Ep. #621: Bill Barr, Andrew Sullivan, Rep. Nancy Mace

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

Everybody,

thank you.

Thank you very much. How are you doing?

I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

All right, our new season.

Thank you, people.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much. Okay,

how about our new

theme song from Green Day? How about that? That was pretty awesome.

Okay, we are back. All right, this is our 21st season here on HBO.
We are starting tonight.

Okay.

And, you know, a lot of stuff, we were off for a couple of months. A lot of stuff happens.
I'm going to catch up. The big story, I think, humans are obsolete now.

No, really.

Have you been on Chat GPT? This just happened.

This is not even me. I'm not even here.
This is just the.

Okay. The other good thing that I,

that's not a good thing,

we're going to talk about

the tech area, I thought that was good, is crypto fucking fell off the cliff. I thought that was fantastic.
You heard about that shit with

Blankman-Fried and FTX, and today another one fell. Genesis, another big crypto exchange went bankrupt.
Genesis, I love that. Naming it after the Bible, that's cheeky.

Imagine naming a crypto company after a book that says if you believe in some invisible bullshit, you'll have fabulous rewards. I mean, it's just crazy.

Sorry, Bill.

And this is kind of big news. A Japanese fisherman yesterday, I think, took a picture.
We've never seen this before, I don't think, maybe once or twice. The rarest creatures, a giant squid.

It has no backbone and lives at depths lower than any human can go, like Kevin McCarthy.

Oh, I did the new Republican Congress.

Hey, we've got a new Republican.

Oh, see, there he is. Some fantastic.
I don't know. It took them 15 ballots.
This was unprecedented. I think the last time it happened was 1823 or something.

15 ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy. Look, you know what? Oscar nominations come out Tuesday.

I know Washington loves to look down their nose on the Hollywood, and you know, I would agree that award shows are pointless virtue signaling

but we don't need 15 ballots to get it done okay

and apparently the Looks like the odds on favor to win the big Oscar they're saying is this movie I don't know if you've seen it everything everywhere all at once

It is the story of how George Santos lies.

So interesting.

I can't keep up with this guy. I said I was gonna, people all during the break, he was like, you gotta talk about George Santos.
You gotta explain him.

I'm going to explain him at the end of the show, how this happened. But in the meantime, just since we were writing this,

I can't keep up with this fucking guy.

The latest this week is that he stole money from a homeless veteran.

He started a GoFundMe for a homeless veteran's sick dog.

Raised $3,000 and then kept it.

Trump said he's like the son I never had.

But he's one of the new Congress.

they're not getting rid of him. They need the vote.
You know, this new Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene,

Jim Jordan, Boebert, all these,

the zombies are in the mall. That's all I can say.
It's already happened.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

got a seat on the Homeland Security Committee.

Two years ago, she couldn't get a seat at the adult table at Thanksgiving.

And

she,

I couldn't make this up, she and Lauren Boebert, you know, the other one like her, the crazy gunnut

from Colorado, they had a fight in the ladies' room.

Yes, the Real Housewives of Congress has come.

You know,

with all due respect to my friend Jeff Foxworthy, you know, when you're fighting in the ladies' room, you might be a redneck. Really?

AOC now says that we need to pass bathroom laws to keep trans people safe from them.

And they say

it could have actually gotten physical. Luckily, Lindsey Graham came out of the stall and stopped the whole thing.

All right, we've got a great show. We have Representative Nancy Mason, Andrew Sullivan.

But first up, he is the former Attorney General. Wow, under Presidents George H.W.

Bush and Donald Trump, whose new best-selling book is called One Damn Thing After Another, Memoirs of an Attorney General, Bill Barr.

How are you, sir?

Nice to meet you.

First thing I have to tell you is our names are way too similar.

Like, I'll be in the house somewhere, and the news is on in the background, and I'll be like, Bill Bart, what the fuck did I do now?

I'll make stories about you. You stole my opening.
Oh, really?

You know, I'm in my study, and Bill Moore said this. I'm going to go, I never said that.
I wish I had. I wish I had.
Well, I don't think you and I often say the same things.

But, you know, I'm glad you're here because there are people, you know, what's sad is that there are a lot of people in this country who think we shouldn't even talk.

That we're both bad people for platforming each other. And it's like I always keep saying, trying to tell them,

they're not going to self-deport the half of the country you hate. That's right.

We have to get along. So I'm going to start with our common ground.
I didn't know this until I was reading your book. We're both half Jewish and half Catholic.
That's right.

The Catholic stuck a lot more with you than me.

What was your back? What was your childhood like with that?

Well, it was fine. I mean, we lived in an academic community by Columbia.
My father was of Jewish descent. My mother was Irish Catholic.
I had the opposite. Okay.
Yeah. And

you were raised Catholic? I was raised Catholic, parochial. From the beginning.
My father had to pledge, in order to

get with my mother during World War II, he had to pledge that the children would be raised Catholic, but he did it voluntarily and he admired the faith.

He was a skeptic for most of his life, but he ultimately converted. And why do you think you chose that path when you had both right there before you?

