Ep. #598: Fran Lebowitz, Ali Velshi, Doug Jones (D-AL)

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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

Thank you, Perpo.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

I love it.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate that.

Oh,

thank you.

All right.

Look at, oh, thank you.

I appreciate it.

That's true love.

You can't gin up a crowd.

They really mean it.

I appreciate it.

I have to start with the public services.

We're here in California.

We're going to go back.

There's a drought, like there hasn't been, but

we're going back to emergency levels now next month.

Yes,

watering outdoors only once a week.

This does not affect me.

The plants I care about grow mostly indoors.

Also,

maybe you're happy about this.

Not so big here in America, but around the world, Sunday, May Day, that's a huge holiday all around the world, celebrates workers and labor.

Labor, by the way, did you know this spelled differently in England?

L-A-B-O-U-R.

There's a U in labor.

Here in America, when there's a U in labor, it's because you just met Nick Cannon.

So

now, how many here are old enough to remember that this weekend is the 30th anniversary of the LA riot?

Was anybody here for them?

Let's hear it for the LA Riot.

No, I'm no, to commemorate the occasion.

Today, Will Smith slapped a Korean grocery clerk.

I just couldn't believe it's 30 years.

That's a very long time.

30 years ago, Amber Heard was shitting in her own bed.

That's.

Oh,

terrible.

But

the big news this week, right?

The big news, Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Twitter is...

Some people like it.

I know, it's a kind of, some people like it, Some people don't.

Elon said, everybody's worrying about nothing.

Twitter is going to remain a place where something you brain farted when you were in junior high can haunt you for the rest of your life.

So stop worrying.

But he's going to make some changes that I think are good.

He said, first of all, going to get rid of bots.

Right?

That's a good thing.

He said,

we don't want any entity here that are not real people.

And Mark Zuckerberg said, why are you making this personal?

And did you see what Elon did?

I thought this is pretty funny.

He tweeted right after he bought it.

He said, and now I'm going to buy Coca-Cola

so I can put the cocaine back in.

Which, okay, but, well,

it's all fun and games until Hunter Biden gets his

head stuck in the vending machine.

That's a.

Anyway.

Oh,

Joe Biden, Joe Biden, this was announced today.

He's the correspondence dinner, that awful thing they do in Washington.

I think I did it

one year.

It was terrible.

They're having that this weekend.

Joe Biden is going to go, but listen to this, we'll go to the dinner, but we'll not stay because of worries about COVID when they serve the meal.

Were they serving bat?

This is

America's COVID policy in a nutshell.

You can go to a restaurant, but when the food comes, you have to leave.

I tell you the Democrats, they are in trouble.

The economy shrank the last quarter.

We didn't see that coming.

And you know, when it shrinks two quarters in a row, that's a recession.

Plus, we have horrible inflation.

Sometimes you get the feeling the Democrats are tanking on purpose to get a better draft pick next year.

I mean,

inflation,

gas, right?

And food and rent.

Have you seen the price of chimneys?

They are through the roof.

That joke had been lying around for hundreds of years.

Nobody picked it up.

I picked it up.

But here's the only way I think the Democrats can win is if the Republicans are even clownier.

And there's somebody who's stepping up for the Republican Party in a big way.

Have you heard about this guy, Madison Cawthorne?

He's the youngest member of Congress.

He's from, you know what, I'm not sure.

I'm going to say Florida because

it's not, it should be.

Okay, so, you know, and he's a real Christian conservative type.

This week, pictures came out of him in lingerie,

women's lingerie, bra panties.

Commisole, teddy, the whole thing.

And then today, a video came out of him with his aide, who's always with him, this guy, and he's saying, you know, I feel the passion, I feel the desire I would like to see the naked body in my hands

and the aide says me too and then puts his hand on Madison's dick

they say they're joking

which I think

I think begs the question how much pretending about being gay can you do before you're actually gay

I feel like this is a

we must ask.

Also,

it turns out, allegedly, Madison

made Venmo payments to this aide and wrote, you know, where you say what the payment is for, wrote down things like quickie at the airport

and getting naked for me in Sweden, really.

Matt Gates

said, you know, I'm not the brightest guy on the planet, but even I didn't write For Sex with a Teenager.

And the answer to this,

this Madison Cawthorne guy got married a couple of years ago, lasted eight months.

You know who went on the honeymoon with him and the wife?

This same aide.

You know, it's not.

It's not a good sign on the wedding night when you say to the bride, let's hurry this up.

I'm I'm going to catch a quick sauna with Steve.

I've got a great show.

Ali Velshi is here and Doug Jones.

But first up, she is an author and social commentator who is currently touring for an evening with Fran Leibowitz.

I did it with her once, three times.

We did it three times.

It's fantastic.

She'll be appearing next at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica tomorrow and again on May 1st and in San Diego on May 2nd.

Fran Leibowitz.

There she is.

She this, to be this, to be this, this.

Oh, thank you.

