Ep. #587: Ira Glasser, Fiona Hill, Matt Welch

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

Thank you, people.

Thank you.

Thank you, my people.

Thank you.

Okay.

And a happy crowd.

Okay.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I love you too.

And I think I know why you're happy that I say that every week.

This week, I think because you did not invest in crypto.

That was a very wise thing.

Yes.

Crypto,

I was hoping for this.

It's horrible for the environment.

You know, it's just fucking stupid.

And it

has crashed like a rock.

They've lost almost a trillion dollars.

I mean, people in the metaverse are jumping off virtual buildings.

It's rough.

And

you know who got it the word?

Millennials, because they thought it was cool.

And now they're like, wait, you mean it was a bad idea to put all my savings into an imaginary currency

with a dog on it?

But you know what's doing good?

The actual economy.

You know, where people buy shit and make stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The economy grew 5.7%, the most since 1984.

Of course, we still have problems, inflation,

supply, but workers, they can't get enough workers.

And listen to that,

in this country that's still paranoid about the virus, they're pressuring workers, because they don't have enough,

to go to work when they're sick.

I think I saw it the other day at the supermarket.

The guy who bagged my groceries asked me if I could help him get to the car.

but yeah, I know people people you're suffering the inflation, right?

I mean, I did you see this dollar tree, dollar tree,

it's not funny, sir.

People need dollar tree, dollar tree is raising the price of all their stuff to a dollar twenty-five.

Why'd you call it dollar tree?

I mean, I feel like you could see this coming.

You know, I've seen 20th Century Fox,

Sergio Mendez in Brazil 66.

Can't you see that it's not in the future?

You just look 200 late, you know.

But anyway,

they're raising the price of everything at the dollar store to $1.25.

They're getting very bougie about it.

They're now calling their expired toothpaste vintage.

And don't get me started on M ⁇ Ms.

You know what?

I realized how much I did not know about M ⁇ Ms this week.

Everyone's talking about fucking M ⁇ Ms.

I haven't had one since I was a child.

Okay, I didn't realize they have characters.

Did you all know this?

Okay, I'm sure.

All right,

I'm that guy who doesn't know this kind of shit.

But I didn't, and so now M ⁇ Ms are, yeah, there they are.

They're making them more inclusive.

Inclusive.

There's six of them of different colors.

They're male and female.

Some have nuts, some don't.

How much more inclusive can you get?

And

I'm telling you.

I'm just learning all this.

I just, the green one, apparently

had to change because she was slutty.

Really?

See, she had like eye makeup and high heels.

Well, that's all gone.

Is anyone out there saying, is that M ⁇ M trying to fuck me?

Is this...

Is this

really the biggest thing we have to worry about?

I mean, there's a lot of tension on the border right now between Russia and Ukraine, and an incursion could lead to war, and war could lead to hockey.

This could go sideways.

We're very mad at Russia, very mad at Russia, and they're mad at us.

They're mad at us because, well, the Olympics are starting.

And it reminds them that they say we stole from them the whole thing about letting big, hairy guys do women's sports.

So I just say

what I meant to say is good for M ⁇ Ms.

But we do have more important things.

Oh, listen to this.

Biden, our president, remember him?

So he,

poor guy, he goes to Pittsburgh today.

to sell his infrastructure bill and talk about infrastructure.

A couple hours before he got there, a bridge in Pittsburgh fell down.

And Jill Biden, his wife, said, you know, as things get older, it's harder to keep them up.

It's also a shame about that bridge.

That's what she said.

But yeah, Biden, did you see this?

He called one of the guys at Fox News a stupid son of a bitch.

And a Republican congressman, I don't remember his name and I don't want to.

This guy actually said about Biden calling a Fox News guy a son of a bitch.

He said, Have we ever seen a president attack and malign the free press like Joe Biden?

Yes, yes we have.

I believe his name was, Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

The other thing this guy hates about Joe Biden is the way he cakes on orange makeup.

That's terrible.

But good news, looks Biden's going to get a little mojo back.

He's going to get a Supreme Court pick.

How about that?

Judge Breyer is retiring, and

he's going to fulfill his promise, good for him, and appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court, the first one we've ever had.

Yes.

And

today Elizabeth Warren said, I just remembered, I'm part that too.

But how about a hand for Justice Breyer, who's quitting?

He did a good job.

He was a good justice.

But

he's 83.

And he said, you know, I'm getting older.

I can remember when M ⁇ Ms were whores.

We've got a great show.

We've got Matt Welch and Fiona Hill.

But first up, what a great honor to have this man.

He is the former executive director of the ACLU, who is featured in the documentary Mighty Ira, a Civil Liberty Story.

Ira Glasser.

Sir, how are you?

I won't shake your hands, but I wish I could.

