BUCK: New York State rolling back the indoor mask mandate but not the school mask mandate, and the CDC — the breaking news here is — they’re still recommending masking in high-transmission areas. Why is this such a fight at this point? Cases are down. We ask that rhetorically, of course. We’ll tell you why. We’re gonna get into why. But cases are down almost 50% in the last couple of weeks.

There’s been an enormous change in the covid positivity rate, right, and the covid rate of spread, of hospitalization, everything. It’s obviously just the end of the season, the end of the season, and they’re acting like this is because we are in a situation where we should be thanking the Fauciites and the people around us for what they have done here, for the situation of the lockdowns, the mask mandates, vaccine passports, all of it.

If anything else, you have to remember, they’re going to try to tell you that they did everything right and that everything that they’re doing is right and will continue to be. And, Clay, what I want to say is I refuse to allow this. I refuse to let them act like the science changed — we found out new stuff, we did everything that we were supposed to do — that the promises they made about stopping the spread and transmission of the virus, that masks work. This is a hill I will gladly die on — unmasked. It doesn’t work, it didn’t work, and they’re crazy.

CLAY: Well, this is significant, right? We need consequences for public policy failures. We need to know that there are issues when you’re totally wrong, whether it’s defund the police, which basically no one in America now is even arguing they were ever in favor of, Buck, like you can’t even find a Democrat now who says defund the police is a good idea. That’s after everyone was arguing for basically six months defund the police was the way to go.

BUCK: I think there’s one, I think on Fox News this morning. Who was it? Just to be fair, Clay, I think there’s Cori Bush.

CLAY: She’s still arguing in favor of it?

BUCK: Cori Bush, as of this morning, is refusing — this is on FoxNews.com — to back away from defund the police. This is their main story, which is what I was thinking about. So, there’s one Clay. There’s one.

CLAY: There is at least one Democrat who is still — and you know what? I actually have more respect for her. I didn’t have much respect for Cori Bush in the first place because she was, if I remember correctly, one of the women who was sleeping on the steps of the Capitol to get an unconstitutional eviction moratorium. But she also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her own private security while arguing that police needed to be defunded.

BUCK: ‘Cause she’s important, Clay.

CLAY: Yes. But at least she’s sticking to her guns, so to speak, on this one. But there need to be… For everybody out there, Dr. Leana Wen — Buck, we talked about this yesterday — when I saw her CNN hit, my jaw dropped. It’s rare that I see an opinion… I mean, this is a woman who a few weeks ago was saying (summarized), “Every kid needs to be mandatory vaccinated. You need to have domestic travel restrictions for the unvaccinated.

“You need to have medical-grade masks on every kid in school,” and suddenly she said, “All of that can go away; this should be a parental decision,” and it’s as if what she said before never existed. And this is where I think we need to keep hammering this for everybody out there. No. You can’t suddenly just pivot and change everything that you’ve been arguing for two years. And the crazy thing is, did you see what Leana Wen tweeted? I mean, this is wild, Buck.

In the coming days, we will see many Governors and local leaders lift mask mandates. This is the right step, and marks a needed shift from government-imposed requirement to individual decision. It helps to preserve public health authority for when it’s needed again. @wolfblitzer pic.twitter.com/66zwIw6vgH

— Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) February 7, 2022

This is her Washington Post opinion piece. I’m saying, “Wait a minute. We have been the nuanced group, Buck!” You and I have been arguing “look at the data” for years! “Address elderly people!” We say this on the show how many times, we told our own parents, “Get the covid shot, get the booster, you’re over 75 years old.”

We’re telling our audience out there, “Hey, if you’re morbidly obese like Stacey Abrams, you probably should get the covid shot,” right? If you are in ill health, you probably should get it. But my 7-year-old doesn’t need to be treated the same as my 75-plus-year-old parents. This is a different world. That’s what we’ve been arguing — and all of a sudden, these scientists can’t say, “Oh, we’re the nuanced group.” No, no, no. You were wrong, we were right, and there need to be consequences politically for your wrongness.

BUCK: And the one place where they’re really digging in still is one of the areas where they have the least data to support them, but where clearly there’s an emotional component on this, and that’s on the situation of kids. Why are we sitting here talking about…? I don’t even have kids. Clay’s got school-age children so this affects him more directly than it does me.

Why are we sitting here trying to fight that fight? Because they’re claiming that they’re going to continue with the masking of children in New York at least, for weeks, if not months, until they can get the higher level of vaccination. Now they’re acting like, “We gotta get all the kids vaccinated,” and that’s the issue. They are neurotics, and they are hysterical.

This is the problem we are facing now, and they’re sacrificing children because they’re not in a position to say, “Hey, adults, stop being crazy,” and they have really trained themselves. Psychologically, emotionally, the Democrat Party has viewed this entire covid-restriction regime as a function of whether or not they’re good people.

