New York Raises Covid Alert Level as Violent Crime Rages

BUCK: Crime in major cities — if you saw some of the numbers over the weekend, shootings in Chicago, a fatal stabbing at a Dave… I’d never been to Dave & Buster’s before but it’s right here in Times Square in New York City. Apparently, a stabbing occurs at the prize area, and I just drove past it in a taxi as all the police cars were swarming to get there and trying to figure out what’s going on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Here in New York… (groans) I can’t even… Oh, I tell you this and I say so to myself, “I can’t believe this is serious.” They’re starting to ramp up again over the covid fears. “Oh, no, we might have to do something! You know, there could be some kind of restrictions coming to place.” I think they realize… Yeah, New York City has raised the covid alert.

I think they realize that people are increasingly unwilling to go along with the most absurd theatrics of all of this. I was gonna fly in past weekend down to Florida, in fact. I ended up not, had to make a last-minute change. So I have not yet experienced the great freedom of being on a plane without a mask on your face, not since the order was gone. But I am hopeful that we will continue to be in a place where we don’t have to go through the absurdity of it.

And I just… If we had real journos including at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, could just one of them please ask Fauci, not why did you refuse to go to the main dinner but you went to the preparties — which everyone says actually where all the really cool people hang out, and I guess the after-parties too — why would you go to those and not actually go to the big dinner?

Like, explain the science behind that. Don’t give me some talking points about (impression), “However, my risk tolerance here and there and everywhere can be in a constant state of flux.” No, no. I want someone to ask Fauci — he’ll — I would ask him but he won’t talk to me. Ah, come on, Fauch, we went to the stage high school, man. We’re Regians. He does not not care. Yeah, true story, true story of the Fauch.

But I want someone to ask him, explain that, from a scientific perspective. People look to you for advice on this, unfortunately still. I want someone to tell us how it is, why it is that that makes even the slightest bit of sense, right? Explain the data. Explain the science about it. He won’t do it. Now, I also think — since we’re talking about data — it’s worth looking at the areas where Democrats are particularly vulnerable going into the midterm election.

We’ve talked about some of them today, the trans agenda for children. For sure that’s a big one because it’s real, it’s there. I don’t understand how anybody… Sometimes we’ll even see people who will criticize some of those, the beauty pageants for very young girls, and I think that’s weird. I agree with the criticism that that’s not something that’s really appropriate.

Why would they think a drag show nor a 12-year-old boy is okay? I don’t understand how that doesn’t become a bigger part of the argument here? Discovery+. Discovery is supposed to… I don’t even know what’s on Discovery these days. I know some of the channels they used to have lions on the Serengeti plains and such. I used to love all the nature shows that they would have, blue whales, all that stuff.

Now it’s like, “Here’s how you make something that goes, ‘Vroom!’” This is on Animal Planet? What are we doing here? But it’s always, you know, you know, it’s a job where you get really dirty, and I say okay, that’s cool, but I don’t know what this has to do with the History Channel somebody said this about Elon Musk… I would give credit but I don’t remember who it was.

Once it was clear he was gonna buy Twitter that it would be cool if he could buy The History Channel and make it do history again, which I tend to agree. I tend to agree with that assessment. But on the issue of crime in major cities, we’re gonna have to continue to explain to everybody why this is so important and how we got to this place because they’re gonna act like it’s really complicated.

And if you live in Phoenix, Houston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia — and sure it’s probably also the case in, you know, St. Louis and in some more mid-size cities of the Midwest where the crime rate has just gone up dramatically –we’re supposed to look around at each other and just say (this is what the Democrats want), “Oh, man wow. What a coincidence!”

It’s not a coincidence at all. These are the results of policy decisions that came about because of a narrative pushed relentlessly, relentlessly by the Democrat media and was used to considerable effect. You have to remember in the 2020 election year to defeat Donald Trump, covid and BLM, lockdowns as a tool of anxiety but also as a tool of control and political mobilization and then the BLM riots, protests, uprisings that occurred all over the country as well.

These were used for political purposes, but they relied on a degree of hysteria. There were all these people who were saying, “Oh, we need more justice, we need more social justice in policing.” Has that actually happened? Did that work? Let’s look at the results right now. What do the results tell us? It’s very clear. The results show that in jurisdictions where there are a lot of people…

So we can look at the numbers more clearly, in jurisdictions where crime was already a problem, it got markedly worse when all of a sudden the story was the cops are racist, we lock up too many people who are minorities, we have to change that as a function of policy irrespective of any one individual’s criminal acts one way or the other.

