BUCK: Town hall on CNN, which was a lot of stuff that we should get through together. Crime, immigration, the border, major topics that the Democrats don’t have good answers for and certainly Joe Biden doesn’t, either. But there are some of these things, Clay, out there that you keep hearing from Democrats. They’re like zombie talking points. You can never make the talking point die.
It will never stop, right? People will talk about them. For the pay gap, they’ll say, “Men and women, it’s exact same work, the same person,” and you have whatever it is, 73 cents on the dollar I think is the statistic or some number, and then when they actually look at it and they break it down, it’s not true.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And if it were true, companies with thousands and thousands of employees?
CLAY: Only would hire women.
BUCK: You save 25% on your labor costs? Guess what? Everyone’s gonna do that. But they’ll just keep saying it. They’ll keep saying it. They’ll keep saying, “There’s no such thing as voter fraud,” until someone says, “That’s weird ’cause people go to prison for it every year.” There are phrases they will use.
There are statements they will make that, no matter how many times we debunk it — we disabuse them of this notion, we point out the lie — they want to keep saying it. Don Lemon, the filibuster is bad now. What’s remarkable, Clay, is that the filibuster wasn’t bad somehow when Democrats were in the minority for the with first two years of the Trump presidency.
CLAY: Even worse than that, Buck, it was the saving grace of our democracy, if you listen to Democrats! When Trump won, they used the filibuster aggressively, Kyrsten Sinema pointed out in her Washington Post editorial explaining why she wouldn’t reject the filibuster; that 41, I believe it was, of her Democratic colleagues had signed a letter talking about how important the filibuster was when Donald Trump got elected president. And suddenly you have the power, and it’s super racist! It’s gone from not being racist at all and you have to use it to being super racist.
BUCK: The situational ethics that Democrats engage in on a regular basis especially when talking about our sacred democracy and the processes of our government, the situational ethics. They could get 9.9 if they were doing the pommel horse. I mean, the acrobatics that are involved.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I got the Olympics on my mind. It’s crazy. They’re just spinning all of this. and they do not stick the landing. They look foolish when it’s all said and done. Don Lemon pressed Joe Biden last night on the filibuster. Here is what he said.
LEMON: (whispering) If it’s a relic of Jim Crow, it’s been like to fight again civil rights legislation historically, why protect it?
BIDEN: There’s no reason to protect it other than you’re gonna throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.
LEMON: Right.
BIDEN: Nothing at all will get done.
LEMON: Mmmph.
BIDEN: And there’s a lot at stake! The most important one is the right to vote — that’s the single most important one — and your vote counted and counted by someone who honestly counts it.
BUCK: It is not a relic of Jim Crow. (laughs)
CLAY: It’s a lie.
BUCK: How many times do we just have to go over there? The tactic of delaying in the Senate so that legislation could not go through goes all the way back to 1789 when Senator William McClay wrote in his dairy, “The design of the Virginians was to talk away the time so we could not get the bill passed.” There were uses of the filibusters in the 1830s.
There were uses of the filibuster before anybody had even heard of Jim Crow or Jim Crow laws. It comes from — funfact — the Dutch for “freebooter” or the Spanish “filibustero,” and it is essentially a pirate. So to be a filibuster is to be a pirate who takes command of the Senate, which makes it sound a whole lot cooler than it actually is. But it is a Jim Crow relic. It is not racism. This is total malarkey.
CLAY: What is designed here is for the Senate — because you have six-year terms — to not swing outrageously every single time that we have a new presidential election. So the idea, for anybody who has studied history, is that the Senate will slow things down to make sure that we are not behaving in a haphazard fashion.
The House is obviously a much more reactionary body as it is only made up of people who are elected, 435 of them, every two years. The Senate, the six-year term, is supposed to protect you from the passions of the moment so that you can make a reasonable decision for the betterment of the country. The fact that we have allowed…
It’s a good question, Buck. You talk about how dumb Joy Behar is. Do you think that Don Lemon is able to understand that, or is he just going to spout whatever Jeff Zucker sound bites are popular on CNN any given day? Do you think he’s cognizant of the fact while spreading disinformation while claiming to care about information in a big way?
BUCK: I think he doesn’t care, and I believe that for Democrat anchors who pretend to be journalists, which I don’t know. I mean, no intelligent person would ever say Don Lemon is unbiased or Chris Cuomo or any of these people.
CLAY: Right.
BUCK: “Fake” Tapper, any of them. No one actually thinks that they’re not Democrats doing the bidding of the Democrat Party, who pays attention and is honest. I mean, there might be delusional, very bored people in airports, although I think they… Are they in airports anymore? They lost some of that airport coverage.
CLAY: They’re not on as much. There’s more sports on in airports now.
