Ep. #660: Michael Eric Dyson, Pamela Paul, Nellie Bowles

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

Hi, everybody.

How are you doing?

Thank you.

Thank you, people.

I appreciate it.

How are you down there?

Hi.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

Let's start the show.

Let's start the show.

I know why you're excited.

There's going to be debates.

That's right.

And they're a little different.

They're earlier in the year this time.

They're going to maybe cut the mic.

No, like when you over the talk.

And, oh, no, Bobby Kennedy.

He was not invited to the debates.

Yeah, but I know.

But the worm in his brain was invited

to compete at Bass Mastery.

Oh, we kidned.

We kid, the worm-ridden.

But yeah, see, Trump and Biden, they both a little on in years, as we know.

So they're trying to get the youth vote.

So they already started to like trash talk each other over the debate.

Trump said he's ready to rumble.

And Biden said, make my day.

Because nothing rubs up the youth vote like catchphrases from the 80s.

Turns out something else Gen Z is not interested in at all is the trial going on in New York, the Stormy Daniels hush money trial.

Are you following that?

Yeah, the kids don't care.

Well, when Stormy Daniels was a porn star, I mean, most of her work was on VHS.

Really?

Not even DVD, and certainly not Blu-ray.

In fact, Blu-ray was what she said when somebody said, What'd you do with Ray?

So, yeah, last week we had Stormy Daniels testify.

This week it was all about Michael Cohen.

Have you been watching Michael Cohen?

Oh, yeah.

Well,

okay.

Not the greatest witness with not the greatest reputation.

In New York, they say everybody knows he was a jerk, a liar, an asshole, and a bully.

And yet, Steve Buscemi gets punched in the face.

But

so I've been using the peppy little phrase, slow-moving coup

since before Trump got elected.

And here's the next phase that happened this week.

I don't know if you saw this in the paper or wherever you get your news, but the Republicans have been showing up at the trial dressed like Trump.

I know

it's all funny until it's the law.

J.D.

Vance was there, the vake Swami, Ramaswamy, Tommy Tuberville,

the head of the house, Mike Johnson, Matt Gates.

No wonder Trump falls asleep in the trial.

He's counting his sheep.

Lauren Boebert also shut up, but only because she heard one of the juries was hung.

Oh,

speaking of cat fights, did you see what happened there?

The House Oversight Committee had a hearing, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's Republican and white, got into it with Democrat Jasmine Crockett, who's Democratic and black, and Jasmine Crockett said Marjorie Taylor Greene was a bleached, blonde, bad-built butch body.

And somewhere in a tree, one of the Keebler elves said, somebody just burned a cracker.

And

it started because Marjorie Teller Green said to Jasmine Crockett, your fake eyelashes are messing up your reading.

And then AOC got involved and said, oh, baby girl, don't even play.

Really?

I mean, and to make it matters worse, you know that kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs?

Today he said, see what I mean?

And

in the most depressing end of the empire news, we found out this week that Justice Alito, yes, justice, he's on the fucking Supreme Court.

Excuse me.

Sorry, I got a little upset about this one.

After Biden won, this is a justice of the Supreme Court, hung the American flag upside down.

You see, hangs it outside,

yeah.

Okay, I got two things to say about this.

First of all, Justice Dolito, there are better ways to hit on Clarence Thomas's wife.

And two,

hanging a flag upside down is not what Supreme Court justices do.

It's what pirates do.

And

And to top it all up, he doesn't deny that it happened.

He blames it on his wife.

His comment was, the flag was placed by Mrs.

Alito in response to something our neighbor did.

The neighbor had a, you know, they said the neighbor had a lawn sign that was offensive.

Yeah, it probably said Biden.

So offensive, Biden.

And

who anymore refers to their wife as Mrs.

Alito?

It's 2024.

I think the correct term is mommy.

Well,

yeah, and okay, so

here's a story the Alitos are just going to love.

There's new numbers out about the LGBTQ community, and the numbers are at an all-time high.

More people than ever register, or I don't know, register, but identify as LGBTQ.

Bisexuals in that grouping are the highest number.

The second group is higher in that group are Republicans who are gay for Trump.

Okay, we've got a great show.

We've got Pamela LaPaul and Nellie Bowles, but first up, he is the co-author of the forthcoming book.

Represents the unfinished fight for the vote and a distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been referred to as the hip-hop intellectual.

Our old good friend, Michael Eric Geison, is over here.

There he is.

How are you?

My brother.

Sorry, it's been a while.

It's been a while, my brother.

Yes.

Did you have LASIC surgery?

I see you have a lot of money.

I did have cataract surgery.

I'm an old man.

Oh, yeah.

No, I can see now.

You're looking more handsome.

Thank you.

Way to start the interview.

I always agree.

Okay, so you know why I want you.

I've read your books on rap.

It's amazing.

I think you've read five or six books.

I mean, you did Tupac.

