Ep. #648: Coleman Hughes, Bob Costas, Caitlin Flanagan

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Thank you, Pape.

Oh, hi.

Hello.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming.

I appreciate that.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Very exciting.

We've got a big show before.

A lot of news.

Before I get to that, I just want to give a shout out to my friend.

He was here last week, Killer Mike, won three Grammys.

It was a...

Then he was arrested at the Grammys.

It was a conspiracy theory because I couldn't get him to endorse Biden.

But they said, that's, I'm sorry, this is going on the internet.

I don't understand the police in this country.

You know, you walk out of CVS with an arm full of shit and they don't say anything.

And then they see a rapper holding three Grammys, and they're like, got to see your hands.

But the other thing that people are excited about, of course, is that the Super Bowl is Sunday and it's going to be a record number, they say, of women watching.

And the women, you're going to, because of Taylor Swift,

but they're really

leaning into the woman audience this year.

They're going to have the refs bring up penalties that happened 10 games ago.

I kid the women we joke.

But here's the big news.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments whether they can throw Trump off the ballots in individual states, Colorado and Maine.

Well, we can talk about it.

But

what do you think about that?

We can't see this.

I don't understand this.

No cameras at the Supreme Court.

I don't get this.

You can film everything in America.

You can barely go to the washroom on a plane without it being filmed.

But we can't see the Supreme Court.

That's private.

So Trump is telling his supporters they're going to have to imagine him snorting, sighing, and folding his arms like a fat four-year-old.

And yes, it looks like, oh, he won more primaries.

That race is over.

Nikki Helley was number two, is number two, I guess.

She ran in Novato, lost to none of these on the bat.

I'm not sure.

She got beat by nobody.

This hasn't happened since Jesse Smollett.

But,

of course,

the issue I was hoping we wouldn't have to be talking about at this point, but of course we do, but you know, I know it, you know what I'm saying Biden's brain.

Well,

a bunch of things happened this week.

First of all, he's not doing the traditional for the president to do the Super Bowl interview, and people are saying, why can't he even do the Super Bowl interview?

It's not a tough, we're not asking him to go on dancing with the stars.

Okay.

And then the special counsel that was investigating the document scandal, remember the document scandal, Trump had his documents by the toilet and

Biden is hid by his old Corvette.

Okay.

So the report comes out and this guy who is a Trump appointee, who was the prosecutor,

it was very much like the Comey letter, said, no, no criminal charges, but then he he spent 300 pages calling Biden Mr.

Magoo, basically.

This is the words from the report: that Biden's a well-meaning, elderly man with diminished faculties and advancing age.

Come on.

Well,

I don't want to say this thing is loaded, but the final line of the report was, I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message.

But But

look,

Joe is not helping his own cause.

In one week, first he mixed up French President Macron

with former President Mitterrand, who died in 1996.

Then he mixed up Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, with the late Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany.

And he said, this is all a big nothing.

I just want to watch the Super Bowl and enjoy the halftime show with Toby Keith.

So

it's not.

But, you know.

And of course the Republicans are trying to make hay out of this.

And now they're trying to, I love this, try to connect Hunter Biden with Joe Biden's cognitive problems.

Marcia Blackburn, she's a senator from Tennessee, she said, did Hunter,

did he take advantage of Joe's mental incompetence to sell access?

Yes, like Hunter Biden's Ferris Bueller.

That's what's going on.

I stole dad's launch codes, Toga Party.

So to put all this to rest, this didn't work out too well either, about his mind.

Joe Biden had a press conference, kind of impromptu press conference yesterday.

Didn't start off well.

He walked in and said, why did I come in here again?

And then in the middle of explaining that he's perfectly fine and he doesn't mix things up, he mixed up who the president of Egypt is, El-Sisi, and said he was the president of Mexico.

This is like claiming in front of your wife that you're not a cheater when the burner phone goes off.

Okay, but you know what?

We knew he was old when we elected him, all right?

Joe, he's like that goldfish you get at the fair.

Don't get attached.

And

who hasn't mixed up the presidents of Mexico and the president of Egypt?

I once invited the leader of Egypt to a dinner party when I meant to invite the president of Mexico, and then it was like, ooh, hope you like tacos.

All right, we've got a great show.

We have Bob Costas, Caitlin Flanagan are here, But first up, he is the host of Conversations with Coleman Podcast and a contributor to the Free Press.

His new book out this week is called The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.

Coleman Hughes is over here.

Coleman.

Great to see you, sir.

Oh, thank you.

All right.

Thank you for being here.

I think your book is great.

Fighting.

So what's the difference?

Where do we draw the line here?

Fighting racism and your book is fighting the politics of race, talking about the politics of racism.

What's the difference between fighting racism and the politics of racism?

Right.

So racism as defined by Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, judging people on the basis of their race rather than their character and so forth, that's not what my book is against fighting.

