Ep. #577: Anne Applebaum, Gillian Tett, Dan Savage

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

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

Thank you.

Thank you.

Seth, please, enjoy.

Thank you very much.

All right.

All right.

Thank you so much, Mask Avengers.

Appreciate you coming.

Thank you, thank you.

All right, I know, I know.

You're very happy.

California's very happy.

Newsome beat the recall.

That's our big news this week.

It was a landslide.

And of course, because this is California, it was also a brush fire, two earthquakes,

a shark attack, and a cult murder.

But

I kid our state.

We spent close to $300 million.

Do you know this on this

stupid recall?

How many homeless people could we have housed for that money?

Well,

here in California, about three.

But the point remains: it's the principle.

And listen to this: we have another election in 13 months.

And Larry Elder, who was the main Republican opponent this time, he hinted that he would like to be the Republican candidate in that election.

And he said, lots of Republicans think that's a good idea,

and lots of Democrats, too.

But there are a lot of of signs the state is getting back to normal.

I saw a guy today homeless.

He was on fire and getting shot.

And the bystanders kept yelling, pull up your mask.

Yeah, because that's where we are.

Well, the FDA today had a lot of big, big hearing there.

I'm sure we have COVID boosters, or as Dr.

Fauci calls them, the extended warranty.

And an executive from Pfizer testified.

He thought the boosters were a good idea, and they asked him why.

And he said, I'd like to buy a boat.

Now,

this is not good news.

Lions at the National Zoo have tested positive for COVID.

They think they might have

got it at the Pride Parade.

I did that for you, Dan.

I know.

And here's the big news in literature.

Bob Woodward has a new book full of shocking revelations about Trump's last days and about how he would not concede losing the election.

Wow, who could have predicted that?

Oh yeah, me, every Friday for four years.

Other than that,

the new book, it's

one of his one-word title books that Woodward has called Peril.

Yes, and I don't know how to sum it up except take everything you thought you knew about Donald Trump and continue thinking it.

And

the big revelation in the book is that in the period after he lost the election, before Biden took over on Inauguration Day, my birthday, no big deal.

I'm trying to get people to associate the two, so every time there's a new president, I get kicked.

But Gordon's our last president, so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, General Mark Milley, he's the

head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took precautions to limit Trump's ability to start a war, launch a strike, nuclear shit.

You know what?

Milley called his counterpart in China, General Li Zhaocheng, to assure him, look, if this nut tries to nuke you, I promise I will stop it.

I think the guy was brave.

I think this is an act of great patriotism, but

I do.

But now, General Milley, he's getting it from both sides.

The right doesn't like that he went behind Trump's back, and the left doesn't like that he talked to a guy named General Lee.

And he did.

This guy should get him out.

He said to him, this is his words apparently in the book, he said, General Lee, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay.

This is the same thing an amusement park tells you after a kid dies on the roller coaster.

Now,

unfortunately, these folks have not stopped.

Tomorrow in Washington, D.C., there's a big rally called Justice for J-6.

Anyone going?

No.

J-6.

That's January 6th.

That's the insurrection at the Capitol.

This is a rally to support those people who are at the...

Yes, they want to raise money.

There's about 600 people who are there who are arrested for...

I never heard this term.

Breaking and entering.

It's at least that, isn't it?

I saw that on video.

Breaking and entering.

That's still against the law, isn't it?

Breaking and entering.

It happened to be the Capitol, but you were breaking and entering.

So they need a lot of lawyers, which I think is pretty funny for people who used to be chanting, Jews will not replace us.

But

the organizers say there will not be any violence.

It's just a little gathering for the people who couldn't get off work for the original coup.

But here's the part of the story I love.

Now, QAnon forums online are saying, wait, maybe you shouldn't go, because maybe this is a plot to round us up, to round up, you know, get us back there.

And

you knew this would eventually happen, right?

That they would get there too paranoid to attend their own paranoia rally.

All right, we got a great show.

Dan Savage and

Jillian Teth are here.

First, he's a fellow at SNF, Agoria Institute at Johns Hopkins, and staff writer at the Atlantic and author of Twilight of Democracy, the seductive lure of authoritarianism, and Applebaum.

Hey, Ann.

Great to meet you.

How you doing?

I never assume people shake anymore.

Whatever you want to do.

All right.

So your expertise is perfect for this show because it's in how countries slide from democracy into authoritarianism.

You know this firsthand, not just from this country.

You live in Poland where that has happened, right?

More than once.

And currently.

And currently, indeed.

Yeah.

So we just had this recall election, and I noticed that Larry Elder said before the votes were cast, it's rigged.

Trump said the only way Newsom could win is if it was rigged.

Well, maybe he could win because it's a highly Democrat state and he's the Democratic governor.

You know, there may be some other ways he could win, and it wasn't exactly an A-list field he was up against.

But it seems like this is the new normal, that elections just don't count.

How do we get back from this place where people don't believe that elections are real?

Well, first of all, you're right that this is a tactic well known as part of the authoritarian playbook.

It's been used in other times and other places.

Cast out on the election, say that whoever wins, if it's not me, it's fake.

Cast out on the people who count the votes.

Cast out on the media.

Undermine anybody who can do checks and balances.