You did

right.

So all I've been hearing in the last few weeks about this Kendrick Lamar Drake feud.

Right.

So who better to answer my questions about it?

Because, you know, look, honestly, when I want to understand rap, I have to ask somebody.

I ask my friends Kid, I ask Killer Mike.

Right.

I was like, translate.

Exactly.

Which says a lot where we are, you know, we're different.

Okay.

So I want to ask you, first of all, why are they feuding?

Why is this necessary?

Well, it began more recently with a song that Drake did with J.

Cole, another phenomenal rapper, and a first-person shooter, where J.

Cole says, it's the big three, me, you, Kendrick Lamar.

So they're giving him

his kudos.

Kendrick Lamar gets upset and says, no, it ain't no big three, it's big me.

But it began years ago.

Drake put on Kendrick Lamar, brought him out, put him on tour with him, always celebrated him.

But Kendrick Lamar had a bit of risent'em on.

You know, he didn't kind of like the fact that Drake was who he was at that particular point.

He was throwing shade at him, as the young people say.

It kept developing, and so they were throwing subliminal punches back and forth until it blew up with that particular song, and then nine different songs exchanged between the two that have claimed the top separately.

Well, that's the specifics, but I'm asking underneath that.

I mean, if we hear from a lot of people that, you know, we're still swimming in a sea of white supremacy and racism, then why fight amongst yourselves?

Well, I mean,

that's a good point.

But, you know, verbal battle is not something that is peculiar to African-American culture.

You think about flighting back in the Scottish culture where they are engaging in ritual forms of verbal assault, and it gets nasty.

I don't talk about nice stuff.

Although

flighting, F-L-Y-T-I-N-G, among Scots.

Scots.

Among Scots.

Okay, let's bring it up to like Hall of Notes.

But I'm saying.

What are you talking about?

Well,

from the 16th century

to Shakespeare, down to what we see going on now.

It's a, you know, the dozens, it's a former verbal concept.

Okay, just from the benighted white guy who doesn't care.

To me, it looks like this.

This is what I know.

Drake is like a party rapper.

That's what pop, very incredibly popular.

But he's not an activist.

Right.

And Kendrick Moore is the socially conscious one.

Sure.

So to me, it looked like what I read about it, that Kendrick was kind of leveling the same thing they used to go at Michael Jordan with.

Why don't you get in the game and talk about these social issues?

And my view was it's okay to just want to be a party person.

Yeah,

and that's very reductive and simplistic.

But you're absolutely right in terms of the fact that

he's being hit on all sides.

It took about seven or eight rappers, and not just Kendrick Lamar, a bunch of others jumped on him.

But here's the point.

Drake is a highly intelligent rhetorical genius, and so is Kendrick Lamar.

But you're right.

Drake is, you know, T.D.

Jakes, and Kendrick Lamar is Martin Luther King Jr.

They each have their role.

They speak to what they speak to, but they're both equally powerful and insightful.

But Drake was dragged, as the young people say, for not only not doing the socially conscious stuff, but being a culture vulture, as if he was

somehow outside the culture.

That when he experimented with a whole bunch of different musical forms, he's somehow not legitimate.

So his blackness was put into question.

And plus, he's black and Jewish.

And as a result of that, people began to question the authenticity.

And I thought that was bull crap.

I'm team Drake all day in this regard.

We talk about, we talk about the black, among black people and black scholars, we talk about the black Atlantic.

It can't just be American-centered notions of blackness.

Drake is Canadian and American.

So you can't get mad at the fact that Brazil has a conception of blackness.

So does Haiti.

So does what happens in Honduras.

So the point is, you can't just limit it here.

And so I think people were trying to make Drake show a passport as to his legitimate blackness.

He's black because he continues to exist in a a world that sees him as a black man.

He continues to talk about issues that are critical.

Now, again, if, you know, say Kendrick is, I don't know, France Fanon and Drake is Jean-Parsart.

He's talking about the existential stuff.

He's talking about girlfriends.

He's talking about what happens when you get up in the morning.

He's talking about vulnerability.

He got beat up early on because what is this goofy rapper?

He's not a thug, because all black people aren't.

He's not, you know, out here slinging around his authenticity.

because he killed somebody because he doesn't.

He is a decent human being, high intelligence, who likes to party, have fun, reflect upon his emotional life, and exist as a human being in a culture that often demonizes that.

That's why I'm team dig.

It's not that he just tries to fuck everybody's girlfriend.

No, I think you're talking about Donald Trump.

Okay.

Well, I mean, I read your article in the, it was in the photo.

It was a Philadelphia Citizen.

Okay, about this.

And you said the world sees Drake, you were the same thing, kind of defending him, as little more than a black man.

Right.

Well, exactly.

Well, you really, you think that's the way the world is now?

This country sees Drake as little more than a black man?

Look, Rick Ross, one of the rappers, was calling him a white boy.

