Ep. #634: Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sam Harris and Mary Katharine Ham

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

Wow, we got a new studio.

I love it.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Great to be be back.

I missed you, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Lee's.

We've been off long enough.

Let's do a fucking show, Kelly.

It's been a long time.

Let's not ever be apart this long, forever.

And of course,

right on queue, always when we come back, big news, Diane Feinstein, our senator for...

no, don't laugh.

No, she was a great serving senator here, died today, first female mayor of San Francisco, and everyone there today observed a minute of no shoplifting.

Let me tell you, when she was mayor of San Francisco, she had that city under control.

When there was poop in the street, it was because John Waters was making a movie.

Also, a senator for 31 years in politics for 54 years, not once was she caught on tape giving a hand job at a musical.

I

think that has to count.

Well, you saw.

You've seen Lauren Boebert.

She's the MAGA congressman.

I guess she's a 36-year-old grandmother.

She is from Colorado, a family's value Republican, was caught on tape.

She was at Betelgeuse, like getting her tit grabbed, vaping, grabbing cock.

I'm not making this up.

This is your government at work.

And

so they threw her out of the theater.

And on the way out, she gave them the finger and said, do you know who I am?

See, this is the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

When Biden says that, he's genuinely asking.

But,

okay, good news and bad news about our government.

There's going to be a government shutdown again.

Why do we always go through this?

It looks like.

I know it's terrible for a lot of people.

On the bright side, the Senate approved a dress code.

Solving a problem they created last week.

Although it's just for the men.

Kirsten Sinema, you're familiar with her?

She retains the right to dress like Kate McKinnon as weird Barbie.

And

there was a Republican debate this week.

Ron DeSantis is here.

He was on it.

Apparently he won it, according to the polls.

But it was a shit show.

Was it not, did you see this?

I couldn't get through it.

I mean, they were just talking over each other.

It made me so tense, I had to calm down by watching a video of Britney Spears dancing with knives.

This thing was,

I always played the Republican debate drinking game.

That's where you take a drink every time you go, oh God, I need a drink.

The weirdest part was they got onto the subject of education and Mike Pence.

Mike Pence has full disclosure, I've been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years.

Why bring up who you're sleeping?

Mike Pence, but people don't really, now they looked into this, he's very kinky.

He and the wife, sometimes she dresses up like Trump and tries to hang him.

But

now I feel like it's my job to watch these debates.

I couldn't get through it.

I mean, I got through like 90, 30 minutes of the 90 minutes or whatever it was.

Also, at that point, Lauren Boebert said to me, my hands are getting tired.

Let's beat the traffic.

Trump, of course, skipped the debate, as his

custom is now.

Instead, he had one of his rallies, or as I call them, drag queen story hour.

He had a bad week.

Really,

a New York judge, listen to this, shocking, said he's a complete fraud.

I know.

Apparently, he's inflated his property values in New York over the years by $2.2 billion.

They canceled the Trump organization's business certification.

Wow, that's pretty big news that didn't get much coverage.

Still not the biggest crook of the week.

That would be the senator from my home state of New Jersey,

Bob Menendez.

Did you see this story?

I love this guy.

Old school.

Old school.

No intricate laundering schemes here, no offshore accounts.

I'll just stuff these gold bars in

my wife's bra.

I fucking love this guy.

He had...

His house was full of cash stuffed into his clothes and gold bars.

Who accepts gold bars?

I've never been anywhere where they went, yes, we take Visa, MasterCard, and gold bars.

They said, why did you have all this cash around the house?

And gold bars?

He said, for emergencies.

Like, what sort of emergency requires cash and gold bars if a rap video breaks out?

All right, we have a great show.

It's so great to be back.

We have Sam Harris, Mary Catherine Hamm, and first up, he is the governor of Florida, who is, wow, currently on our show,

currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Governor Ron DeSantis.

Hey.

Come in.

Ron, how you doing?

It's a pretty good Bruce Dave roll.

No, I know.

Welcome back.

All right.

On a scale of nine to ten, what'd you think of my monologue?

Honestly, I was laughing.

I'll give you that.

Right.

Laughing on both sides of the aisle, too, so it was good.

And welcome back to the show.

I know you guys were on hiatus for a while.

Thank you.

Yes.

I do got to put in a plug, like if you ever have problems in California, you know, in Florida, not only do we have no income tax, no vax mandates allowed in the state of Florida.

Well, we're going to get to that.

We're going to get to that.

I know, but people do wear cowboy boots with a suit.

That's right.

So I'm not going to fly.

Okay, that's

a crazy thing to do.

But there were no cowboys in Florida, Ron.

Oh, yeah, you should try Florida.

We're one of the top cattle states states in America.

Once you go from the beach, you go to the interior of Florida, nothing but cattle ranches.

Oh, all right.

Well,

I stand corrected

because I'm wearing orthopedic shoes.

There you go.

Okay, so the debate.

It was a shit show, but I right.

I mean, even you said

you would have turned it off if you were watching it.

I mean, people screaming over each other.

I couldn't hear what anyone was saying.

It was terrible.

But I heard you won.

