BUCK: Clay, we keep thinking — or at least a lot of well-intentioned, smart people on the right, just reasonable people… Forget about the politics of it. Eventually the lockdowners will be too crazy, and they’ll have their jump-the-shark moment. All right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: We keep thinking we’ll get to this place like when I was saying that Fauci was going to call for double masking months before he did, I thought, “At that point, people will realize this is all idiocy.”

CLAY: They’ll stand up.

BUCK: Didn’t happen. We keep thinking the incrementalism will finally cross that red line even if it’s just a little bit more, just two weeks, just whatever. Here is a moment where any reasonable human being, regardless of their politics, should say that the political leadership, elites in this country, the apparatus of control has completely lost its mind. I mean, the people that are making these decisions are crazy. Here’s Oregon governor Kate Brown, who is among the worst governors in the country. Now that Cuomo’s gone and Newsom’s hanging on, would you put her up there?

CLAY: Whitmer. Yeah, Whitmer in Michigan.

BUCK: We put her top five, though?

CLAY: Yeah, she’s top five, worse. She’s top five. We still gotta get to what Cuomo’s been accused of, by the way, as they now found more covid deaths that he’s responsible for. But this is emblematic to me, Buck, of where we are. Everybody’s answer now, when you look at Oregon — which has record hospitalization rates despite high vaccinations and constant mask wearing — is, “We just gotta lock down harder,” even though there’s no data to support it.

BUCK: And here’s a perfect example. Oregon governor Kate Brown has imposed — get ready for it — an outdoor mask mandate!

BROWN: I’m announcing that effective Friday, August 27th, masks will be required in all public outdoor settings where physical distancing is not possible regardless of vaccination status. Masks have proven to be effective at reducing transmission and are a necessary measure right now, even in some outdoor settings, to help us fight covid and to protect one another.

Oregon’s governor, facing a new high in covid hospitalizations, imposes a new outdoor mask mandate to add to the indoor mask mandate. When are people going to realize masks don’t work? The data doesn’t lie. pic.twitter.com/Y3PYQ4je2c

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 25, 2021

BUCK: Everything she says there is a lie. Everything.

CLAY: All of it!

BUCK: All of it. All of it. There’s no data to prove this. In fact, the CDC… We are now at the point, Clay, where they’re just saying things that everyone knows are false, but they expect you to comply because they think we’ve been trained to do that. We’ve been forced and coerced to do that. Outdoor masks? No one thinks that that’s helping anything. No one actually can believe that who has an IQ above that of a toaster.

CLAY: And here’s also what is happening. We are increasingly diverging from what other intelligent European countries are doing. England yesterday, Buck, with all of their kids going back to school, implemented no mask mandate because there’s not science to support it. And yet you’ve got Oregon and many other states out there where they are just masking down harder, and there’s no data.

Let me say this. I don’t know if you saw this, but a couple of my followers came and said, “Hey, we’re being quizzed by Twitter about anti-mask tweets that you are putting up,” meaning me. I know we talked about this before. I think Twitter is trying to set up an opportunity to ban me from Twitter, because I’m not toeing the company line, arguing that masks actually work because there’s no data at all that they work in schools for kids.

And the cloth masks, as was recently proven, are virtually worthless. And the idea that masking up outdoors? This is like you see somebody driving in their car by themselves with the mask on. There are so many people who have bought in to the mask brigade, and they are completely loony bin insane because there’s no data to support what they’re doing. But even worse than making that personal choice themselves, they’re lecturing everybody else not making the same choice.

BUCK: Also, I think at some level, the people that are doing this stuff, it’s like they’re pursuing themselves through these absurd measures. They think that they’re showing they’re better people. They think that by taking these steps, they’re setting an example for others even when it doesn’t make scientific sense. They’ve started to see this in different places here and there. They act like the mere… Look, it’s religious ritual, is basically what I’m saying.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is now religious ritual time where instead of —

CLAY: Wokeism is a religion. It’s replaced many other religions that used to be important in the United States.

BUCK: And we have to see it as such because we’ve now gotten to the point where pointing out to them what their own data and their own statements say, it does not matter. In fact, the more they’re willing to reject what is rational and true, the more devoted they are to the religion of Fauci-ism. This is what this has turned into.

Otherwise, Kate Brown saying that you have to mask up outside…? How is it these people get away with never being called on the carpet, so to speak, on this one? How is a journalist not asking the first time that they get an opportunity, “What the heck are you talking about, Kate Brown?”

CLAY: It’s a fantastic question.

BUCK: “What are you smoking?” It is Oregon; so probably a lot.

CLAY: It’s what journalists should exist to do, right? In the old days, journalists existed to challenge people in positions of power. Now journalists primarily exist to make sure that the only opinions that are allowed are whatever the consensus opinions are, Buck. I mean, I sit around and I think about this a lot. Social media has so become a rush to consensus, right? Conflict can be good. Conflict is healthy.

People disagreeing is good because typically it leads to a stronger agreement in the long run. That’s the entire basis of the marketplace idea’s theory. Social media is the opposite of that, Buck. People like you and me who are sharing a minority opinion — which, by the way, is correct — that masks don’t work, that masks don’t work in school; that’s what all the data is.

But instead of saying, “Hey, look at what these guys Clay and Buck are talking about,” there are relatively few journalists that will even acknowledge or question. This is like the conversation we had with the New York Magazine guy. He says, “I get crushed for actually talking about the data. We’re in a scary place where facts don’t matter.”

BUCK: The people who push this stuff never have to be challenged live and in real time on what they’re doing.

CLAY: It’s true.

BUCK: This is one of the enormous failures of our entire media apparatus at this point because it used to be — and you and I have talked about this, Clay, just as guys chatting about the business we’re in offline. It used to be that they would have people that disagreed with orthodoxy on CNN.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They didn’t treat them well. They weren’t fair to them. But they would put them on air. Maybe they would throw tomatoes at them, so to speak. It used to be that there was some impulse among people that call themselves journalists to ask real questions even of those who are within their party. We all know journalists pretend they’re all independents. That’s a lie. But now we’re at that point where the only person…

This is why it’s so cathartic to watch Dr. Rand Paul slap around the little totalitarian Smurf Fauci for a bit, and it’s because that’s the only time we get to see somebody who is challenged on making these decisions that are so stupid, do not work. We have the proof’ we have the receipts. How do they still get away with this? Because a lot of people of goodwill all along have thought, “Okay. Just two weeks. Oh, it’s not gonna happen in my state. Oh, this is somebody else’s problem.” This is everybody’s problem, folks. Don’t even get me started (’cause we will get started) on the vax mandates that are coming, ’cause it’s coming everywhere.