I think

it was largely the early Catholic education stuck with me, but my parents never shoved it down my throat. Their mantra was.

Don't follow the herd, think for yourself, and understand why you believe something. You know, don't take your belief off the rack and put them on and say, I'm now this.

Understand why you think something.

And so they...

Oh, that's

interesting because they very much precisely shoved it down my throat. Yeah.

And that may be why we came out differently. Well, the other thing is, in going to high school, the question was, do I go to the Jesuit high school in New York, Regis,

or Horace Mann, which in those days was about 95% Jewish.

And they sent me to Horace Mann because they said, You have to learn to be among people who aren't like you, who don't hold the same views, and so forth, and

you'll you'll turn out stronger for it. And so I think that had an effect, too.
My views were challenged. I had to think about it.

And I've heard you speak a lot about the idea that religion is under attack in this country.

I think it's your overarching theme. And what am I missing? That Christianity under attack? I mean, you're still the majority of the people who are still religious are Christian.

I just don't see where the attack is coming from. It strikes me as paranoia, quite frankly.
Okay. Well, the way I see it, we are moving,

becoming a much more secular society, just 55 years ago. But that's by free will.
That's good. I mean, it's good that people do have free will.
Oh, good. Okay, and

they should be able.

Okay.

But that's not the same thing as being under attack. No, but the problem, I think, today is that we're in a very pluralistic, diverse society.

There's no consensus really on moral value systems and so forth. And what we need today is a live-and-let-live attitude.
And it has to be a two-way street.

And so, what I think is happening today is the problem is not that religions are trying to still impose their views of morality on the non-faithful or

people who don't have religion. I think it's the opposite.
I think

if you're a Catholic doctor, you have to perform abortions. If you're a Catholic hospital,

you have to

perform sex selection surgery.

You know, we want, you can't teach this in your school because it's hate speech if you're teaching traditional doctrine.

And that's why today I think we're so pluralistic, and there's so many views out there, that trying to have the state, it was one thing in the 60s and before where 95% of the country was Christian, practicing Christians, or believing Christians.

But to try to have the state now as the moral instructor

and trying to bring us all together in a melting plot and sort of through state agencies, it's not working. The schools are failing in all three functions, reading, writing, and arithmetic and

the melting plot.

Now they're told the opposite. They're told that there are unbridgeable gaps between all of us.

Yes. I mean, look, I certainly have my quarrels with the left in a way I never did five years ago.
I understand what you're saying.

And a lot of what started out as wokeism has turned into a kind of ugly authoritarianism that very much reminds me of religion. So I'm not going to argue with you about that.

But I've heard you say that you think that the attack on religion is the civil rights issue of our lifetime. For you, that's true.

I didn't say the attack, I said free exercise of religion is

the principle of

Gen Z thinks the civil rights issue of our lifetime is trans.

Right.

So does Biden.

Biden supports that. Yeah.

How do those two sides live in the same country? Again, I think it has to be live and let live. Okay.
Oh, good.

Yeah. No, in other words, in other words,

just

to tangibilize it,

on the issue of gay marriage, for example,

I would have voted for civil union. Supreme Court established that they have the right right to marry.

I'm content with that. I have no desire, interest, or feeling that that should be rolled back.
I can live with that. But what's the civil union as a public?

Okay, but then I don't want them turning around and saying, well, the Catholic Church can't teach this stuff in its schools because it's hate speech. It's homophobia.

So I think we have to, just as we give rights and protect the rights of the gay community, we have to protect the rights of religious communities, whether they be Orthodox or religious.

Okay, Okay, but what if people want to get gay married but not in the church? Can they? That's the church's decision. That's not the case.

But you said civil unions. Can they have a just, shouldn't they be able to have a marriage like any other marriage?

That's what the Supreme Court has ruled, and I'm fine with that. Okay.
You said civil unions. I thought maybe you were going to be a very good idea.

I said, you know, as a voter in Virginia, that's what I would have voted for. Okay.
But I'm content with the way things are. And that's, you know, I believe

in a society like ours, if we're not libertarian,

then we're going to have irreconcilable differences.

Well, look,

you came out against what Trump tried to pull off, which was stealing an election. So, you know, you're kind of to me a Liz Cheney Republican.

Like, I said all along, even though I wasn't very supportive of you being very supportive of Donald Trump, which you were, At the end of the day, I said there are certain Republicans who have a safe word.

Like,

they'll let them get away with absolutely anything, and it turned out that safe word was democracy. And people like,

I mean,

when he tried to

literally steal the election, I mean, he asked you first, you were the head of the Justice Department, look into it, see if there's any truth to the fact that, and of course, this was one of the most honest, well-run elections ever.

And you told him, I think you said, it's bullshit, and you resigned. So you're on that Liz Cheney page, where, you know, what I call as good as it gets, Republicans.
I mean that in the best way.

But you say you still would vote for Trump again.

Well, what I've said,

when confronted with the question, if Trump is the party's nominee and he's running against Biden, who would you vote for? And I said, it's hard for me to see.