Obviously, we should all fight that, no matter who it's directed at.

What my book is fighting is this ideology that really was born with critical race theory, the adult version of critical race theory in the 70s and 80s, and became more popular over the past 10 years that equates whiteness with evil, equates blackness with a kind of moral superiority, stereotypes whole groups of people, says that your race is an essential part of who you are, and feels even that children need to be taught this from as young an age as possible because they're born with the wrong attitude about race and it needs to be sort of hammered out of them by separating white kids from black kids, from Hispanic kids, putting them in different corners of the room, as was done in my Columbia University orientation some nine years ago.

And that the way we're going to get to

the kind of society we want is by focusing more and more on racial identity.

In my book, I say this is nonsense, this is totally against the spirit of the civil rights movement, and that actually the wise principle is that we should try to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in public policy.

Funny, I mean,

that wouldn't have been controversial with any liberal 30 or 40, 50 years ago.

I mean, that is what Martin Luther King said.

What colorblind society?

I mean, I thought we were all after that, and then we all weren't.

And what changed?

Yeah, so even 20 years ago, it wouldn't have been controversial.

I grew up in a liberal town, Montclair, New Jersey.

Many people probably know it.

Diverse town where we celebrated Martin Luther King every year.

We listened to the famous speech and got goosebumps as most Americans do, and really believed that.

And I lived out that dream.

In other words, I had friends of every race as a kid, and I didn't think of them as belonging to a race.

I thought of them by their name and their attributes, right?

They treated you the same way?

Yeah,

for the most part.

Yeah, I mean, there are exceptions, but the exceptions prove the overwhelming rule.

So, you know,

before 2013, you can just look at polling data from Gallup and Pew.

The majority of Americans, black, white, and Hispanic, believed race relations were good as late as 2013, and that's the year everything takes a nosedive so that by 2021, half as many people thought we were in a good place as thought that in 2013.

So the question is, what happened?

Did racism suddenly spike?

Well, no, the data is pretty clear on that.

Racism didn't spike.

What happened is that we all got smartphones and social media and started seeing unrepresentative video clips of cops

harassing or beating or killing black Americans.

And this gave people the misperception that racism was suddenly this widespread problem.

And it touched off all of these trends that we've now heard about for the past eight years under various names, wokeness, CRT, DEI.

It's all fundamentally from that core change in how information has been shared.

But there was part of, part of that was good that we did see these beatings and things go on because that's what changed it.

The one thing I can say is good about it is before the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, cops could basically do whatever and not get punished.

Right.

It's hard to find even a single example.

You can find isolated ones, but mostly cops got away with whatever.

So that's no longer the case, and that's the one thing I could credit.

And then go to jail.

And they go to jail.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, it has not, many people think it just revealed all the racism that's actually out there.

That's not true, because if that were true, people would have an accurate assessment.

And this has been tested.

When you ask very liberal Americans, how many unarmed black people do you think are shot by the cops every year?

The answer they gave in 2019 was 1,000.

The real number from that year was 12.

So this social media algorithmically boosted content has not educating us, it's miseducating us.

Yeah, I mean, I noticed this

in my world because

I remember, and because I have a book coming out where I reviewed all the editorials we've done over the entire life of this show,

I remember the editorials I did about certain subjects that now I could not do because the change, like black people aren't seen in media.

Well, plainly that's not true anymore.

Cops.

I was very rough on the cops.

You know, they never get punished for what they do.

That's not true anymore.

You know,

let me read the stats that you were kind of alluding to.

First time in American history, most white people live in mixed-race neighborhoods.

First time ever, and are not unhappy about it.

17%

of married black adults are married to someone from another race.

80% of black employees say their environment at work is excellent or good and find it welcoming.

You know, the problem I find on the left is that you're not allowed to be happy about progress.

Because

then you're saying we're done.

And of course there's still work to do, but I heard Eddie Murphy was getting a big award, I think it's the Griot Awards.

And he said, it was very refreshing.

You never hear people say things like that.

He said, when I started in the business 47 years ago, he said there was like two shows on TV that had black people in it.

Sydney Poitier was the only black movie star.

We had no directors, no producers, few writers,

no makeup people.

He said, now we got all that.

Okay, we're not saying we're done, but I mean,

I don't get this attitude.

I mean, the Robin DiAngelo, you mentioned DEI, the two authors, Kendi, I think, right, Abram X.

Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, the two...

primary authors where people are getting a lot of this information or this attitude about race.

And her quote was last year, I think she wrote, I think people of color need to get away from white people and have some community with each other.

Get away from white people, you know.

I think white people at this point, obviously, there's assholes everywhere and will always be, just like there'll always be criminals, but I think they want to be allies.

And I certainly have always tried to be that and want to be that, but that's just not cool.

You know, we should get away from white people.

