Ep. #659: Eric Schlosser, Douglas Murray, Frank Bruni

Only Murders in the Building, season five.

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

Hi, how are you doing?

Hi down there.

How are you?

Thank you, people.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Oh, I know.

I know.

It's exciting.

It's very...

Well, it's Mother's Day Sunday, isn't that?

Yeah.

Do the right thing.

Pick up the phone and call your mom.

Or if you're Gen Z, just go upstairs.

I kid the kids.

They love it.

I'm telling you.

Yeah, Mother's Day, a little different in Texas this year.

It's called, if you don't go through There, You'll Be in Jail Day.

And Christy Noam, her kids got her a love.

What?

Everybody celebrates Mother.

They got her a lovely gift

from a shoe store, her favorite brand, Hush Puppy.

But

let's get to what you came here to hear about.

Stormy Daniels, this is the week in the Trump trial.

We finally heard from Stormy Daniels.

Trump posted, the whole world is watching.

I hate to tell you, Don, not even your family is watching.

But

Stormy had a lot to get off her chest.

I mean, she.

No, serious.

We heard all about her background.

She grew up in Louisiana.

She started dancing at the strip clubs at 18,

moved into adult films at 23.

What in Louisiana they call the career fast track.

I get Louisiana.

I love Louisville.

But then we got to, you know, we had to hear about the actual sex with Donald Trump.

And she said, well, it was not exactly consensual.

It was unwanted, but she did not resist what most women call married sex.

And now, now, of course, the looming question is: will Trump take the stand?

And we know for sure he will not because he said he would.

That's how we know for sure he will not.

But come on, Trump take the stand, he'd put his hand on the Bible, and be sizzled like a fajita.

But

here's the thing.

Now, because the details from Stormy were so salacious, I mean, even the judge had to say to her, honey, TMI.

You know, I mean,

there's kids watching.

But now, Trump's team is pushing for a mistrial.

Oh, and by the way, mistrial is also Trump's drag name.

Oh, look.

He has missed Trump.

But you know, Trump has been cited 10 times for contempt of court because he, you know, can't keep his mouth shut.

And anybody else who ten times they would put you in jail.

And he, I think he wants to go to jail because it would make him a martyr.

He's practically begging the judge to put him in jail.

There's a switch.

Lock me up.

And

I love this.

Over on Fox News, Jesse Waters, have you seen this guy?

Interesting guy.

They keep finding him over there.

He said if Trump does go to jail, he's going to work out a lot and he'll come out ripped.

You're right, I could just stop with that.

But no, Jesse Waters said he's going to come out ripped with a jail bod.

Oh, gosh, Fox election coverage, your number one source for gay fan fiction.

And

here's a development in the presidential race I didn't see forthcoming.

Robbie Kennedy.

Right.

So this

revealed some medical news this week.

He said he's fine to run, but full disclosure, a worm did eat his brain.

I'm not making that up.

No.

I mean, not recent.

This is like 15 years ago.

And the worm is dead.

The worm is dead, ladies and gentlemen.

No worries about the worm.

I think this says everything about the presidential race.

The 70-year-old man with a worm-eaten brain is the youth candidate.

And Christy Noam now says we've got to shoot him because he has worms.

All right.

We've got a great show.

We have Frank Bruni and Douglas Murray here.

But first up, he's a contributing writer at the Atlantic, author of the bestseller Fast Food Nation, and a producer of the documentary Food Inc.

2, which is available to stream now.

Eric Schwasser, Eric.

Hello, sir.

How are you?

Big fan of Fast Food Nation, by the way.

Thank you.

Love that book.

How are you today?

I'm good.

Oh, yeah?

Well, I want to ask you about, I wanted to have you here basically because we have a presidential election which seems to be a lot about eggs.

Yeah.

This seems to be what the whole thing is turning on people about your past.

Eggs and worms.

Well,

I was going to ask you about that.

Yeah.

Well, let's go to that first because it is on my mind.

Not in my mind, I hope.

But.

I mean, the bird flu is now in the milk.

Could the worm...

How do you get a worm in your brain?

Let's just go right there.

You know,

ask Bobby.

I mean, I'm sorry that you couldn't talk to him about this when he was on your show.

But

maybe some bad sushi, maybe uncooked pork, but

of all the

food, that's how you do it.

Yeah, but of all the food-borne problems we've got in the United States, worm in the brain is not in the top 5,000.

We have avian influenza being spread by cows.

And scientists had no idea until a few weeks ago that this influenza could even be in cows at all.

How do they get from the birds to the cows?

Well, that's a very good question.

There are wild birds that overfly dairies.

There's all this intermixture of viruses that's going on.

And what's very concerning about it is right now the federal government is not allowed to go into these mega dairies dairies that have 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 cows and test them for avian influenza.

The federal government can't go onto these mega dairies and test the workers, many of whom are undocumented and quite fearful of if they test positive what's going to happen to them.

You have big ag and the big dairy companies preventing the CDC from investigating you know, what could be a life-threatening illness eventually to people.

And it's a perfect example of how the public health is being threatened by private interests.