I heard the polling said you won.

What did you win?

Honestly, with Trump not in the race, what did you win?

Well, but I think that, you know, he's not showing up.

He's missing an action.

He owes it to voters to show up and defend his record.

And I think he thinks he can take a juice poll and then people don't get to vote.

That's not the way the system works.

You got to go earn votes.

So I'm showing up.

I'm showing that.

And here's the thing.

In the midst of all the show that happened, I was the one guy that people said, you know what, this guy's actually acting like a president when the rest were not.

And so, okay, there I am.

I told Donald, let's do a debate.

I'm debating your governor, Gavin News.

We're going to get to that.

But let's do a debate with me and him.

I'll do it.

All right.

But can I ask you one thing about these debates?

Can you get rid of this guy, Doug Bergham?

This guy, this bugs me.

He is not going to be president.

This guy could start dating Taylor Swift.

No one would care.

North Dakota, it's not even this far.

All right.

But you know, the thing is, you did not take my advice.

What was it?

I was on this show a few times.

I said, this guy's crazy to run this time.

He's, what are you, 45 years old?

He just had a birthday, right?

Yeah.

You could run for the next 20 years.

If you were Biden, the next 40.

Okay, why run against Trump?

You're trying to thread this needle that will never happen.

Well, for a couple reasons.

You can't disavow him because that's the base, and yet you're running against him.

And that's why, I mean, let's face it, Ron, if this campaign was going well, you wouldn't be on this show.

Oh, it's not true.

So, one, I don't think he can win the election.

I could win the election.

Two, I don't think he could actually get the job done that we need to do.

For example, COVID.

I think we need accountability for what this government did to this country with the COVID restrictions, mandates, and lockdowns.

Donald Trump is not going to do that.

He says he did right.

He says he saved millions of lives with lockdowns.

He claims his MNRA shot saved 100 million lives.

He's not going to clean house at CDC, NIH, FD, or any of that.

I will do that.

I will get the job done.

And a lot of other things we do.

The one thing about me in Florida, and even my critics will acknowledge.

If he says he's going to do something, he will follow through and get the job done.

So it's about the country.

Are we going to get the country turned around or not?

I don't think he's a vehicle that's doing.

And I have been, when I supported him on the things I liked, I've said it but i've been critical about the things that he didn't do and i'll continue to do that okay but you

but you campaigned for for election deniers in 2022 this i do not forgive well

quote the godfather

i mean carrie lake who said biden is illegitimate president

Trump didn't.

Well, now she's attacking me, so maybe I did make a mistake there, because she's out there saying, she's she's trying to say that we mandated vaccines in Florida where we did the opposite we protected people even from private mandates so so so that may have been Trump lost the election right yeah yeah okay so why did you campaign for people who because I wanted to see Republicans win key races I think it's important that's not a deal-breaker issue for you that's not democracy okay well let's go back to 2016 Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the Electoral College to vote against Trump in the Electoral College because it was stolen.

They said Russia stole the election.

For years they said that.

So don't act like this is like a unique thing in modern history of the country.

First of all, Ron, I have no friends in Hollywood.

You do remember those commercials, though.

I remember them.

Okay.

But, I mean, the thing that you seem to stake your campaign on is where woke goes to die.

You say, that's where.

And look, I'm fed up with woke too.

That's why I have trouble with friends in Hollywood.

I'm an old school liberal, and that's a whole different thing than woke.

And I'm sympathetic to you because, you know, you very often like take on an issue where I feel like, yeah, there is crazy stuff going on in schools.

There is crazy stuff.

But the problem is it doesn't resonate with a lot of people who don't see it for whatever reason.

And so they're like, why is this guy picking a fight with Mickey Mouse?

Right?

Well, they picked a fight with us, but well, listen.

So, first of all, I do a lot more than just that.

I think that's a little bit of a caricature.

But this idea of ideology corrupting institutions, I see it in Los Angeles with the amount of crime that's here and the homelessness.

There are people that commit crimes who are not prosecuted like they would be in Florida.

Our state's crime rate's at a 50-year low.

You elect these people like Gascon and what they did in San Francisco.

You can break into somebody's house or mug somebody and you don't end up going to jail.

That doesn't work, but that's driven by ideology.

So it's not just we're having just a philosophical debate.

I think woke ideology has corrupted institutions.

I think it's corrupted things like the CDC with how they handled COVID, with the nonsense that they did.

So it's a broader issue than just a philosophical fight.

You keep wanting to get back to that.

And I don't blame you, because you're right.

We're on the same page there.

And I think it's unfair what they did to you, because you did handle it better.

You did handle it better.

You were right.

You were like, let's target the people, protect the people who are most vulnerable, and everybody else can go on with their lives a little better.

You open schools sooner.

And a lot of the stuff that's come in, the information we have after now, we've had a few years to look at it, you were more right.

And they won't give you credit for that.

It's not a good idea.

It's not about credit for me, though.

It's not about credit for me.

It's about

them admitting that they were wrong because they are setting us up.

If this happened again, they would repeat the same playbook all over again.

And if we don't have accountability, that's what's going to happen.

