Ep. #554: Jimmy Kimmel, Charlotte Alter, Matt Welch

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

Thank you very much.

Hey, real people.

People are here.

All right.

Hi, how are you?

Thank you so much.

Wow, we got people back.

We got real people.

Real people.

Thank you, real people.

Masked and spaced and tested.

Oh, my God.

Robots wouldn't be safer.

But But thank you so much for doing this and going through all that.

And we're going to have a good show.

We're going to be happy tonight because the Super Bowl is Sunday.

That's a big thing in America, Super Bowl weekend.

The Buccaneers versus the team somehow still called the Chiefs.

How did they slide on that?

The poor Washington team, they don't even get a name.

They're just the team.

You know, just like, fuck it, we're not even going near that shit.

But the Chiefs, we're still, okay.

But this is going to be a great game, you know, Tom Brady versus Patrick Mahomes, almost a 20-year age difference between them.

What we in Hollywood call marriage.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Now, of course, this year is going to be different because of the pandemic.

You know, some fans say

they're going to watch, listen to this, with blow-up dolls.

And then in a tribute to Tom Brady, deflate them.

Oh, I kid Tom Brady.

And who am I kidding?

You know what?

It came out today, 25% of Americans say they're still going to go to a Super Bowl party.

And it's going to be very confusing this year when someone says, pass the corona.

Ask your doctor of getting in a room with a bunch of drunks screaming is good for you.

But yeah, cases are down, though.

This is good news.

You know, 45%, well,

let's not go crazy.

They're down because we're over the spike from the holiday season when Americans just, of course, didn't follow the rules and fucked up and met with each other.

So that's why it's down.

But now we're coming up on Valentine's Day.

I tell you, for once, being a loser with no love life is a good thing.

So,

well, what else is in the news?

Oh, yes, ex-government employee Donald Trump is in the news.

He's getting impeached for the second time.

This is going.

Okay.

How brave of you.

But this was going on exactly at this time last year, right?

It's like an annual event now.

It's like Groundhog Day, except with a weasel.

Yes, we are.

It's so, you know, a second impeachment.

It's so anticlimactic.

You know, no one's going to be watching.

Lindsey Graham said there's going to be so few viewers, not even getting his hair done.

Lindsay.

But I tell you that the Republican Party, they are in trouble.

They have a real identity crisis, which is kind of encapsulated in these two women now that

they were debating whether to censure this week.

Liz Cheney, you know her, right?

Oh, we say we love her now.

Daughter of Dick Cheney.

Okay.

And then you know all about Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Liz Cheney, daughter of Tick Cheney, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, and you know, Liz voted to impeach Trump, so they remanded her for that.

Marjorie's the anti-Semite who, of course, likes to make literal death threats against Democrats for their execution.

They had a five-hour meeting about these two women, and then the two women spoke.

Guess which one got a standing ovation?

Oh, I guess he can't.

Okay, well,

it was the crazy one.

It was Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And the Democrats today, they strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of all her committee standings.

But, you know, she's.

Should we?

Is it?

Is it?

But, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene is now one of the standard bearers of the Republican Party.

She's one of their faces.

It's like having Marilyn Manson host the Grammys.

And

so listen to this.

You know, they do have a leader there in the House.

Kevin McCarthy is the minority leader.

And

he's so afraid to get near this.

He said about Marjorie Taylor Greene, he doesn't even know what QAnon is.

Really?

Is it not his job

to know things that are happening in America?

What else doesn't he know?

Hey, what's with all these people wearing masks?

But really, a five-hour meeting they had on this, where they defended themselves.

Liz Cheney laid out her strong anti-terrorist credentials, and then Marjorie Taylor Greene laid out her strong pro-terrorist credentials.

But Liz Cheney did survive.

She is going to still be the number three in in the house, but only after promising to never again do the right thing.

And

my favorite part was when Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, you know, believes in every conspiracy theory, she said she thinks Satan runs the government.

And Liz said, no, my dad's retired.

All right, we've got a great show.

We have Matt Welch and Charlotte Alter.

And first up, he is the host of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Can you guess who it is?

Jimmy Kimmel.

I don't know how we're.

Hi, everyone.

Oh, thank you.

I should have brought that hand that you have.

That's a funny thing.

Isn't it a funny thing that we're not allowed to shake hands?

Because before I come here, they say, don't worry, everyone has been tested.

Everything is perfect.

There's nothing to worry about at all.

And the athletes.

Not only shake hands, they practically kiss each other.

Speaking of athletes, I pull into your parking lot.

I pull into my spot.

It says Jay Kimmel on it.

Right next to me, it says D Strawberry.

And I'm very excited.

Very excited because Daryl Strawberry.

It's not Dave Strawberry.

Daryl Strawberry is here.

Yeah, that was a fake name we were trying to use so people wouldn't know it was me.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Thanks for that, Jimmy.

Like an idiot, I'm sitting in the dressing room going, boy, nobody's mentioned Daryl Strawberry.

And I thought, oh, it's Bill is Daryl Strawberry.

