Ep. #586: Timothy Snyder, Bari Weiss, Rep. Ritchie Torres

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.

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

Thank you very much.

Oh, thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Welcome back.

Welcome back to my house.

Okay, all right.

Thank you very much.

It's wonderful to see.

It's wonderful to see your beautiful masks again.

Still with this shit.

Yeah, I know.

So much has changed.

We haven't been on for a couple of months.

So much has not.

I had a birthday yesterday.

That changed.

I don't...

No.

Please.

So I don't see myself as getting older.

I see myself as becoming a milder variant.

Yeah, I got a new variant.

Well, you know, today, January 21st, this is the two-year anniversary when they found the first case in America, 34-year-old man in Seattle.

Yes.

And I got to tell this guy, stop putting patient zero on your Tinder profile.

It's impressing them.

But we didn't have Omicron when we were here a couple of months ago.

That's the new one.

And that one's very milder, much milder.

We should be celebrating this.

But of course, easier to, very easy to catch.

It's like the candy man.

You just have to say its name five times.

You can get this shit.

But mild.

Well, most people don't even know they have it.

You know, it's a milder thing.

It's like, you know, it shoots its viral load, and you go, wait, did you?

So,

anyway, hopefully we're getting out of this shit soon.

I can't take it much more.

And by the way, if you are two years in, if you're one of those people who didn't get it at all,

well,

you must be very diligent, very careful, and you have no friends.

You'll be my guest.

No.

Now, it's just gone on too long.

Nobody cares anymore.

Last night the Grubhub delivery guy was eating my French fries right in front of of me.

I mean,

too long.

People want to know,

when can I get back to not going to the gym?

It's ridiculous, you know.

I don't want to live in your paranoid world anymore, your masked paranoid world.

You know, you go out, it's silly now.

You know, you have your mask, you have to have a card, you have to have a booster, they scan your head

like you're a cashier and I'm a bunch of bananas.

I'm not bananas, you are.

Okay, so here's what I read today in the paper that

New Year, 2022.

Anybody remember the movie Soilent Green?

Classic, futuristic movie from the 1970s.

You know what year it took place?

2022.

So I was like, I'm going to take this as a note of optimism.

We're doing better than that.

At least we're not eating people.

Although with the prices at the supermarket, you don't know.

Yeah, oh, well, you know, Biden's got to deal with that.

Biden's been having a rough time.

He finally had to give a press conference this week.

Did you see that?

It went on for two hours.

Two hours.

Although the first hour was just about how kids' bikes didn't used to be so complicated.

So I.

Now they're trying to get...

They're trying to feel good about themselves.

It's not easy.

They made a video, did you see this, with Tom Hanks narrating, where Tom Hanks says, we are strong, we are courageous, we are resilient, and this is the land of the brave.

Now put that diaper back on your face and go hide inside.

And then

I love this.

And then Biden comes on and he said, we have faced so much, and

what we have done is what America has always done.

We have gotten up.

That's what I want.

A 79-year-old president bragging about getting up.

That's right.

America got up, and now we're going to make a cup of senka and check the mailbox.

All right.

We've got a great show.

We have Congressman Richie Torres, Barry Weiss.

But first up, he is a professor of history at Yale University and author of On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, recently released as a graphic edition, Timothy Snyder.

Thank you, sir.

How are you?

What are you?

Are you shaking hands?

You don't care?

You know, I feel like I have to check everyone's paranoia level.

At the beginning of every somebody even suggests we wear color bands that show, you know, like, I need you six feet away or I can shake your hands.

You're okay with shaking hands.

Now that I know you're mild variant, yeah.

Okay, so

let's talk about this other thing that makes us both paranoid, because this, you're sort of the go-to guy on all things coups and cooing.

And

I read the other day that there are 57 people who were involved in the January 6th insurrection who are now running for office.

I thought that would be a deal-breaker for running.

And actually, it's like, hey, I was involved in the riot.

Elect me.

What does that tell you, sir?

I mean, that tells me that what's happened in this country is we're shifting towards a place where rather than talking about policies and people and future, we're talking about the system itself, right?

So people who were involved at the riot are just the tip of the iceberg.

There are a lot more people who are running on the big lie as their only issue, right?

You've got 10 at least Republican candidates for Secretary of State positions who are running on the platform that the big lie was true and implying the next time around we'll fix it so it goes the right way.

But you see, both sides use the term big lie.

You say big lie.

I know what you mean, and I agree with it.

The big lie is Trump claiming that he actually won that election.

They see it exactly the opposite.

Isn't this the big problem?

Is that

no one has the same set of facts?

Yeah, I mean, I said it first, and Trump has been trying to take it back from me.

You said that term first.

Yes, you did.

But I think you're exactly right.

I mean, I think.

He did the same with fake news, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, fake news.

Fake news was liberal for about a week.

Back in the good days.

And then he took it.

You're right.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, no, you're good.

I mean,

I think

the issue here is exactly what you say.

It's the facts.

So in all of this excitement, I think it's very important for the Republicans who would like for there to still be elections and a republic, for the Republicans who would like to avoid some kind of business crash in 2024, 2025, to say, hmm, maybe we should just admit that we lost and move on.

But you know that's not going to happen.

You know what?