I'm so glad you came.

Still shake.

So great to see you.

Nice to see you.

You're a rock star now.

You've just been touring Europe.

I love this.

Tell us what's going on in the Kabilla like the Datac fill in reverse.

Tell us here in America how you find the continent.

Are they different than us?

Extremely different.

In what way?

Well, first of all, in the airports in Europe, all the men are wearing long pants.

That's enough.

I'm out of here.

Really, that's enough.

Yeah.

Right.

And no pajamas?

No pajamas, no shorts.

No baseball caps.

Right.

So they're actually dressed like men

as opposed to

boys.

Also, I think I can't remember which.

I was either in Stockholm or Copenhagen when Russia invaded Ukraine, and they were very interested in it.

And they kept saying, do you realize how close this is?

And I said, I do, but I'm really, aren't you worried?

I said, I'm worried, but not because I think he's going to come to Sweden, but it's worrisome, of course.

When I got back to the United States, it took four days to get the first question about Ukraine.

It's not center mind for people here.

So, and you're touring.

First of all, this is so fantastic that you're touring.

I mean, for all those years, you could not, you know, you were not flush.

You needed, and now I saw your tour dates.

You're like, do you have a bus?

I mean, you're like all over the, you're all over Europe and you're all over America, one date after another, bringing in the dough.

This is fantastic.

I'm at the mercy of the airlines.

Well, we all are.

Yeah?

I mean, yeah.

Meaning it's a nightmare because you...

It's horrible.

Right.

It's horrible.

It's totally horrible.

It's I mean, you know, it was traveling was horrible before COVID, and now it's like a billion times worse.

Well, we both spend a lot of time in hotels.

Yeah, which I hate.

I hate even the great hotels.

Well, because they can't do it anymore.

You know, I complain about this and people say, oh, you know, whining about your privileged life.

Yes.

You know what I bitch about?

I have one request.

You can't open the window.

Yes, that was in my special.

Yes, I can't open the window.

Thank you, yes.

And here's why you can't open the window.

Yes, you're right.

right.

Because apparently people check into hotels with the sole purpose of jumping out the window.

That was my joke, yeah.

That was it.

Like, you know, do it at home.

So, but

my bitch is that I have one request.

I feel

I want a fan in the room.

Not a big fan, just someone who likes my early work.

No.

Again, it was lying on the floor.

No.

You know, because I can't always get the temperature, though.

So,

They control the temperature a little bit.

I can't get as cool as I want it.

And I like the white noise.

So okay, if you can't do it, you can't do it.

But it's a five-star hotel.

You know, just tell us.

No, that's impossible.

They never say that.

Absolutely, we'll have a fan in the room.

And then at least half the time it never is.

Yes.

Don't you wonder who gives these stars?

Okay, because

my agents always say to me, it's a five-star hotel, you know, but it's in a place like where there could be no such thing.

No, they don't care.

So it's relative.

Like in Indianapolis, it's a five-star hotel.

No, I don't think that's true.

I think Indianapolis, not, I love Indianapolis.

Really?

Played their recently.

What's your favorite thing about it?

The crowd.

The crowd.

Was fan fucking tastic in Indianapolis.

I will not hear you denigrate Indianapolis.

Did I see the city?

No, because I fly private.

I didn't even stay over.

Anyway.

That's why you think the airlines are fine.

Okay?

But the crowd was amazing.

All right, I drove to Indianapolis, by which I mean I sat in the back of a car, from either Cincinnati or Cleveland to Indianapolis.

And first the drive is very lovely.

There's all these little farms.

It looks like a 1950s children's book.

Then all of a sudden there's a giant black billboard with huge white letters saying hell is real.

So what?

For you, I'm sure hell is being anywhere outside of New York.

Well, I mean, it says hell is real instead of, and we're going to prove it to you.

Right.

Okay.

But so here's my question.

Now that you're on this tour, making all this money, has it inspired you maybe to go back to writing?

I mean, you heard the famous 40-year writing block.

I'm always trying to get you, because we'd love your book so much, to write another one.

Has this got the juices flowing a little?

Well, it sometimes seems, would you rather be sitting in the Seattle airport for nine hours or at home writing?

And so in that case, writing seems less hard.

Why don't you do it in the airport?

You're in the airport.

But there are other people in the airport.

You should go to a real airport.

There's a lot of other people there.

Please.

Okay, but you know, I've told you this before, many people have, that you don't even have to write.

You just have to have a scribe.

Like Socrates never wrote a word.

He had scribes.

So I found this picture of Kim Jong-un to give you an example of, look at that.

That could be you.

I know.

Right,

look behind you.

I'm sorry.

There it is.

See?

See, Kim, that could be you.

And just have three other assholes write down everything you say because you speak in material, right?

And then there's your book.

Have you ever thought of being a career counselor before?

All right, so.

No one's ever said to me, see, Kim Dunning, this could be you.

It could be you.

You could have that.