And that way,

when you do break the law and when you do storm the Capitol and when you do get your protesters and demonstrators to smash things up, then people will say, you know, you'll have legitimacy to do that.

So

what we're watching is really the end game of a long-term process.

You know, Trump has consistently, really from the time he started the birtherism conspiracy theory, he's been undermining the American system very, very systematically.

And getting people back, in other words, persuading people once again to become part of the political mainstream is a huge problem.

And I think it's time to start thinking about it the way we think of a country like Northern Ireland.

How did they end the divisions there?

And you have to to start talking about peace treaties.

You have to start talking about teaching people again the rules of the system.

You have to start talking about finding common ground.

I mean, it's really, we're much farther along, I think, than most of us think.

I think it starts with, you're right.

Interesting, I never heard that analogy to Northern Ireland, but stopping hate, I think, is the beginning of it.

And I see it on both.

Because if you hate someone, you'll believe anything about them.

And you'll believe they they are capable of doing anything.

And that's where we are now.

It's not really about the election.

It's about I hate these people.

I hate them so much, they will do anything.

It's about, I hate these people, and only we deserve to win.

Right.

We are the real Americans, just like I've heard in Poland.

We are the real Poles.

And that is the real Russians.

And I hate to say it, but it is on both sides.

One side is scarier because they have the guns.

And one side controls one of the major political parties in this country.

But I must tell you,

I've asked this question on the show.

It's also a line I've been saying in my stand-up back recently.

What do you do when the people in your government don't believe in your form of government?

And in a number of times in a mostly liberal audience, someone has yelled out, kill them.

That's a liberal yelling out, kill them.

Well, that's not a liberal.

It is.

They think they are.

Well, it's a Democrat.

Or it's someone who identifies themselves

on the left.

A true liberal doesn't believe that.

A liberal in the classical sense of the word liberal.

Trust me.

I'm at my own shows.

They do believe that.

There's a lot of that belief on both sides that these people, you cannot abide these people.

They just have to somehow be extirpated.

I'm not saying literally that people want to kill half the country, but they wouldn't be upset if half the country died.

You know, it's just that we can't live with these people.

They're not like us at all.

Existential threat is the term we hear on both sides.

This is what we have to dial back from, don't you think?

Because unless we do that, unless we see the other per stop seeing the other person as this ridiculous other that doesn't belong here,

I don't see how we're going to ever believe in anything, let alone an election.

No, you're right.

Polarization, this kind of division that you're talking about, has the effect of making people doubt the system.

In other words, if we haven't won and the other guys are in charge, then it's not real democracy, it's not really America.

We're being occupied by a foreign power or by traders or if you're Hungarian or Jews or somebody else.

And so, yes, you're right.

Seeing the other side as having some legitimacy

and finding a way to share the system is fundamental to democracy.

And if we don't have that, democracy won't work.

I know you've said that the My Pillow guy could destroy democracy, which almost sounds like a joke.

But

I would remind people that for as long as I've been following politics, whatever sounds like a joke today with the Republicans, tomorrow is the candidate.

Reagan was a joke.

I'd love him back now.

Yes, yes.

And you should hear my

liberal relatives talking about what a wonderful person George Bush was.

It's a very similar.

More legitimate than Palin or Trump.

But you know, Trump, of course, was a tremendous joke.

Nothing is a joke.

Nothing is.

I could see the My Pillow Guy, Tucker Carlson, as the ticket.

Yes.

Well, so I had lunch with the My Pillow Guy, which I wrote about.

And

one of the things that's disarming about him is he's so normal.

I mean, he's a kind of goofy Midwestern businessman on the surface, who wants to take the check for lunch and so on.

And what you have to realize when you're speaking to him is he's, in other ways, a normal American.

But what he's the beneficiary of is the fact that the more extreme you become in our media ecosystem, the more you push things, the more attention you get, the more likes and

shares you get on Facebook and social media.

And he's really taken advantage of this both for politics and for, I mean, that's how he sells his pillows.

You know, he says something extreme on Fox, and then people click on his website and buy pillows.

I mean, so it's a kind of commercial political game.

But I think he's also somebody who genuinely has come to believe some of the wackier conspiracy theories.

And really, if kind of, you know, goofy guy from the Midwest can believe it, I think anybody can.

It's really important to take these things seriously.

And he couldn't have been taken seriously before the age of the Internet and social media, could he?

No, he wouldn't.

He wouldn't have had a, he wouldn't have had an outlet to do that.

He wouldn't have had a way to sell it.

No, no.

Right.

I mean, it's really changed the whole game.

And you talk about that in your article on The Atlantic, The New Puritans, which is sort of the other side of the coin.

You talk about the fact that there's kind of two judicial systems in America.

There's the traditional one, which believes in presumption of innocence and degrees of crimes and

letting the statutory limitations run out, things like that.

And then there's the social media, what they call cancel culture, going on.

And

it's interesting some of the people you interviewed, I think the term victims is overused, but there are true victims of this, not necessarily ones we've heard about and ones who are not.

No, many of them are not famous at all.

Many of them aren't people you've heard of.

They're people who have fallen victim to a combination of social media mobs plus often anonymous bureaucracies.

There will be university bureaucracies or HR bureaucracies who will investigate them sometimes without even knowing, without them knowing that they're being investigated.