Yeah, I mean of all the industries that own the government, I'd have to say, you know, pharmaceuticals very high up, but nobody higher than the food.

Well, the food companies spend more on lobbying than the defense industry.

Right.

Yeah, and

I feel like the big picture story from your book, your movie, is that this system really works for nobody.

It's not good for the land.

It's certainly not good for the animals.

It's not good for the workers who work in the factory, even in fast food.

And the farm workers.

And it's not good for the consumer.

It's not good for the person who eats this food.

It's good for a handful of enormous corporations that have basically taken over our food supply in the last 40 years.

That sounds crazy.

That sounds conspiratorial.

But when you go into a supermarket and you see thousands of different products, they're all being made by three or four different companies.

And they hide behind these these different brands.

I mean I just found out from this book that I read recently called Barons by Austin Freerich, a great book, that the biggest seller of coffee in the United States is a German company, not Starbucks, but they sell it under all these different brands so you think that there's choice but it's really an illusion of choice.

And I feel like the problem at bottom is that food is too delicious.

That's why people don't care, is that we're seduced by the food.

The Trojan horse is in our stomach.

So, I mean, we have these, I mean, you mentioned it before.

Cigarettes are great too, by the way.

I used to smoke.

I did say that.

I love them.

But these food companies are carefully formulated, formulating these ultra-processed foods so that they taste really good and you want to eat them again and again and again.

Okay, that's a word I just came across recently from reading you, ultra.

I've heard processed food.

Yeah.

I've never heard ultra-processed.

Is that something new or is it just a word we hadn't heard before and how is it different than just processed food?

It is new.

So a processed food would be something like canned corn.

You know, they cook the corn, they add some salt and some water, it's in the can, you open it up, you eat it.

That's just fine.

An ultra-processed.

Yeah.

I mean, frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, as long as they don't have all kinds of additives, that's healthy.

I disagree vehemently.

Well, vegetables have to be eaten fresh, or it's just shit.

And corn is shit to begin with.

No, but ideally, yes, but in terms of harming your health, it's not going to hurt you.

What's going to hurt you?

If you look at the label and there are all these chemical names that you would never have in your kitchen, that's an ultra-processed food.

And what they're doing is they're creating flavor additives at these factories, mainly in New Jersey, that

hey,

no offense, there are some wonderful things that have come out of that state, but flavor additives may not be it.

Trust me, there are worse smells than the food factory.

I'm a native, I can say that.

And in New Jersey, you can tell where you are on the New Jersey turnpike by what it smells like.

Anyway, flavor.

Flavor additives, emulsifiers, all these artificial sweeteners that human beings have never consumed before.

So we're basically guinea pigs for these chemical additives, and who knows what they're doing to our body, but now increasingly people are concerned that there's bad health effects.

They're giving it cancer.

Obesity.

Well, maybe all kinds of neurological problems.

Right, lots of problems.

But

I think there's a direct link between that, the prevalence of cancer and the shit we eat.

And the problem is when you eat these foods, I think, is that you're not getting nutrients.

You're getting calories.

So your body still wants more food because it wants nutrients.

It wants the good stuff.

So you keep eating, you get fat.

And here's where Ozempic comes in, which I know is the wonder drug and we all love it.

I don't see it that way.

It's an enabler.

It's an enabler to keep eating shitty food.

It's this miracle where you can keep, or maybe you don't eat as much, but you don't have to improve the diet.

So I don't think it's going to make us healthier in the future.

It might make you thinner.

I don't don't think you're still not getting the nutrients that you want.

You know,

we keep on creating problems with technology and then looking for a new technology to solve them.

So this ultra-processed food is absolutely linked to obesity.

So people become obese and then the pharmaceutical companies come up with a drug to help with obesity.

Now I'm not an expert on Ozimpic.

But I think that for people who are severely obese already, what's the choice?

Gastric band surgery or terrible health problems or taking this drug.

We don't know what the long-term implications of being on this drug is going to be, but the long-term implications of being obese are really bad.

The people who probably shouldn't be injecting this drug are people who are maybe

a little too vain and are probably already slender and want to be even more slender.

But for people who are really unhealthy because of their weight, it may be a good thing.

But what we need to do is prevent children from becoming obese.

And that means in schools we need to be serving real foods, not these ultra-processed foods.

Right now, in the American diet, the typical American child is getting 60 to 70%

of their calories from ultra-processed food.

And that's just a recipe for disaster.

And also, there's no variety.

You know,

our diet needs variety.

You know, when we were nomadic, we had a great variety.

This is in that great book, Sapiens.

He makes that great point that once we settled down and factory, well, not factory farmed, but farmed originally and then factory farmed, we'd like three things.

We'd cows, pigs, and chickens.

And very fucking sick.

And sick of chickens.

Right.

Poor chicken.

I mean,

poor chickens.

You get them at breakfast, you get them at dinner.

You get it.

I mean,

that's not good for the body.

It's not good for the body.

And as the co-producer of this film and my friend Michael Pollan put it, we should be eating real food, not so much mainly plants.