You could have people just doing that.

What do you think?

I'll think about it.

Okay.

When I'm in the airport.

Or you know what?

Just have a transcription done of these shows you're doing around the country, right?

Just have them, you can get a service to do that.

They record it, transcribe them, edit out the boring parts, and just put out the book quotes from my shows.

What boring parts?

See?

No boring parts.

That's how great great the book would be.

So, before we run out of time,

I know this, I guess, falls under the category of human interest story, but I feel like it's something that you probably have been following because you can't look away.

What do you think of this Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial that is going on?

I mean...

Well, I haven't seen the trial.

Is it being televised?

No, I don't think the trial itself is, but certainly we get all the dirt.

We get what they've said, their texts, there are videos from it.

I feel like I know these two people very well now.

Well, I have to say that I used to see Johnny Depp quite a bit.

He used to be the boyfriend of Jenny Gray a hundred years ago, and I see him around New York.

I like him a lot.

This girl, I don't know at all.

On the other hand, if I had been seeing him, Johnny Depp, when he met this girl, I would have said, Johnny.

I mean,

men are not that smart when it comes to women because truthfully, there's not a 13-year-old girl who wouldn't know what that girl is.

You know, to me, it's the same.

I'm not saying they're exactly the same situation,

but the situation similar to like Prince Harry and Megan.

Yeah.

Right?

So

you look at Megan, and if you'd known Prince Harry, you would have said, uh, Harry.

I mean,

when I see Prince Harry and

Megan Markle.

Meghan Markle.

I couldn't think of her last name, sorry.

Megan Markle,

I think about his brother, and I think, can you imagine a family where William is a smart one?

That's that family.

I mean, I don't get a reading on them other than they look to me like a typical millennial couple.

I'm just going to leave it there.

Not really typical, I would say, not typical.

So, I mean, Johnny Depp.

Typical in that she's got his balls in her purse.

Johnny, I mean, but this, I feel like.

That's an elegant way of putting it.

What?

That's an elegant way of putting it.

Okay.

But the Johnny Depp thing, I think, you know, there's that thing in the whatever magazine, stars, they're just like us.

They're not.

I mean, certainly this is a cautionary tale about when a relationship goes wrong.

Boy, does it go wrong.

Well, this is also, you know, a kind of...

Why are they in court?

I mean, my feeling is, if you think you have a horrible problem and you want to make that problem worse, call a lawyer.

Right.

Okay, so however bad their problems were, they seem pretty bad.

I'm sure they're worse now because there are a lot of lawyers in that.

And you know what?

I have limited amount of sympathy for anybody who is rich, beautiful, privileged, lucky in life to be where they were, and they still have to make it all about them.

But given that, I still find this to be kind of a tragedy because, I mean, what is the definition of tragedy?

It's different than just something that's sad.

A tragedy means some trait

that is in the tragic character's being makes their doom inevitable, right?

Isn't that why, you know, Hamlet couldn't make up his mind that he was going to wind up dead at the end?

Right.

Not many people would think of Hamlet in regard to Johnny Depp.

No, but like,

but I feel like he, no, this is Prince Harry, buddy.

This is his second, Johnny Depp's second draw.

He did this in England already and lost.

He just, the tragic trait is that he, he, I don't know if he did it or not, if he hit her or something,

but he just cannot stand to think of his honor stained, to say nothing of the bet.

No, I'm sorry.

Terrible.

And so he he had, so he like had to go through these, after he lost the first trial.

He should have, okay.

And of course, neither one of them will ever work again because of the bed jokes.

I mean, that's all we'll be able to think about her.

He will never work again.

It just, he can't stop himself from pursuing this.

It's tragic, I'm telling you.

If Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing this.

About Johnny Depp, I'm certain you're correct.

My last question.

Menthol cigarettes, they have just, well, you're the last smoker, right now.

You know what?

Everyone always says that, yet the streets are full of cigarette butts in places I've never been.

Okay, I arrive in Stockholm, and the streets are full of cigarette butts, and I haven't even been there yet.

But that's you.

Oh, I gotta go.

I love talking to you.

Good luck with your tour.

So glad you're doing so well.

All right, friendly witness.

Let's meet our panel.

Okay, hey,

hi, you guys.

Okay, he is the host of MSMIT's Velshi airing weekend mornings.

Ali Velshi is over here.

Ali, great to see you.

And he's the former Democratic senator from Alabama who was recently the White House nomination advisor for legislative affairs guiding the confirmation of Katenji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court.

Doug Jones.

Okay.

So

let's talk about Twitter and free speech, shall we?

And Elon Musk, you know, we're all in the media some way.

The CEO of Twitter, well, maybe not any longer,

but he was.

He said, our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment.

Now, let's just start with, it is a private company.

They can do whatever they want.

Let's get past that.

That's a Dodge answer.

Yeah.

