Ep. #564: Ben Sheehan, Thomas Frank, Nancy MacLean

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

Thank you so much.

Thank you, thank you.

Ah, you're so kind.

How you doing?

Thank you for masking up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And how about a hand for our

hand for our producer, Dean Johnson, who did the warm-up?

Because that was

usually, you know, the regular warm-up guy's sick, so he did it.

That was fucking painful, wasn't it?

I mean, thank you, Dean.

Anyway, you don't know what I'm talking about here at home, but I know why you're happy and probably at home.

We've reached 100 days of the Biden administration.

It's like

America was on a three-month juice cleanse.

I feel so much lighter.

I mean, it's amazing how much Trump was in there.

And

yeah.

And Joe celebrated with his favorite beer, Old Malarkey.

But he's got a lot to celebrate.

The economy is surging.

Growth 6.4%.

Now, of course, a lot of this because we were stuck last year, but even for any time, in one quarter, 6.4%.

This this is

Fox News' worst nightmare.

They convince everybody Biden is a socialist, and then, oh shit, it's working.

To give you an idea how rapidly this economy is moving, take a chart of the Oscar ratings and turn it upside down.

It's just,

oh yeah, very low.

oh,

sad.

10 million people.

It used to get like Super Bowl numbers, 10 million.

Like, this show's gotten almost half of that.

And one of the winners, you know, went up there and did that thing they always do.

He thanked his agent and God and then told his kids, and go to bed, kids.

And the babies that are texted back, they already did.

And nobody liked this show.

I think.

But the economists say the surge in the economy is driven by you people, the consumer, the consumer, ladies and gentlemen.

People are spending, spending.

It's like we're all strippers,

and the government made it rain,

and now we can't wait to hit Jimmy Choose.

You know, I mean, it's...

And

I can see it on the drive in today.

I saw a packed car dealership.

I saw a long line for an open house.

And there were two people at Sears.

So cool, Sears.

No, I tried to give a panhandler five bucks today, and he told me to make a more serious offer.

I tell you.

But Joe, did you see his speech?

He gave his what really is the State of the Union speech, his first one.

Did you watch?

Not you people.

Well, you did.

Okay.

Well.

I thought he was good.

I mean, he hadn't been a member of Congress since 2008.

A lot of new faces, a lot of new names.

He thought AOC was the active ingredient in weed.

But it did pretty well.

22 million people watched.

It's interesting, the older Democrats saw it on TV.

The millennials watched it on their phone.

And

the QAnon folks listened to it over over the 5G in their vaccine.

Oh, yes, by the way, the speech, very COVID-safe, Joe's speech.

Oh, yes, the big question people had was: should we stay six feet away from Ted Cruz or an additional six feet to the six feet we normally have been spending away?

I get Ted.

Ted, did you, Ted Bruce, during the speech, fell asleep?

They caught him.

Of course, you know Ted, the liar.

He said he wasn't asleep.

He was protesting wokeness.

Oh, yeah,

the Republicans, they were not happy with Joe's speech.

He did not give the speech they wanted him to make.

So they were pissed off.

Ted was pissed.

Lauren Boebert, you know this nut?

One of the new Republicans in Congress.

I think he's from Colorado.

Oh, wow, this is a loon like on a Marjorie Taylor Green level.

During the speech,

she dramatically unfurled one of those Mylar blankets, you know, those kids in cage silver blankets.

I don't even really know the point of this

protest.

So I'm just going to take the high road.

and say everybody's entitled to their opinion, but do not ask me ever to respect prop comedy.

What does that even mean, Mylar blanket?

But yeah, maybe she was pissed about masks.

It was, like I say, a very COVID-safe speech, a minimal audience,

mandatory masks, everybody's space department.

You know what?

It was a lot like what we do here, except Joe's new rules cost $2 trillion each.

Oh, yeah,

it was.

He talked a lot about money, what we've spent, what we're going to spend, $2 trillion.

He talked about that we've already spent for COVID relief, and then another $2 trillion he wants for infrastructure.

And then he's got a families plan.

Another $2 trillion.

The entire federal budget is $4 trillion, and this is on top of that.

Boy, thank God we got Mexico to pay for that wall, huh?

And

I don't know.

I'm sure a lot of Americans are saying, you know what, if you put the Democrats in charge, they spend all your money.

And if you put Trump in charge, you get a disease.

It's like having to choose between marriage and dating.

All right, we got a great show.

We have Dr.

Strank and Nancy McLean.

But first up, he is the author of OMG.

I'm just going to say it.

Oh, my God, what the fuck does the Constitution actually say?

He was polite enough to spell it out.

Ben Sheehan is back with this, Ben.

Simhala, Ben.

Good to see you again.

All right.

Yes, we can say it here on HBO.

Oh, my God, what the fuck.

You're a series of books on what the fuck, and we sure need them.

I mean, the first one was kind of an owner's manual about the Constitution.

So you're really a good guy to be here this week because the census came out, so we have a lot of new information.

And there's also bills I mean they the Democrats of trying to get DC right to be the 51st state where is the Constitution on that so on the census the the Constitution in Article I Section II says we have to count the population every 10 years and we do that with the census we started in 1790 and we've been doing it every decade since and the reason that we do that is to do two things one originally was to decide how much tax each state would pay because everyone paid an even amount but we really use it to decide how many representatives each state gets for the house

and just off of the information, this.