And the latest science is that you should be having 30 different types of plant in one week, because it's so much better to get your vitamins from real foods than to get them from supplements or additives, et cetera, et cetera.

Right.

So

I remember

At the very beginning of the COVID epidemic four years ago, the very first editorial I did here, well, I don't think it was here, it was in my backyard.

That's right, because we were sent home.

But it was all about factory farming.

It was about, look, because we thought at the time it came from the Wuhan wet market, and maybe it did.

We don't know.

It either came from the lab or the market.

It shouldn't be a political issue, scientific issue.

We still don't know.

But certainly that didn't help.

And my point was, as long as you keep torturing animals, we are going to be the ones to suffer.

Even if you don't have compassion for animals.

That's totally right.

Okay, so what's the future here?

Because I worry that the next one is coming or it's worse.

I mean, the next one may be right now percolating in Texas, where this avian influenza was discovered in cows accidentally by a veterinarian.

And you should look up the Secretary of Agriculture in Texas, who's this far-right-wing, conservative,

I don't mind that he's conservative, conspiracy theorist who is basically blocking and trying to block the CDC from investigating this epidemic.

Factory farms are a crime against nature.

And I'm not a vegan.

I'm not a vegetarian.

These are sentient creatures that we're treating like industrial commodities.

And Mother Nature is going to get back at us for us.

All right.

Thank you.

We needed to hear that message.

I appreciate it.

Great work as always, Eric.

Eric Slosser.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hi, guys.

How are you two?

All right, here's a columnist for the New York Post and best-selling author of the book, The War on the West.

Douglas Murray's back with us.

How you doing?

And he's a contributing writer at the New York Times and author of the bestseller, The Age of Grievance.

Frank Bruni, our returning champion.

Okay.

So let's start off talking about Israel and Gaza because we finally have someone here on the show who was there.

That's not something you find a lot in the media these days.

It's very hard to get into Gaza, very hard to know what's going on there.

So I just want to ask you before we get to the politics of it all, because there's a lot of that this week,

what does it look like there?

Are people starving?

And if they are, whose fault is that?

First, I've been in Israel and Gaza for the last six months since the war began.

I can't speak to whether anyone is starving.

I mean,

it's it's a bad situation in Gaza because Hamaz started a war.

And

Israel is stuck in this very, very strange position of having to supply food to the area controlled by its enemy.

And are they?

Yes, they are.

I mean, food trucks going through all the time.

But I mean, of course, the situation is terrible

because

the situation could end at any point if Hamaz did what they've been asked to do repeatedly for six months, which is to give back the hostages.

And now, you know,

my view is that there's, I mean, I've seen the conflict up close and I still believe that, I mean, first of all, you can't just put out 80% of a fire.

You have to put out the whole thing.

You can't destroy 80% of Hamaz.

You can't not get the leader who masterminded the seventh Sinois.

And that's all in Rafah.

And the second thing is, you know, I don't think there's any law of war that says you you can start a war and then when you begin to lose it, you say, let's pretend we didn't start it.

But that is always what Israel faces.

Sure.

I mean, it's very strange.

A year before I was in Ukraine, I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they're retaking land from the Russians, and nobody was saying, oh, hold on, don't win too much.

Everyone was egging them on.

Every Western leader gets a shot of testosterone whenever they talk about the Ukrainian armed forces.

And yet, the Israelis never allowed to win.

Yeah.

Very strange.

And

what do we attribute that to?

Is that anti-Semitism, would you say?

Why they have

a set of rules for them?

I mean they truly are the chosen people.

They're chosen to not win the war.

I agree.

Yeah, and I mean, you know,

for some reason, I think anti-Semitism is one of of the reasons, whenever Israel is involved in a conflict, the whole world goes bananas.

And you can't even have a Eurovision song contest without it becoming an Israel-Gaza thing.

It's crazy.

Everyone gets obsessed with this conflict.

And I think one reason is, by the way, is because a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans and people of all stripes have said for generation, until the Palestinian-Israeli issue is solved, there won't be peace in the Middle East.

As if you solve the Palestinian-Israeli issue and then the economy of Yemen starts to boom.

and then the Iranian mullahs give women rights and the Saudis become really keen on the gays.

No.

It's an issue for sure.

So Biden says he's going to stop giving armaments now to Israel.

What do you think about that?

Is that appropriate?

I don't think it's going to please anybody, do you?

No, of course not.

I mean, he's obviously trying to, you know, he believes famously in a two-state solution, which is Minnesota and Michigan.

And

he's trying to please a few hundred thousand people in America.

I don't think he's going to please anyone, but the fact that he gave a speech on Tuesday saying that he would always defend the right of the Jewish people to defend themselves and later that day stopped arms shipments to Israel suggests to me that, I mean, this is a problem.

You can't, it's devastating if the end of this conflict comes about in another stalemate.

If there's a stalemate at the end of this, Hamas is still in control in the Gaza, the war will happen again in two years' time and again two years after that, and on and on for the rest of our lives.

I don't disagree with any of that, but you were asking about the ire at Israel and the criticism of Israel.