And then they're giving really severe punishments, you know, loss of career, loss of ability to publish, loss of ability to make money.

They lose all their friends and all their colleagues.

They become ostracized.

I mean, these are the kinds of punishments that in another culture would be considered the most severe of all.

I mean, right up to the Greeks considered ancient Greeks ostracism was the next worst thing before the sense.

If you can't go to dinner anywhere and they look at you like you're O.J.

Simpson.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, I mean,

these are people

who have not committed crimes.

I mean, they're not people who've been, you know, who've been sentenced before a court of law.

Right.

I mean, some of them have done.

shitty things and they deserve some degree of that, but there seems to be no statute of limitations.

Exactly.

There's no statute of limitations and we don't have any kind of...

Exactly, and we don't have any kind of agreement about what are the limits.

Right.

And also some people do horrible things and get a pass.

You know, Charlie Sheen gets a Super Bowl commercial.

You know, he did a lot worse things than Louis C.K.

I don't know if you.

And he couldn't get a Super Bowl commercial.

Right.

So

the other point you make about this is that there are victims and there are also casualties like free speech.

You know, know, you say,

if we're going to drive all the difficult people, the demanding people, the eccentric people, I count myself one of all three.

You said it, not me.

Yeah, no, I'm proud of it.

I want to be difficult, demanding, and eccentric.

Thank you.

Then we're going to have a society that is

at a great loss.

You say, what about all the manuscripts that are still in people's drawers because they just were afraid to publish them what about what of all the jokes that go untold

you know we don't it's it's a lot about what we don't see

because it's unsaid I think something like 62% of Americans say they're afraid to speak

and and that's actually a right-wing and a left-wing thing I mean we tend to talk about this as belonging to the political realm but really it's a phenomenon created by social media mobs as I said by new rules about who's allowed to say what people often just don't know what the rules are, and they're afraid of breaking them because they aren't sure what's going on.

And they change

weekly.

And they change, and they become, you know, they're different from institution to institution.

And people, and you're right, and it has a chilling effect on people.

And this, again, you know, I've written books about Soviet dictatorship and other kinds of dictatorships.

And I know this kind of very extreme form of peer pressure.

And it's often just as important as violence and other kinds of threats in keeping people silent.

And so it's something we really don't want in our country.

Well, we'll try to avoid that here at this show.

Thank you very much for coming by here.

Always been a fan of your writing.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey.

Okay.

She's U.S.

editor-at-large of the Financial Times and author of AnthroVision, A New Way to See in Business and Life.

Jillian Tett is over here.

How you doing?

Great, thank you.

He's the host of the Savage Lovecast, an author of Savage Love from A to Z, Advice on Sex and Relationships, Dating and Mating, Exes and Extras.

Dan Savage

is

over here.

All right, so

we're going to get to sex.

I know you always want to.

I mean on the panel.

But let me start our discussion tonight with this, what we're learning about what happened between Election Day

and January 20th, because that's the subject of this new Bob Woodward book.

And apparently the generals were very worried that Trump would do something because he wanted to stay in office that would foment a crisis.

And I've heard a lot of people on the right say, yeah, typical liberal overreach.

Trump didn't start a war.

I would like to answer that tonight and just say, but we know that now.

Given the thousand erratic, unprecedented, dangerous things he'd already done, We couldn't have known that at the time.

Trade did start a war, a cold civil war in this country.

And also,

it's not just about Trump, it's also about the fact that Asia right now is a tinderbox.

And no, we've not had a war so far, but when you look what's happening right now, tension's rising, and there could be a war in the future.

In Asia.

Yeah.

With us?

Between the US and China, yes, absolutely.

Really?

I mean, that would be catac.

I think both countries know that we...

They both know, but here's the issue.

It's a bit like the start of World War I, and that's the historical memory that worries so many people in the Pentagon.

Because if you go back to the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, and you had a hotline between the two countries, they could talk pretty easily.

The problem today that people aren't talking enough about is actually the hotline between Washington and Beijing is pretty broken.

And that's a backdrop which made people like General Milley so concerned that you could get an accident like at the beginning of World War I and suddenly everything would spin out of control.

Yes.

Well, see, this is why I don't eat pot anymore.

Because it made me paranoid.

And then I would have to tell myself, yes, anything bad thing could happen.

That's what happens when I eat pot.

I only think about what bad could possibly happen.

I think this could possibly happen.

that's not even on number 10 of my list.

But don't we want to...

I'm so much more worried about the environment and never...

But you support what Milley did?

Yes, totally.

Yes.

Especially after January 6th, because Milley took an oath to defend the Constitution.

He didn't take an oath of loyalty to Donald fucking Trump.

And what Trump proved after January 6th was he was trying to destroy our constitutional order.

He's trying to shred the Constitution, prevent the constitutional mechanisms from operating that would replace him as president.

Trump went to war with the Constitution on January 6th.

So what Milley did early was prescient, and after January 6th was absolutely necessary.

Yes, I totally agree with that, especially since today we found out Anthony Gonzalez.

I never heard of him, but he's a Republican congressman from Ohio.

He was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for January 6th.

He's not going to run in 2020, 2022,

because he's not going to win.

He's not even going to win the primary.

He knows that.

Because this party is all in.

They are a one-issue party voting.

They're against it.