So I'll bring accountability so it never happens in our country again.

I thought the New York Times did such a despicable hit piece on you that I saw because

I forget what the lead headline was, but it was basically Ron DeSantis fucked up the

pandemic.

And then like at the very end, it says, Florida's death rate overall was better than the national average.

Now, if you're going to do an article...

If you're going to do an article about Florida and the pandemic, shouldn't that be the lead?

Shouldn't that be the

number one state for in-migration?

I mean, if we did so bad, people would have been leaving Florida.

People are coming.

Wealth's moving into the state.

Our economy's done better than any other large state.

And education, we're now ranked, I think, in the top five on most metrics.

And education, now, that wasn't true when I was a kid growing up in Florida.

So we did it right.

But what we did is we understood you can't stop society because of one respiratory virus.

That's not even the way to help people.

Well, you could if it was bad enough, but not that one.

Right.

Well, they were wrong on the death rate.

They were wrong on closures.

They were wrong on everything.

And yet we act like, well, we're just going to shrug our shoulders and move along.

So like, that's the part of you I like.

And then there's the part of you like, you're going after, I mean, your state voted to restore voting rights to felons.

And then through some political bullshit jujitsu, that got undone.

Now you're going to go.

No, no, no, that's not true.

It is true.

No, no.

And you're going after people now.

I mean, you have some.

You didn't qualify, though.

So that amendment did not include murderers and sex offenders.

So we had sex offenders, convicted sex offenders, who voted who were not eligible under that amendment.

So we held them accountable.

But that was absolutely consistent with that.

There really isn't in-person voter fraud.

Like 11 million people voted in Florida, and I think you found 41 people.

I mean, that's

right.

But if you have somebody that's illegally in the country and they vote, should they be held accountable or not?

I think they should be held accountable.

That's.00000.

Not

in a statewide race, but we've had local elections decided by 15, 20, 30 votes in the last few years.

And so I think we want legal people to vote.

If you're not a citizen of this country, you should not be voting in American elections.

Okay, but that's not the biggest issue we have, is it?

I mean...

No one's saying it's the biggest.

We take on all of this.

But

it looks like you're just trying to stop black people from voting.

Oh, that's nonsense.

I don't think it's nonsense.

Black folks don't vote for the Republican Party in very big numbers.

But I got a bigger percentage than other Republicans have gotten when I ran for re-election.

Whoop-de-doo.

I wouldn't brag about that.

We're making progress, man.

And then the abortion thing, a six-week abortion ban.

I don't get that either because six weeks, like if you're, I know you say it's a case of conviction.

If it's conviction, wouldn't it be moment of conception?

That's what conviction is to me.

Like, if you believe the second, you know, before the guy can get the towel, there's the third person in that room.

Well, no, I mean,

so this is a legislative issue, so they have to figure out what they think.

And so the legislature identified the moment where there's a detectable heartbeat as the time where there's legal protections.

Now, they did provide exceptions for all the difficult cases that you hear about, but basically, once there's a heartbeat, it shouldn't be used as a form of birth control.

Okay, so you're going to debate Newsom.

We are.

You know, he's taller and better looking.

Good luck.

Thank you for being here.

Governor Ron DeSantis, everybody.

Good luck out there.

All right.

Let's meet our panel.

Hey.

Okay.

We're back, and here they are.

She is the co-host of the podcast, Getting Hammered.

Co-author of End of Discussion: How the Left's Outrage Industry, wow, shuts down debate, manipulates voters, and makes America less free and fun.

Mary Catherine Hamm.

And he's the host of the Making Sense podcast, the best podcast where the host isn't totally baked.

Sam Harris is over here, ladies and gentlemen.

Well, it's great to be back.

First of all, I want to thank everybody who made this possible.

To be back, you know, I'm talking about my brilliant staff, writers and non-writers, who scrambled the jets so we could be on in two days.

And the union folks who

expedited the paperwork so we could get back so quickly, so thank you.

All right, so I want to talk about Dianne Feinstein.

That was the big news that happened today.

I mean, it's kind of spooky.

Our last show, April 28th.

And what was the last thing I talked about on the editorial?

Dianne Feinstein.

And it wasn't just about that she should resign.

It was about the fact that people in the Democratic Party were kind of playing an outdated woman card about her.

I remember quoting Nancy Pelosi, said, I've never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way.

Bullshit.

Right.

Robert Birds, Drom Thurmond, obviously Biden, but we'll save that to the end of the show.

Our congresswoman here in L.A.

said, when women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside.

When men age or get sick, they get a promotion.

Where did that ever happen?

Yeah, they just make this shit up.

Well, it's the quickest way to sort of get out of trouble is to play the card you have, right?

And Menendez is a perfect example.

Senator Menendez this week was like, how could the Democrats push out a proud Latino American who has made it this far in his career, right?

Like, never mind the gold bars, guys, don't pay attention.

But it's not a bad play strategically, I think it's right morally.

Okay.

So now our governor says he's going to appoint a black woman to the seat.

Do we still need this kind of identity politics as opposed to the best person?

Maybe we do.

I don't know.