I think there's one other thing going on, which is right now there's this paradigm that people like to apply to every situation.

If you have more power, you're probably in the wrong, and if you have less, you're probably in the right.

If you have more affluence, you're probably in the wrong, and if you have less, you're probably in the right.

There are situations.

And skin tone.

Right.

There are situations to which that paradigm applies.

But the problem is we apply it indiscriminately, wantonly, regardless of the circumstances.

And what has been so strange to me about all of this is almost ⁇ so October 7th happens, and from October 8th forward, people are blaming Israel.

There was a ceasefire in place, right?

We're looking for one now.

There was one in place.

Hamas crossed the border, border, invaded, and the savagery, the brutality was incredible.

We have to have a conversation now about the magnitude of the retaliation, about how many civilian casualties there are, about whether this is indiscriminate, but let us not forget how this began.

And so much of the conversation seems to wipe October 7th off the plate.

Absolutely.

Finally.

I couldn't agree more.

I mean, you know, remember about 10 years ago,

Boko Haram stole 300 school children in Nigeria.

Bring back our girls.

And everyone, bring back our girls.

Everywhere.

Where has been the celebrity response, the Hollywood response, the decent people response, the any

reasonable person response of bring back the Jewish children?

Where is it?

Well, it's not at Columbia.

No.

Here's a bulletin from academia.

Yes, Columbia in New York City announced Monday they are canceling their graduation.

USC also canceled commencement here in Los Angeles.

Emory University in Atlanta changing the location of its ceremony.

I don't know.

I guess it's that dangerous.

I mean, what can I tell you?

These kids are such drama queens.

I mean,

the student editors at the Columbia Law Review, they said they were the ones who agitated for canceling the finals.

They said, because the violence of the police clearing, it wasn't violent,

left them irrevocably shaken.

Even if you were this fragile, would you say it out loud?

I mean,

you would?

Well, today

I would.

Today I would, because we live in a culture where if you can portray yourself as the victim and as the person who's been taken advantage of, it somehow has cultural and political currency.

So they're just doing what they see politicians do every day.

But it's not just, it's not just...

It's not just the...

It's not just the fragility, it's the narcissism.

I mean, who the hell is so badly brought up that they honestly believe that if they holler on a corner of a campus in America, the war cabinet in Israel is going to stop.

Like, maybe Benjamin Netanyahu or whatever you think of him, does not take his lead from a 19-year-old student whose parents have remortgaged the house in order to send them to college to become stupid.

But they're not, they're not, they're not

thinking strategically, they're not thinking tactically, they like to holler, right?

This is a moment where everyone likes to holler.

And the message that people get from the way our Congress behaves, look at them, is that they who shout the loudest and use the most hyperbolic language and are the most provocative win the news cycle.

Say hello to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Yeah, I mean, of course.

There's no bigger whiny little bitch than you know who.

Those are your words, not mine.

My words, and I said them a million times and I'll repeat them a million times.

Nevertheless, I can't tell you.

She's the whiniest little bitch that ever was.

She's an emblem of our time.

I'm talking about Trump, as who I refer to.

Who is an emblem of our time?

We shouldn't overestimate the power of politicians.

I don't think that the average student looks to Congress for behavior, do they?

I think they get permission.

I don't think they look and say, that's what I want to be like, but I think a kind of culture is set, a kind of tone is set, in which confrontation is confused with conviction, in which being provocative is confused with being bold and brave.

I think that is a culture that our politicians absolutely feed.

So let me read a quote from

just in case people think that

we're making this up or this isn't really prevalent, but it really is.

And I thought of it because I've been reading your book, and your book is about grievance, the age of grievance.

Okay, this is a 20-year-old UCLA student.

When you are a part of any oppressed group, I don't know what this person's background is.

I assume she is a part of some group that she sees herself as oppressed, especially people that are experiencing direct state violence.

Okay, kids call everything violence.

So right there, you lose any credibility with me, because you think everything is violence.

Like being part of the pan-African diaspora within the United States, that certainly happened in the United States, our shameful history, which is built on enslavement and dehumanization and degradation of African peoples.

That does politicize you.

I'm just asking, does this reflect America in 2024?

Who raises a child to feel this way about the country right now?

I keep saying, can we just live in the era we're living in?

Not whitewash the past, but live in the present.

I mean, that someone feels, you're at UCLA.

Who's oppressing you?

Well, it's not.

The question isn't just who raises them to feel this way, it's who educates them to feel this way, right?

If you look at curricula in a lot of secondary schools, probably the kind of secondary school that a lot of Ivy League students have been to, if you look at the curricula at a lot of elite schools, and I teach at one of them, there is the paradigm I spoke of before.

There are all of these buzzwords, and that's what produces this in part.

What are the other buzzwords?

You mean like?

Oppressor, oppressed, colonizer, colonized, victim, victimizer.

Everything falls into this binary, and if you can claim like the top victim status, then you win.

Whereas, you know, in America, in Britain, and other countries in the West, we used to celebrate heroism and achievement.

I still like those, but

there's a.