Of all the people who've sat in that chair, you are the ones I really want to shake a hand or give you a hug because I feel like you've affected my life as head of the ACLU in being such a great protector of free speech, which is my business.

It sure is.

It sure is.

And I am very aware, always have been, that I've been able to really enjoy free speech, especially here on HBO at ABC before they fired me.

But in general, and comedians weren't always.

I mean, you've been with the ACU a long time.

Were you there when Lenny Bruce was going through his problems?

No, not quite.

Not quite.

But you're aware he had like

nine trials.

Right.

They put him on trial for things that every comic now says openly.

So where is the ACL?

Well, you know,

they tried to prosecute people for wearing

flag shirts, American flag shirts.

Now you see American flag decals on everything.

People make underwear out of it, toilet paper out of it.

But in the 60s, they prosecuted people for wearing.

So you were ahead of this organization, excuse me, for 25 years almost.

I mean, from 1978 to into this century.

Right.

It's changing.

I mean, it was a stalwart defender of free speech and civil liberties.

Is it still that?

Not as much.

I mean,

they just produced a couple of years ago

new guidelines for their lawyers to use when deciding what free speech cases to take.

This is a requirement now for the national ACLU lawyers that before they take a case defending someone's free speech, they have to make sure that the speech doesn't offend or threaten other civil liberties' values.

In other words,

before they're going to defend your free speech, they want to see what you say.

That's the ACLU?

No, that's the government.

What is the ACLU doing?

I read that quote.

Then the phrase was, values contrary.

But your value is free speech.

I mean,

the most famous case, you defended the Nazis being able to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1977.

Right.

Okay.

I'm guessing the Nazis did not reflect your values.

That's a good guess.

Right.

Actually,

most of the speech we defended didn't affect your families.

Of course.

That's what it is.

That's the point.

That is the point.

And you mentioned the flag.

This is the problem I think that humans have, but now they have a bigger problem with it than they did in the old days when they were more sophisticated.

There's concepts like free speech, and then there's Nazis and flags, which are concrete.

And you see a Nazi, you see a flag burning, you don't like it.

Or if you're anti-tobacco, you see a tobacco ad, and you don't like that.

Or if you're for women's equality, you see...

Playboy magazine and you don't like that.

People used to say to me, isn't it hard to defend free speech when so few people in this country are in favor of it?

And my response always was, no, that's wrong.

Everybody's in favor of free speech as long as it's theirs.

Right.

And

everybody has an exception.

Everybody says, well, I believe in free speech, but.

Right, and it doesn't work if there are exceptions.

I mean, can I show a quote from the current head, Anthony Romero?

I'm sure you're familiar with this gentleman.

He said, I reject that we need an entrance exam on civil liberties to establish the bona fides needed to work here.

What?

You don't need an entrance exam on civil liberties in an organization called the American Civil Liberties Union?

Would you like to address him directly?

Well, you know, that might be true for hiring people to work in the Xerox room.

I don't think Yek's not talking about that.

No, that's exactly.

That's exactly.

But, you know, if you're hiring a lawyer to defend the First Amendment, you want to have a reasonable assumption that he likes the First Amendment, that he supports the First Amendment.

If he knows about it.

If you're hiring somebody, if you're hiring a lawyer to defend reproductive choice for women, you want to be reasonably certain that they believe in reproductive choice.

Now, sure, it's possible for a good lawyer to defend things that he or she doesn't believe in,

but at a cause organization like the ACLU, it wasn't so much that you were doing an entrance exam, but why would you want to hire somebody who who didn't agree with what you were pushing?

It seems like, I mean, organizations do drift.

Right?

I mean, the Republican Party used to be about small government and lower taxes, and now it's become an authoritarian personality cult.

I would call that a drift.

We see it in television.

You know, networks don't even do what their name says, like MTV was music television.

They have no more music.

You know, the Learning Channel had Sarah Palin on.

Really?

That's a lesson.

That's a good lesson.

Well, you know,

the ACLU has has become, not totally, this is not 100 to nothing, but they've become more of a

political partisan, what they call progressive organization.

Now,

organizations have the right to change, they can do that, but the problem is there isn't any other ACLU.

And if there isn't somebody who's prepared to defend what you say and prepared to defend what the Nazis say and prepared to defend what people for abortion say and prepared to defend what people who are against abortion say, then the government gets to decide who who can speak, and that's the most dangerous thing of all.

The government and the tech companies are really the ones who decide that these days.

Well, it used to be the government and the newspapers.

I mean,

that's true.

I mean,

you can have Fox News, you can have the Times, you can have the Nation magazine, you can have, you know, a thousand flowers bloom.

But the real danger to civil liberties and the real danger to speech is letting the government pick and choose.

Imagine Imagine Trump picking and choosing who gets to speak.

Imagine Rudy Giuliani.

I don't have to imagine it.

He was mayor in my city for years.

