CLAY: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said we are going to have vaccine mandates, and I think that would have gotten a lot discussion. Instead, Andrew Cuomo kind of soaked up all the oxygen. Here is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explaining why that is necessary.
DE BLASIO: The Delta variant has changed the game. Unless we want to run the risk of going back to restrictions and having our freedom taken away and people losing their jobs again, it’s really clear what we have to do. People have to get vaccinated, and — and we had a long period where it was voluntary. There was incentives. It was compassionate and kind. But now it’s time to get a little blunter about the fact that everyone needs to get vaccinated for the good of their family, their community, their country. And a lot of people, I think, are close to that point, but they needed a little more of a push.
CLAY: Unless we want our freedoms taken away, you must do exactly what the government tells you to do, Buck Sexton.
BUCK: I love that, right? Unless you are willing to sacrifice your freedom, we’re just gonna have to take away your freedom. (chuckles) This is quite a formulation.
CLAY: The logic is amazing.
BUCK: And this is a classic de Blasio. I mean, this guy has done more to destroy the city of New York than most of his harshest critics could have ever really imagined. The city has never been fully back. It is not the tourist hub that it was. It is not the dynamic place of just incredible economic engine room capacity that we’ve seen in the past.
Instead, it’s just, you know, kind of a little bit back. We were out last night, I mean, under the new rules in a few weeks, Mr. Travis, you’re not gonna be able to have that amazing New York City brisket that you are perhaps a little shy about telling your people in actual the rest of America.
CLAY: Yeah, it is.
BUCK: It was pretty good. Pretty good.
CLAY: It’s really kind of the rubber-hits-the-road moment for a lot of people. And you’re gonna have to make this decision as a New York City resident. I’ll tell you this. And I heard from a lot of people after we talked it yesterday. I think there are a lot of people out there where I live that might come to New York City on vacation that are interested in spending their money after they weren’t able to travel around in 2020.
They’re gonna take New York City off of their tourist destination because you might want to come up here and go to a Broadway play or you might want to go out to a good restaurant or stay in a nice hotel and you’re gonna bring your family up and you’re gonna spend a lot of your hard-earned cash in New York City.
They’re gonna go to other cities now, and I don’t know that de Blasio is so tone-deaf to what the rest of the world is thinking that they haven’t even contemplated this. But, Buck, you’re putting so many of these bars and restaurants… You were talking about how a lot of the bars that you’re used to in your neighborhood are gone.
BUCK: Closed. Gone. Never coming back. There’s no sense of full reopen really here in New York. I think we’ve just gotten so used to being downtrodden; so used to feeling like, “Oh, any scraps from the table of the freedom that has been taken from us we’re supposed to be thankful for,” and this is yet another moment in time where you’re seeing that play out.
They’re threatening us with this in New York City. You ask, “What am I gonna do?” I don’t really know what the answer is because I can’t be barred from all public accommodations in my own city, and that’s what they say they’re about to do. Meanwhile, we’ll talk about what the Boston’s acting mayor is saying about this coming up later. She’s got some strong words against the vaccine mandate.
CLAY: A Democrat, black mayor.
BUCK: She’s a Democrat, black, female mayor, and it’s because it’s gonna dramatically impact the Latino and African-American — disproportionately impact those communities in New York and would do so in other cities based on vaccination rates. This is a window into the Democrat mind, actually. It’s, in essence, a distillation of Democrat hypocrisy. It’s like we’ve taken it all the way down to its base layer.
ID for people to vote? Horrible and racist! Vaccine passports? Totally fine! You say, “Well, hold on a second. There’s disproportionate impact of IDs. If there’s disproportionate impact on the IDs and therefore it’s bad, how is that not a problem with vaccine passports?” The answer is, “Because we say so. Watch CNN more. Stop asking questions.”
CLAY: I think, again, the practical impact… I think about this from the context of a dad who takes vacations with his family. I’m not gonna take my family to New York City if I can’t go to a restaurant or I can’t go to a ball game or I can’t go to a play. And if I’m saying that, there are millions of people like me who would enjoy bringing their family to New York City to show them the city and experience New York on a vacation that are not gonna make that choice.
The bars and restaurants that are already struggling, you’re taking away certain percentage of their overall business choice you’re pulling a lot of those millions of tourists out of that flowchart. I know people like to make fun of the people in the red states like me. There’s a lot of people with money to spend that get spent in blue states on vacation. “Guess what? Another trip to Disney World, kids! We ain’t going up to check out the Statue of Liberty or Central Park.” There are a lot of real people will make that choice.