BUCK: Clay, with all the Supreme Court stuff coming down, it is fascinating to watch the arguments that are being made right now. I’m not even sure they’re arguments. I think it’s more accurate to call it wailing, shrieking, shouting, and throwing a tantrum from the left in a whole range of ways, the media, the Democrats in Congress. You have Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House both recommending the set up of emergency abortion clinics on federal land.
There is so much here that I think is interesting, but one thing is, they are about to lose control — I think quite obviously — of the House and the Senate. What do they think is really…? That is their solution, to set up abortion clinics in national parks? People are saying, like, “We’re gonna have abortion clinics in Yellowstone now?” They think this is going to give them what they want?
CLAY: I’m just picturing taking my family to the Smoky Mountains for summer vacation, and you pull into the Smoky Mountains, which I believe are the most visited national park in the country every year. Partly that’s ’cause they’re so accessible to the East Coast, so many people can drive. You get to Cades Cove, and you say, “Hey, kids, get ready — oh, look, there’s a bear,” and then you drive a little bit further and you’re like, “What’s that?” “Oh, that’s an abortion clinic,” or think about it, Buck. You go to Gettysburg and you’re like, “Let’s go look at Cemetery Ridge. Let’s walk through Pickett’s Charge,” and then (laughs) at the base of Pickett’s Charge, you suddenly have an abortion clinic? This is next-level crazy, Buck. Next-level crazy.
BUCK: As an aside, we’re gonna play the AOC calling for this in a second. This is just an aside because I saw this story this morning because I think unfortunately there’s video of it. I don’t know… People in Yellowstone… I’ve never been, and I actually want to go.
CLAY: I’d love to go too, and I haven’t either.
BUCK: Need to understand, bears and bison look cute from far away. I have seen grizzly bears in the wild. I’ve also seen them run.
CLAY: When did you see a grizzly bear in the wild?
BUCK: Oh, I went fly fishing in Alaska with my dad and my brother. It was fantastic.
CLAY: And you were just out there? How close were they?
BUCK: They were walking around us. Clay, when we first got to the stream, there were bears that would just come and were eating the salmon. Alaska, in terms of natural beauty, is one of the most amazing places on the planet.
CLAY: I’ve never been to Alaska, either.
BUCK: Oh, my gosh. Amazing. Yes.
CLAY: So did you see that grizzly man movie about the guy who went and lived with the grizzly bears and ended up getting killed by them?
BUCK: Yes, yes, and then they have the audio, and they don’t play it. Yes, I saw that. He was going to… That was going to end badly. The coolest thing about that guy’s situation was that he had wild foxes became his pets. They follow him around like a little miniature Schnauzer or something. Anyway. Not a Belgian Malinois, Clay, ’cause those are bad-ass dogs.
CLAY: Yeah, I know. Everybody’s mad at me for not knowing the Malinois.
BUCK: But no, I just, the aside here, I’ve gotta get back to AOC in a second.
CLAY: Could you reach… Could you throw a football and hit a bear?
BUCK: Could I have thrown a football and hit the bear? No, they were probably like a hundred yards away.
CLAY: Okay.
BUCK: No, no. We had Smith & Wesson .500s, a .50 cal handgun.
CLAY: They could charge you.
BUCK: And, by the way, the guides told us if they charge, it’s probably still gonna get to you even if you hit it.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: I bring up because the bison, people think that bison… It’s like a cow. It’s 2,000 pounds of muscle with horns and can run 30 miles an hour. Someone just died in Yellowstone. Or, actually, I think maybe was severely injured. I have to check on whether it was a fatality.
BUCK: Can I just say, there’s something really twisted about talking about opening abortion clinics on federal land and saying “the babiest of babiest of baby steps.” Weird.
CLAY: She’s weird.
BUCK: Weird thing to say.
CLAY: She’s weird. And we need to play some of the cuts. I guess she did like a 25-minute interview on Stephen Colbert last night, who has just completely given up on the idea that he does comedy at all and now he sits and talks to AOC.
BUCK: Isn’t it great that our friend Greg Gutfeld’s show just kicks his butt in the ratings every night?
CLAY: Just destroys them. Not only did he destroy Stephen Colbert, which effectively is on the corner from your place, right?
BUCK: Close by. I see the Stephen Colbert line every day, and I want to walk past them and say, “Look, I know you’re visiting New York. This is not worth your time.” (laughs)
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I just want to tell them.