I just find it hard to believe that I could vote against the Republican nominee under those circumstances, Because I think the main threat to the United States and the main danger to our democracy, frankly, is

the sort of radical progressive movement and the lurch to the left that has taken place over the last year. More than the guy who you actually said tried to steal an election.

Is it really more important than that? What happens in our country on a daily basis makes the McCarthy era look like child's. I know, but if it's not a democracy, is it still even a country?

Speech is essential to democracy, just like voting. If someone says, what's the major danger now to democracy?

I agree, elections are critical and the right to vote is critical. But the thing that's most under attack is public discourse, which is essential.

It precedes voting.

Okay.

Well, look.

I'm glad that we can disagree on a thousand things. Yeah.
That's okay, because again, neither one of us is going anywhere.

So, you know, I'm glad that we can be friends and we can laugh.

I must say, the one thing I kind of like hold against you is when the Mueller report came out, I feel like you mischaracterized it and I feel that was shady.

Here, and now I'm going to read, the Mueller report came out and you said the evidence developed, and of course you didn't have to do this. This report spoke for itself and Mueller also released

Yes, a redacted version that you could have used. You said the evidence developed by the special counsel was not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.

That's not what Mueller said. He said if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would have so stated.
Could I have a you know,

I feel like that was shady, Bill. Okay.
Right.

And I just had to get that off my chest.

Can I respond? Yes, of course. That's why I brought it up.
All right.

On March 5th, when he came in and told me what he was planning on doing, I said, you have to give me a report that I can make public quickly. It has to be redacted.

Because the day you give me the report, everyone's going to be speculating. I read he did give you that.
No, he did not. Okay.

So when he came in, and by the way, there was no pressure for him to give in on any day certain. He could have taken his time and redacted it.

But let me get the facts out, because people are very quick to jump to conclusions. They don't know the facts.

So

he came in and they gave us on Friday the report unredacted. It was illegal to put it out.

It was estimated to take two to three weeks to redact it. I couldn't sit on that.
The media was going crazy.

Talking heads were talking about how the president was about to be, you know, go to jail and so forth. We couldn't have that happen to the market, to our foreign adversaries overseas.

I felt that I had to say something to give the bottom line. of what he decided.
Number one, I said he found there was no collusion. It's like going out and announcing a verdict.

I didn't regale the whole trial, but I said, he said there was no collusion. Well, you framed it as he was innocent, and then everything else

argued against that. And then he said we can't come to the conclusion that he didn't obstruct justice, and you said he didn't obstruct justice.

Well, I invite people to go and look at the letter. Yeah, well, I only read part of it.

First, I said what he did. I said he sets forth the facts on 10 episodes, which he believe are potentially obstruction.
He does not reach a conclusion.

He states, colon, that he does not find there was obstruction, but he is not exonerating the president.

Okay, I used his exact language. Then I said, he punted, but I'm making the decision.
And I say, based on that report, there was no obstruction.

And the discussion about how there was no obstruction was not me characterizing Mueller, but me stating my conclusion. So those are the facts.

Well, I'm going to shake hands with the guy who resigned when Trump tried to strike me. Thanks so much.
I appreciate you coming here. Let's do it again.
All right. Good luck with the book.

All right, no borrow. All right, let's meet our panel.

Gotta pick your spot.

Okay, let me say again, thank you to Billy, Joe, and to Mike, and to Trey for doing that new Green Day did our, God damn, hello, Green Day.

I feel like that is so cool. Anyway,

thanks for being here.

It's great to have a new year, and let's bring on, he writes the weekly dish on Substack and is the author of Out on a Limb Selected Writing 1989 to 2021 Andrew Sullivan our most recent guest

and she is the Republican Congresswoman representing South Carolina's first congressional district representative Nancy Mace

And we can still say Congresswoman

I saw it in the property I said Congresswoman do we still is that not wrong am I gonna is it person or

the congressperson with a uterus

don't call me congressperson just just don't call me a BITCH and we're going to be

please yeah okay so let's place you on the spectrum just because you're new here to the show and you're the country

first time first time it's great I love to meet new people and new congress people it's great we have a congressperson on the spectrum

thank you

so just to place you in the Republican Party okay you're you're one of only eight who voted for the woman's right to contraception right Okay.

And you did not get on board with Donald Trump's attempt to steal the election. Right.
Okay.

So you're.

Voted for gay marriage. Voted for gay marriage and biracial marriage, too.
Have you ever had a fight in the bathroom with Marjorie Turner?

I was not in one of those faults. Although I wish I had witnessed it.

I wish I had seen that. That would have been a good option.

Okay, so if she's like on a scale of conservative in the party, like a 10, and I don't know who, Adam Kensinger or Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, they're a one.

Where are you?

You know, I am a caucus of one. I am my own woman.
I was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel. I know you were.
South Carolina. Very impressive.

I would say fiscally conservative, socially moderate, normal, right? Like most Americans, I think we're 80 or 90% of us are, sort of libertarian-ish, small L libertarian.

