CLAY: Let’s start, Buck, down in the state of Florida. Ron DeSantis, it was labeled the “don’t say gay” bill. This morning I’m reading as I get ready for the show, Buck, and Politico came out with a poll that 51% of American voters support banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. Thirty-five percent are opposed to this, all right?

This is pretty massive. When you are in a 50-50 country and you find an issue that you’re winning by 16 points, it doesn’t surprise me ’cause we talked about this, Buck. I’m a parent, talk to a lot of parents. I don’t know very many parents who believe kindergartener, first, second, third graders should be being taught substantially about sexual identity, really sex at all. Were you surprised by this Politico finding? And what does it continue to tell us about how out of touch many journalists are who cover politics?

BUCK: Well, it’s fascinating, Clay, because it seemed like in the early days of this the activists, the LGBTQ activists who were pushing for this to be essentially slandered as the “don’t say gay” bill — they came up with this phrase, call it something — it’s not a wealth tax, it’s a death tax, right, plastic politics, Orwellian, changing of words, newspeak, trying to figure out ways to move the needle one way or another based on the very specific words that you use.

So it seemed like this was under substantial pressure because all the press was asking DeSantis — and what happened, I think, Clay, I think the activists would have been more successful with this one at the Florida state level if it didn’t turn into a club for the lib media to start swinging at DeSantis with, by the way.

Because what happened? DeSantis unlike a lot of other Republicans, “Oh, I’m not anti-gay, don’t hate me, right, which this has nothing to do with being anti-gay.”

Ron DeSantis goes, where is that in the bill, right? Remember that audio, we played if for everybody, where is that, show me where that is, why are you renaming a bill as a so-called journalist something that is not so that you can attack the bill with something that is a lie and then, when everyone goes, oh, wait, hold on a second, they’re attacking DeSantis on this, now it’s a national news story.

Clay, let’s be honest, who would even hoard of the parental rights in education bill outside of Florida across the — very few people. Maybe Floridians it mattered to but to the rest of the country it was all right, this is a Florida State bill. And now it’s become a national cause, and now you have people saying, hold on a second. What do you mean these leftist activists are upset that there’s not gender identity instruction happening for first graders?

CLAY: Crazy.

BUCK: A first grader may say, you know, one day I want to be an astronaut and the next day I want to be a stegosaurus, and, you know, you gotta just, like, let kids be kids here. We’re gonna start teaching them about cisgender and gender queer, which is another phrase that I had to learn recently, didn’t even know what this means, and all these other terms and terminology.

Now, you might say, oh, Buck, they won’t really do that. They just had a school in San Antonio on the critical race theory front where they were saying — they were separating kids by hair color and the lightest kids by hair color were to be many of you treated and told they were dumber and worse than the rest of the kids in the class, to each them about inequity in society.

These left-wing activist bureaucrats are lunatics, and when parents find out about this — parents, by the way, across socioeconomic and racial strata — they’re just saying, no, I just want my kids to be, you know, learning how to spell and do math and behave themselves in class. I don’t want them being taught this particularly in the first and second grade.

The right once again has an opportunity here, conservatives have an opportunity to not just be the party of parental rights in education, be the party of normal people.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: To be the party of, you know, we’re not crazy. Like, what is this stuff?

CLAY: Buck, I had a conversation with my wife recently where I said, it disappoints me how few people can’t JBN. What’s JBN? It’s my acronym, just be normal. Just be normal. Normal parents do not want their kids to be taught sexual-related instruction in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade.

And I gotta give a lot of credit to Ron DeSantis because not only did he fight back as soon as this bill got attacked, but, Buck, he actually went to war with Disney. Because Disney tried to come out and say, oh, we’re gonna take potshots at Ron DeSantis in the state of Florida, and most of the time politicians curl up in the fetal position and they try to avoid these battles, but this is a great example of why I think Ron DeSantis is being way smarter than his critics.

Because so often the Blue Check Brigade members, the blue check journos, as you like to call them, they don’t have the sense of what the real world is like. And as a result, they think the real world is Twitter, which is where a lot of the media spins spends their time. And if you live in New York or you live in California and you spend your time on social media, you can convince yourself that things that are wildly unpopular in the real world are normal or supported.

Because I guarantee you if you analyze Twitter for the way that this bill was talked about, you would think, if you’re just scrolling through, oh, my goodness, everybody’s opposed to this. The reality is exactly the opposite. You know, Twitter say carnival funhouse mirror. It isn’t a reflection of the real world. And when I see these data points, it just makes me so angry that we still have so many people in positions of power quickly reacting to whatever the story of the day is on Twitter as if what those people are arguing in favor of is in any way representative of the nation as a whole.

BUCK: And yet when you add this all together, you have yet again a moment where we can see a pathway to getting people aren’t mobilized by the usual talking points about, you know, the left or the right or whatever, they’re seeing with their own eyes the reality of the school system during the pandemic and also increasingly with the left-wing bureaucracies that teach this.

My friend Ryan Girdusky, who we’ve had on the show before, he always says, they don’t teach CRT. They actually practice CRT, meaning that they put kids through these exercises that are rooted in CRT ideology without even explaining that critical race theory is what’s behind it, and they make them do things, like the hair color — this was in a San Antonio school — By the way, San Antonio, folks, right? I mean, you know, this is in Texas. This isn’t happening — this is not San Francisco or in — you know, in New York City.

CLAY: Seattle. Yeah.

BUCK: And so going into this midterm election, I think this is really unimportant because where did Republicans beat expectations in the last election in Virginia? They beat it with people who were mobilized because of what they’d seen in the school system the next time around, yeah, there will be people that’ll see inflation and the open border and all those things.

The Republican understands and I think independents understand what a disaster the Biden regime is. But we talk about this a lot, Clay. You can mobilize suburban moms to realize the Republican Party at least wants you to have a say and is not crazy when it comes to your child’s education, matters a lot. Matters a lot.

CLAY: Matters a tremendous amount.