Ep. #575: Craig Whitlock, Katty Kay, Ralph Reed

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 going to 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.

Thank you very much.

How you doing?

Thank you for the crowd.

Thank you, masked bandits.

Thank you very much.

That's, wow, that's

all great here.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

That is...

No, no.

That is the only booster I need.

I tell you, that's.

Well, I do need a booster.

We all do.

It's terrible news out of Afghanistan, right?

I mean, you know, we have to report this.

It's the frantically getting people out, evacuating.

And, you know, we got a lot out, over 100,000, 13,000 people in one day.

I tell you, America is not too good at winning wars, but the getting the fuck out part,

you're getting a lot of practice at that.

But of course, there was this suicide bombing, which makes it a giant tragedy now.

Am I the only one who thinks we did this completely ass backwards?

We pulled the troops out and then tried to evacuate the civilians.

I feel that was a little backwards.

You know, of course it's a, yeah, it's

all the

roads leading to the airport are gridlocked, of course.

The airport is complete mayhem.

There's no sanitation, no power.

Today the promoters of the fire festival said that is some poor planning.

That's when you know.

And Robert O'Neill, he is the Navy SEAL who claims he, the one who killed bin Laden,

interesting statement he had today.

He said, it's time to kill people.

This is America, buddy, you're preaching to the choir.

When is it not time here to kill people?

Our motto should be, it's time to kill people, o'clock somewhere.

But Biden,

I think Biden's on the same page, kind of, because he said about the attackers, he said, We will hunt you down and we will make you pay.

So America is no longer the world's policeman, we are the world's student loan officer.

And of course, the attack was carried out by ISIS-K,

not a boy band,

a variant,

a Delta variant of

ISIS-K,

who don't think the Taliban is hardline enough.

Their motto is a face for an eye.

Very hardline.

Very hardline.

Oh, these people are hard.

Oh,

they make women wear two burgers in case one rips.

Just

remember the old two-bagger joke?

And listen to this, a little local flavor into the story.

Thank you, sir.

There are a group of students with some parents who are stranded from in Afghanistan.

They are from the San Diego area.

And these kids are fine.

First of all, they don't know they're in Afghanistan.

They have not yet looked up from their phones.

So that's good.

But wow.

That's how bad things are in California.

Families are vacationing in Afghanistan.

I mean, my father took us on some shitty summer vacations, but

yeah, because this state is always on fire.

Fire season used to be part of the year in California.

Now it's all the time, like elections.

Right?

I'll tell you,

hard to stay governor of California.

Not that hard to get elected, hard to stay.

California elections are like when your girlfriend says, I don't care where we have dinner tonight, you pick.

And then you do, and she goes, not that.

So yeah, the

election is in a couple of weeks.

The ballots are out for our recall election.

One of 46 faceless losers could be the next governor of this state with a fraction of the vote, and the runner-up gets to host Jeopardy.

But

that's ending some good news

that you're anticipating.

I love that.

OnlyFans is staying in the porn business.

The rent stays the same.

That's right.

Last week, just in this spot, I was reporting they're getting out of the porn business.

Now they are staying in because their fans would not take it.

Their fans went nuts.

Boy, there's one thing millennials love more than canceling the patriarchy.

It's women having sex for money.

That's the interesting thing.

Well, I mean things are bad enough in America.

Nothing worse than when even your cam girl puts you in the friend zone.

That cannot happen.

But, okay.

And finally, Donald Trump has endorsed Herschel Walker, the great football player, running as a Republican in the state of, fourth Senate in Georgia.

And Herschel Walker admits he has multiple personality disorder, claims to have a dozen personalities.

Wow, a Republican with a dozen personalities.

And today,

Mike Penn said, can you loan me one?

All right, we've got a great show.

We've got Patty Kay and Ralph Reed.

First up, he is a Washington Post investigative journalist and author of the new book, The Afghanistan Papers, A Secret History of the War.

Craig Whitlock is here.

Craig?

How are you, sir?

All right.

Well, you're here on the perfect night.

We actually planned that.

Afghanistan was going to shit.

You're the guy who knows the most about it.

Just for a layman, let me ask this question.

I see the images on TV.

We've been there 20 years, spent over $2 trillion.

I see Kabul.

It looks the same.

Not even like a Sam's club.

I mean, I was thinking for $2 trillion rebuilding a country, it looks exactly the same.

Your thoughts?

Actually, I think Kabul has changed a lot over the years.

People, I think, forget.

In 2001, Kabul was just leveled, just destroyed.

No electricity, no plumbing.

And we did that?

No, this is actually most of this.

So we put in the electricity and the plumbing?

We did.

We helped with that over the last 20 years.

And Kabul is actually very different from the rest of Afghanistan.

Rural parts of Afghanistan, they look like the Stone Age still, people living in mud huts and so forth.

Kabul, I think, has changed quite a bit, but it's still,

you know, half of it's modern, half of it's not.

Modern.

They must not be filming this on TV.

Maybe your definition of modern is different than mine.

Anyway, I won't argue with about that.

You've been there recently?