I noticed

just socially, I noticed when I I was an undergrad at Columbia, I was literally a thousand times more likely to be talking to a white person that was kind of like afraid to disagree with me or would want to defer to me because I'm black than what my grandfather or even my father would have potentially faced, which is a kind of exclusion because you're black, right?

We've come a long way in this country.

When I was a kid,

it was very normal to see black people on television to the point where it wouldn't even be remarked upon.

And we have to claim that territory, but unfortunately, what I call the neo-racist movement in the book, this new

woke philosophy about race, essentially it wants to deny that any progress has been made.

And anything, the really dishonest part about it is that anything it claims is too hard to achieve, the moment it's actually achieved, that just becomes a pocketed gain.

So I think many people noticed this with the election of Barack Obama.

Two years before it happened, anyone you asked would say, no, there's no way he'll get elected.

The country's too racist.

That was their model of America.

That model was falsified when he won resounding victories twice in a row.

But people didn't update the model and say, Well, maybe that's meaningful.

They immediately pivoted to saying, Well, actually, that thing we thought was impossible, it happens, but it didn't mean anything, right?

People did this as well.

And they shut out people like you.

Right.

I mean, have you ever been on MSNBC?

I have not.

Okay.

I mean, come on, man.

Not you, them.

I mean, well, come on.

I mean, really?

you're and

didn't didn't you have a TED talk that you were that they wouldn't show in truth I'm I'm not viewed as an acceptable voice at many places like this and MSNBC is not going to be super friendly to my perspective.

Shouldn't their audience just hear it?

Sure, yeah.

I mean you're not

crazy person.

The vast majority of people in these audiences are fine listening to me and disagreeing with me.

It's a heckling 5%

that made my TED talk problematic, for example, and people caving to that 5% who saying, they've literally said things like, I make them feel unsafe.

Now, I don't know how you are all receiving me in this room,

but I'm pretty mild.

You're very mild.

I'm quite important.

Thank you.

Well, the last thing I'll say about this is the Democrats are down 20 points from three years ago with party affiliation among African Americans.

20 points in three years among the group that they rely on to win elections?

When is that going to dawn on them?

If you're in a hole, stop digging, maybe?

Democrats?

I mean,

would you attribute that large drop to this kind of

I don't know what I mean?

It could be a number of things.

One, it could be the fact that Biden is just, you know, struggling visibly.

It could be the fact that with all the indictments.

But this is party affiliation.

Right.

not just Biden, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it could be many factors.

I mean, I think African Americans, as Democrats, are the more conservative bloc of the Democratic Party.

Correct.

Even at the height of the summer of 2020, when the whole country was in a hysteria around the police,

80% of black Americans polled by Gallup said they wanted either the same police presence or more in their nation.

Of course.

So,

and you can go down the line, immigration, et cetera.

Black Americans, the spokesman for Black American that you might find on MSNBC is going to portray the whole as this radical, progressive population.

It's never been that, and I think the Democratic Party should realize that.

All right, thank you.

Appreciate you.

You keep doing your important work.

We'll keep having you on this show.

You'll get out there on the other shows.

All right, Colma Hughes, let's meet our panel.

Hey, all right, here they are.

She is a staff writer at the Atlantic, whose new essay collection is called On Thinking for Yourself, Instinct, Education, and Dissension.

Caitlin Flanagan back with us.

Always so glad to see Caitlin Flanagan.

And he is a CNN contributor and 29-time Emmy-winning broadcaster with the MLB and TNT Sports Netsworks.

The immortal Bob Costas is over here.

All right.

Bob.

Bill.

All right.

Great to see you.

All right.

As we are now less than 10 months away from the election, wow, that's a little scary.

The issue, as I said, I most wanted to avoid, Biden's brain.

Now, when our first show back after the strike six months ago, my first editorial was called Ruth Bader Biden.

I said, he is going to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg of presidential politics.

Now I see Andrew Sullivan is saying that.

I think people get that idea.

You stay too long at the fair.

And what brought this up to bubbling up this week, as I said, won't do the Super Bowl interview, which is not a hard one,

mixing up all the world leaders, and then this report that came out.

Now, this report issued by Special Counsel Robert Herr.

You know him, I'm told.

I taught him 11th grade English, but I don't hold myself responsible.

But you taught him 11th grade English?

Yeah, at Harvard School.

Harvard Wesley School.

Well, he's a big Trumper, is he?

I had not realized that until yesterday.

Sometimes I lose track of my

flock.

All right.

Well,

this was the report about taking class of AW.

You're not supposed to do that.

Trump did it, and of course it was such a goofus and gallant

thing with the two of them.

Trump was like, oh, they're mine.

I can keep them.

I didn't do anything wrong.

Biden was like, okay, you're right.

You got me.

I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to do it.

But here's the, see, the Republicans are brilliant at using this.

This is a little bit like the Call meet a letter, a little like the Star Report.