I'm amazed that people don't recognize that it's insulting to the candidate that gets picked.

So Biden did that with Kamala Harris.

So

you say you're going to filter in advance by

sex and race.

Just pick someone as though they're the best person and lo and behold, they are a black woman or

whatever the template is.

It seems,

I mean, it's overt, it's not even implicitly insulting.

It's actually just right on the surface, and no one seems to comment on it.

Well, it's like, it's racism, but for the right reason.

It's like,

it's still the thing.

I mean, we still do need to even things out from our disputes.

But then you even them out, even if that's your agenda.

Just do that and never make it explicit that you cut out whatever, 85% of the contestants.

Well, you could make it

explicit that you've created

a generous pool from which to pick that includes many, many minority folks that would be easy in the state of California.

It's just, I keep coming back to this concept of the zombie lie.

You know, I used to get on the Republicans about it.

They still do it.

You know, like

tax cuts for the rich will increase revenue is a zombie lie.

You know,

that was one that was never was true.

Then there are zombie lies that are things that used to be true.

but are no longer true.

And I think we still get caught in those,

especially race issues.

I saw in the paper

after the 2020 riots, corporate America pledged to hire more people of color.

And boy, did they.

Like 94% or something like that?

Of the 300,000 people from S ⁇ P companies, I think that's 100 companies that were surveyed.

94%.

I mean, I ain't mad at it.

I'm just saying,

can we acknowledge that, I mean, if this was such a horribly racist country, could you be guilted into doing this?

You know, can we just acknowledge we are in the year we are living in and not some year that has passed?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know what the remedy is in each case.

There was a time, I think, where affirmative action was totally defensible and you could be honest about it and you didn't have to.

I mean,

you're redressing a wrong that was historically obvious, but

we have to acknowledge that we're in a different situation now.

We're pretending that there's a disadvantage based on race, I mean, to take one variable.

And for basically as long as, virtually as long as I've been alive,

that has not been true.

So it's like this is something, there's no medical school in this country that is filtering against race to the disadvantage of black people.

Quite the opposite.

It's quite the opposite.

And for a very long time.

And so there is a kind of gaslighting when you're pretending the disparity is is opposite to what it is.

And I mean, I was amazed at that figure, too.

I mean,

94% is amazing.

And may I say to the people who are saying, well, three white people are talking about this.

Exactly.

So fucking what?

White people can talk.

I'm sorry, you know, that's just a ridiculous talking point.

Like, how could you possibly have this discussion?

We can have this discussion.

We can.

Any person who was here in addition to us might add something to that discussion that we are not adding.

But it shouldn't stop people from

talking.

You can be cognizant of that without being quite so insulting as you're pointing out that this can be.

And in fact, in this case, I think he said he's going to pick a black woman for sure, but just a placeholder.

So it's like, well, I'm going to pick a black woman, but I'm not probably not going to pick Barbara Lee, who is actively running against two white people because that might give her too much of an advantage to have actual power in the future.

I don't know what the theory is here, but it seems insulting.

Yeah.

So, another zombie lie I was picking on when we were off with I saw Barbie, which I enjoyed very much.

You got to say that part?

To say that part.

That was good message.

Well,

no, it was cute.

I liked it.

I mean,

I wasn't trying to attack it.

And it is, look, give it credit.

I mean, there are hits, there are monster hits, and then there's phenomenons.

This is a phenomenon.

But it is a zombie lie.

That was the point.

I wrote a tweet, and they all went batshit about this tweet.

Just saying, because I looked up something, that's really what they got mad at.

Because the movie is based on the premise that we live in a patriarchy.

So let's just talk about it.

Maybe we do.

I don't know.

But in the movie, Barbie goes to Mattel headquarters, who made her,

to confront the patriarchy, which is the boardroom.

And she breaks into the boardroom, and it's 12 men.

the patriarchy.

So I got home and I was like, hmm, Mattel's a real company.

I bet you you could look up who's on the board.

Of course, it's like six and six.

Maybe it was seven and five or six, I think, but the CEO is a man, but he's not on the board.

But it was almost or basically even.

Then I looked up how many women were added to Fortune 500 board seats in 2021, I think was the last year I looked up.

It's 45%.

So maybe not exactly even, but I mean, if these are the stats, and of course nobody who attacked me engaged with those ideas.

Well, the writer, Megan Dahm, who I think you might have had on this.

Yes, she's great.

I love her.

She wrote, you remember America Ferreira's piece,

her speech

in the film where

it was just kind of this anthem for

feminism.

So Megan wrote it from a guy's point of view.

proving that it was really this kind of political problem that we're past, it was a kind of a zombie speech because it worked just as well for a guy with almost no changes to the text.

So it was

well first of all,

except that I regret to inform you I am the only person on stage who's allowed to talk about this.

I felt like, first of all, Mattel's happy to come in for that sort of

abuse in the movie because there's this alignment of sort of corporate views and lefty leaning activism and that was sort of packaged into this movie.

I have complicated feelings about Barbie.

For instance, I never played with Barbies, but my daughters do.

And I was like conflicted.