We love our freedom and our liberty. We want people to be successful, have great education, great job opportunities, and live and work and retire in the greatest country in the world.

But you're working with a lot of nuts.

Right?

Well, have you seen the history of Congress? There have been a lot of nuts in Congress for over 100 years.

I'm not like now. I really, really.
Yeah, I think it's a good thing.

Who is comparison with history to Marjorie Telegraph? There's still blood on the steps in Congress.

If you ever come to the Capitol where a member of Congress got shot by a journalist and eventually died, got shot in the face. I mean, there have been crazies throughout the history of Congress.

It's not anything new, I would say, but it's on both sides of the aisle. Well, that's.

Both sides of it. Great.

What an optimistic note to start the year on this. There's been blood on the steps of this place before.

What is everyone so upset about? I will give you a tour of the Capitol, and it's still right there. You can see it.

It's been crazy for a long time. But here's the thing.
You couldn't elect Kevin McCarthy. He's the Speaker of the House.
This is third in line, kids out there. They will be on the test.

I hope they get that. I really hope they get that teacher.
Right, the Speaker of the House. Well, kids don't know shit, so we have to.
I have two of them. I know.
Yeah, okay.

They're not watching anyway. No, they're not.

The ones who are know who that is. But I would like people to get educated, but it's not hard to do, and it's a fucking funny show, so what's the problem?

But, okay, so you have a new Speaker of the House, very important man, but he's not really the Speaker of the the House because it took these 15 ballots to elect him.

And 20 Republicans, and he's a very conservative guy.

He was not conservative enough for 20 of your colleagues. And they made him agree to all these concessions where he has no power.
They can get rid of it. One person can get rid of him.
Right?

Well, for 200 years pre-Pelosi, that was the precedent.

That went on for a long time before all of this. The whole party had to get behind getting rid of him.
Now one person can.

In other words, what I'm saying is these 20 people, that's the real speaker of the house. They can make him do anything they want.
Is that not true? It's a problem.

I will tell you, but they're on the other side of that. Once we get through that, there are folks that are like me.

I would call myself more of a centrist, right of center on many policies, where we'll have the opportunity to say, hey, this is wrong. And I've been one of those voices.

I've been a strong, outspoken voice for a long time, particularly during the Speaker's vote.

Some of those 20 were literally sending out fundraising emails every time they voted against Kevin McCarthy.

They took a, like, like two years ago, they took a constitutional process, hijacked it for political gain, for money, for power, for seats on committees, for committee gavels and chairmanships and those sorts of things.

And I tried to expose that during the whole.

But here's the thing. We hit, I hate to start the season off with something so unsexy as the debt ceiling.

But it does and will affect your savings, right?

What's interesting is you talked about about the most conservative and the least conservative. For me, the word conservative literally means conserving things.

You're supposed to be the grown-ups, the responsible people. But the more conservative, quote-unquote, you get in that party, the crazier you are, the more reckless you are, the more radical you are.

These people are not interested in governing. They're interested in destroying.

They do not have a positive agenda.

They're perfectly prepared to take this country to the fiscal brink, to destroy this economy, economy. To make a little point,

to make a little point for people.

They win by losing every time. Again, that's the point.
Kids, if you're not following.

We hit the debt ceiling yesterday, which means, I mean, first of all, this country has the stupidest system ever, which is we spend money and then we vote on whether to pay the bill.

No other country does this.

They should just have,

if you buy something, you have to pay for it. We can't have a dine-and-dash system of government.

But that's what we have.

So here's what's going on. So we reached the debt ceiling yesterday.
Now, they can move things around as accountants can for the next, I think, until June before these debts come due.

But we've seen this movie before. Seriously, we're going to do this again.
This is the Republicans' way of saying Democrats spend too much money, of course, only when they're not president.

When a Republican is president, it's never a problem, the debt ceiling, and spending money is never a problem.

The first two years of Trump, where they controlled everything spending, went through the roof. Of course.
Even before COVID, did they mention it? Did they even talk about a budget

debt crisis? Of course they didn't. The sheer, I mean, this is what gets people so down.
They're not even, they're not even pretending not to be complete hypocrites. No, that's not.
That's a joke.

Yeah.

Actually, I mean, look at it. We have, and here's some historical context.
The debt ceilings actually started during World War I because of troops in the war. And if you look at what's going on,

that's when the debt ceiling actually was created. That's when we started doing that kind of budgeting process in Congress.
But if you look at what's happened in the last 20 years or so,

you know, $8 trillion of debt. in the previous administration.
We've got $3 trillion right now. And then since, I guess, 1998, President Clinton was the last president to actually balance the budget.

It was a Democrat president that did that in 1998. And since 9-11, you know, Republicans have always wanted more defense spending.
And for that, Democrats wanted more entitlement spending.

And so neither side is holding the other accountable. That's why we have $31 trillion of debt right now.
Democrats vote for the military spending, too. Yes, that's what we're doing.