So my point is that you can call him a white boy.

I'm saying, when I say little more, I'm not saying that Drake is not regarded as a a pop star of the first magnitude.

You know, Beyonce,

Taylor Swift.

He's up there.

I mean, he's an incredible figure who's transcended many barriers.

So no, of course I acknowledge his Promethean,

prolific characters or hip-hop artists, but I'm saying for all of you who are calling him a white boy, Let him get caught at the wrong place at the wrong time.

He's just another black person.

That's what I was trying to suggest.

So you're trying to delegitimize him as not belonging to our culture when the best of our culture has been more expansive.

And guess what?

Barack Obama, whom you love, was half black, so to speak.

He was mixed race.

Many other black people, Zadie Smith, you know, Sarday, there are many African-American people who are mixed race, who have legitimacy, but there's an undercurrent of assault upon his legitimacy as a human being, and to call him a culture vulture, because he begins to experiment.

Jay-Z made stuff with Spanish, and he was seen as experimenting broadly.

Drake does it, you're a culture vulture trying to rip somebody's culture off.

Be consistent and understand the beauty, the power, the diversity of blackness, and one person can't exhaust it all.

The great, right?

The great thinker, Howard Thurman, said.

Howard Thurman said, you can go to the Atlantic Ocean, you can dip your glass in the Atlantic Ocean, but it's not all the Atlantic Ocean.

One black person can be great and beautiful, but you ain't all of black America.

You're not all of black people throughout the world.

Let the man breathe and exist on his own terms because before, now he was black.

You didn't say he wasn't black.

15 years he's been great.

Is it over now?

I mean,

I just can't imagine writing poems about another man all day.

I'm not trying to.

I'm just saying I don't get onto that emotional level with other men.

I just don't.

It's your toxic masculinity.

I'm not blocking you.

Well, no, it's over, but it was a, you know, there are subtexts going on, too.

It wasn't just about two guys beefing.

It's also about a lot of stuff that's going on in the culture, whether it's Israel and God.

Is it a a proxy war for that?

I think it is a great.

It is a proxy war.

It's a proxy because we can't be as vigorous in disputing other issues of social import that we might get canceled for.

So we have to be very careful about what we say and how we say it and in what context.

But within hip-hop, you can talk about all those other issues you want to speak about.

I mean, look, when we talk about banning books and stuff, whatever you say about Kendrick and Drake, the level of rhetorical ferocity, of inventiveness, of quintuple entendres, of metaphors that sing and zing.

This is something that young people ought to be paying attention to.

You can't do that and not be smart.

You can't do that and not be intelligent.

And beyond that, you know, these arguments about DEI and what happens in American culture when diversity is brought in, this is what happens.

The beauty and power of blackness colors the civilization in an edifying fashion.

And one of the ways it does so is enlivening the language.

And I think that's what they represented as well.

Boy, you talk good.

I can't talk like that.

All right, so this story broke today, so I have to ask you about it, P.

Diddy, ugly tape.

Just give us some context.

No one's going to excuse it, nor should it be excused.

But just try to contextualize, as only you can, I think, why this kind of ferocity exists.

I mean, because we are all a product of not just our own past as people, but our own pasts going back in time.

True.

Abuse, as we know, is cyclical.

So just give us the context there of what you think about this.

Yeah, I'm glad you put it in that context.

It's very sensitive and understanding of you.

Look, we know that we live in a culture of vitriol toward women.

We know that we talk about toxic masculinity, but let's speak about the horrible misogyny that exists in the culture, the poisonous patriarchy, and a man thinking that he owns another human being, another woman.

And for what Diddy did, and let me be forthcoming, I've interacted with him, I've talked to him and spoken to him.

What we saw today was repugnant and reprehensible.

It's inexcusable.

And it's, you know, some people would be tempted to say, well, this is the misogyny of hip-hop.

Look at it.

43, more than the regular population, 43% of those men who are domestic abusers are in female-dominated stuff like clerks.

After that, the police and and the military.

After that, people who work in construction and so on.

And after that, preachers and lawyers and so on.

So before we get on our high horse and say, ah, this is the bé noir of, you know, hip-hop showing its face, preachers are beating the hell out of women too.

And they're doing it physically and emotionally and rhetorically.

So having said all that,

it's horrible.

And what we saw there, kicking that young woman while she's on the ground, dragging her, this is the express manifestation of a lethal inability to accept another human being as not only equal, but also understanding her worth as a human being.

And to do that is propped up on every side in this culture, not just in hip-hop, which has its own misogyny, but in the churches where I go, the synagogues, the temples, the religious orders, the political orders, all of that stuff is shocked full of this kind of horse.

Well, I'm glad we have two women on the panel.

There you go.

Great to see you, my friend.

Been so long.

Missed you.

All right, we hope you're well.

Let's talk soon.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hi.

Hi, everybody.

Are you?

