Ep. #535: John Bolton, Kara Swisher

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

Start the clock.

Thank you.

Well,

look at, oh, look at all the people.

Thank you very much.

I know why you're happy tonight.

Trump, still licking his wounds about his bad rally turnout in Tulsa.

You saw that shit?

Oh, my God.

You know, he expected a big crowd who was 19,000 would fit in the building.

6,000 showed up.

And, you know, Trump, all about the big numbers.

So when he got wind that the count might be light, he said to his aides, I want you to put asses in seats.

And that's when they let his supporters in.

I say it with love to his supporters.

But yeah, he was bragging all week before this that

a million people, he said, requested tickets.

It turns out they were teenagers who were punking him.

They were K-pop stands, trolling him.

It's like Hitler being taken down by the lollipop guild.

I mean, a million people and then 6,000 show up.

He was, let's see, 994,000 short.

And of course, they were wearing no masks.

These are what you call die-hard fans.

Because at their age and then the health they're in, they're going to die hard.

Yeah, I would not recommend if that's your health profile, you go to a Trump rally like that.

But yeah, I mean, he spent 15 minutes in the rally re-litigating ramp gate.

He's obsessed with this thing that happened a couple of weeks ago where he was going down a ramp and it did not go well.

And so he's making excuses.

It was the shoes and the no handrail, it was slippery.

Turns out he's not a doddering, top-heavy, fat ass who remained upright because his diaper was full.

It's the shoes.

Then he rambled on for another two hours.

I'm telling you, his fans, when they came in, they weren't afraid of the virus.

By the end of it, they were begging for it.

So, this is the most insane thing that happened in a long time.

He asked his staff, even by his standards, to slow the testing down.

He said, if we have less testing, we will record less cases.

Yes, but they'll still be there.

So his bootlickers, of course, had to say the next day he was just joking.

forgetting the first rule of Trump.

He's only unintentionally funny.

This happens all the time.

He says something insane and then his people go, oh, he's kidding.

And then the next day he goes, I'm not kidding.

It's like an Abbott and Costello routine if both Abbott and Costello were of compulsive liars.

But okay, the good news, Biden up by 14 points.

I mean, 14 points is a lot.

It turns out Biden's strategy of running against the worst person currently alive on earth is really paying off.

Trump camp says they are not worried.

Putin loves a challenge.

But of course, you know their strategy.

Trump is already saying that the election in November is rigged.

It's rigged.

He said that millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries.

And you know, there's one thing Donald Trump will not stand for, and that's foreigners meddling in an American election.

So after all this horrible week he had, he decides, okay, what I'm going to do is make up for the Tulsa fiasco and have another rally in Arizona, this time in a much smaller venue, you know, downsizing so that shit doesn't happen again.

So he goes to Arizona the other day, 3,000 people, very intimate.

He did some acoustic racism.

And he has this rally in a mega church.

And

right before the church's leaders, the megachurch's leaders released this video where they said they installed a technology that kills 99.9%

of COVID within 10 minutes.

Of course, people were like, what?

And then they said, come on, when have we ever manipulated you with unsubstantiated bullshit?

Even the penis enlargement people were like, what?

All right, we got a great show.

We have John Bolton, Karis Wisher, James Cargill, and Wes Moore.

I spoke to them all yesterday.

Let's get right to it.

All right, he is the former national security advisor under President Trump and author of the new book.

I'm sure you've heard about it, The Room Where It Happened, a White House memoir.

John Bolton from Washington, D.C., Ambassador, thank you for being here or there.

And I know you have a big book out.

I'm going to start with something you said in it you're talking about the virus you said trump didn't want to hear warnings about the virus because he didn't want to hear bad things about president xi of china that could affect the fantastic trade deal he was working on are you saying he botched the coronavirus response because he was protecting china

well i think it's uh that's very substantially the case i think in the critical early months january february maybe even before that there was an empty chair in the Oval Office.

The experts around our government, on the NSC staff and the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere, were raising the red flag.

