Viral Clip from Pandemic Expert in 2018: Masks Scare, But Don’t Work

CLAY: One of the questions that a lot of us have been asking is how did we end up in a world where masking…? And, by the way, Buck, I texted you this yesterday, but did you see that Steve Kerr — who we were making fun of yesterday on the program for being the only person essentially wearing a mask in the entire Golden State Warrior arena out in San Francisco — could not be any more perfectly emblematic of the absurdity. I’m sure that Steve Kerr has probably gotten 46 different covid shots because he is a king lib. He was the only person wearing a mask on Saturday in that arena. He tested positive for covid on Monday, was not able to coach last night in their game.

BUCK: He didn’t mask up hard enough, Clay.

CLAY: He didn’t mask up hard enough. He needed more masks. He kept pulling down the mask to yell guidance to his team and we made fun of how ridiculous that was. The minute that this news story came down, my Twitter feed absolutely exploded. So many of you out there — I’m @ClayTravis, Buck is @BuckSexton — were reacting to that conversation we had and how absurd it was and how perfectly emblematic it was that he tested positive, despite being the only person wearing a mask. Masks don’t work. Well, this is a clip that has started to go viral on social media. I saw it yesterday.

You did too. Author Laurie Garrett… This is from 2018, now, just to be clear. But she talks about the fact that a Japanese study has shown masks are more effective in scaring people than in keeping the virus out. This clip has gone viral. I wanted you to listen to it to understand the psychology of why people like Buck and I have been so adamantly opposed to the idea of masking because it isn’t about safety. It’s about control. Listen.

BUCK: What happened to “The Science!” Remember when Fauci said something very similar at the start of the actual pandemic in 2020 and then pretended like he never said it. These people are frauds. These people that push the masking after knowing that there was no benefit in previous trials and in previous pandemics from masking, it’s fraudulent. It’s funny, I actually worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, Clay, as an intern, and Laurie Garrett was a fellow there, a public health expert, and with her whole thing was pandemics. That’s really her area of study. So as somebody who all she did was sit around all day eating Cheez-Its and reading on the screen, you know —

CLAY: (laughing) Cheez-Its are amazing, by the way.

BUCK: They are quite tasty. All she did was study pandemics, and in 2018 before this pandemic she’s saying, “Masks don’t actually keep out the virus; that’s absurd,” right? You and I — I think I have been vilified more by libs on the left on the masking issue than almost anything else I can think of, quite honestly. People have gone completely insane on me. I have not gotten a single apology. Some people on the right have actually reached out to say, “I was giving you kind of a hard time in the beginning, and you were right.”

So, that’s nice. I appreciate that. Jump on in. The water’s warm on Team Reality. But here you have yet again compliance is what this was all about, power, as you said, control is what this is all about and then the shutting down of economies. We were all masking up and it was, “Oh, my gosh. We have to shut down our economies.” Why? Based on what? Whose idea was this? This was the dumbest thing in history, and if someone wants to argue with me I would point out, “It was not shut down to stop the spread of the virus.

“It was two weeks to give hospitals capacity to deal with the influx of the sick. That was it.” It was like, “Okay. Everybody staying in your house for a couple of days,” and then we’d see. And they just lied, Clay. And it’s important everyone to understand because why is your house…? Everything is in your house getting so more expensive, household expenses, why is food, why is gas, why is everything? Those decisions which the Democrats doubled and tripled down on and went crazy on were catastrophically stupid.

CLAY: And I think it’s also important to point out to Laurie Garrett’s analysis here, masks are about scaring people. Buck, you know what else has happened since they have moved masks on airplanes? The number of issues with behavior on airlines has declined by 70%. So all these flight attendants out there, all the pilots — and a lot of you listening us. I guarantee you if we opened up phone lines and we just wanted to take their calls, what those masks did was create a high level of anxiety in travelers.

I’ll tell you, Buck, for myself traveling with my kids… I’m flying later this afternoon back down to Florida. I flew to Florida last week with my kids. I can’t tell you, Buck, how much more normal it feels to be in an airport where no one is wearing a mask, where you go through TSA and the TSA agents aren’t wearing a mask, where you still have to do all the usual clearance process. But it just feels so much better and so much more normal. And I really do believe that there’s a dehumanizing effect —

BUCK: Absolutely.

CLAY: — when you don’t see someone’s face —

BUCK: One hundred percent.

CLAY: — and so it increases the overall antipathy, the overall anger that exists on airlines. Down 70% should be, by the way, a front-page headline ’cause we heard all this talk about, hey, we’ve gotta protect our workers, they’re under siege, all these things. We haven’t seen a delay in flights. We haven’t seen cancellations. We’ve actually seen a more efficient process to travel because masks have been removed and we haven’t seen a surge in cases on airline flight attendants and pilots. It hasn’t happened.

BUCK: The mask advocates — I hate to say this — are as dumb and destructive with the actual results as Defund the Police was.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It’s that level. Defund the police just made everything worse. And that’s why the Democrats had had to finally run away from it. “Oh, we don’t want to do that’ that’s crazy.” Mask advocates is the same thing. They’ve been wrong about everything at every single step of the way — and look, by the way, the point about dehumanization, I think that separating people into the masks and unmasked was a Democrat strategy.

I think they used it in 2020. I think they used it for compliance and mobilization in 2021 on a whole range of issues. It became a political signifier more than anything else. I tweeted out that chart — I know you saw that, too — of all of a sudden in 2020 Democrats all believe in the science. Oh, before that they didn’t apparently believe in the science, but 2020 hits, Fauci’s their little cuddly old grandpa — I mean, he’s an evil tyrant Smurf — and they act like all of a sudden they know things they didn’t know before. Think about times when I was in the plane and I was told to change my mask two separate times. I had a mask on and was told to change, and I’m a pretty polite and even-keeled fellow, I would think, generally. I wanted to bark profanity at these people.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Like, I wanted to start shouting curse words in their faces. The only thing that really prevented me is, one, you know, public figure, YouTube, not good. Two, I felt badly for some of them because I know that they were kind of in the just-following-orders category. But the ones that upset me were the ones that clearly took some glee in this. They actually liked this power that they had. I thought it was pathetic. And I think there needs to be a reckoning on this issue as well as many others.

CLAY: Yeah, and going forward there needs to be a significant analysis of this, because, you know, the science gets a lot of things wrong if you look historically at treatment. Remember we talked about this before, Buck. The idea that you would, for instance, sterilize medical instruments that you’re using in order to treat patients was considered to be laughably absurd until late in the nineteenth century.

The idea that you would say, “Hey, maybe we should clean these things,” people would laugh at you. The concept of when somebody got sick, taking their blood, the idea, “Hey, we’ve bleed you in order to get you well.” I think this mask wearing is going to be considered on that level in years ahead, in that maybe, maybe we’re going to find out that it even worked against places, because if you look, our buddy Ian Miller, @ianmSC?

He’s got a good piece up right now at Substack pointing out that by far the places with the highest rates of covid are the most vaccinated right now and the most masked up. What’s going on there? These are questions that real scientists would be asking because there are many different alarm bells going off — and, by the way, the biggest alarm bell of all is the Biden administration saying we might have 100 million new cases just in time for the midterms. Ah, that midterm variant of covid! Oh, wow. It sure is good timing to be able to allow even more people to be able to corral all these absentee ballots and all those mail ballots.