Well, that's when I was a part owner of the Mets yeah yeah well yeah but you did well with that right I eventually did you get the check I did thank God but first I was writing checks for this whole last year I was shitting in my pants like I've never shit in my pants you had to write checks yes you're in for a penny for a penny I was one of the minority owners there was capital calls when they're losing money and we didn't play baseball for a hundred games and then when we did we weren't selling hot dogs all I was doing was writing this is my problem.

We should not really be talking about this.

Anyway, thank God.

Can I tell you, though,

your advice, when you told me about this situation with the Mets, I was offered a piece of the Las Vegas hockey team, the Golden Knights, the NHL team.

And they said, we'd like to sell you 1% of the team.

It's a great honor.

And I said, I thought about Bill, and I thought, he didn't seem that enthused about owning the Mets.

And I passed

a few.

I did, until the pandemic came along.

And by the way, I still made out like a fucking bandit.

Even with all that, I was right.

It's the best investment, not the fucking Vegas hockey team.

But they went to the Stanley Cup in their first season.

It gives a shit.

It's hockey.

It's not even America.

But baseball, the New York Mets.

the National League franchise in New York City, I knew that could not lose money, and it didn't.

Why didn't they ask you to stay with the ownership group?

Well, there was,

first of all, after the near-death experience of Pandemic 20, when I was writing those checks, I didn't want to.

And then that wasn't,

who gives a shit?

I don't know.

I'm out.

It was a great 10 years at a parking spot at City Field.

I went to see any game I wanted to.

Then we got into the World Series.

Did your parking spot at Citi Field say D strawberry on it?

Maybe.

But that would have been confusing because he probably has one.

Exactly, yeah.

So speaking of sports, what about the Super Bowl?

You know what?

Is that this weekend?

If I have to listen to any more

sportscasters, to all people on TV, sucking Tom Brady's dick for the

right?

I get it.

He's the greatest, the goat, whatever.

It's just like, please, Mahomes, beat this motherfucker.

Please.

I'm so tired of listening to how great Tom Brady is.

I am, I, you know, listen, Mahomes seems like a nice guy.

Tom Brady has certainly won his share of everything, but

I am rooting for him because I think, and I think this maybe is true for a lot of these sportscasters, is this is a guy who was told by his employer, By the way, this reminds me a little bit of you, and I'll explain why.

Stay with me here.

When you were at ABC, they said, all right, that's it, we're done.

You went on to become tremendously successful here at HBO.

You're like the Tom Brady of and what

I think you want the Achonoids for himself.

But I think everybody, everybody who's been fired from a job goes, I love to see this guy leave his job.

They go in the toilet, he goes to Tampa, which is also a toilet.

Let's be honest.

I live there, I know.

And then he's, you know, in the Super Bowl again.

And who knows?

He might win it.

I was going to ask you, you grew up in Vegas.

I grew up in Las Vegas.

You know, one thing I'm, the thing I miss the most

in 2020 and now they canceled a bunch of dates again is touring.

You don't really tour like I do.

No.

But I do go to Vegas.

I have a comedy club in Las Vegas.

Right.

And I enjoy going there.

And I miss Vegas.

I mean, that's one of the main stops.

Obviously, I'm there six or seven times a year at the Mirage, or I was.

I hope it resumes again.

I miss that.

I mean, I couldn't live there.

I love Vegas for the weekend.

You grew up there.

I don't know.

What was that like?

How did that shape you growing up in Vegas?

Well, in a weird way, I guess.

You know, it's funny.

People, when they ask you about growing up in Las Vegas, it's as if you grew up on a pirate ship or something.

It's like,

was it scary?

Were you drunk all the time?

Did you lose an eye?

Didn't you hear the clanging of the one-armed bandits when you woke up?

Because that's my image of Vegas.

I wake up and I go down to breakfast and all I hear a ning and ning.

But that's not really, you grew up in a house.

I grew up in a house.

My dad worked for this company.

They did math and my mom was a hooker.

It was just a normal upgrade.

Right.

Just a normal upreading.

No different than anyone else.

Vegas is still, though, it's different.

You know, people think we need it.

We need one place in America that will be the bastion of political incorrectness.

It really is.

Because drive in.

There's a billboard.

You can

drive a tank and fire a machine gun at a ventriloquist out of it.

And then there's another guy on another billboard holding up a lobster the size of an eight-year-old.

Well, I'm home.

Yes.

But I mean,

the direction the country is going, someplace has to be a place where we don't have to conform and be perfect.

Right, audience?

Thank you.

People.

I love it.

By the way, I get a kick out of watching you.

I watch you every week.

And I've enjoyed because I can relate to the fact that you are doing your show for your own staff.

And I'm doing my show for my own staff.

I did it on, I did your show when it was your staff.

And they were a great crowd.

They were great for you.

That's why I'm thinking.

I have an idea.

Quite frankly, my staff is sick of it.

Switch staff.

Let's trade.

Let's trade staffs.

It will be like swinging but for rock shows right you know

i also have another plan and i think this is a good plan who is because i'm tired of doing the show for my staff and they're more tired than i am of it so who is the group that has been vaccinated and has nothing but free time

old people old people i want to start bringing groups of like Tell them the bus is headed to Laughlin or something.

Put them on.

They come.

We'll have bingo.

We'll do the whole thing.

I'll get a bunch of old people.

Yeah.

Everybody's got a lot of people.