I'm actually not so sure about that.

Really?

I'm not so sure about that.

I mean, 25% of the time.

Well, what is your optimism based on?

My optimism, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist.

I'm just hopeful and I love my country.

And

what I'm afraid of is that if we stay in this cocoon of the big lie, we're not going to have a country a few years down the line.

And I think the arguments for that are pretty strong.

And I think that there are some Republicans of good faith who, if they look back from that disaster, would agree.

There are some.

Ten.

No.

There were ten.

Wait.

There were ten congressmen who voted against his impeachment for doing this.

Ten.

Two of them, Liz Cheney and

Gonzalez not running.

Liz Cheney's not going to win.

The other eight have gone to silence on this because you can't go against the cult leader.

So again, I don't see where your optimism is based.

There are now secretaries of state in 15 swing states.

15 of them,

two of the 15 admit that Trump lost the election.

Right, right.

So that means the secretaries of state, these are the people who count the votes, right, in the next election, often.

13 of those 15 in swing states will be people who are already in the tank for Trump.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I like being called an optimist.

I don't get that all that often because I agree with you.

Like, that right now is the mainstream scenario.

The mainstream scenario in 2024 is something like Trump runs, he loses by, let's say, 10 million popular votes, he loses by many dozen electoral votes, but some states either file an alternate slate of electors or they just run out the clock and he gets installed as president anyway.

I think right now where we stand, that's the most likely scenario.

And the reason why I appeal to Republicans is that I don't think they've thought it all the way through all of them.

They're thinking about winning the game.

But if you treat it as a game, you know, then at some point the other side is going to walk away and you're not going to have a country left.

No, I think they're thinking about the corner office.

They have a nice office.

I did a whole thing about this one day.

They have a nice office.

They have a job that they could never otherwise get because they have no skills.

And you don't need any skills to be a congressman.

You get a staff,

you get a nice office,

people kiss your ass, you get a good table in the restaurant.

That's why they do it.

Yeah, yeah, but okay, you're right.

But you know what?

This is why democracy is good, though.

Like if we were in a more democratic country where we had less gerrymandering, we had less voter suppression, then congressmen would have to at least do one thing, which is represent the population.

Part of our problem is that as we move away from democracy silently step by step, the job of congressman becomes more and more like what you're talking about and less and less like what the founders thought it should be.

So let's talk about what I keep thinking is going to be where the rubber hits the road, which is the period between Election Day 2024 and Inauguration Day, which is

January 20th, 2025.

Because

based on what we're saying here about how Trump is right now changing the people in power, I mean, sometimes they've changed it so that state legislatures count the votes instead of the Secretary of State.

Well, in 2022, the Republicans are going to win those elections big time.

They're going to have those state legislatures.

So let's say in 2024,

Arizona and Wisconsin send a bogus state of electors.

Right?

He didn't really win those states, but they're sending that because they found bamboo or some crazy shit, or that they think that the Dominion people in Venezuela switched the voting, whatever crazy shit they tried last time, this time those people are going along with it.

Rudy Giuliani is going to be out there with his hair dye going down his face,

but this time they're going to believe that.

Okay.

What happens then?

Kamala Harris has to, on January 6th of 2025,

do what Mike Pence

did.

Yeah.

But this time she has to actually do what he didn't do.

She has to throw out those votes because they are bogus.

Yeah.

Now what happens?

What do Trump's people do then?

Yeah, well, what do Trump's people do then?

But what does everybody do then, right?

Because in those two weeks it will be clear that a plot is underway, essentially, to install

to them, a restoration of truth, justice, and the American way.

And that's the problem.

I mean, in our scenario where Trump has lost the election, that means there are a lot of highly motivated people who are keen not just for him not to be president, but are also very eager not to have this scenario play out.

We're talking about it now.

In two years, everybody is going to know that this scenario is possible.

And if people watch this happen, you know, stale broken step by stale broken step, they'll come to the conclusion we should be doing something about it.

And that's what worries me in those two weeks, is that you'll have partisans on both sides who think that their president is the president.

You'll have government institutions which will be unsure who the actual president is, and then the country, and I don't mean this metaphorically, I'm afraid I mean it literally, then the country can break down.

That's my question to you.

What do you, when you look at the movie in your head of what you're seeing between that period of inauguration, before Inauguration Day, what do you see going on in the streets?

What do you see going on in Washington?

And what happens on that day, January 20th, 2025?

Yeah, I mean, it's such a...

When they both show up.

Yeah, when they both show up.

I mean,

I imagine Trump giving a victory speech from some kind of isolated, protected location.

That's something that comes to my mind.

I imagine people in the military trying to reaffirm what the chains of command actually are.

I imagine Americans in blue states going to red states and Americans in red states going to blue states worrying about what's going to come next.

And what I really worry about.

Wait, so you're saying Americans, just citizens, going to places in the country where they feel safer

from their fellow citizens.

I agree.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean,

we're the most heavily armed country in the world.

Right.

48% of Americans think that a civil war is likely.

A fifth of Americans, according to polls, are ready for military rule.

A majority of Americans thinks we're heading for some kind of collapse.

So people are worried already.

So if politicians dish up for them, the scenario, the very scenario that could break the country, people are going to be rightly afraid.