Oh, you are.

All right.

She's an acclaimed author and an opinion columnist for the New York Times.

Pamela Paul's back with us.

Great to see you.

And she's a founder of the Free Press, where she writes the weekly column TGIF, and whose new book is called Morning After the Revolutionist Factors from the Wrong Side of History.

Nellie Bowles is here.

Are you with Child?

I am with Child.

You are with Child.

Eight months and still doing a TV show.

It's not right.

It's

working

now.

You have no pressure on you.

Not.

It's all going to be egg gravy, baby.

I was googling adrenaline and labor right before this just to make sure that nothing's going to happen.

It's going to get fucked up everybody goes.

She was eight months pregnant.

What do you expect?

I've used that excuse a few times.

All right.

So let's talk about these debates.

I mean, I don't really want to.

But it is what's going on in the country.

And, you know, first of all, to me, it says Biden knows he's losing.

Because else he wouldn't have agreed, right?

Only the loser wants a debate.

Trump always wants a crowd, so that's different.

But

this is what's so interesting about it.

I've never seen a summer debate, not for the presidential elections.

They're always in October right before the election.

This one, I mean, June 27th, that's not even, they haven't had the convention yet.

Well, they're not getting any younger.

Why wait?

That's a great discussion.

Yeah, like.

Okay, so June 27th and September 10th.

Is this going to early, no crowd?

And I was ranting about this, about cutting off the mic.

I forget what debate I was watching, but it was like every debate is just, I can't stop talking first, or else I look weak.

So I will so they talk over each other.

So they're going to do that.

Once your time is up, they cut the mic.

Is any of this going to make a difference in the election or with the debate?

I think that the debates themselves are not going to be decisive.

I think that, you know, people who haven't tuned in to all of the Trump

rallies, they're going to tune into this one show just to see what happens.

One thing I find interesting is that both candidates think that they'll win the debate because they'll make the other guy look bad.

That once people see the other guy, they're going to hate him so much that they'll then vote for that person.

And that's kind of a sad indication of what each candidate thinks about what they have to offer.

I'm excited for them.

I'm excited to watch it.

I didn't think it was going to happen, so I'm looking forward to it.

And it might sway people.

It might sway.

Well, I think the guy who has more to prove is Biden.

I think people, Trump is a known commodity.

They know he's going to be an asshole.

He's going to be lurking and growling and not obeying the rules and everything else.

But Biden, they want to see proof of life.

I think it's, I see it a little bit more favorably for him because he's already shown that he can stand up and give a rousing talk when

need be.

So he just needs to show that he is seen.

There might need to be some amount of drug testing before for both of the men, just because we never know what kind of amphetamines and steroids are going to be helping accelerate.

Really?

Well,

I bet you I know a drug they're both going to be on, Rapiflo.

I'm too young.

What is that one?

Too young and too female.

It's about peeing.

Oh.

Penises.

Peeing

out of the penis, sure.

But, I mean, this to me, it's a 90-minute debate.

I mean, that to be, I mean, this election would be over if Biden went, you know, I just got to pee,

which could happen.

In fact, I think it should just be a pee-holding contest.

Skip the.

You know what?

That's the answer.

Skip the talking altogether.

We know what they're going to say.

We don't care anymore.

Whoever can hold it longer, just go out there.

You get to go right before you come out there.

And whoever has to leave first appear.

I feel like we have turned a corner, though.

Like after the last election, it was Trump is finished.

And then a year later, it was, well, he's not going away.

And then it was, uh-oh.

he could win again.

And now it seems like the consensus is almost Biden can't win.

And he is losing in all the swing states, I think, except Wisconsin.

And by bigger and bigger numbers.

Is it too late to switch out?

If the Democrats are going to do it, what?

Well, I was thinking, is it too late?

Probably.

Is it too late for him to win or too late to suck someone in?

Switch.

Because like in these states where Biden is losing, it's interesting.

The Democratic Senate candidate is not losing.

So it just says something, which is it's not the party necessarily, somewhat, but it's the guy.

They just don't see him as the guy.

No matter what he does, he has plenty of victories.

It doesn't seem to ever move the needle.

But the Democrats will have to get off their keester now.

Now.

Or, I mean, look at the actuarial tables and sort of there is the chance that, well,

we're not rooting for that.

No, we're not rooting for that.

Not one of them will die.

Just realistically.

Okay, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

But we're not rooting for that.

No.

We sound like three kids around the hospital bed.

You double-check dad's rules?

All right.

So I don't think that baits even matter, but when you're at the, they're wearing the uniform of the cult leader stage.

I don't think anything matters.

I mean, I showed the pictures in the, and you've seen them.

I mean, showing up looking like Trump with the red ties, I mean,

this just

a fool's errand, both metaphorically and literally, too, because the base, like the one thing you need to be

a vice presidential candidate for Trump is loyalty.

So that's just a given.

