Overtime – Episode #692: Douglas Murray, Sen. Tina Smith, Matt Welch

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Speaker 3 Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Speaker 4 All right, you suffers. He is a best-selling author.
His new book is called On Democracies and Death Cults. Douglas Murray, to my left,

Speaker 4 to my right, and editor-at-large of Reason Magazine and co-host of the fifth column podcast, Matt Welchin. She is a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Teenage Smith.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 5 Here are the questions from the actual people. For Douglas, what is your reaction to the UK Supreme Court declaring that the definition of a woman is, well, we should include you in this too.

Speaker 6 It's about women.

Speaker 5 Is based on biological sex and excludes transgender people. Yeah, this was a big ruling this week in England.
The Supreme Court there, definition of a woman is biological sex.

Speaker 5 To put it in shorthand, J.K. Rowling won.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 5 J.K.

Speaker 7 Rowling won, everyone who said this for years has won. All the, particularly women who've been defamed and lied about and bullied and chased and much more for years, they were right.

Speaker 7 And I just think, apart from being a statement of the obvious, isn't it amazing that the best legal minds in Britain spent years having to work out the first thing we knew as a species?

Speaker 4 But just to be clear,

Speaker 5 we're not saying there's not such a thing as trans, right? We're not saying there's not such a thing as someone who is, quote unquote, born in the wrong body.

Speaker 5 I don't think people get born in the wrong body now. Oh, I do.
I do. Yeah.
I mean, I think there's a default setting for humans. Like, we should acknowledge that.

Speaker 5 It's not just every time there's a baby. Ooh, who knows what the fuck it is?

Speaker 6 That's crazy.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 there are

Speaker 8 variations of homosexuality.

Speaker 2 That's a continuum.

Speaker 5 But it's how we handle that.

Speaker 5 I mean, and I think we would agree that children, and

Speaker 5 this is where America is now an outlier country. We're the only country that went full, and I guess Trump was reversing it, but certainly under Biden, who went fully toward that.

Speaker 5 Like, we don't care what age, kids can self-diagnose themselves. I mean, that to me was going way too far on this.
Again, nobody just comes back to the sensible center.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, to me, the sensible sensible center is that like you respect people, you trust parents, you let parents figure out what to do with their kids, and you don't need a bunch of politicians in Washington to be missing.

Speaker 4 That is not the Democratic position, at least here in California.

Speaker 2 That's my position.

Speaker 4 I'm good. I'm good.

Speaker 4 I think that's where the Democratic Party issue.

Speaker 5 That is not the position that we've had here in California, which is like, don't tell the parents what the kids are doing at school.

Speaker 5 And you really alienate voters. Parents are voters.
When you're not a parent yet, you know, it's like, oh, voting, whatever.

Speaker 7 Sex is not a spectrum. I mean, it's male and female.
There are some people with very unusual conditions who deserve absolute sympathy and support.

Speaker 7 But that does not mean that we're a hermaphroditic species. We're just not.

Speaker 6 No, but not.

Speaker 5 No, not the whole species. But this goes back, I mean, like, I mean, I don't want to use the term chicks with dicks, but I could.

Speaker 2 You did.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 5 this goes back to like ancient Rome. And like, there was always people who were like, not

Speaker 2 quite want.

Speaker 10 It's not hard to get to toleration and acceptance without rewriting biology. Right.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 10 It's a normal. That's

Speaker 2 your normal sir. 700.

Speaker 5 What is the legacy of Paul Revere's BidDot Ride, which was 250 years ago today?

Speaker 5 The fact that no one under 40 knows what the fuck I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 That's the legacy of that.

Speaker 4 Maybe 60.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. Maybe 60.

Speaker 9 Well, maybe the legacy is that we decided we didn't want a king, and oh, what the fuck, here we have one.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 8 There you go.

Speaker 5 What does the panel think of RFK Jr. announcing he will find the cause of autism by September of this year?