They're already in a mental place where if you give them that scenario, they're going to react.

Right.

And my last question is about the future even from there if we have one.

When it's a cult of personality,

even if it's not Trump, it never goes away.

You know, I mean, in Korea, it's Kim, then Kim, then Kim.

Let me guess, the next president's going to be Kim.

And here it's going to be Don Jr.

And then Ivanka.

or whoever their kids are.

Once you create this cult of personality with a figure who's above reason, I don't think it ever goes away.

So that's your next book.

Thank you very much, Professor.

I appreciate it.

Hope we're all being too pessimistic.

Thanks.

Let's meet our panel.

Hey!

I bet you too.

The millennials are here with me.

All right, he is the Democratic congressman representing New York's 15th district, who at 25 years old old became New York City's youngest elected official and is the first Afro-Latino LGBTQ member of Congress.

Representative Richie Torres is over here.

And she is editor of the newsletter Common Sense on Substack and host of the podcast Honestly with Barry Weiss.

Barry Weiss is over here.

Okay.

So you heard what I was bitching about in the monologue there.

Let's talk about the bit of a reset, I think, think, going on in the world with COVID.

I've been asking for it for a long time.

I see in Europe, a lot of the leaders are now saying, we have to live with it.

Boris Johnson said it.

We have to live with it.

It's not going away.

Treat it like the flu.

Some of the things they're doing in the UK

now that they're not doing anymore, they're ending mandated face masks, masks in school, that's gone.

Work from home advisories, nope.

Mandatory passports to get into nightclubs and large events.

Legal requirement to self-isolate.

No.

They're getting back to normal.

We should follow this, I think.

What do you think?

Should I leave it to the Congressman?

I think we've been gradually transitioning to normal.

I mean, the public health response has become less draconian and more measured over time as the pandemic has become more manageable, and that's because of the success of the vaccination campaign.

The Biden administration has presided over the vaccination of more than 200 million Americans, which has been effective.

But now that, okay.

I'm done.

With this question?

No, I'm done with COVID.

I'm done.

It's like I went so hard on COVID.

I remember raided the Pringles cans that I bought at the grocery store, stripped my clothes off because I thought COVID would be on my clothes.

Like, I did it all.

I watched Tiger King.

I got to the end of Spotify.

Like, we all did it, right?

No, no, we didn't know that.

Well, here's the thing.

A lot of us did do it.

And then we were told, you get the vaccine.

You get the vaccine and you get back to normal.

And

we haven't gotten back to normal.

And it's ridiculous at this point.

I know that so many of my liberal and progressive friends are with me on this, and they do not want to say it out loud because they are scared to be called anti-vax or to be called science denial or to be, you know, smeared as a Trumper.

I'm sorry, if you believe the science, you will look at the data that we did not have two years ago, and you will find out that cloth masks do not do anything.

You will realize that you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic in carrying Omicron.

And you will realize, most importantly, that this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.

The city of Flint, Michigan, which is 80%, I think, minority students, has just announced indefinite virtual schooling.

In the past two years, we've seen among young girls a 51% increase in self-harm.

People are killing themselves.

They are anxious.

They are depressed.

They are lonely.

That is why we need to end it more than any inconvenience that it's been to the rest of us.

I think,

it's a pandemic.

It's like at this point, it's a pandemic of bureaucracy.

It's a pandemic of bureaucracy.

It's not real anymore.

Let's not forget that the pandemic has left a death count of more than 850,000 Americans.

Well, that's a

blunt question.

Richie, it was a blunt instrument, okay?

If you look at who was affected by this, 803 children have died in the past two years in the entire country from and with COVID.

Because I offer a perspective, I was a New Yorker who lived through the early weeks and early months of the pandemic, and it was...

just a catastrophe for New York City, the likes of which we've never seen.

We saw overflowing emergency rooms.

New York lost more than 60,000 people.

The Bronx alone lost more than 7,000 people, which is larger than the combined death toll of Pearl Harbor and 9-11.

I saw mass graves in Hart Island in the Bronx.

I mean, most New Yorkers saw a level of death and suffering we've never seen in our lives, and that's the source of the concern about COVID.

I mean, I reject the notion that the response to COVID has been worse than the disease itself.

Well,

I would argue that that.

I mean,

I asked for the COVID deaths by state.

This is per 100,000 people.

The worst is Mississippi.

My home state of New Jersey, four.

Fourth worst.

New York, sixth worst.

West Virginia and Massachusetts are 10 and 11,

right together.

Could there be two states who are more unalike

than West Virginia and Massachusetts?

And the poster boy for keeping shit open was Florida.

They're down at 17.

So New York and New Jersey did worse than Florida.

What I'm saying is...

Well, we did worse because we're a densely populated hub of international travel.

Florida should have done worse.

Florida is home to

all the old people in America.

So maybe they should have done worse.

But the data is crystal clear, and this is beyond dispute, that the deaths and hospitalizations have been overwhelmingly concentrated among the unvaccinated.

If you are fully vaccinated, you have a far lower risk of infection and hospitalization and death.

But that's not even the issue we're talking about now.

We will get to that.

What this is saying, it's Florida like stayed open.

I mean, I was just in Florida.

I've been there a few times since this started.

Half of New York has moved there.