We used to have a talk show that did that.

It was called the Merv Griffin Show.

Really?

Merv.

I love Merv.

Do you remember?

Oh,

you didn't never.

You were too young to do that.

No, no, that is not true.

In fact, I once, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, these were like the You're Homesick from School shows.

Right?

Yes.

But Merv, he did three tapings in a day.

Yes.

Well, you know, he wanted time off.

He had other activities.

Yeah.

In Vegas.

But Danny Terium.

Anyway, it was like 3.30, 4.30, and 5.30 were the tapings.

And if you got the 3.30, I'm telling you, there was nobody there under 112 years old.

And, you know, I was like 28 and trying to do accommodation to these people.

Anyway, again,

I had problems, not really.

I shouldn't do this, what you're saying.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

But, you know, I was watching you.

You were talking one night about how you took this trip to Idaho.

Oh, yeah, I did, yeah.

Which now is the number one destination, I think, one of the top destinations for people leaving California, which is a big thing.

You know, there's a big exodus.

I read it in the paper last week.

Now they're going to Miami, all the tech guys.

To Miami?

Yes.

Oh.

And why wouldn't, okay.

I'm not going to get into California, hopefully tonight, maybe a little later.

I do have something at the desk which I want to show.

I have my problems with California.

Yeah.

The regulations and the taxes taxes and the fires, but Idaho, let's talk about Idaho.

I once went on vacation to South Dakota, which is not a place you'd think you'd find me.

And I had a great time.

Oh, yeah.

Again, I wouldn't want to live there.

But there is something about those states and the people in them.

You tell me what it is.

Well, For us, just the reason we went there, and by the way, I bought a place in Idaho.

That's how much I like it there.

But

for us, we'd been in the house with the kids for too long.

And so we decided, I bought an RV.

We decided to put them in a smaller house that would make them throw up.

And we wanted to just kind of get out and see the country and breathe the air and eat at Chili's.

Although we didn't really stop anywhere along the way, we kept it very self-contained.

But it is funny because we went up to Idaho and it was a great time.

We got to go, we saw Mount Zion, and the kids got to look at YouTube on their iPads in Mount Zion.

And then we got back in the RV.

The trip back is no good, because you know you're headed home.

You know what's in store.

We get back in the RV.

That says something right there.

Yeah, you're right.

That does say something.

But we get back in the RV and we stop at this campground.

They have these nice tents set up and we get the kids in the bed and we're laying in the tent.

And it's hot, really hot.

And of course, there's no air conditioning.

Did you know tents don't have air conditioning?

Tents.

We're in the tent.

And I'm laying there, and I say to my wife, let's drive to Vegas.

And we packed the kids up, we got in the RV, and we drove to Caesar's Palace.

And they have parking for RVs at Caesar's Palace.

Of course, they do.

And that's where we spent the time.

You can drive them over the Snake River like Evil Knievel did.

Jimmy, it's great to see you.

You always make me laugh.

It's great to see you too.

Thanks for having me.

I have tears in my eyes.

I can't do this.

Sorry about the parking spot thing.

I'll go and change it to, you know, I'll change it to Keith Hernandez or something.

Jimmy Kimmel, everybody.

Jimmy Kimmel.

Came by.

Thanks, pal.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay.

Hi.

Okay, here they are.

He is the host of the Reason Roundtable podcast and co-host of the Fifth Column podcast.

Two podcasts.

Matt Welch, two.

Two podcasts.

Okay.

And she's a senior correspondent at Time and author of The Ones We've Been Waiting For, How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.

Charlotte Alter.

Charlotte, how you doing?

Okay.

Now,

before I let you two talk, I just want to show this thing.

This is Days Waiting for Solar.

People who watch my show know

I have been bitching.

I'm not going to lie, it's bitching.

I've been bitching about the fact that I've been trying to get the solar turned on at my house for over three years.

I mean, we are supposed to want solar, right?

And it's supposed to be good, and I did everything right.

And, okay, I read in George Will's column last week, the Pentagon was built in 16 months during war, 500 days, 500 days.

Empire State Building, 410 days during the Depression.

That little shed, I had to build a little shed

to house the solar, because it comes in on a poll now, but the poll's not good for solar, probably bullshit too, but okay.

The shed just got built like

two or three months ago, finally got the shed in.

Now we just have to turn on the 1,082 days now,

if you're watching this tomorrow.

And I just want these people to know, I'm going to leave this here.

And I just think this is a terrible advertisement for Democrats.

California used to, the neighborhood I grew up in California down in Long Beach and Lakewood area, is a neighborhood that houses like...

Oh, you grew up here?

Yeah.

Like 60,000 people.

It was built in a year and a half, essentially, in the 1950s.

Granted,

there was land back there.

But California doesn't build things.

And they get really surprised when it has tons of homeless people.

Like, if you don't allow things to get built, if you drag out approval processes forever, what happens?

You don't have enough housing.

And everyone is perpetually surprised as if this sort of magic supply-demand thing, you mean that that applies also to housing?

It does, sadly.

And the approval process is a main culprit of that.

But also, so much of this is because we haven't decided it's a national project to get people solar.

It hasn't been a priority for any real administration except possibly this one, which has only been in office for like two weeks.