CLAY: I love David Letterman. I know we’ve disputed this before. But he was in that studio, in the Ed Sullivan Theater there in New York City. What’s wild to me is, not only did Stephen Colbert destroy the legacy, in my opinion, of the Late Show with David Letterman of being funny and irreverent and zany and all those things, but everybody else followed him off the cliff ’cause he had success. Now Greg Gutfeld on Fox News is beating all of them in late-night, and they try to pretend his show doesn’t exist in media, because there’s still a lot of people who cover late-night as if it’s a story.
And they won’t even discuss, by and large, Gutfeld’s show even though it dominates all of them. But, Buck, what this is really about is not even just on national park land. Because in many states abortions are going to be even more available post-Roe decision than they were before. For instance, if you want to go New York, California, Illinois, they’re going to expand abortion rights even further than Roe did. So this is really about going to red state national parks where those people who live in those states are making their own decisions about what the abortion policy should be.
BUCK: This is about… There’s a lot of federal land in Utah, for example.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: They want abortion clinics — and remember, that means abortion clinics funded directly with federal dollars too. Now, getting into the seriousness and the morality of this again for a moment, this is about making every state and every taxpayer complicit in this, even after Roe v. Wade was overruled as a non-constitutional right, which is obvious. They can keep this make-believe game going of “No, it’s not a constitutional right anymore.”
If we had to sit and stomach for decades the lie that it is a constitutional right, they just have to stop being babies. Pardon the phrase. They have to stop being so sour grapes about this and pretending that this is not actually the way it’s gonna be going forward. What do you think happens when Republicans take back gun control of the Congress, by the way, with their federal abortion clinics? What do they think’s gonna be the reality there? And also, why do they hate democracy so much, Clay? Why can’t they allow this to play out in the states?
CLAY: Again, I think the wild thing about this — and that’s why I used the Smoky Mountains as an example. Tennessee, my home state, is going to make whatever choice they want as it pertains to abortion based on the democratic process. The idea that you’re going to build on federal land — ’cause you would have to build, right? You can’t just start doing abortions in tents, I can’t imagine. You would have to build a physical facility.
And suddenly when you’re driving through the Great Smoky Mountains, you’re going to pass by an abortion clinic? It just… I can’t imagine it becoming a reality. It just… It strikes me as really wild in terms of how it would be applied and the lack of logic that would also be entailed and it also would be messy. Just messy in terms of the way that people would respond to the federal government coming in, trying to big foot state law.
BUCK: We’ve gotten used to this. Conservatives actually have lived with this regime of state laws can be very, very different. We have a right to bear arms, right? We all know this. And liberals try to undermine it and eradicate it, destroy it all the time. We live in a country where, Clay, if I’m found with a firearm in New York, I face multiple years in prison, right? Whereas if I lived in Texas, I could just go and buy a gun at the store and walk around.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: New York says I’m a bad person for having a gun. Of course, ’til recently they wouldn’t even give you one to carry. It says I’m a bad person, deserve to be in prison. Texas says, “No, actually the Second Amendment really counts.” Same thing in Florida, right? We can find these other states. This is the reality that we face day in and day out. The left has to have it their way or they want to just overturn and overthrow the whole system. They have a meltdown. They can’t understand, this is actually the system we have. Roe was the wrong decision. Roe was the problem with the system, and that problem has now been purged.
CLAY: Another easy analogy — and obviously these are different things, Buck — is what happened with gambling law? I know this because I spend a lot of time with sports gambling. Supreme Court says we can’t have a system set in place when it comes to federal gambling legislation, so now every state can make their own decision.
So if you live in my home state of Tennessee, you can gamble on sports. If you’re down in Georgia, you can’t. Every state gets the right to make their choice, gambling, lotteries — to your point, guns — there are lots of issues all over the country. Even how much alcohol you can have in beer, how you can buy them, what the rules are gonna be. They’re different for every state.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: There’s, I think, a reality that is dawning upon the… I hate to use the term “intelligentsia” for the left, because are they actually intelligent? It’s an open question on a lot of things. They’re certainly not reality based. But it’s starting to come together where they see, Clay, that their electoral fortunes are gonna be very dim — and keep in mind, everyone, it’s not just this midterm. The midterm will effectively mean the end of the Biden presidency as a force for “progressive change,” right, because not only are they going to lose any…
Now, remember, they still have the budget — they spent their $2 trillion, the American Rescue Plan, $1.9 trillion — and the president has his executive orders. But you got a Supreme Court majority that’s pretty constitutional in its thinking for the most part, certainly 5-4 constitutional in its approach, and you’re gonna have Republicans that control the House and the Senate. How did we get to this point? We often talk to you about the nuts and bolts of day-to-day life in this country that are frustrating people, and understandably so, like the price of gas, the price of food, the price of rent, the wide-open border.