They could give a shit about all their traditional ideas like balance the budget.

They're about as much concerned about that as they are the new season of RuPaul's drag race.

They don't care about anything except this one issue.

Remember personal morality?

Remember sexual morality was such a big issue with the Republicans?

There's no way.

I've spent 30 years of my life Republicans trying to slap the dick out of my mouth, and then they reveal themselves with Trump to not give one flying fucking shit about sexual morality or responsibility.

And here's the issue.

Basically all of the Republicans are saying right now that what General Milley did was unconstitutional, if they'd spent one-tenth the amount of energy worrying about whether Trump was acting in a constitutional way, they'd have a bit more credibility right now, to go back to your point.

Trump wouldn't have been president in 2020.

I mean, Milley was, like, I'm not an expert on any of this shit, but Milley seems to have been in an impossible position.

He took an oath to defend the Constitution and the the president was the enemy of the Constitution trying to destroy the Constitution what was he supposed to do and the point is that you know you say you want to smoke pot to not worry about the future well we want generals who worry about the future that is their job to try and save off risk

I said I don't eat it

I didn't say I'm not going to smoke it I'm going to smoke a lot of it

okay so some good news.

We've made great strides with poverty in this country because of the pandemic, because so much government largesse went to lift people up.

And we're not in such bad shape anymore with a lot of people.

However, homelessness rose 40% in this state in five years.

We have half all the homeless in the country, but there's over 500,000 people who are homeless.

When they asked Californians in exit polls after the recall this week, what's your number one issue?

COVID, 32%.

That makes sense.

Second, not the economy, not crime, homelessness.

I understand.

It's on people's doorsteps.

In San Francisco, they have an app now called SnapCrap

where you can request sidewalk cleaning

because there's

VCs on, yeah.

Those same Californians, though, who tell pollsters that this is their top issue, homelessness, or the second top issue, ask those same Californians if you can build multi-family housing in their neighborhood, build apartment buildings.

Well, now it's a law.

Single-room occupancy hotels in their neighborhoods.

Like the problem in California is a lack of housing supply.

Right.

And it's driving up prices because of scarcity of housing.

Yes.

And that's making people homeless.

And the same people who put a sign in their front yard saying, in this house, we believe that no one should be homeless will murder their representatives, you know, their city council members, if they rezone their neighborhood to build more housing for these people who are homeless.

Well, and there's a word for it, NIMBYism.

not in my backyard.

Right.

And basically you have to stop and ask yourself, I mean when you were a kid, did you see homelessness around you?

Did I see homelessness?

No, go back.

Okay, so why?

That's a question we should all ask, okay?

There wasn't homelessness 50 years ago, 40 years ago, and it's very simple.

It's not rocket science.

Basically, Zillow, of all people, did a great survey which showed that as soon as you have communities that are spending more than a third of their wages on rental costs or home costs, you start to see homelessness rise.

There's not enough affordable housing.

There's not been enough ability to build affordable housing in California.

And so the type of measures that Governor Newsman are introducing right now, frankly, are too little, too late.

Well, yes, it's also last week I was talking about why can't we pipe water from the east to the west?

There's too much in the water in the east.

Yep.

And you know, when I looked into this, it's not that we can't.

It's completely feasible.

We've heard for decades it's not

only unfeasible because we don't want to do it because of graft.

That's really the basic reason why, because it would just cost so much in paying off all the different people and all the bullshit that's involved in getting anything done.

And it's the same thing with housing.

This state put aside $12 billion to solve the housing problem.

You couldn't build barracks and hire enough security guards.

and doctors, by the way,

inside barracks.

They've done it before.

So if you are on the street, come inside.

It's not the writs, but you have a cot and three meals for $12 billion.

Of course, we could.

It's just that we don't even start.

It's also, though, about this issue about empathy and tribalism and whether America feels a sense of community today or not.

Because NIMBY is basically driven by the sense that people want to defend what they have and keep out everyone else.

The problem with the homeless is that you can't trip over them in the street, even if you're an elite person in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

And the question, I guess, is how does America overcome this sense of tribalism, of NIMBYism, of just protecting their own little patch?

There's going to have to be a cram down to build housing.

Like some people are going to have to eat it.

And elected officials are terrified of pissing off the NIMBYs, even though there's a YIMBY movement now, a yes in my backyard movement now.

There's a YIMBY movement?

Yeah, that encourages housing, that welcomes housing, and it's increasingly organized.

People are going to public hearings to testify now and say, yes, please rezone my neighborhood.

Yes, please build a lot of people.

And now it's the law.

That's what Newsom did today.

So he's a Yimby.

Yes.

Okay.

Some of that credit also goes to Scott Wiener, Democrat of San Francisco, who pushed that law.

Scott's what?

Scott Wiener, Democrat from San Francisco, who pushed that law.

So good for him.

Panophag like me, so I wanted to drop his name.

Which is Wiener.

When are we going to get it?

Which is Wiener, conveniently enough.

When are we going to get

but bumper stickers in praise of Yimbis?

But

well, you know, you talk about this tribalism.

I don't know if this is tribalism, but I was looking at the pictures from the Met Gala, you know, and we're going to get to AOC.

She wore tax of the rich on her dress.

But

I noticed something that I've seen, having been out at a few parties,

since the pandemic began, and that is the people going to the party don't wear masks.

