Overtime – Episode #659: Eric Schlosser, Douglas Murray, Frank Bruni

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

All right, welcome to Overtime.

Here's our panel.

He's a contributing writer at the Atlantic and producer of the documentary Fooding Too, Eric Tlasser.

He's a New York Post columnist and author of The War in the West, Douglas Murray, and he's a New York Times contributing writer.

His new book is The Age of Grievance, Frank Rooney.

All right, guys, here are the questions.

What are the panel's thoughts on a Virginia school board restoring Confederate names?

Oh, yeah, I saw this today.

The schools there, two schools in Virginia restoring, I think Stonewall Jackson is getting his name back on the school.

Didn't see that coming.

Is it a sign of backlash to DEI?

Yeah.

I mean, it's a backlash thing.

It is.

And always, this country never knows where to stop in the middle.

It just never

can find, it's like the thing that goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, that people have on their desk.

A pendulum?

Yeah, Yeah, well,

that steel balls.

You know the steel balls.

Anyway.

It's a venerable class to make a discussion.

So what do you think about it, panel?

It's slightly dangerous terrain, but I can throw one thought out.

I looked into this some years ago when the statues started coming down in 2020.

And

there are some places where I think there was like very weird overreach and I can understand some places where some locals might have like got resentful about that.

If you go to Monument Avenue in Richmond there are no monuments.

It's just an avenue with a lot of like stone bases

on which

you could put a statue at some point but there aren't.

If you're into Plinths it's a great place.

It's a lovely place.

And in fact the only statue that is still there is what's the the name, Arthur Ashe, the tennis player.

Arthur Ashe?

Yeah, so there's a big statue of him.

It's the only one still standing.

And he's got a child kneeling there with a book, and he's got the tennis racket up.

And unfortunately, it looks like he's about to beat the child.

But it's just, but I cannot, I

point you, I can understand

if I were a local, I might have gotten a bit annoyed about this.

But I think it's worth remembering that the Confederacy celebrated slave owning.

And these statues weren't built during the Confederacy.

They were built when the Jim Crow laws were being enforced and segregation was really being enforced.

So I think we need to know our history and honor our history.

But I can understand how it would be tough to live in a town that is celebrating people who really thought that slavery was a great thing.

Well, everybody thought that, by the way.

I mean, I agree.

Now, first of all,

to re-put the statue up?

No, that's not.

That's great.

I mean, yeah.

But you can do what museums call retain and explain.

I mean, you say we need to know our history.

How are people going to know their history if there's no statues representing anything that happened except for one side?

I mean, in most countries, like France said,

France said in 2020, the president himself said, we will take down no statues.

We need to know all of our history.

And that's true.

Because the Soviet Union, should they have kept the statues of Marx and Lenin up after

Russia became a republic?

I've been to them.

Lots of the former Soviet republics put all the statues in a park, for instance, where you could then go.

To a museum, that's a good thing.

A museum would be great.

Right, it is.

But a lot of the statues we're talking about are not explanations, they're veneration.

Should be celebrating.

Exactly.

And if they're celebrating, as you just spoke so eloquently to, if they're celebrating things like slavery and the Confederacy, then I think it's worth having a conversation about whether they belong.

And they were traitors.

They were traitors.

This was a war against a secessionist.

Yeah, people always have to remember.

I mean, look, there are obviously cases like that, like Stonewall Jackson, I don't think you particularly need to have a school named after.

But, you know, don't forget in 2020, this rampage went all the way through to any high school named after Thomas Jefferson.

Right, that's right.

So there's a logic

and it can get out of hand.

And it got out of hand very fast.

You were talking about what might happen with the Trump administration.

I hope that we're not going to have in Monument Valley the January 6th insurrectionists.

What was the guy with the horns?

Statues.

Statues of those rebels.

I could see.

But he will get them out of jail.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

He will pardon them.

But, I mean, again, on the slavery thing, don't put up statues of traitors who supported slavery, but also teach...

kids the truth.

Slavery was a horrible thing that everybody in the world did, including people of color in other parts of the world.

It's all through the Bible.