It's been a few years, but I mean, it used to be no phones, no cell phones, no nothing.

Now everybody there has got a phone.

Most of the people are under 25.

70%

of the people do not remember the Taliban when they were there in power.

Has anything taken root, is my question.

Because I imagine if the Taliban go back to their ways,

The thought that it's going to be kind of a shock to 70% of the population could mean a very different outcome than we're picturing.

I think it could.

And Kabul, again, again, remember, Kabul is very different from the rest of the country.

It's kind of like New York compared to the Great Plains or something.

You know, it's just a very different.

Again, I don't see New York.

I don't know what is on your television.

I do not.

But okay.

But they have television shows with hosts and guests and things like this in Kabul.

So it's a different way.

How long is that going to last?

I mean.

Well, this is nobody knows.

And when the Taliban comes on, they've already said they're banning music again, right?

Right.

And these are the people who banned kites, and they told the women to go home already.

So it's going to change.

Well,

yeah, I love this.

The Taliban says the women will have all their rights within the limits of Islam, which is a great way of saying none.

That's right.

I never understand why the liberals, especially in this country, are not

more apoplectic about the way women, the feminists, are treated in so much of the world.

Especially this part of the world.

Well, this is the big question, right?

You know, why did we go to Afghanistan?

What was the mission?

Well, the mission was to stop them from planning, which was a stupid idea.

They planned it in Hamburg, Germany.

You can plan it anywhere.

You don't need to be in Afghanistan.

And then they'd show the film on the news of the terrorists on the monkey bars.

That's absolutely right.

And America sent all the money and the troops.

But we got fixed in that tunnel vision, that mindset that bin Laden was in Afghanistan.

We've got to go there and we've got to stay there until we can say it will never happen again, which of course means we'll be there forever.

Right.

And your book really is sort of the modern Pentagon papers.

I mean, it is astounding and sad how similar this played out to Vietnam.

It's like we just did this shit and then we did it again.

We forget.

One generation just completely forget, which don't get me off, we should teach history in school, maybe.

Maybe that would help.

But

what your new Pentacon papers look really has the same theme, which is that they lied to us.

They presented a rosy picture in public for all these years, and behind the scenes, they knew it was unwinnable, and they just weren't telling us.

Liars.

And this went from the beginning, really.

There are memos we obtained from Donald Rumsfeld, who was Bush's defense secretary.

And in public, people are asking him, is this going to be another Vietnam?

Are we going to get stuck in a quagmire?

And Rumso would make fun of journalists who would ask this.

Then in private, just six months in the war, he sends a memo to his military chiefs saying, if we don't get a plan to stabilize Afghanistan, our troops are going to get stuck there forever.

And he ends the memo with one word.

It says, help, exclamation point, right?

And you see this go on year after year after year.

In public, they say things are getting better.

We're making progress.

We're turning the corner.

And yet, in private, in diplomatic cables, memos, conferences, internally, they're saying things are a mess.

And they know that slowly this war is slipping from their grasp, and it's gradually becoming unwinnable.

The one that mystifies me, though, is Obama.

Obama ran, and I loved it, when he said, I'm not against all wars.

I'm against dumb wars.

I was like, that's my guy, you know, because I feel the same way.

Can't be against all wars.

There's evil in the world.

Sometimes you've got to be a badass.

And America has more than not

stepped up.

But this was a dumb war.

And he kind of doubled down on it.

I mean, how could a guy that bright think you could do what we were trying to do, surge, take over the country, flood it with money, and that would change things around when really it was just doing the opposite?

What's your take on that?

Well, Obama, you have to remember, when he ran for office the first time, he was saying Iraq was the dumb war, right?

And we're going to get out of Iraq, no question.

And he did eventually pull troops out of Iraq.

But he said Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan, he said, well, no, when he first ran, he said Afghanistan was the just war.

This was the just cause that Americans, this was a war of self-defense originally because of September 11th.

But that war was already over for many years by the time he got there.

I mean, if it was a just war,

certainly after he got bin Laden, what was left to do?

I mean, it morphed into nation-building.

It morphed into this ridiculous idea, as in Vietnam, that we could change hearts and minds when by the things we were doing there, you only lose hearts and minds.

Well, and that's right.

And each president said both Bush, Obama, and Trump all promised the American people and public, we're not nation-building in Afghanistan.

We're not doing it.

Even though at that very moment, that's exactly what we were doing.

The United States spent more than $100 billion nation-building in Afghanistan.

That's more than we spent in Europe on the Marshall Plan after World War II.

And now it's all gone up in smoke.

This is what I keep saying every week.

It's because we wanted to, because that's where the money was.

You know, Ross Perot used to talk about the giant sucking sound, which was jobs, I guess, going to South America and Mexico.

The giant sucking sound is any place you have a war where the money just disappears.

in giant caseloads of cash.

And of course, you're going to have people, defense contractors and everybody else, who, let's go to the place where the money is, where no one's keeping track of it.

But I think in some ways it was even worse than you think.

Oh, God.

No, no.

No, I'm serious.