You know, we filed more First Amendment lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani than any mayor in the history of New York.

He didn't like a painting in a museum.

He tried to get rid of it.

You can't allow the government to pick and choose which speech to allow.

And the only way to do that is to defend speech no matter what the content

Yes.

So it's.

I mean, all the things you mentioned, you're right.

They are threats to free speech.

I also think this idea that feelings

are the most important thing

is a great threat to.

You know,

I'm Jewish and I had relatives.

who were victims of the Holocaust.

And

I know

what feelings were generated by the Holocaust survivors in Skokie when people with swastikas on their arm came to demonstrate in that town.

Nothing could be worse than that, except possibly how black people felt in Mississippi when people ran around with white sheets and pillowcases on their head and demonstrated.

Those are real feelings.

But

I once heard a proposal in the ACLU when I was there that said, well, why don't we say that it's all right to prohibit speech that causes emotional stress?

And I remember looking at the person who suggested that and said, you know, every time I open my mouth, I'm looking to cause emotional stress.

And

I'm about to do it again.

And then, you know, William Buckley's wife at a dinner we were at once once said to me, I used to be on his show a lot, and she said to me, why do you, you know,

you're so mean to my husband, Bill, she said, sort of, and I said, well, Pat, he says such terrible things.

And, you know, it would be irrational not to be mean to him.

That's what I do for a living, you know.

And so, you know, for the ACLU to decide that that kind of stuff

needs to be prohibited, restricted, or they're not going to defend it,

to deny what the ASLU is there for and to deny what it's been there for ever since it was created in 1920.

Well, I wish everyone sees this documentary, Mighty Ira, because you certainly are.

And I'm glad you're here still talking about it because we need you.

Thank you so much.

Ira Glasser, let's meet our panel.

Hey.

Honey, everybody.

Okay.

Here they are.

He's the host of the Reason Roundtable podcast and co-host of the fifth column podcast.

Matt Welch is over here.

Two podcasts.

New media man.

I know everyone in America gets one, but you have two.

She's the former senior director at the U.S.

National Security Council, my old job.

Specializing in Russian and European affairs and author of There Is Nothing For You Here, Finding Opportunity in the 20th Century.

Fiona Hill.

Great to see you.

Okay, great to see you both.

Last week we were talking about COVID at the beginning of the show.

We're going to do it again because, you know, we're having a big national debate here about, I think,

life and death and what should we do moving forward and who's being selfish or not.

So a lot of people attacked me, but I just want to say

My opinion that we should get back to normal.

I'm in good company if I'm crazy

because the governor of Pennsylvania, he's a Democrat, he said this week,

I think everybody's angry.

It's been two years now.

We are fatigued and ready to move on.

I think a lot of political vectors are reflecting that.

Okay.

I see Denmark.

I mentioned last week the UK.

Boris Johnson said, we're opening back up.

Now I see the Prime Minister of Denmark said, we say goodbye to the restrictions and welcome the life we knew before.

As of February 1st, Denmark will reopen.

So Matt, I wanted to just read your quote.

I thought it was really interesting in the end of your article.

You're talking about kids.

And you say they, we, need relief from the restrictions imposed by neurotic, statist, and ultimately selfish adults.

I would agree with that.

And I'm particularly interested in the word selfish, because that's where it's always lobbied at people who are saying that we are, that we should reopen.

We're the the selfish ones.

If you are for maximum safety in all situations, you are the good people, and this is selfish.

It's a great question.

Who is really being selfish at this point?

The people who are wanting to keep schools closed, there's still some closed, Flint, Michigan, who have personnel problems as well.

But people who want to impose the types of rules that are not being followed or recommended pretty much anywhere else in the world.

The World Health Organization says don't mask kids under five.

New York and 14 other states, all of which voted for Joe Biden, incidentally, follow the CDC guidelines, mask from age two.

My daughter, who just turned seven this week, has been wearing a mask for 30% of her life.

And in January, as Omicron, thankfully, is you know, it's a shaped like a steeple, right?

It goes straight up and it goes straight down in New York.

As Omicron was cutting through, they're like, okay, you have to upgrade your mask that you wear every day in your school where every one of the kids is vaccinated and every one of the teachers is vaccinated.

Who are we protecting in that scenario?

We don't realize to what extent we are departing from basic kind of scientific understandings of things and giving into our own understandable at first sense of fear and panic.

But we're adults.

We have to assess risks.

We have not been doing that, and we've been inflicting it on the most vulnerable population.

And it's a disaster.

It's been really, really bad.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well,

David Leonhardt, I think

in the New York Times, the only sane voice there, in my view.

And I think he's fantastic.

Here's a great quote from him.

This week he wrote, millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around COVID is core to their identity as progressives.

That's really a key to this because again, these are the science people and they're not listening to basic science.

I see people in cars, alone in a car with the mask.