That's the one thing they're saying. And then Republicans vote for the military.
It's completely bipartisan about. Throw as much money at the Pentagon as possible.
The Pentagon is the Virgin Mary.

It's perfect. There's nothing wrong with it.

It's not, but because Republicans want the defense spending, then for that, Republicans give Democrats more spending on Obama.

Who is actually being responsible for that? Not of them. That's who is actually being responsible.

This is both of their faults. Republicans and Democrats like.
They both are at fault. I know, but your party is the one that pretends to be the fiscal responsibility party.
That's the thing. Oh,

you won't hear any argument from me. You have to do it.
It's been a day in this country. It began with Reagan.
Most of the Democratic presidents have tried to arrest it.

Every Republican one has blown it through the roof, and they have the balls to say their fiscal risk. Well,

the last Republican to balance the budget was Richard Nixon in 1970.

No, I mean, and look, it is the Democrats who are the spenders. I mean, they spent, I mean, Trump, you're right, it was by $30.
$8 trillion

in debt that ran away.

COVID cost $6 trillion, $2 million more than World War II, for the forever flu.

Okay.

But

the point is,

there are moments when you do need to make big borrowing. You had to borrow in that period.
But the point

when you're not, well maybe not that many people. And half of it was stolen.
Well that's half of it was just stolen. They just sent out checks willy-nilly.

So I understand the Republican idea that we have to say, well, these people are spending like drunken sailors and an adult has to cut up the credit card.

But like you say, when it comes to the adult part, that's when you...

Yeah, are they proposing? Are they proposing and putting their names to a budget that would actually balance? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That would be what.
I actually have that plan.

It's called the Penny Plan. It would actually balance the budget in five years,

Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare. It's Rand Paul's bill in the Senate.
There are plans out there that would actually do that. It's called the Penny Plan.

Look it up. Very important.
Could be bipartisan to be reasonable.

And if you were to pre-COVID dollars, the Penny Plan would balance the budget in five years, cutting one penny, one penny of every future dollar the federal government spent.

Post-COVID, you're looking at five cents on every dollar. It can be done.
You can still balance the budget in five years. I'm saying, hey, let's do it in maybe 10 years.

Let's be even more, have more longevity with the balancing the budget process. I'm open to that.
That would be a good idea. But no one's even caring.

That is not what anyone is going to be caring about. Your committees are all going to be about

showing pictures of Hunter Biden's blurred penis.

I don't want to see that. I don't want to see that.

No,

I don't want to do that. But I mean,

that's what they're going to be doing. I mean, this documents documents thing.
Now, look, was Biden shady with the documents? Absolutely.

And the fact that they found them before the midterm elections and they didn't talk about it.

Two months.

Okay, very shady. I call shady on both sides.
Now, of course, it was very different. Trump, when he got caught with documents,

he said, I'm not going to turn them over. He didn't cooperate.
Biden cooperated. But the fact that Hunter Biden was in the House.

All a conspiracy theorist needs to know.

I don't think Hunter Biden knew about the documents in the House. That's not what he cared about.

Can you at least admit that $50,000 in rent from Hunter Biden to his father, Joe Biden, was a little sketchy? Nobody knew. It was a little sketchy.
Well,

if you run Hunter Biden on right-wing TV and right-wing radio and right-wing networks, you will get major, major ratings.

And one party is now basically a media party that's simply yanked around by these crazy populists out there in the media. And it's not actually interested in governing for the people as a whole.

I'm just saying that's all we're going to see. I mean, if you think Benghazi at least was a real place.

But this.

Well, I actually, I will have a committee on oversight. We won't be looking at blurred photos of Hunter Biden's, you know what? Well, I won't be doing that.
I make that pledge tonight.

I make that pledge tonight. I will not do that.
So

this week, as a birthday present for me, we found the worst criminal in the world, Brian Walsh, I've been following this story. I think this is, what a gift to comedy this guy is.

This guy allegedly killed his wife. We don't know, but they did find...
I'm not making this part up.

We're going to get to the part I'm making up, but it's not this part.

They found his Google searches. This guy apparently is so stupid, he does not understand that we can all see what you, we could see anything nowadays, anything you write anywhere.

Okay, just probably, if you think it we probably know it but certainly google these are the real google searches of mr brian walsh whose wife is missing how long before a body starts to smell

he googled 10 ways to dispose of a body if you really need to

how long for someone to be missing to inherit

How to clean blood from a wooden floor.

Is it better to throw crime scene clothes away or wash them?

We found out some other people who have Google searches. Now this is the part I'm making up.

Would you like to see some of those? Because you know, a lot of people don't get this about Google searches.

Like Gavin Newsom Googled statistically, how many 80-year-old presidents make it through their first term?

See, that's very...

Kanye Googled Christian dentists in my area.

Matt Gates, Chuck E. Jesus near me.

I try not to be suspicious.

Kylie Jenner, Mother's Day gifts for dad. Oh, well, see, there are.

Army Falmer Googled, wines that go with Chinese.

Megan Markle Googled, is the race card an actual card?