The documents we got for the Afghanistan papers, they have testimonials from people who were there in Afghanistan, Army officers, aid workers, saying we were spending money so fast we didn't know what to do with it.

You know, we were building schools when there was no need for it.

We built projects that were ghost projects.

We were just throwing money at it to say we could do it, even though the whole time they knew it it wasn't going to do it.

And I think I read in your book, 18% of the money went to the Taliban because it was kind of a giant protection racket.

You couldn't move around unless you paid off the Taliban.

So we're paying the people.

It's like when you're getting divorced and you got to pay for

your spouse's attorney.

Well,

again, in some ways.

Not that I would know.

I've heard this.

But in some ways it was worse than you think.

There was one story, an Army officer said, in this one province, there was this racket going on where we would build a bridge, Taliban would come in and blow up the bridge, right?

And then the local Afghan official who was our friend would say, okay, I need money to build the bridge back up.

But his brother was with the Taliban, so these brothers had this racket where they kept blowing up the bridge, and we kept going in and rebuilding this time and again.

And this, that's kind of Afghanistan in a nutshell.

It sounds like a Judd Appetow comedy, and you kind of look like him.

You could direct it.

Yeah, it seems like, you know, Reagan and Bush, Bush I,

they were the two presidents.

Reagan, the Beirut bombing, you know, Republicans love to say, we can never cut and run.

He cut and ran.

He went, you know what, these people are fucking nuts.

Let's get out of here.

And he did it.

And Bush I

did not go all the way to Baghdad.

Other than that, we never seemed to be able to resist.

Well, you know, you talk about Vietnam.

Just after the war started, George W.

Bush was asked, are we going to get stuck in another Vietnam?

He was very confident.

National TV says, oh, no, we learned our lessons from Vietnam.

We're not going to get stuck.

We're not going to get, especially in Afghanistan, we saw what happened to the Soviets.

We're not going to let that happen to us.

Of course, we ended up being there twice as long as the Russians were.

And even then, there are some people in Washington who want...

the war to keep going, who wanted to keep troops there.

And Biden finally said, okay, time to pull out.

All right.

Thank you for your book.

It's great.

It's going to win prizes.

And we hope for better days in Afghanistan.

Okay, thank you very much, Craig.

Let's meet our panel.

Hey!

Looks who it is.

All right.

Here is our panelist.

She is a TV journalist, best-selling author, and Washington editor for Aussie Media.

Caddy Kay is back with us.

Caddy, great to see you.

And he is a Republican strategist and founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, my old job.

Ralph Reed is here.

Ralph,

we can't help it.

We like each other.

We can't help it.

We try, but we can't.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Well, let's see.

We'll keep this secret.

I was guessing.

Right.

We'll see what happens at the end of the show.

Let's talk the politics about this for a minute, because I see two dozen House and Senate Republicans are calling for Biden to resign or be removed.

You know, I just mentioned mentioned the Beirut.

They didn't do that when Reagan lost all the troops in Beirut.

They didn't do it with the Bay of Pigs.

They didn't do it with Jimmy Carter's fiasco in Iran.

It's a tough job, President.

Sometimes people die on your watch.

Anyway, Marsha Blackburn, I was just in Tennessee.

She says Biden should resign, also Kamala Harris.

The whole thing is rotten.

It's got to go.

What did Kamala Harris have to do with this?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is starting an impeachment committee.

Josh Hawley, I love this motherfucker.

In May, he said, I think we should have left Afghanistan a long time ago.

Better late than ever.

I think President Biden has made the right decision.

Now, he has neither the capacity nor the will to lead.

He must resign.

I feel like Democrats do difficult things, and then they get shit for it.

Like

the Republicans run up the debt.

And then a Democrat comes in and has to clean that up.

They pay for things like Obamacare was going to be paid for.

or they get out of wars that both sides say we should get out of, and then you kind of use that as a cudgel against them, when really they're the ones who are doing the cleanup work and the dirty work and the responsible adult things, and then they only have to pay.

First of all, it's taken Republicans a nanosecond

since the actual atrocity and the bombing and the killing of these people to bring politics into the conversation.

the families are just being informed, and already the politics has raised its ugly head in this particular way.

It's very hard for the Republicans to make a case on this one because they stood by Donald Trump.

I mean, you've got Kevin McCarthy, who even in the course of this week seems to be saying, well, we should have all of the troops out, but actually, we should secure Bagram, which would take several thousand troops because you couldn't secure Bagram without several thousand troops there.

He doesn't seem to know himself whether he wants the troops in or whether he wants the troops out.

He went along with Donald Trump.

Donald Trump signed this deal back in February of 2020, which included, by the way, the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, which is where you get the kind of atrocity that we got in the attack this week.

That was Donald Trump's deal, and they signed on to it.

It's a bit much for them now to turn around and say.

Well, I'm glad we're all in agreement.

No, no, no.

No.

No, we're not in agreement.

Oh, Dan.

First of all, I would encourage your viewers to go online and actually read the agreement.

Okay, read the agreement that the Trump administration negotiated.

It was conditions-based.

It required the Taliban to break all ties with Al-Qaeda, with ISIS, with the Al-Qani network, and other terrorist infrastructures.

