CLAY: I think we were the first people to start to ask this question, Buck. I didn’t see very many other people in media pointing out that as the CDC made the decision to change the rules surrounding masking and vaccine mandates and everything else, suddenly Fauci disappeared. In the lead-up to the State of the Union address, Fauci, who would do every media outlet on the planet — you would see him multiple times a week on CNN, MSNBC, quoted all the time in the New York Times and the Washington Post — suddenly, he’s gone.

And you’ll remember if you listen to this program that we have been offering for Dr. Fauci to come on to this program forever, and the Fauchmeister responded and said, “Hey, I’m too busy to come on the Clay and Buck show,” which is — not to brag or draw attention to ourselves, but — the biggest radio show in the country. And we’ve been wondering, “Where is Fauci?”

BUCK: Is he hiding in the couch cushions over at the MSNBC greenroom? Has Fauci fallen into a desk draw at the NIH and some late-night janitor closed it up with him yelling in there (impression), “Put on your mask! What’s going on? I can’t see. It’s dark in here.”

CLAY: So Dr. Fauci has been doing podcasts and YouTube shows with virtually no audience. In fact, Dr. Fauci this week recently appeared — and, by the way, credit to… Is it Jordan Schachtel who tracked this all down?

BUCK: Schachtel, yeah.

CLAY: You can read about it with him. You can read before it at OutKick. One of my guys wrote about it. He appeared on an online streaming show called “WOKE AF,” and that’s woke as I’m sure you can imagine what that might stand for. There is virtually no audience. He also then has been going on local (laughing) public Access Television shows in the Washington, D.C., area. This is embarrassing.

He is so unbelievably desperate to be able to be heard. And, by the way, he’s continuing to rail against the unvaccinated. He’s continuing to argue for — stop me if you’ve heard this before — stringent restrictions surrounding covid. But my goodness, I gotta be honest with you, Buck. I love that even the Biden administration has finally said to Fauci, “You’re outta here, Bud.” They basically have canceled him.

BUCK: So let’s look at what this really is telling us all. Fauci was a political tool all along, and he identified that he’s an NPR-listening, CNN-watching, New York Times-reading lib and wanted that side of this debate to be his side of it. He wanted to do… He never once told Democrats — whether the Biden administration or any Democrat governor — something they did not want to hear on covid.

Which is remarkable when you think about it, given how much wrongness there was from the establishment, the health establishment of covid and the apparatus of covid control. And now you see… I’m just wondering if Fauci at some point is gonna show up and you’re gonna see him just in some local basement doing off, off, off Broadway theater shows, like, “My name is Fauci.

“I’m here to tell you to mask up, to continue to mask” and there will be seven people in the audience, three of whom are drunk and don’t even know where they are. This guy is addicted to attention. He was all along. There were a few early indicators for why I knew and, Clay, you knew. I don’t know, when did you decide? Before I get into this, when did you say to yourself, oh, this guy Fauci’s a problem? For me by May of 2020 I was like, “Fauci’s a big problem.”

CLAY: Yeah, May — and I think I’m like a lot of people out there listening, Buck, because we’re about to come up on two-year anniversary of “15 days to stop the spread.” I was willing. I didn’t think it was really smart, but I was willing in March of 2020, I said, “Okay. Maybe this 15-days thing will work. But I wanted things to be back to normal really quickly, and by I think May is a good example, maybe even late April.

You were, like, “Hey, by Easter we have to be back to normal.” I gotta give you credit. Because I was not an Easter guy, but soon after Easter of ’20, I said, “Oh, my God. This is crazy,” and I got fired up about the fact that kids weren’t going back to school and by May, I was done with the Fauchmeister.

Hey @PeteButtigieg why are people still masking up on planes? Please explain the science of “stopping the spread” for less than 1% of a person’s life.

Also please show us the data on effectiveness of “masking up between bites” – which is the official airline policy.

