Ep. #623: Medaria Arradondo, Bret Stephens, Rep. Ruben Gallego

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

Thank you, Frieza.

Thank you. How are you?

I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

What a beautiful crowd. Thank you very much.
Okay.

Please, thank you.

Thank you. I know.

Jesus, okay, what are you drunk from Groundhog Day?

Yeah, Groundhog Day was yesterday. Boy, not good.
The Groundhog saw a shadow.

And then the cops beat the shit out of it.

Oh, that's sad. Well, this country's so fucked up.
It really is. Did you see this week Dr.
Phil is calling it quits after 21 years?

I know. And he was like, you you know, I've been America's therapist for 21 years.
Obviously, I failed.

I really think that's what's behind it.

You know what people are freaking out about this week? There's a balloon.

A Chinese spy balloon over Montana. Oh my God.

Now they know where we keep the cows.

Who gives a shit? And the Chinese, of course, are denying it. They say it's very innocent.
It's a weather balloon. They said they would never use a spy balloon to infiltrate and monitor America.

That's what TikTok is for.

So,

of course, the usual suspects on the right one of us say, shoot it down. Shoot this fucking thing down.
But the experts say it's too dangerous. We don't know exactly what's in it.

So we just have to watch from a distance until it slowly and inevitably crashes and burns, like we're doing with Kanye.

You can, you make it.

Oh, speaking of blimps, Donald Trump is in the news.

Yeah,

I could tell the 24 campaign is already on. You know, he had his first rally in South Carolina last week, and I could tell it's on because he's going at me again.

Yesterday he called me a low-rating sleazebag. Oh.

I do not have low ratings.

Say what you want about it.

He says,

I'm a low-rating sleazebag who laughs at conservatives because he thinks we're weak and stupid.

He's so weak and stupid.

But he's got competition. This is interesting.

We have an official race now. Nikki Haley,

former governor of South Carolina, is going to announce on February 15th. So that's pretty interesting.
And she's got a great slogan to start her campaign: the Republican Party, now with women.

But here's how I can really tell the campaign's underway already. It's only February of 23, but because Trump is starting to give people nicknames.

She's going to be Tricky Nikki or something. Remember, little Marco and low energy jab, and he's going at it with Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSanctimonius.

I don't even know what that means. He said, Ron de Sanctimonius is a rhino-globalist.
Now, if you don't have your

English to Republican code book,

rhino means not crazy enough.

Globalist means Jew.

And de sanctimonious, I think, means I have dementia. I don't know.

He's so weak and stupid.

And, oh, and another Republican is probably going to get in the race, former governor of Maryland Larry Hogan.

Exactly.

Yeah, Trump is not too worried about him.

His nickname for him is Larry Hogan.

But hey, you know what? If he's going to go up against Biden, he's going to have a tough time fighting on the economic front. We had the best jobs report pretty much that I can ever remember.

I think most people can remember.

Last month we added over 500,000 jobs.

They haven't had a report like this since the moon landing.

Or if you're Marjorie Taylor Green, the moon landing.

Yeah, the unemployment rate went down to 3.4%.

I know.

I know. When you hear that, a lot of you are saying, then why is my kid still living in his old room?

All right, we've got a great show.

We have Organ Gallego and Brett Stevens, but first up, he was a police officer for over three decades and most recently served as the police chief of Minneapolis before retiring in 2022.

Madeira Arredondo.

Sir, Chief,

how are you? Great to see you.

I've seen you a lot on TV because, of course, you were out there in 2020 when you were head of the Minneapolis Police Department and we saw you.

I thought you handled yourself in the whole situation as well as could be handled. Thank you.

So, obviously, you're a great person to talk to today because we, at the same time, of course, want to condemn what happened in Memphis full-forwardly. But also, you know, I want to understand,

first of all, in the tribal way we live in America now, I got to think being a black cop is about as hard a job as it gets

because we are tribal. Yeah.
Yeah.

Yeah, Bill,

the journey of black cops in this country,

oftentimes having to serve in some of the most challenged neighborhoods and sections of the community, and then, of course, still facing a lot of the same institutional challenges within the organizations and with the tribalism that you had just mentioned, it becomes difficult.

And that's why the situation in Memphis is so...

And first off, I just have to, you know, thoughts and condolences to the Nichols family who just buried their son this week.

And I've heard the conversation about race and particularly those being five black officers. And I think what is most shameful and despicable besides

what Mr. Nichols suffered and what his family is going through is that the black elders and the black civil rights icons and all of those people that fought so hard so that,

even for myself, that we could be in the positions that we are in today and so so that that really

it's it's just terrible on so many fronts but yeah there's these challenges and as you mentioned America has changed so much and I would imagine challenges even within your own community because I'm sure there's a lot of some black folks who don't think it's kind of being a traitor yes right absolutely so you're having to face that and do your job yeah and at the same time a couple of years ago when the abolish and defund movement was really taking on a lot of rhetoric, it was those same communities, those black communities, that needed that police protection even more.

And so they were torn and the divisions. And so it's been very challenging over the last year.
It strikes me that race trumps almost everything in America. You know?

I mean, if it's a man-woman situation, usually people will side racially. Yeah.
Except for cops.