They failed to do so.

It also said that they couldn't launch any attacks.

They failed to do that.

It also made clear that Basram Air Base was going to be evacuated at last.

That was going to be the last facility we left.

Why?

Because that facility was where we provided counterintelligence, drone, air support that was necessary to keep the Afghan forces alive.

And when Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, when Joe Biden cut and run out of that facility and left $350 million in MRAPs and armored personnel carriers,

in night vision goggles and other sensitive, expensive equipment there, he not only handed the death certificate for Afghanistan to the Taliban, he sent a clear message to the Afghan forces, we're done, we're finished, he owns the whole thing.

And trying to blame his predecessor

only makes it a lot of money.

He signed a deal that was such a bad deal that the Taliban was never going to work on the ground because the Taliban were never going to totally cut their ties with al-Qaeda.

The 5,000 prisoners that were released as part of that deal were the kinds of people that were going to come round and attack the Americans if they could do as we were leaving.

You seem to be suggesting that Donald Trump signed a terrible deal, and perhaps Joe Biden shouldn't have stuck that deal.

I mean, he could have said, yeah, you're right, there were clauses in this deal that the Taliban haven't stuck to, and maybe he shouldn't have stuck to the deal at all.

And that would be the argument for the future.

But what I said was not that he shouldn't have stuck to the deal.

What I said was, that isn't what I said.

What I said was the deal was conditions-based and it was sequential.

So we did certain things after they kept their word.

He was not obligated

to withdraw precipitously and incompetently

when they failed to live up to their end of the deal.

It's a bullshit argument about the deal.

Who gives a fuck about the deal?

The deal

was no deal.

There's nothing.

37 million Afghans care about the deal.

Our neighborhood is a good deal.

What they care about is living in a peaceful country, which unfortunately they can't get for themselves, which I feel bad about, but that's not all our fault.

But there's no deal.

We have a new administration.

The old administration was a crazy man, and

he made a deal with people who were never going to

abide by any deal.

They're the Taliban.

They're laughing at a deal.

So, Joe Biden, you're right.

I'm not arguing with your main point.

I said it last week.

I don't know how it could have gone worse under Trump.

Why did we pull out the security guard before we got the people out of the disco?

You know,

it was done horribly.

It just, it depresses me a lot, like I said, that the adults take over and then they can't do better than what the children are doing.

So, execution F, absolutely.

My question is, how long does this stick to Joe Biden?

What is the political ramifications?

How does it affect people in the election coming up in a year?

The midterm election.

Is this going to be an albatross around every Democrat's neck?

Because I'm sure they're going to try on the right.

And

it is?

I don't.

I'm not.

We'll have to see whether the events of the last couple of days have

the kind of ramifications for Joe Biden that would pull down other Democrats in the midterm elections.

Because up until that moment, all of the polling suggested that the American people were with the principle of withdrawing and accepted the idea that it was going to be messy.

You've now had American soldiers leaving their lives.

And the question is: do Americans, after 20 years, feel that we were so desperate to get out

and we realize it was going to be complicated?

I think there was a lot more sympathy among the American public for the complexities of this mission and getting people out.

And in a year's time,

the awfulness of the last few days, they're prepared to tolerate because they wanted to get out.

Well, you know, the truth is 14 months is an eternity in politics.

And that's how far we are from the 2022 midterms.

People's memories are.

But if past is prologue, when you have a national security fiasco of this magnitude, it can become defining of your presidency.

When North Korean gets...

But Benghazi was for people that were not Hillary's fault, and that lived on forever.

Yeah, it did.

And this is their new Benghazi.

And I'm sure.

And it will be Benghazi.

And the fact that during that investigation, we found out that she had a homebrewed server with classified emails on it.

haunted her all the way no i mean it haunted her all the way to the general election yes it did

and and look when not justifiably but it is whether it was justifiable or not yes it did stick to it

and what there are going to be investigations yes there are going to be subpoenas Oh, I know.

There's going to be testimony.

Oh, I know.

And it's going to be ugly.

And I think if you go back.

Why do we have to make it ugly?

See, here's my question.

Like I said at the beginning, we can't help being friends.

You know, we like it.

We just do.

You keep doing this show.

I keep having you on.

Even though we have so little in common.

And

America has to get back to this.

We do.

This is my question.

I mean, I see depressing things on the news all the time with like hard to watch, you know, mobs of people like surrounding a car because they don't like the mask policy of the school board member or the health official.

And we know where you live, we know where you live.

And this happens on the left, too, you know, especially online.

I mean, more than one celebrity's gotten to trouble for like, you should die.

Who talks like this?

Who thinks like this?

You should die.

We know where you live.

How do we get back to just, I don't get you?

We're definitely not going out to the titty part together.

No, we're not.

You know?

And yet.

No, we're not.

And yet,

you're an American.

I'm an American.

We don't have to hate each other.

We used to be there.

How do we get back there?

Because the road we're on now is not going that direction.

There's no American tragedy.

It's always just a Democrat or a Republican tragedy.

So how about you were there when you had somebody else to hate?