What Musk is saying is, but it is de facto the town square, and some sheriff should come in and say, what good is the First Amendment if we're the place where people are really talking they can't talk you think that's a valid argument

Toug knows more about the the the legality of it he's right and I think everybody needs to get over the fact that the First Amendment does not apply to Twitter this is not government censorship of anything I think what we do have to worry about what Elon Musk who's a really great thinker and is really moving the needle on some important things in life about electric cars and about going to Mars I think what he needs to think about is our democracy, which is struggling at the moment, relies upon an informed electorate.

And that's always been a problem for us historically, but social media is not helping us become a more informed electorate.

So there's a responsibility, even by a private company or private actors, to say, Am I making a bad situation worse?

And how do I get you that town square that is so valuable without wrecking society?

And I think Twitter could have a serious conversation with itself about that, asking Facebook.

Well,

yeah.

you know,

I'm all for the First Amendment.

Everybody, all Democrats are for the First Amendment, for goodness sakes.

But Russian bots do not have a First Amendment privilege in this country or on Twitter, period, in the discussion.

And that's the biggest problem.

It's not, it's not, it's not.

I think we can all agree on

that.

Let's just at least be who you really are.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But that's not really where the argument is.

The argument to me is like, has Twitter failed in setting themselves up in the past as the judge of what can go out there?

And I would say, yes, you have.

You failed when you threw the New York Post off of Twitter for talking about Hunter Biden's emails, and it turned out that was a real story.

Right.

You failed when you said we couldn't read about whether COVID had come from a lab.

You failed.

Did you read about this Babylon B?

Do you know what the Babylon B is?

I didn't know this.

No.

It's like the Christian version of the onion.

Because everyone needs that.

Well, some people do.

I thought that was

all you and me, okay?

It says you're trusted source for Christian news and satire.

I didn't know there was such a thing as Christian satire.

I thought the religion itself was satire.

That's me.

I'm not everybody.

Okay?

I'm not everybody.

Have a little humility, right?

So listen to this.

They got flagged for, they posted a funny video.

This is funny to them.

Okay.

Sensitive content, Twitter said.

In the video, they were making fun of Twitter for being too sensitive.

This is so through the looking glass.

Here's what happens in the video.

This woman who, going into the Twitter building, this is, you know, parody.

This is what people do on television and have done forever.

Okay, she's complaining to HR about how sensitive Twitter is.

And the guy shows her an ink blot, and she keeps seeing Hitler in all the ink blots.

Okay, then she runs screaming out of the building because she's...

This is well within what satire has always been.

And the fact that they flagged this for being insensitive shows their complete lack of self-awareness about what their own problem is.

If that's where the line is, you have failed, Twitter.

You do need a new show.

You know, look, I think people would agree totally with that.

I think what we're talking about here, though, is trying to get back to having those tweets or posts or whatever the hell you want to call it.

But the fact of the matter is, insensitivity is one thing.

Flat out

misinformation, disinformation, flat out lies, fake news.

Fake news is a lie.

Let's just put it out there.

Fake news is nothing but a lie.

And things that incite violence, things like that.

I think there is a response to that.

Right, well, that's in the First Amendment.

You can't.

You can't incite violence, and we're all

no one's arguing.

So there's stuff that Twitter's done that falls into that category, and we think that's okay.

I think the issue is no one else is going to regulate them because we've learned that we're not anywhere close to being able to understand this and regulate social media.

So, could these companies take some responsibility and say, imagine if we were really that town square.

Imagine if we were this place where people with differing opinions could have robust discussions.

And there's a way they can get there.

It's not what Elon Musk is currently looking at, and that worries me a little bit.

But boy, if he could do that, if we can create that real town square, what would it do for us?

You try and do it on your show, right?

You battle people with different opinions with respect and respect their pluralism.

Right.

That's what that space would do for democracy.

Exactly.

And since we're bringing and you know, the truth is,

Twitter became a left-wing place.

It just did.

You should see my Twitter.

There's a lot of right-wing garbage on it.

Did you ever see Donald Trump's tweets?

Yeah.

I mean, Trump?

Yeah.

You know, I mean, Trump is a lot of people.

It was left-wing stuff.

Yeah, what left-wing stuff.

But the point is, like

MSNBC, Fox News, I mean, people have their own silos where they see the news that they want to see and very rarely challenges them.

Newspapers the same way.

We're almost back to 1790, where each party has their own newspaper.

Twitter could be a place where you might see an opinion that you didn't formally consider.

And we need that desperately in America.

Now, I see President Obama spoke at Stanford University a couple of weeks ago when he's talking about this issue of disinformation.

He said these companies, companies we're talking about, need to have some North Star other than just making money.

Yes, I think the North Star should be free speech.

But he also said it's going to be Gen Z that figures this out.

I hope not

because they're the worst.

I'd much rather have

Elon Musk making the rules than some 23-year-old who can't take the joke on Babylon beeswax or whatever the fuck that is.

I mean, this is a generation that doesn't know what the word violence means.

They think violence means anything I don't like.