How many was it like back in 1780?

So 65 was the first size of the House.

And today we have 435.

But how much did each represent?

So 30,000.

30,000.

30,000.

Today it's 76,000.

So

one congressman represented 30,000.

What is it today?

762,000.

Wow.

And James Madison actually tried to cap it at 50,000.

It's one of the amendments that was in the original Bill of Rights, but didn't make it in.

But now we're 15 times beyond what he wanted it to be.

Okay, so

tell me about the D.C.

thing, because

I've read, now Joe Manchin today, I think it was just today, came on, and of course the Democrats need 60 votes, they only have 50, so they're short anyway, doesn't really matter.

But Joe Manchin is a Democrat.

He's the one they always need.

Joe Biden, only the second most powerful Joe

in Washington.

Right.

So he said he would never do that.

So why are we talking about it?

Well, yeah, I mean, you're right.

You'd need to get around the filibuster to make D.C.

a state.

But in the Constitution, it says that Congress can set the size of D.C.

can't be more than 100 square miles.

But this current bill, it doesn't make D.C.

a state as is.

It shrinks the size of the federal government to about two square miles, and then the other 66 square miles would become a state.

Okay, so the Republicans say, why not just, I learned a new word, retrocession.

Right.

Put it back to where it, whence it came, which was Maryland.

Yes.

To create the capital, they took a little chunk out of Virginia and Maryland, right?

So what's the deal with that?

I mean, then they would be represented.

Sure.

You know, and you, and nobody lives in the area that actually the people work in.

Nobody lives at the Capitol.

Well, right, exactly.

The two-square-mile area for the Capitol, there's very few, if any, people that live there.

But Maryland would have to agree to it.

So in the Constitution, the state legislature in Maryland would have to agree to take that 66 square miles and 700,000 residents back, and they've said that they don't want that.

What about Puerto Rico?

Puerto Rico, well, I should say support for DC statehood among people who live in DC is like 85%.

They did a referendum in 2016.

Puerto Rico is a lot closer divided.

It's a very bare majority,

but obviously you don't have to be able to do that.

Of the people there who want to do that.

Of the people, yeah, a very slight majority.

They've done some.

What is their, describe their status now, because America was an empire.

Some people would say it still is, because we have territory, which is a weird thing to have.

Like, because when you own territory, you kind of own the people.

Right.

So either make them citizens or, you know, let them be their own citizens of somewhere else.

It's incredibly fucked up.

And it plays into this long history of honestly.

It's very anachronistic, is it not?

It's really messed up because you have now four and a half million people who pay taxes and they participate, you know, they join the military, but they don't get representatives in.

You're talking about not just Puerto Rico.

No, you also have Guam, the U.S.

Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Why do we have Guam?

It seems wrong.

It seems very unwoke.

It's about 100 people.

Where are the woke people on this?

Pro-Guam state.

I mean, I'm not even a wokester, but I'm not sure if you're a good person.

After Puerto Rico, that's the next most populated

territory.

But basically, you would have...

In Puerto Rico, they are citizens.

They're citizens.

As we know.

Yeah, and there are over, there's about 3.3 million citizens.

It's odd to me that you can be citizens and yet not be a state already.

Right.

I mean, you know, a lot of the states that we have began as territories within the, you know, the 40, the continental United States, but Puerto Rico has, they've had a referendum six times.

And the last few times they've had a bare majority for statehood.

The most convincing one was this past year, 20 years.

But what is that in human nature, do you think, Ben, that people very often vote against their own freedom?

I've seen it in Scotland, too.

Scotland has referendums.

And they go, nope, we don't want to be governed by us.

Right.

Well, I mean,

the history between the United States government and Puerto Rico is dark.

And there's a lot that we don't teach in our schools, and it's a really complicated thing.

Even more so.

Even more so.

right exactly and they've made themselves known and they voted in the last three in the last decade there have been three referendums and they clearly say that they want to be a state with a bare majority but it takes an act of Congress and right now Congress hasn't decided to act okay so what about the now we've heard a lot about the term court packing right I remember this from eighth grade history when FDR that's when I heard about it 1937 yeah yeah in FDR he maybe I guess he was frustrated in the same way many presidents are when the court doesn't rule in their favor.

So he wanted to add justices.

It looked like a power grab.

But then in this recent run-up to the controversy, we've learned that, well, it's not unconstitutional, right?

No.

I mean, the Constitution does not say how many justices there have.

We could have 100.

We could.

In fact, we started with six and then went down to five and then six and then seven and then nine and then ten down to seven and then back to the five.

By a few F first girlfriends in the later years.

It's a whole other story.

But we've been at nine since 1869.

And again, all it takes, like a lot of things, to change our government, all it takes is an act from Congress to change the number.

And so the proposal is to give four more additional justices to make it 13th.

But that would look like a paragraph.

Not that they don't kind of deserve it because of the way Mitch McConnell and the Republican Congress completely fucked the Democrats in a way that was completely unprecedented when they wouldn't.

Well, that's, I mean,

I kind of, I mean, I don't like the idea of politicizing the court.

On the other hand, that is one of those things that, like, cannot stand, that they denied a president a pick.

