Southwest Airlines Employees Walk Out Over Vaccine Mandate

BUCK: I know a lot of you right now, at the top of your minds — top of minds all over the country — is it feels like for the first time we have had a major, concerted pushback against vaccine mandates, a major crossing of the Rubicon in a sense here, because you’ve got people that are finally standing up here and saying they’re not going to show up for work.

And enough of them are doing it that it’s causing a major corporation — which, of course, now we all realize these big companies are acting as arms of the federal government in federal policy. And the Feds have a lot of leverage over them, have a lot of ability to dictate what they can and can’t do. So what’s gone on here?

Southwest Airlines over the weekend had thousands of flights — I think it was over 2,000 flights canceled, a few hundred more canceled today. And initially we were told, because of the narrative, this was the result of weather. And then that people when they looked and they looked online they saw, “Hold on a second.

“There’s not really any severe weather to speak of in the country. It’s actually really nice out there. So what are you talking about?” And then they changed it to, “Oh, it’s actually the weather and staffing shortages. But don’t worry! Don’t worry! It’s not staffing shortages caused by opposition to the vaccine mandate” that Southwest Airlines and all these airlines have put into effect and are firing people over.

So, this was a time when you started to see a couple things. One, they’ve gone too far, and now enough Americans are realizing it. So the lockdowners, the Fauciites are beginning to be a little concerned about their next steps for the first time. The next steps are pretty clear, I think, depending on what the virus does. We keep thinking we control the virus; we really don’t.

We try to do some things here and there. Most of what we do is utterly meaningless. “Oh, no! Put more rubbing alcohol on your hands.” We ever I go there, handing me hand sanitizer. Haven’t we figured this out? IT doesn’t do anything. This is like an emotional support system for people. This is a little safety blanky courtesy of Dr. Fauci. (impression) “Rub your hands with the rubbing alcohol.

“It’ll maybe mitigate some…” No, it doesn’t do anything. It’s an aerosolized virus. But people are seeing this finally and recognizing, “Oh, wait. If we do push back…” Not one person, right? One person refusing to wear their mask on a plane is someone whose day is ruined, whose trip is over, and who’s gonna be banned from the airline forever.

Hundreds or thousands of pilots, airline attendants, those are people who if they act together, they can bring an airline to its knees, and that seems to be what’s going on right now. Will it persist? Will they stay with it? I don’t know. But at least it’s the beginning of it. I often say to people, and this goes my feelings about how it is to be, say, a conservative on a college campus ’cause I speak to two college-age conservatives regularly, ’cause they reach out.

They listen to this show; they listen to my podcast. By the way, you can subscribe Buck Sexton podcast in the morning. I put out a podcast every day. It’s only about 30 minutes long. So please check it out when you get a chance; subscribe to it. It’s the Buck Sexton Show. It’s kind of a quick rundown, then we come on air.

I use it, really, as a warmup or preparation and getting in gear here for the three hours we do on radio. But I speak to college kids, and they’ll say, “Shouldn’t I write a conservative essay in my political science class?” And I always tell them, “I would advise against it. I would advise that you do what you have to do.

“You don’t have the power to fight back effectively. This is a question of tactics, right? This is a question of what works,” and I will tell people, to put it in very easy terms, “The difference between, you know, charging the machine gun nest and its an act of heroism and bravery and charging the machine gun nest and it’s unwise, is, ‘Do you have a plan to take it?'”

Is it conceivable? Is it worth taking the risk or are you just going to get mowed down, so to speak? If you’re the one person on an airplane who refuses to put your mask on, you’re getting mowed down. They’re gonna bring security on. I’ve seen them do it. (laughing) I saw them do it when I was riding on Spirit airlines, which we’ve talked about a fair amount as well.

They’ll pull you off and they’ll ban you from ever flying that airline again. They’ll take really serious sanction against you. But if it’s the pilots, that’s a little different. If it’s the airline attendants, it starts to feel quite different. And they know this. The Fauciites are aware of it at some level. They have an understanding of what’s really at stake here, what’s really going on.

And so, the initial reaction was to lie about why this was happening. Think about that for a moment. Oh, the first corporate statements out of Southwest and news media, too, were, “Oh, yeah, and then it was staffing shortages,” but sudden staffing shortages that have nothing to do the vaccine mask mandates? Really?

