Live With It, Libs! Ron DeSantis Was Right

ANDY COHEN: Watching Mayor de Blasio —

ANDERSON COOPER: Don’t go on a rant, man.

ANDY COHEN: — do his —

ANDERSON COOPER: Don’t go on a rant.

ANDY COHEN: — victory lap dance after four years of (crosstalk) the crappiest job as the mayor of New York.

ANDERSON COOPER: (crosstalking)

ANDY COHEN: The only thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on is what a horrible mayor he has been.

ANDERSON: COOPER: Wow.

ANDY COHEN: So sayonara, sucker!

Bravo’s Andy Cohen, Andy Cohen!, absolutely obliterating New York City mayor Bill deBlasio as his term ends is a fun watch. Enjoy: pic.twitter.com/T6twntLJI3

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 1, 2022

BUCK: Happy New Year, everybody. That was Andy Cohen on New Year’s Eve talking about Bill de Blasio, which I just have to say, I have been telling you on this show… I know when the others and some of my esteemed fellow hosts who are on WOR NYC — Mark Simone among others — with will say de Blasio is the worst mayor in the country. He is awful beyond words, beyond measure.

He’s finally gone, thank heaven. So if nothing else, while New York is in the midst of this, “What are we gonna do? Where do we go from here,” the plan failed. Let’s be honest. The plan to stop the spread failed and notice they never account for natural immunity in any of this because that would also include overall infection because eventually, we’re gonna get to the point where people have to say, “How many of us have not gotten covid?”

The whole mitigation and vaccine program, all of this needs to at least be taken into account the reality of how many people have truly gotten infected over this whole period of time, and you have this juxtaposition right now, Clay, particularly between New York and Florida, right? Florida, as we know — we talked about it over the summer — was the place of #RonDeathSantis and he was responsible for covid and monoclonal antibodies that he was pushing were something that he had a financial interest in. All lies and nonsense about that.

And then also seasonal, the virus is seasonal as we know. Now it’s crushing New York as well as Massachusetts, the whole Northeastern U.S. Michigan has a really high caseload. Really the whole Northern and Northeastern, Democrat-controlled corridor of the country is having a really tough time with covid. But there’s still this desire to make it seem like this is a function of one side understanding the virus and what to do about it and the other side not. I was in Miami Beach — and I gotta tell you, it was paradise, Clay. It was fantastic.

CLAY: I think a lot of people out there are super curious about your experience, because I’m lucky, like you say, and I know a lot of our listeners are too. I live in Nashville. I spent a lot of time… I went down to Key West, had a tremendous time, had a great time down on the Florida Gulf Coast. But I’m going from freedom to freedom, right? When I fly from Nashville to Florida, from the state of Tennessee to Florida, there’s not a massive difference.

I am utterly intrigued for you to have had your 40th birthday. By the way, happy birthday, incredible time to get away, be down in great weather in the Miami area. And what the feeling is — ’cause a lot of times when people leave good weather and you’re going back to cold weather and it’s the winter you got like sort of a depressive feeling because you’re like, “Oh, man I gotta get the coats out and everything else.”

But if you add that stultifying inability to have basic freedom, that has to be weighing on your shoulders in both directions, right? You’re tossing it off when you go south. And then when you get on the airplane, Buck, and go back north, you had to be thinking, “I just feel so miserable to be going back to this.” It’s such an incredible dichotomy between Florida and New York.

BUCK: It was like I had escaped the Soviet Union, and I thought I was now a defector. I was a defector to Ron DeSantis’ Florida and all the lovely Floridians down there and just a whole different world. Everyone’s just more mellow about this stuff. You don’t have it, and the sufficient that’s out there is mostly, the signs you’ll see about distancing or masking. It’s for the neurotic New Yorkers and New Jerseyans and Massachusetts residents, et cetera, who go to Florida to escape that but still have a little bit of anxiety over it. But here’s the mayor of Miami Beach who’s a Democrat, who despite the reality of what we’re seeing is out there slamming the best governor in America.