But it's a priority in theory, but in practice.

I got some bad

that's the thing.

It is a priority.

They talk about it like it's a priority, but then when you go and do it, you can't actually get it done.

Have they told you yet about how you have to like clean it every 18 months or else it stops working?

I'll lick it.

Just

okay.

But okay, so like

so and this week, I'm also reading about the fact that 44 San Francisco high schools, did you see this, are having to change their name because the school board had a blue ribbon committee who just basically went on Wikipedia and looked up everybody's name who was on a high school.

And if they found anything,

you know who

can't be on a high school?

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln is being Lincoln.

Diane Feinstein.

who was a senator, still is a senator.

Wow, she's been a senator a long time.

But in 1984, she was the the mayor of San Francisco and there was all these like cultural historic flags in front of the building and somebody took down the Confederate flag and then Diane Feinstein either replaced it or didn't stop it when somebody who gives a fuck

this is this is not affecting anybody's life.

It's just like this virtue signaling of I'm going to disappear this person because in 1984 they didn't replace the right flag.

I'm saying this is an important issue.

I'm saying when you can't put out the fires and you can't build a house, it just looks like this is what you spend your time doing.

It looks to a lot of the country, this is what the left is obsessed with, not real progress, this nonsense.

There's a way in which this is an important issue, which is to say there are 50,000 kids in San Francisco who haven't set foot in a school for 329 days.

Think about that.

That's appalling.

You're a school district.

You basically have one job.

Your job is to provide education to kids.

They are not doing that job.

The people who are suffering from that job, surprise, are poor and minority kids, most of all.

And instead of spending every bit of time and every bit of money, because you got to, you know, you got to change the names of schools, that's going to cost money.

Instead of doing that to open the schools to do the one job, you're doing this bad Wikipedia virtual signaling where like Paul Revere gets canceled for the wrong reason.

Paul Revere gets together.

And what did he do?

He didn't ride fast enough.

I don't know.

But the other part of this is that, you know,

this is one of the, this kind of virtue signaling and this kind of political correctness is one of the only things that's driving young people to the right.

On all of the issues on climate change,

young people,

not all young people, of course, but the young people that I've spoken to who are moving to the right, who are becoming conservative, it's often because of stuff like this.

It's not because they don't believe in climate change.

It's not because they have a, you know, difference, they're not driven by taxes.

It's not because they have a small business.

It's because they're frustrated with this type of left-wing virtue signaling.

And we even see that in the Republican Party right now, where almost all the rising stars of the Republican Party have defined themselves in opposition to cancel culture.

They haven't defined themselves in any, with any kind of real policy agenda.

Look at the standing ovation for Marjorie Taylor Greene.

So the quickest way to, at this point that we're in, the quickest way to make a hero on the right is to cancel them on the left.

And they're co-opting that term.

You know, I have my issues with cancel culture like I think a lot of sane people do.

Just like I had my issues when Trump was talking about,

or rather when people were talking about Trump using fake news.

And within weeks, Trump took that term and made it his.

That started out them calling his ass on that.

You're doing fake news.

And soon it was him saying, no, fake news.

Everything was fake news.

And now, I think this is happening with cancel culture.

I mean, Jim Jordan literally used it about Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Right.

That's okay.

We're just going to have to come up with a different phrase to describe it.

And it's not, I mean, one of the better definitions of it just has to do with: are you ganging up on someone who doesn't hold power?

It's not just a consequence of their actions.

Did they make a minor slip-up that at the time didn't feel like it, and suddenly they're out of a job?

Happened to a New York Times reporter today, just before the show.

He got canceled.

He got fired from his job because he used the N-word in a context of racist, talking about racist language, not as a slur towards anybody.

Fire, done, one strike, and you're out.

And what does every single conservative on Twitter say about that today?

The New York Times is crazy.

The left is crazy.

They've got to stop it.

And that is an attractive message.

I mean, cancel Lincoln.

I want to ask you, you're a millennial, right?

You know, most of the people I hang out with now are millennials, especially in the pandemic.

Can you talk about it?

No, no, I love my millennial friends.

I do.

I thank God for them because the people my age, they're afraid to go out or I don't know what the fuck their problem is, but that's not, they just don't hang.

You know, I mean, they're married.

I get it.

You know, they can't keep up with me.

What can I say?

Okay.

But here's the difference between boomers and millennials.

Boomers are not like, they don't have issues with their own generation so much.

My millennial friends all have issues with their own generation.

They talk about their own generation like, I mean, maybe I'm with the sane ones, but

what sort of generation, and I'm guessing that this is coming from millennials, that

they would take the name Lincoln off a high school.

What is it with this, that nothing is good enough for them?

I mean, nothing is pure.

Lincoln?

Lincoln is not good enough for you?

What the fuck?

Why?

Because, I mean,

where does this come from?

So I think there's a couple things happening here.

One is Matt's great point about one strike, you're out.

That is actually has history in the way millennials were raised.

So in the 1980s and 90s, that was the first time that people were even talking about bullying as a problem in schools.

So you began to have this zero tolerance policies policies in schools where people my age, you know, grew up.

And those zero tolerance policies meant that if somebody called someone a name on the playground or got in a fight when they're nine or you know,

like hit, hit pushed somebody off a swing, they could get suspended or suspelled.