The atmosphere is just different.

I'm not moving to Florida.

I'm not promoting Florida.

I'm just saying AOC just went to Florida and had a good time without a mask, hugging.

Like she was having a good class.

Okay.

I'm just saying I've been to Florida.

The atmosphere was just night and day from California, which was gloomy and everything was, the Andromeda strain was out there.

And

you went to Florida.

And I'm just saying, yes, there are different factors and different states.

But basically, it's like they stayed open and went on with life and they didn't do a hell of a lot worse and maybe did better.

So to say,

now, as far as you're thinking about the vaccines,

what's so different from where we were two months ago, the last time I sat here, is that we now know the vaccine does not stop you from getting it.

I found that out when I got it.

I mean I got it and everybody was like, oh my god, how'd you get it?

You had the vaccine.

I guess I was one of the first and now everybody has it.

It doesn't stop you from getting it and it doesn't stop you from transmitting it.

It stops you from dying when you do get it.

That's a pretty good reason to take the vaccine.

I'm not saying it's not a good reason.

I'm just saying that's a huge difference and it counteracts the argument that we need the vaccine to protect other people.

It just protects you.

It doesn't protect you from me.

It doesn't protect me from getting it.

It protects you.

So it's just really about you.

But the main point is this.

Every adult in America has had access to this vaccine for more than a year.

Obviously, I ran to get it the second I could, probably a second before I should have.

But the point is that if you're choosing not to get it, which I think is a foolish decision, We are not stopping the world for the sake of those foolish people in the same way we wouldn't intervene for the people who, like me, want to eat a Big Mac every day.

It's just not what we, that's not how we can proceed.

And about the science, you know,

the people, this is, I think, where Democrats look bad.

Like, we're the people of science.

And then a lot of what they do has nothing to do with science, like suggesting you wear masks outside.

There's no science to that.

Or preschoolers having to be fitted for special KN95 masks.

Or that the virus can get me when I'm walking in a restaurant, but not when I'm sitting down.

Exactly.

I mean, you know, there's so much mindless bureaucracy.

I think like Kyrie Irving can play

on the road, but not home games.

That it's just stupid.

Look, for me, there's no greater assault on science than the attempt to delegitimize vaccination.

I mean, if it were not for vaccination, we would have never eradicated polio from the United States and smallpox.

No one's arguing that.

Trump's Trump's talking about how he's gotten the booster.

I mean, well, Trump is an exception.

Apparently, I mean, Trump is more rational

on vaccines than the rest of the Republican Party.

But the Supreme Court just ruled on this, and when we found out what some of the justices said, they were listening to NPR all the time.

Exactly.

It showed that they were just like every other liberal or conservative.

They all listened to their own media zones.

And so de Maire said, we have over 100,000 children in serious condition and many on ventilators.

At the time, there were fewer than 5,000.

She also said it was a blood-borne virus.

Blood-borne virus?

It was...

I mean, that's really ignorant for a Supreme Court justice.

So don't be the, we're the people who believe in science, but you don't have the facts.

I read this before, like 41% of Democrats last year thought that over 50% of people who got COVID were hospitalized.

It was less than 1%.

But I'm sorry, if you're watching cable news all day, that's what what you're going to think.

There is misinformation and not just on podcasts and the internet.

It's also on cable news.

I think the biggest thing to me about the Democrats is, you know, present company excluded, I think is amazing.

And I hope the future of the Democratic Party is this man.

He's trying to tell the line to that.

But what I'll say is that

the Democrats are supposed to be the party of the little guy.

Right?

At their best, that's what they're about.

You know what the Democrats are now comfortable with or seemingly comfortable with?

A two-tiered system in which the haves get to go into a restaurant, laugh with their friends for hours, and the people serving them are masked and wearing gloves.

Or they get to walk, as AOC did, at the Met Gala, while in the background the staff look like they were in the handmaid's tail.

I mean,

this is a look that is unbelievably detrimental.

And

jobs.

The people with the consulting jobs or whatever bullshit they do,

they get to stay at home and order the food out and do shit by Zoom.

Whereas

it's the working-class people who are breathing their shitty stale air all day.

That looks like it's going to create a class resentment.

I mean, it looks like the liberals are always suggesting sacrifices they themselves don't have to take part in.

Look, I'm hopeful that the worst of COVID is behind us.

I'm glad you never forget you're in Congress.

There will never be an eradication of COVID, but it will become endemic.

It will become no different from the seasonal flu, and there will be a return to normal.

Okay.

We're hopeful of that.

The Democrats, and again, we're shooting on the Democrats because we want them to get better, not because we want them to lose.

That's agreement.

So in the year year 2021,

14-point swing

in their party affiliation.

At the beginning of the year, it was Democrats plus nine.

At the end of the year, it was Republicans plus five.

I've never seen a swing like that in a single year.

Some of that has to be COVID.

Some of that, I also think, is crime.

Let's talk about crime for a minute, because there's a lot of crimes that are now, I know this is a big issue in New York.

I read the local paper there.

Okay, the DA

fighting with the new mayor because the mayor won on a, you know, let's stop crime program.

And not just New York, some of the things that, oh, here we have it on the screen, thing that progressive district attorneys aren't prosecuted anymore.