Here's what Robert Hurry, your old student, says.

He said he's not going to prosecute because Mr.

Biden,

he couldn't convince a jury that Mr.

Biden was guilty of a felony that required a mental state of willfulness.

The way they're using this to...

Mr.

Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interviews with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.

Now, maybe he is that, but wow.

And so much more.

Biden.

No,

he is those things.

We know he is those things.

But as I taught Robert, and so many other students fortunate enough to benefit from my tutelage, when writing,

the most important thing in an essay is we keep related ideas together.

So, Robert, the assignment is: should criminal charges be issued for this thing?

Not,

can you give us an armchair neurological report on the man investigating?

So

just because the Republicans and Fox News and all the tributaries that come off of that will overstate it, turn a blind eye to the fact that Trump, who has always been an unprincipled and reprehensible person, is now a ranting lunatic who has mental gaps of his own.

So it's a selective truth,

but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

And when it comes to Biden, this is like the truth that no one until very recently wants to say out loud.

But my friends will tell you, I've been saying it for four years.

This is Emperor's New Clothes stuff.

Joe Biden should have run on a firm promise that he would be a one-term president.

The only reason he is president is that he's not Donald Trump.

Then the Dems could have gotten a lot of people up in the bullpen and they could have sorted through those people.

If Biden's hubris is such that he doesn't understand the best interests of his party and more important, his country, then he has to be shown the door.

Period.

Because

if Trump is a threat to democracy, and in many ways he is, So too are the Dems who are in danger of being as feckless as the Republicans have long been shameless if they're going to send this guy out there.

If Trump is a monster, and in many ways he is, you're going to send this guy out to slay the dragon?

I don't think so.

And by the way, he did not run on a promise.

He did not run on a promise not to run again.

But he did run on a big hint.

He said, I see myself as a bridge that's collapsing.

Yeah.

No.

But I see myself as a bridge.

I read that as one term.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

And I guess the question now is, is it too late?

And I don't think it is because I still think you can do it at the convention.

And people have said to me, oh, that's ridiculous.

They'll look like nothing.

Nobody gives a fuck what you do at the convention.

They'd be thrilled if they did it the day before the election.

You could switch him out at the convention.

You could.

And he could say, well, look, you know, I've had a health issue or whatever.

I want to run it.

In the sense that he, because he didn't really have to run much during the primaries, he doesn't have delegates to give to someone else that the party would come together and say...

Well, if a guy says, I can't run, then you have to do it then it has to be somebody else then it's an open convention we've had open conventions many times different scenario a long time ago but when johnson in march after a close primary with eugene mccarthy in new hampshire when johnson said i'm not going to run for another term then humphrey stepped up yes rfk a tragedy ensued he stepped up there's plenty of times

they make it up as they go along anyway it's politics

okay

all right so

let's get to real news about this, which is happening in the courts.

Courts are going to be everything in this election.

Remember when Bush said, I'm the decider?

The courts are the decider.

That's who the decider.

Federal Appeals Court this week strongly rejected Trump's claim that he had absolute immunity to do anything as president, including kill people.

Like, they really,

okay.

Well, they do have that immunity, but it has to be through an act of war, and they don't have, then they can't do it themselves.

You can't just be immune for breaking laws all over America because you're the president.

And during a time of war, you don't get to kill a political opponent in the United States.

No, no, no, as far as we know.

No, you get to kill the enemy, right?

But that kind of is a slow-moving coup here: the courts, because we may not even get to see.

I ranted about this last week, so I'm not going to do it two weeks in a row, but we may not even get the big trial, the I tried to overthrow the government trial, because the courts are moving too slow about it, so fuck them.

Okay.

Second one,

Supreme Court.

Supreme Court are about to rule, and it looks like it's going to go in Trump's favor, about whether individual states can bar someone from running under the Insurrection Act, because January 6th, now look, even people who do not want Trump to be president, and I think that's everybody at this table, many of those people, including myself, I must say, not opposed to this ruling because I just don't think this is the way you can do it.

First of all, it's a little murky whether that January 6th was an insurrection.

It certainly was a riot.

It was a bunch of...

A lot of those people, some of them were definitely there to stop that election.

A lot of them were just like, oh, good, Trump, I love him.

And the Capitol's open now.

You know, it's, it's.

And.

Half the country has not been convinced by an impeachment trial, the January 6th Committee, a lot of the media being in it.

They're not convinced.

If they do this, if they bar Trump from running, or if he loses the election because he couldn't run in two states, this will become the norm.

Of course.

Then the next time it's going to be the Democrats, they're going to find a reason to do that.

So that's the other big real news about this.

Well, I think we have to remember that We have to remember who we are.

I mean, I say something that my son hates it when I say it, but my new slogan is, America, let's finish strong.

Like, let's remember, if we're close enough shop, let's remember who we were and how we got to be.

