Confusion on the Left
“The anti-Trump opposition is confused, my friends,” Buck mused to start off Monday’s show. “People know they are supposed to be opposed to Trump, but they’re not clear what the accepted policy is regarding the Syria strikes.”
Buck offered his theory that the Progressives operate similar to Soviet-style groupthink, that one has to be in lockstep with the prevailing opinions.
“Progressives need to know what they can say before they say it,” he observed. “They need a slogan to repeat, to drown out the opposition.”
They’re still trying to figure out the slogan on Trump.
Turning to the strike itself, Buck offered a measured endorsement.
“The strike doesn’t worry me all that much, though there’s a possibility there could be a miscalculation, a mistake,” he said. “The only action that would prevent Assad from doing what he does is force. There’s no easy way out here.”
To dispel the notion that the Syrians might be against this, Buck played a clip from Kassam Eid, who had survived a chemical weapons attack in Syria in 2013, in which Eid harshly criticized the Obama administration for failing to act.
“Trump did something, Obama did nothing. Over the many years he could have taken action, he did nothing. How does the media handle this? They’re under orders: Trump is bad. Even though Assad is a bloody dictator, they’d rather peddle narrative that Trump is the greatest threat to the Syrian people.
Tragedy on Palm Sunday
Buck then covered the bombing of a Coptic Christian church in Egypt on Palm Sunday, a tragedy for which ISIS has claimed responsibility.
“When you have to have major security in churches in Europe, these may be more than isolated incidents,” Buck said. “And the West, for fear of seeming like its playing favorites, does not come down hard on this issue, they do not express the due outrage to protect the Christian minorities in their midst.”
Buck tied this discussion to one of the points he’s been repeating since the chemical attack: that the people who said Assad’s chemical weapons had all been turned in are the same ones who assured us Iran would not get a nuclear weapon.
“Pretty sure I was one of the first to point that out,” Buck joked, after noticing that a headline bearing a similar warning had appeared that day on the Fox News front page.
Majoring in Fascism, Minoring in Black Lives Matter
Returning to the theme of restricted free speech on college campuses that he’s covered recently, Buck invited Heather Mac Donald, author of The War on Cops and a senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, to the Freedom Hut to describe her experience being shouted down and menaced by protesters at Claremont McKenna College, and again at UCLA.
“It’s quite amazing how little free speech there is on campuses today,” Mac Donald began. “Students believe they have the absolute right to shut down speech they find racist.”
Mac Donald recounted the harrowing escape she had to make to survive her talk, leaving in a police vehicle after an increasingly violent mob closed in around the room where her talk was being given.
“They go under the name antifascist,” Mac Donald said, referring to the protesters, “but this is the most garden-variety form of fascism, to use brute force, and to prevent their fellow students from making up their own minds.”
Mac Donald ran through the positions she’s taken in her book and elsewhere.
“The Black Lives Matter narrative is a complete fraud. Everything that the public thinks it knows about policing from Black Lives Matter is wrong. Reverse it and you have the truth.”
As for the protesters, “They presumably believe that I am a fascist and white nationalist, which is preposterous,” she said. “I would hope that some of the faculty know that that is a ludicrous assessment and put themselves up between myself and the mob.”
High-Five, Mitch!
Quickly, Buck addressed the “happy side of things:” that is, the swearing-in of Neil Gorsuch as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Buck played clips from an emotional Gorsuch, who accepted his seat promising “great things” to the American people.
“President Trump gets a tremendous win,” said Buck, “and Mitch McConnell gets a high-five as well. And we should celebrate the wins, my friends, because there might be a tough road ahead.”
“For those of use who were not sold on the Trump thing from the beginning, the Supreme Court was the argument that nobody could in good faith refute for why to support Hillary over Trump if you were a conservative,” summarized Buck. “And he has delivered.”
In Soviet Russia, Airline Flies You
Finally, Buck focused on the wretched story of the unfortunate United Airlines customer who was injured while being forcibly removed from a plane after being told that the flight had been overbooked.
“Flying an American airline carrier is like stepping back into a timewarp to the Soviet Union,” Buck joked. “They tell you what to eat, they tell you when to read, they tell you when to sit down and stand up, they tell you when you can walk around.”
“Airlines have gotten worse,” Buck said. “Unlike so many aspects of our lives, yOu are getting worse service in greater discomfort than you ever did before.”
“My iPhone can do the work of the whole NATO alliance in 1945, but they can’t change my flight for less than $150? The seat change fee is grotesque profiteering.”
Buck attributed the problem to monopolies helped along by regulations and bureaucratic red tape.
“We’ve gone from ten major carriers to four.”
“It’s revolting that you could be a paying customer with a ticket that you bought and you’re not getting on this flight because we’re giving it to someone else,” said Buck. “I hope this gets the wheels going for deregulation and increased competition.”