Johnny Depp Googled, do quartz check what's in your thermos?

And Amber Heard Googled, 10 foods that will help you poop. Oh, well, that's quite

And Kevin McCarthy Googled, what does Speaker of the House do?

So

in our second half of our show,

I thought a great subject to talk about would be schools because they're in the news a lot. You write about it a lot.
I read about it a lot.

I mean, if you're not reading about it, you're not reading a lot. That's all I can tell you.

It's everywhere. And I figured, you have kids, right? How old are your kids? 16 and 13.
Wow, 16 and 13. And you've been married, right? Twice.

And I'm my third one.

Really?

I've done it a couple of times. I'm quite the expert.

A couple of marriages did not get re-elected.

Yeah, right. But I did.
I got re-elected. There you go.
You got re-elected. Okay.

So,

you know, we live in a prison yard in this country where it's just everything is tribal.

And, like, anything to do with schools or education is something really the Democrats have to answer for because they control it.

I mean, if you look at the Democratic Convention, it's like three-quarters of them are teachers.

My sister's a teacher, I'm a big defender of teachers, but what's going on in the schools is outrageous, and somebody needs to answer for it.

I was seeing a couple of weeks ago while we were off, a six-year-old in Virginia. A six-year-old brought a gun to school in Newport News.

My day, it was an apple.

Shot the teacher, which is horrible in itself. But here's

the quote I thought was very interesting. This is from the school librarian.
It's talking about how students are routinely assaulted.

She said, every day in school, in one of our schools, teachers, students, and other staff members are being hurt. Every day they're hit, they're beaten, they're bitten, they're beaten.

How did we completely lose control? How could any kid learn in this atmosphere when you can't even survive? And these are all schools. It's not just inner-city schools.

I hear this anecdotally from people.

We've completely lost control of our schools.

What's Congress going to do about that?

Well, I mean, with Congress, obviously, any of the money that we give to states, there are certain strings attached to it.

But really, education, by and large, what I've seen in South Carolina and elsewhere, is really controlled by the state and by school boards.

And you saw a parent last year, the year before, whose daughter was sexually assaulted and raped in a bathroom in Virginia.

And the father of that child who came to the school board because the school was hiding that story got arrested. What's bringing the story to the school? What's the root cause

of why kids are allowed to run over ramshot over a school like this? Isn't it parents? If the parents disciplined the kids, would they be able to do this in the school?

Well, I mean, I

turned out. And no one wants to go after the parents because those are your voters.
But that's where you have to look. If you really want to be real about it, that's where the problem is.

I think parents should take that. I think

parents,

and I did this over Christmas because I'm a bad mom, but I took my kids' iPhones away. I took their screens away.
Their grades were down. And, well, they call me a bad mom.
And I'll take that label.

You should. But we got to take them off of social media.
We got to take them off of TikTok. It's literally ruining our kids' brains.
What we're doing, having all the phones and all the social media.

The one thing we used to tell kids was that there is someone in authority.

At some point, you have to take note of that person in authority. The kids today, I hear it.
I actually said that, the kids today. Shit.

It's okay. It doesn't automatically make you bad because they're younger and we're older.
I know. We have to actually look at what's going on.

Sometimes older people actually have the right idea because they live through shit.

And stuff is crazy.

Stuff is crazy. If you want to call me old for that, go ahead.

Children who are taught there's no such thing as authority, the most important thing is express yourself at all times, are never held responsible for anything, are constantly being excused for everything, they're going to end up this way.

They need direction.

People need authority. Especially kids.

Order you. Yeah, that, and I think

as parents, you have to obviously hold them accountable and know that there are rules and you follow those rules as well. I mean, we just, we don't.
We have to stay their friends.

You have to stop being their friend to start being their parents.

It doesn't help the president and past president, anyway, and your party are busy making it a virtue to break every rule they see in sight and insult everyone in authority they see.

The level of like public just hatred of people who have responsibility and authority is intense and it's counterproductive. That's so short.
And it's replacing actual teaching.

I mean, really, kids don't know anything.

Why do you have to teach it? Why does a four-year-old come in? Instead of teaching them the colors, you're telling them, pick your pronoun. Well, yeah.
Where on earth did that come from?

And who told us it was going to be imposed on children? And now it's in school curriculum everywhere.

I told my kids when this wokeness started happening, this gender thing started happening, it's pretty new. I said, don't be coming home with your gender pronouns.

You better be coming home with A's and B's. I mean, that's what it really should be about, our education system.
Well, and it's.

But more and more, you look at this curriculum, it's all about that stuff.

It's all about identity. It's all about being queer or trans.
I mean, children can't understand that stuff. Not in kindergarten.
And you say that as a queer.

I honestly, I don't want to teach five-year-olds about being gay. I think it's wait a little bit.
And they'll pick it up anyway. It's not like they can't watch the TV.

I mean, you don't, but what they're doing is not telling them that. They're telling them something worse.

They're telling them that people can choose to be a boy or a girl or neither or both or something else entirely. That is a lie.
You can't.