It seems like that's the one thing. When you're a black cop,

I'm just going by this and other situations, but obviously there's something about being blue, I guess because it's your life on the line.

Well, it also, I think, it attaches a history to it. You know, these policing departments and institutions have been around in most parts of the country for almost 200 years.

When they were created, someone like myself was never envisioned being a part of that.

And so along with all those challenges, along with some of the hurt that many in the black community had suffered at the hands of police departments, now when they see someone who is black, who is serving,

some of that history and some of that generational trauma continues with it. And so

it does make a difference. Yeah, I mean, when people say, you know, well, first of all, it's an interesting way to run an experiment.

We took whiteness out of the equation completely on the surface because all the cops were black, police chief, the majority of the force is black.

Okay.

But that doesn't mean whiteness is really out of the equation completely, because as you say, history matters. Absolutely.
So it's a little counterintuitive. That doesn't mean it's not true.

That even black cops can be racist to black people. Absolutely.
And that you would say that is the truth? Absolutely. You know, Van Jones, who I have a lot of respect for

spoke on it probably much more

better than I could, but what I will say is: absolutely, can black people be racist? Absolutely. But I will also just say this here:

what those five former officers did to Mr. Nichols,

as Chief Davis of the Memphis Police Department said, it was inhumane.

And I don't believe that you can truly love yourself if you are willing to subject a defenseless person to that type of brutality. Okay, Mr.
Nichols did.

So

let's get into that.

When you see these beatings, and we've seen it, you know, Rodney King, I think it was the first time we saw it, because before that there wasn't video like that.

So obviously it went on even worse before.

But when you first saw that, and this is very reminiscent, you know, we've seen many instances, including some white people who get...

had the shit beat out of them, where there's four or five or six guys. And it's extremely frightening because there is a mob mentality going on there.
It's very lord of the flies.

There's something atavistic about that that is scary, especially when it's law enforcement people doing that. So help me understand, if you can,

what is why a police,

why that happens? Is it because they're just on such a hair trigger? Because what they see all day, every day, is it an accumulation?

That rage inside of them, where is it coming from and how can we channel it differently? Yeah, so that's a great question, Bill. And so I think two things we have to focus on.

Historically in policing, which is a paramilitary model, they take into account groupthink, team work, and team membership, and that gets transferred into the academy.

But what we are not doing a good enough job, and we certainly one aspect of the Memphis situation is when camaraderie suffocates character, we need to start telling folks that their individual character means everything.

And if they see these acts, they have to speak up and intervene them.

So So

that's very important. That's a tough sell in the police department, isn't it? It is.
Many or the military police. True, it is, but it's what's going to matter.

As fast as technology, we can get all the tools and the excellent training in the world, but police departments move at the speed of trust. If that is not there, this all ends.

And so we have to really focus on that.

But I will also say, which we saw in Memphis, and I really want to give credit to Chief Davis, Mayor Strickland, we saw even Governor Lee there, they moved very swiftly to condemn and to call out what it was.

We haven't seen that in practice often, and so I think that that is going to be a shift that we see in terms of holding folks accountable.

But before our communities call out bad police misconduct, we within the organizations have to do that first. Yeah.

It's a self-balancing act between.

I mean, I've... I've said things on this show about the police over the years, and I'm sure.
I've heard.

I know. Well, I'm sorry.
Sundays they deserve it.

And we tried to make it funny. I'm sure it wasn't to them.
But yeah, I mean

things like, you know,

it's a dangerous job. We get that.
But you know, it can't be, the mentality can't be

as a cop, I can do whatever I have to do to protect myself first. You're there to protect and serve us.
So I'm sure you're right. I mean, stuff like that.
I know they don't like to hear it.

You're right. But on the other hand, you know, we do have to have sympathy because, in my view, what's going on is society is broken.
Our society is broken.

We don't educate people anymore.

Discipline is all broken down. Families are broken down.
So

who sees this? Who sees the result of that? The cops. Yeah.

You know? Yeah, and they're being asked to do so much more today.

They're not only law enforcers, they're social workers, they're advocates.

They're

marriage counselors. Marriage counselors.
I see it on cops.

No one ever calls you to the porch to tell you how well the marriage is going.

You're right. They don't.

You're right. And so they're being asked to do all of this in many cases around the country now with depleted ranks.
And the need for their service continues to go up.

But the other thing I want to say, too, that we have to really make sure we have to take care of the officers themselves because they're also a part of this broken society.

And And years ago when it was the cop with a chip on his shoulder that departments all have, they're much more easy to identify and address today, but the ones that are the ones that we need to really look out for are those officers that have been performing for the most part well, but what you don't know is they're going through divorce.

They're dealing with aging parents. They've got kids with substance abuse.
And all of a sudden something snaps.

And those are the ones that police departments have to do a better job of making sure they have those resources for them as well. All right.
Thanks, Chief. I appreciate you coming here.

Very enlightening. We'll see you back here, I hope, on the panel, maybe.
Okay. All right, let's lead our panel.

Okay.

Here they are. He is a columnist for the New York Times.
Say no more. Brett Stevens is right over here.
Brett, great to see you.