President did not want to be bothered with it.

He didn't want to hear about the cover-up, the outright deception that China was engaged in in terms of the extent and the nature of the virus.

And he particularly didn't want to hear anything that could foreshadow trouble for the American economy because of the disease that might upset his path to re-election.

So there's a long list, and I won't repeat them all, but people can find it in online and in newspapers of statements Trump made, senior officials made saying the virus is not a threat.

We've got it under control.

There won't be any impact.

And that cost us a lot of time.

And earlier steps could well have mitigated the effect of the disease substantially.

Okay, staying with China for a minute here.

Twitter last week purged 174,000 accounts, fake accounts, from the Chinese government.

And of course, we know from the last election and what all our intelligence agencies told us, that Russia was playing mischief, not only with social media, but also trying to directly hack into our election system.

What did you, as National Security Advisor, do to protect us

from this happening again?

Well, first, let me say I think it's very clear that Russia and perhaps others did interfere in the 2016 election.

I said before I joined the White House, I considered that to be an act of war against the Constitution, and I feel even more strongly today about it than I did then.

Russia has been joined in the past couple years by China, Iran, North Korea, probably others.

Vice President Pence gave an important speech about China's effort, which focuses not simply on interfering in the elections, although that's obviously very disturbing, but on broader efforts to affect American public opinion.

What we found

in looking at our possible responses was that the U.S.

government was bound up by a series of procedural rules, I won't get into the details, that made it very hard for the United States to conduct offensive cyber operations.

My view, and I think the view widely shared in the government, was that the best defense against Russian attacks or Chinese attacks or anybody's attacks was to have our own offensive capability so that we could impose costs on those who tried to interfere with us to the point where we could create structures of deterrence so that in Moscow and Beijing, they would say, it costs us too much to interfere in American elections.

We're going to back off.

That battle goes on.

Let there be no mistake.

I think there are efforts to interfere even now in the election.

And I think really what our adversaries want to do is disrupt America's institutions, sow mistrust among the American people.

We focus on are they backing Trump?

Are they backing somebody else?

It's really the larger attack on our entire political system I think we should be looking at.

It is, but it's one party that's taking this help from foreigners.

And you mentioned so many instances in your book of things that went on in the Trump administration.

And you were critical of Bush in a big way in 2008 after he left office.

You wrote something in the Wall Street Journal that was very critical.

But that's a different story.

Let's go to Trump.

You say coddling of Kim made you ill, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, siding with Putin at Helsinki, abandoning the Kurds, you called the Ukrainian thing that got him impeached, a drug deal.

You didn't want any part of that.

You were there when he said to Xi of China, people are talking about maybe repealing the law that says I can't only have two terms.

And yet you won't vote for Biden.

You say you won't vote for Trump, but you won't vote for Biden.

How could Biden be worse?

What could the Democrat be that you think this list could be surpassed by?

I think it's comparing apples and oranges.

My objection to Joe Biden is philosophical and it's important because this plays out in policies.

I do think he'd be another four years of Obama national security policy.

I think Trump presents an entirely different set of risks because I don't think he's competent to be president.

I wish there were a conservative Republican that I could vote for who had a chance of winning, but there's not.

My situation is that I live in Maryland and my vote really doesn't mean that much one way or the other.

So I'm going to do the best I can to show philosophically that I remain committed to these national security values that I've had for a long time.

But we only get two choices.

We only have apples and oranges.

There's only an apple and an orange on the ballot, and you have to pick one.

And even if your vote doesn't count, your influence does.

Well, look, I faced this question in 2016 and I said to people who were saying I don't have to choose between them, I made exactly the argument you made and I voted for Trump on the ground that

it's at least worth trying.

That's really why I went into the administration.

I thought I could make a contribution.

I think what I've tried to do now is lay out 500 pages of facts.

about Donald Trump's performance, and they're there for anybody to use for whatever purpose they think fit.

Obviously, Trump didn't want the book to come out at all and sued to stop it.

But I view that as the contribution that I can make.