We just had that horrific tragedy over 50 people killed in that one human smuggling incident ’cause we have a porous border so the cartels think they can run tractor-trailers… Think about this — and I’m sure they’re doing it successfully most days, by the way, so that’s why they’re taking these people, they’re doing these kinds of operations, ’cause it is lucrative for them because it usually works and now led to an awful tragedy in that instance. The crime in cities across the country…
I think Los Angeles just voted to downgrade some of the funding for the sheriff’s office out there. So there’s all this craziness of the policy. But also, in the tone and the language and the overall approach, people are starting to realize, “There’s something really wrong with these libs.” I know we’re going AOC, but I think she moves the media conversation in this country more than really any other Democrat.
Joe Biden’s president. Okay, fine. But, you know, usually it’s, “Joe Biden’s mumbling; he doesn’t know where he is,” and everyone goes, “Well, you know, that’s Joe!” AOC can say something and then all of a sudden, the media tries to back her up. We pull it apart because it’s usually so flimsy and stupid. And then they say, “Why are you obsessed with her?” Well, here she is talking about the Supreme Court decision. I just want you to hear it.
CLAY: (laughs)
BUCK: There’s a story about 29-year-old man competing in the border competition in New York City against… Just so everyone understands, the competition last year was won by a 16-year-old girl; a 10-year-old girl actually came, I think, in third place. So a lot of teenage girls in this competition.
CLAY: Skateboarding competition.
BUCK: Sorry. Skateboarding competition. Okay? Skateboarding competition. There’s prize money. A 29-year-old man is competing against these teenage girls, and the media wants to tell…? You could see the photos. The individual’s grown out his hair.
CLAY: Navy veteran with three kids, I believe.
BUCK: Yeah. He’s grown out his hair a little bit, and other than that, is biological male, folks. I mean, it’s a 29-year-old guy competing against — in the women’s division against — teenage girls, and the media wants you to believe, the Democrat malady… AOC, if she was ever asked about this — which she won’t be because the media knows this is not a good place for them to actually go, but if she were asked — she would say, “This is great! This is progress — 29-year-old guys beating 13-year-old girls in athletic competition is progress. This is America. This is what it means.” To your point, Clay, 90% of America looks at them and goes, “You guys need to stop being crazy.”
CLAY: You wonder on some level whether… You know, we have Pride month. What if men decided they wanted to identify as women month and basically went and won every women’s competition that was going on that was open. Because how do you…? It’s so absurd. Just follow my logic here. I don’t know how… You’re pointing out this 29-year-old skateboarder which we wrote about at OutKick, “What standard do you have to meet in order to be able to identify as a woman?” In other words, if there was ladies’ night at the bar down the street here where I’m living, and ladies got in for free and got dollar beers?
I’ve got a beard, but if I wanted to be a lady, could I identify as a woman to take advantage of ladies’ night and the lower price on beer? In other words, I don’t know that there’s any standard, even, to be applied to identify me as a man or woman when it’s just my gender identity in my head. So for so many of these competitions if a man walks up and says, “Hey, today I’m identifying as a woman,” could you go become a WNBA superstar tomorrow?
I haven’t played basketball in a long time. I think I could make a WNBA team right now. I think at six foot, 185, 43 years old, I think I would be good enough to play women’s professional basketball. I really do. If I just decide I want to identify as a woman, can I become a WNBA player? Can I become a pro women’s athlete? It sounds ridiculous. But that’s where the Democrat logic has taken us — and if I follow their logic, I think I could apply and say, “Yes, I’m a WNBA star.”
BUCK: I think that’s true. And, by the way, they would tell you that you would be brave.
CLAY: Be very brave of me.
BUCK: It’s stunning and brave, in fact.
CLAY: Stunning and brave.
BUCK: It would be stunning and brave.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: AOC was on with Stephen Colbert last night. Stephen Colbert initially was involved in humor, and his humor —
BUCK: (laughing) Tangentially in the proximity of humor, yes.