And he is the Democratic congressman from Arizona who recently announced his campaign for Arizona's U.S. Senate seat in 2024, Ruben Gallego.

Running for the Senate. Yep.

Okay, so anything that the chief said that you want to echo, fight with

well, I mean one thing that

did remind me, I was in the United States Infantry Marine Corps, and it was important to have that leader within that group that said, hey, you're doing this wrong. Don't do this.

This is against our values. And, you know, I had a tough time.
A lot of us had a tough time. I I was in constant combat, someone was always trying to kill me, blow me up, or the combination of both.

And I still needed to keep the pride of the Marine Corps and treat the civilians like they deserved to be treated.

But there was also some senior leadership that was always there to remind me about my duty as a Marine, as an American. And I think that really matters when it comes to keeping people in line.

We also have to bear in mind, particularly at moments like this, that 99.5% of police officers do their job honorably and courageously.

Deserve our respect.

First of all, let's just say you're pulling that number right out of your ass.

We don't know that for a fact.

I'm supportive of the police.

We have to have police, or else it's the purge every night. Okay?

But there is a lot of bad tape on cops. So I don't know if that number is 99.5.

I don't. One thing that Brett said.
One guy, thanks.

The one thing he said, though,

what we were aware about in Iraq is that even though, yes, it may be 99.9, whatever the number is, our one action could have ramifications across the whole war.

We saw the ramifications of the Abu Gharaib torture. We ended up having harder times with insurgents because of those Yahoos that actually caused it.
You keep making this analogy.

First of all, thank you for your service, honestly, in the war, but that's a war.

And

we don't want to be brutalizing civilian populations, but it's a little different than our own American citizens.

But you should, what I'm saying, the standard, when it's that hard, should be easy to meet when you're dealing with your citizens, who are you're sworn to protect. Okay, so.

So every week, a cop in America is shot and killed. Every single week.

And this is a conversation we're not having, but every police officer is very well aware that he's going out on a squad car, he's getting out, taking a risk, and putting his life on the line, and they deserve a lot more respect than they get.

First of all, they get a lot of respect. They get a lot of respect.

A lot of people in this country are always bowing and scraping to the cops. I know when they pull me over, I give them a lot of respect.

And I think most people...

Most people,

when they, they also get, fuck you, who are you? Yes, they do. And yes, and every encounter, you don't know exactly what you're going to get.
That's true.

They've also studied how dangerous policing is. It does not crack the top 10 of most dangerous jobs.
People like loggers and electricians and cab drivers. These daredevils get killed at a higher rate.

Okay, look, we need the police. We love the police.
We respect the police.

It is a responsibility.

It is a responsibility for them to protect the citizens. I do think that that's something that we have to reorient police into.

Your first responsibility is to protect citizenry, not necessarily also to protect yourself. I mean, that has to be a secondary thing.
That's what I was trying to say.

That has to be a secondary thing. And again, I'm sorry, my analogy is to the war, but first of all, it's an accomplishment, and then after that is your self-protection.
But that's just my perspective.

Okay, so

President Biden is going to have the family of Tyree Nichols in the balcony for the State of the Union address next week. I feel like this is tragedy, porn.
I really feel like this is gross.

You know, it's too soon to impose on that family now in their hour of grief grief to help you politically.

I mean, it's just, it's stunt casting, which they always do at the State of the Union address.

And

I just feel it's

we should be better than that.

It's exploitative. I don't know.

It's exploitative of a family in grief, newly in grief. That's a call for the Nichols family to make.

I remember after 9-11, Lisa Beamer, widow of one of the passengers of Todd Beamer, Flight 93 was there, and it was a moment for her and for the nation.

Those are

intensely personal calls.

Stuncasting is as providing Rush Limbaugh after he gets the president of Medical Freedom. That's stuncasting.

To talk to a family, talk to the United States that is traumatized by seeing the government kill somebody, I think

is a good use of that time. We are talking about the State of the Union.
The country is talking about what just happened. And it's hard to say no.

It's hard to say say no to the president when he asks you to do that. But okay, we don't know.
So I think we should just get rid of the State of the Union.

I actually agree.

It's like the Oscars. Like, their time came

and it went, and I'm waiting for Lorne Boebert to try to assault the president in the way that Will Smith tried to assault Chris Rock last year.

It's just, but

it descends into spectacle. You have Republicans who are constitutionally or mentally incapable of applauding a Democratic president for anything.
It often happens the other way around.

Everyone is there waiting to be caught on television by Fox or MSNBC, God forbid, saluting someone on the other side of the political plan.

It's depressing because it used to be a place where we would see us come together. I remember Gerald Ford.

was able to say like 50 years ago, the state of our union is bad, Which no one would ever say because then it would be in every campaign commercial, but we trusted each other.

It's like, oh, you know what? Things do suck and we're all going to pull together and the dude who's in charge is admitting it and we're all going to work together on it. I get it.

That would never happen. I get how there's this ill feelings for the state of the union, but traditions do matter.

I think one of the things that we're running away from are some of the things that still unite us as a country. And yeah, we do have some assholes at the State of the Union.

But it is important for the president to communicate his vision and speak to the country.

This is one of the few rare moments that it happens that you will gather all of Congress, the Senate, the Cabinet, and for them to really speak.