Because that's fundamental rules.

You broke the fundamental rules.

When you break the fundamental rules.

And, you know, it goes back to the idea of like, why do we have a court with lifetime appointments?

You know, the original intent was to make it so it's really non-partisan.

That's not in there either.

What?

In the Constitution.

Lifetime appointments is in the Constitution.

That is in the Constitution.

That is in the Constitution.

Right.

But the idea is to have it be these unelected people whose allegiance is to the Constitution and to federal laws.

And so having this sort of, you know, even-handed, balanced court is kind of core to the whole original idea.

Yes, lifetime appointment is bad because I see, you know, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we know that the Democrats are mad at her because

she didn't step down.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's their fault.

Their plan was she doesn't die.

That's not a plan.

No.

Now Stephen Breyer is the next liberal, he's 82.

Right.

And I, you know, and we heard that when Ginsburg was alive, Obama had her to lunch.

Right.

And kind of, you know, without saying, hey,

how's your health?

Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Now they're doing it with Stephen Breyer.

There's this, and who wants that in your life?

People like kind of hinting,

you should quit because because you're gonna die soon and we need to replace you crazy subject a lot of the thin air.

What's your cholesterol, Steve?

You don't want this, right?

Right.

And why do we need a lifetime appointment anyway?

What if it was 18 years?

I mean, that's.

Well, it's been proposed by constitutional scholars, and the idea is you have an 18-year period on the court, but then you go down to the circuit court.

And so you sort of shift through it.

So there's sort of workarounds.

It's unclear if that's actually constitutional.

Some people say it is, some say it isn't.

But yeah, the idea of lifetime appointments is putting a lot of power in the hands of very few people.

Okay.

So you mentioned the census.

I see, and this is not a surprise, the people are moving out of the Northeast and they're moving to the South and the West.

What is the big picture long-term repercussions for that?

So you had six states gain representatives, gain seats, and seven states.

Undoubtedly, most of those states, I mean, Texas, Colorado, Florida, Oregon, North Carolina,

and others, but it's a net gain for, I guess, red states and blue states lost seats.

And just by the reapportionment, it's cutting the Democrats' lead in the House right now.

It's a four-seat advantage to two before gerrymandering, before redistricting.

So, just the data from Monday means that it's now a two-seat advantage in the House for Democrats.

All right.

Thanks for coming by.

You always have the answers.

It's like a great game of Jeopardy.

All right, Benji and let's meet our panel.

How you doing?

How are you?

Good to see you again.

All right, she's the author of Democracy and Change, The Deep History of the Radical Right Stealth Plan for America, Nancy McClain, back with us.

Great to be back.

And he is the author of The People Know, a brief history of anti-populism.

Thomas Frank, great to see you.

Okay, so I mentioned there in the monologue that the speech Biden made was really not the speech I thought the Republicans wanted him to make because when they gave the rebuttal, it looked like it had been written before.

They always want him to fall into the woke trap.

And he just never takes the bait, right?

Because the only way they win politically is on cultural issues.

Because he really is being the blue-collar president.

And I know this is a big subject of both of yours, but you write books about it.

Do you think he's succeeding about that, winning back the blue-collar?

It seemed like to me he was.

You're asking me like.

Yes, with the speech and all what he's proposing, and

I feel like this is what people like you have been saying for years.

Yes.

I was really pleased by what he said in that speech.

Right.

Come on, he said the middle class built America and the unions built the middle class.

Nice going.

And defended the police.

Wait, he also said

health care is not a privilege, it's a right.

Fantastic.

Nice going, Joe.

Look,

and something else I want to say here, Joe Biden's career as a senator, which spanned many decades, for someone like me, it was not very promising, right?

I didn't have a lot of high hopes for the Biden administration.

A lot of people did not like it when he, no.

Well, he was a deficit hawk, among other things.

Well, that's gone.

Look at what he's doing.

Austerity, all that Obama, you know, let's have a grand bargain with with the Republicans, gone.

It's fantastic for someone like me.

I'm very pleased.

Now, the big question, of course, Bill, is is he actually going to follow through?

When he finally does, look, so far, the business community, corporate America,

They can handle gigantic Keynesian spending.

That's not a huge threat to them.

But when he actually goes and does something like the PRO Act or the minimum wage, they're going to start pushing back.

And he's going to get some resistance.

Is he going to be able to follow through?

Is he really going to do it?

We're going to find out.

I certainly agree on the follow-through, and I wish he'd spoken more about the For the People Act, which is critical to saving democracy in this country.

But I was really impressed as one of those people who was not excited to have him as the front runner.

But I think he is doing a really exciting job, and I thought that was a terrific speech.

And I think there's a reason for that, though, too.

I think the country has changed, and Joe Biden understands that we're at a pivot point.

We either save democracy by showing that it can address the needs of people, that it can do things that people look to government to do, or we're going to lose it.

We're going to slide into authoritarianism.

And given the gerrymandering and all the kind of rigging that you were just talking with Ben about, that's the kind of question we face.

These are not ordinary elections coming at us.

And he really grasped that moment.

And I think that that is fantastic.

And also, he's been pushed by the progressive base who did the work to get him elected.

The only way,

I mean,

if you watch the speech, you know, there were things things that

even 10 years ago,

I don't think a bipartisan group like that, half of them would not applaud for.

