Will the Covid Fear Panic Ever End?

BUCK: Let’s get to first Emily in Georgetown, Kentucky. What’s up, Emily?

CALLER: Hi, guys. First of all, I want to say what a great job you guys are doing.

BUCK: Thank you so much.

CALLER: When we lost Rush, I was so scared. I was like, “It’s not gonna be interesting anymore. There’s not gonna be facts.” So I’m just gonna say, I think Rush is looking down enjoying the show just as much as we all are.

BUCK: Thank you so much.

CLAY: Appreciate that.

BUCK: Nothing would make us happier than that. It was helpful to have Rush as a tutor. I know a lot of you think of him as your political tutor and best friend for many years, in some cases decades. He was that for us too. So we all had that.

CALLER: Absolutely. It was losing a friend for me for sure. I want to get back into this mask mandate in public schools.

CLAY: Yeah.

CALLER: So my kids… I have a son in kindergarten, my daughter is in second grade. So they are required to wear a mask. So I did give them a mask that was really lightweight. It wasn’t mesh but it was a really lightweight material, and it was small holes in it. And let me go ahead and say, now, they wore these since day one in school, and nothing had been said whatsoever.

And they were doing okay with ’em. My kids have a hard time with the masks. I’m sure like a lot of children do, especially my kindergartener. He really struggles, so much so, he’s not even enjoying kindergarten whatsoever, hardly. And then I got a call from the principal.

So I dropped him off last week one day and she had said that there had been some concerns the day before about my kids’ masks, but not to worry, that they were gonna give them some. So I got the voicemail and my kids were look at school, well, I picked my kids you from school that afternoon and they’re upset.

They’re crying and I asked, “Well, what’s going on?” And they said that the guidance counselor had met them at the door that morning before they even made it in the school with masks. She said they had to remove theirs and they had to put those on. So I hadn’t even spoke to them and they went ahead and did that. And the reason it’s upsetting is because my kids are little, and all day they were upset ’cause they thought they had done something wrong.

BUCK: Ugh.

CLAY: Yeah, I appreciate the call. Madness.

BUCK: Clay, we could very easily go ’round — I could go ’round — to places in New York ’cause there are some here still. Is there anywhere in Nashville right now that is requiring indoor masking that you know of? Because there are plenty of places in New York that still make you do it, even though it’s ad hoc, it’s place by place. No? Not that you know of?

CLAY: Well, it’s interesting, the Nashville Predators — who are the NHL franchise — are requiring covid vaccine passports in order to get in to watch the team play starting in October.

BUCK: Ahh. This is coming to your city.

CLAY: First place anywhere that I’ve seen.

BUCK: I keep saying and you keep saying, “It starts in New York, then it’s L.A., then it’s Chicago and San Francisco, and then it spreads out across the country into places you wouldn’t even expect.” I just bring it up because we could very easily — based on actual science and data — go around and be the N95 mask shamers. We could wear N95 masks and look at everybody in a cloth mask and say, “Why don’t you take the virus seriously?

“Your cloth mask is not sufficient! Why? You shouldn’t be wearing this!” Obviously, this would be crazy, but I’m just saying, people that do things… I was on a plane; I had the same thing where they told me take oaf that mask and put this one on because if you can breathe too freely, Clay, you’re not suffering. You’re not actually paying penance to the mask religion. As a matter of science, these paper masks that everyone’s wearing are useless idiocy, but they keep pretending that something else is going on.

CLAY: And look, in my home school district, they had a big meeting last night — to speak to Emily who had just called us — and there’s a mask mandate still in effect where I live in Tennessee. But thankfully the governor has stepped in and said, and they give medical and religious exemptions. Basically, all you have to do is sign your name on a piece of paper and they’ll give it to you.

As a result, virtually no kids in my kids’ public school are wearing masks. But I don’t know how this ends. This goes to the question I was asking earlier, Buck, which is a good buddy… Sorry. Not a buddy. But we do emails where I respond to questions and I got a great one from somebody in Washington, D.C., who said — and we could talk about this a little bit maybe in the next hour — the 930 Club is one of the most famous music venues in Washington, D.C.

BUCK: I’ve been to a bunch of concerts there, yeah.

CLAY: I’ve been there as well. It lets in a thousand people or whatever. They’re now open after being shut down forever. They require vaccines. But when you provide proof of vaccination, you also have to wear masks inside of the concert venue. So not only are you providing the fact that you have been vaccinated for covid, you still have to wear masks. And the guy wrote in saying, “Hey, I went to go see the Foo Fighters, great concert. How does this ever end?”

BUCK: It ends insofar as there will be… In my mind, this is my answer to this, and I know no one really knows. But I believe that the same way that there’s this acceptance of the lingering absurdity and stupidity of many FAA security and TSA regulations coming from the era of 9/11, there are still these things that we all have to do, and they act like it’s really important.

That kind of safetyism is all throughout our society because of covid, and I think there will be these things where they can kind of turn on the pressure, turn off the pressure. Limit people going into certain places to a certain extent at certain points in the year. Some places will have masks; some places won’t. There will be the apparatus of covid control continuing at different levels for years to come. That’s how I think.

CLAY: That’s what’s scary. I got asked, “Hey, when will you not have to wear a mask on an airplane again?”

BUCK: I think you’re wearing masks for years until Democrats stop being crazy. That’s what we’re facing.

CLAY: Maybe until the 2024 election results?

BUCK: I think it could be an issue in the 2024 election, because on planes? I’ve never seen so much ferocious stupidity as airline attendants telling people to pull the mask over their nose.