And of course, sometimes transparency is the most important thing. And then we will find out if the Lauren Boebers of the world are as crazy as they seem.
She is, just to get you wondering.

Okay. You know, it's not in the Constitution.
I know it's not in the Constitution.

The Constitution is very vague. It's just like you have to make it.
It's an annual message, right? It's an actual message.

It's actual. It's like a Facebook update.
Just, you know, like whenever you want it. It can be a letter, it can be anything.
You don't have to get up there and make a big show.

It's a tech message nowadays. I mean, yeah.
Right. So the other thing they do with the State of the Union, you know, of course, is unveil a lot of bullshit.
It's a laundry list.

You know, I remember Bush one year we're going to Mars or something, and I was like, okay, really?

Remember, he mentioned Mars? And I'm like, whoa, we can't even get to the Baghdad airport, you know.

But, you know, it has to be everything.

Girl Scout uniforms, whatever it is. You

So

it seems like that Build Back Better program, that seems like the exact kind of thing they would unveil. And I know you're going to run now against, not against, but for Kirsten Sinema's seat, right?

Yes, yeah. Okay.
So Kirsten Sinema. If you got one of my emails, I've been sending a couple out asking for money, just throwing that out there.

In case you're wondering, putting it right there.

Okay, we'll talk, Abd to that.

But, okay, so for those who are not following at the 400 level of our course here,

Kirsten Sinema is the Democratic, formerly Democratic, senator from your state of Arizona, Arizona, which was a long time the most Republican state in the country. But it's changed, and

she's quirky and independent. Now she's literally an independent because she can't win, because the liberals, the Democrats in Arizona are fed up with her.
Well, not just liberal Democrats.

Last polling we saw was all Democrats.

Her numbers are in the tank with independents, and she's certainly not winning Republicans, but she's running as independent because she would never have been able to beat me in a Democratic primary because she was a very good person.

Right, in a Democratic primary, for sure. Everybody would have been a primary.

Because she got to be known as the bad guy with Joe Manchin because they were the ones who said the Build Back Better bill, which was for $3.5 trillion,

which is a lot of money.

Over 10 years, it was about

20.

No, you spent $800, I think, and $25 billion just in one year on the defense budget. Yes, I agree.
That's a lot of money, too. I couldn't agree

that that should be cut in half easily. I know you.
Well, I don't disagree with that. I disagree with that, too.

I think they saved Biden's presidency in its past time. We recognize that they stood up to this.

Look, inflation would have been twice the problem we had had if we had pumped twice the money into the economy. Don't take it from me, take it from Larry Summers, a former Democratic

Secretary of Treasury. So they put forward, they ended up with a bill that was manageable.
It still caused inflation.

It still nearly wrecked Biden's presidency, but he ended up getting the legislation we needed.

I'd like to put it, the Federal Reserve has never said that the majority of inflation was caused by these plans and these programs. If anything, we needed it.

You know, inflation would have been certainly helpful if you could receive the child tax credit for $200. First of all, let's tell folks,

it did pass, but not at 3.5 trillion. Right.
Something like 785 billion. Still kind of a lot of money.
Oh, absolutely. Okay, all right.
So I just got to say, I always was sort of on this page.

Like, first of all, 3.5 trillion,

do you even know what's in there? No.

And also, I just don't trust the government at this point.

The money that they spent on COVID, half of that got stolen.

Hundreds of billions of dollars.

Hundreds of billions that went to the PPP program, protection program, and unemployment. It was just stolen or given out to anybody.
Right. And on the flip side, Bill, we aren't in a major recession.

In 2008, the lesson of 2008, when this country went into the deepest recession, it took us nearly 10 years to get out of that. Working families had their savings wiped out.
People lost their homes.

They were barely starting to recover when the pandemic hit.

And because of the investment we have, the working class came out stronger than ever instead of trying to limp along like we did for 10 years. We're not saying no aid should have been given.

Yeah, we're just saying that there's a big difference. No, there is a difference because

if you're not afraid of the problem,

you're throwing out numbers.

of what's actually in the bill.

I can't think of a better argument for the most right-wing Republicans than saying that all Democrats believe in is throwing huge numbers of problems they don't really understand.

That's an argument for a DeSantis. That's it.

That's never going to happen. But the most important thing is what it means to the people, right? The fact that I could say to a working-class family, hey, we understand you're having a problem here.

Here's $200 per child. Use it to pay your bills.

That's something that we have.

But the money went to everybody. There was no.
Well, I'm sorry, we're talking about Build Back Better. Now you're talking about the PPP load.

What I'm saying is, I don't trust the next one when the last one was such a mess, okay? I don't trust.

But

that's almost any government program. There are abuses.

Okay, there was always this idea that you cannot transfer money except by way of a leaky bucket, which I totally understand. I agree.
There is no bucket in government that does not leak.

But at a certain point, you don't even have a bucket. You just got a handle.

You know, I mean, am I supposed to not notice when

they see?

I think it's important to notice.

But we have to make sure that we understand, it was a horrible situation.

We were about to enter into a recession, a deep recession that would have caused the American public, working class people, a personal economic situation.