And so I got them only Barbies with flat shoes because that's the secret to feminism, guys.

But I think Barbie gave a lot of women feelings.

And we were like, why am I having feelings about Barbie?

And did I get dressed up as Rodeo Barbie with a pink cowboy hat and go to a movie with my friends?

Yes, I did.

And some of it really hit me over the head with the patriarchy and I found that insulting.

But there were parts of it that were a little more sneaky.

Things like the fact that that is interchangeable for men, that speech where I went, this is a movie about how being human is hard.

And in fact, for men in the current time, and this is what you're speaking to, which I wish the movie had tapped into a bit more,

when it comes to despair, loneliness, suicides in some demos, academic achievement, men are having a lot of problems.

And I have three daughters and one son, and I would like them to be equally successful and have equal chances and I don't think that my son deserves sort of any sort of comeuppance because things might have been harder in the past for women.

I saw it with my nine-year-old daughter so I had rolfed my brain into the appropriate shape before seeing it and I enjoyed it.

I loved it.

You did?

I did, yeah.

I mean I laughed way more than I thought I was going to laugh.

Purposely or I know.

No, no, I mean I just I listened, I mean

half of it was going over my daughter's head because she's nine, but so I was sort of

having my own experience.

But

yeah,

it's interesting to just, I mean,

you're in the most charitable possible mood when you're seeing a movie like that with your daughter.

And so it does define the experience.

And again, I enjoyed it.

I just thought it was 2008.

You know, it just wasn't up to the times.

At one point, I remember the Barbies have to get the Kens back, and they do it by pretending to be helpless about stuff like I don't know how to use a computer and the woman I saw it with said to me I don't know any woman who acts like that anymore so how could a movie that's that not with the times be that successful but I guess people just they want to believe what they want to believe it's emotional truth yeah but I do think that could be a critique of both of those gendered stereotypes right in some respects as well and I did the thing I liked about the movie is that it was interesting where it was allowed to be complicated and it was not as as interesting where we tried to gender stereotype in this really specific way.

Although, like, what is gender anymore, anyway?

You also can't have two sexes that are a naught, so I don't know.

It's confusing in these modern times.

Well, I want to show the Lauren Boebert video because it's funny.

I just do.

So, this is Lauren Boebert about a week ago watching Beetlejuice.

There you go.

Back and to the left.

Back and to.

There you go, honey.

Play hard to get.

That's how you do it.

I mean, let's not gloss over the fact that she said this was a first date.

I love it that on a first date,

what is that all about, just seeing if she's wasting her time?

But I want to get to an important question about this.

She said afterward that the lesson she drew from this is I learned to check party affiliations before you go on a date.

And I just want to say that.

Look at that, she was checking party affiliations.

Yeah, because the guy was a Democrat.

And this was the big lesson she got.

And I feel like this is the exact wrong direction to go in this country.

I think Republicans and Democrats should be groping each other,

talking to each other.

I think we are all too much in our own silos, and our biggest problem is we don't mingle.

We think that the other side is deplorable, and the people are not worthy of mingling with and dating.

So,

the correct response to TMZ would have been like, Sure, was I Boeing the Burt at Beetlejuice?

Or

that's a forever I've never heard that.

Yeah, I haven't heard that either.

Some people have their names on bills, some people have different things.

Or was I building bridges, right?

Right.

I agree with your substantive point.

It's a different structure.

Okay.

But I agree with your point, and there's polling on this that people, because of negative partisanship, continue to think more and more coldly of the opposing party in this country.

And they have fewer and fewer friends together.

I will say consistently it shows in polling that Republicans actually have more friends, are more likely to have Democrat friends than the other way around.

Now, my liberal friends will say, well, that's because we're awesome, and obviously, you guys want to be friends with us.

But

it might be because you're on one side less open-minded than you give yourself credit for.

And this actually calcifies your thinking.

It means you're surrounded by people who only agree with you

and it turns you colder against the other party, unlike the scene that we just saw.

That's very warm.

I think there's a difference.

I think there's a difference in the extreme

political rhetoric that's being and behavior that's being tolerated in the two parties.

I mean, so you go far enough left, you go far enough right, you meet

just just unacceptable political intuitions and behavior.

But the Republican Party has become a kind of personality cult.

And I mean, we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and we didn't have one.

And the

party loyalty at this point is predicated on not acknowledging how obscene and dangerous that was.

And so you have someone like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney who are just

exiled as blasphemers in their party.

And

there's an asymmetry there.

It's just that there's something,

there's an anti-democratic,

populist, conspiracy-addled movement that has to be

disavowed before you can have a kind of symmetrical, okay, this is the stuff we disagree about.

Well,

the question is, though, do you put that on every single voter of the party?

Which I think there's some responsibility for, but in your daily life, can you have a conversation without doing that?

The other thing I would say is that people of the left often say, yes, there is this tremendous asymmetry, and I've been a critic forever of all of the things that you have listed, probably to the detriment of my career, since I am a person of the center right, right?

But on the other hand, There's a poll out last week that 75% of Democrats believe it's incumbent upon the government to censor hate speech.

Hate speech, of course, is whatever they think is hateful, right?