That shows you where we are.

Yes.

Or at least where those motherfuckers in Washington are, how much they hate each other.

Yes.

Cutting child poverty in half.

Complete silence.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I saw that with Obama, too.

I was like, really?

You can't applaud for that?

You hate these people this much?

The only way, I think, to change that is to change the voters.

Those Republicans have nothing to lose by not applauding anything because their voters hate so much.

So you can't get the politicians

to stop hating because they're doing it as a representative of the voters.

But you can get the voters to stop hating by doing the kind of stuff I think he's starting to do.

But I think before we blame the voters who bear their share of blame, I guess you could say, I think we also have to look at the donors.

The donors have been driving this, the hard-right donors to the Republican Party, above all the Koch network, but the whole rotten mess of them, they have set up, in their terms, the incentive structure, an incentive structure that rewards exactly the behavior that we're talking about, where they will not compromise on anything.

They think compromise is a dirty word, and they agitate, and all their allied organizations and media like Fox News agitate the base into thinking that this is a do-or-die war for their tribe and that they are under constant assault from us and that we hate them and we we disrespect them and we disregard them and they get them into such a stress state that they become aggressive and attack so and some of that's the voters but the donors are the ones there is and some of that is true there is a lot of you write about that a lot

a lot of looking down right

I can hear you I need it and during COVID I've lost my hearing or something oh I'm sorry I thought it was the smell but okay

then you write about that the looking down on problem that's you know yeah the the sort of utopia I call it a utopia of of scolding because the people who do the looking down are the sort of your affluent, highly educated, suburbanites, the kind of people that I and you know, we know these people very, very well.

They tend to be, these days, they tend to be Democrats.

They're very well off.

They're, as I said, highly educated.

And they

regard the world, they regard,

well, let me put it this way.

Trumpism was an incredible shock to them.

And their reaction has been to, to, you know, lapse into this kind of scolding, you know, this sort of culture where liberalism is about your personal virtue.

Being a liberal is about being a better person and looking down on all of these people who don't get it.

And there's something really repugnant about it.

But I call it a utopian scolding because these people have nothing to lose.

You know, Trump cut their taxes.

You know, they're getting richer by the minute during this, our COVID.

Well, James Carvo gave an interview to our friend Sean Illing over at Vox this week, and it got a lot of pickup because Sean finally got James to come out of his shell and say what he really means.

I'm joking.

He does that all the time.

Okay.

Anyway.

All right.

Here's Carville.

He said, wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it.

It's hard to talk to anybody today who doesn't say this, but they don't want to say it out loud.

Well, actually, Jim, we've been saying it out loud on this show for quite some time.

But I get your point

because

they'll get clobbered or canceled, this too cool for school shit doesn't work and we have to stop it.

And I feel like the battle in the party is that Joe does not get sucked in to this bullshit, but the party does.

Sometimes it seems like it's all they do.

I mean,

and I always say on this show, you are always part of the party of, no matter what you do.

We only have two tribes in this country.

The Oscars, you are the party of the Democrats.

You just are.

Whatever you do, that's the way America is going to see it.

Whatever crazy shit happens on the left, you're going to be, and that's, of course, why they gave the rebuttal speech they gave.

They gave it to the speech they wanted him to make where he was woke, and it wasn't that speech.

But again, that's how they win.

And

here's some other Carville.

He says,

you get the sense that people in faculty lounges, in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people he mentioned latinex which i've mentioned a couple of times on this show and people argued with me no we need that word yeah and then the polling keeps showing no no one likes it no one uses it this is your insanity

and it it obscures the fact this kind of craziness

obscures the fact that the Democrats did give people Obamacare, finally at least started to solve the health care thing.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

saved the auto industry, the trillion-dollar tax cut that Trump

got back to the middle class.

Most of Biden's been, you know, they actually do the work and they don't get the best.

And the Democrats I know, you know, maybe different ones being in the DC region, but the Democrats that I know talk about those things.

They're out there, they're on the doors, they're on the phones, they're doing the work, and they know how to talk to people in plain language.

I mean, I come from a private university with a faculty lounge.

I don't like jargon from my students, from my colleagues, anywhere in the world, but I think it's also really important that we maybe not fall into the terms that our opponents have said.

You know, the right since the New Deal, and Tom, you know this as well as I, have been calling Democrats arrogant.

Arrogant, because we let workers speak up to bosses and have a say in how their work relations should run, right?

They started the trope of the liberal media in the time of the civil rights movement to discredit

northern reporters who are coming down and telling the truth about the south.

That's when they started saying don't trust the liberal media.

So they've been pushing this line for a long time.

So are there, you know, like word choices I would find unfortunate or something?

Yeah, but also there's a lot of pain in this country.

There are a lot of people who have been stepped on for a long time.

George Floyd was stepped on for nine minutes, as we know, and that woke up the country.

That kind of woke, we need to be woken up.

I believe that we need that woken up.

I mean, yes, we don't have to.

But do we need to be woken up 24-7?

I think that's like the problem people have with the Oscars.

Well, nobody likes self-righteousness, right?

And maybe I just did some, so don't hate me.

But I mean, so, yeah, I mean, but I think we all need to laugh at ourselves, right?

And not well, also, something it's an industry about entertainment.