They were never going to be able to get out of the country.

Gallup just did a poll. Among Republicans, the number one problem as far as Republicans are concerned is government.
What's interesting, that's not surprising.

What's interesting is the number one problem, as far as Democrats are concerned, is government. Now, they clearly mean different things.
I would would bet you so yeah.

This kind of collapse of trust in governments that simply can't perform the functions which they're intended to serve is problematic.

When you have an IRS, you're pumping billions of dollars into government, trillions of dollars, you have an IRS that picks up 10% of its calls. It's a problem.

That's one of those services you need as a citizen.

When Republicans actually don't give you shit about it, when we actually hire the agents to pick up the phones, the first thing they do is Republicans give you shit about actually hiring the agents.

So I mean, yes, We're not saying some checks shouldn't have gone out. We're just saying, like, maybe this Kristen cinema had the right idea to not just throw it out the window.

Are you familiar with our toilet in San Francisco that cost $1.7 million? Yes, I am, yes. Okay.
Well, if you're not familiar with this story. I told you I am.
No,

it's just not.

San Francisco, which is unfortunately the poop capital of the world,

which is not good for tourism, tourism wanted to build a single a single public outdoor toilet the bid came in at 1.7 million dollars for a toilet and it would take three years to build a toilet again we're talking okay that was like six months ago so this got into the press so they were like okay well we got to stop this so they stopped the then a company came along and said you know what i know you want to build a toilet we're going to donate it

and pay for the installation. So donation of the thing itself, an installation, oh, there you saved $1.7 million.

Again, the toilet was $1.7 million.

No.

This is the problem I have with government.

The cost, said the San Francisco Chronicle, isn't the project, it's project management.

In other words,

it would still cost $1.2 million, even though the thing itself and the installation was free. Why?

Construction management, engineering fees, permits, civic design review, surveys, contract preparation, cost estimate. This is the bullshit.

Yeah, actually. That sucks all the money

out of the 20th century. This is the bullshit.
It actually is something that I think is something that really needs to be worked on by both Democrats and

Republicans. Infrastructure is more expensive, it is here than in Europe.
They build, you know, high-speed rail over there because a lot of the BS costs that end up in planning and design.

And we really do need to find a way to streamline it because it is killing our ability to

get behind common sense deregulation. I think they're actually

smaller states working with like competitive bids. I mean, these are not hard calls.

Absolutely, they're hard calls. And they can happen, but it really does need to happen at a grander scale.

We could be making a lot more investments in terms of our buy, you know, in terms of infrastructure if we had less of this.

This would be a great thing for a Democrat to go after. I mean, I'm not saying I'm not going to.
I mean, you might have just got a preview. Okay, great.

All right. So

it is award season out here, so we're all very excited. And the Grammys are coming up.
Are you following the Grammys? There are 90.

Boy, there are now 91 categories in the Grammys. And we've done this other years where we tell you about some of the new ones.
Here are some of the actual new categories this year.

There is the Songwriter of the Year non-classical. There's the best alternative music performance.
There's the best America America HANA performance. There's the best score soundtrack for video games.

Wow.

There is the best spoken word poetry album. I got my money on.

But that's not the only ones. Would you like to hear some of the other new Rion Hall awards?

There's a best album that pretentious assholes say sound better on vinyl.

Is the Hipster? Is that the Hipster Award?

Totally the Hipster Award, yeah. There's the best song by an artist who will be in next year's In Memoriam.

There's the best 90s love song that reminds your parents when they used to fuck.

There's the best Christian song that you think is a love song until you figure out who he is.

There's a best album by a group who thought they were recording with Rick Rubin, but it was just some homeless guy.

There's the award for the most times a rapper asks if you know what he's saying.

There's the best weird Icelandic music that makes you want to cut yourself.

Oh, this is a good one. The most empowering female vocal performance by some chick singing about her cooch.

Best male artist song about loving you forever because you're beautiful just the way you are.

And best female artist song about, fuck you, you cheating bastard. I'm better off now that you're gone.
All right. So, um.

I have a newspaper man here today, so I thought I would ask a little bit about what's going on in journalism because I saw something that I thought was rather groundbreaking in the Washington Post, your competitor over there from the New York Times, Leonard Downey.

He used to be, I think, the executive editor there. Okay, he wrote an editorial about objectivity,

which I thought, again, was kind of a sea change. I mean, objectivity, I remember in the past, always was something that was, of course, impossible to obtain in journalism.

But I never remember anybody saying, we're not trying. If you got accused of not being objective, they would say, well, we're humans, of course we are.
We try, we get as close as we can.

We can't help it if some believes in now. Apparently,

new journalism is, we don't even try, and we're not trying, and we don't think that's a goal.

He said the reason he said the standard was dictated, talking about objectivity, over decades by male editors in predominantly white newsrooms. So

that may be, I'm sure, true, but so the concept of activity should go?

Are we not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here? If he were to get his way, that would be not just the end of any serious journalism in the United States.

I think it would be the end of the United States. I mean, this is

Trump's America. Let me explain for a second what I mean.
That's dramatic. Hang on a second.

This is Trump's America, because what it means is that Truth is whatever you claim it is. Truth is whatever your lived experience is.
Truth is whatever your narrative is.