Perhaps that might become dangerous.

Perhaps that might be seen as non-democratic.

There's other places that have been trying to pass laws where you would actually

be a crime to misgender someone.

So these things feel very threatening to me, but I will still talk to people who fervently believe those things.

But the percentage of Democrats who believe that it should be a crime to misgender someone, I mean, that's got to be down around the city.

It ain't small.

It ain't that small.

No, I mean,

I mean, the polling I'm aware of on this is that you have like an 8% activist class on the left that is driving that particular debate, that particular debate.

That issue.

But the thing you're talking about, centering speech, that is dangerous because, I mean, there was just a case, Missouri versus Biden.

Okay?

And this was about COVID misinformation,

but a lot of the misinformation, turns out, was coming from the other side.

But you couldn't say it.

I mean, that's what this case was about.

Big tech was basically colluding with the government to suppress any speech.

This was brought by two very esteemed doctors who and they had a letter that I think was signed by 16,000 doctors and researchers who said, we are dissenting from what we think is the right way to handle this pandemic with the masking to the degree it was done, school closings, shutdowns,

natural immunity versus vaccination.

None of it was crazy stuff.

And you're not allowed.

That's what you're talking about.

That's what's dangerous, I think, from the Democrats, is that a lot of them believe that social media's job is to suppress.

And these are the people who used to be so skeptical of corporate America and the pharmaceutical industry.

And now they want the government just to shut down anybody who doesn't agree with them?

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't think there's a bright line here because

we have a public health emergency that we are trying to understand, and you have a consensus of a sort forming over here, and you have

outlier voices that are getting preferentially amplified by an algorithm that doesn't this is not just a level playing field where you get to say your piece, I get to say mine.

We have a business model that is amplifying divisive lies and misinformation preferentially, right?

And it is so you have a lie that spreads like wildfire, and then you have a patient debunking of that that doesn't spread because it doesn't provoke the same thing.

Except the patient debunking had to be done of the government and of many public health officials.

These are truths that were formerly known as conspiracies.

And the fact that

we're not able to have an open conversation about it.

We did have, you know, very recently the Sackler family, the maker of

OxyContin, fined $8 billion because they knowingly sold their hillbilly heroin to people, knowing they were hooking them on it and killing a lot of people.

So it's not like we don't know they're capable of this.

We just found out last week, they've known for years that Sudafed and Benadryl are bullshit.

Oops.

They don't work and they still say so.

Half of the ingredients are bullshit.

Well, using it as a pill never worked.

Yeah, I mean, the problem is that experts were wrong.

And when you talk about an uneven playing field, when the government comes to your social media company and is like, oh, it's a nice thing you got going here, but it's a shame if we're right.

But I do think you're right about Trump being the biggest threat and the threat to democracy.

Nothing compares to that.

I basically agree with that idea, but I do think what happens is if you get so hung up on saying the other side is worse and therefore off off limits for me to engage with, then you never engage.

And normal people don't engage.

And that is actually what makes us come closer to the trip.

I may interrupt.

Now,

the biggest story really probably while we were off for these five months was Trump being put on trial.

He's got four trials.

He's got a,

I gave hush money to a porn star trial.

He's got a, I stole documents and put them by the toilet trial.

He has a, I asked for 11,000 votes trial and I tried to overthrow the the government trial

So I just want to say even if you're a fan that's a lot of trials

So we thought

Since since he the chances are very good that he will get convicted of one of these we thought as a public service because we're always about the public service here

We would put out a little pamphlet called tips for Donald Trump's cellmates.

He's probably gonna have a cellmate

So these are things you you might want to look out for if you are, you know, if you're the person who becomes Donald Trump sub-wife.

Don't believe him when he says how many cigarettes he's worth.

Explain to him that he's not allowed conjugal visits from his daughter.

He loves compliments, so tell him that jumpsuit really brings out your orange.

Don't be surprised if one of his cavity searches turns up Sean Hannane.

When he begs some Mexican inmates to help him get over the wall, refrain from pointing out the obvious irony.

Let him know that singing YMCA in the shower might send the wrong signal.

Don't get aggravated when he keeps referring to his one phone call as perfect.

He's a big eater, so don't be surprised when he takes a shiv and makes it into a spoon.

And finally,

when he offers to blow you for a diet coke, make sure you get the blow job first.

But

show his mugshot.

I gotta say, when they, we have waited for this, a lot of people wanted to see this mug shot.

I gotta say,

he nailed it.

I mean, I'm just blown away by that.

In one take.

In one take, that is his evil genius.

Like,

a model could be there for three hours with a professional photographer trying to get, okay, I need a little more.

I'm crazy, but I'm going to kill you in a few.

And they couldn't have gotten that shot.

So what is going to happen with, now he's, what if he's convicted?

I mean, he's not going to actually go to jail.

I mean, he would.

It's hard to imagine.

And then he could be elected president.

I'm guessing he would be home confinement running the country from Mar-a-Lago.

Right?

That is not a joke.

It sounds like it should be, but it's.

Yeah, no, it's.

I mean,

the truth is, I can't let myself think that far.