Larceny under $250, robbery if the gun isn't loaded, shoplifting, trespassing, minor...

if a minor is in possession of alcohol, wanton or malicious destruction of property, public transportation, fare evasion, disturbing the peace, disorderly contact, receiving stolen property.

I mean, it goes on and on.

And people are saying, rightly or wrongly, they're saying people overreacted in 2020 after the heinous crime of the murder of George Floyd.

They say then there was an overreaction, disbanding the police, a lot of talk about that.

And who's going to get blamed for all this?

Not the Republicans.

I read, let me read the quote from London Breed.

She is the mayor in San Francisco.

I thought this was an amazing quote.

It's time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city come to an end, and it comes to an end when we take the steps to be less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.

This is...

What?

This is how you talk like a real person.

You say the word bullshit.

But the reason that that's such an important bellwether is if you go back, just wind back the clock to 2020, she was talking about being soft on crime and defunding the police.

She was running around talking about that.

Oh, really?

And the switch is a great, great sign about where she thinks her base is and where she just thinks the common sense approach is.

She's now declared a emergency area in the tenderloin district, which looks like, I mean, anti-civilization to walk there.

And there are parts of LA that look just the same.

I think you're going to see the same sort of showdown between Alvin Bragg, the DA that you mentioned in New York, and Eric Adams, the commissioner.

But it's happening with the recall recall of Chesapeake in San Francisco.

It's happening in Philadelphia.

The other day I was in San Francisco, we were walking in a beautiful park, and there was a sign that said, This is a carjacking area.

You're going to want to take everything out of your car.

Who put this sign up?

Oh, this was a government sign.

No.

Oh, yes.

Oh, absolutely.

The government put up a sign that said, this is a carjacking area?

Yes.

What about alternate side of the street parking?

I mean,

that was still okay.

I mean, that's crazy.

That reminds me of the 70s in New York when the thieves would put a sign, or people would put in the sign for the thieves.

Nothing in the car.

No radio, thank you.

They would thank the thieves for not robbing them.

The soft on crime critique, to me, is more of a caricature than a fair characterization of where most Democrats stand.

You know, everyone has their theories about the crime wave, and...

We tend to gravitate toward the theories that confirm our own ideological biases.

Ocknum's razor holds that the simplest explanation is almost always the best.

And the simplest explanation is that when you have more guns on the streets, you will have more gun violence.

There are more people during COVID.

During COVID, more people are buying guns than ever before.

More people are carrying guns illegally than ever before.

More people are assembling ghost guns at home than ever before.

And police departments will tell you they're finding more guns flowing in our streets than ever before.

That may be true, but that's not really what all this crime is about.

It's like people are going into Targets and stores like that and just robbing them and no one's stopping them.

Because Richie, if the government announces or if the DA in a city announces as they have in somewhere like San Francisco, you can steal hundreds of dollars worth of stuff at Walgreens and nothing will happen to you.

That is why there's private security in Walgreens and Floss is behind the lock and key.

No, that the

New York City has five district attorneys.

There are thousands of district attorneys in America.

The policies vary widely.

The upward trend in gun violence is a national trend.

There's something deeper than the particular policies of prosecutors and politicians.

And it's the national wave of gun violence.

But we've always had a lot of guns.

We have more than ever before.

But

I don't think the lack of crime is a very important thing.

I had three police officers shot in my district in the last month and a half.

There was an 11th-month-old child who was struck by a stray bullet.

The gun violence is out of control.

And my constituents want to to live in an America where mothers and grandmothers are no longer bearing children and grandchildren.

Yes.

And that's a reasonable expectation.

But, Richie, Richard.

Don't you think there's also something at play where in lots of these blue cities, there was everyone, the chic thing to say was talking about abolishing the police and defunding the police.

And you know what a lot of police officers I've spoken to in my reporting say?

You want to see what the cities are like without us?

Great.

We're going to withdraw.

I called the LAPD the other day because my friend was, someone came at my friend with a knife and tried to stab him in daylight.

You know what the LAPD said?

What do you want us to do?

I mean, isn't that a part of this?

It's important to put the numbers in perspective.

You know, in 1990, when I was only two, there were more than 2,200 murders in New York City.

In 2021, there were 488.

So are we reverting back to a crime wave of the 1990s?

No, but I'm concerned about the outbreak of violence.

But you're blaming that.

I think it's fair.

It seems like you're blaming that on guns, and I'm saying those guns were always there.

America always had a lot of guns.

We have the same violent gangs that we did before.

The difference between then and now is those gangs have access to more guns.

You can purchase gun components online and assemble a gun at home to an extent that you could have never done before.

Okay.

Well,

let's go on to another topic.

It's a more wholesome topic.

Yeah, well, this is very wholesome.

I had a couple of gigs canceled because of the dreaded 19 already this year.

And it puts me in a, whenever that happens, I was going to be in New Orleans at the end of the month, and it's not going to happen now because no one, everyone stopped buying tickets because they were afraid of Omicron.

Okay, so whenever that happens, I get into kind of a funk and I watch a lot of stupid television.

So I was watching the latest documentary on Playboy, the Playboy Mansion.

There have been like a million of them.

I think I'm in a hundred of them.

But this one, this one, there was something in it I just had to point out.