No, actually, that's not the truth. And newspapers exist to at least seek a standard of accuracy and truthfulness that is not what Ruben or Bill or any of you in the audience happen to think it is.

I thought that was the battle we spent six years fighting the Trump administration about, that you just couldn't say it was true, that you had sold 90% of your condominiums in your fabulous new development,

even if it,

even if it, if it wasn't true. So this is, I mean,

what he's talking about is a trend in newsrooms, which is, I think, incredibly damaging. And all this business, well, you know, it was white guys who got on the bandwagon of objectivity.

What exactly does that mean? So anything that a white guy happened to have come up with at some point in time is therefore suspect.

Let's throw out the polio vaccine because it was a pair of white guys who came up with

Einstein's theory of relativity no longer holds because Einstein was manifestly white? You know what I mean?

So I agree with you on what you're saying. Like, just because a white guy did something like that, doesn't mean we throw it out.
You know,

that's not how things. I think there does need to be a balance because I have heard, and people complain, like, look, if you know something is

black, the color black, and your person you're interviewing is saying, no, no, no, that's clearly white. The reporter is saying, well, it could be either black or white.

That's what I think there needs to be at least some discussion about how do you balance this out. But, you know,

turning newspapers into absolute ideological rags, I think is not the way to go either.

I do think that that creates a downward effect that really, I don't know if it actually destroys the country, but certainly could aid to a point where I think we just don't want to be in that situation.

Yeah, I mean the Washington Post probably does not want to turn itself into Breitbart East,

right? With a slightly different

political coloration. And I hope the Times doesn't.
I hope no other newspaper takes that advice. We need objective standards of truth.

The way we understand the truth is like building a cathedral brick by brick, fact by fact, until you have a picture. Right.
And we have the op-ed page for opinions.

Or at least be transparent. Also, though, be transparent too.

Like if you are going to have an ideological leaning, and you should at least clearly state that so that way the reader understands where that person is coming from.

There are some new magazines that are actually stating ahead of time what the motivation was of the journalist when they were writing this and what their leanings are so that people could actually say, okay, now I understand what at least they're going at,

coming from, and then I can make a determination about the validity of their opinion or their writing.

Okay, so an important date was announced this week by the Biden administration, May 11th. That is the day COVID is officially over.

Making this up.

You hear that, germs?

You got some May 11th to get out of town.

But no, that is when we're the emergency,

whatever it is. What it really means for people is that you're on your own now to pay for vaccines and the free money pipe is turned off in many instances.

And the government is finally understanding what the rest of the country figured out about 12 months ago or so. Yeah, they did seem to want to keep it going longer.

I mean, you do have to tail off some serious things. Like, for example,

in the VA, we do a lot of work in terms of telemedicine and a lot of health care because we're allowed to do it under the emergency use.

So if you take that away without slowly bringing veterans back to in-person appointments, you're going to affect people's opportunity to do that. Hospitals get paid a certain amount.

Now they also have to start tailing off. So I agree.

I think last time I was here, I said, you know, it's time for people to take off the masks and return to normal. And I think we should do that in many aspects as we can.

But there are some places where it does matter that we slowly bring this out because you could affect a lot of people's bottom line health care, veterans especially.

Well, veterans, I think, we should just take care of whether there's a pandemic or not. I mean, that's ridiculous that they should ever have to fight for any kind of health care.

It is, but this has helped us, and we've learned a lot from the pandemic, thank God, about how to treat veterans, especially remotely. But this has helped, you know, the emergency use also.

We also learned that a lot that was tried didn't work. There was a pretty big study that came out this week from the Cochrane Library.

I'm not familiar, but apparently they're very well respected, and they studied a lot of other studies, and they basically said masks the kind that most people wore even surgical ones if they weren't n95 masks did nothing and we're not even that sure about n95 masks are you are you surprised i'm not surprised i've just everyone's wearing their mask like this well

i i disagree i mean i disagree a properly worn mask i think would properly worn mask that is an n95 does make a difference but the rags around your face no i mean if not you know in the m well at first they just said a rag was fine remember that i didn't even know i mean there was a lot of there was a lot of bad information like at at first, it was just put anything on your face.

If I go to the doctor, and he's opening me up,

I want him to wear a mask. There's a reason why they're doing that.
That's different because he's a surgeon.

We're not. And they're opening you up.
And they're opening up. Yes.

Can it stop a big Gabba snot from falling out of his face? Well, yes, of course. But I think that there needs to be more study on this.

I'm not so certain that one study proves that a properly used mask doesn't reduce the surface. You know, I'll be interested in 10 years for

some journal to figure out what was more damaging, COVID as a virus or the various reactions to COVID which kept kids out of school, which created lasting psychological damage, which destroyed families, which prevented people from being with their loved ones

when they passed away, the economic damage to businesses, deaths of despair that came out of COVID. I don't know the answer, but I think it's an interesting answer.
It's worthy of a real study.

A million people died. We know that.
That's bad. I mean, like we can't.
Okay, a million people died died with COVID, not necessarily, it's complicated. It's not that simple.

Like they were in perfect health and then COVID killed them. It's just a very misleading way to approach that.