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) March 3, 2022

BUCK: There was a debate — I think some folks will remember it now — within the Trump administration, and Trump was thinking about calling for Easter of 2020. That would have been early April, essentially a full reopen.” We’re not doing this,” and I was public about it, I said this… We gotta push through. I know that there are gonna be problems. I know there’s gonna be more covid, but we cannot change our society for this. And, man, did I get dragged online for that one. Of course, turned out it was all true and correct and no one ever writes and says, “I’m sorry about all the death threats I wrote you. That was a little hysterical of me.”

CLAY: I do like the criticism of you when people said you were Thanos. That’s actually pretty funny.

BUCK: That was a little bit of a thing.

CLAY: For people out there who don’t have kids, Thanos — spoiler alert — snaps his fingers and half the people die, and so the idea that Buck was… I actually give credit to that criticism and think it’s a little bit funny. But, yeah, you were at the early vanguard.

BUCK: I was there. Jesse Kelly was there. There were a few of us who were just like, “This is total madness. There should not… We cannot do this more than two weeks to slow the spread. We cannot do this beyond the two weeks to slow the spread.” I mentioned this a second ago, because I actually am trying to troll tweet Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary.

CLAY: I saw that.

BUCK: Yeah. I’m going after these people now. I want answers, and you have Buttigieg… I think we have that clip somewhere, right? He was asked… If we don’t have it, we can get it. You know what? Before we get to that one, I’ve been saying for a while that this is a mental health issue for people now who continue to wear masks outside. Clay, there were pro-mask demonstrators singing! Now, this is not going to be pleasant for your ears, folks, but you need to hear the lunacy. Play clip 15, pro-mask demonstration and dad the elevators in New York.

WATCH: New York demonstrators sang a song demanding mask mandates. #NationalReport pic.twitter.com/I0GK53fZgg

— Newsmax (@newsmax) March 3, 2022

BUCK: “Just because we’re tired doesn’t mean it’s over”? These people need some serious counseling.

CLAY: Regulate us harder, is basically what they are screaming at the government. And to your point, we’re talking about March 18th, in theory, would be the day when the federal mask mandate — the CDC, I believe, if I’m not mistaken — put in place for airplane travel, for subways, everything else, buses. He was asked whether the CDC will let him drop the mask mandate on planes and trains, and it’s not gonna surprise that you our esteemed Mayor Pete — who at least, to his credit, is finally back off of his paternity leave, he didn’t have a good answer here. Play cut 19.

VOICE: Planes, trains, are we gonna be wearing masks forever?

BUTTIGIEG: There hasn’t been any change to — to the guidance that’s currently in effect. Uh, and you can imagine why, if you think about, uh, the — the — the guidance that thankfully has come out that’s allowed us, you know, a lot of different places in Washington, for example, where the transmission is considered low to move into new (sputters) — uh, new stage with regard to these masks. You got a plane you might have a hundred different people from 99 different counties, some of which are low, some of which are high, some of which are in between and so the strategy is a little bit different but the question about how long it’s going to be required, that’s going to continue to be based on the findings of the the CDC.

BUCK: So he sounds like a blathering moron, but I would tried to give him the credit of he’s just too much of a coward to speak the truth. I don’t think he’s so stupid that the secretary of transportation thinks what he just said makes a damn bit of sense. I don’t think he’s that dumb because he does sound like a true moron. And I think he’s just a dishonest little political coward. That’s been true for a long time. Clay, the CDC does not make law.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: This is the thing. The whole time, this has been the game. We’re waiting for the guidance, waiting for the guidance. The Biden administration could say, “You know what? No, we’re done.” They could do that tomorrow. This thing of, “Oh, we’re just letting the experts make the decisions,” and then we go to the experts, and we say, “Hey, why are you making these stupid decisions?” They say, “We’re not making the decisions! The government’s making the decisions. The White House is making the decisions.” This is evading accountability from totalitarians who are idiots. That’s what they’re doing.

CLAY: Also, Buck, the CDC just the changed the definition of what a significant outbreak was, which is how they managed to end the mask mandate! There are more people dying with covid today than were dying with covid a year ago on this date. So the idea that the CDC is in some way relying on science? They could snap their fingers tomorrow and say, “You know what? We changed the metrics by which we analyze whether people need to wear masks on airplanes. They don’t exist anymore.”