Their standard of free speech is, I'm uncomfortable.

That's not where the standard is.

Right.

Yeah, so I think what we are missing in the discussion of democracy and or free speech, which is important, I think, to all of us and all of us here, is this idea of pluralism, which we do not nurture well enough in this country.

The idea that, Bill, my goal tonight shouldn't be to get you to agree with me.

It should be to cherish the fact that you and I hold different views on things, and I wouldn't have been exposed to them if I had not listened to you.

That's a good point.

I hope so.

Let's make that our North Star.

I think we can generally agree most Americans are in favor of free speech and preserving it, and they should be, because when the lights go out, you don't get the news, and when you don't get the news, bad things happen to you.

Well,

most Americans aren't.

Certainly not most Americans under 30, because we stopped teaching it in schools.

Civics doesn't exist anymore.

They don't know what the

they don't know that.

Free speech, what the fuck does that mean?

It hurt my feelings.

That's what matters to them.

That's what I worry about.

I mean, I hear it all the time.

No, look, I've seen it.

I've lived it.

I mean, I have understood the fact that civics in this country

is a relic of the past, and we have got to get back to that.

That's why you see so many different opinions that are based on misinformation.

That's why you see different people looking at,

on the one hand, thinking that the January 6th riots was simply a group of tourists that were doing okay.

That's why you see,

you know,

but the fact of the matter is, this generation has become one, as you say, I completely agree with you.

Pluralism in this society is something that that has got to flourish.

And we have moved light years in terms of racism and things like that, but it's still progress.

We've made progress, but we have also taken a number of steps back.

And we've got to get it.

I think it's got to be the gray hairs and maybe the no hairs that

end up moving moving us and getting back to try to teach these youngers.

What about the dyed hairs?

The dyed hairs.

So I got to mention January 6th.

Let me ask you about that.

I mean, you were just in the Senate recently.

I don't know what is going on there because, I mean, we heard this week a lot of information about how many Republican office holders were heavily involved in contacting Mark Meadows, who was at the time, January 6th.

I mean, how many chiefs of staff did Trump have?

At least three or four, right?

Of every office.

Okay.

So this guy was there at the end.

Now, the chief of staff is the guy, if you can get him on the phone, he's the guy you talk to.

He's the gatekeeper.

He's very often more powerful, really, in the United States.

And

the President of the United States.

So the fact that Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, was getting all these calls from all these people,

Republicans, saying, basically, declare martial law was what some of them wanted.

I mean, they were absolutely not going to accept this election.

One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, our comedy's friend, Marjorie Taylor Greene,

she

at, we have the text now, you know, she was texting him martial law.

She spelled it wrong, okay.

So now in Georgia, there's a legal challenge to her being in Congress at all because I didn't know this, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies you from public office if you take part in any insurrection or rebellion.

Now, Jamie Raskin, Democrat for Maryland, you must have had him on the show a bunch of times, right?

He's a pretty high-up Democrat.

He says we're going to have these hearings about January 6th.

He said I think they'll be compared to the Watergate hearings.

He says they're going to blow the roof off the house.

He said it'll be a game changer.

I think they won't.

I think everyone in this country is already on teen red or teen blue.

And this is what Democrats think is going to be the game changer.

Yeah, we want to get people ginned up.

Mention Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

That hits them right in the gut.

No.

It's going to be out in inflation and immigration.

Yes.

That's what the election is going to be about.

And we hope not a recession.

But, you know, things are not looking good there.

But look,

these hearings do have the possibility of maybe not being a game changer, but at least letting the public know what's going on.

I think early on, the January 6th Commission did a very, very good job of just methodically and efficiently moving forward on trying to figure out what happened.

We have to remember that the role of the January 6th Commission is not to put people in jail.

It is not to indict Donald Trump.

It is not to indict anybody.

It's to tell people what happened in a non-partisan fashion.

But But who is going to put people in jail?

If you don't get put into jail for insurrection, where does it stop?

Well, you've got a whole lot of.

But the January 6th Commission, that's not their job.

That's the job of the job.

But it is the job of Merrick Garland, isn't it?

What are we waiting for?

I mean, you know what?

They got about six months before the election,

which the Democrats are going to get wiped out.

There's not going to be a Democrat between Massachusetts and Pacoima.

They're going to be like Buffalo.

I mean, they're just going to.

Okay.

And then the January 6th Commission becomes the Hunter Biden Commission, right?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

So

what is the plan there on the Democratic side?

Where is Merrick Garland?

Where is the indictment?

This is the advantage of having Doug Jones here, because real lawyers who've done real things in life will tell you that the wheels of justice are supposed to move at a pace that is more akin to the way this is going than what it did during the Trump administration, where Donald Trump would say something and his Attorney General, as he described him, would move with great haste to achieve whatever the political aims are.

So the problem here is that this Justice Department is being very deliberative.

And there are a lot of good lawyers who are arguing that that's the way justice should go so that it is not doubted and disrespected by people.

