BONUS! Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Apr 22 2025
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Welcome in Tuesday edition Clay Travis Buck Sexton show. Appreciate all of you out there listening and hanging out with us. We have got a bevy of stories to dive in with all of you today. Congressman Chip Roy, great state of Texas, will join us at 1.30 Eastern time. David Zweig, who I would say, Buck, of the left wing,

Left-leaning media may have been the most honest person in the way that he covered COVID. For New York Magazine, if I remember correctly, back in the day. And he's got a book out that is just savaging...

The decision to shut down schools that he wrote about for some time, masking all of the chaos that came out of COVID. And I think we will enjoy that conversation with him. And I hope that his book, which is designed to be an early version of the historical record of what we went through with COVID, will become relevant.

a clarion call for those who are pursuing truth going forward on the historic record. Because one thing you and I have been talking about for years now is not only we knew, you and I, early on that much of the COVID failures were inexcusable, but

But what is the lesson that will be drawn in the decades ahead for people who are studying this era of history? And I hope we are starting to get some of that truth out into the public record. As you know, you read the book, the great influenza book that everybody suddenly started buying.

up during COVID and much of the way that we responded to the influenza epidemic, the Spanish flu back in the 1919-ish era,

unfortunately was reflected 100 years later. And one of the things that you saw, Buck, and we'll dive into this a little bit later with David Zweig, but just off the top here, one of the things that you saw was people just didn't want to talk about it. They just kind of put it in the background and pretended that it hadn't happened at all. Now, that was much more traumatic experience

in general because the percentage of people who died was higher. The people who died from the Spanish flu tended to be much younger, whereas the people who had COVID issues in this country, thankfully, tended to be on the older end of the spectrum. I say thankfully because you didn't have otherwise fully healthy people dropping who otherwise would have had decades of life. Thankfully, COVID did not have hardly any impact at all on people

because if you had reversed this and COVID had had the same impact on the super young that it did on the aged, I think the way that America and the world responded would have been very different. But this book that he is writing, I've got a copy of it in my house, and I've already started to read it a little bit, is, I think, an important historic record, so we will talk with him at 2. Speaking of important historic records, all of the books are now being written

That we told you would be written in the wake of the 2024 election. Having to do with Joe Biden and the mental and physical lies about him being at the peak of his abilities are now being exposed. You can go back in time. We told you they would try to protect him as long as they could. They would argue that he was sharp as a tack.

Now, even Jake Tapper, who tried to argue that any attacks on Joe Biden for his mental and physical health were cheap fakes. Now, even he has written a book that is going to be out, I think, in the next couple of weeks. And even left-leaning media are now holding their politicians' feet to the fire when they do interviews. This interview that I want to play for you guys is of Elizabeth Warren, who

Buck does a very good Elizabeth Warren impersonation, if I must say so myself. Thank you. This is, I want to make sure that I give credit because I got an email from these guys saying, hey, we're an independent podcast and can you, if you're going to share this, this is on the Talk Easy podcast. This is Sam Gregoso interviewing Elizabeth Warren and they have this exchange about Joe Biden's.

Did I mispronounce that? Did you say Grigoso? I think it's Fridoso, right? The way I have it written here is Grugoso, but it's possible our team got the name wrong. But Frigoso or Grugoso. No, it's Frigoso. You're right. I should just shut my face. Keep going.

This is the podcast that it's from. I just wanted to give them credit. Elizabeth Warren being held accountable for her lies and listen to how she responds to the questions about Joe Biden's physical and mental well-being. This is cut one. Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity? He had a sharpness to him. You said that up until July of last year. I said what I believe to be true. And you think he was as sharp as you?

I said I had not seen decline. And I hadn't at that point. You did not see any decline from 2024 Joe Biden to 2021 Joe Biden? Not when I said that. You know, the thing is, look, he was sharp. He was on his feet. I saw him. Live event. I had meetings with him a couple of times. Senator, on his feet is not praise. No.

He can speak in sentences, is not praise. Fair enough. Fair enough.

What you have to remember here is that was he an out-and-out vegetable? No, he was not. He was able to open his eyes and blink, and I did not see an SOS coming from him, and so... Clay, Clay. I saw him on his feet as an all-time line. He was able to stand...

is an unbelievable defense by Elizabeth Warren. This is like the conversation you would have about somebody who was declining and changed their will in the last days. Were they of sound mind or not? Well, he was on his feet. We're talking about the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, and she is saying, essentially...

He wasn't a full-blown vegetable, so don't blame me. I just kept going with the rest of the crowd here. She's not alone. All the rest of them did this too. And I think that more than anything...

What happened here, Clay, was that the anti-Trump media became so it was like a river that could only flow in one direction. And nobody was ever nobody was ever told what you're saying is too crazy. And I mean, nobody at MSNBC, nobody in the Democrat Party, New York Times, New York Times, Washington Post.

Whatever you said about Trump, he's Hitler, he's worse than Hitler, he's a monster, he's a... Whatever it was, was actually supported by the infrastructure of the Democrat Party. The apparatus was cheering for it. So all corrective mechanisms were gone.