But the servers wear masks.

Yeah, there's a, there's, look at this.

I mean, that just, there's something about this that's not liberal to me.

I mean, these are the liberal swells of the world.

But if we're all vaccinated, and do the germs know who the good people are?

It just seems,

it seems a little wrong.

What do we think about this, people?

You're not going to get any pushback from me.

I do think that seems a little

security theatery, performancy around the masks.

But I want to

say devil's advocate, if it reduces the chance by 25% that somebody may get infected.

So, but

let's just make the help wear the mask.

That's the liberal approach.

That doesn't seem so.

Not at all.

And we have to realize, I mean, you know, I'm trained as an anthropologist before I became a journalist.

And so I really care a lot about symbols and the kind of signals they send.

Unfortunately, America is so tribal that wearing a mask has become almost a tribal symbol.

And it's often an amulet.

Absolutely.

I see it.

But there is a body of research that shows that they do work.

Yes.

Of course, that's why surgeons wear them.

Not in every situation.

I see the San Francisco marathon is going to make the runners wear the mask.

Now that is just powerful stupid.

But

on every level.

That does seem tribal.

That does seem like a kind of virtue signaling.

But they are, like,

I wish we could have a critique of masks that didn't go to a place where then people don't want to wear masks on airplanes and like assault flight attendants.

Like, we have to emphasize, even as we critique that kind of thing.

Well, then don't lie and do stupid stuff with them.

That they work.

But here's the thing.

Don't lie, and then people will have more trust.

Okay, well, let's establish that.

Sorry.

So I was going to say, one of the things I wrote about in my book is the fact that actually masks aren't just about medical science.

They don't just stop germs.

The act of of putting on a mask each day is like a psychological prompt to remind you to change behavior.

And it's also a cultural signal that you uphold the values of the community and have some sense of responsibility to everyone else.

That is the key thing.

And it is

also asshole signaling, not just virtue signaling.

When I get on an airplane to come here and there was some guy not wearing a mask, it's like, That's an asshole and I'm not going to sit by that guy.

But I'm glad I'm not sitting by that guy.

So I think you're right.

I think having pictures of liberal celebrities not wearing masks next to helpers who are wearing masks, servers who are wearing masks, doesn't send the right signal about communal responsibility.

Okay, so I also wanted to show the picture of AOC wearing her dress, because this got all the attention this week.

This is something that, you know, the Met Gala attracts lots of crazy outfits, but this is a new thing that people have been doing.

They've been wearing, I guess, their message, their life philosophy, tax the rich.

I just want to read the, I had some sets here.

Oh, at New York City, 65,000, the richest 65,000 New Yorkers out of 8 million people pay 51% of taxes.

And what proportion is that?

I'm just saying 65,000 out of 8 million pay half.

And they're taxes.

So it's not.

So it's not like we don't tax the rich at all.

We've been slashing taxes on the rich for 50 years.

Yeah, okay.

The rich are richer now than they have ever been.

And the lie we've been told the whole time we've been cutting taxes on the rich was that if the rich just have the most money they can possibly have, we will all benefit, we will all have jobs.

And it's a lie, and it hasn't come true.

No, no, and we need to go back to the high tax rate that we used to have.

That's fine.

I'm all for ending income inequality, but let's not lie.

The rich pay a lot of the taxes.

Yes, because guess what?

The rich are getting richer and richer, okay?

And I know we're a bit like the Breakfast Club.

He's a cool kid, I'm the geek, the nerd, okay, on the show.

But I'll point out that quantitative eating, super-loose monetary policy has massively inflated the assets of anybody who's wealthy, and the gap between rich and poor has been rising and rising.

So it's not surprising that the rich are paying a large chunk of the tax.

And if you want to build that pipeline to bring the water from the East Coast to the West Coast, you can't tax the waitresses.

You can't tax the help at the Met Gala.

You're going to have to tax the rich farmers.

Most of them don't pay taxes already.

They pay a higher proportion of income tax than Jeff Bezos does.

That his company does.

Yes, I understand that.

Yes, there are lots of things we need to amend about the capitalist system.

We have crony capitalism in this country.

No doubt about it.

I'm just saying,

you wear tax the rich on your ass.

And people are always saying rich don't pay taxes.

They pay some taxes.

They pay a big part of the freight already.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be more, perhaps, but let's not lie.

Now, I want to show you some other dresses that people were wearing at the Met Gala, because now that this is a thing to wear your slogan on your ass, Oprah was there, and she wore a dress called Ignore Previous Dress.

Don't you

understand?

Caitlin Jenner wore I still like attending balls.

Scarlett Johansen had taxed the rich, mainly Disney.

Industry joke.

Nikki Minaj had asked me about Iver Mecton.

Britney Spears was there.

My dad picked out this dress.

That's what her shirt.

Amelania was there.

Eat the poor.

Okay.

Lori Laughlin had get into any college, ask me how.

And Ivanka was there.

Someone please talk to me.

That's what her dress said.

All right.

So

let me read something else AOC was involved in this week, which is her series of tweets about abortion, because that's the big story that's happened in Texas, of course, but all the country is watching this, because this has always been, I think, the great motivating issue in elections in the last many decades for women.