And what we see that cities are now less safe, and things are happening on a regular basis that you would say are indicators of just how much decay there really is in major cities, right? You see these things. I mean, Chicago over the weekend had — okay, yeah — 32 shot, seven fatally over the weekend. That’s a lot of people to be shot in one weekend. It’s a lot of people to lose their lives in one weekend, in one city in America.

And what are the Democrats offering up to change this? If this were showing up — if the mayor of New York City even, Eric Adams — saying if you hurt people, I don’t care, you know, about what the excuses are, explanations, social justice, you know, historical inequity, whatever. If a human being hurts another human being severely, seriously…

You know, talking about a serious assault, kills somebody, tries to kill somebody, rapes somebody, does anything, we’re going to lock that person up for a very long time. If, breaks into a story and steals $100,000 of handbags, we’re actually going to lock that person up because the disorder and anarchy that comes from failing to enforce laws even about things like shoplifting…

Now, we’re not talking about shoplifting a stick of gum. Right? This is why there — the left always likes to do this. They say, “Oh, my gosh. Think of all the people that are rotting away in prison because they were found with one joint, you know, marijuana cigarette.” Gosh, I say marijuana cigarette and I feel like I’m 20 years older but, one tiny bit of you marijuana.

Oh, look at all the people that are serving life sentences. That’s actually not what’s happening. And while they may be able to and I think under California’s three strikes law there have been some egregious cases where somebody did something that was write minor but it was a third strike; they need to adjust that. that’s not the reality, though, of what’s happening day in and day out. What you see are people walking into stores knowing that they can steal and create a climate of fear for the employees, create a situation where the companies can’t actually turn a profit, where small businesses are often targeted in all this as well.

But sometimes it’s the big designers and people that you would be told by the left, “Well, they can afford all of this.” There’s a very straightforward way to handle this. You know, we used to have this phrase, “tough on crime.” You can either have the cities of — go down the list, all the ones that I mentioned to you, right? East Coast, West Coast, everything in between.

You can have the administrations of the various mayors and city councils and the police commissioners say, “No more nonsense. Criminals are going to be dealt with in a much more severe fashion and serve real time for real crime. You can either take that approach or everything else is just noise. Democrats won’t say it. They won’t even do it, really. You see this.

Look at Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago. You have Eric Adams here. You have Garcetti in Los Angeles. You have mayors in other major cities that are Democrat run. You got Krasner, the DA. I don’t know the mayor of Philadelphia, but is it Krasner, Larry Krasner is the district attorney. They’re not gonna change their ways, because it would be viewed as an ideological betrayal.

And this is where the whole separation comes. This is where the problem is. It is viewed as an ideological betrayal of the Democrat base to say that we’re going to enforce the law against criminals and we’re going to punish people, and we’re not gonna play games anymore with this, “Oh, we have to end the carceral state.” We hadn’t even heard that phrase. It just started being used a couple of years ago.

“Gonna end the carceral state.” Okay. So what do we do? What happens? Well, what you see happening is that there was a story that just… I sent this around to some of my family members. It was about the Madison Avenue stretch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is some of the fanciest, most expensive stores you could find anywhere, right?

It’s like the Rodeo Drive for the Los Angelinos who are listening here. That’s like fancy and all, right? I don’t know it that well. I can’t remember the name of the really nice mall we were in in Houston, but, you know, it’s like a fancy part where you get the… You know the fancy mall in Houston that we were. The Galleria, I think it was, maybe? Something like that.

I gotta learn more of my Houston locales. I do want to go back. Had a great time there. But on the upper east side they actually have these stores where as an anti-mask theft maneuver, they are turning the lights off in the store, locking the door, and only allowing people to shop who call to make an appointment. This is on Madison you have a on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, should have read that story and said, “My God, I am failing so far,” because that’s probably the safest, most expensive neighborhood of all of the five borrows of New York City. And if you have stores it there that in broad daylight feel like they can’t operate in the daylight because people just come in and they walk in. They come in with trash bags and they just take stuff.

You know, it’s a lot of time, it’s a female salesclerk in some of these stores. And even if it’s not, do you want to be the individual who, you know, making maybe minimum wage plus commission to try to tackle two or three guys who may be armed who walk in — broad daylight — just start filling their bags with goods. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars of theft in some of these cases.

And you have AOC, congresswoman from New York, who will say that people are stealing because they’re trying just trying to feed themselves and buy bread. She actually says stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. People are going in and stealing a hundred thousand dollars of fancy handbags so that they don’t starve to death in this country. Yeah, tat’s what’s happening. This is what the left says. Friends, they’re nuts, okay? They’re nuts. And until we force them to change, they’re gonna keep doing this. They will not make the necessary adjustments to make places, make cities safer.