And by the way, and also,

I mean, I think we should also realize that some people are...

You know, they used to be said in the history of warfare that people fight the last war.

You know, like in Iraq, you fight Vietnam, and in Vietnam, you fight Korea, and so on.

And it's one of the reasons why a lot of wars go wrong.

I'd argue also that people are fighting the last culture war.

I mean, a lot of people would just love the clarity of 1968.

And they honestly believe that they would be the heroes, whereas, of of course, they'd just most likely be like everyone else and not particularly.

Well, you've written recently about Alan Bloom, right?

Yeah, of course.

That's the late 80s, early 90s.

You had a show called Politically Incorrect, right?

If you go back, and I do in the book, if you go back and you look at the late 80s and the early 90s,

it's the same conversation we're having now, just different words.

So I was watching a video of Robert Bork the other day from, I think, the early 1990s, and he was talking about radical egalitarianism.

He was inveighing against it.

That's just wokeness with more syllables, right?

So the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Also, one of the very interesting things about that with Bork, Bloom and others, is that they

diagnose, people diagnosed this in the 1980s, as you know.

And we've known the problems that are going on, this victimhood culture.

We've known this for 40 years now.

And everyone's been great at diagnosing it, but we haven't solved it.

We haven't reversed it.

It's just got worse.

Well, I mean,

we have an ex-president maybe to be a next president who's the victim-in-chief, right?

Whose entire political currency currency is making himself the world's biggest victim of the deep state, of those awful elites, of Democrats, of everyone, right?

He won election because people saw themselves in him, and he said he encouraged that.

And he said, I am like, I'm a symbol of your victimization.

Vote for me, and it is your revenge against the people who oppress you.

And he said it more bluntly than ever this cycle.

He said, I am your retribution.

I think those are some of the most meaningful words we've heard in a long time.

And that's why I think he wants to be sent to jail for for a night.

Well, I don't know that he wants to use the jail toilet.

I don't know.

No, I mean, like, that's got to be in his head.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

But I did mention graduation.

Most of the colleges are still having graduation, but it's a little different this year.

No, every year, it's a custom on the show.

We show the hats.

You know, when kids graduate,

they're some of the real ones that they have.

Thanks, mom and dad.

Hire me on to the next adventure.

This year, they're a little different.

Would you like to see someone like, okay,

I thought you would.

I thought you would.

Like, hide your weed, mom and dad.

I'm coming home.

I'm Gen Z and I might possibly vote.

Love to my family, death to America.

Not anti-Semitic, I just hate Jews.

Oh, wow.

It's a very different year.

Thanks for the checks, Mr.

Gates.

The job I haven't started yet already sucks.

I quit.

They said I couldn't do it, and that's why I cheated.

Ready to cancel speakers in the real world

From the river to my parents' basement.

And

excited to see what I'll complain about next.

All right.

So let's talk about.

Okay, I know I talk about this a lot on this show, but I have to do it again.

I did it last week.

I tore up Merrick Garland, a new asshole, because, I mean, the Democrats have had four years to put Trump on trial, and it is all just going away.

They blew it at every term.

Here's what's happened this week.

Georgia, that one, okay.

They're going to take up Trump's argument about Fannie Willis.

Now, she's the prosecutor.

She's having an affair with the guy she hired.

I mean, it's not really relevant to the case, but they left an opening.

And now that one's going to be delayed.

The stolen documents one, that's never never going to happen because that's a Trumpy judge down there.

So it's Stormy or bust.

I saw what you did there.

It just comes out.

I'm not trying.

If this one doesn't work, and she's a bad witness, because let me show you a little video.

This is when I had Stormy on.

in 2018 and first I asked her why she had sex with Trump listening to that and then listen to what she says after that, and then we're going to talk about the trial because it's quite at variance of what she said to me in 2018.

Why did you fuck Donald Trump?

I have no idea.

Okay, but you say it's not a me-too case.

It is not a me-too case.

I mean, I wasn't assaulted.

I wasn't attacked or raped or coerced or blackmailed.

They tried to shove me in the me-too box in front of their own agenda.

And first of all, I didn't want any part of that because it's not the truth, and I'm not a victim in that regard.

That's not what she's saying now.

She's talking about he was bigger and blocking the way.

It's all the Me Too buzzwords.

She said there was a power imbalance of power for sure.

My hands were shaking so hard.

She said she blacked out.

Blacked out?

She's a porn star.

I don't think second.

That doesn't mean she's been subjected to the likes of Donald Trump.

I might black out too.

Do you really think she blacked out?

I mean, listen, a porn star is used to having sex with people she does not know.

That's the job.

It's kind of like stormy Bob.

Bob Stormy.

Fuck.

Action, and let's go, and we're losing the light.

So I just think this is, I just think she's not a good witness, and this is...

No, yesterday wasn't a good day for her in court.

and the uh she wasn't a good witness she has contradicted things she said in the past and you know everyone who is hanging on the hope of stormy daniels being the way to get trump in prison is gonna have another disappointment coming i think uh this this feels to me uh as a kind of uh last chance as you say for the people who it's clear to a lot of the a lot of the country think let's say that there is just an aim to make sure that Donald Trump is not on the ballot later this year and it'll be done anyway.