And how, you know, and we can tell ourselves when this whole thing ends, maybe in my own lifetime, we can say, but we came from that place that made that thing, that made parts of the whole world free, and that anywhere in the world that's free, and people have liberty and they can't be thrown in jail without charges or anything.

We did that.

We thought of that.

We made it.

regardless

of the legal merits, and as Bill said, it's murky, of any of these situations, the behavior itself, as Chris Christie said, leave aside what may be decided in the vagaries of constitutional interpretations or a given circumstance, the behavior itself, until pre-Trump, we'd universally agree.

This behavior is abhorrent.

We wound up in this place.

And unfortunately, unfortunately, the MAGA cult, which is a coalition of the brainless, and when it comes to fellow Republicans, the spineless,

that coalition

is not going away.

They want, for the time being, Trump.

If Biden stepped aside tomorrow, there wouldn't be a bunch of Democratic voters going, oh, please, please stop.

Your friend Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom, who's a very, you know, charismatic and dynamic guy, but he's being disingenuous disingenuous when he makes an articulate case for Biden and then says, I just don't understand why this hasn't landed.

Yes, you do, Gavin, because Biden can't utter one sentence of the five perfect paragraphs you just put together.

He not only can't make

Not only can he not make the case for himself, he cannot prosecute in the court of public opinion the case against Trump.

And what needs to happen here isn't a narrow victory, which is the best Biden could hope for.

Trump and what he represents must be repudiated.

Not conservatism or Republicanism.

MAGA must be repudiated.

And Biden ain't the man for that job.

Well,

no one's going to do that.

Gavin Newsom is not going to do that either.

I know you're friends with Newsome.

We live here, right?

We live in California.

I was born here.

In Oakland, they have Kaiser Hospital, where my pediatrician was, the hospital put out a notice last week, employees are not to leave for lunch.

It's too dangerous in downtown Oakland.

That's on him.

Our homeless problem.

I don't want to hear that the homeless problem is intractable.

You want to be CEO?

It's your problem.

It's your dad.

I guess.

I know you like him, but I just think

I can't imagine them being

having the gall to run, to lead this country when he's run this state into the ground.

When we just had Governor Brown not that long ago, Oakland was safe.

Things were going on.

It's not good.

It's not, he looks very shiny,

but he's not a straight shooter, and he's not willing to do the hard things to make this state better.

And that's his only job.

He doesn't realize that.

He thinks it's to go sing Kumbaya with a former Marvelette at New College of Florida to make some vague points.

Meanwhile, back in our state, people are dying in these encampments.

Well, I'm hoping that running nationally will bring him more to the center.

Okay.

All right.

So it's Valentine's that

Valentine's Day this government.

Are you excited?

All right.

So

now

I don't know if you remember, there was something during the pandemic that happened called quiet quitting, or maybe it happened even before, but you know, people were quitting their workplace, not really.

Not actually quitting, just doing the minimum when you were there.

This country is so passive-aggressive.

It's sick.

It really is.

So now I listen, I read this, I guess, where was this in Glamour magazine or someplace?

Oh, well.

My subscription lapsed.

There is now something called quiet quitting in your relationship.

Okay,

how to tell if your partner is quiet quitting?

I love this.

Some of the ways, look at some of the ways we have these here.

They deliberately spend time apart from you.

They're not interested in what you're up to.

They don't bother to argue with you.

And those are absolutely all the ways.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

We have some other ways.

I'm sorry, there are other ones.

Would you like to hear the other ones?

I'm sorry.

I forgot.

Okay, like you have dinner by phone light.

The only time you're in the shower together is to wash the doll.

These are ways.

His favorite favorite sex position is reverse mortgage.

Whenever you try to get intimate, she says, not tonight, I have long COVID.

You get home and find a path of rose betals that circle through the house and back out to your car.

When you text, I love you, they text back, K.

When you start choking at dinner, he chants, come on, chicken bone.

And

she always finds an excuse to be in another wing of Mar-a-Laga, is the only one.

Okay, so,

of course, the big Valentine's story is Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl, and Bob, you've covered many Super Bowls.

I have.

I have hesitated to cover Taylor Swift like it's a national news story, but I swear to God, after all my years of experience doing this, this is a national news story in the sense that this is a person who could literally swing the election.

I don't know what that says about this country, but

I would just say to the MAGA people, you should be very careful attacking her because this is someone who transcends parties.

I mean, this is a country girl, right?

Her first, she started out as a country artist.

There's a white girl from Pennsylvania, I think, grew up on a farm, right?

Never had a black boyfriend.

I'm just saying,

there's time.

There's time, but

I mean, she's had a lot of boyfriends that we all know about.

You know, if MAGA's full of racists, they gotta like that.

You know, I mean, she's finally dated an NFL.

It's 80% black.

She couldn't find one there.

I mean.

Anyway, no, I mean,

I'm not criticizing anybody for anything.