And the truth is

Trump is approaching this like a season of celebrity apprentice.

He's just going to make everyone grovel.

He's going to, I mean, he did it to Mitt Romney.

He did it to Chris Christie.

He loves to see someone throw themselves out there as a candidate and then to leave them hanging and looking like idiots.

So, and then he's just going to surprise us because he likes a plot twist.

I feel it's so inevitable that it would come to this.

It's almost classic tragedy.

You know, tragedy, it's always about, no, a character has a tragic flaw.

It was always going to end bad for Hamlet because he couldn't make up his mind.

And to me, the Republican tragic flaw is they're just natural cultists.

You know, I, what?

They're not?

I feel like, I feel like...

I think humans are kind of maybe natural cultists, but yeah, yeah, no.

No, no, I think, you know what they always say?

Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.

That's always the thing.

And I really, I always believe that.

Like, your personality comes before your politics.

Your politics grows out of what your personal, and also where you were raised and your background.

But it's just, this was always going to happen.

They just had to find the guy they wanted a cuck for

to this degree.

I feel like there there was a brief moment where it could have gone differently, right after January 6th, where some Republicans sort of meekly stood up, but then they all folded.

I mean, I agree with you that when push comes to shove, Republicans hunker down together and Democrats kind of stand around asking each other, like, what should we do next?

Where should we go?

But guys, real Republican candidates ran against Trump.

And we were just talking about it.

No one real has run against Biden or come to challenge Biden.

So

people were really falling in line within the Democratic Party, too.

Yes, that's true.

Yeah.

But the problem is, I think no one is in love with Biden.

And what's scary is when you look at polls, the people who like Trump love Trump.

The people who like Biden are kind of like, well, we're married to him.

It's been a long time.

It'd be too difficult to get out.

Let's have MSNBC wine moms.

Okay.

Also,

they just don't talk about Biden the way they talk about Trump.

This is just a different thing.

Could I read some of these

things from Vivek Ramaswamy?

He said, President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century.

It's a fact.

Because he's eight years old.

Tim Scott, at the end of the day, you want the ball in the hands of the best player on the field.

That player is Donald Trump.

I just love you.

Now, people don't talk that way about Biden.

Doug Bergham said, working with President Trump as a governor was like having a beautiful breeze at your back.

So we thought this would be a good time to do the old Askisser or the Mark release.

We used to do this on the first Trump term, but

would you like to hear some of the other things Republicans have been saying about John Olton?

For example, Fox News host Brett Barrett says he's such a great golfer, I won't saw him get a hole in zero.

Doug Burnham says, when Zendaya had that threesome in Challenger, she got in the mood by imagining both guys were Trump.

Representative Elise Stefanik says, Trump's Trump's farts smell like a new car.

Oh, Rudy Giuliani says,

I'm lucky after I've been drinking, I get to see two of them.

Eric Trump says Trump is like the father he never had.

Lauren Bobert says says Trump's mind is so powerful he can read her thought.

Tommy Tomberville said, every Republican dreams of being one of the two guys Trump jerks off while he's dancing.

I say

every week.

Okay.

You're welcome, I know.

All right, so I think one thing that three of us kind of have in common is that we've all kind of provoked the ire of the left wing sometimes by basically calling them out on their nonsense too.

I mean, like your stuff about J.K.

Rowling, which I loved and I concur completely.

I gave her a Cahone Award.

And your book, Very, you're always very funny, by the way, very, very funny.

And

I feel like it's such an interesting journey you've taken there from somebody who, I mean, you're from San Francisco

and you were, you know, kind of...

You got a clock for San Francisco.

And you kind of migrated a little because San Francisco is a kind of ground zero for crazy stuff.

If you open your eyes and are honest about the rhetoric versus the reality in San Francisco, you start to question some progressive orthodoxies, if you will.

Right.

Yeah.

And look, we just had

the fourth anniversary of the George Floyd murder, which obviously changed a lot in this country.

I think the big headline there should always be that it was a good thing that more of America got more impatient with racism.

Yes.

That's the main thing.

But like with everything in America

Like with everything, we never just react, we overreact.

And now some of these things seem to, that came out right after that seem to be being rolled back.

For example, defund the police.

That was a big thing.

People aren't doing that anymore and candidates who are for it aren't winning.

DEI.

That seems to have fizzled out a little bit and people said we did too much of that.

Forcing diversity statements.

MIT said they're not going to do that anymore.

That's where when you, to get the job, you have to write out, here's what I would do to help the cause.

It's like, okay, just be a good human being.

We don't have to get the statement like we're in the Soviet Union.

Right.

So do you think this is

what?

I think that it's safe now for liberals to criticize what I think was always an illiberal movement on the far left without being necessarily called racist or Republicans.

I also think that progressives are maybe a little bit embarrassed about some of the excesses.

Well, there's definitely a very

concerted effort now to memory hole a lot of the

defund the police.

