Ep. #608: Ross Douthat, Rikki Schlott, Piers Morgan

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This is a Bose moment.

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It's not great.

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

Thank you,

Thank you very much.

How are you?

Okay.

All right.

You look good.

Thank you.

All right.

So now we got a big show.

A lot going on.

Thank you very much.

I know why the

Democrats are happy.

They passed their big anti-inflation bill, the climate bill, the one they've been trying to get through.

This is big news.

Biden's approval rating now,

back over 40%.

Wow.

Well, and the price of gasoline is under $4.

Inflation is going down.

Prescription drugs are now going to be, because of this new bill, much more affordable for seniors.

This is popular across the board.

Even a majority of Republicans now approve of Biden stealing the election.

So it's

So Joe

Joe, he's earned his vacation.

He's on vacation now.

Just the immediate family and whoever Hunter found on Craigslist.

It's just

on vacation.

And

Hunter, there's something wrong with that boy.

I tell you, you know, he...

He keeps leaving his laptops at computer stores.

They found some stuff.

I'm not making this part up.

I'm not making any of this up.

No, no, really.

There's a screed that I found in Hunter Biden's words talking about why he's always leaving nude selfies.

He said in his words, I love being reassured that my nine-inch, very big penis is actually very big.

Really?

He wrote that.

I mean,

if you measured it and it's nine inches, why are we having anyway?

And he has been reassured, because everyone who meets him says, what a dick.

Also,

also good news, free at last, free at last.

The CDC finally says they're dropping a lot of the restrictions we've been under for COVID.

guidelines, you know, that are going to change.

They say we just have to get used to it.

COVID is like an Australian on vacation here to stay.

So the more quarantining, but they point out these are only guidelines.

They do not want to use the word mandate because a mandate can lead to monkeypox.

But

the really big story this week, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

I'm sure you saw that.

Well, apparently,

I find this hard to believe, but apparently Donald Trump was up to no good.

I don't know how it happened.

But they say the FBI was tipped off by someone very close to him.

So that eliminates Melania.

But yeah, went into his home for nine hours.

Of course, Republicans reacted like they do in Karachi when someone burns a Koran.

Karachi's in Pakistan.

Sorry, I thought you knew that.

Yes, the holy man Donald Trump was insulted.

So now, all across the right-wing media, it's war.

They're literally using this word, civil war, war.

There's a right-wing podcaster, I think the name is Stephen Crowder, said, Sleep well, tomorrow is war.

And then tomorrow came and there was no war.

Unless by war he means more podcasting.

Yeah, war.

War.

There's a dozen people protesting MAGA people outside of Mar-a-Lago.

That was their war.

The first battalion of the MAGA Brigade,

based out of Fort Starbucks.

Trump put out a statement, my beautiful home is under siege.

Even Lindsey Graham was like, girl, relax.

They waited till you weren't home.

They went and they got some of your old boxes.

It wasn't so much of a raid as a bad breakup.

But even though this is about some, they're saying now the Washington Post said today, about nuclear

information that shouldn't be out there that Trump has.

Trump supporters are like, no, this is politically motivated.

They say, if you lock him up,

how are we going to lock her up?

And all over, like Fox Nation, this is their big thing.

If they can do this to Trump, they can do it to you.

That's right, average American.

Think twice before you leave the White House with classified nuclear information.

But, you know,

somebody has to tell these people, this is actually how the system is supposed to work.

You know, like when you watch criminal minds, it's like that, except real.

If you do something wrong, Joe Montaña puts it in jail.

It's one of the reasons I've never staged a coup.

But I think this is what they really were upset about.

They got into his safe.

They have this say.

And the safe, interesting.

Trump's safe.

You get into it by facial recognition.

Luckily, one of them had a rotting jack-o'-lantern.

But here's the exciting thing.

They got into his safe, and we got the contents.

They're on the way here tonight.

We're going to open them right here on the show.

I don't know how they did it.

Yeah.

We're going to see it together for the first time.

I'm very excited.

It should be here in about, I don't know, 20 minutes, depending on how the panel's doing.

Anyway, Trump had a really terrible week.

Not just did that happen to him, he had to testify in New York about his business empire, which is a little shady, I hear.

He took the fifth 440 times.

And after that, he posted this statement.

He said, you know, I once said, if you're innocent, why are you pleading the fifth?

Now I know.

Yeah.

I know too because you're fucking guilty.

That's why.

All right.

We've got a great show.

Piers Morgan and Ricky Schlott are here.

But first up, he is a columnist for the New York Times and author of The Deep Places, a memoir of illness and discovery.

Ross Dauphett is over here.

Ross,

how are you, sir?

Great to see you.

Great to see you.

I mean it.

Very sincerely.

There's so much going on in the world, but for the next 10 minutes, we're going to talk mostly about Lyme disease.

Hopefully, no one is watching the ratings dial at HBO Hedgehog.

Well, you know what?

Hopefully, no one is out there

in New England or places where these ticks are walking around with bare feet.

Because, I mean, you've been to hell and back.

That's what your book is about.

First of all, I'm just so glad you look fine.