You still have James Carville, for example. Remember how he said this is all about creating…? We talked about this yesterday. Everybody I think knows what I’m about to say, about how when everything started to fail, Clay, to fill that emotional hole that people had from all the fear and everything else, they didn’t turn on the government. They turned on the unvaccinated. Here’s James Carville saying he wants to punch ’em in the face.

James Carville Calls for a Law making it legal to punch Unvaccinated citizens in the face.

The political Left are terrorists. They dehumanized us for 4 years during Trumps Presidency while calling for violence and what happened? pic.twitter.com/9EXkWXYcDi

— Anna Taylor Sassy American (@AnnaTay59833185) February 8, 2022

CLAY: He wants to punch me right in the face. I’m unvaccinated — by the way, I think I like my chances with James Carville —

BUCK: Give it a shot, Jimmy.

CLAY: I’ve got him by 30 years and probably 30 pounds, so it’s not exactly a fair fight, kind of like when you’re a girl and you’re having to swim against boys, which is what’s going on in the Ivy League. That’s why we have weight classes for boxing. But I think I would take James Carville, and I actually at times think James Carville’s really entertaining.

To me, this is a sign that he doesn’t know what the data is, right? Because if he… There are a lot of people out there of the James Carville ilk who are Democrats that convince themselves that they did everything right and the only reason covid still exists is because people are unvaccinated. That’s not remotely true. That’s not what the data shows.

BUCK: I think the primary reason… There are a lot of reasons. There are still people, I mean, Clay, walking around New York City. There are double maskers outside right now.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Still, walking into the studio today, I see double maskers outside. I also saw an NYPD detective who came over, flashed his badge, said, “I love what you and Clay are doing.” So high five to that guy.

CLAY: I appreciate him. Maybe he can help me sneak into a restaurant whenever I’m back in New York City.

BUCK: I think NYPD would have us covered here.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: But anyway, the reality is that the primary motivate for the apparatus is to maintain control of the dissent and to always have in the background… You know, they’re gonna loosen the leash, Clay, but they’re not gonna take the leash off of us. That’s one aspect of it. And then for the people, the mass those of who have suffered from mass formation psychosis…

I love that term because it sets them off into fits of rage. Their biggest thing is, “We can’t have been wrong this whole time. Those stupid Trump voters can’t have been right.” There’s a huge ego component of this where they just… You keep saying “the data.” Clay, there are people now who will look at the most obvious and clear data. They’ll look at, what is it, Williamson County versus Davidson County —

CLAY: Davidson County, yep.

BUCK: — schools side by side and they’ll say, “I don’t care. The numbers don’t matter to them anymore. Those anti-maskers, Trumpers, anti-vax mandate people? They’re the bad people, Clay. They should get punched in the face. They can’t be right.” We’re here to tell all those, folks, “No you were right, and the other side — the libs, the Fauciites — were Wrong. Big W Wrong.”

CLAY: And here’s the other thing I think is worth mentioning. Even as Democratic governors in places like Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and even in New York, Buck, with Kathy Hochul start to walk back their restrictions, it’s important to recognize that governors can walk back their restrictions but the cities and the local school districts where many kids are attending school still are not walking back simultaneously, right?

So I think this is a little bit of a bait-and-switch, because we know that the media, many people who cover certainly left-wing politics are not very smart and they’re also biased. But, Buck, I don’t want us to overlook, just because a governor walks back a restriction statewide doesn’t mean that the vast majority of kids in a state still could not be mandated to continue to have to wear masks.

I think some of our people out there listening may not understand that, and I think it’s going to create even more tension and even more conflict at a school board because this is like what’s going on in Virginia. The woman that we had on yesterday, she said, “Wait. I was told if the governor didn’t have this restriction, that mask mandates would disappear.” Merianne Jensen who came on with us yesterday. But the reality is these local school boards and these dictatorial mayors can still have power over whether or not your kids are required to wear masks.

BUCK: The lesson of what we’re seeing right now for me and for anyone who’s paying attention to this, Clay, is that the science didn’t change; the politics changed. Everyone’s saying that now, and it’s accurate. But that’s not just about what’s going on now. That has been the case the whole time. They have been making policy and judgment calls under the rubric of “the science” when it was really “the politics.”

That’s been true the entirety of the pandemic, really from the beginning. And I would even argue going back into the Trump administration there were a lot of politics involved in what lockdowns, when. Remember Cuomo and Fauci early on? They made this political, right? Trump wasn’t listening to the science enough. I think he listened to, quote, “the science” as in Fauci too much. This has been the case the whole time, and everyone who looks back, I think, they realize and they see that.