Rep. Lee Zeldin Assaulted, Attacker Released in Two Hours

BUCK: The big news from yesterday was that Lee Zeldin, who we had recently on the show, was attacked on stage by a belligerent drunk who had a blade in his hand, kind of a strange-looking edged weapon, but he had a blade in his hand. And he grabbed Lee Zeldin — it’s all on video. I’m sure many of you have seen it. In fact, we’ll put the video up for reference at ClayandBuck.com if you haven’t seen it to understand what went on here.

This guy walks up to him, tries to take the mic out of his hand and grabs his arm and then he’s got a blade in his hand, but he kind of falls down after he gets tackled by a bunch of people. Now, it’s clearly assault. It’s felony assault of a gubernatorial candidate in the state of New York. People are saying it’s an attempted assassination. Look, I don’t think this guy’s going to get charged with attempted murder for this. But it is assault. It is assault probably with a deadly weapon. It’s felony assault. And that means that this should be — it’s a very serious event. And I think should be treated with extreme seriousness by the courts. Clay, he was out on bail. Lee Zeldin was giving a talk at the time about bail reform in New York state. His attacker was out on bail in less than two hours.

CLAY: Well, it’s a perfect distillation of the argument that he’s trying to make of why violent crime is skyrocketing in the state of New York and why so many people out there are listening to us right now who may in past years have said, man, I would never listen to guys who were going to vote Republican in the 2022 midterms, 2024 presidential election because Democrats have lost their mind.

In particular, Buck, when I saw this news break last night about Lee Zeldin I thought about the Brett Kavanaugh attempted assassination. And however you want to classify this to your point. assault with a deadly weapon, assassination attempt — however you want to classify it, in the space of, what, six weeks, we have had an attempted assassination of a sitting Supreme Court justice by a left-wing lunatic who wanted to kill Kavanaugh because of his politics. And we don’t know exactly what the motivations, to my knowledge, are of this crazy left-wing loon who attacked Lee Zeldin.

But I just want everyone out there to think for a moment, if a gubernatorial candidate had been Democrat, attacked on stage by someone with a weapon, and if someone had shown up outside Sonia Sotomayor’s house with an intent to kill her or intent to kill Elena Kagan or certainly Ketanji Brown Jackson, how would the media be handling these two incidents? And I think all of you know where I’m going. They would be saying this is what white supremacy causes; these are what right ring extremists lead to. They would tie it all into January 6. I want to point out, to my knowledge, Buck, maybe I missed it, I haven’t seen CNN connect into stories or MSNBC connecting these stories, and I haven’t seen any demand from left-wing media of the Washington Post or New York Times that we have to talk about left-wing political violence and how dangerous it is and how much of an existential threat it is to our democracy. And this ties in also, Buck, with what we just saw happen in Maryland.

How much discussion are you seeing of Democrats.. we saw it happen in Illinois. Democrats all over the country are spending tens of millions of dollars to try to select their opponents in all of these primaries. I haven’t seen Republicans really doing this. Isn’t that a direct attack on democracy, trying to pick who your opponent is and spending tens of millions of dollars to try to rig elections? Oh, but January 6 is the greatest threat that’s ever existed in human history. I just think the timing of all this and the crickets from many parts of our media are illustrative of a bigger picture here.

BUCK: I also think that the bail reform — remember, it’s not just New York. Other places have done no-cash bail.

CLAY: Most cities in America now.

BUCK: This was a central component of — you have to think of this as these multiple pieces of these soft-on-crime, left-wing agenda, which we’ve seen talked about really for the last, I’d say, 10 years. But in the last three years, in particular, they got their way all across the board. Because of BLM, all of a sudden, all of the, oh, wait, this doesn’t work for crime reduction, this doesn’t work if you want to have an orderly city or just an orderly society.

People said, “I don’t want to be call racist, so I’ll do whatever the defund-the-police, end-mass-incarceration movement demand.” A big part of it was always this bail reform. They sold it to everybody as they’ll find a story of somebody who, “Oh, man, there’s this guy and he just stole something but it’s because he has a particular circumstance. He had a health issue.” They’ll find the most sympathetic story possible and say he just doesn’t have the $5,000 of bail. Now, other people, bail bondsmen put up the bail, whatever it was. The story is poor people sit in prison forever and never get out for minor things. That was the narrative in whatever way they tried to push that on people.