I mean, it's really hard.

It's really hard to believe we're in this situation.

But, I mean, you mentioned Menendez.

I thought it was so interesting.

In this upside-down world we live in, where law enforcement now are the bad guys, the FBI is now the bad guys.

So Robert Menendez,

obvious crook, I mean, everything but actually having his hand in a real cookie jar.

Only the Democrats want him to step down.

Not a single Republican is asking him to go.

Because again, in an upside-down world, world, when law and order comes after you, they're the ones who are suspect.

Well, and it's all driven by partisan desires, right?

Democrats are like, yeah, get rid of this guy because he's now weakened and we have a Democratic governor and so we could replace him.

Republicans are like,

you don't need to get rid of him because he's weakened now.

And also, we need to maintain this standard where indicted people are perfectly fine to run for office, right?

So that's the two sides thinking on this.

But the original sin where you talk about law enforcement problems and Republican attitudes toward law enforcement, particularly as the FBI on this stuff, the original sin from both media and the intelligence agencies and

federal law enforcement is the Russia gate stuff.

And the reason that so many in the party, and I'm here as the translator because I'm not one of them, but so many in the party accept so much of Donald Trump's behavior is because the Russia stuff was a lie and nobody paid for it.

No, it wasn't.

Well, it wasn't all a lie.

It wasn't a lie.

It's not all a lie.

You guys have been ripped.

Are you going to to do steel dossier on me?

No, no.

Well, some of the steel dossier was true.

Okay, you know, this is the same thing.

Like, we did Mueller report for three years.

Yes, and Mueller never said he was innocent.

And the whole time, I'm like, guys, I don't think he's a Russian plant.

And everyone on CNN said is looking at me like I'm crazy.

And at the end, we get to not much there there.

There was quite a bit there.

There was a lot there.

There was collusion we never had before.

It was unprecedented that a president would do that.

He just did it in public because he's insane.

You do know

I think one of the advantages of being insane.

And most of it,

probably none of it was illegal.

Right, so I mean this was always David Frum's line.

Everything he's doing is in plain view and it's not illegal.

He's just violating every political norm we have.

He's not.

Except

there were things that were illegal, like using the FISA court to spy on American citizens in ways that they should not have done.

And that's what I was doing.

No, that was legal, but that wasn't him.

That's right.

And the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign was partially responsible for funding this dossier, which partially came from a wait for Russian disinformation, it was a, and it started this cycle of media circle jerk, and then we had four years of that.

I think it was his own election authority guy who said something like, I can't believe I have to explain this, but it is illegal to accept anything of value in an election from a foreign national.

He accepted things of value.

His campaign manager was trading campaign information with a GRU agent.

That's not collusion with Russia?

What about the meeting with Don Jr.?

I have dirt.

How did Paul Manafort run your campaign?

And Paul Manafort has been

a legal thing.

Paul Manafort is like a 200-pound gold bar in the closet.

The transgression, the unseemliness of it is right on the surface, given his contacts with the...

It's not exactly everything they said it was, but it's not nothing.

The standard of evidence used for the Russia thing for three, four years versus the standard of evidence used now in media for Biden and Hunter Biden's shenanigans and fairly obvious influence peddling is worlds apart.

Worlds apart.

And I would just like,

and voters deserve fairness in how these two people are treated.

They do not get it, and they sometimes don't get it from law enforcement.

Okay.

And that's bad.

Yes, there's a lot to untangle here, but I'll completely grant you that if

Hunter Biden had been Don Jr., if it had been Don Jr.'s laptop, everything would change in terms of the reception.

And that seems like an unfair asymmetry.

But the background reality is we have never had a person like Trump in our politics, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone in this studio.

And

he has shattered every norm.

I mean, we didn't even know how much we relied on norms.

I mean, we're a nation of laws, but more important than the laws are the norms,

Like committing to a peaceful transfer of power when you're a president.

I mean, that was the most shocking violation of

normal democratic principles I think in our case.

I agree with you about the norms.

And here's the problem.

A bunch of people, including in the justice system, looked at Trump and said, he's going to bust all the norms.

And you know what we need to do?

Bust all the norms to stop him.

And that is a very, very unhealthy decision.

Unhealthy, I'll guarantee you that.

Got to stop.

Thank Thank you.

Welcome back.

Time for new rules, everybody.

Okay,

let me get back to new rules.

All right, new rules.

Now that we've got spiked seltzer, spiked soda, hard lemonade, spiked juice, hard cider, spiked iced tea, spiked energy drinks, spiked coffee, spiked coconut water, spiked mountain dew, and spiked juice pouches.

Let's just go all the way and spike the tap water.

Finally, our tax dollars put to good use.

Good schools?

No.

Safe streets?

Not really, but where else in the world can you get drunk off the garden hose?

Never old, since 2.2 million migrants are projected to walk into America this year, we need a better plan than get used to soccer.

How about this?

Fire the Border Patrol, take down the fencing, and once every single man, woman, and child in Venezuela is here, we go there.

Think of it as a hemispheric house swap.

We get your crystal blue waters and white sand, and you can help yourself to our tents.