It said that the dogs at the Playboy Mansion at some point were hooked on cocaine.

I swear to God, look, even the dogs at the Playboy Mansion were addicted to cocaine.

So now this is not the most important issue, but I thought, you know what?

Let's just get one in the win column.

Let's do something.

I'm going to become a single-issue candidate of getting dogs off cocaine.

So

I have come up with this pamphlet:

How to Tell

If Your Dog is Addicted to Campaign.

Would you like to hear some of the things in here?

For example,

when he hears the theme to Miami Vice, he hides under the sofa.

When you tell him, Speak, he won't shut up.

He stays up all night cleaning his dog house.

He keeps leaving in the middle of dinner to use the hydrant.

You see him sucking some other dog's dick.

When you tell him to get down, he puts on cool in the game.

When he humps your leg, it takes him forever to finish.

And whenever you can't find him, he's with Hunter Biden.

So.

Congressman, I couldn't have you here without talking about Westside story.

What?

Clearly, I'm an actual expert on Westside story.

Well,

because I'm gay.

No, but part Puerto Rican.

I'm Puerto Rico.

Right.

Okay.

And your father's from Puerto Rico.

I mean, this is half of what the show is about.

It's a big story because Steven Spielberg, I mean, probably the most successful director in American history, he made the remake recently.

And, of course, he tried to be very woke about it and got nothing but grief.

He cast

Rachel Zegler as Maria.

She's half Colombian.

I mean,

she's Colombian and Polish, I think.

So she's not Puerto Rican.

That's, I guess, what the complaint was.

Do you think people should make

a problem of this?

I mean, this is the kind of thing that hangs around the necks of progressives, I think, all the time.

And people, voters in this country, say,

what are they doing?

Why?

What is the point?

You're too woke.

I'm supposed to be the defender of wokeness?

No.

I'm just asking.

Does Maria in West Side Story have to be Puerto Rican or can she just be Colombian?

I think

look, we should be mindful of diversity, but ultimately I do care about the quality of the end product, and I'm sure I'm going to enjoy the show.

I've not seen the show, Westside Story.

Movie.

Or the movie, I'm sorry.

So

that goes to show you how much of an expert I am on Westside Sword.

You didn't even know he made this?

Come on.

I'm so knee-deep in Washington, D.C.

that.

There's a man who's working for you, right?

Westside.

Cancellation at this point, it's like COVID.

Everyone's going to get it.

Everyone's going to get it, but it's a, you know, anyone that tries to make anything or take a risk or do anything creative, you know, but we're living in a world now where Frederick Douglass has been canceled and Abraham Lincoln's been canceled.

So why not join the ranks of the canceled?

It's pretty great to be free of the bullshit.

I guess my

look,

I share the concerns about cancel culture.

My frustration with the conversation about cancel culture is that we often speak of it as though it were an exclusively left-wing phenomenon.

And I would argue that the most egregious example of cancel culture in America is Donald Trump's iron grip on the psyche of the Republican Party.

There are Republicans, absolutely,

there are Republicans who live in fear of cancellation at the hands of Donald Trump, no one too afraid to tell the truth about the 2020 election, who voted to decertify the results of the election even after a violent assault on the U.S.

Capitol.

Like that kind of cancel culture is far more alarming to me than the excesses of the people.

No one ever got canceled.

No one ever got canceled faster or harder than Colin Kaepernick.

That was a right-wing cancellation.

You're right.

It happened.

There are snowflakes on both sides.

But also, if I can bring up one more thing with the woke this week, this week in Woke.

That should be like a standing segment.

This is pretty amazing.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

I didn't know there was such a thing.

It's apparently a museum.

That's what I got out of this.

The Academy Museum, maybe this is the Academy.

I'm sure we had some museum for motion pictures before, but they started a new one, and apparently they put the arm on the A-listers out here to go.

Were you invited?

No.

Are you kidding me?

I am not part of that thing.

And I'm so glad, because I wouldn't want to go.

But Brad Pitt showed up, and Queen Latifah showed up, and Nicole Kidman showed up, and Lady Gaga was there.

And I know these people don't really want to leave the house to go to this shit, but somebody said, this is important, this is what we do, this is our business, show up.

Okay, so this is the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

They left out the Jews.

Yes, they did.

That's pretty amazing.

I mean, that's like a Holocaust museum, not mentioning the Nazis.

I mean,

I'm just saying the Nazis were integral to the Holocaust.

So Jewish Hollywood studio founders, I said, make the list.

Carl Lemley, German-born Jew, started Universal Pictures.

William Fox, Hungarian-born Jew, that was Fox.

Harry Cohen, American-born Jew, Columbia.

Adolf Zucker, Hungarian-born Jew, that was Paramount Pictures.

Samuel Goldwyn, Polish-born Jew, Marcus Lowe, we still have the Lowe theaters, and Louis B.

Mayer, that was MGM.

The Jews invented this business.

Lockstock and drama.

I thought this would be a

topic you would want.

If she gets the Puerto Rican West Side story question, I get the Jewish question.

Exactly.

But I know we both believe we can answer both.

I didn't get the next question.

Exactly.

Listen, this is part and parcel of a new ideology that claims to be all about diversity.