They’re sure the vaccine mandates aren’t causing the shortages but something else is. What is it? Oh, it’s the weather! But it’s not the weather, right? They were running in circles. It didn’t make sense. What you see is lying to the American people about the cause of a major workers’ strike that has crippled an airline. It seems very Soviet, doesn’t it?

It felt like a little tour of what it must have been like to be in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, you know? All of a sudden, “Oh, there’s not the government lying to you about why something is happening and why you can’t get home. Your flights aren’t actually gonna be going at all, never mind being on time.”

That’s how invested they are in protecting this narrative. That’s how insistent they are that we can’t know. Once the people find out that they can do what the left does (unfortunately) so effectively, which is direct action and concerted action, the use of power. The left understands how to get in a position of and wield power. All right?

This is what they do in corporate America. This is what they do in the academy, universities. It’s what they’ve done in Hollywood and the news media for decades. It’s not that they build it all. It’s not that they’re the ones… It’s certainly not because they’re so good at it, whatever it is, whatever profession or area we’re talking about.

It’s because they go in and like a virus, they replicate themselves and take over. They go in and they block out everybody else. So they don’t allow for the competition of ideas. They don’t allow for people to have a different way. They go in and they go scorched earth. Now, on our side you’re seeing people that are finally saying:

“If we don’t draw a line here on a vaccine mandate for airline employees, it is obvious the next step is going to be vaccination mandates,” assuming the caseload stays high in the winter, which I think is likely. But I can’t tell you that for sure. Unlike Fauci, I don’t pretend to know everything and I’m actually right a lot more than Fauci is, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Isn’t that amazing? I’m not the only one. But people without MDs somehow are more right about “the science” than Fauci is. We see this and we understand finally that if people push back effectively, if they work together, they can actually create a different strategic imperative here. They can create a different calculation of the risks for the other side.

Wait. We’re gonna keep pushing this? They’ve gotten away to this point without ever having to step back and say, “Okay. We’re suffering too much as a consequence of the mandate. That has not happened anywhere. In fact, what you see is in New York City and Los Angeles and places where they’ve really cracked down and instituted mandates, the takeaway from the people, the takeaway from the tyrants is, “Oh, wow, look at that.”

If you threaten people, if you make it so they won’t be able to pay their mortgage and you threaten to take their career away from them… Remember, in Oregon they’re not just firing nurses. They’re firing them and then trying to take away their nursing licenses so they can’t get a job elsewhere! Yeah, it turns out when you use force, you can often get your way.

But there is another part of that. There’s a corollary. There’s an addendum. When you use force to make millions of people do things they don’t want to do, they become angry. And when you use force based upon the premise of “the science” and it turns out you’re ignoring the science, particularly on something like natural immunity, which we’ve seen, they ignore it.

They just pretend like it doesn’t matter because it gets in the way of their preferred policy. They act like it’s fact but it’s really opinion, and it’s opinion rooted in politics. That’s the basis for these mandates. And now people are saying, “Enough.” Now they’re deciding not only will they… As an individual, you getting fired, and 99% of your office staying put?

That doesn’t have the impact that one would see, right? You don’t have a plan in that instance. Now, I’m not saying there’s no need to stand on principle. Some people, it’s important to them as an individual to stand on principle, but if you’re looking for change, if you’re looking to fight back, you need, in a sense, an ideological army.

You need people who will go along with you in this. And for the first time it seems we really have that. I was hoping we would get to mass noncompliance over masks many months ago. We still haven’t really gotten there. We certainly haven’t gotten there in blue states. Those of you in red states, you’ve been there for many, many months.

Some of you have been there for 18 months. But in the blue states and even purple states there’s still all these mask mandates that are in place, all these mitigation measures that are expected, the stupidity of the social distancing reminder signs everywhere. It’s like we’ve turned into some version of North Korea.

But instead of the member of the Kim Dynasty, it’s little Fauci everywhere showing up, telling you where to go, what you can do, what you can eat, who you can see. Maybe now — maybe — it’s too much for enough of us that they know they won’t get away with it that much longer. I’m hopeful. It’s not clear. I’m hopeful.