DAN GELBER: Rather than treat it like a health care crisis or a — any other crisis we deal with like a hurricane when we all stand together and tell the public exactly the same thing, not caring what party you’re at, he has made this a wedge issue. And in a health care crisis make something a wedge issue and you divide the public so that half the public does one thing and half the public does the other, you get what we’re getting right now, which is variants still coming, people still getting sick, and this disease still with us. And that’s really the — the tragedy within this tragedy.

BUCK: Now, this Democrat mayor in Miami Beach is delusional, okay. Variants were always coming no matter what. This idea that the unvaccinated created the variants or the unvaccinated are the only reason there are variants is completely antithetical to everything we know about the history of viruses for as long as we’ve had a practice of microbiology, okay? This is crazy talk.

But you can see that they can’t process this. They can’t understand, “Hold on. We did everything right in New York, but Florida is living in peace, prosperity, freedom, and dignity when it comes to the war on the virus, and New York is Looney Tuneville!” They can’t seem to make sense of it, Clay. They can’t seem to figure it out. Ron DeSantis? It is a wedge issue, and here’s the wedge: DeSantis was right. The politicians in your home state of Tennessee who haven’t allowed this to overrun people’s lives and shut down, they were right.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The libs were wrong. That’s the wedge.

CLAY: That’s the wedge, Buck. To me, this is why 2022 is such a massive year in so many different ways. I think a lot of times people say, “Oh, this is a big, important year,” and it’s not necessarily true but if you looking what Democrats supported to get Joe Biden into the White House, defund the police has blown up in their face. They try to claim now that they never actually said it.

Now pretty much everything that they have said about covid has blown up in their faces, and they are left with a stark reality that I think is becoming more true every single day, that there are consequences for right and wrong policy choices. And you can’t just shift your position to, “Oh, now we have to fund the police.” Well, what about the thousands of people who are dead that would otherwise be alive if you had never argued in favor of defunding the police?

What about all of the people who lost their jobs and are never gonna go back? What about all the kids out there, Buck, who lost over a year of schooling and are never going to make it up? You know, there are I think a million kids that we just lost. They were public school kids that are no longer even able to enroll.

BUCK: We should be, based on what we’ve been told by the experts, we should be in a place now where we are arguing the costs of all the things they made us do versus — right, versus — the benefits of many of these policies.

CLAY: It’s what adults do.

BUCK: We should be in that place. Where we actually are is many of the things, most of the things we made us do had enormous cost and actually no benefit. This is the part of it that… The lockdowns, none of this made sense, none of this was a good idea. Vaccines, as we always say, for personal protection for those at risk are at good tool. So are monoclonal antibodies who those who get infected, right? Early treatment is something that somehow still never gets on the radar.

I know a lot of people listening probably saw and heard some of the Dr. Malone-Joe Rogan interview. I listened to the whole thing. I know you read the transcript of it, Clay. Why don’t we have definitive answers? Why don’t we have clinical trials about things like that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin? Why is there this FDA roadblock to some of those processes, right? These are all things where we should be having a discussion. Instead, they’re just telling us more — and I don’t mean that in rhetorical terms. You look at Israel, they are on shot number four officially now.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: If you are at height risk, you need a fourth shot. My friends, this is absolute madness! Think about your mind-set in March of 2020. If Joe Biden had told you, “I’m going to be pushing for booster mandates and eventually I’m gonna be pushing for a third shot in the first year for the American people to protect them from covid,” they would say, “You’re completely out of your mind and I’m not voting for you.” So many people would have known that is where we are now. They should take stock of that.

CLAY: No doubt. And I would just ask people as we go to break here, when has there ever been a “vaccine,” in quotation marks, that I read radio you to get four shots potentially within you a year which is what they’re doing in Israel and still didn’t keep you from getting or spreading the virus that you got the four shots for? I can’t think of any traditional vaccine that we have ever talked about that, right?

Measles? Mumps? Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I’m not gonna get on this airplane because I’m not sure if somebody else got their measles or mumps vaccine”? No, ’cause you got your vaccine and you know you’re fine. Just think about that in the back of your head. Four shots which is what they’re talking about in Israel, and you still are not in any way guaranteed that you’re not gonna get or spread the virus. How do we even call that a vaccine?