The problem here is that the net outcome of what may happen in the midterms in November is that democracy itself may be at stake.

These texts demonstrate that there may be people who are leaders in Congress come November, come January as well, who just don't believe in democracy the way that we do.

These are not disagreements about abortion or disagreements about taxes or wages or health care, all of which are important discussions.

These are fundamental disagreements about how you conduct elections, who wins, and how you do it.

And there's no maybe about it.

There's no maybe about it.

They don't believe in it.

I think that the Justice Department may need to, this has to be items one through ten on their list.

We're almost out of the, I mean, this happened January 6th, 2021.

I'll get a fan in my room before they have this.

No, no, no, no.

Bill,

no, look,

we can,

yes, you were exactly January of 2021.

That's what, 16 months?

That is a minuscule amount of time for a major.

This is the biggest investment.

I bet if it was them, they would have had it in February of last year.

But that wasn't good for the world, right?

The justice system that didn't do that.

That's why.

I'm with you, but I am worried about the acceleration of justice for the wrong reasons, but this does feel like a good reason to put everybody on.

So to introduce another issue that I don't know whether this is going to go for the Democrats or against it, I saw DeSantis today.

He looks like he's stepped in it here, and not in a good way.

With getting in the middle of Disney.

Okay, he was kind of coming in on the Ted Cruz opinion.

Ted Cruz said, I think we have a headline here, Mickey and Pluto going at it.

He said,

we'll show Mickey and Pluto going at it.

I mean, they're having this.

It's a wild.

It's wild.

And DeSantis today said, you know, when we were kids, we didn't have to worry what was in cartoons.

So, I don't know.

I thought these guys are crazy.

And then I look at some of the movies that Disney has coming out.

They may be onto something with this grooming and highly sexualized content.

Would you like to see some of the movies that

I didn't realize this?

Like

bed knobs and nipple clamps.

I did not know that that was a Disney movie.

The Love Plug.

Who cucked Roger Rabbit?

The Little Sperm Age.

Honey, I transitioned the Kid.

Mary Poppers was not

around the world for 80 bucks is a different

and of course the sorcerer's appendage.

Anyway,

it was terrible.

So

okay.

Someone deserves an award for that.

Well, it won't be us.

We never get an award, but we have the love of our audience.

Our staff certainly deserves one.

So, okay, so one party is arguing that Cartoon characters are a threat to your children, and they're beating the other party.

That's basically where we are.

Because I've seen the polls.

I'm not going to, you agree.

Yeah, no, I've seen them too.

I mean, it's going to be a bloodbath.

Well, there's still time.

You know, look, I am not going to give up on this.

Well,

I'm not going to give up on this.

There's a lot of really good candidates out there, especially in the Senate.

It's not about candidates.

It's about

the price of gas and food.

That's what it is.

I mean, Pete, when people...

People are hurting.

It's the economy stupid.

Remember the slogan on the wall?

And if there's a recession plus inflation, that's like Jimmy Carter stuff.

I mean, they're going to get killed for that.

Yeah, I mean, in fairness, a mortgage, a 30-year fixed mortgage is 5% right now.

It's almost double where it would have been a few years ago, but it's 5%.

It's not 19%.

It's not 14%.

So

we can still manage this.

The difficulty is no president wants to be the president of inflation.

increasing oil prices.

And the way you fight that is with raising interest rates, which is what's going on.

There's no good answer to this one.

No.

It's circumstances.

The good answer is not to be in office when it happens.

Yeah, that's right.

That is entirely right.

But

the culture war stuff, we have to make sure it's not causal, right?

You're right.

One party is putting forward nonsense about Disney teaching your kids all sorts of things that they shouldn't know,

and they're polling higher.

It's not because of the Disney nonsense.

It's not because of the culture war stuff.

It's not because of the book banning.

It's not because of all that stuff.

It's exactly what you said.

It's kitchen table issues, which is, we are just in an unfortunate period of time.

And there are things going on in schools that parents don't like for very good reasons.

But parents have not liked things going in schools for a long reason.

I've got a banned book club that I run every Sunday.

All we do is banned authors.

I got Margaret Atwood on this Sunday.

People have been banning books because they're prudish for generations.

People have been burning books.

We've got burning books going on right now in America.

Parents always don't want their kids learning stuff that's going to be bad.

Doug Jones prosecuted a case that was unsettled in Alabama since 1963.

He did it in the 2000s.

These are still stories that people in Alabama didn't want settled.

That's the way of the world.

We're going to have to learn things that you and your kids are uncomfortable with.

Well,

that's got to work.

That's not the problem.

Of course.

I don't think anybody disagrees with that.

But I think you would do, right?

No.

Well, I think what parents are doing what parents don't want is, I don't want my five-year-old to hear about anything sexual.

That's just what they're saying.

But can we wait a little?

Could he just have a little innocence, just play with dirt for a little while?

You know?

Jesus Christ.