Do they think they're going to get it from the radio?

And

they might be wanting to be incognito.

I have to say that sometimes

I have put the mask on when I don't want anyone to know it's me going by.

Haven't you done that?

I mean, come on.

I don't have the level of notoriety.

I've definitely done it.

I have to confess.

But

why can't we

precisely target, and I mean target, protect the people who are vulnerable and let society go back?

I mean like, here's what I don't understand.

Lancet came out this week.

90%, up to 90%, their head guy said, I think it was their head guy, said Omicron people who have it asymptomatic.

With the other variants, it was like 40%.

Now even 40%,

think about that.

The horrible Delta, the horrible COVID classic.

Almost half the people never even knew they had it.

That never happened with smallpox.

Okay.

Now, he says, Omicron, up to 90% could be asymptomatic.

So it's, and I know so many people have had it because it's everywhere.

And they're like, it's nothing.

I've had hangovers that were worse.

Really?

So I'm not, okay, but I also know that people are still dying, hundreds of people a day.

I want to know how both things can be possible.

So I'm asking, so I got, who's dying?

99%

from June 2021 of COVID-19 deaths unvaccinated.

78%, I've read this before, are the people hospitalized or died overweight or obese.

People over 65 make up 75%

of all COVID deaths.

So in other words, we could be more precise about this.

We could pinpoint and help protect the people who are vulnerable and the rest of us go back to life, it seems to me, and we don't do that.

Why?

I think it's part of the way that we've started to talk about it.

I mean, you're already touching on it, right?

I mean, you just said that

part of the problem is, you know, the Democrats, you know, on the one hand, think one thing.

Of course, we know that on the other, Republicans.

I was literally in a coffee shop up in Wisconsin when I was visiting some of my in-laws, and a guy in front of me, I was wearing a mask because this was in the peak of the Delta variant.

And the guy said to his friend, you know, of course, I'm not going to get vaccinated or wear a mask because I'm a Republican.

And I immediately thought, what?

I mean, how are we making these decisions based on a partisan basis?

And that's really what you're getting at here.

It's that people are actually looking at identity politics or their own personal political preferences.

We've got so polarised that we're not making rational judgments.

I mean, I'm probably with you guys, weighing up my daughter, who's 15, versus my mother, who's 87.

I haven't seen my mother in more than two years.

She's now in a residential home in the UK, but she's obviously at risk.

Whereas my daughter's in a completely different category, so we need to have a sensible conversation about that, not

based on what my political preferences are.

Right, that we protect the people.

I would spend any amount of tax money to do that, the people who are truly vulnerable.

You know, Stephen Breyer

doesn't want to work with Gorsuch because Gorsuch won't wear a mask.

I support that.

He's 83.

I get that.

Gorsuch should wear a mask around an 83-year-old.

But you know, this is not a country where most people are around an 83-year-old.

It just isn't because we're an ageist country.

I guess we're a different country.

I would also like to, I mean, it's completely right when you look at the different spread of policies, of maskings, of vaccine mandates, and whatever you people had to do to get into this building today by California law.

Unspeakable acts on Fairfax.

But

no, with all the, it's based on partisanship.

It's based on who you voted for in the election, which is bananas to me.

So as someone who's not part of that, I would like to propose this kind of semi-truce.

Each side, Team Red and Team Blue, did one good thing, one big thing great, and one big thing terrible, right?

Team Blue, you did so great on the thing that actually matters the most.

You got vaccinated, right?

It's the greatest protection possible against this thing.

Get the vaccine.

You're probably not going to die if you're healthy.

80% of Republicans over 65 got the shot.

Right, but still not enough.

Still not enough.

And a lot of the places that are getting hurt right now, so Republicans didn't do that stuff good.

But Republicans did keep schools open, didn't

issue vaccine mandates to go into a bar.

New York, you're five years old.

You can't go inside of an indoor building, even though if you're coming from Europe, you can't get a vaccine in Europe.

There are all kinds of mad things that have happened in blue states, they got that wrong.

So can we all say that we all did, and I did too, we all got stuff wrong.

So in the meantime, can you get rid of some of these mandates that we don't need anymore after the Omicron steeple goes down and then also get vaccinated?

And then we can get back to the...

But there's going to be another variant.

You can't, every time

one goes away, we're like, okay, now we're out of it.

We're never out of it.

We're never out of it.

It wants to live and it will.

It's a virus.

It's going to evolve.

And it can't be like, oh, okay, when the...

That's what we said about Delta.

When that goes away, that can't be the template.

I'm sorry.

It has to be, it's here.

It's...

It's here.

It's what?

I don't need more countries.

We have the protection for it.

That's the main argument, is that we have the protection for it.

So like, we should be able to, after

the ICU beds are no longer filled, we should be able to not.

Again, the huge change.