One strike, you're out.

That's what zero tolerance meant.

So actually, this whole idea that there would be a draconian punishment for a seemingly innocuous one-time thing is something that boomers created because they were so afraid of their kids being bullied in school because heaven forbid their precious children ever

have a minute of discomfort.

You're right, they raised their kids wrong.

To put it brightly, they did.

But was it really boomers who raised millennials?

Why does Gen X, which is in the middle,

why are they just completely

slide on the whole generational battle?

We were slackers originally, and you had no children?

We do have children.

And we see this every single day.

And especially it's reinforced by the schools non-stop.

And what the effect is, is that it makes all parents, and I live in Brooklyn where they voted like 103% for Joe Biden, probably.

But parents are all just aggressively rolling their eyes at the nonstop messaging that's very, very super woke and politically correct.

But they dare not say a word because they don't want to be tarred as being racist.

And this is being used again in the school opening context.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, they say, we're not going to reopen the schools because it's an artifact of white supremacy.

In Chicago, which is, there's teachers are not showing up to work right now, they say they're doing this because the reopening drive is an artifact of racism, sexism, misogyny.

It doesn't make any sense at all, but there are these words that they could be used as a weapon to cow people into silence, and that's where it's the most pernicious.

That is so true.

And it's

Okay, so I want to say this about parents.

Okay.

I feel for parents today because you can't raise your kid in the vacuum.

If all the other kids are doing it, you know, you can't tell your kid you can't have a phone.

So I get that, but they're also little bitches for their children.

They let the kids run their phone, and it ruins both their lives.

Ruins the kid, and it ruins the parent.

And that's one thing.

The other thing I think is phones.

Your generation, right?

How old were you when you first had a phone?

There was...

I was actually like, I don't know, maybe 14.

Yeah, that's ridiculous.

That's when we got clock rating.

And now they probably have them at 10 or even younger.

And I think phones make you a bad person.

I do.

I think they make you...

They make you shady.

Wait a second.

How many of you people have phones?

I know we all do, but it makes you shady.

They make you passive-aggressive.

They make you fake, cowardly, and bullying.

You know, when you're anonymous, you can be as big as asshole as you want.

You know, everything is not real

with the phone.

I think the filters and the...

The pandemic has really goosed that negative aspect because we haven't

been around each other.

When we're in a room together, and I'm sure you found this during your show remote, like you just can't read the room.

You can't act like so much of an asshole.

You just can't get away with it because you're going to get immediate negative feedback.

You're going to feel weird about it in person.

There's generations of kids right now who haven't been able to see their peers for a long time.

And so you have this flattening kind of digital communication and that's where it gets bad.

I think once people start actually seeing each other and picking the nits out of their hair and doing the normal chimpanzee stuff that we do when we're around each other, then we're going to stop being so

sort of focused on on on these flat communications where you can't really understand what people are saying or cherry-pick something bad that they did and try to ruin their lives.

But then, you know, the other side of this also is that anytime there's a new technology, people are always saying, oh, this is going to ruin the kids.

TV is going to ruin the kids.

I'm sure people thought that the radio would ruin the kids.

And

I don't know.

I mean, listen, I think.

But this one really is.

It really is.

I mean, I get your point.

It's true.

The old guy never says that.

And

I'm always asking that question.

Am I hitting this just because I'm 65 now?

But

I check myself like, no, I'm looking at this objectively.

It really is bad.

It really does make you a coward, that phone, ghosting people,

having no ability to confront.

You know, that's not a good thing.

Kids, I read something where 81% of millennials have anxiety just to make a phone call.

Let alone get one when you don't know who it is.

Ah!

We used to just go, hello, who is it?

You know, you have to, hi, it's Billy Maher.

Can I talk to Michelle?

Okay.

Well, now you get a phone call and you think someone died.

That's why it's scary to get a phone call.

You think it's like the hospital calling to tell you someone died.

But listen,

I don't think it's better or worse.

I just think it's different.

I think that all of these ways that people communicate with each other and they have confrontations and they experience rejection and they have arguments, they do it through the phone.

And I certainly think you're totally right, Matt.

There's a lot that's lost with in-person communication, and this is something that's been especially true with conspiracy theories.

I mean, conspiracy theories spread much more easily in digital communities than they do in real-world,

you know, real in-person conversations, because somebody says something crazy, and they can see on the other person's face, like,

that's nuts.

But ironically, the people who are actually most susceptible to that are the older people who don't actually know and understand technology that well and aren't actually that fluent in how information moves across the internet.

So I think you're right that the internet is ruining society to some extent, but actually the younger people who grew up understanding it and using it are more equipped to surf it.

And it also makes them more equipped to be more squirrely.

Maybe.

Maybe, but they're squirrely.

It's also a really creative tool.

It's more sketchy.

I have a 12-year-old daughter who does all kinds of crazy creative stuff on TikTok, as do all of her peers that's a positive thing too right so like all new things you have to sort of figure it out you have to monitor it or or you know make sure that people emerge from their rooms more than once every four months but it can be a source of creativity and staying in touch with people like her grandparents who are many thousands of miles away okay so it's a new era now we have a new president we thought it'd be a good time to do one of our favorite refillables called I don't know it for a fact

I just know it's true now

people know about this bit sir I mean, you don't know.