You look healthy.

I'm so glad you came back.

And I mean,

you talked about the fact that when you got this in 2015, I think in the first 10 days you saw 10 doctors,

all of which were wrong about what you had.

Yeah, so I, basically, my wife and I were living in Washington, D.C., as, you know, elitist journalists tend to do.

And like,

you know, like a lot of people in D.C., we had a fantasy of escaping to the country.

We were both from New England.

And at a certain point, we just decided to do it.

To where?

To Lyme itself, the town?

To a town where my wife grew up in western Connecticut.

So we bought the farmhouse, the brick, the stone walls, the barn.

You know, I was going to be a gentleman farmer, something like this.

Sounds like Green Acres.

It was, you know, Green Acres, meet Stephen King.

That was basically

the dynamic.

That's what happened, right?

Yeah, while we were moving there, basically, while we were still in DC, but we'd done the home inspection and I'd wandered in the fields and inspected my whole beautiful property.

I got horribly sick in this bizarre way where I had pain all over my body, phantom heart attacks.

I lost 50 pounds, which inspired some people to say that I was looking really good, but in fact

was not ideal.

And yeah,

no one could figure out what was going on.

But these 10 doctors in 10 days,

these were all MDs, right?

I'm assuming that you went that route first.

And a lot of them said it was stress.

Yeah, it was you're moving,

you have a column for the New York York Times, that has to be stressful.

They'd read the comments on my television.

But we're talking about serious pain, right?

I mean, like,

I was sleeping about an hour a night.

I was going to emergency rooms with chest pain, and nothing was showing up on blood work, and basically they were conditioned to say

all in your head.

I mean, you see why, besides the fact that I do care about you and glad that you're better, why I'm so glad you're here to testify, because this is sort of the case I've been trying to prosecute on television for about 30 years.

And it's never popular.

People want to believe that the doctors are a priesthood in their white coats and they have all the answers.

And you're just living proof of what I've been trying to tell them.

I don't think that necessarily they're corrupt, although there is some of that.

They just don't know a lot.

So here's your statement.

You said, I very quickly entered a world where the official medical consensus had little to offer me.

It was only outside that that consensus among Lyme disease doctors whose approach to treatment lacked any CDC or FDA infirmatura that I found real help and real hope.

What did they know that the other doctors didn't?

So basically they knew that there's sort of a standard way that you get Lyme disease, which is true of many illnesses, and medicine in its sort of great successes, which I'm not, you know, I'm not here to criticize, is built on figuring out what the standard case is and treating that case.

And with Lyme disease, the standard case is you get a bullseye rash around where the tick goes in, you get a positive blood test, you take two weeks of antibiotics, you're better.

And for about 70% of people who get Lyme disease, that's what happens.

And then there are the other exciting cases, like myself, in which the sort of easy answer doesn't work.

And it's not just that you have to sort of go outside the consensus, you have to experiment.

And this is something, you know, this was, I guess, four years before COVID gave us, you know, a kind of crash course on what it means to have a disease that nobody has encountered before.

But basically, when you're in that 30% of any given disease that doesn't fit inside the box, you have to both find doctors in strange places and you have to sort of become your own doctor and sometimes do very strange things to yourself.

What strange things did you do to yourself?

You know, I

lay on tables and let chiropractors put magnets all over my body.

I bought a machine called a Rife machine that looked like a computer in a 1980s movie, a sort of weird science kind of computer that supposedly generates vibrations that shatter bacteria.

And, you know, as I describe it, and this is something I try and do in the book, you know,

when you have an illness like this, you do things, and while you're doing them, you think to yourself, well, this is obviously crazy.

And then sometimes they do nothing, but sometimes they actually do help you and help you get better.

And for me, it was the weird stuff and taking six years worth of antibiotics, which I finally stopped taking about a year ago, and I'm 95% better.

And, you know, here I am with you.

So again, I'm going to quote you.

You say, from the beginning of the pandemic to it's still unfinished in, there were weirdos on the internet,

weirdos on the internet, who were more reliable guides to what was happening, to what was happening, what was possible, and what should actually be done than Anthony Fauci or any other official information source.

So there is kind of a connection here to COVID and medicine in general.

It's like, yeah, there is a lot of misinformation out there.

Some of it's from weirdos on the internet and some of it's from Fauci.

They've been wrong about a lot too.

It's like you said, you have to be your own doctor.

And I think what people like me have been saying all along is just don't stop me from reading what I want to read.

Right.

I mean, what I'm saying.

Don't censor what I want to know because you obviously have not proved that you should have a monopoly on medical information.

I'm talking to the Western Medical Section.

And you are living proof of that, I think.

No, and I think

I've tried to argue, sort of linking my own experience to the COVID era, that what you're looking for is balance.

Once you've had this kind of outside-the-box experience, you don't want to take that to mean, you know, anything Anthony Fauci says is false.

Or, you know,

I am vaccinated for COVID.

I think the vaccines generally work.

I think the establishment has gotten a bunch of things, core things, right.

But they've also over-promised, gotten things wrong, made terrible predictions, reversed themselves, and

left us with, you mentioned at the top of the show, a kind of regime of theater, right?