The vaccine doesn't stop you from getting it and doesn't stop you from transmitting it.

It stops you from dying.

That's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Take your victory and go home.

Yeah, I'm nothing.

And if you don't, I can't, you know,

I can't be more invested in your health than you are.

Yeah, it has to be about communication, right?

I mean, we've got a safe space in this table, a very safe space up there with everyone with all their masks on.

We have to be able to figure out how we can talk about this in a second.

It starts to look like every other government program.

And what is the common thread of government programs?

They never end.

They never end.

Exactly.

Including all that.

I mean, you talked about money being spent on this.

You'd be happy to.

We've spent a lot of money.

Where did it go?

Jeff Bezos on masks on Amazon.

Yeah.

You see.

Right.

And those masks are now like polluting the ocean.

They're everywhere.

Yeah, they're everywhere.

But exactly, government programs never end.

That's whether it's a Mohair subsidy

or let me bring up this government program that maybe should have ended, NATO.

Because let's talk about that.

That was a funny segue.

You don't think that's a true Segway?

No, it's a great Segway.

Yeah, because NATO was formed to fight the Soviet Union.

which disappeared in 1991.

I mean, I'm not sure what we should do about Ukraine if Russia looks like they're about to install a puppet government, like they did here.

But I mean, is it really our fight?

And again, why is there a NATO?

When the Soviet Union went away, Would we have been better off instead of it to say, we still hate you, Russia?

It looks, starts to look like an only, everybody but you club.

Well, that's definitely how Vladimir Putin feels.

I mean, you know, if he's watching this monologue right now, he'd be going, yep, that's exactly how I feel.

Well, I mean, I'm not saying he's not a bad guy.

He is a bad guy.

We're going to talk about him in a minute in a funny way.

But again, I'm just going back 30 years ago when the Soviet Union fell.

NATO was formed strictly to counter the Soviet Union.

Now it doesn't exist.

But we've signed up 15 new countries to be against the thing that doesn't exist anymore.

Of course, Russia still exists, but of course

there's going to be a reaction to that.

Would we have been better off to disband NATO when the Soviet Union went away?

And so these countries became free of the Soviet Union, but not part of an organization that's against you?

Well, Mike, you were out there, weren't you, in Eastern Europe, just around that time, because there's a different perspective from, you know, where you're sitting and standing at the same time because in Eastern Europe they probably said let's keep it we want to be part of that club but in a Russian perspective they wanted it to go.

They were interested, especially the first kind of graduating countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, they were interested in the Cold War ending too.

Didn't go so well for them after all.

They had 100,000 Red Army troops on their soil.

They had to get them out of there.

And they didn't want Washington here.

And so there's a big initiative at the time to say, we want a new security group.

It will be European.

It won't be Russian and it won't be American.

It'll be European.

Let's do this.

What do you say, Europe?

Crickets.

And crickets.

Crickets and also Yugoslavia.

Bad combination, generally speaking.

So France and Germany

and England couldn't get anything together.

And so they tried for two years to create a thing.

Nothing was created.

Meanwhile, these countries that had been absolutely devastated by communism, 40 years of communism, and then their whole history before has been invaded from right and from left, from Germany and Russia.

They wanted a security guarantee.

So it's not a question of America in 1994 and 1993 really wanted to expand NATO.

Nobody did.

Those countries did.

They wanted a place that had a security guarantee.

They didn't have to do what they wanted.

And no one was offering to.

Well, the question is, like, are they...

We just made a bad decision.

We just, I think we, like, the guys after World War II, those guys, Keenan, they made brilliant decisions about how they handled the post-war world.

Brilliant.

And I think these guys fucked it up.

Well, George Kennan, in fact, that very one and the same, he didn't think it was a great idea to expand NATO either.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So, I mean, he would have been with you for exactly the reasons that we're giving it up today.

But, you know, that was, of course, just as Matt said, there was a push coming from elsewhere to expand it.

And, you know, at the time in that early period of the 1990s, we did have this big discussion about should we have some other arrangement with Russia?

Unfortunately, we didn't.

And now we've got Putin trying to dismantle it by force.

We thought this would be a great week to do 24 things you don't know about Vladimir Putin.

I don't know if you

know our

some of the

favorite departments of our show, but we do 24 things you don't know about.

I mean, us magazine did 25, but this is, I think ours is better.

And let me tell you, Putin is known to be secretive, but when we interviewed him for this, he was an open book.

For example, 24 things you don't know about Vladimir

I'm selling the P-tape as an NFT.

There you go.

I did not know that about

it.

When immersed in icy water, my penis gets bigger.

I'm an optimist.

I look at Ukraine as half-invaded.

Sometimes I think about stepping down from leadership so I could vote more of my time to selling stolen electrons.

My favorite 80s hairband, Motley Crew.

Ha, you thought I'd say poison.