The truth is that lunatics with a knife in their hands jump up on stage and attack a Republican governor and they’re out in a couple of hours. That’s what bail reform has actually meant. Just like defund the police was supposed to be, Clay, we just need more social workers and more community investment. It was, okay, now you have less cops, less OT, less units that are highly trained to deal with the violent human element, and more people are being robbed, attacked and dying in American cities. The cause and effect here is clear.

CLAY: I think we have audio from Lee Zeldin. Just so you know out there, we have invited Lee Zeldin on the program today. I’m sure that today is total chaos for him, but he may call in, he may not. Certainly if Lee Zeldin’s people are listening right now we’d love for him to reach out to our audience and tell the story. But I believe we have audio. He has spoken about exactly what happened during this attack as he was speaking in Upstate New York. Let’s listen to this.

ZELDIN: The way that I’m wired, when I see somebody wearing a hat saying they’re a veteran, my guard couldn’t possibly be more dropped. But at the exact same time, I noticed he had a weapon in his hand and it had two holes where he had two fingers through the holes. It had two sharp, dagger-like edges on it. And he was telling me, “You’re done.” And obviously at that point, regardless of whatever is on your hat, this was not a normal situation and there needed to be action taken. When he lifted up his hand and he was lunging for my throat area, the first thought was to grab onto his wrist and just to hold it because there were so many people around that I would expect there to be help quickly.

CLAY: I mean, this is terrifying, right? And thankfully he was able to hold off that hand, that potential attack, not potential, that attack with the weapon. And, Buck, I feel like, with the rise of violence overall that’s going on in the country, I hate to say it, but if I’m a politician on the road campaigning in the midterms this fall, I want a level of security around me that I have never had before even if you aren’t a person who feels particularly in danger. Do you know what I’m talking about? The ratcheting up — Joe Biden was supposed to make America normal again — but the ratcheting up of violence and the acceptable nature that the left-wing has now put in play, I would be very nervous if I’m on the campaign trail.

BUCK: There’s a desperation from the Democrat left right now. They have no good arguments. They know they’re not just about to lose an election; they’re about to be told by strong majorities of the American people, ideas that leftists hold very close to their sense of how virtuous they are, how good they are, how smart they are, those ideas are about to be dumped all over by the American people coming into or in this midterm election. And so I think there’s, one, the left, because of the rhetoric and covid and the lockdowns and all of this, is more unhinged than we have seen them, I think, than we’ve ever seen them, at least in my lifetime. I think the left has gone crazier on more things, and they don’t have arguments. And so you hear even the mainstream rhetoric from Democrats.

You even hear from the Hochul campaign, there’s a lot of, “Get out there and you tell Lee Zeldin that his wanting to get rid of common sense gun laws because he doesn’t care about children dying from gun violence.” You hear the stuff that they say and you go, a person who really believes that is going to feel like they have some greater justification for confronting physically politicians and perhaps even for some of the most unhinged leftists, incidents like this, and God forbid incidents that are even worse, what we saw with James Hodgkinson at the baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia in 2018. Bernie Sanders supporter. By the way, how long do you think it will take.

Not that I blame Bernie Sanders for that, but I do think if we are going to talk about political violence, we have to be honest about the fact that there are violent leftists, obviously; and beyond that, Clay, when do we actually get to have a conversation about the fact that the last election was held under a degree of duress? That there were stores boarding up all over America because they were terrified of what was going to happen if Joe Biden didn’t win?

CLAY: Yes. The violence of the left is very minimally talked about. The easy analogy is, we just had another January 6 hearing, and to my knowledge nobody has figured out or had a legitimate hearing into how do we have a whole summer of violence in 2020? Who facilitated it? Who paid for it? And how do we know it’s not going to happen again as soon as Democrats have another election that they’re trying to win.