And this show was always about entertainment.

And they put on a show that was like, We dare you to be entertained.

We dare you.

No jokes.

No jokes.

No songs.

not even any clips of when we used to have fun.

Fuck you, eat your peas.

And this is, you know, ubiquity for any cause, I think, doesn't help.

But I have to take your word for it because I didn't watch, I haven't been to the movies since last February.

So I didn't see the Oscars because I didn't see the movies, right?

And I don't know, I think a lot of us felt like that.

Like we haven't done anything normal, like go to the movies with friends, so why would we get excited about watching the Oscars?

I think it's a blip.

Can I just throw out there that there's basically two different models of how you do liberalism in this country?

And one of them is what I call the populist model, referring to back when we had three parties in this country.

One of them was called the Populist Party.

It was a left-wing farmer labor.

When was it?

Sorry?

When was it?

The 1890s.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you remember.

Come on.

Good times.

But anyhow,

the populist tradition, which believes that the gay 90s?

No, isn't that what they called it?

the gay nineties at the time no it was a terrible depression this was like a new york they called it the gay nineties

okay it was a time when the you know when the you know the the economy was was you know was was shrinking people it was awful strikes marches on washington all this kind of thing anyhow There's two ways of doing this.

One, you build a mass movement of ordinary people.

To do that, you can't be some kind of judgmental prick that goes around using this kind of jargon and talking about what a fine and noble individual you are.

The other model is ideological purity, where your politics are a kind of fashion accessory.

And that's what you're describing.

And

that is, well, to use everybody's favorite word, toxic.

This is no way to go forward.

If that's what the Democratic Party was doing,

forget it, Trump is not aware of it.

It wouldn't be so hard to fix this.

I mean, in the rebuttal speech, the Republicans picked their one black senator, Tim Scott, who gets a lot of work on TV.

Yeah.

And he said, America is not a racist country.

And, you know, within 24 hours, Biden agreed with that.

Kamala Harris agreed with that.

I think it's a silly paradigm to put to begin with because it's not an either or it's not like a pregnancy.

It's not a pregnancy test.

Look, it's blue.

We're not racist.

I mean,

you know.

Tim Scott, by his own account, he said one time he would pull, he was pulled over seven times in a year.

He said he's been followed shopping.

He's the one black Republican Senate.

Okay, this is evidence of racism.

So plainly, we're a recovering racist country or something.

But yeah, I mean,

both things are true.

I felt sorry.

Young, go ahead.

I was just going to say, I felt sorry for the man.

I mean, he comes from the party that worked with the tobacco industries to deny the harms of tobacco smoke, then is working with the climate, captured by the fossil fuel industry, denying the climate.

So he's just the logical next step.

And they denied the insurrection.

They denied that the election was won.

But you'd think he'd kind of look around and say, how come they keep making me one point?

Right, I agree.

And I think most Americans, you know, I mean, I don't think Kamala and Biden are being disingenuous when they agree with that.

Because they think of the many millions and millions of people who are not.

And they just don't want to be told all the time, every day, come on.

You think you're not a racist?

Dig a little deeper.

Yeah, exactly.

But look, this country has a...

They're saying, I didn't follow anyone in the store.

You know, I didn't pull anybody over.

You know, even if it's my ancestors, that wasn't me either.

You know, it's like that kind of thing, like individual versus collective guilt.

And I think that's where the kind of professional culture that Tom has critiqued so well comes into play because it's a kind of a therapeutic model, right?

That says that racism is a sin in our hearts or it's something wrong with our thinking process.

And it's all on us as individuals to then become virtuous and non-racist or anti-racist

These structures have been there since the founding of the country.

They've been perpetuated in different ways.

The wealth inequality at this point is the biggest factor in racism and harm to African-American lives.

And so we have to change the conversation.

But fortunately, that work has already started with the Movement for Black Lives, with the response to George Floyd.

But I think we have to kind of keep that conversation going and also make an exit ramp for white people from the notion that they are trapped with these other folks.

And I think the way to do that is precisely by understanding that this is a country of both things.

It has a very racist history, and it has a really impressive anti-racist history that starts with the anti-book that we can't forget.

But it's also, but you can extend that in all sorts of other ways.

This is, in some ways,

the most democratic country in the world,

the most egalitarian people that I have ever met.

And it's at the same time this country that has this profound, has always had since the beginning, this profound suspicion of democracy, you know, this fear of the lower orders rising up in their insolence and outvoting us or doing some dreadful thing.

And you see this all the time around us now.

But both things happen in the same country.

It's wrong to try to, like you said, you said a pregnancy test.

I was going to say like the, you know, be before the throne of God sifting out our souls, you know.

All right.

Well, with Biden polling so well, I've noticed that the right-wing media has had to ramp up the lying.

It's interesting because, well, I mean, we thought we were over this a little bit, I guess, when Trump left, but this is, show the meat one.

This is real from Fox News.

This is Fox News.

This is not a joke.

Cut 90% of red meat from diet.

This is what they're claiming Biden is going to make you do.

Max four pounds per year, one burger per month.

I mean, that's Fox News.

That's a major news outlet.

I would become a Republican if that really happened.

It's what they do, though, right?

They activate the reptilian brains.

Yes.

You You know, our tribe is under threat.