And so when you have that, you can have a situation like exactly what transpired where they just knew there's no upside to speaking the truth about Biden. Anything that that is going to go against Trump is incentivized within our own ecosystem. And so they all just had their marching orders.

As crazy as I was going to say, like Lemmings, but as you will see in my new book, which has finally been cleared by the CIA, Lemmings don't commit mass suicide, everybody. That's a crazy story. But there's other things that you talk about in the book that you will like as well. Yes, Clay, this was something that they now have to take some degree of responsibility

accountability for when there's really no pain politically for them because they can't move on without addressing it at some level because people like you and me will just keep on dunking them under the water on this as we should.

You know, I thought it was interesting, too. I saw a graphic, I think it was from Axios this morning, that the coverage of misinformation and disinformation has basically ended on CNN and on MSNBC. They're not trotting out their fact checkers anymore. I would submit to you, Buck, that the Joe Biden cover-up

ended the misinformation and disinformation era. Now, Trump winning obviously had a substantial impact on that as well, but when the entire left-wing media

legacy media lined up together. And I think you're right that maybe the most devastating single statement that anybody made was Joe Scarborough basically lighting his entire career on fire when he said this was the best version of Biden. His show hasn't recovered and those networks haven't recovered from this. So here's the thing. Elizabeth Warren is trying to rewrite history in real time here in this way.

It's not, Clay, that they said. The narrative at the time, go back to exactly what you brought up with Joe Scarborough. The narrative at the time wasn't Biden isn't as bad as they say. He's semi-coherent and maybe we can push him across the finish line and then have VP Kamala take over.

That would have been somewhat disingenuous or, you know, that would have been dishonest. But on a scale of one to ten dishonesty level six or seven. Yeah, I went to dishonesty level 11, which was Biden is the best he has ever been. Right. Biden is, in fact, the sharpest version he has ever been, which just goes to show the desperation and the lie.

You know, that's what this really was. It wouldn't be enough to try to just soft pedal and say, look, he's lost his fastball, but, you know, I think he can still get it done. That's not what they were saying. They're saying Biden's fine. How dare you bring anything up? It was Stalinism level propaganda. It was this guy. It's like Kim Jong Il and on and Kim Il Sung, who can all hit holes in one every time they play golf. You know, it was that level madness.

By the way, you were correct. It is Sam Fragoso. Oh, look at the Buxter. He's got a sharp ear. I'm just trying to help. So our staff, who I'm immediately going to throw under the bus, they wrote it as Sam Grugoso. But it's Sam Fragoso who had that interview. And I do give him credit because...

Anyone who said that Biden was able to serve as president in a fully honest media, they should have to answer for that. They should have to explain why they said that. And not only the not only politicians. Have you ever heard?

Joe Scarborough be asked or pushed in any way on that viral clip where he argued that this was the best version of Biden that had ever existed? Has anybody held him accountable? To be fair...

I think that he is just trying to ride out things and wait and wait so that by the time anyone asks him about like, I don't think he's putting himself in a position where even Elizabeth Warren, because she's not as bad based on the sound bites with this as some of the others. She's trying to take the medicine now. I think Scarborough knows that.

that it's brand annihilation that he faces if the wrong person gets him on the hot seat and asks him this question. You can't come back from that. Why should someone listen to Joe Scarborough about anything? If he's that dumb or that dishonest, why would you care what he thinks about a single thing in existence? I don't care what ice cream flavor he thinks is best.

Yours is answers pistachio, which is, by the way, maybe even worse than Joe Scarborough's answer would be, to be fair. You see this incoming that us pistachio lovers get from Clay and his flute playing ways. It's outrageous. We'll take some of your calls on this. I do think that these conversations that we're going to have with David Zweig are important. And if you are out there and you argued that this was the best version of Biden, the

The two by four is coming for you because these books are coming out and everyone in the legacy media is trying to cover their backsides on this. And so they're now covering the release of the books and every little detail. For instance, I'm reading that Biden was supposed to do his prep work from Camp David and he got too tired and he just went outside by the pool and fell asleep, which is.

But remember, they were telling everybody his prep has been amazing. And then they tried to say, well, he has a little bit of a cold after the debate performance. Imagine you're trying to prepare the president for debate. And he's like, I'm tired. And he just goes outside by the pool and falls asleep. That's a story that's out there right now. You know, there's a movie, The Death of Stalin, that's actually pretty clever for what it is. And it's a farce, right? But it's what does everyone do when Stalin dies around him?

The fall of Biden movie that you could make where you basically go weekend at Bernie's. I mean, you just it would be if if anyone in Hollywood wanted to take this idea, it would be utterly hilarious. And I think everybody would want to go see it. And you could base it off of the real stories here. By the way, I will say as we go to break, imagine what Jill Biden saw.

Imagine what the wife of the president, the first lady, what she saw. I still think she is maybe the biggest villain here because she was willing to drag his basic corpse right across the finish line so she could keep living in the White House. I mean, she is. Imagine what she saw. I have a I want to.