It's just, there are things in this world which I freely admit I do not know for a fact.

I just know they're true.

For example, I don't know it for a fact.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that Keith Richards got COVID and didn't care.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that when you throw out Chef Boy RD, the raccoons who eat it hate themselves.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that Army Hammer joined a dating site called Eat Harmony.

I don't know for a fact that there are now a dozen garage bands called Jewish Space Laser.

I don't know for a fact that most of the anti-Wall Street GameStop crusaders will be stockbrokers in 10 years.

That's actually true.

That isn't isn't not even a joke.

I don't know for a fact that kombucha is the Japanese word for pond water.

It's okay.

I don't know for a fact that Justin Trudeau moonlights as a tantric yoga instructor.

I

feel it's true.

And I don't know for a fact, Sears and J.C.

Penny will merge into a mega chain called Suckmart.

I just know it's true.

All right.

So

now I was pointing a little fun at Army Hammer there.

This may seem frivolous to bring him up, but I keep reading about Army Hammer,

and I think we could talk about this in relation to where feminism is, because

apparently Army Hammer has a predilection to tell his dates he wants to eat them.

And who wouldn't want to be eaten by Army Hammer?

Come on.

Exactly my point.

Thank you, one honest woman.

If Army Hammer says, I want to eat you, you're going to say yes.

But apparently, this is something called ethical human cannibal fetishism.

No actual women were eaten in the making of this movie.

We're just talking.

So they have his text where he's saying things like, I want to take your rib out and boil it and

eat it with barbecue sauce.

I don't know.

I feel like this is just a subway stop past, you know, I want to spank you.

But we're in such a porn-centric society.

People have been watching really hardcore porn for so long that spank you doesn't really cut it anymore.

Now I got to take your rib out and eat part of you.

So anyway,

my point is that the women who are objecting this now, who went out with Army Hammond, willingly and stayed in willingly, and apparently

you know, there wasn't physical bad stuff happening.

Okay, that would, we wouldn't have a discussion there.

We'd all just agree that's intolerable.

Okay, but if there's no physical coercion, why isn't this just filed under,

that seemed like a good idea at the time

to let Army Hammer eat me, but it really wasn't.

But it seems like we don't have any ownership anymore of our own choices.

But

there was some physical stuff, right?

Some of the women have alleged that there was sort of some slapping around.

One woman said he carved his initials into her body.

I mean, did he tie her down and do that?

I don't know.

That's a good question.

I don't think so.

I'm just kind of, you know, like they, like, how consensual, are we sure that this was really consensual if these women are now coming out and saying it wasn't?

Well, they're not saying it wasn't.

They're not saying it wasn't.

That's the thing.

They're saying it was creepy,

which, I mean, I don't want to invite the dude over for a barbecue.

It just doesn't sound right.

I clicked on the link about the cutting stuff because I think cutting, which is a whole culture, it really creeps me out.

It's wrong, and I was expecting to be horrified.

And it's a tiny little bit letter A

down here, which is weird enough, right?

But it looks kind of like a tattoo gone slightly wrong.

And the person wasn't...

trying to get free when that thing was done.

So what do you do with that?

As an outsider, as a society, what do you do with those people in that moment deciding it was a great idea to get a penknife and carve an A into an abdomen and then afterwards feel bad about it?

And I think as a society, or at least something placed with laws, there aren't laws for that, right?

Like press charges when something is not voluntary.

Press charges when someone committed violence against you, but that doesn't seem like what this is.

But this is exactly one of the things that's I think happening now, which relates back to the school thing, is that essentially, you know, like you said, we have a criminal justice system, right?

That if you steal a candy bar and you rob ten banks, you're going to have different punishments because those two things are different crimes.

Now we have this concept of social justice, which I think me too and the conversation around feminism and consent would come under this umbrella, but there isn't a system for adjudicating, you know, the difference between an Aziz Ansari or a Harvey Weinstein.

But one of the things that happens when you have have that is that men, for very understandable reasons, are now tremendously anxious.

And I completely understand why there is a tremendous amount of anxiety that their sexual behavior could get them completely

shunned from society.

But guess what?

Women have had to deal with

that particular anxiety that the way they behave sexually could ruin their life for literally millennia.

Of course.

Literally millennia.

The idea that

sex has consequences,

obviously the biological consequence of getting pregnant, but until what, maximum 70 years ago, women could be, and still in some parts of the world, women could be ostracized, murdered, tortured, forced into some horrible marriage for talking to the wrong person, for having sex out of wedlock, for showing their ankles, all kinds of ridiculous stuff.

So the idea that there's now suddenly consequences consequences that might feel, and I agree are, very unfair for the way, for, you know, given that it's, you're right, it's possible this was consensual.

But I think you have to look at it in a broader context of,

you know, women have had to ponder the

extraordinary consequences of sex for all of human history, and now men are getting a taste of what.

But I mean, that is all true.

I don't know what it has to do with what happened last year with Army Hammer.

She's not bearing that whole history on her shoulders.

She was born 25 years ago.

She probably doesn't even know all that.

I think what I'm saying is that, sorry.