Well, that too.

But just in the last week, we've learned things about Alzheimer's, MS,

vitamin D.

I read in your paper that reverses things we always thought were true.

The Alzheimer's was based on bad researching that they believed for years.

Vitamin D, like we always thought, oh, that helps build strong bones.

They say nothing to do with it.

Metabolism, last year we found, always thought that it's slowed in age.

Turns out it doesn't.

Again, you just don't know that much.

So don't sit there with the white coat.

Like, just do what I say, because when have we ever gotten it wrong, and what don't we know?

You don't know anything.

No, you know what?

Well,

you know something.

I know something.

I'll say something.

But not enough.

Well, what you know, what you should know is there's a huge difference between science as a process

and science as a system of authority.

Right.

Science as a process is what you want to trust.

Right.

Don't give me the science.

Right.

You don't own the word the.

Right.

You give me science.

You give people the best.

I mean, I think one of the biggest failures of sort of messaging in the pandemic has not been people like Fauci trying to offer their best opinion at a given moment.

It's been the failure to sort of emphasize how provisional it is, to say, you know, we're three months into a totally unknown disease disease that, for all we know, came from a Chinese laboratory.

And

here's our best.

As you know from reading my book, there is also a lab-leak hypothesis for Lyme disease, too.

Well, right.

And who knows?

But certainly it's possible with COVID, if not likely.

But certainly.

And we weren't allowed to say that.

Right.

We printed.

That's not science.

Yeah, there were six months where entertaining the hypothesis was considered disinformation on Twitter.

And then it became what it should be, which is, frankly, a hypothesis that is possible.

We will probably never know because the regime in China is going to ensure we never know.

Right.

But it's something that we can be arguing about in interesting ways for a very long time to come.

So one more, by the way.

They found two weeks, three weeks ago, a bacteria that is visible to the naked eye.

They said it would be like discovering a human the size of Mount Everest, but they were never aware of it before.

Come on.

I thought this was going to be, I was expecting some kind of mar-a-lago joke.

Well, Bill, but

no, and well, and just and on the chronic disease, on the chronic disease front, one one of the diseases that is sort of similar to Lyme disease in its some of its presentation and often gets mixed up with it is MS, which probably some people in the audience have experience with.

And about nine months or a year ago, ago, there was a study that said basically we think MS is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, which something like 40% of Americans have been exposed to.

So we've gone

through 50 or 60 years of

treating MS, sometimes treating it effectively, but only now are we figuring out that it is, in some way they don't understand yet, linked to chronic infection.

So there's all kinds of things like that happening below the surface, I think, of Epstein-Barricis.

That's it.

And virus, I have it.

Many, many people have it.

The people have the actual

Epstein-Barr syndrome where they can't get out of bed and stuff.

That's like any virus in your body.

If you're in ill health,

other million other factors that they don't, they look at one thing at a time.

It's just

so many different factors.

The weirdest thing about this, in a way, this kind of illness, is that you realize just how much your body is this kind of system.

Exactly.

All kinds of things are alive at once and

come back the way you get chicken pox and then you get shingles.

Or with my own symptoms,

I'm almost all better and then my kids come home from school with a flu and I get some weird Lyme disease symptom back because your body is in this kind of weird balancing act at all times.

And that's just not how we're trained to think about.

They want a specialist who can look at this one part of your body and Lyme disease goes, ha ha, we're going to move all around.

Yeah.

So fuck you specialists.

So my final question,

because the body is holistic.

Okay.

So you're a religious person.

Why did God do this to you?

You're a nice guy.

He did it to bring me back to your television show so that I can witness to you.

Oh, thanks for Jesus Christ, Bill.

Yeah, good answer.

I'm so glad you're well.

Ross Doufett, ladies and gentlemen.

Really glad.

See you next time.

We will talk about other things.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Oh, you got me on that one, boy.

That was a good God answer.

All right, he is the host of Piers Morgan Uncensored on Fox Nation.

Piers Morgan is here.

And she's a Gen Z columnist at the New York Post and co-host of the Lost Debate podcast.

Ricky Schlott is on our show for the first time.

How you doing?

Excellent.

Thank you for having me.

Okay.

So we have big things to talk about, but first, I have to say something.

It's somewhat personal, but also national news.

A friend of mine, dear friend of mine, good friend of this show, got stabbed today, Salman Rushdie.

I'm sure people have seen this news.

He was stabbed by someone named Hajj

Hadi Mattar.

We don't know the motivation yet.

But Sal did have some enemies in the past, as I recall.

So I'm guessing Hadi is not Amish.

Sal was in Chautauqua.

He was giving a lecture, how about this for irony, about how the U.S.

is a safe haven for exiled writers and other artists under threat of persecution.

And making that speech itself is unthinkable in most Muslim countries.

Salmon Rushi living in most Muslim countries without getting stabbed every day is unthinkable.

So don't come at me with Islamophobic.

Phobic means fear, right?

Well, Saul had a good reason to be fearful.

And when you say phobic, it's just a way to shut off debate.