Just because I feel like fighting with Clay today. I have a very different take on Jill Biden that I would like to share when we come back. I have a very different take than you on this. I did not expect. She is, to me, the worst villain here. Buck thinks she's a hero. We'll talk about it when we come back. No, no, no. That's not the take, you naughty man. We'll come back, though.

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Welcome back in. Clay Travis, Buck Sexton Show. Appreciate all of you hanging out with us, rolling through the Tuesday edition of the program. And we are joined now by David Zweig, investigative journalist and author. He's got a brand new book. I think you guys are going to love it. I've already started to check it out. We've got it at the home. Buck is holding it up right now.

An abundance of caution, American schools, the virus, and a story of bad decisions. David, thanks for joining us in our New York City studio. I know we've had you on before, and I think it's fair to say that

A lot of your reporting was not necessarily well received by people on the left and that you are not some far right wing conspiracy theorist. You just did something wild. You looked at the data and you were willing to write about what the data showed. And you were, as Buck and I have both been, profoundly angered and still angry over the failures of American public policy as it pertains to COVID-19.

What pushed you to write this book and what do you hope that people take from it? That's a very good assessment. Yeah. In the beginning, very early on, it seemed reasonable to me. I wasn't knowledgeable about what was happening. I live right outside New York City. OK, the schools are closed. Everything shut down. But very quickly after that.

I watched my kids just wilting away in the kind of the gray light of their Chromebooks, sitting alone in their bedrooms. And I was like, this isn't going to work for a long period of time. Like this, this, how, how can this be? And, and from there I just started thinking,

kind of researching and digging in. I was in the middle of writing a book on a totally different topic at the time, but this was just so crazy what was happening. I wanted to learn more about what was going on. And very quickly, I started to speak with experts in Europe and elsewhere because you couldn't speak to them in the United States.

And it was very obvious that there was no reason for the schools to remain closed. And that kind of set me off on this path. And as you noted, this very much was, you know, what was termed a contrarian view against the establishment. And it was...

It was certainly a challenging position for me writing for mainstream publications to get to get my reporting in there. But I pulled it off. And I think people kind of perceive me. I think it's true is basically the only guy who's really able to do that, to write a number of pieces. They were all backed by evidence showing why the establishment view was so wrong.

David, you said something I want to return to if I can. You said that there was no reason for the schools to be closed. There was no medical reason.

for the schools to be closed but i am sure in the course of your research you found a whole slew of non-medical reasons or rationales or uh horse trading that led to the continuation of public school closures while you know i grew up in new york city so i know that system pretty well i went to you know went to catholic school there there's private schools parochial schools public schools

parochial and private were open for business in that fall after the initial pandemic, and yet public schools were remote. Why? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's so remarkable, and it's almost astonishing that this actually happened in real time, and it's kind of one of the main...

of why I wrote this book was to make sure that what happened isn't just memory hold. And the idea, as you noted, kids were in school, in private schools. They were in school in red districts and in red states, while at the same time, a kid could be down the block in public school and he was kept home while his best friend in a different area or went to private school was in school every day. So the irony to me is that

On the left, which traditionally perceives itself as being the heroes of the underprivileged in our society, they championed the rules of

And the guidelines and the policies that actually harmed underprivileged kids the most. And it's like one of the most tragic ironies of of the pandemic to me that this was the result that you had people vigorously. It wasn't just advocating. But as you know, anyone who disagreed was immediately vilified. You were some right wing crank. You are a piece of garbage if you disagreed with them.

Well, I mean, I am a right-wing crack, so I can imagine what it would be like for you being called that when you're not one. Yeah, I was Benedict Arnold here. I was immediately cast aside. I was called a murderer. How could you do this? One of the things that's so important...

and this is kind of like the original sin that I talk about in the book. At the end of April, in the beginning of May in 2020, schools began to open in Europe. And it's not just like some little school in Tibet somewhere with 12 kids. We're talking about millions of kids were back in school. And the European Union, the education ministers met in May. And at that meeting, they said,

We have observed no negative consequences of opening our schools. They met a second time in June. They had the same determination. No one reported this. I ultimately reported it myself in June. But this is kind of an astonishing thing. This wasn't, you know, a random blog. This wasn't an obscure medical journal. This is the European Union and their official report.

regarding opening schools where millions of kids were in there was, there was no negative consequence. And as far as I'm aware, no one in the U.S. media reported on this meeting. That sort of set things on the course, you know, where we were just kind of never to come back from that. Okay, so I want, that's an important point. I want you to expound upon something that happened that a lot of people have forgotten.

In June of 2020, and I may get the official name wrong, but it was like the American Association of Pediatricians or something like that said schools needed to open back up and we could do it safely. That was a big story in June.

And then Randy Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers somehow kind of got into their universe. And they ended up, you probably, I'm sure it's in the book. It is. They ended up reversing their guidance.

What do you think now when you see Randy Weingarten going around on show saying, oh, I never said that I wanted schools to be shut down? What does the evidence show us, and how important was it from a science perspective for those pediatricians? And I remember their argument being, David, correct me if I'm wrong, that while the virus wasn't going to go away, kids had far more to gain by being in school than they did to fear from the virus. That was June of 2020, and then they completely reversed themselves under political pressure.