And it's done in order to placate certain special interests in Washington, namely the LGBTQIA plus people, who also have been captured by the far left. We should say no to this.

I know. Why isn't, I don't, I just don't understand why this is the hill the Democratic Party wants to die on.
Because they're too scared. Both parties are too scared.

They're bullied by the extreme right, bullied by the extreme left, and no one has the balls to say, no. No, we haven't had a moment yet.
And again. And someone stands up and says no.

We're not, none of this is anti-trans. No.

No, most of these people who are making the argument we're making are liberal people who think it's a great thing that in America now anybody can actually be whatever they want.

And of course, trans is a real thing, rare,

but real. But rare.
That part seems to be. We all seem to have to pretend that we're born, I don't know, jump ball.
I don't know.

And it's just

bullshit. It's just bullshit.
They can't even pick out and decide what pizza topping they want on their pizza at 12.

How do they know if they want to be a eunuch or a boy or a girl or a tree or whatever the heck the hundred plus genders are that are out there now?

They don't know. And the thing is,

pro-LG. Yeah, that's a thing.
Did I not read that in your article? I read that in George's article. Is it teaching a kindergartner that you could identify as a tree? Yes.

I'm not a joke in series and something like that.

I think seriously. But to practice social justice.

But then to tell something like this to a kindergartner or that boys can menstruate and girls can have penises, it's got to be

how could it process that when you're that age? It's bad shit crazy to do this to our kids when they're young. You'll eventually figure it out like we all did.

I mean, I dropped out of high school at 17. I'm in Congress now.
Like, I eventually figured it out.

I mean, it takes some time sometimes, but you know, we eventually got there.

I know, but

we went through some of the people who are your colleagues. I wouldn't brag about that.

Brag about the citadel. That's worth it.
This one was awesome. When no one said the word homosexual because it was so too disgusting to even mention.

And you know, it sometimes gets at me that when the younger ones tell me that I'm the dinosaur,

do you know what we of our generation went through as gay men and women? Right. Do you know what we really did? Do you know the oppressions we really do?

Do you know the actual oppression of dying in the streets? Right. Of dying of age, of fighting for basic civil civil rights.

And they turn around and tell us you're an old has-been, you need to just go away. Not only that, you hate trans people.
Fuck you, is what I say.

Excuse my anger.

But I'm tired of it. I'm tired of it.
And the way that they can't debate you, they can't say,

they say immediately, you hate people. I don't hate people.
No, of course not. I don't want,

I would cherish a trans kid. I just don't want a little gay kid to be told told suddenly he might be a girl inside.

I don't want kids who are not able to make these kind of decisions to decide to have medication, medicalization, sterilization, drugs, before they've even hit puberty. It's just wrong.
And who can

kids can't. Children can't give consent.
I mean, they literally cannot give consent.

And there are parents, and I've seen it in South Carolina even where they're bragging about their children at four, five, or six transitioning. And I'm like, what are you talking about?

They haven't let the natural process happen. They might grow up and be trans.
They might not be. They might be gay or straight or something else.

But again,

parents are putting this on social media too, and that puts that pressure on that child and doesn't make it any easier.

And then the mental health part of it, if they grow up, there's this story about Chloe Cole, this young 15-year-old girl, where they chopped her breasts off because she thought she had gender dysphoria, thought she wanted to be a boy.

And then a year later at 16, she said, oh my god, what did I do to my body? You can't change it.

Yeah, and I think the Biden administration is all in on that.

Well, they will not say a word against it.

Even though plenty of other countries in Europe are establishing, plenty of the media and the New York Times, even the Washington Post, have begun to consider maybe there's problems with these puberty blockers and these early interventions, and maybe we shouldn't intervene so early.

And the Biden administration is no enemies whatsoever to the left ever. Right.
We will never say anything but this is essential, obvious, and we should transfer

as soon as possible. And it's just, I don't even think Biden is that behind this, but he's certainly controlled by people who are.
Well, medical schools are behind this, actually.

You've read stories about it. That's the problem with this.
Yeah,

they're training these medical students to say that puberty blockers are reversible. They're not.

And this is coming from the, we're the science people. Right.
Not science.

All right. Thank you very much.
You were both great, but it's time for New Rules. First New Rules and Decision.

New New Rule, America owes a debt to whoever designed this sculpture of Martin and Coretta Scott King and their powerful, muscular, dismembered arms.

Finally, a statue we all want to tear down.

At least I think those are arms. It looks suspiciously like the real-time award for having your head up your ass.
And if you don't,

this is a real one we had. I'm telling you, we used to give this award

the head up your ass award, so

I think they ripped us off.

All right, new rule: now that there's such a thing as human composting, where instead of being buried or cremated, you have your body processed into nutrient-rich soil that can be used as garden fertilizer, sign me up.

When I'm gone and one of my friends says, I miss Bill, I want someone to say, I grew this weed with him. You're smoking him right now.

New rural, the Catholic Church has to change the name of its weekly service from Mass Sunday to Drag Queen Story Hour.