You know, the transphobic, Islamophobic, and we should have a debate about this.

Sorry, but you know, these things don't go away.

Islam is still a much more fundamentalist religion than any of the other religions in the world.

And that means they take what's in the holy book seriously.

And that has been dangerous for a long time.

It's still dangerous.

This was 1989 when he was first threatened.

You know, they say we have a long memory.

We just got al-Iwan, al-Zawahiri.

We were bragging about, well, you can't get away from it.

They have a long memory too.

So, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, I want to just draw your attention to a quote from Salman Rushdie: the defence of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can't stand.

You often have to defend people you find outrageous, unpleasant, and disgusting.

And that's the point I think that people have forgotten in this debate about free speech, which is it's not about the right of people you agree with to say what they like, and then you nod along.

It's about your ability to listen to people whose opinions you might staunchly disagree with.

You might hate their opinions.

You might hate them.

But you should be able to tolerate their right to have a different opinion.

Well, but my point is that

that point of view is not even extant in many countries around the world.

Not just Muslim countries, but especially Muslim countries.

The idea of freedom of speech is like, what are you talking about?

You insulted the Prophet.

But that's the way America and Britain and other countries, they're moving this way.

And that's why it's so dangerous.

You know, you've written some great stuff, Ricky, about what's going on in campuses around America.

We're having the same thing in Britain.

Only last month, this survey came out of students in the UK.

86% want trigger warnings on anything they might find offensive.

This has so far included Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare.

36% want academics fired if they say something that is hurtful or offensive.

And, you know, for me, the note of this bill came, it was actually in San Diego up the road.

And it was a guy called, a professor called J.

Angelo Corbett.

And he was cancelled from doing a lecture he'd done for 20 years.

And the lecture was about the usage of offensive language.

And as part of the lecture, he used offensive language.

And so they cancelled him because students objected to him using offensive language in a lecture specifically about the usage of offensive language.

It is nuts.

It's nuts.

And so when you see a country like America, the home of free speech, moving that way,

it is a very thin line between that and what happened to Salman Rushdie.

Ask Dave Chappelle, attacked on stage in this city, I think, wasn't it?

Attacked on stage for having an opinion, for cracking jokes.

Ask Chris Rock, punched on stage at the Oscars for cracking a joke.

Once it strays into violence, then you end up with Salman Rushdie being stabbed by a lunatic on a stage in New York.

Well, that predated all that by quite a bit.

And to your point about trigger warnings, I must say, Shakespeare, there are some dick jokes.

There are dick jokes in Shakespeare.

There are.

Yeah, and I'm a member of a generation that never really was taught the principles of free speech and what it means to be a classical liberal and who Jon Stuart Mill is and why that's such a

precious thing to our society.

And, you know, growing up and going to school like NYU and seeing that on the back of my ID card we have here's the emergency hotline and here's who to call if you're sick and then here's the bias report hotline if you're offended and the bias report hotline.

In case you're offended, there's a phone number on the back of your ID card.

What's it called?

It's called the bias report hotline.

Yes.

Bias report.

On the back of our ID.

At NYU.

It's a hotline.

It's a hotline in case you're offended and your feelings are poked and prodded.

And unfortunately.

Who answers the phone when you call it?

I have never called it when I've been there.

there, but I'm someone at the university.

It's on the university card.

And then they do what?

You know, investigate why you're offended and if something needs to happen.

I'm fascinated by this.

I know, right?

Just not submitted.

Please.

Yeah, and you know, the logical conclusion to these young people who believe that words are violence and what you say in classrooms makes me unsafe.

I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but the logical conclusion is that you fight words that offend you with violence because if words are violence, then this is an acceptable response.

Right, that's a good point.

Yeah.

Well, I mean why does your generation

you're looking at me?

No.

No.

I know you're

I thought I was looking youthful.

But I'm so glad you're because we don't often get someone 22 years old on our show.

So we have

an eyewitness to this great sanity I don't understand.

I mean first of all, why all the anxiety?

Where does the root of that?

Why are they so anxious?

I mean, whenever I walk outside, all I see, the only people wearing masks outside are your age.

And I just want to ride around town with a bullhorn and go, you stupid fucking moron.

You're 22.

You're not going to get it anyway.

You couldn't get it outside if you tried.

It's...

Yeah, I know.

What is the root of the anxiety?

I mean, we're the coddled generation.

Our parents were like wiping us down and not letting us get germs on our face when we were toddlers.

And it's continued with all of our teachers saying, you know, if your feelings are hurt, like, let's talk it through.

And, like, you don't need to resolve conflicts on your own.

And if you're anxious and you feel this way, that's always valid.

There's never a chance for personal growth, for learning from mistakes and fumbling and falling.

We've been coddled.

And I think that's kind of the logical conclusion.

Is now we're all very anxious because the real world

do that.

There's a celebration of victimhood yeah in today's society where young people are led to believe that the more they play the victim the more sort of celebrated they are on social media yeah you know it's like i failed my driving test for the fifth time i'm so proud of myself it's like what are you talking about

you failed your driving test five times you're a loser have have better lessons right

Why are you proud of yourself?