Every civilization did it.

They didn't even think it was wrong.

There's no laws against it in the Bible.

There's a lot of laws about it, and nobody ever goes, oh, maybe we should just not do it.

Never crossed their mind.

Right.

Again, teach the whole story would be my thought.

Okay.

Should cities employ safe use sites to combat the drug epidemic and help addicts?

Well, Portland just pulled back on that.

I I think it was Portland, or maybe it was San Francisco, maybe about, they had that, you know, let's give out free drugs, see what happens.

I think it's a great idea, but I'm not an addict.

You know, addicts, you know, to them, they were just like, great, more drugs.

I mean, it didn't seem to work.

I just did a document on the fentanyl crisis recently.

I went to some of these safe use sites, and there's so many problems about it, because on the one hand, there's a very good

idea.

It's a compassionate idea that you give give users a facility where they can shoot up with needles that are clean, and there's Narcan in case they overdose, and this brings them back round.

And it's certainly

in that way, it's understandable.

The bit that's the problem is like 10 blocks around any safe use site is covered with needles and people trying to sell you fentanyl.

So

you have to weigh them up.

Okay.

How does our tiered economy, this is for you, Frank,

contribute, or tiered economy contribute to people's sense of grievance.

Oh, yeah, that's in your book.

Yeah, no, I read a lot about that in the book.

I think

one of the things that's happened to us is our economy has become such an engine of envy, right?

Our service economy is tiered in a fine-grained way that it never was before.

When I was a teenager and I went to a rock concert, I remember getting up at 3 in the morning and going to the Hartford Civic Center, what was called Queen.

Who are you seeing, I have to know?

Queen.

Queen.

And I'll tell you, right, but here's the thing.

There were basically three sets of seats.

There were three ticket prices.

And if you wanted to sit, as I did close to the stage, I got eighth row, what you did wasn't shell out $10,000 or more as people do for one of the like 250, 350 prices for a Taylor Swift ticket.

You actually went in a quasi-egalitarian way and you stood outside online.

Got into the eighth row, caught Freddie Mercury's tambourine when he threw it out at the end of the show.

Those

were.

I would still have got it.

But what happened...

Wow.

No,

I ended up losing it over time, which is a terrible thing.

Suddenly it's the Kelly Clarkson show.

But you take the Taylor Swift concerts as an example, right?

People are paying so many different prices, and then they are going on their social media feeds, and they're posting pictures of how close to the stage they were.

Sometimes it's a family of six.

You're looking at $10,000 shelled out for one evening.

We are more aware.

of the people who live on the echelon above us, the echelon above them, the echelon above that.

It is in our faces and social media media all the time, and I think it fills us with envy and drives us apart.

It's part of our grievance culture.

Yes.

Whenever I read about the prices of these tickets, especially Taylor Swift, Beyonce also, I mean sure, all the big acts, I'm just amazed.

It makes me think I don't understand the American economy at all.

It makes me think I'm glad I didn't go.

Well, that's

that too, but that so many people can afford this.

And most of them are kids or pretty young, right?

I mean,

teenagers, tweens.

I mean, I guess her fan base goes older.

Yeah, they're the ones you were talking about before who are living in the basement with their parents.

Right.

So you're saying you're in the middle of the moment.

That's how they have the money.

That's how they have the money, right.

Yeah, my generation ruined the world, but they always take the money.

I noticed that.

How does, or does the junk food, this is for you, Eric, does the junk food that Americans eat contribute to the decline at the level of our intelligence and empathy?

Oh, I guess it's saying, does it, you know, we know it affects the body, does it affect the brain?

I think that some of these artificial sweeteners may turn out not to be good for your brain, but I think

they may.

Really?

Is there any doubt that aspartame is poisonous?

I have to hedge my answers because.

Why don't?

Because

I have very...

You can afford better lawyers.

I have to have to.

I'm constantly worried about getting sued, but the evidence suggests it affects the brain.

But I really think it's the mass culture that's affecting people's thoughts more than it is the junk food.

The junk food is just making people really unhealthy and shortening lifespan.

All right, well, let's go have a drink.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

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