No, yo, go.

I think what I'm saying is that, is it such a huge crime now that some men have to have to think about the way they behave sexually as if it could have tremendous and unfair consequences for them?

Because no, it's not.

That's what I, when this first happened, that's what I called playing with five fouls.

You know, I don't know if you follow basketball, but you're allowed six fouls in the game.

So when you have five fouls, you have to think about who you're going to foul.

Right.

You're playing with five fouls.

You can stay in the game, but you better be careful.

And that was a great thing that happened to men.

Kind of ironic in this conversation that Will Chamberlain never fouled out, yet had

quite a career after 20,000.

Didn't he say he had 20,000 conquests?

Something like that, yeah.

Okay, well.

No, I think the thing that is happening now that I am alarmed of as part of this is that in some places laws are changing.

They changed college campus adjudication and then they changed it back.

But for about four or five years, there,

you could easily just get kicked out of your college through accusations of a sexual assault without being able to defend yourself.

Like they literally just threw due process out the window in the name of believing women more strongly.

I think that's wrong.

In New York, Governor Cuomo said that we need to close, what did he call it, something something like the intoxication loophole of sexual assault law so that if you got drunk on purpose and then consented, had sex on purpose, but then regretted it some time later, you could still classify this as sexual assault, saying that you couldn't have been in your capacity.

I think down that path is where injustice is going to lie.

And I mean, you're going to get the government involved in like, how drunk were you?

How much did you consent?

And that's just kind of a squirrely place to be.

The other place is, and the Aziz Hansar example is a good one, as is the Arnie Hammer one, there's this thing now where you can just go on to medium and do, I guess, what the dudes were doing four decades ago, just like, oh, she's loose or she's a slut or the way that men used to talk a lot about women.

That was terrible.

You can do that as a woman now, or as anybody, and do it on medium, and you can have like your post facto regret

discussion about a person.

And maybe that is warning future partners that he's going to talk about your rib in a way that's going to be a little bit unsettling.

And so maybe that has uses but I think sometimes and I know this that's happened to actual human beings that it's ruined their jobs and livelihoods based on scenarios that weren't clear but in that case I mean as many people have said it was just a bad date she had many opportunities to leave he's 5'4 he didn't drag her to his apartment

so I think we're in the sorry I didn't know

So I think you make a lot of great points, and I agree with almost everything you've said.

I think that what we're talking about here is this kind of spasm of moral purity that has really taken root over the last five years, right?

And guess what else has been happening over the last five years?

Donald Trump has been president of the United States.

And Gen Z.

And its generation.

Sure, sure.

But

I think that what's happening here is that Donald Trump was president and Donald Trump got away with everything.

And so nobody else could get away with anything.

I think that there was this kind of cultural and societal need to purge ourselves of all of the wrongs that Donald Trump seemed to embody, whether that's assaulting women, whether that's racism, whether that's any number of things that we've, in the last five years, had these fever spasms about.

I think that there's been this

push towards accountability, and it's because he's been this big symbol of all the ways in which those things are still tolerated in our society.

But then I think it becomes a self-reinforcing thing, right?

As these kind of zero tolerance and sometimes just kind of insane sounding

justices or mob justices that are meted out, that said that does has the effect, like you mentioned earlier, of people saying, screw this and screw the people who are doing that.

I'm going to go over for this team here.

So that makes that more popular.

The question is, like, how do you get out of that cycle?

And for me, granted, I'm coming from a civil libertarian point of view, you get out through civil libertarianism, through due process, through caring actually about being careful in the way that you track down the bad guys and you make them punish.

And go after the guy actually committing the crimes in this case, and not people who are not, as a way of sort of symbolically dealing with your feelings about that.

I also must say one more thing about Army Hammer.

I think he is exactly the guy in the book 50 Shades of Gray, which was the most popular book ever,

I think, with women.

Oprah said, I hope the movie is filthier than the book.

Oprah said that.

I mean, he's this rich, right, handsome movie star guy,

and he's got a kink.

And, you know, the women said, at first he love-bombed me.

It was great.

Yeah.

Well, if you're going to swim with the alpha sharks, it's not going to come out well in the end.

Shouldn't you know that?

I mean, is that really that hard to figure out without the law getting involved?

But then the other side of that is Army Hammer hasn't been under a rock for the last five years.

Shouldn't Army Hammer know that if he's got a really weird kink like this, he better be really sure that the person that he's dealing with is super on board with it and have a real amount of trust with them,

you know, that they're not going to go to the presses immediately afterwards?

Like, shouldn't he have dated them for a second and know that?

Well, he did date them.

That's the problem, is that while they were love-bombing him,

the tattoo was all good.

And then when he dumped them, it was not.

Are you going to sign an NDA?

Like before you get into the catalog.

He's a CAD.

Sounds strange.

I just think if I, let's just say I'm Army Hammer and I have this predilection, right?

I would sort of make sure that I'm with somebody that I really trust, that I really know is definitely on freedom.

Do you think a guy who wants to eat your rib cares about that?

He doesn't care about trust.

He cares about the taste of blood in his mouth.

He's a king.

The final tap taught us that we should all think about the majesty of rock and the mystery of roll.

And there's a whole lot of mystery of role when it comes to sex and what turns people on and not.