New rules, someone needs to tell the Pride community that LGBTQ Plus sounds like a video streaming service.

Don't get me wrong, I'm down with the cause, but when I hear LGBTQ Plus, I think gay, but with no commercial.

Neural.

Before you judge how many kids in the U.S.

are overweight, check out Australia, where it's reported that childhood obesity will double by 2035.

In fact, it's so bad that they're remaking that Meryl Street movie, and now she says, help, a baby ate my dingo.

Google it, kids.

It's funny.

Nural, if like Virginia legislative candidate Susannah Gibson, you've live streamed yourself having sex.

and also asked viewers to pay you money to perform specific sex acts on Cheddarbait.

You don't have to campaign anymore.

I'm already voting for you.

Because talk about being responsive to your constituents.

Some guy asked you to blow him into reverse cowgirl, and you did.

All I want from you is a permit to hook up my solar.

And finally,

new rule, someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he's going to turn the country back over to Trump and

go down in history as Ruth Bader Biden.

The person who doesn't know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country.

All of us who like Joe Biden have been struggling lately with the political situation in the Democratic Party.

An incumbent we admire who acquitted himself well in a first term, but who even members of his own party don't want to see run for a second, despite a touching letter of recommendation from Aston Kutcher and Mila Kunis.

I kid, they shouldn't have gotten shit for that.

If you ask me, do I think Joe Biden can do the job of president?

My answer is an unequivocal yes, he can do the job.

Do I love everything?

No, but that's every president.

But government work is done in small, quiet rooms like the Oval Office.

And in that setting, Joe's compassion and centuries of experience

are pluses.

And he's generally made good decisions that got us out of Afghanistan, handled Ukraine, kept the economy chugging, finally got us rebuilding infrastructure, returned a sense of normalcy.

There is a term for Joe Biden, but not two.

Because while he can do the job, what he can't do is run for it.

Our campaign season is long and it gets icy in New Hampshire.

To those who say he beat Trump once, he'll do it again, I say things change.

They always do.

The parade moves on.

2024 is not 2020 in so many key ways, including, yes, Biden being four years older.

You can be a national treasure and still be too old for the job.

If I'm on a plane and the pilot says, This is your captain, Buzz Aldrin,

I'm getting off.

Mitch McConnell has served Satan well.

But when he starts buffering during a speech

and it appears his soul is leaving his body

It's time

I have made it a theme on this show to rail against ageism, the last acceptable prejudice in America.

I've tried to make the argument that judging by age is wrong because we all age so differently.

Some people are old when they're 45 and others are spry at 90.

So it should always be a case-by-case basis.

But the credibility of my argument against ageism rests on the honest calling out of people when it is time to go.

That's what case-by-case means.

At an event last weekend, Biden referred to L.L.

Cooljay as L.L.J.

Cooljay.

Say what you want about Trump but he remembers Kanye's name.

Look, at some point perception becomes reality.

What matters is voters think Biden's too old.

What matters is he's gonna lose.

to Trump, who's almost the same age, but his age just doesn't read like Biden's.

Maybe it's because Trump is insane.

Maybe it's because he's always a ball of white-hot anger, but for whatever reason, he looks robust robust and Joe looks like his own skeletal remains.

If this was 1860, when Joe first ran,

this would not be an issue.

You didn't have to look good, and there was no ubiquitous media to pick on every little mistake.

The only people who saw the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the people who went to them.

But Joe's debates next year will be televised to all, and I don't think he's going to look good.

Yes, Trump is old too, but Trump is like KISS.

He puts on the face paint and the wig

and he looks the same as he did in 1978.

Far from being the only one who could beat Trump in 2024, Biden may well be the only Democrat who would lose to him.

James Carville told me any centrist Democrat around 50 or 60 would get 55% of the vote, and I believe him.

You know that future headlines bit we do?

Well, the most predictable headline ever is, presidential race tied.

Two weeks before every election, it's always tied, no matter who is running.

The vast majority just vote for the D or the R.

But Biden is the one Democrat who gives pause to so many people, even in his own party.

Andrew Sullivan makes the necessary point that a new nominee for the Democrats would shift the dynamic immediately.

Trump would be the tired old guy retreat hanging on to the past and the Democrat would now be the future.

Let the Republicans be the party with the candidate who babbles nonsense, shouts at the TV and can't do ramps.

Joe, you did noble service for your country and you checked that big box, the President of the United States.

Of course, as a politician, you're naturally going to say, but the work is not finished.

Of course not.

It never is.

But it's time to let someone else finish it.

You don't want to go down as Ruth Bader Biden.

America is calling Joe, and it's saying, that's not our car, Grandpa.

We're over here.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Fox in St.

Louis, October 7th.

Wow, coming up.

The Orpheum in Omaha on the 8th, and the MGM Grand in Vegas, November 3rd and 4th.

I want to thank Mary Catherine Henn, Sam Harris, and Ron DeSantis.

We got Keegan Michael Key and his wife Al, Matt Welsh, and Sarah Isger next week.

Thank you very much, folks.

Great to be back.

Thank you.

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

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