I'm just saying, this is somebody you could really get in trouble with as far as attacking for MAGA because Trump's people, they're already registered and voting for him.

Her voters...

perhaps are not registered at all.

And she doesn't have to say who she's voting for.

All she has to say is get registered.

It's turnout.

They know who she's voting for.

It's not changing minds, it's turnout.

Right.

Right.

So I think you could be awaking a sleeping until the afternoon giant here.

Did you see the

Republican guy who had the perfect dance?

All right, they're going to have Taylor Swift.

We've got...

Who do we have?

We've got...

Who's the cat scratch fever guy?

Ted Nugent.

We got Ted Nugent.

We got Ted Nugent,

et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

We got Kid Rock.

We got Ted Nugent.

And then

Ted Nugent says, Taylor Swift has no substance.

This is the guy who wrote Jailbait and Cat Scratch Fever.

Every time he hears one of these songs, Bob Dylan says, Why didn't I think about it?

Anything on Taylor Swift?

You know.

She's just, I mean, obviously, she's an amazing young woman, and

I just don't know anybody who hasn't made up their mind in this election, no matter who.

But

that's the thing.

She could get so many people who are not registered.

That demographic is the one that is untapped.

And, you know,

don't you think, seeing as maybe we can get a few more years out of this country, wouldn't it be good if we had some things like the Super Bowl, like Thanksgiving?

You know, everybody says, oh, I want Indigenous People Day, but when you go the week before Thanksgiving, everyone's in the supermarket buying the turkey.

Isn't it good that as we ease out of the world stage in the national sense, that we remember some things that we can all like?

We like Taylor Swift, we like Thanksgiving.

Let's leave somebody untainted by our insidious politics.

It's about the turkey, huh?

Yeah, it's all about the turkey.

Okay.

All right.

Next issue.

You're here.

There's an issue about the Olympics this week.

Nobody is more associated with the Olympics than probably since Caitlin Jenner, was Bruce Jenner.

Anyway.

But that's sort of the Olympics.

It ties in here.

Well, it does.

Well, it does.

Because Leah Thomas, this is the transgender swimmer.

she's been much in the news the last few years, she is suing to compete in the Olympics because they prohibit trans people from competing unless they transition before the age of 12, which probably is not many of them.

Okay.

Not yet, anyway.

Probably a couple of Olympics down the road, there might be more athletes than.

Right.

Anyway,

do you ever hear, I mean,

Leah Thomas, in the 2018-29 season, she was in college for Penn.

For the Penn's men's team, she was on the men's team.

In the three big ones, she came in 554th, 65th, and 32nd.

So, not terrible, but mediocre.

Now, as a woman, first openly transgenderate, she won, of course, number one.

Won some meets,

not others.

She's much better relatively in competition with women.

She's not really at the top across the board.

Okay, but she's the first one to win an NCAA Division National Championship.

Yeah.

And, I mean, obviously a lot of people are saying, is it fair?

No.

Is it fair to make some women biological to compete against someone in the Summer Olympics who was the opposite sex in the Winter Olympics?

Without getting too deep into this, people may not realize this.

The individual federations that govern these sports make up their own rules.

So World Aquatics may have different rules than FIFA or the Track and Field Association.

So I understand that when it comes to Olympic boxing, that federation will allow trans women to compete against biological women at birth, biological women.

That seems crazy, and you don't want to be called, it's not transphobic to say, let's inject some common sense here.

A lot of this is murky, and we don't want

that some people who use this as an issue actually are hostile toward trans people or people who, after a carefully considered decision at a certain point in life, decide that they'll be happier and closer to their true selves.

I think any sensitive person is aligned with that.

But Sugar Ray Leonard didn't fight Mike Tyson.

They were contemporary.

Sugar Ray was a welterweight.

Mike was a heavyweight.

If someday the best player in the WNBA can play in the NBA, everybody would applaud.

But if the worst guy at the end of the bench on the worst team in the NBA went to the WNBA and averaged 40 points a game, everybody knows that's bullshit.

All right, so

what's the answer for...

Just trans athletes, what's the answer?

A separate division?

Well, I don't think you want just trans athletes competing against other trans athletes.

They're going to have to codify rules that I'm not prepared to say exactly what those rules would entail, but they'll have to codify them so you don't have have a hodgepodge.

If you want to compete and you're saying you can't compete in the men's division, then what other answer is there?

An open

division, but I think that we have to remember, you know, these kind of extreme cases, I hate that we have to talk about them so much because it makes, we have to say things that are cruel or hurtful to some people.

But, you know, women's and girls' sports, they weren't created as separate from men's and boys because of some weird gendered thing, like they have to wear pink and they have to wear blue.

They're that way because of the profound sex differences between the sexes.

That's the reason.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

And it's just, you know, we don't hear about any trans male athletes on a D1 basketball team.