I'm the first to admit Russia has problems.

For example, the suicide rate of our journalist is off the charts.

Let's just say I don't not drink human blood.

I own a small hotel chain in the United States called the Trump Organization.

Two interesting things about my tattoo: it says 666, and it's not a tattoo.

So let's talk about the Cold War.

Let's talk about here.

I've heard you say you think we're kind of in a Cold War here.

I think that's very interesting.

You know, there's lots of talk about a Civil War.

But I keep saying, how could that work?

It's not like the first Civil War.

We were on different sides and we're all marbled together.

We're intermingled.

I don't know, you know, my dry cleaner is behind enemy lines.

I don't know how I.

There's four million Trump voters in California.

That's more than there are people in 30 states.

But

the time of troubles in Ireland.

That's what you're comparing it to.

That's interesting.

If people don't remember Ireland, the sod from which I was spawned.

They had 30 years where it was a low-level civil war, but it was just bombings and violence, and life went on, but horribly brutish, nasty, and small.

And you think that could happen here?

here?

Yeah, I mean, look, that's kind of inter-communal violence, right?

I mean, I think we'd all say that saying it's going to be the civil war and we're going to have the Battle of Gettysburg again just doesn't seem to get it for most people.

But what was going on in Ireland for a very long period, and I was growing up in the north of England at that time, and it was on British soil, you know, more broadly, not just in Northern Ireland, but also in the mainland.

You had, of course, it was actually the biggest

improvised explosive device bombing campaign in history.

I mean, you tend to to think of like the PLO or, you know,

some of this happening in the Middle East, but it was actually in the UK.

They tried to blow up Margaret Thatcher during the party convention for the Conservative Party.

They did blow up Lord Mount Bounce.

They did, and assassinations of also

various members of the British Parliament, bombings in mainland cities.

And eventually,

this was kind of stopped by a big civil rights equivalent movement, basically women getting on the streets and protesting about what was going on there.

But for someone growing up there, you couldn't leave basically a bag in the street because people thought there would be a bomb in it.

I had friends who left a car parked somewhere and it would be blown up because people were so paranoid and on edge the whole time.

And look, I mean, it's basically like we are, you know, right now, we look at someone and we immediately get suspicious about are they on the other side.

You know, as someone growing up, you know, you'd meet an Irishman or a Catholic and immediately think, God, are they in the IRA?

You know, what's going on here?

Are they a sympathiser?

But in actual fact, the IRA was only really 400 people.

Because when we start to think about inter-communal violence here, we think about militias.

We're not talking about thousands of people.

We're just talking about a few hundred people who were really that motivated in terms of perhaps.

The Irish Republican Army was only 400 people.

It was only around that.

It was only the real hardcore of the IRA.

It wasn't that.

The people who actually did the violence.

Yeah, because even though you've got a lot of people...

The political wing was much larger, who supported them.

Correct.

So you can have a big bo pool of sympathisers or people who actually do believe that Ireland should have been united and independent, but they're not going to be the people who are perpetrating the violence.

Like terrorists, Islamic terrorists or Islamists.

Exactly.

Big difference.

Yes, but Islamists are people who generally would applaud what the terrorists are doing, but wouldn't do anything.

But they wouldn't necessarily do anything themselves.

Right.

Exactly right.

But you're saying you don't need a hell of a lot of people to...

Right.

And you could just have that kind of tipping point of sentiment, but you don't need to have something on that big scale.

Look, it went on for decades before, as I said, there was like a movement from the grassroots to try to stop it.

I tend to think that we'd need them to be in better shape than they are currently.

I mean the

U.S.

domestic terrorists who are doing the next sectarian troubles in the United States.

People are not that motivated, I just don't think, here.

When you walk down the street, you don't see someone who's ready for political violence or to cheer it on from the sidelines.

I don't think that people are that emotionally invested of it, especially after 22 months of the pandemic, you're emotionally invested to survive the day of getting your kid into school more than just about anything else that they're doing.

But it depends on the circumstance.

Think about January 6th.

I mean, not everybody who showed up at Trump's rally then stormed the Capitol building.

Right, but look at the people who did.

Like, look at the...

They were surprisingly motivated in weird ways.

They were.

Motivated in weird ways.

But like, see, but see, it's true.

But see how desperately bad their organization was.

I mean, if you read the affidavit of their complaint on the Oath Keepers guys who are now up against insurrection charges, it's a pretty pathetic day that they had.

They're like, all right, I'm going to, do you have a boat to go across the river here?

Gosh, I don't know what to do.

Like, they were not coordinating well.

They were not organized.

And they were the scariest bit of a very, very scary and troubling day.

What I wonder is, is that day the beginning of something new?

Do you notice people go, you know, those people look great to me.

They were really on the cutting edge of something.

Or do people look at that and get a little bit scared straight?

