What Have Fetterman and Kelly Done to Merit Senate Seats?

BUCK: Our friend Blake Masters is in a tight race for the Senate seat out in Arizona, critical Senate contest out there, against Mark Kelly who Clay rightly points out, when’s the last time you heard a really great idea — or heard anything, anything at all — from Mark Kelly?

CLAY: He’s never said anything. It’s crazy.

BUCK: I don’t know what his voice sounds like.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I know he was an astronaut. That’s all I know.

CLAY: That’s pretty much his entire political campaign is “I used to be an astronaut.”

BUCK: Yeah, Fetterman’s campaign in Pennsylvania is, “I wear baggy sweatshirts,” and Kelly’s campaign in Arizona is, “I was an astronaut.” That’s pretty much it, seems like.

CLAY: Fetterman is — wears hoodies and shorts pretty much all year round and says that he’s a Bernie acolyte —

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: — and our astronaut friend in Arizona doesn’t even care about the border.

BUCK: I hope that all the people who work for a living in Pennsylvania have to show up for a job that they must do to pay their bills. I would find it condescending for a politician to be like, “Yeah, I wear, like, big slumpy sweatshirts and shorts ’cause I’m just like you,” when his parents and his family’s paying all of his bills. He’s basically like a trust fund…? What?

CLAY: No. I was just gonna say, this is such a big point to me, Buck. If you have a family and you’re in your thirties and your forties and you are healthy and your family, your parents are paying for your family? I’m not talking about somebody who’s got a health condition or something bad. This guy is, up to that point, totally healthy, unable to provide for his own family in his thirties and forties and his mom and dad have to care for his family. You shouldn’t even be able to consider yourself to be a decent human being if that occurs, much less a United States senator.

BUCK: I’m just saying Fetterman has never had a job-job —

CLAY: Correct!

BUCK: — like a job in the normal economy. But he’s showing up at all these, “Hey, I wear, like, a big baggy sweatshirt and my shorts and, you know, I just look like I don’t care ’cause, you know, I’m just like you who, like, do the things to make the money to live.” It’s like, no, dude, this is a… It’s a little bit like with some politicians all of a sudden they start wearing like Carhartt jackets they’ve never worn before, like, “Yeah, I’m just like a working class guy.”

CLAY: Or they do the different accent depending on what part of country they’re in.

BUCK: Exactly. It’s like, don’t. People work hard. Show respect. Don’t do this. Oh, yeah. Look at me with my Carhartt work gloves on as a politician who’s never actually done one of these jobs. Anyway.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: But going back to Masters… But is important rule of thumb, anytime a politician has a brand-new Carhartt outfit when they’re on the campaign trail, you should think twice about who this person really is and what they’re doing. If it had it for 10 years, great, if they’re the real deal but in all of a sudden, you know, it’s like the ones they’re like, “Yeah, I love to go hunting.” It’s like, “Do you know which side the bullets actually come out of? I’m wondering.”

But so Blake Masters run against Kelly, and here’s what ended up happening. He got into a scuffle on Twitter, a kerfuffle on Twitter because of this. He tweeted something about the AP. The Associated Press wrote this report about how great it is that there’s “more diversity at the Fed,” at the Federal Reserve, “than ever before.” Okay. So Masters tweeted about this:

BUCK: Now, of course there was all this backlash to this, and here is Blake Masters. He made a video about this. Here is what he says in the video.

Everything he’s saying there is true, that this is wrong, it is unethical to make decisions about somebody based on skin color, hiring, letting them into a school, whatever the case may be. The Supreme Court is taking this up in just a few months; they’ll hear the arguments. Republicans have gotta lean in on this stuff. The racial entitlement regime needs people to go at it all-in and make the case.

CLAY: Buck, every time that you need something really important done in your life, do you care about anything other than excellence? Let me give you an example. If you suddenly or a member of your family needed to have lifesaving surgery for some sort of illness, would you care anything about your doctor other than whether he or she was the absolute best at their craft? The answer, of course, no matter who we’re listening to right now, is you want the best.

When you get in an airplane, do you feel better if the pilot is cosmetically diverse, or do you feel better if the pilot says, “Yeah, you know, I spent 30 years in the military as one of their top aviators and then I decided come over to commercial air aviation?” I would be like, “Hey, you know what? I feel pretty confident about the guy or the girl who is flying my plane.” I want the absolute best, period. That’s what America represents, the meritocracy.

BUCK: To your plane example, any American right now gets on a plane and let’s say they go and they speak to the pilot for a second, sometimes, you know, the door will be open, let’s say they see a Native American pilot who’s sitting there. He says… You know, oh, he explains. He’s Native American, he says I’m Native American pilot, and I also flew in the Top Gun program for the United States Navy for 15 years, you’re like, awesome, sweet. Let’s say you walk into another plane, you see a guy there named Bob, Bob’s a white guy and you’re like Bob, how’d you get this job he’s like, “Oh, you know, my dad’s a high-level executive at the airline.”