Nobody ever said that.

Nobody ever said toddlers can send gender messages.

Nobody ever said that.

Nobody ever wanted to get rid of elite public schools.

Nobody ever said that.

And now there's sort of some of the more embarrassing edges.

But I don't think that we're in a point where this is being walked back or this is being totally reversed until we see maybe like some apologies to the people who got in a lot of trouble when they opposed those MIT DEI statements, let's say.

Or maybe some people would get their jobs back.

A lot of people lost their jobs in the kind of spasms of cancellations over the last few years.

You don't see any of that happening.

You don't see

I think where the change is happening or it's going to happen more quickly is in corporate America because

Companies want to make money and so when they see that this maybe is not adding to their bottom bottom line, and they can move quickly when they don't like something.

But I think that the change that we're seeing now, if it's like a receding of you know, wokeism, I think that that change is going to be very slow in institutions, in cultural institutions, in the arts, certainly in academia, that's not slowing down at all.

And in fact, I think that in many of those places, it's not just going to continue, it might even deepen a little bit because these are all young people who have been hired into these jobs.

They're going to be there for a while.

Yeah, it's not going away.

Thank you.

Part of why I write,

you're not crazy.

This happened.

Like, let's preserve this.

I write the column to say, you're not crazy.

This happened this week.

And people are going to try to deny it or try to deny.

If they find out one part of it, it's embarrassing.

But it happened.

And it's happened.

People got very excited at the Tom Brady roast.

And it was like, oh, it's all over.

Wokeness is over now.

Yeah.

Because we made fun of Tom Brady and we were able to, you know,

call him words we haven't heard on TV in a while.

It was a one-time thing.

Now he says he regrets it.

Then I heard, you know, well, look, the Sports Illustrated issue, okay, I saw it.

You know, the war on boners is not over.

One of the reasons why

One of the reasons why I think this is going to last for a long time is that when you look at the young people who buy into this, right?

Like your generation, I think you're a lot of a millennial.

I love the return to me there, though.

Gen X, boomers, like when grown-ups said things, we made fun of them.

We didn't buy into it.

We did the opposite.

What's alarming is that in this case, like they are all in on, you know, all of this ideology.

They are not rebelling.

And so that's scary in and of itself.

But that's also why I think it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

And also,

you know, I think something we all agree on is we don't like what I've always called the one true opinion, that you're only allowed to have one true opinion.

Other than ours?

Our collective...

I don't agree with it.

Now this week there's a guy in the news named Harrison Butker.

He's the kicker on the Kansas City Chiefs, also known as the Taylor Swift Chiefs.

So he got invited to do the commencement address at a conservative Catholic college.

And by the way, if you're getting a guy from the special teams,

this is not one of the big schools, okay?

But look, I can't express how much this guy is not like me.

He's religious.

He loves marriage.

He loves kids.

Here's a quote of his, I have seen it firsthand how much happier someone can be when they disregard the outside noise and move closer and closer to God's will.

Yeah, not me.

I couldn't be more not like this guy.

The closest you've been to a baby.

Never.

I've never touched a baby and I never will.

I had to do it once in a sketch, but that was it.

I asked for a stunt baby, they didn't have one.

So he's in big trouble because he said at this event, and this is a Catholic college, conservative Catholics, and he's now history's greatest monster.

Again, I don't agree with much with this guy, but I don't get the thing.

He said, some of you, talking to this, the women here, some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world.

Okay, that seems fairly like modern.

But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I don't see what the big crime is.

I really don't.

And I think this is part of the problem people have with the left, is that lots of people in this country are like this.

Like he's saying, some of you may go on to lead successful careers, but a lot of you are excited about this other way that people, everybody used to be, and now

can't that just be a choice too?

And I feel like they feel very put upon.

Like, there's only one way to be a good person, and that's to get an advanced degree from one of those asshole factories like Harvard.

Well, Nellie's doing both at the same time right now, so you don't have to choose.

What?

Nellie's doing both right now at the same time, so you don't have to choose.

I think think maybe part of why it's so upsetting to a liberal to hear that would be that there aren't great positive

like masculine visions within the left or within liberalism right now.

It's masculine,

yeah, yeah, masculine role model.

Masculinity is inherently toxic.

It's bad.

And so a guy like this, who a lot of conservative guys probably look up to and are admiring, that's sort of upsetting.

But there's not an alternative that the Democrats or the progressives are presenting, really.

And so it's I find it

very ironic that he's saying, you know what, in my world, you know, we like the women to stay at home and just have babies.

And the college kids and the young people find this absolutely abhorrent.

But they're demonstrating for Hamas

who make that a law.

It's not just an opinion in Hamas that you stay home and have the babies.

We will enforce you for doing that.

Okay, I just wanted to make that point.

Nelly is queer as for Palestine.

Yes, queer is for Palestine.

We both are.

We wanted to come and do an intervention.