You know, like, my God, what did we do on that day right okay let me move on to the court because i think this is a very historic week we're going to have the first black woman on the supreme court that's pretty big stuff

it's also the week we learned that the supreme court is going to take up uh whether we should have uh consider race in admissions now i've always been a proponent of what they call affirmative action I don't even use that term anymore.

But I don't know, it's been a long time.

Maybe it's outdated because when I look at the polling, 73% of Americans say college and universities should not use race as a factor in admissions.

62% of black Americans agree with that.

I find it weird to be more on the side of something black people themselves are not.

I mean, I think it's important to work backwards a little bit or like start with the first question of what are we trying to do here, right?

If the idea is we're trying to reduce the barriers to people who have had, through no fault of their own, disadvantages, what's the way to do that?

Is it to start judging, do you belong to this category called Asian or black or whatever, based on sometimes some pretty weird tests?

Or do you come from a socioeconomic background that's having a hard time?

That's how they do it in Oxford.

It's the socioeconomic thing.

It has nothing to do with race, and it kind of works a lot better.

If you did that, and at Harvard and other places, got rid of legacies, the one out of three people who are admitted because daddy or mommy got in there,

that would do a whole hell of a lot more than trying to figure out whether a Bangladeshi is the same as a Chinese person, is the same as a Philippine.

It's all madness.

Especially as we mingle more and intermarry more.

It's harder.

It's going to be harder.

It's already harder to say who is of what race.

I do think we have to be a little bit careful on this, though.

And I'll just you know speak to this because I did go to Harvard for grad school and I was actually affirmative action.

I mean although I'm obviously white but because I came from a very poor socio-economic background and when I was being selected for grad school pretty much everybody on the scholarships that I came from from the UK went to Oxford and Cambridge, no offense to Oxford and Cambridge, but they all came from basically private schools with one other exception.

But I was the only kid basically or at that point, you know, who was selected for these scholarships to come from a poor background and from a very under-resourced school.

And so, I was very grateful that Harvard had actually made that extra effort to seek me out.

And what I saw when I was there was that that was just one faction.

I think the socio-economic aspect of this is very important too.

And when you get back to the Supreme Court, which is kind of very interesting that they're looking into this selection right now, one of the candidates that Biden is apparently considering for the Supreme Court is a black woman from a poor socio-economic background who went to a non-Ivor League school.

And so I think that all those kinds of factors really need to be considered because it's not a question of people getting an unfair advantage because of how they look or what their ethnicity or race is, but it's getting rid of unfair disadvantage.

Well, one of the unfair disadvantages that's underlying the Harvard case is just against Asians, right?

It's against Harvard.

That's what the suit is about Asians.

And boy, they have done them some dirty.

Because, I mean, Asians,

they study hard, whatever it is, I don't know, but they do very well, so well that Harvard basically went back door to make sure that they didn't basically dominate the incoming class.

So they went to something on the test called

positive personality.

So they're going to judge you also on your personality.

And they judged Asians were lacking in likability.

And these are basically, they're judging high school kids.

These are who they are.

Likeability, courage, kindness, and being widely respected.

Oh, yes, because I remember being widely respected in high school.

Anyway,

that's...

They used tests like that in the 1920s at Harvard and other Evangel schools to limit the number of Jews.

I mean, we're working backwards from perceived bastions of success that would never accept people, someone like me.

And then saying, oh, there are too many Asians?

Okay, we've got to do something.

That's weird.

That's using discrimination against Asians.

I don't know.

Thank you.

You were great.

Time for new rules.

New Rule, now that Baseball's Hall of Fame has denied Barry Bonds membership for the 10th year, someone has to tell them, you're being ridiculous.

He's the game's greatest home run hitter.

Let him in the hall.

It's not like it's going to give him a big head.

New rule, if you visit Bangkok, skip the exhibit called the birth experience at the Kid Mai Death Awareness Cafe.

It's not very realistic.

Not many babies step out of the vagina fully clothed, wearing a strappy sandal.

And if you had to leave this place in a hurry, imagine what the emergency exit looks like.

Parables.

Neural, you can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to pretend that it's Islamophobia.

Every time I call this out as barbaric, but you have to admit, there's something a little off when your meat is not wrapped, but your wife is.

Nero, if you're going to make someone an offer to buy their children, don't do it at Walmart.

A woman in Texas did that and now, well, she just looks cheap.

Get a Macy's baby or a Neiman Marcus baby.

And Target always has everything.

And be smart about it.

Don't approach the mom until her kids are throwing a temper tantrum in the cereal aisle.

She'll pay you to take them.

Literal, now that the Los Angeles Times has written the headline, psychics and astrologers are huge on Instagram.

Now scammers are impersonating them.

Someone must send them an anonymous tip that this guy on Hollywood Boulevard may not actually be Spider-Man.