I disagree. You disagree? You think it pretty much is a problem.

COVID killed nearly probably more than a million people. Well again, as I said, people died with COVID.
That doesn't mean they died really from COVID. It's a combination.

Health is not as simple as you just died from COVID. And perfectly healthy people generally did not die from COVID.
I mean people

with weak immune systems for a number of very obvious reasons. They deserve to live to die.
Of course they deserve to live.

No one is saying they don't deserve to live Ruben. Let's not make let's say but saying that like oh we shouldn't have taken some steps to avoid those people that somebody was in parallel.

I know we should have taken some steps.

When it became obvious fairly early on in the pandemic that children weren't dying from COVID, right?

Or very few children were dying from COVID, That the really susceptible people were the very elderly, those with various comorbidities.

How could we have focused government efforts to take care of the people who needed to be taken care of and let everyone else get COVID and discover that? That's what we're arguing about.

Not virtue signaling.

Of course, people should limit to that. What is the right approach? Is it a more focused approach or is it this broad approach?

From what I remember, they were saying that 1% of the population would die from COVID. 1% 1% in this country is close to 3 million people.
And it was less than that.

Because we actually took steps to stop it. Well, that's partly...

Look at survival bias. It's called survivor bias for a reason.
It's partly. It's partly.
Partly.

Speaking of kids, I agree. Once we figure it out, we should figure out a way to get our kids back in school.
But part of the problem is kids don't teach kids. It's adults.
Adults... are the teachers.

They're the ones that sometimes are going to be more susceptible. Some of them have comorbidities.

Our teaching...

Right, and couldn't we have had a system where teachers who had comorbidities or who felt at additional risk could be taken care of, whereas healthy 35-year-old teachers could go to their classrooms and make sure that we didn't lose an entire job.

100%. But the problem was there are not that many 35-year-old teachers.

Like, we have a problem with teachers aging out already. What did you think of Title 42, which was what we used on the border? I think it's expiring, is that right? I believe so.

I mean, it keeps going back and forth.

Okay, Title 42 was what allowed us during COVID to say to people who wanted to get to to this country, illegal immigrants crossing, no, we have a crisis here because of COVID.

It sort of allowed us, Title 42,

to do what a lot of people wanted to do. We were in a crisis, and it is the responsibility of the government and the president to protect us.

And we don't know who was coming over with whatever, if they were going to spread coronavirus or if they were going to have problems. So

we did the right thing. What I'm asking is, should it stay, this Title 42, even without COVID? It seems to allow us to do

better solutions to the US. No, we should have a serious immigration policy, which is welcoming to legal immigrants and enforces a border, but we shouldn't use transparently fictitious

or irrelevant premises just to use that tool because it's going to lead to greater. It's also not a good tool, and here's why.
So under Title 42,

it's catch and release. You grab you and then we send you across the border.
If you don't have Title 42, then you have two options.

Either number one, you don't have the option, you don't have an option to claim asylum, so you're just breaking in the country legally, you're on America Sim back.

This happens with the Mexican nationals, for example. Number two, you have a just case for asylum.
You ask. If you don't get it, then guess what? You get sent back.
And if you keep it, you keep it.

Right now, we're just sending people back and forth because there is no process.

So this is actually, we need to end that process and actually put a real, real, real asylum process there and a real immigration reform. It's interesting, the governor of your state of Arizona.

Current one of the

previous one?

The current one. Current one.
Sending migrants to your state, New York.

And so is people, obviously Florida did that, Texas did that, but now the governor of Colorado and the mayors of New York and Chicago have complained about this.

Yeah, and

it's an absolute crisis and Democrats are doing themselves no favors by pretending that it isn't. Look, I think think you cannot get a more pro-immigration conservative than me

on this stage, probably.

But if you have a system which just has essentially an open border in which hundreds of thousands of people are coming across,

they don't even have court dates. I think the number

was 600,000.

People feel that the law is being treated with contempt, that there's no control over the border. It's an invitation to a populist backlash.

I don't know why it should be so hard for Democrats to say, fine, we'll build your wall. Let's get the Dreamers.

The wall wouldn't even work. That's

give the Dreamers citizenship in exchange for building the wall, create a system in which we're bringing five.

If you said build a wall, I think I could get a conservative who was less anti-employed. So just anti-immigration.
No, I'm saying I'm talking about the women.

I think I might be able to get the right thing.

I'm talking about a political compromise. Republicans won't go for any form of immigration.
A political compromise. You just said we shouldn't do a stupid thing.
That's a stupid thing.

As a border state guy. It's not a stupid thing.

As a border state guy, two things, right?

What's happening right now is if you go to these borders,

these border towns, San Luis, for example, right on the border, small community, they're trying to help out however they can, but they have a small tax base.

So when the South Seekers come over, they're trying to deal with that, right? Everything that comes with it. So when we're sending people to other states, it is because

it is a burden on these towns.

And what the federal government should be doing right now, at least in the middle, in the immediate future, something Democrats and Republicans should do is we should be helping these towns deal with this.

But we should also be helping Chicago deal with it if you're going to help house them.

But then, overall, where is the deal to be made? Thank you, guys. Time for new rules.