So Trump

is winning.

Trump is winning the young people 46 to 43.

This is what I'm reading.

And most of it is because of men.

There's a giant gender gap now, apparently.

The women have moved to the left.

The men are pretty much where they used to be, probably in caveman days, but okay.

31% of women LGBT now identify as LGBT.

That's almost a third.

Q plus.

Q plus?

Oh, yes.

I can't keep.

Every time I try to say it, they added one last week, and then I'm behind again.

So I'm not, you know, sorry, LGBT, that's as good as I can give.

Okay, so to me, this is like a vicious cycle.

The more awful young men get, the more women don't want to be around them.

And I don't blame them.

And then they're like, oh, well, I guess it'll have to be an incel.

Nobody wants to fuck me.

They're all.

Well, I mean.

Am I wrong?

That divide is real, and it's not just in the United States, it's in most of Western Europe, it's in China,

it's in South Korea, it's in Poland.

So that's happening all over the place.

But I think that, I mean, part of it is social media, which is like, I think when you're a girl or a woman, you go online, and the deeper down the rabbit hole you get, the more it becomes about, you know, victimization, about vulnerabilities, about powerlessness, about,

and then with men, when you go down the internet rabbit hole, it's more about power and it's about you know fighting back and it's about winning and it's about, you know, it goes into that whole kind of Andrew Tate sort of vibe and I think that the right is very good at stoking that kind of male you know

and it becomes a vicious cycle where the Democrats are the party of women and for women and the Republicans become the party of men and for men and so it then becomes reinforcing and probably the solution for the young people is just if you want to be with someone who agrees with you politically you've got to go gay.

And it's fine.

It's fine.

I do think that liberals have,

you know, liberals talk a lot about expanding opportunities, empowering people who've been marginalized, helping the powerless, and perhaps that is all to the good, but none of them are talking about how to empower what to do for boys and for men.

And I do think that there are men who say, like, what about us?

Why is there nothing, why are we left out of this conversation entirely?

Yeah, like there needs to be like a left-wing Andrew Tate.

Okay, well, that's important.

We looked at you.

Yeah,

I mean, I mean,

yeah, it's true.

I'm offering myself.

No, I, I,

men, believe me, I've thought about doing a TED Talk, but they won't have me.

But

just because men need to learn game again, they just don't understand it.

They don't get that.

Women are communicative creatures.

You've got to talk to them.

It just can't be, you know, eggplant emoji, what's up, my dick.

You know.

But let me add one more thing to our discussion there about rolling back some of the overexcesses in 2020.

I don't know how this got lumped in, but the kids are lumpers.

They do like to lump things in together.

Solidarity.

Yeah, exactly.

So

British pediatrician Dr.

Hilary Cass on gender dysphoria this is about, this is in the UK.

They are now pronouncing the United States as way behind.

This is so, to me, symbolic of so much of woke excess.

By thinking you're so progressive, you're actually behind.

The UK now says the reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes or interventions to manage gender-related distress in kids.

These are kids who are wanting to switch sex.

For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way.

There's no clear evidence that social transition in childhood is any positive or negative mental health outcomes.

And the ideology on all sides has directed care.

So, in other words, by trying to be so far ahead, the United States, and this is not just England, this is all the Scandinavian countries, they've all pulled back on this.

To me, this says a lot about where we went, and hopefully, we're getting back to someplace sane.

Because, yes, I don't think we should be doing medical interventions on kids before they can figure out who they are.

It's the horseshoe, and hopefully, at some point, we'll go all the way around the horseshoe.

But I don't know when it's going to happen because right now, the medical establishment, the major medical associations, are staying mom or digging in.

Right.

They're afraid.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

I cramble about that a lot.

Time for new rules.

Okay, new rule.

Since California spent $24 billion on the homeless and nothing happened, the next time Gavin Newsom wants cash for the homeless, he has to make a cardboard sign and knock on my windshield at a red light.

There are 200,000 homeless people in California.

For $24 billion, we could have given them each $120 grand.

I don't know if they're smoking meth, but somebody is.

New role, Baron Trump must reconsider his decision not to be a delegate at this summer's Republican National Convention.

Come on, you'll be missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience, being in the same room with your dad.

And while we're on the subject, has anyone checked this kid's scalp for a 666?

Yes, I went too far.

Neural, someone has to ask the

women who pay big bucks to go into the woods and participate in rage rituals where they scream and beat large sticks on the ground as an outlet for their stress and anger.

Hey, could you keep it down?

We're trying to play golf.

Oh, I can.

I can.

Let it out, ladies.

Harboring pent-up rage rarely ends well.

Just ask Christy Noam's dog.

Numeral, the California man, who was told by local officials he had to build a six-foot-high fence to hide his boat from the view of his neighbors, and then commissioned an artist to paint a mural of the boat on the fence

must go into Republican politics.

Petty, vindictive, spiteful.