But for some reason, the Jews and Jewish history don't really seem to rank or don't really seem to count.

It's an ideology that has whitewashed, frankly, Jewish history that says that because American Jews are successful, because they

benefit from white privilege, because they can change their last name from Ralph Lipschitz to Lauren, that the oppression that they claim, that the victimhood they claim, the fact that since the 1990s, the Jews are

the single most

aggrieved group when it comes to religiously motivated hate crimes, including what happened in Texas last Saturday with the hostage taking at the synagogue, which thank God no one was killed.

In other words, if you're looking at

identity groups merely through the lens of the amount of melanin in your skin, merely through the lens of race, you're going to overlook the unique story of the Jews, the unique oppression that Jews have faced, and their successes, as you were just mentioning in this case.

So why did they leave them out of the Motion Picture Museum?

What was the motivation?

Just because they wanted to

include, I mean, and they did include, like, obviously, Spike Lee and people who deserve to be included.

They're fantastic filmmakers.

But that your theory is that they left them out out of prejudice because they're successful?

I don't know enough about the history of the museum.

What I know.

There is no history.

It just opened.

Yeah, I know.

Well, I don't know about.

Their history is they fucked up on day one.

Right.

So what I would say is, given that this is Hollywood and given the ideology and the orthodoxy and the dogma that's prevalent here and the kind of this town is is run by Jews but but

what the heck could they be thinking

what they're thinking is they still run it what they may be thinking is uh

those are just dead white guys oh sorry oh that's so they're the founding father equivalent where it's like

tearing down the Lincoln statue a little bit oh my god I don't know I'm curious how Richie wins

look I I worry about anti-Semitism in our society there have been attempts to deny the status of Jews as minorities there have been attempts to exclude pro-Israel Jews in particular from the progressive movement.

I feel all of us have an obligation to condemn anti-Semitism no matter what form it takes and no matter what

ideological direction

from which it comes.

So

it does feel like our society increasingly fails to treat anti-Semitism with the seriousness that it deserves.

So let me ask you one final question.

There's going to be hearings that we're going to see on TV, maybe like the Watergate hearings about January 6th, that are going to start.

I don't know.

Do you know when?

You would know this.

In the weeks to come.

Weeks.

So it will be in the weeks.

Okay.

So Jamie Raskin, he is a colleague of yours, right, in Congress.

He said they are going to blow the roof off the House in terms of explaining to America what actually happened in the attack on our democracy.

I hope everybody will watch and hope everybody will discuss it and it will lead to a report that I hope again will be a game changer in terms of American history.

Overselling it?

Because I feel like I've seen this movie before, where the half of America who already believes it watches it and loves it, and the half that doesn't ignores it, and it doesn't matter.

You see it differently?

I agree with Jamie, and I was sworn in on January 3rd, 2021, and then lived through the insurrection three days later.

Wow.

So it hits close to home.

One of my colleagues jokingly said, none of this was happening until you came along.

But, you know, to me,

what is at stake is the survival of our democracy, which can no longer be taken for granted.

You know, as Democrats and Republicans, we can have differences of opinions about taxes and spending, about culture and society, but as Americans, we should be united around the peaceful transfer of power

as the cornerstone of our democracy.

democracy.

We should be united

in defending the idea that political differences should be resolved not by violence, but by elections, by respecting the results of elections.

All right.

We will end it there.

Here, here, here.

Thank you, you two.

Very entertaining.

Now it's time for new rules, everybody.

New rules in 2022.

Our 20th year.

All right.

New role now that Louisiana Senate candidate Gary Chambers is smoking pot in his new campaign ad,

he has to tell me where I can donate to his campaign.

Because I'm excited for the day when democracy has been reduced to, do you like the candidates who hold up guns in their ads, or do you like the candidates who hold up weed?

That way we can finally unite around the one feeling both Democrats and Republicans share: paranoia.

New role, Stephanie Motto, the former reality star who now has a TikTok channel where she charges $1,000 for a jar of farts.

Can't stop there.

There's still one tiny part of my intelligence you haven't insulted.

I say she has to sell an NFT of a jar of farts.

Oh, what?

She does?

Thank you, Western Civilization.

I think we're done.

New world, now that Antonio Brown has quit the Tampa Bay Buccaneers by stripping to the waist, flashing a peace sign, and jogging off, everyone has to quit their job that way.

No, it's not professional and it may affect future employment prospects, but you have to admit, when Miriam from Accounting does it, you'll never forget her.

New rule, if cable news really wants me to care about Ukraine and Russia, they have to find some better B-roll than this poor bastard in a trench in the snow.

This doesn't make me want to send them our best and brightest to fight and die.

It makes me want to send Kyle Rittenhouse.

New Roll Paps Blue Ribbon, whose account tweeted, not drinking this January, try eating ass,

has to tell me: A, are these my only two choices?

And B, did this message really come from an official source in the company?

Or was someone just being tongue-in-cheek?

Terrible.

And finally, new rule, Democrats must thank President Biden for his great service to America and then move him into a more ceremonial role.

Let me finish.

Joe Biden has been president now for a year and a day.

The day was pretty good.

But the year?

Not horrible, certainly better than the alternative, but for some reason, America has lost its faith in Joe.

Sometimes that just happens.