But as you say, to end up with a Stormy Daniels case as the main hope is if I was

the main person wanting to get Trump in prison, that would not be the thing I would want to hang this on.

I worry about another aspect of her testimony, which is the detail, the gratuitous detail.

I keep having flashbacks to Lewinsky-Clinton, right?

And one of the reasons I think Bill Clinton was able to survive that whole Monica Lewinsky chapter was because Ken Starr and his Republican pursuers were so lascivious and overzealous.

I mean, we saw the details of the Star Report are nothing.

I mean, what she said on the witness stand is nothing compared to that.

I don't think.

You know who wrote that?

What?

You know who wrote that?

The Star Report?

Brett Kavanaugh.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

He's the one who wrote all about.

That's Justice Kavanaugh to you.

But all the stuff about

sex with a Jew on Easter.

They put, you're right.

They put in all those details on purpose, and I think your point is that it screwed them, right?

Yes, and if you are not a total partisan at this point, if you're that tiny band of people in the middle, I don't think they like to see people, even Donald Trump, gratuitously humiliated.

And so I don't think that is helping the cause of preventing another Trump.

Yeah, the humiliation thing is really striking.

I mean, there were details that the court went into this week, which they didn't need to.

There was no reason why she had to go into these details about allegedly spanking him with a magazine.

I do like the spanking.

In which case, Bill can give you her number.

No.

I like the symbolism of it because, in one version of the story, a disputed version, she's spanking him with a magazine that he's on the cover of.

And that just feels to me like some perfect convergence of political commentary, psychotherapeutic come up-ins, and bad porn hub video, you know?

Which is perfect.

But nevertheless,

as with Clinton, there is that thing that the abject humiliation becomes too much, even apart from anyone who's a complete partisan already.

And I think a lot of people will think that...

Yes, I mean people wouldn't want to have their sex lives gone into in this kind of detail.

It's interesting.

I'm out plugging a book.

I probably shouldn't do it tonight, but I will.

It's called What This Comedian Said Will Shock You When It's Out May 21st.

You can pre-order it now.

But no, but it is true.

Now that I'm doing the interviews with this, the big question that people are asking me, I see every interview ask the same question, which is like, you know, you make fun of the left a lot more than you used to.

Yes, I do, because they're goofier and more obnoxious than they used to be.

It doesn't mean I've turned into a Republican.

I haven't changed on that at all.

They also just became weirder.

They're still not the threat the Republicans are, but I do both.

And the question I get from everybody is, if you really don't want Trump elected, and I really don't, then why don't you just shut up about Joe Biden and just shut up about what's wrong with the left?

And it's so interesting, this very week I noticed, I guess he's not your boss anymore, right?

You're at the Times.

I see you in the Times often, but you're not officially with the paper.

I'm kind of half in, half out.

Okay.

Oh.

I'm just going with the evening's metaphors.

I see.

So

I see that the head of the New York Times, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, was asked almost the same question.

This guy, Dan Pfeiffer, used to work for Obama.

He was complaining.

He said, the Times does not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.

He was complaining that they don't do it.

And Mr.

Kahn said, I don't even know how that would work.

We become an instrument for the Biden campaign and put out a stream of stuff that's very favorable, very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side, which made me laugh because I feel like that is what the Times actually does.

And I didn't even want the other side to come out.

But now here's Mr.

Kahn, what he said.

He said there are people who want to elect Donald Trump as president.

It's not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening.

It's the job of Biden and the people around him.

So I applaud this.

I think that is the right.

But I wanted to get you guys on this.

If you really, I mean, it is a reasonable question.

If you really don't want Trump to be elected, should you just be quiet about the other side's flaws?

Absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

If you ignore and you sugarcoat Joe Biden's shortcomings, then when you turn your attention to Donald Trump's wretchedness, you've surrendered all credibility.

We don't have a surfeit of credibility to work with right now.

It's our job.

It's our job to cover both of these candidates honestly.

And I honestly believe that if we do that, the one who will end up in the less flattering light is one Donald Trump.

And it's our job to be a part of democracy.

If you believe in democracy, you give voters a full menu of information.

You don't feed them baby bird style, just what you think they can tolerate, or what you want them to eat.

And then you let them make the decision.

That's called a democracy.

And we've spent the last year since 2016, when Trump was elected, we've been saying we are the servants of truth, we are the

guardians of truth.

We can't say, but there's an asterisk if we think telling you the truth might have an election turn out differently from what we want.

But I mean, we already know that the media does this.

I mean, the media, everyone in the media seems to think that we're not completely transparent to the public.

And we are.

The media as a whole, the public can see right through it.

The public knew exactly what most of the media were doing with Hunter Biden in the 2016 election.

They knew, the 2020 election, sorry.

They knew that there was an attempt to suppress the story, and then afterwards, we discovered, sure, there was an attempt to suppress the story.

Why?

Because a large amount of the media just wanted to get their guy in.