So another one, the burger eaters.

Fourth of July canceled.

And these are real.

Look at this one.

Kamala Harris, migrant children giving copy of VP's book.

They're apoplectic about this, that Kamala gave, that we were giving out her book.

It's a children's book.

It's a real book called Superheroes Are Everywhere at Taxpayer Expense at the Border.

First of all, we did, I said, find out how much this would actually cost.

Seeing how mad they were.

We did the math.

For the number of kids who came in and the price of the book, even not buying in bulk, it would only cost $272,000.

What a horrible thing to give these poor, bestraggled children a little, a book to say,

here's a gift.

You've made it to America.

No.

You know what?

I mean.

I do not spare any powder with the Democrats, as you both know, but man, the Republicans have not given one inch on being the most dickish,

unnecessarily assholish people.

I mean,

anyway,

so they're just flat out on Fox News lying about this.

It was all last week.

Would you like to see some of the ones they have for next week?

Oh, because it's just getting

worse.

I mean, look at this one: Trump border wall to be melted down for giant statue of Colin Kaepernick.

That's they made that up.

Hunter Biden traded White House secrets for hit-off vape pen.

That's.

Fauci, babies in the womb must wear masks.

No.

Kidnots.

National anthem before NASCAR to be replaced by acknowledgement of privilege.

That would piss off Kansas, wouldn't it, Tom?

Biden, looting to be renamed Justice Shop.

And Dems, in all depictions of Jesus, crown of thorns to be replaced with a pussy hat.

Pussy hat.

Okay, I'm a little loopy.

Okay, so

when I used to live in New York, I lived there in the 90s when Giuliani was mayor, and there was a saying, Giuliani time.

Yeah.

You remember that?

You never heard that?

Amadou Diallo, right?

Well, I mean, you know, he was a tough on-crime mayor, and the cops loved him.

And when they would do some bad shit to somebody before they started, it was like, it's Giuliani time.

You don't remember that?

I've never lived in New York.

Bait.

Not from Kansas, but I'm not from the national news.

It was the gay 90s.

Forget it.

But anyway,

bad police violence would come.

Giuliani time came to Giuliani's apartment

this week.

The FBI, this is, I just want people to understand how unprecedented this is for a former,

just a lawyer, let alone a former prosecutor, mayor of New York, the president's personal lawyer.

And the F, I mean, this is the scary shit.

I mean, it was 6 a.m.,

he was just getting in his coffin

For them to, you know, this is the no alarm, you know, just, can you, this is when you shit your pants, literally, I mean, you know, and took his phones and they're investigating.

Now, you know, Rudy would say they hate me for being loyal.

Yes, loyal to a horrible president and a scummy guy, so I can't feel too sorry for about him.

But unprecedented, yes.

Now, is this unprecedented for one of two reasons?

Is it political payback?

Is this politics?

Or is it because

what Giuliani and Trump did was unprecedented?

I would say that.

I went through.

What do you think?

I don't know how unprecedented this is.

I mean, come on.

The Biden administration, the Nixon administration, there's a lot of those guys went to jail.

But did they involve themselves with other countries?

I feel like

they did.

No, I'm just following your train of thought.

Yes, I feel like

we play dirty politics, but we used to always just have one rule: no ringers.

Keep it in the family.

Do what you do, you know, but don't bring in the guy from Russia.

You know, this, I don't, this seemed like, now, look, a lot of the stuff we found out, we were finding out, was reported erroneously.

You mean Russia gave?

Yes.

There are things about that, but the basic idea, see, my theory is that we forget that Trump was both an idiot and crazy.

Really?

I feel like this is very important.

Like an idiot is, I didn't know healthcare was complicated.

That's an idiot.

Or like, I can charm Kim Jong-un.

That's an idiot.

Crazy is like doing your crimes in public,

which he did.

And that doesn't compute.

So we thought it had to be more of a conspiracy.

It may turn out that most of it really was just what he did in public, because it's so insane that he was Russia, if you're listening, and when he admitted he fired Comey.

When I look back, I'm like, wow, we lived through this?

Yeah.

Sometimes you wake up

and you're like, it was just a few months ago that we had a,

the president of the United States was telling us that we just had a massively unfair election, that he should have won, but

this country still hasn't conceded.

I know, but he was sitting in the White House saying this shit.

Yes.

It's hard to really, it kind of boggles the mind.

It's so, you know what, these days I'm so happy to wake up and he's, I'm sorry.

I know.

I don't want to sound like that.

And it seems like I want to be more.

I have to be more.

The birds are singing.

The radio has no singer.

I'm a cynical guy.

I don't want to say stuff like that.

It seems like it was so long ago.

It seems like Trump was president in the 50s or the 80s.

Except that the people behind him who were getting lots of what they wanted under under his administration are not gone.

They're waiting in the wings.

And they're still doing the same old stuff.

And my own thing is we're just talking about gerrymandering.

We just heard that with the new state that's coming to North Carolina, our Republicans in North Carolina believe that they can draw the line such that they will get 10 seats to Democrats four seats in a state that's divided 50-50.

Like this is the kind of rules rigging that they have been doing systematically.