A new CBS poll has just over a quarter of Americans saying the country is going in the right direction, and the Quinnipiac poll has Biden's year one approval rating at 33%, the lowest for any president ever, even Trump.

33%.

If he were a movie, he'd be listed as certified rotten.

Now, of course, he's not, and what's gone wrong is certainly not all Joe's fault.

But the hard fact is, even when Joe does something good, he seems to get no credit.

Our economy is actually pretty awesome considering what we've just been through.

Wages are up.

Workers have more leverage.

We avoided a recession.

Stocks just had their best year since 1995, and yet only 38% approve of his handling of the economy.

This is what happens when you lack passionate defenders, as opposed to Trump, who every day shit the bed, and 90% of Republicans blame the bed.

And Biden may well have even further to fall because there's no die-hard Biden base.

His is a coalition of the unenthused.

No one ever fainted during one of his speeches or claimed Biden was appointed by God or asked him to sign their tit.

When he first got into office, I told you that Biden was like non-dairy creamer.

Nobody's first choice, but he got the job done.

And he did get the job done in 2020 when his nation needed him to beat Trump, and he did.

But

fair or not, to most people now, it looks like Joe Biden's get up and go got up and win.

There's no big dick energy coming out of the Democratic Party.

And their bench is so thin, they're even talking about running Hillary again.

And I'm sure she's thinking, well, who else do you got?

Kamala, her approval rating is lower than Biden's.

Bernie's too old, and Pete's too young, and this didn't work out.

But there is one guy all Democrats could rally behind and would love to see back in the White House.

Now.

Now, of course, you're saying, but Obama can't be president again.

He's had two terms, and that's the rule.

Yeah, the rule.

You know, politics, often called the art of the possible, really has now become the art of whatever you can get away with, something only Republicans seem to realize.

Like when they just made up that presidents can't appoint a Supreme Court justice in an election year, or when they changed their mind and said, oh, wait, they can when our side is in power.

Here's Mitch McConnell telling us in 2016 that he's not Not even going to give Obama Supreme Court pick a hearing because there's only eight months to the election.

American people need to weigh in and decide who's going to make this decision.

Not this lame duck president on the way out the door, but the next president next year.

And here he is on whether they'd fill a seat if there was an opening during Trump's last year in office.

If Supreme Court justices die next year, what would you do?

Oh, we'd fill it.

And then they did, eight days before an election.

To them, hypocrisy is not a bug, it's a feature.

They're all about grinning in the mirror as they shove it up your ass, like Jesus would do.

That is the essence of Trumpism.

You want to see my tax returns?

Show me where that's written down.

You want me to concede when I lose?

That's just a tradition.

Now here at real time, as a way to describe this phenomenon, we like to remember Gus.

That's the 70s Disney movie about a mule named Gus who gets signed by a football team to kick field goals with his powerful leg because there was nothing specifically in the rule book

that said a team couldn't sign and play a mule.

Trump pulled a gus every day when he was in the White House.

Not divesting his businesses, making his son-in-law our de facto prime minister, filling cabinet departments with acting secretaries so they wouldn't have to undergo being approved by the Senate, screwing with the post office to make it harder to vote.

All presidents pardon some shady people, but he was the first to say, fuck it, I'll give it to myself.

What the Democrats have to do now is their version of August,

and it goes like this: Biden and Obama must divorce their wives, not leave them, just officially, legally,

divorce them.

Then Biden will gay marry Obama.

Thereby putting him back in the White House.

Yes, the law, the law says Obama can't be president again, but there's nothing that says he can't be first lady.

And if Obama was back as Biden's husband, the Democratic Party would get its mojo back and we'd have confidence that the person really running the show was the person we really want running the show.

And Biden, of course, would still have value, like that extra Pope they keep in Rome.

When Obama did something good, Joe could stand behind him and say, this is a big fucking deal.

Historians say that when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, his wife Edith secretly ran the country for a year and a half.

Can Democrats do it again?

Say it with me, yes, we can.

Except.

Except this time, do it proudly with that smug Mitch McConnell look on your face, like, yeah, we know it's wrong and never been done, but that's all secondary to fucking you and loving it.

Don't whine that, oh, but Biden and Obama aren't really gay.

Yes, that's the whole point.

Although

if the two of them ever did have a slow dance while Beyoncé serenaded them with that last,

I'm sure MSNBC would explode into rainbow Skittles.

But

that's not where we're going with this.

This isn't not this is not about gay This is about showing that Democrats can play by gus rules, too Trump lost the popular vote in both of his elections and still got to put three judges on the Supreme Court So don't ask me to feel bad about First Lady Barack Obama

I mean

What's the big deal, Mitch?

In America the first lady always gets a pet project she feels passionate about Laura Bush had literacy and Michelle Obama had fitness, and Melania had anti-bullying.

Really?

Obama will be no different.

It's just that his First Lady project is running the federal government.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Fox Theater in Oakland, February 12th, the Mirage in Vegas, February 18th and 19th, the Fillmore in Miami, March 4th and 5th.

I want to thank my guest, Richie Torres, Barry Weiss, and some of the excited.

Don't forget to stay tuned for Bob Costas' new show, Back on the Record.

And now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime is back.

Thank you, folks.

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.