I can't understand this.

I have to say, I don't know about the job of a comedian, but the job of a journalist in relation to politicians is famously what the position of a dog should be to a lamppost.

You're meant to piss on them.

You are.

You're not meant to be

the media.

The media is not meant to be.

Journalists are not meant to be the armen chorus of any political party, any politician.

We're just meant to report the truth as we see it.

Of course, it's editorializing.

But this idea that it's like a team sport, if you want a team sport, go into politics.

Don't be in journalism and the media.

But here's the thing we can't do.

We need to be honest about them both.

We need not to ignore and sugarcoat Biden's shortcomings.

But we also can't do this.

Here's one bad story about Trump.

Here's one bad story about Biden.

We can't enforce this mathematical equivalence, right?

You've got one candidate who has delusions or aspirations to a quasi-fascist state.

You've got another who's going to mix up the name of world leaders and need a midday nap.

It's not eeny, meeny, my original.

And yeah, but the problem.

The problem with that is that it could easily be done by a Trump supporter the other way around, as you know.

And the problem in this country now, as I see it.

What's the other way?

Look, if 50% of the population vote one way, 50% vote another, and occasionally you get this sort of small percentage who swing, I would have thought you'd at least have to take the reasons why people support Trump seriously and assume that they're sort of voting for him in spite of what they know about him.

And I think that there's this very, very strange thing that's happened in this country, and it's worse than any other democracy I know, which is that you have now a situation where people don't have different opinions.

They have different facts.

And so everything that you can say from 2016 if you're a Democrat and from 2020 if you're a Republican or from this year on is just a totally different set of facts, a totally different version of the history.

My worry is that.

That's called the internet and social media.

Yeah, and that's the thing.

Yeah, that's definitely made it worse, of course.

But let me take Frank's side on this for a minute just by quoting Mr.

Tim Scott.

He was running for president on the Republican side.

He didn't make it.

Now he was asked this week, last week, would he accept the 2024 election results?

He goes around a little bit and then he says, at the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump.

That sounds a lot like, no.

I will not accept any results except unless our side wins,

it's a fake election.

So I think that is a very fundamental difference.

Look, I agree, but I'm not making this as a partisan on this point.

I just say that a lot of Republican voters will just observe that lots of Democrats didn't accept the Trump election.

A lot of people in this country did Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Russia thing turned out not to...

They relied on it.

My God, did they rely on it?

Night after night.

Because there was giant collusion with Russia.

You are making somewhat of a good point, but you cannot.

You cannot.

No, no, no, no.

You cannot.

No, but in all honesty, you cannot compare saying Russia meddled, Russia meddled, Russia meddled, which, by the way, Russia did, with January 6th.

You can't compare it.

No, but you can see.

You can't compare it with the grievance, no, but you can create it.

Donald Trump launched.

Donald Trump launched a scheme, fake electors, et cetera, to steal the election.

That is not the same as Democrats saying we think Russia is stealing.

It's not the same, but it's on a continuum.

If in 2016 there are people who say that is not our president, you get it first from Hillary Clinton, then you get a lot of other people like Nancy Pelosi, not small figures.

If they do that for four years and the Republicans get on the game, then what happens is exactly what we have now, which is people in this country now only think the election is won when it's their side of the world.

It always happens.

I have to cut it short just when it's getting hot.

Anyway, thank you guys, but I gotta go to New World.

All right.

Okay.

New World, the celebrities who wear these ridiculous outfits to the Met Gala have to answer the question: how do you you go to the bathroom?

Or get a drink, or dance, or do anything one typically does at a gala.

And then there's the embarrassment when you have to tell your mother, I was out all night pulling a train.

New rules, someone has to ask the man who's in the news because he raised a four-month-old lion and plays with it in his yard, you know how this ends, right?

Yes, congratulations, my friend.

You're going to be in the news again.

One more time.

And like everyone who imagines they can make a pet out of an apex predator, your last words will be, don't worry, he's just playing.

New rule between Christy Noam saying she shot her dog and RFK saying he found a dead worm in his brain,

politicians need to go back to lying.

What is it?

Too much information.

It's not helping your chances.

When I hear a guy found a dead worm in his brain, it makes me think just one thing.

You can stop asking me to try sushi.

I'm sure it's delicious, but I think the cavemen were onto something when they started cooking with fire.

New rules, now that the Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America, someone has to tell them that still sounds kind of creepy.

Maybe even more so.

We're Scouting America for young boys.

Yeah, that doesn't sound good either.

New world, don't be surprised these $800 designer jeans with the stain that looks like you pissed your pants

are sold out.

Hey, the kids love streaming

And young voters are the key to this election.

And these pants say, I love Joe Biden so much, I want to dress just like him.

See,

we're living up to our

credentials.

And finally, new rule, now that the campus protesters are finally packing up their tents and delousing their hair,

it's time for the media to admit that they blew the whole thing way out of proportion.

because as always with media these days, they don't cover what's most important, just what's most fun to watch.

There are 15.2 million college students in the U.S.

and 2,300 have been arrested.