Okay, so what about the other big I issue, which is immigration?

Now, Joe Biden famously used the phrase, big fucking deal.

When is he going to understand this is a big fucking deal?

We just had an election in France.

Now Macron pulled it out pretty handily.

But I mean Marine Le Pen

is you know started at nothing and now she's very

18 points.

Yeah, I mean you know within striking distance and this is the same issue as Brexit in England.

This is the same issue as Trump voters in America.

I mean the Orban just won an election in Hungary on the same issue.

Yes.

But I mean this is France.

Yeah.

And you know, working class voters feel like they've been ignored and abandoned.

And when I've been to France, they certainly were ignoring and abandoning me.

I seem to remember that about France.

But that is a reasonable argument that there's this elitist group that's running the world that's left us behind.

Yes, there's, look, and people think that to some extent about Democrats.

Democrats have lost their way in the sense that they have not been talking to mainstream America.

They've been talking to urban this and this group and a coalition, but they have lost their way talking to rural America, to folks on Main Street.

We have got to get back to giving those messages.

You talk about inflation and all.

We need to be talking to those folks to say, look, we are working.

We are doing things.

We're releasing oil.

We're doing this.

The Fed is doing that.

Rick Scott is proposing to tax you.

He's the governor of Florida.

Yeah, but the governor of Florida.

Who is running?

The senator

running the Senate campaign committee for the Republicans.

His proposal is to tax people under $50,000 to raise their taxes.

We've got to get that message out to folks, and we can't do it in a way that is simply like Republicans are bad, Democrats are good.

We've got to be talking about issues.

We've got to be talking about them and then say, oh, by the way, let me introduce you to this Democratic candidate who believes in everything that you talk about.

And he or she as the person that...

So you want a race in Alabama as a Democrat?

Yeah.

No, against the child malevolent.

It was, yeah.

not the strongest candidate that the Republicans could have ever put out.

I agree with that.

But no, I wasn't putting you down.

I was saying,

even in Alabama, I think that's a tremendous victory.

And he had a wildly popular candidate.

Right.

Right, he was still.

It didn't exactly stop his voters from coming out for him.

But you're saying this is the what you, that was your message in Alabama.

It was, you know, but again,

when you've got things, I think too often, way too often, the messages get lost on the tribalism of just Republican versus Democrat.

Once you get to that point, I'll give you an example.

There were too many times when I was first running, people didn't know.

The first question they would ask, are you Republican or Democrat?

They didn't give a damn about what I was talking about.

They didn't ask me, what's your purpose?

What are you going to do for me?

They asked, you're a Republican or Democrat.

And it's because Democrats, we're not talking to folks like that.

We had lost them.

We played a lot of politics with different groups, and it is time we have.

We are an inclusive party.

We believe in equality for everybody, and that includes the farmer that is putting food on your table.

It includes the electrician that's doing the work there.

It includes the doctor's assistant, not just the doctor.

And I think Democrats have to do a better job of getting back from this.

All right, we will leave it there.

It was a pleasure, gentlemen.

Thank you for being here, but it's time for new rules.

New Rules, someone must tell me the difference between Easter and Orthodox Easter.

Because honestly, when I hear Orthodox Easter, I picture this.

New Rule, now that Megan Fox confirms that she and Machine Gun Kelly each drink each other's blood for ritual purposes, whatever.

I don't know if you heard, Megan, but the bar for crazy has been raised.

Call us.

Call us when you're shit on the pillow.

Neural, someone has to tell the California man arrested for making violent threats against Merriam-Webster because he didn't like their woke definition of the word woman.

If you think you don't like the definition of woman in the dictionary, just wait till you find out what it is in prison.

New rules, the media must stop showing these photos of Madison Cawthorne partying in women's lingerie.

Who are we to judge?

I say let he who has never staked his entire political career on being a hyper-masculine Christian conservative and then got caught dressed in a camisole and lacy black brassiere

cast the first stone.

Until then, I just don't want to see these pictures.

These pictures right here

of Madison Cawthorne wearing a bra.

They don't want to see it.

New rule, if you ever run into a former heavyweight champion of the world flying jet blue, just go ahead and assume he's in no mood to be fucked with.

The only thing that saved this guy's life is that the fastened seatbelt sign dinged

and Mike returned to his corner.

And finally, new rule, if this sort of brazen larceny is concerning to you, then you might want to look at how much of the trillions of dollars in free government COVID relief money was just flat out stolen.

Viewer warning, what you're about to hear may be triggering, and if it's not, it should be.

Let's start with what we spent, the checks the government sent out to get America through the pandemic.

There was the Families' First Coronavirus Response Act for $192 billion, the Payment Protection Program for $484 billion, the Consolidated Appropriations Act for $900 billion, the American Rescue Plan for $1.9 trillion, and the CARES Act for $2.2 trillion.

Although, for how much of that money actually made it into employees' pockets, they should have called it the Who Cares Act.