And that the whole period of the Cold War, it was going to be easier to be friendlier with people who you disagreed with because there was an outside enemy.

And then the outside enemy went away, and for a very brief period after 9-11, everyone loved each other again.

That didn't last very long.

But without that outside enemy, there is this weird urge to hate somebody.

Because actually, if you look at the policies, even on controversial policies like abortion and gun rights and immigration, people aren't that far apart on the left and the right.

In many cases, there are majorities on policy.

It's not policy, it's emotion.

It's emotion.

Take the emotion out of it.

I mean, show people that there are business leaders who support more immigration and that there are union people that don't support more immigration and it's not a left-right Democrat-Republican issue.

There's a lot room for nuance.

It's emotion.

It's all about the emotion.

I think

there's a weird fervor of...

I think you're definitely onto something where that external adversary drives us closer together.

We certainly felt that for not as long as maybe we would have liked after September 11th, but there was a period of national unity and coming together.

I think social media.

Even the French liked to be able to do that.

I think the right has to be.

I think social media tends to exacerbate these differences honestly.

I think it tends to exaggerate them.

And I think we need to move away from the,

you know, I'm not saying get off those forums, but I think we need to find fora outside of social media where you can have a real constructive.

people didn't used to talk politics all the time i really think that's the problem

we had no idea how much we hated the other guy and it worked a lot better because we didn't talk about it it wasn't on facebook if you were just talking politics and talking policy i don't think we would hate each other I think it's the in a tribe.

I'm in my tribe and nothing that you say I'm ever going to accept because you're not in my tribe.

So I have to hate you, even if actually, you know what I kind of agree with you on a lot of issues.

I still have to hate you.

You know, I was watching,

did you see the new Borat movie, the sequel?

I missed that.

I'm sure Ralph.

All right.

Well,

there's two guys in it that he lives with for a week.

They obviously never had seen the first Borat.

Right.

They didn't know he was in character.

They didn't know he was in character because he's so great at that.

Okay.

So, and these are two which you might call rednecks, but they weren't bad people.

And I'm thinking, I'm watching these guys, and outside of the politics, I could talk to them, I could go to a baseball game with them.

They're not stupid, they're not crazy, they're using computers,

but they believe in every QAnon crazy thing there is.

I mean, Ralph, you don't think the Democrats eat babies, do you?

No.

Oh, good.

Okay, but they do, and QAnon does.

Okay.

Okay, what I'm saying is, you take away the politics.

These are just your regular guys.

How do we get into their head so we can get them out of the idea that the Democrats are reading?

I'm not going to be able to get a couple of things.

I'd like to, if I can, just say I think the glass is maybe more half full than you're willing to acknowledge.

The first is, I just finished reading Ron Chernow's biography of George Washington, which is what he wrote before he did the Hamilton book.

And it's amazing.

I mean, it's easy to forget how much they fought.

It's easy to forget how pitched the battles were.

And, you know, in our own time, you know, we've had a problem.

Between the citizens, or are you just talking about the founding fathers themselves?

Everybody.

I mean, there were party organs, there were party newspapers.

Most of them.

Jefferson was subsidizing a newspaper, attacking Washington while he was in Washington's cabinet.

Washington was accused of being a British agent.

Sound familiar?

Most of the president being accused of being an agent of a foreign power?

Most of New York

was on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War.

The point is this.

It's okay to have these kind of fights.

It's okay as long as they're mediated.

But they're not.

As long as they're mediated by a common sense of value.

Did it get to you should die with

it?

Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Well, yes,

that's not okay.

That's not regular citizens.

I think the.

Yeah, I guess you got me there.

I guess I do have a point there.

You know what it is?

Yeah, we don't duel anymore.

We don't duel anymore.

That's right.

When it's anonymous.

We threaten to hang Mike Pence.

That's close.

We threaten to hang hang Pence.

And not just them.

Right.

I think that when it's anonymous, I don't know if you guys have found this on your Twitter feed, but when things are anonymous, people suddenly feel they can be really, really mean.

In a way that they never would if they had to put their name in the middle.

The phone is evil.

It's

really evil.

All right.

So, listen, there is a new king of late night, and his name is Greg Gutfeld,

according to Variety.

Look at that, or Newsweek.

I don't understand this.

I read this, so I sampled this show.

Funny.

No, actually, it's an interesting discussion we're going to have, but

it's Fox News found a good thing.

They can make fun of liberals, and they are doing it to great success.

We will discuss why in a minute, but in the meantime, I just want to tell you, Fox News smells a good thing.

So they are coming up with they have greenlit a whole new slate of conservative television shows.

Would you like to see some of the things they have coming on?

I knew you would.

Like a third rock from the sun, according to science,

is

one of their new ones.

Comedians in Cars Getting Jerky is going to be

I Love Deucey,

Myth trusters.

How I met your handmaid

Mad About Jews with Steve Bannon.

Cuse the boss.

I dream of gerrymandering.

Curb your environmentalism.

And this is Gus.

So,

okay.

All right.

So, you're going to like this part.

I've been asked over the years many times, why isn't there conservative comedy?