So what happened was the American Academy of Pediatrics put out a guidance that was unambiguous. It said, we've got to get kids in school. Don't even worry about six feet of distancing. If you can do it, great. But if you can't, don't worry. Just three feet is fine. Whatever. Just get the kids in the building.

Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump tweeted, we must open schools in the fall, all caps with a bunch of exclamation points. Within days, the American Academy of Pediatrics put out a new statement. Gone was any mention of don't worry about distancing. Gone was the idea of get kids in school no matter what. And instead...

They mentioned money. It's really important for a lot of money to flow to schools. And then the second important thing about that revised statement was who authored it. And it wasn't just the American Academy of Pediatrics. It was co-authored with the two largest teachers unions in the country.

It was so stark what happened that even NPR reported on this. But I got to tell you, this is part of a larger thing. And I talk about this a lot in the book where I show this behind the scenes thing that was going on. So as I started writing these articles challenging the sort of dogma and the establishment view, I

People started reaching out to me from around the country, parents, regular people, but also a lot of doctors. And these are doctors, not just some suburban pediatrician, but people who are at elite institutions, our top university hospitals in the country. And they were saying, hey, thank you so much for writing this. I just want you to know, I think it's terrible what's happening with kids.

I think these policies for keeping schools closed and these mask mandates, there isn't good evidence behind this. Schools are open in Europe, all these things. And they said, but all of this has to be off the record because they were afraid to be cast out by their peers. Or in many instances, they were explicitly told. And I have examples of this in the book. They were explicitly told by their superiors, by the administrators at their hospitals. Do not say anything about this.

So I had this bizarre experience where I'm observing this narrative that's going on in the culture, this sort of manufactured consensus that wasn't real. And I had this very lonely, strange experience where I'm getting all these text messages and emails and I'm talking with all these doctors who are disagreeing with this. But the dissent was silent. I wasn't allowed to talk about it and they were too afraid or weren't allowed to speak about it themselves. So my book gives what I hope is...

is this deep behind the scenes account of what actually happened during the pandemic, not the narrative that we were all fed. And I'm hoping that when people finish reading this, that they're going to be armed with enough information so they can actually understand and see how the gears turn within the legacy media and how they turn where they were working in conjunction with different institutions of power. So it's not just for a pandemic, but for when any other crisis happens,

that your listeners, when they're like, oh, I read about that in Zweig's book, I see exactly what's happening now. We're speaking to David Zweig. The book is An Abundance of Caution. I have my copy in my hands here, American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. One of the reasons we want to have you on, David, is we like to reward people who were right when it mattered and did good work when it mattered on this issue. So congrats on the book, and we hope people will pick up a copy because I think that's very important.

it's very important, right? It's a lot easier for people to jump on the bandwagon now, but we know that you were early on this and you got heat to that end. Just one, I mean, Clay might have a question for you in closing. I don't know if you're a sports fan or you like the SEC or anything, but that's always a possibility here at the end too. Um, but, uh,

If you were to walk around right now, tell us what it's like on the other side of it, because they'll still talk to you. They won't talk to us that much. Some of them listen to the show because it is so entertaining, but generally speaking, we have a center-to-right audience. If you walked around Park Slope or you walked around Santa Monica and just talked to people who watch CNN, read the New York Times, the LA Times, and said, hey guys, the next time around, we're

We're all clear that we don't shut down the schools for this, right? Are they clear on that? I think there's been a softening. So I think that's the good news. The bad news is that there is this revisionist history. There's this narrative that they've been pushing, which is, in the beginning it was, we have to close schools, we have to do all this stuff. Eventually, when it was so obvious that that wasn't beneficial, it was so obvious this was only causing harm, then they shifted. Then the narrative was, well...

This is regrettable, but it was an understandable thing. This was a fog of war decision. It was chaos. We did the best we could. And what I show in the book over and over is that information was known in real time. And that example about the European Union is just one of many examples

They knew what was happening. It was ignored or it was dismissed. So when you ask me that question, my fear is that when the next crisis happens, it doesn't have to be a pandemic, that once again, that there's this excuse of we're building the plane as we fly it. We don't know. Sorry, we're doing the best we can. Don't accept it.

It's not true. Demand evidence. And that's what my book is about at its core is you can't say stuff without providing evidence. And over and over, and I cite these long examples in the New York Times and all these other media outlets, they kept quoting all these experts saying things that

But they didn't provide any evidence. They never challenged them. Journalists shirked their core duty, which was to actually question the statements by those in power. So I'm hoping my book will act as a counter as a corrective, as this is an actual real history of what happened. And it works as its own guidebook to help arm people to understand how the gears turn behind the scenes so we can try to prevent something like this from happening again.

Last question. You came from the left and Buck's right. I'm just curious from your perspective. We hope that the historic record 20, 40 years, 60 years from now is going to be a worthy lesson. How much less faith do you personally have in the so-called legacy media than you did before COVID happened? So David Zweig 2019 compared to David Zweig 2025. How are you different?