All told,

all told, $5.7 trillion laid out.

Now, certainly, some large amount of spending was necessary to avert catastrophes like hospitals being overrun or falling into a depression.

So we can argue another day if that 5.7 trill was the right amount.

But for today, let's just look at what happened after the forever flu hit America, and Washington's answer was a mountain of money and a sign that said, come steal it.

$872 billion went out to unemployment assistance.

You know how much of it went to improper payments and fraud?

Well, they don't have a solid figure.

That would require accounting.

But the low-end estimates are $163 billion in fraud.

The Inspector General says it's likely higher than that.

And ID.me, an Insurance Fraud Prevention Service, estimates the number is closer to 400 billion.

That's almost half of it.

In one instance, $2 million in unemployment checks got sent to one address.

What was the job that guy was out of?

In Arizona, scammers got nearly 30% of the benefits.

And that's Arizona, where the most fiscally conservative, penny-pinching Republicans used to live.

Republicans, at least, used to pretend to be the mean old man who watched your money.

But now, nobody from either party even pretends to.

Defunding the police, yes, that's a bad idea.

But so is depolicing the funds.

Palm Beach, thank you, one guy.

Palm Beach, Florida, which has 160 golf courses, got COVID money.

What'd they do with it?

They built a golf course.

Several nonprofits overseen by an organization called Feeding Our Future got $65 million to feed needy children during the pandemic.

But it was actually a massive fraud, and the FBI says almost none of this money was used to feed children.

That's like something Trump would do.

Even the poor kids were like, if we wanted to get fucked this bad, we could have gone to church.

The Paycheck Protection Program, PPP,

was designed to help small businesses pay their laid-off employees, but hundreds of loans went to fake farms in areas where farming isn't even done.

You know that saying, don't have a cow?

They literally didn't have a cow.

The government sent $1.4 billion in stimulus payments to a million dead people.

This woman used COVID cash to hire a hitman, and I assume the guy who got whacked then got a check.

We gave billionaire Kanye West millions so he could continue making the world's ugliest shoes.

Tom Brady's company.

Tom Brady's company got a PPP loan because you wouldn't want to have him touch his savings.

Turns out the poor guy couldn't even retire.

The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program gave out $10 million to Broadway's West Side Story.

No wonder they're singing, I Want to Live in America.

And

another Broadway show, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, also got $10 million because J.K.

Rowling was living in her car.

Here in LA, lots of people actually do live in their car.

So six years ago, we passed a bond program to provide housing for the homeless.

A couple of months later, it came out that each unit would cost $350,000.

And we were all shocked, because that's a lot of money to throw at a problem, even here in California.

By 2020, the cost had risen to $531,000 per unit.

Now, it's $837,000 for one unit.

You know, in France, the land of high taxes and socialism, $857,000 will buy you this.

Okay, that is $20,000 more, but it does have a pool.

You know,

there's an old adage that government cannot transfer money except by means of a leaky bucket.

And I get that.

I get that.

Some amount of leaking is inevitable.

But when it's all holes, it's not a bucket anymore.

What you got there is a handle.

A January New York Times article about the effectiveness of the PPP program says, overall, the PPP was extremely inefficient.

Only about a quarter of the money spent by the program paid wages that would have otherwise been lost.

It didn't primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs.

It was effectively a windfall for business owners on the whole, a wealthy group.

Okay, shouldn't liberal Democrats, therefore, be the ones who are most upset about this?

Who do you think is most getting fucked by all this graft and thievery?

If I say, you know, the government, they take our money and waste it, people say, you sound like a conservative.

But again, I haven't changed the whole to bucket ratio.

That changed.

Should I never notice that change to keep my progressive card?

Should I stay supportive of government transfers of money until the percentage that's stolen is, I don't know, unlimited?

What if they start to shoot money out of a t-shirt cannon?

Still good?

You know,

I guess these days that these two are seen as the bad guys in their party because they looked at another multi-trillion dollar spending bill and wondered if our government was up to the task of taking all that money and not just having it siphoned off by grifters and for bullshit.

Would it surprise you that the $6 billion earmarked for carbon reduction in that bill doesn't actually mandate any carbon reduction?

It will pay for new street lights and bike trails, though.

You know, know, I know when the numbers get up into the billions and trillions, our eyes glaze over and it doesn't seem real.

So by way of analogy, let's return to our friend in Aisle 3 at the Walgreens.

Okay, the Walgreens, that's the United States government.

And Aisle 3, that's the $5.7 trillion in COVID relief.

And this guy's shoveling it into a bag and walking out, that's all the boondogglers and con men in America who fleece the system.

And this security guard who's just watching it, that's your congressman.

All right, that's our show.

I will be at the MGM National Harbor in Washington, D.C., May 1st, and at the Soaring Eagle Casino in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, June 18th.

I want to thank Ali Velchi, Doug Jones, and Fred Leibowitz.

Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime.

Thank you, folks.

You were great.

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.