And, you know, it's the men, excuse me, the trans women who seem to be using a natural advantage that comes from sex-linked traits.

You know, we, women, we can't compete.

But it might not be

at some point down the road, if it's codified, and if you take the hormone, the transition hormones, and balance that out, and maybe that happens either before puberty or only shortly after, because even if you begin that hormone therapy, you retain some of the advantages that generally go with being a man, greater lung capacity, greater strength, et cetera, et cetera.

Leah Thomas certainly does.

So they're going to have to codify it.

In 1996 at the Olympics, I dubbed that Olympics the first Title IX Olympics, because it's the first generation after the 1972 Title IX legislation, which was progressive in the best sense of that word.

I had a younger sister.

She never played a single organized sport.

I wasn't the greatest athlete, but I played lots of them.

One generation later, my son and my daughter played roughly equal numbers of organized sports.

That's a really good thing.

We don't want to be cruel or punitive towards someone who

is trying to deal with a circumstance.

Right.

But at the same time,

we can't throw common sense out the window.

All right.

Finally, this is also big,

I thought, precedent-making news.

First time a parent was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter because of something the kid did.

You know this story.

Okay, Jennifer Crumley's the woman's name.

It was in Michigan.

Her son, Ethan,

mass shooting in the school, did what a lot of kids do these days, shot up a bunch of kids in school, killed four of them.

But here's the details that I guess influenced the court.

They bought him the gun.

Why any kid needs a gun under 18, I don't know.

But he had texted his mom that he was seeing demons.

His journal said, I have zero help with my mental problems and it's going to cause me to shoot up the school.

I mean,

he turned in a math, this is a math homework with pictures of blood on it.

The thoughts won't stop.

Help me.

Blood everywhere.

My life is useless.

Is this prosecutorial overreach or is this,

I think it's a good precedent, I think parenting,

somebody has to say, yes,

it's not against the law to be a shitty parent, but there are limits.

The alarm bells here were very loud and they were very persistent.

People who have much more expertise than I do, however, say, look, spectacular cases often have effects as precedents down the line in cases that will never be on the news, and perhaps that establishes a bad precedent.

But if we're just looking at this particular circumstance, I mean, how could you possibly be more negligent than this?

The kid is practically screaming at the top of his lungs, not just help me, stop me.

And you know, the mother, he texted the mother, and the mother texted back about the guns.

She got him the guns and they were the teacher content.

The mother texted, LOL, I'm not mad at you.

You have to learn not to get caught.

First of all,

first of all, don't be texting your kid.

Talk to your damn kid.

All right, I got to leave it there.

You were great.

Time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

All right, Newell, the next time a toddler gets stuck inside one of those claw machines,

he must be left in there.

No police, no fire department, those are my tax dollars.

You're the one who lost sight of your kid long enough for him to climb inside a machine, get a roll of quarters, and win him back.

Apropos of what we were just talking about.

Neural, stop asking me to prove I'm not a robot.

I'm not a blade runner trying to hunt down an escaped replicant from Off-World.

I just want to order some socks.

If I don't recognize a stop sign, that doesn't mean I'm an android.

It just means I drive in LA.

New Roll, this one goes out to Lucy, the Tennessee pit bull whose ear looks like a selfie.

Get over yourself, bitch.

Nural, someone in our trillion-dollar defense industry has to tell me why, whenever there's a Russian incursion in Alaska, their plane looks like it came from 1938.

And stop telling me the Chinese have some jet that could blow the doors off of ours.

Boeing already does that.

Neural, the makers of Ozempic must come up with the opposite drug, one that makes you want to eat more

so we can give it to our metrosexual movie stars.

Yes, introducing Ozempig.

For those waitress young actors who play action heroes but would clearly lose in a fistfight with Jennifer Lawrence.

And finally, New Rule, if you run for office in America, you have to want to live here.

I bring this up because there was a video that made the rounds recently by a woman who said she was a proud progressive and was running for state representative in New Hampshire, and yet posted this.

Is there a place we can move that people would be happy to have us, that we're not gentrifying or colonizing?

I don't want to be a problem, but I need to get the fuck out of this country.

The fuck out of this country?

The one you want to be elected to a leadership position in?

What was your campaign slogan?

America, a shining shithole on a hill?

Jesus.

Even prostitutes have to pretend they like what they do.

Speaking of prostitutes, last August Donald Trump.

last August he was remarking on the great sacrifice he's made by offering himself up as our president again by saying

I could have been relaxing at Mar-a-Lago or in the south of France, which I would prefer being in this country, frankly.

Again, I'm confused by this political message.

Vote for me because I hate it here.

Now, does America have big problems?

Yes, I've often cited the America sucks list.

Things like being 54th in the world in infant mortality behind Cuba, 19th in literacy behind Russia, 72nd in female representation and government behind Iraq.

A lot of work to do here.