And

holy crap, we don't really want to get too close in there.

We just want to make sure that everyone's safe and not committing crimes.

Right, okay.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

Time for new rules.

Okay, new roll, now that D-list celebrities are recording cell phone messages for money, we should make politicians do it too.

Hi Timer, this is your boy Chuck Grassley here saying yo yo yo, it's your birthday.

Sister you got to do it upright.

Put your foot in it.

Also abortion is murder.

Thank you for your support.

Neural, it's time to officially retire the line.

Of course it rained.

I just washed my car.

The last time that was funny, the car was a Model T and the person who said it was Henry Ford.

And his daughter was in the back seat saying, Stop it, Dad, you're embarrassing me.

New rules, sociologists have to explain how smashing food in a person's face went from being the sign of an abusive relationship to a symbol of undying romantic love.

When people ask me why I never married, I tell them, I have too much respect for cake.

New rule, since sex is a real thing that happens in real life, every porn video should open with the words, based on actual events.

Then at the end, do that thing where we're told how the lives of those depicted in the film turned out?

Tammy went on to work in a vape shop and is the proud owner of a lizard she stole from a petting zoo.

Derek digs broken jet skis out of landfills and rents them to tourists in Florida Panhandle.

They both still fuck.

Thank you.

New rule, Nostradamus has to admit he really dropped the ball in the last 12 months.

I mean, a little heads up would have been nice.

And I'm not talking about the pandemic or Trump trying to end democracy.

I could have bought GameStop at 12 bucks a share.

And finally, new rule, as long as we're going to go to the trouble of another impeachment trial, we might as well be honest about what it's really about.

The events of January 6th were a faith-based initiative.

And Trumpism is a Christian nationalist movement that believes Trump was literally sent from heaven to save them.

It's right there in Senator Tommy Tuberville's campaign ad.

God sent us Donald Trump because God knew we were in trouble.

There's a lot of talk now in liberal quarters about how Republicans should tell their base, who still believe the election was rigged, that they need to grow up and move on and stop asking the rest of us to respect their mass delusion.

And of course it is a mass delusion.

But the inconvenient truth here is that if you accord religious faith the kind of exalted respect we do here in America, you've already lost the argument that mass delusion is bad.

It's fun to laugh at QAnon with the baby-eating lizard people and the pedophile pizza parlors, but have you ever read the book of Revelations?

That's the Bible.

That's your holy book, Christians.

And they've got seven-headed dragons and locusts that have the face of men and the teeth of lions and other stuff you only see after the guy in the park sells you bad mushrooms.

Last week, the big story was Marjorie Taylor Greene believing in Jewish space lasers, which answered the question, will there be comedy after Trump?

But the book of Revelations will tell you exactly where the world ends.

Megiddo.

Israel, I've been there.

Yeah, that's where all of the armies of the world will gather and Jesus will come down on a flying horse shooting swords out of his mouth.

Jesus, not the horse.

And have a thousand-year cosmic boss battle with Satan, the beast, and the Antichrist.

It's like 10 Avenger movies plus 10 Hobbit movies times a night out with Johnny Depp.

Spoiler alert, Jesus wins.

After which he will rapture up all the good souls, plus 144,000 Jews who were grandfathered in.

By Oscar Schindler.

But space lasers from Jews.

Please, magical religious thinking is a virus and QAnon is just its current mutation.

That's why megachurches play QAnon videos.

It's the same basic plot.

Q is a prophet, Trump is the Messiah, there's an apocalyptic event looming, the storm.

There's a titanic struggle of good versus evil.

And if you want good to win, just keep those checks coming in.

We need to stop pretending there's no way we'll ever understand why the Trump mob believes in him.

It's because they're religious.

They've already made space in their heads for shit that doesn't make sense.

When you're a QAnon fanatic, you're also a fundamentalist Christian.

They just go together like macaroni and cheese or Chardonnay and Vallium.

Just me?

Okay.

That insurrection looked like a revival meeting with people praying around wooden crosses, waving the Christian flag and Jesus Sabe signs, yelling, Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.

A Jesus 2020 banner hung near the gallows that was erected for Mike Pence, because I guess guess he's Judas in this version of the story, which makes this guy punch his pilot?

It's not a coincidence that every senator who objected to certifying the electoral vote in Arizona is an evangelical Christian.

When Ted Cruz defended his vote to overturn a legitimate election, he said,

Recent polling shows that 39% of Americans believe the election that just occurred was rigged.

You may not agree with that assessment, but it is nevertheless a reality for nearly half the country.

In other words, we have no proof the election was stolen, and you may have verifiable evidence that it wasn't, but that doesn't matter.

It only matters that we believe it.

And that's when you're at religion.

That you have to respect something just because people believe it.

Does that include professional wrestling?

The founding fathers were pretty adamant about building a nation based on reason instead of faith.

Thomas Paine wrote a whole book about it, The Age of Reason, and it was a big hit.

It was the white fragility of 1794.

So respectfully, I direct you to your own t-shirt.

Fuck your feelings.

All right, thank you very much.

That's our show.

I want to thank my guests, Matt Welch, Charlotte Alter, and Jimmy Kimmel.

We will see you next week.

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.