CLAY: Yeah, I’m not that excited with Bob.

BUCK: We all understand what merit actually means here. We want the first pilot, right? But the problem that you run up against here is that people want a system — they want a system — whereby you can change what merit is and how it is gauged and affect the outcome and demand that everyone pretend there’s no effect on merit in the outcome. It doesn’t work.

CLAY: Let me give you an easy example from the world of sports, Buck. Every member of the U.S. men’s basketball team — the national team that played at the Olympics — is black. Every single within. There’s only 12 or 13% of the American population that is black. If we had a perfectly representative United States basketball team, we would take away the all-black team and replace it with white, Hispanic, Asian, and black players, right, to perfectly approximate America.

The reality is, every single profession in the world is not going to perfectly represent what the population at large is because talent is distributed differently in meritocracies. Some groups… I’ll give you another example. Look at the spelling bee. Almost every spelling champion for, what, the last 40 years as long — as the spelling bee has been going on — is Asian. A huge number are Indian. Is that because the spelling bee is biased against Indian spellers?

Or is it because, for whatever reason, that talent, that group of people has decided to focus on the spelling bee, right? Certainly, the English language is not biased in front of recent immigrants, which is overwhelmingly the people who win spelling bees. No. We are never going to have any industry — I really believe this — that is a perfect approximation of the cosmetic diversity in this country. We want the best, period. That’s what America is. That’s what the meritocracy represents. So, all this cosmetic diversity BS? Blake Masters is right about it. We want people who do the job fabulously well such that what they look like doesn’t matter at all.

BUCK: And it’s also so unfair and undermining to anybody who’s in a protected minority category. We think about somebody like Dr. Ben Carson, for example, is a world-class surgeon in his field, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I forget what the procedure was. He’s a world class surgeon in his field. When there are people who are in, say, the field of medicine who are minorities, there are going to be people they come across who say, “Well, I know that we changed standards.” So they will make improper assumptions about the ability of individuals like a Dr. Ben Carson based upon the changing of the meritocracy, the changing of the system to bring about this outcome that the left thinks is more equitable, which is unfair to people who have all skills, have all the ability and didn’t benefit from it, right? That’s the other part of this that I think often gets overlooked.

CLAY: It’s what Joe Biden did to his own Supreme Court justice nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson pep if Joe Biden had said, “I’m going to pick who I think is the best candidate to replace Justice Breyer,” and gives you a list like Trump did of 20 different names and he picks Ketanji Brown Jackson, I think a lot of people would have responded differently to her selection than saying, “I guarantee to you that I’m going to pick a black woman,” which automatically eliminates 94% of all the people in the country who are not black women.

And then you pick a black woman. Well, how do you argue that you picked the best man or woman when you said on the precept as part of the precondition, “I’m only going to pick a black woman”? You have undercut your own nominee’s legitimacy based on your identity politics. I think Joe Biden did a disservice to Ketanji Brown Jackson in that respect.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: We were just talking about Fetterman, the would-be senator from Pennsylvania, and how he is not a good choice, folks. That’s very clear. But here he is back in December. So this was… Clay, is this before the stroke that happened? He’s had a stroke.

CLAY: Yeah, this is in December of ’21 I would be —

BUCK: Yeah, this was before then. He says that he is against voter ID, and I want to you all to hear why.

BUCK: First…. I mean, there’s a couple of parts of this. On the one hand, notice Democrats always oppose voter ID. The Supreme Court looked at voter ID years ago. There was a case Indiana, I believe, voter idea is when universally applied, fine. It’s necessary for election integrity. It is not racist. But they oppose it wherever they can at the state level under the “it’s racist” mantra. And to that I just want to say, someone should ask Fetterman, ID is something you can get for free, you can give it to people for free in states. Why does he assume that people of color, as he says, don’t have ID?

CLAY: Yeah. It’s a racist assumption. It’s also an assumption that is overwhelmingly rejected by white, black, Asian, and Hispanic people. Hopefully everybody listening to us right now is gonna go vote. It’s not that big of a deal to show your ID to prove that you are who you say you are, to be able to vote. I mean, this is crazy. Like, I can’t… Buck, I can’t go to a sporting event and go to “will call” and pick up tickets without a photo ID, right? Like there are photo ID required for things that are not very important at all.

So this is, again, part and parcel. Make no mistake about it: Fetterman said that he agrees with Bernie Sanders on everything. Would Pennsylvania elect Bernie Sanders to be their United States senator? If they would, you should vote for Fetterman. If you’re out there right now saying, “Man, that would be crazy if Pennsylvania elected the senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders,” that’s the choice you have. Dr. Oz is not a perfect candidate. There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. But he ain’t Fetterman, and that is a big win. Pennsylvania, you gotta do what’s right here and get behind Dr. Oz.