CLAY: Every now and then, you see something that goes viral on Twitter, Buck, and you just look at the number of people who liked it or shared it and you think to yourself, “What is going on?” Stephen Colbert tweeted yesterday, “If the Supreme Court is going to allow prayer in the middle of a high school football field, they should allow high school football games in the middle of a church.” This is such a bad and unfunny joke and not even remotely interesting of a comment — and I looked, and it got 30,000 likes.
And actually, the top result I see is, “This joke is worse than January 6th,” which is actually way funnier than Stephen Colbert’s attempted jokes. But it’s emblematic, Buck, of this sort of weird and not even really intelligent cottage industry that has emerged. Stephen Colbert was not good as a late-night TV show host, so he just basically started a propaganda show that was anti-Trump, and then it was successful, but it’s not a comedy show anymore. I’m gonna talk about AOC in a moment, but we were talking about this tweet off air, and you were like, “If one of us said that on air, it would make us want to cringe.”
BUCK: Yeah, I’d come back later and apologize to the audience for assaulting their ears with something so dumb. Yeah.
CLAY: Do you think…? I certainly don’t lack for confidence. I’m confident that I could a better late-night talk show than Stephen Colbert.
BUCK: Keep in mind he’s not even writing it.
CLAY: I’ve never been a guest on a late-night talk show.
BUCK: He’s not even writing his own jokes.
CLAY: He’s got a huge cottage industry of people writing his show for him, and it’s still awful every night.
BUCK: What we do with radio is we sit down and we talk for three hours a day with whatever comes to mind and whatever we think is important after reading for hours before we come on the show. A lot of people who are in the news-entertainment space — which is, I think, what you’d have to call now the Colbert show, right? It’s not really a comedy show. It’s kind of a new… It’s essentially the next iteration of The Daily Show, which, while clever, I always recognized it for what it was and Jon Stewart was the host there.
No one even cared. Trevor Noah is propped up by the liberal system. No one actually thinks he’s particularly talented, funny, or good at what he does. They gave him the show. No one ever heard of the guy before they gave him the show. But it doesn’t have any resonance. You never even seen people talking about Daily Show clips anymore. What Jon Stewart did was create a world where the libs are validated.
Their worldview is always validated and the other side gets made fun of, and if anyone pushes backson it, “It’s just jokes, man. It’s just jokes. I’m just a comedian!” Someone described it as clown nose on, clown nose off, or sword and shield. “Actually, I’m not serious. Actually, I want to sit down and talk to the secretary of defense now.” That’s the whole game, right? And they’ve been able to get away with this for a long time in various places.
But the late-night comedy shows aren’t really comedy shows anymore. And it’s really in keeping with the fact that they can’t actually make jokes, Clay. We know this. The only people they can make jokes about are Republicans and cisgender, hetero, white males. Anyone else that they make jokes about… I mean, look what just happened to Dave Weigel over at the Washington Post. He didn’t even make a joke!
CLAY: He’s on suspension.
BUCK: He retweeted the joke.
CLAY: Unpaid suspension.
BUCK: You’re not even allowed to make a joke about women.
CLAY: I want to reemphasize, I think this is a good joke, all right, and again I’m paraphrasing. this is how crazy the left has become. All he did was retweet! All he did was retweet this joke. “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out whether it’s bicurious or…” Sorry, bisexual. I’ve already messed up the joke. Bisexual or bipolar, right? The joke is on the word “bi,” and it’s actually kind of funny, right? I sort of messed up that joke there.
But a lot of you would smile or you might snicker. He got expended for a month from his job for retweeting somebody else’s joke! I just can’t believe that we have reached this world. And to your point, Buck, that’s emblematic of what’s going on in late-night television. They can’t even make jokes because somebody’s gonna be offended, so they basically run propaganda networks now which are designed to ridicule Republicans.
BUCK: What is out there, right? You look at the day-to-day, there is so much to make fun of with the Biden administration!
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Joe Biden himself. Kamala Harris. If you were really a comedian looking to make jokes —
CLAY: Kamala is a gold mine.
BUCK: — Kamala Harris provides them. Just her sound bites! You don’t have to go back into her policy statements or whatever, just the things she says.
CLAY: She was a side chick for much of her political career. You don’t even have to go into that, although it is funny. How about Biden falling off of his bike?
BUCK: The whole —
CLAY: Can you imagine if Trump had fallen like Biden fell off the bike?