I would say, if I may, not just the legacy media, but the entire left establishment, if you will.

My experience during the pandemic and what I observed and what I experienced as a journalist actually chasing down the evidence and the facts has completely shattered my entire worldview that I had. I was a smug liberal. I've always been an independent. I was not like a staunch Democrat. So I was an independent minded person, but I tended to believe in these institutions and always

what I observed and experienced was the absolute failure. And these people who are the good guys, I recount some stuff in the book about, I had evidence from Arizona, the state itself, which differed from a study that the CDC put out. And when I contacted the CDC, I said, Hey, I have evidence that I have data that's differing from what you have in your study. And I knew what they had was wrong because I had the official data. And their response to me was, we looked through it. There are no errors.

When you can't come back from something like that. And like, I remember just like kind of hunched over with like a migraine that night talking to my wife. So to answer your question, I'm, I just,

Feel entirely differently about how the world works and and you just can't recover from something like that when you know you would think something like the NSA or Defense Department might pull some type of BS on that. This was this is a health department and the CDC. They were lying through their teeth right to me.

um, in, in email saying there were no errors when I knew we, they knew that I knew and I knew that they knew that I knew that this was complete BS and they didn't care. You can't recover from something like that. So my book is filled with kind of that type of stuff where I, this was, um,

This was almost like a cathartic endeavor where I had to set the record straight. So people and hopefully not just your audience, though, I know they're going to be receptive, I think. But I'm hoping that I can persuade some independent minded people as well. That's my real goal is like to help people see what's really going on. David Zweig, everybody, an abundance of caution. David, thank you so much.

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Welcome back in Clay Travis, Buck Sexton show.

There is now another legal dispute that is underway. Harvard is reportedly going to sue Trump and the Trump administration over the withholding of billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars that have otherwise been going to the university, Harvard, but also a lot of other universities. And I grabbed this stat.

and credit New York Times where it was, and I shared it on social media the other day. I don't know if you have seen this yet, Buck, but we are going to spend, or we did spend in 2023, $60 billion in taxpayer money

More to colleges and universities. $60 billion. Harvard is getting billions of that, but the money is being spent many different universities across the country. And this was 30 times what they spent in 1953 if you account for inflation. So there's a graphic, and I shared the graphic, and the New York Times had it up,

and you look at it, and what we are spending on universities blew my mind. Here is a question for you, because I would put this in the same category. Now, the defense of this is going to be saying, okay, well, they're doing research, and we want them doing research development, all these different things.

If it's such a great idea, why aren't the universities funding their own research and development? Why is it the responsibility of you and me and so many of you out there listening to us right now to not only potentially be paying tuition and room and board that is exorbitant for many of these colleges and universities nationwide, but for us also to be funding with our dollars humanly

huge amounts of the bureaucracy that exists at these universities. I actually give Trump credit. I never really thought about it before. I didn't know the dollars were this extensive. Did you know that we were given $60 billion to colleges and universities? And why should we be doing this? Well, you know, one thing that you've heard a lot about is this is for research, for R&D. Okay, like what?

I want to know that if we're hearing this, because there's a lot that you can say is research. I mean, is this the kind of research where we're spending money to find out the mating habits of, you know, tsetse flies or something? Like, what exactly is this money being spent on at these schools? Or even worse, is it looking at...

Is it just a lot of people being hired to do sociology research to forward the progress of DEI initiatives? I mean, we have no idea, right? So your first point, Clay, did I know or do I think the general public had any idea how much money was going to the universities? I knew the answer was that there was money and it was considerable. I didn't know it was $60 billion. That's a lot. And the second part of it is, well, this is where you get more into the Doge piece. What...

what exactly is this money being spent on? And then you can add to that, well, hold on a second. Why are we to fund these universities? We've already decided that the government's going to backstop the loans. So now everyone can get a loan to go, I'll just be honest, to a worthless four-year college degree or whatever at a place that

does not have any incentive really to make sure that its graduates are getting jobs that can help them pay back the loans because it doesn't matter to them. It's not their problem, right? The colleges and universities have no incentive to address what the job market actually looks like. I'm not saying they don't do any of this, but from the macro view, it's just there's no skin in the game for the colleges and universities. And this is why the tuition keeps going up.

Because why not? Because it's not their problem. The government is backstopping this stuff, and anybody can get these loans. So that's part one of it. Or rather, that's part three of it. And I just think that then you add to this the ideological realization that we all have had for a long time, but just what factories of insanity these places are. And I think that the campus pro-Hamas stuff was just the latest iteration of this. But I had friends who were in law school, Clay, during the George Floyd stuff.

And what was law school and what was being sent around in law schools was nuts. Yeah. You know, you want to talk about do you think any of them thought that Derek Chauvin should get due process? This is law schools. Yeah, of course. Of course not. I also think this ties in and I'm going to start hammering this really aggressively. NPR said that Trump was going to fire Pete Hegseth.

You can go read NPR.org or NPR.com or whatever the heck their website is. It is full-on left-wing propaganda daily. We compete with them.