I mean, we've often heard the phrase, you know, if men could get pregnant.

Well, AOC says the gutting of Roe versus Wade imperils every menstruating person in the U.S.

I would have thought maybe just saying women, but okay.

I'm willing to always listen.

She said, just one reason Roe isn't a woman's issue, people who aren't women can menstruate too.

Duh.

Trans, two-spirit, and nine-binary people have always existed and will always exist.

People can stay mad at that or grow up.

I guess they menstruate or

trans men have uteruses.

Trans men menstruate.

Trans men can

do get pregnant.

Wait, wait, all trans men have uteruses.

Well, trans men are biologically female and they've transitioned to male.

Okay.

And not all trans people get bottom surgery.

Right.

And not all trans men get hysterectomies.

And there are trans men who keep their uteruses and want to become parents and will become pregnant.

So trans men do menstruate, can't get pregnant.

If they're on testosterone, it suppresses menstruation

and they'll go off testosterone if they want to get pregnant.

But that is something that can impact a trans marriage.

Trans men can be raped and sometimes are raped by cis people who are angry at them for being trans and can get pregnant and need an abortion, just like a woman rape victim could need an abortion.

Okay, I'm just.

Maybe what she should have said is basically abortion is an issue who affects everyone who has sex.

Let's make it inclusive and not true.

She did.

Every person who engages in sex.

But my question is political.

It's about this has always been a woman's issue.

And when you say this is not a woman's issue, I'm wondering if that's the best...

It's important that the two-spirit vote, I'm sure, is very important.

I'm not mocking two-spirit.

This is the first time I heard it.

And maybe what I'm saying is, you know, maybe if the tone of this wasn't like you morons who don't know that men can menstruate and what two-spirit is, catch up.

That's why people hate.

I think what you're saying is let's get beyond the tribalism.

Because the problem with tribalism is that these people get affiliated almost no matter what to an opinion and a standpoint.

I have to say, I completely agree with AOC that trans, two-spirit, non-binary people have always existed.

Everybody needs to get over it.

40 years ago, gays and lesbians were two-party people.

Many people were just learning about it.

Right, right.

And we shouldn't be so scolding in tone.

But I disagree that abortion isn't a woman's issue or that we shouldn't describe it as one.

The left talks about voter suppression laws that make it harder to vote as racist.

They are racist in their intent.

They target black voters particularly, and we talk about that as a racial issue.

Even though some white people aren't going to be able to vote, don't have voter ID, might have a harder time voting.

We don't say don't talk about voter suppression like it's about race because some white people, and I think we can do the same,

we can walk the same line on abortion.

Yes, it is, it's misogynistic, patriarchal.

It targets women.

It's about controlling women's bodies.

It is going to impact some trans, two-spirited, and non-binary people who might need access to abortion too.

But the intent of the law targeting abortion, like the intent of the laws targeting voter suppression, that is racist, even though some white people are going to get fucked over too.

The intent of anti-choice, anti-abortion laws, what's going on in Texas, is to target women.

And it's going to impact some trans men too.

Help us along, explain, don't have this attitude.

Like the part of the country that isn't completely caught up with this is just moronic and I can't even bear to deal with you.

Grow up.

It's just, it's just, first of all, it's just bad politics.

It is political.

It's bad.

These aren't, I don't know if she thinks she's only

Republicans are in that camp who don't know what Two Spirit is.

But I think a lot of people are just learning about some of this stuff.

And it's new.

Let's not pretend all of this.

But we're having this conversation now about it because of what she said, which was a little scolding and probably unhelpful.

But now we're having a reasonable conversation about it, and more people who are watching and listening are finding out about what two-spirit is and what two-spirit means.

What does it mean?

Native Americans described people who were gender non-conforming as having two spirits, a male spirit and a female spirit in one body, one person.

Right.

And it was sort of...

what Native Americans use to mean what we use trans to mean.

That's why you see it lumped together with trans, two-spirit, non-binary.

That's what two-spirit is.

It's Native American.

Okay.

But I'm a fairly well-informed person, and I just learned it.

Yeah, but you were open to learning it.

And you learned it because.

I am open to learning it.

But you learned it because of what

AOC says.

That's not the way to do it.

I agree.

I wish the left could take the example of Obama in 2007.

What Obama's, Michelle and Barack both did was they never got angry in public and they had every right to be angry.

all the time.

Absolutely.

But it would have cost him votes he needed from

looking for an excuse to vote against him because he wanted to get the power to benefit the lives of people he wanted to change.

And so he never got angry in public and it was strategic and political.

Should a black man be able to get angry in public and get elected president?

Absolutely.

Can one?

No.

And Obama knew that.

And so the lesson here for the left is like, can we be a little bit more like Obama about our rhetoric, about our positioning, to bring along the people who may not know what two-spirit means yet, but we still need their vote, so don't flip them off while you're telling them what Two-Spirit means.

And be less tribal.

I mean, if you were to put the founding fathers in a a time capsule and bring them to the modern era, I think they'd pretty shocked that the University of Spain is a very important thing.

They'd be cancelled

straight away.

For some very good reasons, actually, too.

But exactly.

But I mean, you know, they didn't envisage an America where everyone was as tribal as this.

They tried to build in checks and balances to avoid that.