So it's that mentality where the more you can play the victim, the more the group around you goes oh, you're so you're fantastic.

You're a winner.

You're heroic.

Oh, you suck.

You're terrible at driving.

Get a better instructor.

Right.

Right.

So, okay, so you were at, you're not at NYU, but you were?

I was.

Let's start with NYU.

So that's in New York City, obviously.

I mean, it's one of those elite coastal campuses.

How many, do you know, can you guess how many of the colleges in America are kind of like that?

The thing with the bias?

Even though I think it's a very small percentage, but the kids that come out of these schools have an elite-sized influence on society.

And then we, you know, we end up in corporate boardrooms crying at HR and changing the corporate setting.

Or we end up being the world leaders and changing the laws to make us feel better or to make hate speech or certain words illegal or offensive just on that basis.

So I think even though it's a very small group of kids that are coming out of these elite institutions, it's really shifting society in a very serious way.

I think you're dead right on that.

So you left NYU because you couldn't take this kind of stuff?

You know, I couldn't take this kind of stuff, and I also realized that our society just makes it seem as though there's one path to success.

But, you know, you don't need the fancy four-year degree and the stamp of approval every single time.

You don't need college.

The position.

You know,

I mean...

The Democrats have a position which is that the more education you get, always the better.

The more time you spend in a classroom looking at a blackboard, the better.

And the position of this show has always been, let's not make college free.

Let's make it unnecessary, because it really is unnecessary for most jobs you do.

But I want to.

When you were at school,

like

you were in a dorm?

I was for a year.

Okay, who cleans the dorm?

Us.

The kids themselves.

Oh, yeah, no one was cleaning your dorms.

There's no maids.

No.

No housekeeping.

No, it's not that bad.

No.

Oh.

No.

Although in my freshman year.

I was hoping to get them on that one.

I'm sure there's some school where you could get that.

I'm sure that's a good question.

I feel like I've read that a lot, that these kids were at school complaining about privilege, and then they have someone cleaning the bathrooms.

Yeah, not in my school.

Maybe the communal bathrooms.

I'm not sure.

We had like an apartment style because it was New York.

It might have been different.

That's NYU.

So are you going to go back to college?

The jury is still out on that, but for the time being,

there's something to actually going out and doing the work that you want to do and learning on the job.

And for now, I don't need that stamp of approval.

I'm having more fun paving my own path and doing my own thing.

What do you need in your ear?

They're already on this show.

What do you need?

Second college.

Exactly.

Now I'll just withdraw.

All right, I'm getting a message.

I don't even have an earpiece.

Somehow I'm getting a message.

That the contents of the save.

And I have have to say before we come out here, there's the boxes.

That's what they found today, and they found a lot.

We're going to talk about that.

But then there was the contents of the safe.

No one knows what's in the safe.

But we somehow, this guy's the real-timer.

Can we bring out the content?

Oh, my God.

This is awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you for your service.

Serious guy.

Wow.

We're opening this together.

I've never seen this.

This is what was in Trump's safe.

Don't ask me how we got this, but we did.

Oh my god, this is so exciting.

Oh, look at this.

The P Tech.

I should have known that that's

oh, well, this is the

quotes for dummies.

Oh, look at this.

What is this?

Oh, the receipt for Melania.

This is...

Oh, Trump's birth certificate.

Oh, from the Republic of Kenya.

Wow, that is really shocking that that's what...

Oh my God.

Look at this.

An envelope that says, don't lose combination is safe.

Put in safe place.

Oh, the deed to Rudy Giuliani's soul.

What is this?

I'm like, oh, it's a...

It's a penis pump that says Trump penis on the child.

Oh.

Oh, and a family photograph.

This must have been precious images.

Mom and dad, January 1952.

All right.

So

let's talk about that.

Now, they raided Mar-a-Lago this week, and I guess the big question is, is it going to be El Capone's vault?

It's not really what was in the safe.

It was what was in the boxes, which they took away today.

And we're learning more about what's in there.

It sounds to me,

look,

I had them look into this today.

How How many things are reported as classified?

Because this is classified information.

He definitely shouldn't have had it, no matter what it was.

But they classify a million things.

There's 1.3 million people who are allowed to look at top secret.

But then there's actual top secret stuff.

It sounds like some of the stuff he had in there.

What is your guess as to how serious this is?

Is it going to justify this raid, or is this going to be a political nightmare?

Well,

at the moment,

the suggestion is it's not really about the classification so much as the specifics of for example him violating potentially the Espionage Act if that is what turns out to be the case.

That is clearly serious but as always with everything to do with Trump there is a tendency from those who don't like him of which there's a large number to what my grandmother

not least in this audience I suspect

to what my grandmother would call over-egged the souffle.

And that can be a problem because it can play into his hands.

So I think you take a swing this big, you do an unprecedented act, you go and raid Mar-a-Lago with over 30 FBI agents.

You've got to land

a big punch in terms of evidence.

But he actually nails it.

It is unprecedented because he's unprecedented.

Yeah, true.

He's an unprecedented.

But Bill, here's my point.