Speaker 10 I think that's when OJ finds the real killer.

Speaker 8 I think it's the...

Speaker 2 I mean.

Speaker 4 Well, he's dead, so that's not going to happen.

Speaker 5 Well, I would say, you know, this is why people think he's a quack, because you're not going to put a date on something they've been looking into for 30 years

Speaker 5 and say, we're going to have it by September. It's not going to be, oh, it's the gummy bears.

Speaker 2 That might be something.

Speaker 9 That might be something you say if you think you already know the answer to the question you're asking and you're going to deliver the answer in September, right?

Speaker 5 What I read in the paper is he did speak on it this week.

Speaker 5 And I did not agree with the point of view of the article I was reading, which was that he's completely crazy because he was saying it's not mostly genetic, it's mostly environmental toxins.

Speaker 5 I happen to believe that's probably a more likely answer. And they were saying, well, no, genetics.
And

Speaker 5 of course, genetics is involved in everything health-wise. But to present

Speaker 5 the argument I saw framed in that way, that he's a kook because he thinks it's coming.

Speaker 5 I mean, environmental toxins is really the story of my lifetime. I'm glad I was born as old as I am at a time when everything wasn't completely polluted.
I think that's why I'm still alive today.

Speaker 5 And it just got worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 5 And, I mean,

Speaker 10 but still, the air is less polluted, the water is less polluted. As countries get richer, they pollute less.
When they're industrializing, they pollute more.

Speaker 10 There might be individual environmental toxins, yes, but as a broad description of the status of OECD countries, we are polluting on net less.

Speaker 5 It depends on where you live, first of all. That's right.

Speaker 5 Out here in California, I believe I'm breathing in the fire still.

Speaker 5 The fire burned a lot of this city, and a lot of this city had plastic in their home. And we were already getting, they say, a credit card's worth of plastic in our body on a weekly basis.

Speaker 5 So I don't know what you're talking about, like it's better than it used to be.

Speaker 10 I'm talking about I can see the mountains from Long Beach, which I couldn't growing up. I mean, we pass rules, we do cleaner tech over time, and all rich countries do this.
It is a process.

Speaker 10 It's a whole theory of the case called the Kuznets curve. It's a thing.
It's worth reflecting on and respecting too.

Speaker 5 Okay. Well, you may be sanguine about that.
Maybe that's a libertarian in you.

Speaker 5 But this is what I worry about more than anything, is the plastic in my head.

Speaker 2 Because someday it's just going to.

Speaker 2 I worry about it, too.

Speaker 2 You should.

Speaker 4 You should.

Speaker 5 After Trump said Federal Reserve Chair Jarone Powell's termination can't come fast enough, do you think Powell will last until the end of his term next May?

Speaker 5 Now, the President is absolutely not allowed to fire the head of the Federal Reserve, right?

Speaker 9 Not unless he just commits massive malfeasance. And Jay Powell has said, you can't fire me, and I'm not going to leave.

Speaker 9 So this is a classic example of why we do want parts of our government to be independent from political influence, particularly the parts of our government that are going to have a big impact on the long-term strength of our economy.

Speaker 4 I give it to the assembly.

Speaker 10 You can make a person uncomfortable. And Donald Trump right now is on a making person people uncomfortable spree.
He's trying to light fires everywhere.

Speaker 10 And it'll be difficult for Paul to stay in his travel.

Speaker 2 Also, we're at war.

Speaker 5 We're at war with Venezuelan gangs. So when you're at war, you can do anything, right?

Speaker 5 Wasn't that the argument they'll make? I mean, they'll just make it up. This is what happens when you lose all your power.

Speaker 7 There's one way he'll get fired immediately, which is if he's bad on TV.

Speaker 2 He doesn't go on TV.

Speaker 7 Somebody should send him on. He'll be bad.
The person will hate it. He's gone.
Okay.

Speaker 4 All right. Thank you very much.
You were a great crowd. I appreciate it.

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