC.

“If you’re fully vaccinated, you don’t need to wear a mask indoors or outdoors in most settings. We have gotten this far. Whether you choose to get vaccinated or wear a mask, please protect yourself until we get to the finish line,” and the headline is in all caps from the White House, “FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE CAN STOP WEARING MASKS.”

And now, they have flip-flopped on that directive. So you mention Facebook, Buck. It raises the question. Do they now have to go back into Facebook and start to remove all the misinformation about mask wearing that they shared as recently as two months ago from the CDC?

BUCK: There’s been a total lack of humility from the lock-downers, the Fauci-ites, and the Democrats this entire time. You see this continuing on. They don’t care. There’s an interesting piece in Slate, which is a far-left website — not quite as far as The Nation, but it’s pretty left wing — where they were saying, “Is there such thing as ‘a noble lie’ when it comes to public health policy?”

I saw them finally admit — and I know you feel this way too. When we were willing to… Well, we weren’t. But when people were willing to believe that Fauci lied about masks, because it was for our own good. Remember that, back in February of 2020? It was he lied about mask effectiveness because he decided to change his mind, and then we were told they were worried about a run on masks.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: No intelligent person should have believed this. Okay? We weren’t running out of masks. We never ran out of masks. We never ran out of hospital capacity. We didn’t actually need a million ventilators. In fact, what we found out was a lot of the medical community were far too quick to put people on ventilators, in part because they might have been too panicked about dealing with covid in the first place when we didn’t know as much about it.

Being put on a ventilator was, for a lot of people, a death sentence, because they were put on it too early. The point being, we were willing to believe that Fauci lied to us for our own good. And then he had credibility afterwards. No, he didn’t lie to us for our own good, Clay.

Any adult that’s really thinking this through says, “Oh, he just wanted to change his mind because his team felt like masks were going to make everybody feel better.” Not stay healthier. But emotionally, psychologically feel better. It became their little blanky. Their little safety blanket.

CLAY: No. It’s 100% right. And we’re fortunate that we have laboratories in all our state governments, because if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be all the evidence to prove how completely unnecessary and unworkable the mask requirement is at all. I think there are three things, Buck, that we have been talking about on this program that we are going to continue to hammer home as one of the only, I believe, honest and trustworthy sources you can find anywhere.

One: Covid is not going away. We’re never going to get to Covid Zero. That’s important because there are a lot of people who still don’t understand that. Two: Masks, if you look at the data, do not work — or at least don’t work in a substantial enough way to be this absolute crazy mandate that we are seeing. And three: If you look at the data, virtually nothing that we’ve done since covid started in terms of our day-to-day interaction has changed anything.

BUCK: I also think it’s fascinating that we’re led to believe that the people demanding masks are the ones who are vulnerable because they’re not vaccinated. That’s what the media, the corporate media narrative is in general. That’s not true. The people demanding masks are hyper anxious Biden voters in their 30s and 40s and 50s who are already vaccinated. But it’s not good enough.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: This is safety-ism above rational thought, and that’s what we’re seeing.