I remember the day after the election, 2016, I went to the Knicks basketball.

I'm an LA Lakers fan.

Don't get me.

I went to see how the rivals were doing, you know?

And Chris.

You don't know anything about basketball.

You don't know.

Not a Lakers fan.

You don't even know where they are.

I love the Lakers.

Don't.

And Chris Rott was at the next table in this little area, restaurant room.

And we got talking about the election result.

And he said it's a lot of interesting things about it.

But the one that really stuck with me, he said, you know, the problem was they over-demonized him.

And he said, if someone's killed nine people, you don't need to go around constantly saying he's killed 10.

And I thought it was a really smart observation because there's always a tendency with Trump to overdo the sledgehammer.

And then when it doesn't quite deliver what you scream it's delivering, he uses it to play the victim, the martyr, it fuels him, empowers him, and actually strengthens him.

Yeah, I think this will be a really interesting set of revelations that'll come out from here because I think you have the group of Trump supporters who, no matter what comes out of these documents, he's a guy under siege by the FBI.

But then you have a huge swath of more conservative people in this country who were ambivalent Trump voters.

And I think they could flip one way or another on the basis of this.

But based on the preliminary reports that there are nuclear codes and stuff in there, or some sort of nuclear, not codes.

No, nuclear, but something really

nice.

You're even going to

be nuclear.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, here's what was, a federal judge, okay, found cause because it could have involved espionage, obstruction of an investigation, and

destruction, alteration, or falsification of records involving bankruptcy.

Gee, that doesn't sound like Trump.

I noticed no one on the right has so far said, well, it's a big nothing because, you know, when has he ever done anything wrong?

It's not that.

They're planting evidence.

Not, it couldn't have been.

Of course they know this is what he does.

Why did he take it to begin with?

I don't think he even knew it was in those boxes or cared.

I just think it was like, they're mine.

But also, I mean,

I live here.

I put them in those boxes i get to take my boxes i don't think he even knew he never he just the weirdest thing is is that there was a subpoena to get a load of this stuff out of mur-a-lago and they handed over i think 15 boxes of stuff but they kept all this back uh but in the end look it comes down to what is in these these boxes they've seized if it turns out to be the real deal if it turns out that donald trump has violated the espionage act that is a serious crime but if that's he should be held to account but bill if he doesn't if it doesn't turn out to be that, there are legitimate questions, I think, from the Trump supporters about the different standards applied to Donald Trump, as have been applied to Hillary Clinton, to James Comey, to Hunter Biden, and the others.

And that is the problem with when you take a massive sledgehammer like this unprecedented sledgehammer, you've got to deliver.

But if anybody else, if the President really is not above the law, if anybody else walked out of the White House with that amount of classified information, even if it wasn't that top, top, top level stuff, they'd be in jail.

Well, they'd be fined, certainly.

Well, they certainly wouldn't be let go.

It wouldn't be a cause celeb.

I mean, the problem here for me, and again, I think they had to do this because, look, I got to think that Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, who Trump appointed, I think he's a solid guy.

Merrick Garland, I mean, sure, he's got a few axes to grind.

But I think he's this very serious guy.

I just don't think those two people would have signed off on this if there wasn't reason to do it.

I don't think they wanted to do it because I

just

because it's just like and it's like Trump, he did sell his soul to the devil because he is the luckiest man in the world.

His fortune was finally falling.

The big lie was finally losing momentum.

DeSantis was beating him in the polls.

You know who hates this more than anybody?

DeSantis.

DeSantis, yeah.

DeSantis, I had this in the bag, and now I got to run against President Martyr.

And this is saving Trump politically.

Because now, of course, all the Republicans, what do they do?

It may be what, of course, Joe Biden would secretly like.

He might want to face off against Trump again.

He might think...

So he's behind it.

Is that what you're saying?

Because they won't run with any more conspiracies.

They will run with that one.

Yeah.

But if you're Joe Biden, who would you rather face?

Donald Trump, who has all the baggage who has the january 6th investigation raging a number of legal actions all this stuff now where you know last time you got the record number of votes of any presidential candidate ever would you rather face him again or would you rather face a much younger more dynamic desantis who doesn't have the baggage so in a way you could see that although it looks in the short term like this might play out advantageously for trump politically if he doesn't get nailed by what's going on here actually it could work in joe biden's favor in 2024.

I've got an honor thought into that one, I think.

So, we're assuming Joe Biden is going to be the nominee in 2020.

I wouldn't if I was him.

After the two weeks he's had, I'd quit right now.

I'm leaving.

You gave a dispirited sigh.

A dispirited sigh.

Can you expand on that sigh?

Well, I would say, you know, my generation is one of the up-and-coming voter blocs, and we've had the most precipitous drop in approval ratings for Biden by like 20% since he's gotten into office.

We were bullish because we came out of the Trump years and those were our kind of formative years and our teenage years.

But this hasn't really delivered and he's older than most of our grandparents.

Wait, wait, wait.

It's not the funding.

Why should that matter?

That's not an argument.

That's a prejudice.

That's true.

But

the argument is that he wasn't doing his job.

What about the last two weeks?