Okay.

New rules.

Someone must tell these Bulgarian men participating in the Epiphany Day tradition where a priest throws a wooden crucifix into a lake and whoever retrieves it is rewarded with good health throughout the year.

Congratulations, you just gave Republicans an idea for a health care plan.

New rule, the soccer player who was ejected after putting his finger in another player's butt.

He looks a problem.

Should know better. This is soccer.
You're not allowed to use your hands.

Neural Mazda has to lean into the fact that their cars are built in the city of Hiroshima. They're good cars, but they'd sell a lot more with an ad that says, you dropped a nuke on us.

The least you could do is buy an SUV.

Neural, the Michigan teenager who found out her own mother was the one anonymously cyberbullying her must admit she was suspicious.

Like when the bully wrote, hang yourself, but not with the flannel sheets. Those are from grandma.

Neural, stop asking George Santos where he worked and where he went to school and where his money comes from and ask him what happened to your ass.

He's right next to my office.

The question isn't, how did this guy get into Congress? The question is, how is he a drag queen in Brazil?

And finally, new rule: if you're part of today's woke revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixir, they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings.

Communists thought selfishness, selfishness, could be cast out of human nature.

Russian revolutionaries spoke of the new Soviet man who wasn't motivated by self-interest but instead wanted to be part of a collective.

No, it turns out he wanted to be on a yacht in a Gucci tracksuit holding a vodka and a prostitute.

Not standing in line all day for a potato.

The problem with communism and with some very recent ideologies here at home is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it, that you can bend human nature by holding your breath.

But that's the difference between reality and your mommy.

Lincoln once said that you can repeal all past history, but you still cannot repeal human nature. But he's canceled now, so fuck him.

Yesterday I asked ChatGPT, are there any similarities between today's woke revolution and Chairman Mao's cultural revolution of the 1960s? And it wrote back, how long do you have?

Because again, in China, we saw how a revolutionary thought he could do a page one rewrite. of humans.

Mao ordered his citizens to throw off the four olds, old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits. So your whole life went in the garbage overnight, no biggie.

And those who resisted were attacked by an army of purifiers called the Red Guard, who went around the country putting dunce caps on people, yeah, who didn't take to being a new kind of mortal being.

A lot of pointing and shaming went on. Oh, and about a million dead.

And the only way to survive was to plead insanity for the crime of being insufficiently radical, then apologize and thank the state for the chance to see what a piece of shit you are.

And of course, submit to re-education, or as we call it here in America, freshman orientation.

Listen to this story.

There's a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago named Jason Kilbourne whose crime was that on one of his exams, he used a hypothetical case where a black female worker sued her employer for race and gender discrimination, alleging that managers had called her two slur words, the type of real-world case these students might one day confront.

And knowing the extreme sensitivity of today's students, he didn't write the two taboo words on the test, just the first letter of each.

He was teaching his students how to fight racism in the place where it matters most, the criminal justice system.

But because he merely alluded to those words, again in the service of a good cause, he was banned from campus, placed on indefinite leave, and made to wear the dunce cap.

No, not really the dunce cap part, but

our American version of that. Eight weeks of sensitivity training, weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity trainer, and having to write five self-reflection papers, a grown-ass man,

a liberal law professor. If you can't see the similarities between that and this, the person who needs re-education is you.

Yes, we do have our own red guard here, but they do their rampaging on Twitter. Here's a cute example from a couple of years ago.
The banjo player

from Mumford and Sons tweeted that he liked a book, a book that apparently had not been approved by the revolution. So, of course, he had to delete the tweet, then take time away from the band.

Oh my god, you mean this could have affected Mumford and Sons?

And then the cringing apology, I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed. Pain? From a book? Unless he hit the drummer over the head with it.

What happened to, I can read whatever the fuck I want.

Don't worry, I'm a musician. It won't happen again.

There was once a very different musician named John Lennon who wrote a song called Revolution. And people who didn't really listen to it thought it was a rah-rah call for revolution.

No, it was the opposite. The lyrics are, you say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anybody anyhow.

There's a guy who understood how good intentions can turn into the insane arrogance of thinking your revolution is so fucking awesome and your generation is so mind-bendingly improved that you have bequeathed the world with a new kind of human.

You're welcome.

With communists, that human was no longer selfish. In America today, that human is no longer born born male or female.
And obesity is not something that affects health. You can be healthy at any size.

Really, we voted on it.

A formally serious magazine last year published with a straight face an article called, Separating Sports by Sex Doesn't Make Sense.

Yes, it does.

Because again, we haven't reinvented Homo sapiens since Crystal Pepsi came out.

I've spent three decades on TV mocking Republicans who said climate change was just a theory, and now I've got to deal with people who say, you know what else is just a theory? Biology.

All right, that's our show. I'll be at the MGM Grand in Vegas, February 17 and 18, Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, March 12th.
It's Nitzer in Portland, April 2nd.

I want to thank Brett Stevens, German Gallego, Madera Arredondo. Hey, I can watch overtime on CNN.
CNN tonight, every Friday at 11:30, or catch us Saturday morning on YouTube.

Wow, we got a lot of shit going on. 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. For more information, log on to HBO.com.