They've done it in the 30 states they control that we have to get at least most back from and they've been doing it at the federal level with all of these these other efforts So I think while America breathes a rightful and collective sigh of relief about Donald Trump and I am breathing easier much you know much easier every day like you we have to remember that unless we deal with the conditions that enabled him to come to power well one of those conditions another one well you can't you know there's something that we haven't you can't deal you can't deal with the condition that 18 this is a point Carville made this week, that 18% of the population elects 52 senators.

Yes.

You can't deal with that because that's a constitutional change,

I guess.

But you can approach it strategically, and that's what the Democrats I know have been talking about and doing, which is doing things like organizing in rural states, which is not just focusing on federal power or local power, but getting out in the states, contesting for state government, and changing within.

Virginia just abolished the death penalty.

Virginia's been been doing all this great stuff because ordinary Democrats worked their tails off over many election cycles to get us there.

Georgia, look at Georgia.

You know, Biden can only do these things because of shoe leather in Georgia in a pandemic because people did close, deep organizing and now the world is open and we're breathing freely, but we wouldn't be here.

We'd all be biting our nails again and waking up in misery.

All that is true, but there's something that we're

There's something that we're overlooking here, and that's sort of been lurking behind all this, which really is that, I mean, there really has been an important historical change.

You were talking about James Carville a minute ago.

Carville, of course, most famous for getting Bill Clinton elected, you know, a Democrat elected president in 1992.

We all celebrated, hey, look, the Democrats are back.

What does Clinton do?

Basically, one of the first and most important things he does is NAFTA.

You go back and, you know, what I was doing today, I spent a whole lot of time reading Clinton's speech that he gave

when he signed NAFTA.

And he was basically saying, workers, you're screwed.

You have to get used to it.

This is a new economy.

It's an economy for the highly educated.

That's whose prosperity matters.

And we're going to retrain all you people whose lives are ruined.

This guy then does away with the welfare system.

Remember, they called it welfare reform.

Well, he didn't do away with the welfare

system.

No, he

abolished it.

It was overturned.

They have something called TANF now.

It's a load of welfare in this country.

AFDC, whatever you want to call it.

Okay.

Then he goes around, deregulates Wall Street.

Deregulates Wall Street some more, deregulates Wall Street yet again.

Okay?

This is a transformation.

Did he get rid of Glass-Steagall?

Sorry?

Glass-Steagall?

Yes, they overturned that.

I wanted to

definitely move the Democrats to the center.

What's your point?

No, he moved the Democrats to the right, and he abandoned his

more rightward to the center.

You think that's the center?

This country didn't want those things.

The country didn't want to deregulate Wall Street, deregulate telecoms.

Why did he get elected twice?

Why was he?

Because the alternatives weren't so good?

Right, exactly.

And then there was Ross Perot in the beginning.

Yeah, that's right, Ross Perot.

But Ross Perrot helped him.

But going back to the discussion about the Southwest, Democrats lost the South, not with the Civil Rights Act, as the legend goes.

I mean, they lost in presidential politics after the Civil Rights Act, but some recent research by a wonderful economic historian, Gavin Wright, has shown that it was NAFTA that did in the Democrats at the state level.

It was all so many southern states still had Democrats in state houses, in the governor's office, in other state positions.

But NAFTA

was a very important

thing or PNTR China, which is basically NAFTA applied to Democrats.

But it looks like Biden is at least talking a talk that was not talked by Obama or by Clinton.

In Washington, Bill, just and I should shut up, I know, I talk a little too much.

You're on a talk show.

People regard

people regard these moves that Bill Clinton made as absolutely genius.

And I'm here to tell you that

they redefined who the Democratic Party

redefined who the Democratic Party was in a disastrous way, in a catastrophic way.

And I am hoping, and I think Biden understands it, although Biden went along with everything that I just described and then some, right?

Biden was the bankruptcy bill under George Bush.

Biden was mass incarceration again and again and again.

But Biden seems to

has grasped the folly of all this.

This was a

world historical mistake, a blunder that the Democrats made back in the 90s and continuing up until quite recently.

And Biden isn't alone in that.

And I think we have to recognize we are in a different moment now

because the whole country has changed.

The fallacy of that tax-cutting austerity politics has been proven in a way that's devastated people's lives.

It made us unable to deal with the coronavirus.

But also, there's been changing

reckoning with all this among thinkers, including the economists who worked with Clinton.

The two most famous economists who worked with Bill Clinton, Joe Stieglitz and Robert Reich, are now people who are trumpeting the kind of things that Biden is doing.

So I think that we're really potentially in a moment of a huge historical sea change that will transform

that conversation.

Thank you, you two.

Positive, that's what we are here.

Time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

New rule, now that the U.S.

is going to share up to 60 million doses of its AstraZeneca vaccine with other countries, each one has to come with a little note from us to them that says, sorry about the whole Trump thing, this one's on the house.

Love America.

Actually, not a bad idea.

Neural, someone must explain why making animals with paper is called origami, but making animals with balloons is called SAD.

It's not fair.

Balloon animals require more skill, because while you're making one, you have the added pressure of a bunch of kids at a birthday party muttering, wow, this clown sucks.

New rules, now that America has been swept with Nomad Land fever, let's make it a TV show.

Move over, that girl, Mary Tyler Moore and Alice.

There's a new girl in town and she's shitting in a bucket.

Now, the network has just a few notes.