That's 167th of 1%,

and half of the ones in New York weren't even students.

But we were given the...

But we were given the false impression that these protesters are the voice of their generation, having found a cause for which they were willing to go to the tents and to the barricades.

Oh, please, these kids are more violent when their team wins a championship.

A Harvard youth poll proved it.

They asked people 18 to 29 what issues mattered most to them, and out of 16 choices, Palestine came in 15.

The vast majority just wanted to do what they went to college for in the first place, to experiment with being a lesbian.

But when these kids chant, the whole world is watching, they're right.

But only because you assholes with the cameras won't show anything else.

Isn't there a bear in a swimming pool somewhere you should be covering?

So

I thought as a public service, since it's so hard to find reliable news these days, tonight I would provide a few rules of thumb for trying to follow the news in our modern age.

Starting with, if the headlines in your preferred news outlet routinely feature words like shreds, destroys, pummels, bashes, your outlet is a partisan piece of shit.

Either that or you're reading a Batman comic.

Ditto with obliterates, roasts, annihilates, and owns.

You're supposed to be a source for information, not Nikki Glazer at the Tom Brady roast.

Oh, she was good.

Two, any news source that quotes the internet or writes Twitter says or a bunch of hacks too lazy to do real journalism.

You can pretend you wrote a piece on the zeitgeist, but what you really did was look on your phone and quote the three angriest people with the most time on their hands.

Three, if your news outlet consistently reduces everything that happens in the world to who the president of America is, get rid of it.

It's just thoughtless, reflexive team politics.

Trust me, no one lighting a tire fire in Haiti is thinking, I wouldn't have done this under Trump, but given the weakness of the Biden administration, why not?

Every problem in the world isn't caused by the president.

When that train derailed in East Palestine, it wasn't because Trump deregulated the brakes and the container ship didn't hit the bridge because of Biden's woke DEI agenda.

These aren't news stories.

They're story lines pumped into your bubble.

Four, always be aware that once the news became a profit division of media companies, they stopped being in the news business and are now in the audience stroking business.

The goal is no longer to inform opinions, it's to reinforce them.

Walter Cronkite used to say, that's the way it is.

Now it's, that's our story and we're sticking to it.

Narrative first, whole story never.

On Fox, a Venezuelan migrant is always stabbing a white lady.

And on NPR, where they stop bashing the rich long enough only to beg for money.

Jamaica is a paradise and Nebraska is a no-go zone.

News Nation reported this year that the U.S.

was on track for nearly a 300% increase in measles cases.

300%?

Wow, that sounds like it could be millions.

It was 35.

Because they just want to manipulate you into clicking.

Look, I have 10 fingers.

You want to see me suddenly have 80% less?

Let's go, please.

Okay.

Five, never trust the initial reports.

The media cares way more about being first than being right.

They love a scoop, but it's a scoop of shit because it always turns out to be wrong.

This goes way back to, remember Columbine, remember remember that, the first school shooting where it was widely reported that the shooters were members of a trench coat mafia?

They weren't.

That they were being bullied?

Not true.

And they targeted jocks.

No evidence of that.

So they got everything right except for all of it.

You know.

You have to care about the truth.

The media doesn't care about it because they know you don't care, that you just want to hear your side.

So at some point, you need to take a step back, look around, and be really honest.

Are you actually as fucked as your news feed tells you you are?

Are you miserable?

Some people are, and we should help them.

Are you destitute?

Some people are, we should help them.

But most people who take the subway get to work alive.

Most don't fall out of a plane with a missing door.

Odds are you won't actually catch bird flu during a school shooting or be living on the street because a squatter snatched your house.

Be honest.

Are you really that sad about the present, sorry about the past, and scared shitless about the future?

People come up to me a lot these days and they say, Bill, what are we going to do if he wins?

They didn't even ever have to say who.

I know who they mean.

The guy who always looks like he's jerking off two guys when he dances.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Fan favorite.

Well, you know what?

I don't know what we'll do if he wins, but my guess is we'll keep on living.

Trump could absolutely blow up the world on day one of term two.

He's a dangerous, erratic, insane, awful person, and I'd love to help him get not elected.

But he didn't actually start World War III last time, or nuke a hurricane, or trade Puerto Rico for Greenland.

Sure.

Sure, the sequel is usually worse, but until he does, I'm going to live my life and not the one the media wants me to live, hating half the country and shitting my pants 24-7.

Is the sky really falling?

I don't know.

Maybe.

And maybe it's just the door from a Boeing airplane.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Officer in Minneapolis July 13th, the Riverside in Milwaukee on the 14th, and the MGM Music Hall in Boston, July 26th.

I want to thank Douglas Murray, Frank Rooney, and Eric Schlosser.

Now go watch Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

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.

Yo, this is important, man.

Uh, my favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're called pacebreakers.

The ones with all the pockets.

I just got back from vacation and I left them in my hotel room.

And dude, I need to replace these shorts.

I wear them like three times a week.

Could you send me the link to where you got them?

Oh, also, my birthday's coming up soon.

So, anyways, thanks, bro.

Talk soon.

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