Why should, regardless of what your politics are, why should NPR be getting millions and millions of dollars in government funding? We don't get millions and millions of dollars in government funding. We don't get favorable treatment when it comes to ad dollars being allocated basically from the federal government. If we're directly competing with NPR, which we are,

Now, you guys have brains, so you probably don't listen to NPR that often, but in many of the 550-some-odd stations that we are on on a daily basis, there are a lot of stations out there that will be top competing options with us will be NPR. There are lots of places out there where you might live where you might not get this show and you get NPR.

Why is that not one of the first things that they would cut? To your point on Doge, Buck. And if NPR says, well, we're not getting that much money, and they make the argument that, okay, why are you getting any at all?

and you are because it's coming through local advertisements and everything else, I don't think a single red cent of taxpayer money should go to subsidize NPR's coverage in any way of their media outlet. In the same way that I don't think we should be spending millions of dollars on Politico subscriptions or anything else, we shouldn't be giving them a penny. Yeah, well, why? I mean, it's for the government. The government in general, you don't really want in the business of business, you want to let...

the american people do that would we want the government to create a really bad smartphone company it's a no i i think that there's plenty of people already in that space there are plenty of people in the media space uh... we don't need incumbents who are uh... little piggies at the trough of government funding to continue to do what they've been doing so i i completely uh... completely agree with that and on that colleges and universities side of things it

It's very clear. I mean, Harvard is just the most prominent example. Understand this, everyone. Harvard has been violating the Constitution for years with its admissions policies. Now, you could say at the time Harvard thought they were operating within. OK, fine. I'm not saying that we can hold them responsible after the fact in a legal sense. But I do think it's worth noting that Harvard has engaged in a long practice of discrimination. And when it comes to discrimination, just look at Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

places end up being punished or being watched very closely for historical discrimination in some cases for decades or more. The reality of discrimination law is that once you find a place that has discriminated under the law, they are under a dark cloud of suspicion for a very long time, legally speaking, mind you. Look at Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

Although I think now that Supreme Court's even looked at that and changed the formula, but put that aside. You know what I mean in general. I think, Clay, on this issue, Harvard has shown everybody that the plan is to continue to get the money, but to not have to abide by federal guidelines or... So...

Why should you have your cake and eat it too, Harvard? Amen. It's effectively a hedge fund that also has classes at this point. It's got an, what is it, $80 billion, $60 billion endowment? $53 billion endowment as most recently. We don't know what it's been for the last year and change. But to your point,

When you take federal dollars, you agree to be bound in some way by federal guidelines. And the most basic of federal guidelines is don't discriminate on the basis of race and make sure that everybody has an equal opportunity to be educated and they're not going to be discriminated against based on ethnicity, religion, anything else. They failed during the protests surrounding the October 7th related incidents and many other universities failed as well.

I told our team to get Dr. Larry Arnn. There was a great article interviewing him in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition. He is the president of Hillsdale College. Hillsdale made the decision, we want our educational mission to be completely independent of the United States government. And so we are not going to take any of their dollars. Hillsdale has way less money than Harvard does.

And they have managed to run their university independently without needing federal dollars. Why wouldn't that be the standard for Harvard? Unless Buck, they were feeding at the trough of special interest dollars. They've got a $53 billion endowment. They can't afford to run their university without taxpayer subsidies.

You would think. You would think. And, you know, Harvard, at one point, the reporting was that they were planning to just batten down the hatches and do without the federal funds. But I think they've realized, well, hold

Hold on. It would be for a number of years here. You start to do that math and there was hundreds of millions of dollars feel like it's it actually adds up even for Harvard. So this is this is a moment that we've been waiting for on the right for a long time, which is just more accountability. These universities have been given tremendous preferential treatment for this preferential treatment. Right. I mean, whether it's about the tax.

tax policy, supporting the student loans with government backstopping, which I think is a bad idea. Now even the discussion, although you know Trump is going to start Trump's

Department of Education. Not a Department of Education. Who's behind the loans? Who does the loans? Student loans. They're going to start underwriting. Yeah, it's a good question. I'm wondering who does the collection on that. I don't know. But anyway, they're going to start collecting money again. Because I was like, DOE, that would actually mean they do something that they're supposed to do. Yeah, so I think that you're going to see

more people paying attention to this issue than they have in a while because of that. And I also think that the universities have betrayed the...

mandate that they've implicitly been given by the american people which is to educate future leadership and make our people as smart and competitive in a global marketplace as possible instead they're educating a ton of foreigners okay start with that because the foreigners pay full freight no no uh help with the tuition whatever you go to a lot of the elite universities and everybody's from beijing and dubai this is just the truth not everybody but huge percentages of these classes

And they've become left wing indoctrination factories that are churning out kids who don't know anything. That's not good. So they're getting slapped down. I like it. I also would point out, I think there are massive lawsuits to be filed here. Some of these education loans are indefensible. For instance, you shouldn't be able to take out a loan of $200,000 to get a social work degree.