What about this Ben Billy just...

The last two weeks have been.

Well, okay.

He just, I mean, I thought your generation cared or pretended to care about the environment.

Not you, but no, they don't.

About the environment.

He just signed the biggest climate bill ever.

Finally, we're doing something about climate.

Now, we don't know.

They say this is going to get us back to 25 levels or reduce what we were putting out in 25 by 2030.

I don't know.

They've thrown around these numbers forever.

Yeah, right, which we were, by the way, they said in the 90s we're all already going to die if it was like that.

But it's at least something.

It's the biggest move we've ever made.

Isn't that

why

don't we follow the facts?

Shouldn't your generation look at that and go, oh, finally somebody got something done?

Well, I think, unfortunately, politics are also just very much about optics.

And with my generation, the optics of this...

presidency haven't been inspiring and exciting.

Falling off the bike.

Is that what?

Yeah, I mean,

and I don't love this.

Farting in front of the queen.

I know.

So you're just beating it, man.

I don't even know what that is.

No, I know.

There's going to be some senior moments.

Get off the table.

Yeah.

You know, there just are.

It's true, but it's going to show up without pants on.

Yeah.

It's just going to happen.

For a generation of young people who have just grown up in a partisan hellscape for as long as we can really remember politically, a career politician and someone who's older and been in that world is maybe not the most

important since then.

But that's why he finally got something done.

But it's not why it's not.

Because he was an older politician.

It is.

It just is.

It is not what I'm doing.

Everybody counted him out when he ran for president.

Remember, he was dead in the water.

And then he was the nominee.

And then he couldn't beat Trump.

And then he beat Trump.

And then he couldn't get anything done.

And he was the worst thing ever.

And now he killed Al-Zawahiri.

And inflation is back down.

And he got the climate bill passed.

And people are working.

You know,

he's not.

But we think the smart play actually is.

I think Maureen Dowd wrote this last week.

The smart play for Biden.

I don't think he should run again in 2020

for the benefit of the Democrats.

I think what he should do is ride this wave he's on that

and say now, actually, I'm not going to run again.

Find a young, dynamic person in the Democratic Party that he can get behind, and then they've got a good chance, I think.

But if it is Biden, I think that

he rides into town.

Yes.

I saved the town, and now I'm cleaning.

And I'm riding out.

Thank you and good night.

Thank you and good night.

So

but

Paul Gosar, he's a crazy Republican congressman from Arizona.

He says his quote was literally, this is a quote, we must destroy the FBI.

Somehow the Republican Party, the same thing with the Capitol riot on January 6th, like, wait a second, the police are the bad guys and the rioters are the good guys?

Well, how do you go from wanting to scream abuse at anyone who says, defund the police, to then saying, defund the FBI, who are elite police officers?

I mean, to me, there's a double standard there anyway.

Well, I don't know.

It's been so disheartening seeing people just jump to the conclusions in the worst possible extrapolation from a developing story, and even journalists and people in the media who just use this developing story to kind of fit their preconceptions about Trump and

potentially politicizing the FBI.

I mean, it was really disheartening to me.

I'm not in a great mood about security people today after seeing Salman Rushdie get stabbed and it was like going on for like 20 seconds before anybody can.

You know, it's like so many people in this country are cops or ex-cops or so many people have security written on them for a country that has so little security.

You know, I mean, I've been trying to be supportive about the police after

2020 because like they all got tarred, like they're all Derek Chauvin, and that's not fair.

They certainly are not all that, not even close.

But come on, after Parkland and Uvalde and the Las Vegas shooter and this thing, it's starting to look like, you know, you guys want a little extra leeway, then at least do your fucking job.

You're security people, provide a little security.

All right.

Time for new rules.

On that happy note.

Sorry, but

sometimes.

All right.

Sal, if you're out there and you can hear me, we hope you get better, and I know you will.

All right, new rules.

Someone has to tell this woman that she'd have a lot more success on Tinder if her profile didn't say, I have the world's biggest pussy.

Nerul, and this one is for the kids.

This summer, when you go to the swimming pool, you don't have to scream the whole time.

I can never tell if they're having fun or being chased by a scary clown.

Screaming, screaming, screaming.

Kids today, doesn't anyone just stare silently at their phone anymore?

Number oh someone has to tell the makers of hot dog rounds

the big slabs of hot dog meat processed to fit on your hamburger bun

not everything has to be non-binary

And don't tell me that's not what's going on here.

I mean come on.

It's a Frank identifying as a patty

New rule, the FBI must tell us if they were able to guess the combination to Trump's safe on the first try.

I mean, come on, it's Ivanka's measurements.

I mean, it's...

New rule, the interior of the new Mercedes-S-Class has to look less like a strip club.

I test drove one of these things.

I didn't know whether to adjust the mirrors or start stuffing singles in the seat belt.

The windshield has three settings, defogger, defroster, and make it rain.

And the radio only plays Def Leppard and Nelly.

And finally, finally, new role casting directors have to stop listening to the casting police and go back to doing their job, which is picking the best actor for the role.