BUCK: If my choices are Woke NBA or CNN in the airport, I want to watch some reporters get drained, I gotta tell you.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: I will make that concession. But, no, I think that for people who are now — and I’ve even had friends bring this up to me recent. It’s kind of like all media has just turned into clashing narratives and activism —
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — and they say, “How do you feel about that?” I say, “Well, what I do,” what you do, Clay, is we tell people: This is what we think, this is what we want, and who we are. The old media of, “This is just the truth, there is no other truth, and we bring no perspective to this” — journalism — is a lie. It’s been a lie for a very long time, but to specifically answer your question about Don Lemon: No, ’cause the point of that town hall was not to give people… First of all, itwas clearly not to challenge in any way the president of the United States —
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — or make him answer tough questions. The point of that town hall was to give a platform with a facade of some neutrality or some unbiased nature so that Joe Biden could look good and say things to his constituents, and so Don Lemon succeeded in that regard. So it’s a success even if he says something dumb because the dumb thing he says helps Biden. It doesn’t matter that it’s wrong, and his audience doesn’t care. Just one more thing. You can tell this gets me fired up, Clay.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: The journalists, when it comes to guns — and I’ve said this for a long time. People say, “No, no, no.” They’re so disdainful of not only guns, but gun owners.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Your standard D.C. or NYC journalist hates gun owners so much, and that’s actually why it’s become such a cultural issue because it’s such a signifier of your politics. It’s not even just about the gun violence. By parading their ignorance, by literally going on TV and talking about machine guns with bayonet attachments and all these things, they’re saying, “Oh, well, it’s all so stupid and whatever. Who cares? As long as I’m showing you how much I hate it, that’s what matters.” Go ahead.
CLAY: That’s why the Democratic Party has such a big cultural issue in many parts of the country, even for people that might respond favorably to some of the things that they argue for. As a kid who grew up in Tennessee, we’re around guns at a young age. And that doesn’t happen for many of these left-wing New York and California liberals. They just aren’t, right? They aren’t ever in a backyard with a gun firing at a target.
They don’t have BB guns growing up, and so a lot of that discomfort is just nervousness because they haven’t ever experienced a gun in a nonlife-threatening fashion, right? They’re thinking, “Oh, my God. I’m gonna get shot,” or whatever. The comfort level with a weapon at a young age I think many people and certainly a large percentage of our listeners have had that experience.
And so you aren’t as terrified of guns. There’s a genuine fear factor. Really, “Everything is racist and everything is gonna kill you,” is basically the Democratic Party’s brand right now. That’s their brand.
BUCK: Yes.
CLAY: “Everything is racist. Everything is gonna kill you.” It’s a fear-based party, which is, unfortunately, getting trumpeted across the entire nation.
BUCK: You get to feel virtuous while handing over control of your life to people that you think are even more virtuous if you’re a lib, if you’re a leftist. That sounds so appealing to them. It sounds like a nightmare to me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: Buck here, and we had some interesting moments in this last night Joe Biden town hall. I am a fan of the site the Babylon Bee.
CLAY: They’re fantastic.
BUCK: And they just put out, “CNN Airs Hour-Long PSA on Warning Signs of Dementia.” Ouch.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Ouch. They are not holding back there at all. Well, one area where Biden had no good answer — and I think, to be fair, and I do aspire to be fair —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — at least within the context of what my beliefs are on this show, I don’t think Biden can give a good answer on what Kamala said about the border or what’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border. You have unprecedented numbers — truly, by the numbers with the data in front of us right now, unprecedented numbers — of apprehensions, of illegal crossings. We have the closest thing that we have had to an open border, really, ever, at least in the modern era of this country. Biden was asked about Kamala saying, “Do not come,” and here’s what he said.
WOMAN: Vice President Harris said to Guatemalans, “Don’t come.” Recently you have indicated you are in favor of refugees coming to this country. Could you please explain your administration’s basic stance on immigration?
BIDEN: Yes! They should not come. What we’re trying to set up is in the countries like (sputters), in particular, Northern Triangle: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, et cetera. We are setting up in those countries: If you seek asylum in the United States, you can seek it from the country.
BUCK: That’s called being a refugee.
CLAY: (chuckles)
BUCK: There’s actually a difference here, which I would hope the president of the United States would know. You show up and say, “I need to stay here,” that’s asylum. You apply in another country and say, “I need to get out of this place because there’s a war or a famine, that’s a refugee under U.S. law. I don’t think Biden knows or cares about the difference, particularly. But, Clay, more to the point, oh, they just — they don’t have any problem with the people who are gaming the system. They just to want help them game the immigration system differently.
CLAY: Well, and that’s also the place, if you were a true journalist, to follow up and say, “What about Cuba?” I mean, if you are truly a journalist, which is what CNN claims that they are a journalistic information, you should speak truth to power. So if that is the policy that is in place for what Joe Biden believes should exist at our southern border, why — in the throes of repression — as the Cuban people have tried to speak out in favor of democracy and freedom, would the United States say, “You aren’t going to be able to come here. Don’t flee. We don’t want you.”
It is, to me, such an inherent hypocrisy. And, Buck, to your point, the idea is, “Oh, those might be Republican voters.” But take away the politics and just go straight to the policy itself. Try to explain why that difference is occurring, and I don’t think Joe Biden could do it because it’s nonsensical. But that’s what a real journalist should do. That’s what someone who is trying to get to truths and hold leaders accountable, that would be the immediate follow-up, right?
BUCK: Yeah, but they’re not journalists as we know.
CLAY: Of course not. Yeah.
BUCK: We just keep saying it. It’s almost at a point now, we have to keep saying it until they finally admit it. I know that for everyone who’s with us now, you all know that CNN is fake news and that’s why it stings. That’s why they get so upset about it.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: You know, when people say things that aren’t true about you, that hurts a lot less when it’s negative than when it is true. But journalism in this country is something that I think people realize no longer really exists, and CNN last night was a perfect example of that.