Overtime – Episode #669: John McWhorter, Peter Hamby

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maul. Oh wow, we get to talk extra.
He is a Columbia University professor and opinion writer at the New York Times, one of my favorites. John McWhorter is over here.
And he hosts Snapchat's Good Luck America and is a founding partner at Puck News. Peter Hamby back with us.
All right, here's what the people want to know. The people.
Peter, why this is just for you, I think we can all talk about it. What explains Donald Trump's appeal to young men? I saw today that the gender gap, I think, is the widest.
I mean, it's very predictable. I mean, the women are much more for Kamala, and the men are much more for Trump, generally.
But it's not predictable if you look at past elections where voters under 30, generally men and women, went for Democrats. This is remarkable.
I think to explain it... Wait, wait.
You're talking about under 30? Yeah, the under 30 gender gap. Why? What's going on elections.
What's going on? Bigger? Much bigger. So in 2020, young men and young women voted for Joe Biden at roughly the same rate.
Over the last four years, and now with Kamala Harris, young women are voting for Kamala Harris at that same level, if not more. Kamala Harris has barely moved the needle with young men.
They have gone more toward Trump. There's a lot of reasons for that.
I think Trump has exploited culture war stuff. You know, he appears on hyper-masculine podcasts, and he just seems like a fun bro who's not going to ban your zins, you know? But this could actually be...
This is a real issue for Kamala Harris, though. Like, this could be fatal for her campaign.
So, if Democrats need... Democrats need to win 60% of the youth vote to win the White House.
Hillary came up short. Obama did it.
Biden did it. Kamala Harris is right now at, like, 55% of the youth vote.
If she doesn't get to 60, she could lose the election, and it's because young men, Gen Z men, are breaking to Trump. They're not going to vote.
Yeah, but... I mean, I agree they like him better, but they're the ones who are going to stay home.
And, you know, he's the towel-snapping camp counselor. You could call him having a good sense of humor.
But the thing is, Joe Biden was such an underwhelming prospect that I think it made an awful lot of young men, including of color, think that Trump would be the better deal. I imagine a lot of them would find, you know, the exuberance and the promise and what is it, the joy of Kamala to be something more exciting.
And so I would hope that that might help tip some of this, but would have to really, you know, decisively tip it. Okay.
What does the panel think of Trump promising free IVF? Yes, in vitro fertilization treatments and criticizing Florida's six-week abortion ban. Well, it's because it's musical chairs season.
It's where we, the music starts again and suddenly Kamala's four fracking and he loves abortion now. You know, it's like that when the music stops, pick an issue.
and he's running scared. And, you know, he was never pro-life in the first place.
And so all of this is fairly predictable. But it shows his desperation.
Yeah, that's his biggest vulnerability among any issue, is abortion rights and women's health care. So he's saying whatever he needs to say.
But if he gets into office to fund free IVF for everyone in the country, like, he's going to have to get Republicans in Congress on board for that and Republicans in the Senate. I don't think, like, those are much more rank-and-file, like, dogmatic social conservatives than Donald Trump.
Remind me what the bug up their ass is about IVF. I mean, I certainly understand abortion.
You know, there's a baby growing in the womb. I get it.
It's going to be a human. Doesn't bother me.
But yes, it is murder. Again, doesn't bother me that it is.
But it's not a human yet. But IVF is just, we're talking petri dishes, right? You're not supposed to mess with that.
That's what many people think. You're supposed to let...
Oh, I see. Great man upstairs.
It goes back to that stem cell debate that George Bush had. Yes.
Remember? It's just like life. Laugh.
We support laugh. Having covered so many Republican events for 15 years of my life, laugh is something you just hear all the time.
But, yeah, I just... I don't think Republicans want...
They might be okay with IVF as a, like, public statement. I just think putting their votes and federal money behind it, I just don't think Republicans in the House or the Senate would actually do that if Trump became president.
Okay. Do you think, for a panel, college campuses have an anti-Semitism problem? Oh, I'll file this under duh.
I was going to say, Max. They do.
They do. And I would say they have an ignorance problem, not knowing things, and that leads to lots of other sub-problems like anti-Semitism.
Oh, yeah, I mean... There...
There can be no doubt that the sorts of things that Jewish students are supposed to put up with every day, based on those protests and so much more, if anything like that were said, even once,

if anybody got into some encampment and said DEI has got to die against black students,

that person would be sent that day to another planet. And if that's the case, then you can't

say the Jewish kids have to put up with it because they're white. That won't do.

And that's what we were going through last week. What are you expecting for the fall semester there at Columbia this year? You know what? I'm on sabbatical all year.
I've heard it's going to be more of the same, but I hope that the discussion can be a little bit more, to use definition to, of the word Pacific than it was last spring, and I suspect that it will. But there will be further adventures and further controversy.
I guarantee the kids don't know what the word Pacific means. Well, I'm trying to.
No, I know, but they don't know. They think it is an ocean.
It's an ocean. But they don't know it means peaceful.
I once was at a college called Occidental, and I asked the kids if they knew it. Not a kid who knew.
They went to the college. They didn't know what it was? Yeah, I explained.
It's the opposite of what you say, Oriental for the East, Occidental for the West. Not one kid knew what the...
So, the curiosity level... Did they think it meant something else?

Or did they just think it was a pretty name? They just had

never fucking thought about it.

Well, is what it is.

Life is complex. Yes.

Okay.

Final question. Trump

seems to have picked his nicknames

for the two opponents.

Comrade Kamala. I didn't see this.
I'm taking this person's word. Tampon Tim.
So, I mean, I get, I don't agree with, but I get Comrade Kamala. I get that's what, you know, she's a communist.
But tampon Tim, I, I, I, I, I'm not, he's a towel-snapping camp counselor. It's repulsive, but it's funny.
Thank you very much. You're a great audience.
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