BUCK: And you’re effectively guaranteed to take a fifth shot.

CLAY: Never ends. That’s right.

BUCK: It’s now the fifth shot because the fourth shot’s gonna work. Oh, and Clay here’s the other fun thing. You and I are not doctors. Fair point, right? But we do know something which is how effective and how serious are the long-term studies on the effect of four or five or six mRNA vaccines? They’ve never run them, folks, because we’ve had this vaccine for a year. Okay?

CLAY: And, by the way, the fact… I just want to say. I know we gotta go to break. But the “you’re not a doctor” thing that doesn’t mean you can’t look at data and make decisions that are intelligent. There are so many people out there that try to use that as an argument. There are lots of people out there that are doctors who aren’t actually that smart, Buck!

BUCK: Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, and I can assure you, folks, he knows nothing about nuclear engineering, nor does he know anything substantive about what it would actually mean be in a compact situation.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: In fact, I worry that he’s gonna walk out on stage one day without his pants on and we’re gonna see those jacked up black socks with the stirrups on the side. But, hey, let’s listen to Joe Biden. He knows what he’s doing!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: We had mentioned before that Governor Ron DeSantis, they’re of course attacking him, as always, and they’re always trying to say that there’s something wrong with whatever he’s done. They went after him, as we mentioned, for being what they said was “missing in action” while the Florida covid case count was rising. Governor DeSantis responded to this today from Florida. Here’s what he says.

DESANTIS: Yeah, I mean, I guess I should have at the beach in Delaware, right?

CROWD: (laughing)

DESANTIS: They would have been really happy with that. It was… I mean, you look at. We’ve actually put out the schedule, and I think these people didn’t know that ’cause you’re not doing a big press conference. So, Friday, Kevin Joe and I had all had discussions about doing what we’re doing. Of course, I was down in Miami later, Thursday in the office working on this and some other stuff.

BUCK: Yeah. But they jumped on him anyway. Remember when the… I think it was a CBS reporter came after him about the —

CLAY: Publix.

BUCK: — Publix grocery store chain and how it’s, “Oh, donors,” or something and he just eviscerated them? What you realize is that they don’t even care. It’s not about credibility for the media apparatus and the Biden regime toadies. It’s about taking your opportunities to ambush DeSantis. True or not, it doesn’t matter because the other libs will like you for it.

CLAY: No doubt, and I think it’s important that you bring that up. What was going with Publix was we were distributing the vaccine using Publix pharmacies to the best of their ability because as anybody who spent much time in Florida knows there are a massive number of Publix grocery stores and so one of the ways to get the vaccine out to the largest number of people was to have the biggest possible retailers to give these vaccine shots.

And what CBS tried to say was, “Oh, this was a give-away over a $100,000 contribution.” Now, I think Ron DeSantis right now, if I’m not mistaken, has $67 million in his 2022 election war chest. That’s the most recent number that I have seen. A hundred thousand dollars barely even registers on that horizon. But in that story, many Democrats, actually, came out and said, “No, no, no. We were involved in the meetings surrounding this.

“The reason why Publix was involved in vaccine distributions was to get as many shots in arms as we possibly could.” So he was actually trying to implement the strategy of the Fauciites — particularly given how many elderly people there are, Buck, in Florida — and get as many vaccines in arms as you possibly could using the best possible method to do so.

BUCK: And then of course there’s the reality that we’ve discussed of how Democrats, including members of Congress, including AOC (among others) act when it comes to covid versus the way they speak about the issue. DeSantis called out AOC for being yet again another politician who was saying, “Florida’s reckless and there’s no mask and it’s so dangerous,” and they go, oh, but when I went to hang out and relax that’s where I go.

DESANTIS: If I had a dollar for every lockdown politician who decided to escape so Florida over the last two years —

CROWD: (laughing)

DESANTIS: – I’d be a pretty doggone wealthy man, let me tell you. I mean, congresspeople, mayors, governors, you name it — and it’s interesting, though, the reception that some of these folks will get in Florida because I think a lot of Floridians say, “Wait a minute. You’re bashing us because we’re not doing your Draconian policies, and yet we’re the first place you want to flee to basically to be able to enjoy life,” and so I’m not surprised to see that continue to happen.