And going back to that spirit of actually having empathy and trying to reach out to people who shock, who may have a different point of view from you, may have a slightly different tribal affiliation.

That's a country where

there's lots of people who are not like you and just to insist that you come over and be exactly like I say you are immediately, that's not going to work.

One-on-one anthropology is actually recognizing that just because it's your worldview, it doesn't mean that you can assume it should be everyone else's.

It's about trying to listen to somebody else for change and actually recognizing the art of trying to listen to another point of view doesn't just give you empathy for others, it actually teaches you about yourself too.

Because there's this great Chinese proverb, a fish can't see water unless you jump out of your fish bowl and go and swim in different water for a bit.

And by golly, after COVID-19 lockdown, where we've all been locked down with our own tribe, our own little pod, people just like us, there is a desperate need right now to jump out and go and swim in some other water and try shock horror and talk to someone who might actually be from a different party.

Oh, I could not agree more.

And don't talk politics with them.

Just talk.

Yeah.

Let me ask you this about gay and trans.

They're lumped together in LGBTQ.

Right.

But it seems like they're actual opposites because gay was always about we're born this way, which I think is true.

And trans is about

what we say we're going to be.

We're not born anyway.

We choose.

Isn't that

kind of the opposite?

No, in many ways it's the trans and gay experience are very different.

In some ways they're similar.

You know I was...

But there is a risk.

I was gay and but the default setting, the presumption was that I was straight.

And I had to come out.

I had to say, you know what, the assumptions that my family, my church, everyone around me have made about me all my life are not true.

I'm gay.

For trans people who have an inner sense of themselves as not

that their sex doesn't align with their gender identity, it's a long process to get to the point where you come out about being trans.

You know, the assumption is because you have have a penis, you're a man, because you have a vagina, you're a woman.

Not an unreasonable assumption, accurate 99% of the time, roughly, right?

But they do it.

But for some trans people,

the sex doesn't align with the gender identity, like who they know themselves to be.

And the coming out thing is very similar between the gay and trans experience.

Trans people always were trans.

They just hadn't come out yet.

I always was gay, but there was a time in my life where people thought I was straight.

I let them think I was straight.

But they transition.

kids now at a very young age so that doesn't really happen because they're from a very young age.

They've been trained.

There are gender dysphoric children who are allowed to socially transition.

There should be and there are

safeguards in place.

And most kids are allowed to socially transition, you know, wear their hair longer, change their name, change their pronouns, explore their gender identity.

The advice that clinicians give is to wait and see if it's consistent, persistent, and insistent around gender.

But a lot of kids who experiment with gender and explore wind up identifying with their birth sex eventually.

Some kids do transition and need to transition and it saves their lives to let them transition.

Right.

And some regret it.

That happens too.

That'd be fair.

There are people who've detransitioned.

That is a thing that can happen.

And we need to make the world safe for people who've transitioned and for people who've detransitioned and not get tribal about that either.

Right.

Couldn't agree more.

So why do you think there was not a big baby boom from the pandemic?

Usually when people get locked in, like a blackout is just one day and there's, oh, nine months after the blackout, which I always think is like very insulting to your partner, like, oh, I can't watch the voice tonight.

I guess I'll fuck you.

You know,

it's kind of insulting, but okay.

But why being locked in?

We had an actual sex recession.

What do you think about that?

Well, for a lot of people, it was a frightening time.

It was scary.

It was uncertain.

That scary?

That you couldn't fuck in your own home?

A lot of people were fucking.

Justin Lee Miller out of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, did actually a study on how the pandemic was changing people's sex lives.

And roughly, like half of the people studied, and it was a large sample size, had a lot more sex, and half had a lot less, or none.

So it cratered some people's, and about an equal number of people skyrocketed.

But whether you want to fuck your partner is a very different question about whether you want to like make a baby and bring a baby into a world where during the pandemic it looked like Donald Trump might get another term, where the world is on fire, the environment is collapsing.

I think nothing else, the COVID-19 experience has shown people just how uncertain the future is.

But all these certainties that we thought we had about planning time, our time horizons, a lot of them imploded in the pandemic.

Elections counting.

That's kind of a big one.

Yeah.

You know, we may have seen the last one of that.

Anyway, on that happy note, thank you, panel.

Very enlightening.

I appreciate you being here.

Time for new roll.

Your rule of Orthodox Jews must continue the ritual of Kapparot, or rot, whatever it is, practiced on Yom Kippur, where they swing a chicken over their heads to transfer their sins before slaughtering it.

I must continue to mock it.

I'm not saying that chickens don't have healing powers.

They do.

But you don't swing them over your head.

You put them in soup.

New Roll, the Florida man, who in a single day got married, crashed his car, fled the scene, went to jail, responded to a request to undergo a drug test by bending over and sticking his fingers up his ass while shouting, All hail, Donald Trump.

Must admit, what he did was really stupid.

I mean, come on, man.

Who gets married anymore?

New role Ricky Martinez, the porn star, known for his ability to blow himself,

must be fitted with one of those dog cones.

Because Lord knows these days we don't need another reason to never leave the house.

New Roll, let's call school board meetings what they really are, open mic night for the mentally deranged.

And then let's replace the school board with a panel of celebrity judges and make a new show called America's Got Issues.

New rule, Kim Jong-un must share his diet secrets with America.