And I always would give the answer, which I think was the true answer,

there's none good fodder for it.

You know, the liberals aren't crazy.

This was my answer for many years.

I cited Dennis Miller, who is a great comedian.

Yeah.

Period.

As a comedian, he's great.

But when he became a conservative, he was tasked with doing 10 minutes on Nancy Pelosi.

She's in the same way we would talk about Sarah Palin.

But Nancy Pelosi isn't funny like that, because she's not crazy or stupid.

Sarah Palin is a moron.

It's easy to,

she is, and it's easy to make fun of her, really.

It's easy to make fun of Wasilla Living,

meth lab, whatever, Sarah Palin.

I'm not saying she works in a meth lab, but I'm sure we did some jokes about that.

Well, the family,

so there was just this,

there was nothing to make fun of that was that crazy.

Now,

I don't think it's the same situation.

I keep saying to the liberals, you know what?

If what you're doing sounds like an onion headline,

stop.

And that's why

this is why there is an opening for conservative comedy.

Because, you know,

when you tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln in the land of Lincoln, land of Lincoln cancels Lincoln, it's an onion headline.

You know, three-year-olds pick their own gender.

is an onion headline.

You know, a lot of this stuff that goes on on the left now, it's, you know, Seattle votes to decriminalize crime.

Now,

the problem is that they don't know how to do comedy.

But if they found someone who did, they could.

Because I do it more here than I used to, because comedy goes where the funny is.

And there is funny on the left now, as well as the right.

So, um.

You don't agree?

Did you go to many Trump rallies?

What?

Did you go to many Trump rallies?

I was made fun of in many Trump rallies.

I didn't.

I've never.

Of course, why would I go to a Trump?

I get punched.

So I went to a bunch of Trump rallies.

It was sort of a show, right?

I mean, it was the same thing.

I watched Gutfield before I came to this.

It's kind of the same thing as a Trump rally.

It's done with a little bit more, somebody's written it a bit more succinctly because Trump went on and on and on.

He'd have been thrown off after, you know, two hours.

He's still going.

But it was a sort of funny show.

And the lines that Trump used to talk about, that he used to make fun of, liberals, the wokeness, is exactly what Gutfeld is saying.

It's the same thing.

He's just taking his lines from Trump.

He's stolen the lines.

Yeah, and look, the other thing is, when comedy becomes totally predictable, it's just not funny.

And what's happened to the traditional legacy broadcast media shows is they're democratic talking points.

Right.

And when it becomes predictable, I mean, half of comedy, is you say something I don't expect you to say.

Right.

Okay?

It doesn't matter whether it's left, right, or center.

And I think in addition to that, and you know this, the camera's a very penetrating medium.

There's nowhere to hide.

You've either got the talent or you don't.

And I know Greg.

He's funny.

He's smart.

He's quick.

And particularly when you put him with an ensemble, as they've done, where he gets to play off other people.

But you know what works?

I watched it.

It's pretty predictable.

I mean,

you can tell what he's going to say.

I mean, it's as predictable as a child.

It's not as as predictable as Colbert, okay?

It's pretty predictable.

You know exactly what he's going to say about climate.

You know what he's going to say about women.

I could say the same thing about the other shows.

Absolutely.

Yeah, no problem.

It is the one true opinion out there.

If you don't have the one true opinion, don't go in front of the audience that comes because they don't like it.

And they're there more to clap to the opinion that they already believe in than to laugh.

And that's what changed.

And back to your earlier question.

When did everything become about about politics right when did comedy become about politics because well there's always been that wasn't the way carson was it wasn't the way leno was it wasn't where the way the early letterman was it wasn't the way jack parr was well they certainly did politics in the monologue but they did a middle of the road you didn't even know who johnny voted for but they were equal opportunity tormentors they dinged both sides

and what i'm saying is when did comedy yes become reduction

right when everything became partisan when it became more important to cheer for your team than to actually have a laugh.

That's where you started with partisanship.

If we're in this position where things are so partisan and you can never criticize your own tribe, and we've seen that happen during the course of this week, where reporters have been slammed by the administration and by some Democrats for pointing out that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a massive display of incompetence, which it was.

It was, you know, when people are clinging to the wheels of a plane, that's incompetent.

It shouldn't be happening.

But it's almost more vicious within your own tribe, I think, that we've got so

to your point about that.

We replaced everything with politics.

You know what else we replaced with politics?

Religion.

Religion is way down, Ralph, I hate to tell you.

And I think it's because politics is the new religion.

You know, eating babies, there's nothing more religious than that.

And now that's what.

But listen to this.

U.S.

church membership, the Gallup poll, had been doing this for 80 years, polling people about their religion.

In 1937, 73%

went to church.

In 1999, it was still 70%.

2010, 62.

2018, 50.

Now it is for the first time dropped below 50%.

2020, 40.

Please.

Be nice.

Yes, and I take a lot of the credit.

No,

in 2020, it was 47%.

Democrats showed a 25-point decline since 2000.

Even Republicans, a 12-point drop.

Catholics lost the most audience share, shall we say?