You can never pay it back. When your job... And look, I appreciate the people who take jobs that don't pay that well. But the fact that these universities would loan somebody, fuck, $200,000 to get a job where you're going to make $40,000 a year, it doesn't ever add up that you can ever pay these things off. To me, they're predatory. Also, I think this is a function of, hey, we should be teaching actual basic math and investment and understanding in schools because the people who agree to these loans...

I don't think they have any concept of how impossible it is to ever pay them back. If you're a lawyer or doctor, someone getting a master's degree in business or something like that, you could. I wouldn't even tell people to get an MBA. Look, I looked at getting an MBA from fancy places and I didn't do it. Now I'm sitting here with Clakes. I wanted a media instead.

I think advanced degrees, people need far more honesty in this discussion. Most advanced degrees are not worth very much, and a lot of advanced degrees are truly worthless. In fact, they put you deep in the hole. A perfect example of you.

Journalism. Don't ever get a master's in journalism. It is a waste. I don't even know how journalism schools still exist. It is a waste of your time. And a lot of master's degrees in the humanities, unless you are convinced you're going to get a teaching job, that is the only thing that they are worthwhile to do. And those are very hard to come by. Right, Clay? You look at this stuff. Most advanced degrees are a waste. I just don't think people do the math.

I don't think people do the math, and I think, unfortunately, we have a lot of people who don't understand how loans work and a lot of people who don't understand how interest rates work, and you don't even sit back and think how you're going to bankrupt yourself basically getting a degree that never pays for itself. I actually qualified for master's credit from Georgetown School of Foreign Service as an undergrad, so I got master's credit as an undergrad. You know what the master's credit was for? A class.

just like the classes I was taking in undergrad. I remember thinking, so I would just go to school for two more years to do two more years of reading books that I could read on my own? I don't think so. Lessons in life from Clay and Buck. As hard as the Israelis have tried to return to a normal life, difficult to do. Nearly every day there's talk of another missile attack on one of multiple fronts. You never know which direction it might be coming.

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Keep up with the biggest political comeback in world history on the Team 47 podcast. Clay and Buck highlight Trump replays from the week. Sundays at noon Eastern. Find it on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. In the fall of 1986, Ronald Reagan found himself at the center of a massive scandal that looked like it might bring down his presidency. Did you make a mistake in sending arms to Tehran, sir? No. No one was let go there.

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Please do. To hear the whole story, listen to Fiasco, Iran Contra on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back into Clay and Buck. We've got Congressman Chip Roy with us now. Sorry, I got my guest time slots confused here. But he's fantastic, and we appreciate him being here with us. Congressman Roy, appreciate you. And let's talk about this. Why are your colleagues all of a sudden taking these taxpayer-funded boondoggles down to El Salvador? What do they think they're going to prove with this?

Well, I was kind of hoping we were going to talk about A&M and UT baseball in Austin, but we'll get to that in a little bit. But look, we've got... My Democratic colleagues are doing what they do best right now. And what I mean by that is...

They very much believe, and I believe they mean this, they believe that non-citizens should vote. They believe that non-citizens should be able to flood into the United States, frankly, at whatever level they see fit, regardless of the law. And they believe that they're in...

better standing to try to go defend somebody who has very obvious ties to MS-13, with two courts having acknowledged that very strong reality or likelihood. And they're fine going down to try to defend them rather than standing up for the Americans who were hurt. Now, I mean, a lot of people have been saying this. I mean, there's nothing new about what I'm saying.

But look, I got to be very personal here. When I've gotten to know Alexis Nungere, the wonderful 28-year-old woman whose daughter Jocelyn was murdered last summer by Trende and Agua outside of Houston,

That's a real person, a real individual who lost their life directly as a consequence of the people released into our country. And now Democrats want to go to El Salvador to hold up as the poster child an individual who has an order of removal, who had his wife go file charges against him, who was stopped transporting a carload of illegals in a car.

and who has known affiliation with MS-13. And that is the poster child for who Democrats would have put front and center. Not Rachel Moran and her family, not Jocelyn Nungary's family, not Kayla Hamilton's family. And that's how out of touch Democrats are. But the good news is President Trump is trying to do the right thing. And Republicans in Congress hopefully are waking up to try to support what President Trump is doing.

How much of this is just a big structural issue? We were talking earlier in the show, Congressman, about the fact that this is just basically a math problem. If Biden is going to have, as he did, let in around 10 million illegals, and if you look at the rate with which Trump is able to deport, let's say he's going to be able to get 350,000 people from inside the country out,

Basic math would say it would take 30 years of that to get the 10 million that just came in in the last four years to say nothing of all the people who've come in before. How much of this is structural in that the president has to have the ability to get people out of the country as easily as the prior president had to let people into the country? That's the real battle here in essence, isn't it?

Yeah, that's very well stated. And so for those of us who in 2019, 2020, even under the Trump administration, who was dealing with the complexities of the law to try to secure the border himself, and ultimately COVID was a part of that as well. But then all through the Biden administration, when we were all saying, guys, they're doing this on purpose. They're violating and abusing parole and asylum in our country.

We put in place these laws to try to help people, and they're abusing these to flood the zone. It's intentional because they know how hard it will be to remove them.