Look at him now, he went from DMZ to GQ.

And I think I know how.

He ditched his posse.

Yeah, it turns out all those guys with the notepads were taking his lunch order.

And finally, new rule, no cash prizes for snitching.

As I'm sure you've heard, Texas just passed America's harshest abortion law, which includes the idea that anyone even helping a woman get an abortion, like the Uber driver who takes her to the clinic, can be sued by random citizen snitches for up to $10,000.

Yes, finally a way to tap into that vast reserve of Uber driver wealth.

Jesus, when did West Texas become East Germany?

Even if you hate sluts and love money, you have to admit bounty hunting people who help pregnant women is a little un-American.

Also, you're...

You're working too hard, Texas.

This is 2021.

You don't have to pay people to snitch.

America's snitch nation now.

They'll happily do it for free.

It's okay.

It's okay.

I was with this group.

Being a snitch, now it's not a bad thing.

Oh, it used to be.

It used to be one of those first, one of the first things we taught children.

Nobody likes a tattletale.

But now, virtually any public accomplishment comes with the obligatory follow-up snitch story a few days later.

Like what happened with that sad schmuck who was supposed to host Jeopardy.

But fortunately, the honor of game shows was preserved when Squeal Team 6

went through his old podcast and found out he once used the term booth slut.

Whatever the fuck that means.

I'm sorry, Mike, but we, the perfect people who have never made a mistake, we just can't let society be sullied by horrible people like you.

Bye-bye.

Fans of cable news will recognize the rising journalist Alexei McCammond, who was appointed editor of Teen Vogue, but then had to resign before her first day when some of her high school tweets suddenly became too much to bear.

Tweets like, Now googling how to not wake up with swollen Asian eyes,

and ha, you're so gay.

And her resignation was endorsed by the hierarchy of the magazine, including the senior social media manager, Christine Davitt.

Good for you, Christine.

You helped catch the zodiac killer.

Oh, oh, oh no, you just ruined someone's career for no reason.

Same div.

Funny ends of the story, after Alexi McCammond resigned for her innocuous tweets, someone went through Christine Davitt's old high school tweets and, oops.

Seems she tweeted the N-word twice to a white friend in 2009.

Buh-bye.

You know,

this is why I'm a little hopeful that this purity purge may end, because it's starting to eat its own.

ESPN reporter Rachel Nichols was a feminist success story, but when she complained in a private telephone call about ESPN's crappy long-time record on diversity and expressed her view that she felt like she was being sacrificed by the network so they could make up for that crappy long-time record on diversity, the call was leaked and she was toast.

Now, in addition to the fact that a person shouldn't have to love getting fired, even if it does achieve more equity.

This was a private call.

Does private mean anything anymore?

Apparently not.

Even Satter, this love of snitching seems to be one of the few areas that is now truly bipartisan.

Snitch Nation isn't about what side you're on, it's about this mindset where everyone is an amateur secret policeman and tattling is a virtue.

The woke side of the internet thinks going through someone's old MySpace account makes them part of the resistance.

It doesn't, it makes you a punk.

And Republicans lately, besides sponsoring that new reality show, Texas Zygoat Hunters,

have been encouraging college students to whip out their phones to record and report professors who espouse leftist ideas.

As always, these snowflakes fall just as hard on the right as they do on the left.

Colleges pride themselves on being safe spaces, not for professors, at least not any who might want to stretch young minds to think differently and try on new ideas.

Yeah, try that at your peril.

Same with comedy clubs, where ever since the iPhone, comics have been complaining about snitches in the audience who rat them out for crossing the line, crossing the line, which is practically the job description of a comedian.

Comics are joking constantly.

Even some people who aren't comics do that.

And if you're lucky enough in life to be around people like that,

I'm sure you know.

They can't all be gems.

Sometimes you get the twisties and the joke doesn't land just right.

Exposing that doesn't make you noble.

You're not David Kaczynski, the brother of the Unabomber who turned in his own brother lest any more mail bombs go off.

That was noble.

You know, because it was about bombs and not bombing.

There's a real difference between the Unabomber and the editor-up teen Vogue.

For one thing, the Unabomber made some good points.

Or think of Edward Snowden enduring exile in Russia so he could expose unlawful government snooping, noble.

Colonel Alexander Vindman exposing the Ukraine fiasco, noble.

That's not you taking down the host of the ice capades.

You're a loser with Wi-Fi and all the time in the world to listen to long-forgotten podcasts.

You're not a journalist.

You're just a creepy little rat.

Go to Texas and catch a runaway embryo.

Oh, what?

You dug up a letter where JFK said Indian Giver?

Great, now we can tear down the Kennedy Center.

You know what?

I don't want to live in Snitchlandia, where you can't trust your neighbors and you're always looking over your shoulder.

A land of Karens and Gladys Krabitz's, ruled by citizen informants, where Republicans sue you for your sex life and Democrats get you fired for a Halloween costume.

And then we all go home and applaud ourselves for our courage.

All right, thank you very much.

That's our show.

I'll be at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore, October 23rd, at the Wind Creek events in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 24th at the Fox in Atlanta.

Killer Mike, I'm coming, November 6th.

I want to thank my guests, Jillian Zed, Jan Zavage, and Ann Applebaum.

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.

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