We love that she drifts around in a van, but can she be 19 and hot?

Maybe give her a different supporting cast.

A handsome guy, a funny guy, a lesbian best friend, and a dog.

They could solve mysteries.

Call me.

New role, I've been a heterosexual for a long time, so someone has to tell me what I don't get about mud wrestling.

When I see a beautiful woman, I never think, man, I'd love to see her punch her roommate in a swamp.

It's the erotic equivalent of ice fishing.

Someone must like it, just no one I've ever met.

New rules, someone must ask the kid whose science fair project was to smear lipstick on a cat's butt to see how much of the surfaces in the house came into contact with the cat's anus.

What did you out?

And did you tell mom what you did with her lipstick before you put it back in her perch?

What?

Fuck, we're just joking here.

And finally, new rule, nothing with crypto in the title ever turns out good.

There is a mania rising in the country these days about cryptocurrency and how the train is leaving the station, so you better get on.

Tesla has jumped in with both feet, and Microsoft accepts it for software now.

Etsy, Etsy accepts it now, and so does PayPal, Starbucks, and Whole Foods and Home Depot.

One in ten Americans use their stimulus checks to invest in one of thousands of cryptocurrencies in existence, Bitcoin being the most famous, but there's also Ethereum, Binance, Tether, even one called CumRocket.

There's also one called Dogecoin that someone started as a joke, but

as far as I can tell, it's exactly the same as all the other cryptocurrencies because the whole thing is a joke.

I fully understand that our financial system isn't perfect, but at least it's real.

Apple stock is worth money because Apple makes thousand-dollar phones that everyone buys and then drops in the toilet.

But Dogecoin recently rallied to be worth more than the market cap of Ford and Kraft Foods, and it has no product and no workers.

It's just Easter bunny cartoon cash.

I've read articles about cryptocurrency, I've had it explained to me, and I still don't get it, and neither do you

or anyone else.

And

I'll explain why.

So, there's these things called nerds.

And in 2008, one of them, we don't know who, because this person or group of persons is still anonymous, made up Bitcoin out of thin air using the fake name Saratoshi Nakamoto, which I think are the Japanese words for monopoly money.

Now, capitalism, of course, has always contained an element where instead of actually making something or providing a service for money, you could make money in the exciting field of money.

But we knew money had to originate from and be generated by something real somewhere, to which cryptocurrency says, no, it doesn't.

Maybe this is why Warren Buffett says, cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything.

What you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that's person's got the problem.

In terms of value, zero.

Or as another analyst put it, it's an open Ponzi scheme.

It's like having an imaginary best friend who's also a banker.

This is how the world economy crashed in 2009.

It wasn't the lost value in actual houses that sunk us.

It was this virtual market that required inventing algorithms to bet on how much houses might be worth in a virtual scenario.

But then the landlord called in the bill for this virtual market because, in adult land, it turns out the landlord is always real.

Our problem here is at at root, not economic, but psychological.

People who have been raised in a virtual world are starting to believe they can really live in it.

Much of warfare is a video game now.

Why not base our economy the same way?

And cryptocurrency is literally a game.

Bitcoins are created by what they call mining, mining, but not the kind of of mining that's done by seven dwarves who share a woman.

This kind of mining involves using rooms full of supercomputers to make something that is purposefully arbitrary.

Essentially, one computer thinks of a number between one and infinity, and other computers take trillions of guesses at what it is.

It's the old game of I'm thinking of a number between one and ten, except times a gazillion, and the guy guessing the number number lives in China and the guy who knows the number lives in the matrix

take that work

Do I need to spell this out?

There is something inherently not credible about creating hundreds of billions in virtual wealth with nothing ever actually being accomplished and no actual product made or service rendered.

It's like Tinkerbell's Light.

Its power source is based solely on enough children believing in it.

And unfortunately, what is real is the unfathomable amount of electricity those massive supercomputers suck up for their mining.

The power, listen to this,

the power being used right right now to guess numbers and win imaginary prizes is the same as all the electricity needed to light all of New York State, except the governor's office where they use romantic candles.

Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind.

Just one uses more energy than a million Visa transactions and has the same carbon footprint as 85,000 hours of watching YouTube.

What a 15-year-old calls the weekend.

Bitcoin uses more energy than Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google combined.

I mean, cars are bad for the climate, but at least they take you somewhere.

In Tiger Woods' case, a tree.

But this,

this,

this is just a beanie baby that runs on coal.

How can a company like Tesla be all in on saving the planet with electric cars and then participate in destroying it with this completely unnecessary online play money?

Almost.

Almost all the people who tout Bitcoin and deal in Bitcoin and won't shut the fuck up about Bitcoin,

the millennials, the Gen Zers, the Silicon Valley types, these are all the same people who see themselves as hip and progressive and big environmentalists.

Bullshit, you're money-hungry opportunists, and you're not allowed to pretend you care about the environment.

According to the journal Nature, Bitcoin's growth could, single-handedly, push global temperatures above the tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius.

I know melting ice caps can wait.

Your green new deal involves cash.

Social scientists call this cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between who you think you are and what you actually do.

I call it being full of shit.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas.

Oh, thank you, Jesus.

July 16th and 17th, I want to thank Nancy McClain, Thomas Frank, and Ben Sheehan.

We'll be back next week.

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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