Right now, think about this. Democrats are doubling down on this guy. Imagine what they'll do when it is the grandmother who is not a criminal or doesn't have a criminal history who came here illegally and was wrongfully paroled into the United States, put ahead of other people, flooding our zone, burdening our systems and Medicaid and hospital and all that. But

but isn't a criminal. You know how that will go. And to your point about the numbers, okay, this is why the president and why his team are fighting this so hard. The president needs to have significant authority, and I believe does,

to push back and release people who were wrongfully put into the United States who are citizens of other countries. It is the only way to have a sovereign nation. I believe that the president, I believe the vice president, I believe Stephen Miller, I believe Tom Homan, I believe they are all correct when they are trying to push back on that notion.

Speaking to Congressman Chip Roy out of Texas, a congressman. And what is it that they I asked Clay this yesterday. We tried to walk through this. So to make the Democrats who are going down to El Salvador, not for vacation, but to meet with Ebrego Garcia, to make them happy.

Trump would negotiate a I guess a deal or put in a request with Bukele, the president of El Salvador, to bring this illegal back to America so that then we could say, hey, he's an illegal and send him back to El Salvador. Or or is it just that they want to bring him back and then try to jam up the process so he gets to stay? Like what is their preferred outcome?

The goal of Democrats is to empower courts to be able to process every single individual who was paroled into the United States or released into the United States under asylum laws under Biden, which is millions of people.

And to be able to say that each one of them has an individual claim and due process right to get into court to adjudicate the claim. And I don't believe that is accurate. Right. They had an administrative process for going through and determining what their status is. But they do not like this is not due process in the sense for all your listeners out there right there. These individuals aren't charged with a crime like murder.

As a non-citizen, they come in here and they murder somebody. I mean, some of them are, by the way. But in this question, it's not that as to whether, okay, are they getting due process? Are they getting a lawyer? Are they getting a chance to go into court and prove their guilt or innocence? This is literally a question of status. And it's an administrative process. And they're trying to get into court. So, yeah, I mean, Stephen Miller outlined this pretty well when he described the situation with the police.

with Garcia down in El Salvador is saying, well, okay, you want to fly him back here? Well, we can release him to some other country, right? So even if you accept that we can't send him to El Salvador because he's threatened by some other gang, which was his position five years ago, he would still be deportable to another country because a judge has already issued an order of removal.

And that is not, to the best of my understanding, appealable other than in the context of the administrative proceedings in question. It's not a due process claim. So this is what Democrats are trying to do. They're trying to game the system in order to achieve the objective, their objective, of NGOs going into court and filing suit on every individual who is released into our country so the president cannot release or remove them voluntarily.

by class as Joe Biden allowed them to come in by class. Congressman Chip Roy with us right now. Earlier this show, we started off with a clip that I bet you've seen that has gone viral of Elizabeth Warren trying to explain why she in any way backed the mental and physical fitness of Joe Biden.

I'm curious, what is the long-term fallout in your mind of the biggest lie that's been told in a very, very long time when it comes to the legacy media? And also, behind the scenes were Democrats in Congress, were they acknowledging that they thought there were issues with Biden but they wouldn't say it publicly? How much discussion do you think there was

among Democrats about what all of us, and certainly we've been talking about on this show for years, could clearly see? Well, to the second question, which relates to the first, for the most part, my Democrat colleagues, you may have a handful of friends who would very honestly and openly acknowledge their concerns when you'd have a private conversation, but they were very tight-lipped about it publicly because...

The overwhelming motivating factor for Democrats for the last nine years has been hostility to Donald Trump. That is literally been their entire motivating factor. So it did not matter to them that Joe Biden was very clearly mentally not present. I don't know if you all remember, but last July, after the debate, when they were

I think we lost him there for a sec. It broke up. See if we can get him back here a sec to finish up the interview. The other thing that's floating around out there, Buck, is all these books coming out,

I wonder on some level whether the Abreu Garcia conversation and everything else is a desperate attempt to keep people from looking at all of these stories that come out. I understand it's in the past, but it's such a miscalculation to me to focus on Abreu Garcia as the front-facing element of the Trump deportation policies.

that I just find it almost incomprehensibly dumb that this could be as calculated of a decision as it appears to be. That you could decide, hey, this is the ground upon which we want to fight. And I think we've got Congressman Chip Roy back with us right now.

Yeah, I'm sorry about that, Clay. All I was saying was I introduced a resolution calling on the vice president to carry out the 25th Amendment, right? And why I did that was because it was very – I wanted to call the question because it was important that the question get called. But to your point, Democrats – let's get back to the core basis, which, by the way, relates to the border issue and immigration.

They don't care. It's all about political power. It is literally all about political power. And I wish I didn't have to say that, right? I mean, it oughtn't to be that way. I ought to be able to sit down with some of my Democrat colleagues and figure out, like, issues that are important for our people. But right now it is animus towards Trump, and it is about opening the floodgates to people to try to build a political base for themselves for power. And that's it. That is driving everything they are doing. It's about political power.

Congressman Roy, I appreciate you being with us, sir. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

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