BUCK: The problem is their audience has been trained. The Democrat mind-set in the coasts particularly, so New England, New York, New Jersey, California, and the Pacific Northwest, the coastal blue staters, have really been trained to think that jokes are mean. You can’t laugh at a joke that involves anybody unless you despise them, which is not true, but that’s their mentality or, you’re punching down or you’re undermining them as human beings or whatever. And so as a result of that new framework, the only people you can make fun of — you see this all the time. They’re constantly making fun of right-wing Republicans. Right-wing Republicans aren’t very funny. (laughing) I hate to break it to them. It’s not that much that’s that funny about conservatives, which is why their shows stink.
CLAY: And so AOC went on for, like, a 25-minute infomercial last night with Stephen Colbert, and she was praising Cassidy. I don’t think AOC is smart enough to even understand what hearsay is.
BUCK: I don’t want to derail from the AOC thing, but can I just put out an idea and then I promise we’ll get to this AOC clip. AOC’s political career, if she had to do a Lincoln-Douglas style debate, right, which is what I did in high school — I don’t know what they call it other places, if she did L-D style debate with either one of us for an hour or any one of our conservative brothers and sisters in the movement, this media for an hour — her political career, I think, would be over. They never actually… This is one of the problems we have.
CLAY: That’s true.
BUCK: In the new media environment, these people who are the paragons of ideology for their side can get away with being total ignoramuses and morons without having questions. Say what you will about some of the Democrats, James Carville at least would mix it up with people, you know what I mean? I know he’s not a politician. He’s a pundit.
CLAY: Bernie Sanders, I disagree with much of what he says. Bernie Sanders is able to defend what he believes, whether you agree or disagree with him. Right? He is smart enough to understand, I think, on some level the larger permutations of his policies. He would debate with you or me, I think, and be proven wrong.
BUCK: He’s basically a communist who complains about rich people and always says everyone’s gonna get free health care.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: End of story. But he will say that.
CLAY: Yes. And I think he at least understands it on some level. I really question whether AOC is able to unpack the vast majority of what she says.
BUCK: So I derailed you. AOC reacted to Hutchinson, Clay.
CLAY: AOC loved Cassidy Hutchinson. Last night she went on Stephen Colbert and said this.
CLAY: It’s not true, right? The Secret Service are testifying it’s not true. But I just want to mention, she says absolutely stunning that anyone would seek a pardon. I think Republicans need to push back more aggressively on this. It does not stun me at all that if you were a Republican who was fighting against the election of Joe Biden and making aggressively legal arguments as a part of that fight, would it surprise you at all, Buck, if you were charged with a crime based on the way we’ve seen Democrats use the Department of Justice as a weapon of their political party?
So I don’t buy into the concept here — which is being spread and I think not fought back against very aggressively — that the only reason you would ask for a pardon is because you think you did something wrong. No, no, no, no. I think most of these guys and girls who, if they did — I’m not going to they did, but if they did — it wouldn’t be because they believe they did something wrong. I don’t think they believe that at all. It would be because they think they’re going to get a show trial like Donald Trump is, and might get prosecuted for political show even though they did nothing wrong. That makes complete sense to me that you would say, “Hey, could I get a pardon for this?”
BUCK: Yeah. The Mueller probe destroyed any faith that a rational person should have in the Department of Justice and the FBI’s ability to be nonpartisan when the most sensitive political issues are at stake. So of course people would be concerned about that, would be thinking about that going forward. I think as well you have to look… What exactly do they think they’re going to get out of all of this, right? Are they going to prosecute Donald Trump? I keep wondering about this. What is the charge going to be?
What would the charge have even been for Mark Meadows or Rudy Giuliani? What? Lying about an election result? I got news for libs. They got a lot of people running around who have a long history of lying about elections, lying about Russia collusion. This is the criminalization of politics. Unless Donald Trump himself was down on the Capitol grounds in the building with the big, furry hat on and the spear, they need shut their mouths about prosecuting the former president. It’s ridiculous.
CLAY: I agree with all of that. I would also add, another reason why you might want the pardon is, you might have to spend millions of dollars of your own money even if you did nothing wrong defending yourself.
BUCK: Yeah. The process is the punishment.
CLAY: That’s exactly right, and so I think Republicans need to do a better job fighting back against asking for a pardon means you did something wrong. No, no, no. It probably means that you foresee that Democrats are going to use the Department of Justice in a political matter.
BUCK: That’s why we’re here, Clay —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — to crack our knuckles and throw some haymakers.
CLAY: I just think that Republicans are doing a poor job of responding to that attack. And I think it’s not a difficult attack to respond to. And I also think AOC is an imbecile and the Stephen Colbert show sucks, by the way.