How does Vice President California man sound?

Neru, before you buy one of the new whole-body deodorants, you need to ask yourself, am I a zombie?

Because if your whole body stinks,

that's a sign that you're decomposing.

It's a sign you're decomposing and probably have bigger problems than body odor

For example, your poll numbers

And finally, new rules, someone, maybe AI, has to figure out a way to slow down time.

Because what everyone has been saying to me lately is, I can't believe it's May.

Oh, Americans, we do nothing but bitch about everything under the sun, but damn it, life goes by too fast.

It's Memorial Day in a week?

Christ, I might as well start my Christmas shopping.

But it is, it's May, a month I have been anticipating for a long time because my book comes out next week.

A book I have waited my whole career to write, one that is based on collecting the creme de la creme of these end-of-the-show editorials and reimagining them, but also covers some virgin territory.

For example, I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of what historians of the future will say about us.

Imagine it's the year 3024 and you're living in a colony on the planet Musk.

Formerly Mars.

What will the historian say about the Americans of 2024?

Well, probably that we were self-absorbed, algorithmically enslaved, on drugs, and worshipped a god named Apple.

But what they won't do is write about the very thing that consumes us, our petty squabbles.

In the myopia of the present, our partisan differences make each side believe they're nothing like the other side.

Libtards and deplorables.

Historians will disagree.

They won't see red on one side and blue on the other.

You're thinking of Jaws 3D.

But historians see the character of a people as a whole.

The Scots were clannish, the Spartans stoic, the Mongols expansionist, the Greeks were too into anal.

And for us it will be no different.

Historians will say we're also too into anal.

But also the other thing.

They will see us as a singular people.

with the same pathologies and unappealing traits on both sides, traits that simply manifest themselves differently.

For example, I believe they will say Americans of our era were unscientific.

One side thought climate change was a hoax, one thought gender was a construct.

One warred against mother nature, one against motherhood.

One doubts evolution, one wears masks when they're alone in the car.

Which is kind of like wearing a condom to jerk off.

In medical schools now, professors are so fearful of being labeled transphobic, they have to apologize for saying words like male, female, and pregnant woman.

Katie Herzog writes, some of the country's top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes.

The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.

Okay, but generally the people with breasts and vaginas who give birth are the women, and the ones with the penis hogging the remote are men.

Historians will say that as a people Americans lost our rationality.

They'll say we were conspiracy theorists.

The right wanted to believe that Obama was born in Kenya.

The left wanted to believe in Trump's P-tape.

We have January 6th truthers, but the Washington Post reports that there are also now October 7th truthers who believe Hamas never raped anybody and the hostages all died of natural causes.

Now, does the right do conspiracy more?

I think they do.

QAnon and Jewish space lasers, Hillary's pedophile ring, microchips in the vaccine, Sandy Hook didn't happen, the election was stolen, Jews are trying to replace us.

Yeah, but of course on the left, Jews are the Nazis now.

Somehow even enemies always find a way to agree to blame everything on the Jews.

I think future historians will see us as a sad people, saddled with a genetic predisposition to always break into factions and then be consumed with the hate that that engenders.

Each side in America right now considers the other an existential threat.

to the point where both camps literally collaborate with foreign enemies over fellow Americans.

Republican news channels use Russian talking points.

Their voters wear t-shirts that say, I'd rather be Russian than Democrat, and their leader sides with Putin.

When today's Republican watches Rocky IV, they root for Ivan Drago.

Meanwhile, on the left, this happened.

Americans chanting death to America.

College professors and their students exhilarated by aligning with a theocratic, murderous, terrorist group with values fundamentally opposed to our own.

Finally, I think the people of the future will, ironically, be puzzled by our common desire to live in the past.

On Fox News, they're always pining for 1950 to make America great again.

And in the Huffington Post, it's always 1619, and nothing has changed.

For a people so being into the moment, nobody seems to want to live in the year we're living in.

Trump's entire shtick is to return America to some idyllic time when the traditional family was a husband, a wife, a couple of kids, and a porn store on the side.

A time when America was the only superpower and you could drink at work.

When a cheeseburger cost a dime and a girl brought it to you on roller skates and she'd liked it when you complimented her ass.

Nikki Haley says America was never racist.

And then there are voices on the left saying racism has never been worse.

And the normies in the center say, how hard is it to meet in the middle and just not be stupid about shit?

And that's who my book is for.

People who don't want to be stupid about shit.

But I welcome the discussion if you don't agree.

Come see me this Monday at noon at Barnes ⁇ Noble's on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Thank you very much.

We're off next week.

We'll be back on May 31st.

I'll be at the Palace in Albany, May 19th, the MGM Grand in Vegas, June 21st and 22nd, and the MGM Music Hall in Boston, July 26th.

Thank you, Pamela Paul, Nellie Bowles, and Michael Eric Dyson.

Now go watch Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.