And is it possible for a country to lose itself so much that leaving it is justified?

Yes, but we're not there yet, not by a long shot, and we don't need quitters.

We need people who will stay and fix it.

Maybe the problem isn't that America isn't worth defending.

Maybe the problem is that lots of people today are entitled whiners who have no perspective and no idea how good they have it.

59% of self-identified liberals say there have been times when they considered leaving America for good, like after NBC canceled the West Wing.

I don't get it.

You want so badly for every immigrant to come to this country and experience the good life, but somehow it's so terrible, you want to leave.

And I see conservatives in Texas are talking secession again.

They have two bumper stickers in that state.

America, love it or leave it, and we're leaving it.

Just like there's a long list of liberal celebrities who swear they'll go if a Republican is elected, and no one ever does.

Miley Cyrus once said, I am moving if Trump is my president.

I don't say things I don't mean.

Here she is looking miserable, having to endure America at the Grammys last Sunday.

I guess she flew back from Tajikistan.

In 2016, Eddie Griffin said, if Trump wins, I'm moving to Africa.

Apparently, very slowly, because in Trump's four years, he only got as far as Van Nuys.

George Lopez once said that if Trump won, he won't have to worry about immigration.

We'll all go back.

George Lopez, still here.

And it doesn't look like the migrant traffic is going back.

Then there's all the TikToks telling Americans things like...

It's fucked.

I think the new American dream is to to leave.

I'm 18 years old and I escaped America.

Yeah.

Yeah, you don't have to escape America.

That wall we're always debating isn't to keep you in.

The New Republic just ran a story about the vulnerable minorities who want to flee America, including the author, a gay man trapped in the dystopian, homophobic hellscape that is New York City.

I wonder if he knows that there are 66 countries where just being gay is a crime.

Cute story in the news last month.

Burundi's president called on his citizens to stone gay people and not in the good way.

Wow, suddenly the don't say gay law doesn't sound all that bad.

And Uganda?

Oh, they don't just give you a ticket for parking in the rear.

You can get the death penalty for it.

In China, they have the death penalty for almost 50 crimes.

And in 13 countries, atheism is punishable by death.

And 61 impose restrictions on women's clothing, so bring a scarf.

According to Amnesty International, paramilitary groups kill the government's critics in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and arbitrary detentions are widespread in Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua.

If you're wondering how that's just like no-cash bail, it's not.

In Russia, just referring to the war in Ukraine as a war can get you 15 years in the fabulous prisons made famous by some of the world's most famous novels.

You think America's evil because we didn't nominate Margot Robi for an Oscar?

Just wait till you get thrown out the window of your very own dreamhouse.

Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Sudan still cut the hands off of thieves, so if you're coming from San Francisco, do your shoplifting at home.

And you might also want to do your protesting before you go, because protesters are ruining shot in lots of places.

Gosh, it almost seems like the world is full of suffering, intolerance, and oppression on a scale we can't imagine.

But that can't be true because if it was, we'd be protesting it.

It must only happen in Israel.

And

if for your exile you do wind up in some comparatively luxurious place like Canada or Japan or the UK, not that they want you,

At at best, you'll be trading a bunch of stuff you hate about this country for a bunch of stuff you'll soon hate about your new home.

It took me only four days in Amsterdam to learn that while I admire Amsterdam, I don't want to live there.

The buildings are cramped and shaped like needles.

The food is awful.

The TV's in a different language.

It's wet and cold.

The people are polite but cold.

And they do a bunch of weird shit.

The explanation for, according to my friend, was just remember they're high.

Italy always makes the list of great expat destinations because of all those stories on CNN about how you can buy a house in a quaint Italian village for a dollar.

Except it's not a house in the way we think of one, as a structure with plumbing and electricity and a roof.

When these places were were built, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was still straight.

Well sure you can spend a hundred grand to make them livable and I'm sure it's no problem to find reliable workmen in rural Italy who you'll then fall in love with like in Under the Tuscan sun.

But now you're living in some dinky village in Italy with nothing to do but watch the old guys play that game with the wooden balls.

And

have you ever seen the Eurovision Song Contest?

They actually listen to that crap.

Look, everywhere in the world, I'm sure, seems great when you haven't lived there.

I hear people tell me Costa Rica is beautiful.

I'm sure it is.

You'll also get bitten by a snake on the flight over.

The travel site Lonely Planet describes Sri Lanka as endless beaches, timeless ruins, welcoming people.

And if you love child marriage, food shortages, and the strictest abortion laws in the world, Sri Lanka could be right for you.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the MGM Grand in Vegas, February 16 and 17, the Plaza Theater in El Paso, March 3rd, and the Eckles Theater in Salt Lake, April 21st.

I want to thank Caitlin Flennig and Bob Costas.

Coleman Hughes now watches on Overtime.

I'm seeing at 11:30 or Catch It Saturday morning 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.