18 points.

Even Protestants are down 9 points.

Jesus is having trouble putting asses in pews.

Why?

Why?

Why do you think?

Why is it dropping so much?

I think it's part and parcel.

A sinking tide lowers all boats, and

there's a general lack of trust and affiliation with all organized institutions, whether it's business or the media.

Almost every institution

has suffered.

It sets itself up as an institution above.

Organized religion has been no exception to that.

But let me point out a couple of other things from that poll.

The headline is about that one number, but let me tell you what else the poll showed.

It showed that 83% of the American people still say they believe in God.

It said that 59% of the people say they pray to God regularly in their daily lives, which is 9% higher than it was in 1990.

And do you know what the number one reason that people gave in that poll for why they were no longer attending religious services?

The number one reason was because they preferred to pray and worship God in the privacy of their own home.

So they're not turning away from God.

They're not turning away from Jesus.

They're turning away from an institution.

But I believe they'll come back.

It's cyclical.

The same polling also shows that trust in religious leaders has fallen to an all-time low of 37%.

You are less trusted than

doctors, teachers, even the police.

You are more trusted than journalists.

I give you that.

It's hard to get one word in the media.

I will grant you.

But, you know, you look at, we had a slew of Catholic sex scandals.

And then I think you had the big evangelical churches putting their weight behind a guy who was not the most religious of presidents.

And you wonder why there has been a decline in trust in religious leaders.

Caddy, I know that's your opinion,

and you're not the only one who holds it.

All I'm saying is that's not supported by the data.

When people were asked why they had lost faith or why they weren't attending church or why they weren't members, they didn't say politics.

They said, I prefer to worship on my own.

But there's no question that some of these scandals and some of these downfalls have affected the way the church is viewed.

But remember that the ultimate objective here isn't to get them to have faith in an institution or in a leader.

The objective is to lead them to God through his Son Jesus Christ.

Okay?

And what I'm saying is that spiritual hunger is innate to the human spirit.

Every person has what Pascal called the God-shaped vacuum in their soul that nothing else can fill.

And as long as they're in a human being,

but it's not Sunday morning.

Hey, it preaches on Friday night.

What if the

polarization that we have been talking about fueled the drop in people going to church and feeding the need for religion?

Your point about religion and politics being linked.

Because part of the reason people go to church is a sense of community and tribe.

Yes, there's a spiritual side, but there's also this fervor, which is, and faith, which if you've got political polarization and politics or a political group becomes your new church and through Facebook in a way it became a new church.

That was your new organized religion.

That's not what's happening.

I'm just telling you, this is the world that I swim in.

That's not what's happening in the churches.

Right.

You go to the evangelical churches, and do you know what you hear from the pulpit?

You hear right now how to help Christians and refugees get out of Afghanistan.

That's because those are the things that you hear about helping the homeless.

You preach the gospel.

They're not talking about politics in the churches.

But, Ralph, that's the only thing that's not going on.

We're talking about the people who have stopped swimming.

But what I'm saying is, if they left the church because of politics, there's not politics going on.

No, I'm saying they've replaced it.

They're still religious.

Politics is religious now.

That is,

it's not rational at all.

That is a serious problem.

Can I interject one more possibility why this poll reflects what it does?

Google.

Google.

People can Google religion now.

You know?

Mitt Romney used to come to your house with a pamphlet.

That's all you knew about Mormonism.

Now you can look it up and go, wow, you people are nuts.

You know,

I mean.

I also think, Bill, that it was impacted by COVID.

Remember, a lot of churches were closed.

The numbers were declining over the last year.

They were declining, but what I'm saying is, even as attendance at physical places of worship has declined in the last several years, the online worship experience is skyrocketing.

There are churches out there that have hundreds of thousands of people all over the world that are worshiping online.

And so, you know, the church is jumping.

I don't think religion's going away.

The church is not going away.

I know, I know.

And it's still going to be a major

big part of how I make my living.

Anyway, thank you very much, you two.

It was very entertaining, but it's time for New Rules.

New Rules, someone has to tell the 30-year-old man who as a baby was on the cover of Nirvana's iconic Nevermind album and is now suing because he says that that cover was sexual exploitation that hurt him emotionally for the rest of his life.

That if someone can recognize you today from that picture, you've got bigger problems than the courts can solve.

This scarred you for the rest of your life?

Try growing up Catholic.

Let's like to give a shot to the Catholic.

Nerul, Roll, it's time to admit that Candyman has the worst premise of any horror movie ever.

And that premise is, if you say his name five times, Candyman appears and kills you.

Solution, don't say his name five times.

But everyone does.

Why?

To own the libs?

Even Candyman is going, I'm way busier than I thought I'd be.

New rules, the Long Island couple whose wedding was derailed by Hurricane Henri must not be so devastated.

Maybe it's a sign that this was not meant to be, because marriage is a lot like a hurricane.

At the beginning, you get blown a lot, but in the end, you lose your house.

It's terrible, Ralph.

I'm so sorry.

I only do it because I know you you can't hear it anywhere else, so I know you secretly love the dirty stuff, so I do it when you're here for you.