BUCK: These people are in denial, by the way, the ones that ignore this stuff, that think, “Ooh, who cares that AOC goes to Florida.” No, it matters a lot actually. When you’re pushing for children to be masked up in schools where you live because that’s where your political power base is. But when you go on vacation you’re maskless, big crowds, kids, adults, who cares? It matters a lot. But I think there’s a lot of denialism, Clay, on the left about all this.

Because so many people were so sure. They believed. Fauci was a father figure for them, a religious figure for them. Pope Fauci was giving his edicts. It’s really hard, I think, for a lot of particularly those on the left who are used to thinking of themselves as being smart and elevated just for having the right positions, to have to come to grips with the fact that you got swindled, libs. You’re just not that smart.

CLAY: Well, not only did they get swindled, what they’re now trying to do is convince everyone — and this is a calculated attempt — that they never said masks protect, that they never said, “If you will get the covid vaccine, it will prevent you from getting and spreading covid.” That’s 100% what they said. So don’t allow them to pivot and now say, “No, no, no! We just said that masks help some,” even though that’s still disputable, certainly cloth masks.

Now their guy’s saying, “Oh, no, no! We never…” There’s a lot of people saying this now, Buck. “Oh, we never said that the vaccine was going to prevent you from getting covid or spreading it. We just said that you weren’t gonna get super sick if you got covid.” You notice how that’s also the statement that every Democrat makes whenever they test positive now? Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense, just came out and said, “Hey, I’m tested positive from covid.

“I’m double vaccinated.. I’m also boostered, but my doctors…” They always say, “My doctors have assured me because I’m vaccinated and I’m boostered that I’ll have minimal symptoms as a result.” I didn’t get the vaccine. You know what I had? Minimal symptoms. You know what most people who get covid have whether they’re vaccinated or unvaccinated? Minimal symptoms. That’s even more true with Omicron. So what are you actually proving? How do you know that the reason you had minimal symptoms was because you got the covid vaccine?

The reality is more most people when you got vaccinated or not, your symptoms are going to be relatively minimal if you get covid. It doesn’t mean for everybody. And again, over 75 years old, senior citizens, if you have immune system issues, all those things, I think you should do everything you can to protect yourself. But for the vast majority of us, Buck, we’re gonna be 100 billion percent fine if we get covid — and ultimately, herd immunity is what is going to save us.

BUCK: It was also really vicious — and I did want to take a moment to backtrack for a second here. For the conversations we’ve had for the last four months or so, there was really a period this fall where Biden, all that pandemic of the unvaccinated, the unvaccinated are a threat.

CLAY: The winter of death!

BUCK: Well, that’s saying that they’re at risk.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: But I’m talking about really demeaning people that were unvaccinated as a public health threat, they were the unwashed, they were the unclean, and now we see that’s just not true. And it should be something that we all take a step back and say, “That was a terrible thing the Biden administration did, assuming that people who are unvaccinated,” irrespective of natural immunity, which we now know beyond any doubt is more powerful, lasting, and durable than the vaccinated kind.

This is now irrefutable based on the largest studies that have existed to date, or I should say cannot yet be refuted because it is science. But here we are now just moving past it, and, Clay, there was a real effort to create the undesirables, to create the less-than among the unvaccinated based upon their threat to others. If you want to take a threat to yourself, that’s one thing. You want to be a threat to other people, that was what the whole basis of this was. And they were wrong. And it’s gross. And I think it’s immoral, and the Biden regime should be held to account for it.

CLAY: I think it’s well said, 100% correct. And I would just say they’re continuing, like, even during the holiday break they said the unvaccinated are going to have a winter of death! I don’t think that’s true, either, and I think they’re continuing to try to divide us while not actually looking at the data and the science.

BUCK: I’d be fascinated to see — real quick, Clay — what the actual hospitalization data for vaxxed and unvaxxed looks like by the end of January. It’s gonna be very interesting.

CLAY: We’re never gonna see the real data. That’s my concern.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: They’re not gonna share it with us.