Now, I mention this because a lot of people lately are either apologizing for or calling on others to apologize for playing roles they call appropriation.

James Franco was just chosen to play Fidel Castro and John Leguizamo posted, no more appropriation.

Boycott, this is fucked up.

I don't got a problem with Franco, but he ain't Latino.

Okay, but John Liguazamo is Colombian American.

He ain't a Venetian, but he played one.

He ain't a French little person.

Or an Italian plumber, but he played them too.

Because he's...

Because he's an actor.

Why the hell do you think people become actors?

Because they want to spend their life not being who they are.

Appropriating sounds like an unforgivable sin until you remember that's what acting is.

That's why acting jobs are called roles.

Sean Penn won an Oscar for playing gay civil rights martyr Harvey Milk.

At the time, it was considered a courageous act of solidarity for a straight straight male movie star to play a homosexual.

Now it's the opposite.

Eddie Redmain played a transgender woman in the Danish Girl, but now calls that a mistake because many people don't have a chair at the table.

Well, actually, in movies now they do.

And what does it have to do with you playing trans?

Does it then work the other way?

Can trans actors only play trans characters?

Because that's not going to be a good deal for them.

And isn't the best acting always about making us feel our common humanity beyond separate identities?

A black George Washington and Hamilton, of course.

But Ryan Gosling as Frederick Douglass?

Yes, that would be problematic.

Ditto, Shia LaBeouf as shaft.

No, it's.

Why don't we just go by merit and let the best actor win?

Which seems like what happened when Anna DiArmas just got picked to play Marilyn Monroe, even though she's Cuban with an accent.

Hey, maybe she should play Fidel Castro and

James Franco can play Marilyn Monroe, and then we can all

Then we can all stay in our lanes.

Is that what diversity and inclusion look like now?

Everybody's staying in their lane?

Lawrence of Arabia was gay.

Peter O'Toole wasn't.

I can live with that because he was so cool, he almost made me gay.

Emma Stone caught hell for playing a Hawaiian, Jake Jillinall for playing a Persian, Gal Godot for wanting to play Cleopatra, Johnny Depp for playing an Indian, even though he's not an actual Comanche, and spoiler alert, he also doesn't really have scissor hands.

And he's not actually a drunken pirate.

Okay, bad example.

Tom Hanks now says that if Philadelphia were made today, he wouldn't do it because the character was gay and he's not.

Well, besides the fact that this would force all gay actors to reveal their sexuality, even if they didn't want to,

great actors, which Tom is one, try hard to keep their private lives private so we don't think of their real lives when we see them in a movie that attempts to transport us into a different world.

Could you really look at this actress now

and not think of the trial?

Should she only play bed shitters now?

What's Daniel Day Lewis really like?

I haven't a clue, which is why he's so great.

Because when he plays Lincoln, I only see Lincoln.

I don't think, well, there is a British heterosexual.

But Hanks says, I don't think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy because, quote, we're beyond that now.

Don't get him started on bosom buddies.

I mean,

really?

Does Forrest Gump get thrown under the bus too because Tom isn't really mentally challenged?

And as far as we're beyond that, no.

No.

That implies progress.

This is the opposite.

This is regression.

And it's...

And it is, frankly, typical of so much wokeness that doesn't build on liberalism.

It undoes it.

Empathy.

Putting yourself in someone else's place so you can understand them better used to be the very heart of liberalism.

Now it's considered offensive because don't even try to put yourself in my shoes because you could never know.

What a bunch of bullshit that always was.

Of course, no one can ever know exactly what another person's struggle is, but we try.

Black Like Me was a 1950s book about a white man who darkened his skin and went out into society because he wanted to understand what his black brothers and sisters were up against.

Today, all the woke mob would see, about that was a guy who did blackface.

Steven Spielberg originally remade Westside's story and bent over backwards to respect ethnicities and ended up pleasing nobody.

And it's too bad because the original musical was created by Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Lorentz, and Leonard Bernstein, three gay Jews.

And if you can't trust gay Jews to write about hot-blooded Puerto Rican teenagers, who can you trust?

Next thing you're going to tell me, street gangs don't even dance.

And now they're making a movie about Leonard Bernstein, and Bradley Cooper is playing him.

I mean, if he can get through the picket lines.

You see, like Rachel Brosnahan playing Mrs.

Maisel and Helen Mirren playing Israeli Prime Minister Gold in My Ear.

Bradley is, sadly, a Gentile.

And that's the new sin in Hollywood, being a non-Jewish actor portraying a Jew.

Because that's always been the problem in Hollywood.

Not enough Jews.

The woke even have a word for this troubling new phenomenon, Jew face.

Do you see what I mean about them having their head up their ass?

Really?

The word you're using to fight anti-Semitism is Jew face?

It sounds like something Mel Mel Gibson says at a traffic stop.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Chicago Theater in Chicago.

I love Chicago.

September 10th at the Uptown in Kansas City, Missouri.

September 11th at the Fox in Detroit, October 8th.

I want to thank Piers Morgan, Ricky Schlutt, and Ross Douthett.

And you.

And now we go to YouTube to join us on Overtime.

Thank you.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

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