New rule,

someone has to help me out here.

Is this Shia Muslims in Iraq taking part in a religious ritual in the run-up to the Islamic Holy Day of Ashura?

Or a club on Fire Island over 4th of July weekend?

New rule, don't make your hurricane projection map look like a vagina.

I know you've got weather to report, but when you do it this way, men have trouble finding Boston.

And finally, New Rule, blind hatred of America is just as blinkered as blind love.

And we Americans should really get some perspective about where we live.

Watching the shit go down in Afghanistan, I was reminded lately of every conversation I've ever had with an immigrant, almost all of which, if we got to really talking, included the notion, oh, you people have no idea.

All you do is bitch about and bad mouth your own country, but if you knew about the country I came from, you'd stop shitting on your own.

Now,

right?

I have never been a rah-rah America type and in fact have often made fun of Republicans in the past for being overly sentimental because they're the ones who tear up at military flyovers and get a boner when the governor of South Dakota rides into a biker rally dressed like a painting at Teddy Roosevelt.

John Boehner used to cry, cry, like fucking weep

at the drop of a hat.

If anything reminded him of what a star-spangled miracle this country is.

If there was a little flag in his club sandwich, he'd lose it.

It's just in the conservative DNA to have this dewy-eyed, sloppy, drunk love for their country.

that often renders them incapable of acknowledging its problems.

That's how we got the 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Not because John Roberts is a monster, but because people like him tend to over-romanticize America.

He thought the South was ready for the honor system.

They weren't.

But

liberals, as usual in this era, have now gone too far in the other direction.

They under-romanticize America.

They have no perspective.

Last week, the Taliban murdered a comedian.

His name was Nizar Muhammad and he made up funny songs on TikTok.

They forced him into a car, tortured, and then executed him.

A comedian.

A thing like that hits a little close to home for me.

I've had two presidents up my ass.

This one warned me to stop speaking my mind.

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

This is not a time for remarks like that.

There never is.

and this one sued me over a joke

and as president called me every name in the book for the crime of predicting he'd do exactly what he did this crazy Bill Maher this idiot comedian these people are sick he's a crazy lunatic he's a whack job he is a total nut job

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean

neither experience was pleasant.

But I didn't have to worry about being dragged till I'm dead behind a Toyota Tacoma.

Have a little perspective about the stuff we howl about here.

I'm sorry your professor said something you didn't like.

That won't be a problem with the Taliban because you're not allowed to go to school.

In Saudi Arabia, grown women can be jailed for doing the kind of things we think of as routine without the permission of a male guardian.

China rounds you up if you're the wrong religion and puts you in camps.

More children in Burkerna Faso work than are in school.

Only 5% of Burundians have electricity.

The homicide rate in Honduras is is eight times what it is here.

The inflation rate in Venezuela is 2,719 percent.

The Philippines, in the last five years, has put to death 27,000 low-level drug dealers.

My old job.

In North Korea, people starve to death.

The only people who starve here are doing it for a roll.

And the only people who have no water live in California.

If you think America is irredeemable, turn on the news or get a passport and a ticket on one of those sketchy airlines that puts its web address on the plane.

There's a reason Afghan mothers are handing their babies to us.

And

we should take them.

Americans right now should take in Afghan refugees into their homes and into their neighborhoods.

And I'm sure everyone who just clapped is thinking the same thing.

Yes, someone who isn't me should definitely do that.

But that doesn't make us the bad guys.

We're not the bad guys.

Oppression is what we were trying to stop in Afghanistan.

We failed, but any immigrant will tell you we've largely succeeded here,

and yet the overriding thrust of current woke ideology is that America is rotten to the core, irredeemably racist from the moment it was founded, and so oppressive, sexist, and homophobic, we can't find a host for the Oscars or Jeopardy.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure you heard the new Jeopardy guy is out because he said boobies in 2014.

And this is where your new Afghani roommates that you took in

will prove so valuable because they'll turn to you and say, have you people lost your fucking minds?

Have you?

Have you ever heard heard of honor killings,

public beheadings, throwing gay men off of roofs, arranged marriages to minors, state-sanctioned wife beating, female genital mutilation, marriage by capture?

Because we have.

What's the lesson of Afghanistan?

Maybe it's that everyone from the giant dorm room bitch session that is the internet should take a good look at what real oppression looks like.

Ask your maid.

Ask your Uber driver.

ask the Asian woman giving you a massage.

She'll tell you this place is Shangri-La, and not just because she works in a place called Shangri-La.

America may not be the country of your faculty lounge and Twitter dreams, but no one here tries to escape by hanging on to an aeroplane.

No,

we wait till we're inside the plane to fight.

And then only because they cut off the beverage service.

All right, that's our show.

We're off next week and back on September 10th.

I'll be at the Temple Hoinbule Theater in Denver, September 11th at Marin's Veteran Memorial Auditorium in San Raphael, the 25th, and at the Hulu Theater at Madison's Grey Garden in New York, November 13th.

I want to thank Hattie Kaye, Ralph Reed, and Craig Whitlock, and you folks.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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.