New Roll, someone must tell the Tennessee cop who had sex with six fellow officers, fuck the police is just a song.

You know your city has a horny police forest when a cop pats you down and then says, now you do me.

You're all now that Titanic has had its big 25th anniversary, fans have to stop arguing about whether there was room for Leonardo DiCaprio to join Kate Winslet on that door.

Please, Leo didn't swim away from Kate because there wasn't room on the door. He swam away because she turned 23.

And finally, new rule: well, not a rule, but a big thank you for all the birthday wishes today from everybody out there. I really appreciate it.

But

thank you very much.

But birthdays and vacations are over now and someone has to explain George Santos.

Someone has to explain this phenomenon in case you've been living under a rock or you live here in California and your rock washed away.

George Santos is the newly elected Republican House member from Long Island who pinocchioed his way into Congress

and who represents a growing segment of American society, liars.

Now, if you're sort of hazy on the details of Santos' life, don't worry, so is he.

When they film his biography, it'll start with based on a false story.

This guy lied about his schooling, his career, his sexuality, his charity work. What kind of family raises a person like this? We don't know because he lied about them too.

He lies like a goose shits. If he's not doing it at the very moment, he's about to.

He said he attended the prestigious Horace Mann Prep School.

They have no record of him, nor does NYU, where he said he got an MBA, or Baruch College, where he falsely claimed to have graduated in the top 100% of his class and starred on the volleyball team.

I would say you can't make this shit up, but he just made this shit up.

And it raises a lot of questions, starting with, if you're going to lie, why volleyball?

He also claimed he ran an animal charity that neutered 3,000 stray cats. He didn't, but again, what a a strange thing to brag about.

He literally lied about cutting off cats' nuts, and that takes a lot of balls.

But,

okay.

Here's the explained part.

Don't think Santos isn't pioneering something new. in American politics.

Of course, we've seen liars before, but it was always about tacking from the extreme to the center of your own party, what Mitt Mitt Romney called shaking the etch a sketch.

But Santos is the first one to realize that since we are all in our hermetically sealed media bubbles now, you can pretend to be everything to voters in both parties.

And no one on either side will notice. Some of Santos' lies appeal to the far right, far-right Republicans, like being all in, as he was on Trump's election denying.

or making the white power sign in the halls of Congress, or claiming he was a Wall Street wonder kind who made millions working at Goldman Sachs, which he didn't, or that he was a luxury yacht broker, which he wasn't.

The giveaway here is that Santos' district is Long Island, New York, suburb of Manhattan, not as liberal, but almost always went Democratic. Biden won it by eight points.

So how did a Trump-loving, election-denying white nationalist get elected in a Democrat-leaning district? Simple. He told them what they wanted to hear too.

What do liberals love? Identity politics and victimhood. So he said he had a brain tumor.

And he was one of the first New Yorkers hospitalized for COVID. He said he lost four coworkers in the famous Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.

He's from Brazil, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, but when he ran in New York, he said he was Jewish.

And in fact, his grandparents fled Ukraine to escape the Nazis. That's right, his Jewish-Ukrainian forefathers escaped the Holocaust by being born Catholic in Brazil.

His immigration policy is we must stop people like me from getting into this country.

Also, he claims to be half black.

Although I doubt that's the half that wears a blazer with a fleece vest.

Oh, and he's gay. Of course.

Or at least he is since the divorce, he divorced the woman he was married to two weeks before the campaign started. Oh, yes, George knows where the sweet spots are with Democrats, too.

He once said, I'm very much gay.

What does that mean, very much gay? You have a blue check mark on Grinder?

Everybody keeps asking, how could a guy like this get elected? I'll tell you how, because no one cares anymore about substance. It's all tribalism.
The only thing that matters is, is he on our team?

Is he doing our shtick?

Santos is just the first one to realize you could do both sides shtick and get away with it because people have completely tuned out anything that doesn't already fit their narrative.

Republicans love a winner, and Democrats love someone whose life story makes you want to kill yourself.

For Republicans, George claimed he went to the Capitol on January 6th. Yes, he personally attended the insurrection and has tweeted hashtags like Dems are destroying America.

But that obviously didn't matter to plenty of Democrats in his district. What mattered is that he's a brave, sad, proudly gay, half-black Latino Holocaust victim

with a brain tumor.

Vote for him. I'm surprised they didn't have him host the Oscars.

Yes, everyone saw in George Santos what they wanted to see.

Republicans saw a Trump-loving rich prick, Democrats saw a proudly gay person of color, and the proud boy saw a guy who would blow them after a couple of beers and not tell anyone.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Kivo Auditorium in Albuquerque on the 28th of this month in MGM Grand in Vegas, February 17th and 18th, in the Hard Rock Live in Wheatland, California, February 25th.

I want to thank my guests, Andrew Sullivan, Representative Nancy Grace, and Bill Barr. And stay tuned now for the premiere of Game Theory with Lamani Jones

and Overtime on YouTube. All right, thank you.
I forgot we have Overtime.

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.