And finally, new rule, it's depressing enough.

Having just had a birthday and being 66, please don't ask me to start doing grown-up things like run for president.

A few weeks ago, Fox News's Dana Perino, a former Bush press secretary, suggested that the Democrats should recruit me to run for president, which is kind of special because it means that in the space of 20 years, Bush press secretaries have gone from telling me I need to watch what I say.

They need to watch what they say, watch what they do.

And this is not a time for remarks like that.

There never is.

They've gone from that to wondering if I should run for president.

It'll be interesting to see if Bill Maher is recruited to run for the presidency.

Now, some people think this means I've changed.

I assure you, I have not.

I am still the same unmarried, childless, pot-smoking libertine I always was.

I have many flaws, but you can't accuse me of maturing.

Let's get this this straight.

It's not me who's changed.

It's the left, who is now made up of a small contingent who've gone mental and a large contingent who refused to call them out for it.

But I will.

That's why I'm a hero at Fox these days.

Which shows just how much liberals have their head up their ass, because if they really thought about it, they would have made me a hero on their media.

But that can't happen in this ridiculous new era of mind-numbing partisanship, where if I keep it real about the nonsense in the Democratic Party, it makes me an instant hero to Republicans.

The same thing happened in reverse to Darth Vader's daughter, Liz Cheney.

who is now a hero to liberals simply because she recognizes Biden did not steal the last election.

What a sad commentary on our politics, where simply acknowledging reality is now seen as a profile and courage.

People sometimes say to me,

you didn't used to make fun of the left as much.

Yeah, because they didn't give me so much to work with.

The oath of office I took was to comedy.

And if you do goofy shit, wherever you are in the spectrum, I'm going to make fun of you because that's where the gold is.

And the fact that they are laughing at it should tell you something.

It rings true.

When normal people read that San Francisco has basically legalized shoplifting, they think Democrats have gone nuts.

They think,

you know, that Ted Cruz guy seems like a real stiff, but at least he believes in the concept of shopping with money.

It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL and WTF.

Members of Congress tweeting things like, cancel rent, cancel mortgage, and no more policing or incarceration, declaring that capitalism is slavery, canceling Lincoln and Dr.

Seuss, teaching children they're oppressors and math is racist, making Mr.

Potato Head gender neutral,

and now an emoji for pregnant men.

Real, I'm not making it up.

California just passed a law requiring large retailers to have a non-gendered toy section.

A non-gendered toy section?

Isn't Ken enough?

We need a law for that.

You have to inject yourselves into everything,

from where you can throw a frisbee to who can braid hair.

This is why so many people, by the way, were triggered by COVID policies.

They were already sick of rules.

Regulation should be a good issue for Democrats.

It's certainly one they're associated with.

And I think the average voter would agree that banks and chemical plants and drug companies need watching.

Telling a company, You can't dump the waste from your hog farm straight into the water supply.

We're mostly all for that.

But Democrats have become a parody of themselves, just making rules to make rules because it makes you feel like you're a better person.

Making sure that everything bad never happens again, which you can never fully do.

It just makes everyone else's life a drag.

The Biden Infrastructure Bill has a provision that requires all new cars to install an alert system that goes off when you leave a baby in the back seat.

which is something done only by crackheads and people who sadly, yes, do it on purpose.

And after every one of us winds up bearing the cost for cars to install this alarm, you know who's going to ignore it?

Crackheads and people who do it on purpose.

A sensor light is not going to fix this problem.

And Democrats no longer possess the common sense to understand that not every problem in the world can be fixed with a regulation.

But don't tell that to the advocacy groups who also want every future car in America to only start when the driver blows into a breathalyzer.

Oh, great, my other car is a Karen.

Well,

you know, it's also not safe to drive when you're crying.

Should we make a car that follows your texts and stops the engine when you're dumped?

Racism is bad.

How about a car that won't start unless you play a message about tolerance from George DeKay?

Regular viewers of this program may recall my long battle to get solar power hooked up at my house.

It involved this shed, which had to be built to house this solar battery.

Yes, that battery needed a house to live in.

And not just any house.

One that had to follow the specifications of this chart.

That's a real chart of the steps we had to go through to get this thing turned on.

Democrats have to stop thinking that what the voters dream about is to be hassled.

If you buy a shed at Costco, it comes with this warning: warning, this product can expose you to wood dust.

Wood dust.

No kidding, which is known to the state of California to cause cancer.

That's right, California thinks you're going to snort your shed.

I don't want to blow Pinocchio.

I just want to put the lawnmower away.

All right, that's our show.

V at the Smart Financial Center in Sugarland, Texas, April 9th at the Tulsa Theater in Tulsa, April 10th, at the Borgata in Atlantic City, April 30th.

I want to thank Matt Welch, Fiona Hill, Ira Glasser.

Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.