And, by the way, I thought of when I was done with Fauci. I remember my answer now. Had to go back in time into my brain, pull it out. My birthday’s April 6th, Buck. So in 2020 on April 6th in the middle of the still the early part of the lockdown in many ways, somebody knocked on the door in my house. Went to the door, opened it, and I had had cupcakes sent to my house. Nice birthday gift from someone.

And the person was delivering the cupcakes, and I said, “Wait a minute. Cupcakes are considered an essential business?” ‘Cause at that point in time so many nonessential businesses — which, that’s one of the many flaws which existed. All businesses are essential if you’re employed by them, or you own them, or you rely on them. I said, “Wait a minute. The cupcake business is allowed to stay open with no restrictions, and they’re allowed to go door-to-door and deliver cupcakes?” Now, look. I love cupcakes.

BUCK: We love cupcakes. No lie. We’re not coming down on cupcakes.

Does anything say “we appreciate you” like fresh baked cupcakes? 🙌 Just remember to include options for your gluten-free team members!

Head to our stories to see all of our gluten-friendly options – it’s not just carrot cake! pic.twitter.com/NXRcI0QAbD

— Gigi’s Cupcakes USA (@GigisUSA) March 4, 2022

CLAY: If Big Cupcake is listening to you right now, I’m not trying to cancel you Big Cupcake, all right? If Gigi’s Cupcakes wants to come in and spend a million dollars with Clay and Buck, we’d be ecstatic to have you. But it ain’t essential that you get cupcakes delivered to your house, and so at that point, I went out on my show and said, “I’m done with essential and nonessential businesses because there’s no way to justify this.” So at that point in time, I was basically done with Fauci. That was early in April. I remember that specific moment.

BUCK: It was all so arbitrary. Every aspect of the lockdowns, the mitigation, not only was it useless, it was arbitrary. It was actually worse than… I take that back. It’s not correct to say that the lockdowns and the mandates were useless. They were hurtful. They were harmful. They were counterproductive. They made things worse. It’s not just that they didn’t… Yeah, masks don’t work very well.

But you had to wear masks all the time, and people now have speech impediment issues, and people have learning loss, and people have skin problems and all kinds of additional health issues that came from this that have been suppressed up to this point. But I’ll tell you real quick, ’cause I know we gotta keep moving long here. Clay, for me, as soon as I found out…

First of all, the Fauci “don’t wear a mask in public, it’s silly,” and then a few weeks later it’s like, of course, “You should wear a mask,” I knew this guy was just a… He’s a bureaucrat. He’s going with the winds of politics right now. That’s all he’s doing. But when I found out that he was calling Chris Cuomo at home every night when he had covid to check in on him — for, like, 10 days or seven days or whatever the quarantine period was.

But there are thousands and thousands of seniors dying all over the country. We’re getting overwhelmed by all these different ideas about what we should do and shouldn’t do with the pandemic. You’re gonna call a weightlifter, 45-year-old Cuomo tomorrow every and check on him?

CLAY: (laughing) Yeah.

BUCK: Because he was a little quisling suck-up to power, and I knew that. As soon as I found that out, I was like, “Uch.” We’re looking for Fauci. He might have fallen into a thimble somewhere or a little bucket or something. I don’t know. Little, tiny Fauci. He’s missing in action right now.

CLAY: I’m still furious over the distinction between essential and nonessential businesses because I started a small business. I was fortunate I was able to continue to run everything that we did at OutKick through the covid mess. I had employees. We had to make the payments and budget and everything else. But for those people who lost their business because of that idiot tyrant — and I have to be careful what words that I use — I still feel sick to my stomach that we did that to small business owners who put their entire heart and soul into their business.

A lot of them — tons of them listening to us right now — were forced to shut down because we listened to people like Fauci. And I don’t think I’m ever gonna get over it, and, Buck, that’s why I’m so fired about November of this year. It has to be a reckoning. It has to be an ass-kicking of all ass-kickings.