CLAY: I think he is… I don’t really know how Rex Chapman became a thing on Twitter. So for those of you who don’t know — and I know you Kentucky people are like, “I know who Rex Chapman is.” He’s a legendary basketball player from the University of Kentucky, had a pretty good NBA career as well, and then descended into, I believe, drug addiction that led to his being arrested for robbing an Apple store. So along the way, he started posting on social media.
BUCK: Shoplifting?
CLAY: Oh, yeah, like thousands of dollars. We’ll have the crew look up the exact amount, but he stole thousands of dollars of Apple gear and was arrested, says it was during his drug addiction, decided that he was going to become clean — hopefully is — and then started posting on social media all the time. And initially was kind of funny before he got political, he would post funny videos and just say “block or charge.” And it would be like a dog running and knocking over a guy and you’d be like for basketball purposes was this a block or a charge.
And that’s where I initially saw him. And then he just at some point went full on left-wing loon mask police, just really crazy, even crazy for sports media, which is super left wing. And so yesterday he posted. I just want to read these series of tweets ’cause I think it’s emblematic of white liberals, white left wingers who feel very comfortable, first of all, criticizing Clarence Thomas but also policing — this is the same thing Joe Biden did — what black people can or cannot do based on their race. Remember Joe Biden saying, you ain’t black if you’re not voting for me?
BUCK: This is part of a broader trend, and it’s been true for a long time, white liberals think as long as they are super woke —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — and they are allowed by their own side, they do get away with it — to be really racist toward black conservatives. Bottom line, white liberals think they can say whatever they want. They can be racist as long as the target is clearly a conservative who is black.
CLAY: So here’s this series of tweets which is really… I don’t think Rex Chapman is very smart., and I’m not saying that as an insult. I just I don’t think he’s a very smart human. So he puts himself in some of these situations where logically you can’t even… By the way, thanks to the staff. In September of 2015 — so wasn’t that long ago — Rex Chapman was arrested and charged with shoplifting $14,000 worth of merchandise from an Apple store in Scottsdale, Arizona. I’m assuming, maybe he was just acting out. It seems like —
BUCK: That sounds like he was in there with a Santa Claus bag and was just throwing laptops in it. You know what I mean?
CLAY: And, by the way, September of 2015, he was ahead of his time because nowadays everybody can go in and steal and it’s just like totally acceptable. But $14,000 worth of merchandise, that is a great deal of merchandise inside of an Apple store. So that was the downfall of Rex Chapman, and I then he’s now gotten really active on Twitter. He was memorably one of the CNN+ employees that was —
BUCK: RIP CNN+, RIP.
CLAY: Yeah, he’s CNN+ and they decided they were gonna have Rex Chapman traveling around the world doing interviews which may be the worst pitch for a television show or digital show I’ve ever heard. But here’s what he tweeted, which is weird:
So there’s white people there and Clarence Thomas was there.
Again, super weird. And then it gets weirder. “Clarence Thomas would last 20-30 seconds in an NBA locker room. Why have you never seen Clarence Thomas at an NBA game? As in — ever? Bill Clinton used to come to our games in Landover with the Bullets. Clarence Thomas – never.”
So he moves from, “Look at Clarence Thomas with these white people,” to basically isn’t black because Rex Chapman never saw him ever come to an NBA basketball game, and also “Clarence Thomas would last 20 to 30 seconds in an NBA locker room”? I don’t even understand what that means. There are lots of conservatives in NBA locker rooms. Despite the fact that sports media and sports they try to claim is all woke, lots of athletes agree with us, Buck, a lot of them listen to us.
BUCK: I think with someone like Rex Chapman — who I never heard of until you told me about him — the only reason this is noteworthy in any sense and for us to talk about it on a platform with millions of listeners. You really saw, after this Supreme Court decision last week, talking about the Roe v. Wade decision written by Alito as the primary justice but signed on to by Thomas, there was such a particular singling out and hatred of and undermining of Justice Clarence Thomas, who, as we’ve said before, is a national treasure, everyone knows him says he’s an amazing human being, on top of being a legal giant and somebody of tremendous principle, tremendous courage and character. And his life story as we discussed as well, Pinpoint, Georgia, right?
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: Incredible to come from Pinpoint, Georgia, very humble origins and rise all the way to Yale Law School, Supreme Court, amazing story. But it is fashionable on the left still to trash black conservatives, honestly, any person of color who is conservative is able to just — and the left, they don’t police it. They don’t have a problem with it. The rules all of a sudden are so different, wokeness goes on total hiatus the moment someone’s a conservative who happens to be a person of color, and it’s grotesque. And it just shows you, this is not principle. This is about people looking for emotional and social validation of their ideas through being nasty. I mean, I always thought that Elon Musk, Clay, when he said that wokeness is just really about being mean to people and thinking you’re a good person while you do it, that’s what you see with these attacks on Clarence Thomas.
CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt. And it is wild to me what people can be able to get away with saying if they play the woke card. Because effectively what Clarence Thomas is being accused of here is not being black by a white guy. So a white guy in Rex Chapman is policing what is acceptable behavior and standards for a black guy. And it’s allowed. And I think, to your point, Buck, Alito wrote the opinion.
There’s no doubt Clarence Thomas has been the most criticized in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. And even a guy like Keith Olbermann referred to Amy Coney Barrett as a paralegal. So if you are female or if you are black and you happen to have some conservative political opinions, then the usual racism and sexism allegations are never trotted out. They don’t apply at all. You can say anything and attack people as much as you want.
BUCK: That’s why we have to call them out, show the hypocrisy, show the disgraceful nature of the way they go after people like Justice Clarence Thomas.