And I'm going to be unstinting in my

assessment of Trump as we get closer to the election.

I'm not going to go out of my way to attack Biden because I think I'll leave that to him.

But I do think what I'm going to focus on is keeping Republican control of the Senate because if Biden does win, I think it's very important to make sure that Republicans hold at least one of the three elective entities.

Well, okay.

You took a lot of heat for not testifying in impeachment because you did call it a drug deal, and you did say if you were a senator, you would have voted for impeachment.

So you were on the Democrats' side on that.

But you said, and I think I agree with you here.

You said, even if you did testify, it wouldn't have changed the vote.

I agree with that.

But is the book going to change anybody's vote?

I mean, by coming out with a book instead of testifying, you think that's more influential, that you have a book that says Donald Trump is a narcissistic dunce who sides with dictators.

Didn't we know that?

Well, look,

the book is the most detailed I could make it and still get through the government's pre-publication review process.

I do think that while it may not have taken a village, it did take a book.

I don't think with all due respect in a television interview or even in testimony in Congress, you can tell anything approaching the full story.

I thought this was the best I could do.

And, you know, people will read it and make up their own minds.

Many Republicans could read this book and vote for Trump anyway.

I just want them to know what they're voting for.

Okay.

You say that up to 10 times

you tried to convince the president not to do what he was doing with Ukraine.

In other words, he was withholding this vital aid that they needed until they came across with some dirt on Joe Biden.

Ten times.

So you obviously knew what was going on and how wrong it was and you felt strongly about it.

Somebody finally blew the whistle on that.

We know, of course, there was a whistleblower.

Why weren't you the whistleblower if you felt that way?

Well,

it was eight to ten times that Mike Pompeo, Mike Esper, Mark Esper, and I together or singly tried.

It was

the only people in the national security space in the administration who had any hesitation about giving this aid to Ukraine was Donald Trump himself.

And we were focused on a very important operational question.

This is going to sound bureaucratic, but the money was going to expire on September the 30th.

If we didn't make that transfer as the days dwindled down, it could have just disappeared, and that would have harmed the United States.

That's why we were focused on it.

All of us ended up speaking with members of Congress.

And I think what really persuaded Trump was not the whistleblower, but the political political pressure, especially from Republicans on the Hill.

And I recount in the book, that's not the first time that happened.

It's very frequently, it was the political pressure, not the national security arguments that moved Trump to do what he did.

All right.

Well, I must say it's always a pleasure to read about what an asshole Donald Trump is.

So I have enjoyed reading the portion of your book that I've read so far.

And I thank you for joining us today.

Thank you, Mr.

Ambassador.

Thanks very much for having me.

Okay.

Okay, here's our panel.

He's president of the Robin Hood Foundation and the New York Times best-selling author of Five Days, the Fiery Reckoning of an American City.

Wes Moore, back with us by Zoom.

Hey, Wes.

He's an MSNBC political analyst and co-host of the weekly podcast 2020 Politics War Room, the great sage of the Democratic Party, James Carville.

James, great to see you.

Great to see you both.

I do see you through that little little lens there.

Okay, so let's start with the big story.

Biden has a 14-point lead over Donald Trump and not just the usual suspects.

Obviously, winning big with young people, minorities, women,

but also college-educated, but also some of the people we wouldn't have suspected.

I mean, suburban white women doing well, men, suburban men, the military not too crazy about them nowadays.

In North Carolina, there was a primary Tuesday.

The moderate, who Trump was against, beat the other guy that Trump was for by 32 points.

I've never been this optimistic.

James, let me start with the obvious question.

How are the Democrats going to blow it?

I don't know if we can do it.

I mean,

I think of ways.

I get up in the middle of the night and I said, nah, that can't happen.

Look, he's beaten.

He's feeble.

He's

frail.

He's a failure.

He's fat.

He's going to pick the next next F word that you want, you know,

something else.

The question is not just to beat Trump, we have to eradicate Trumpism.

The idea that Wes Moore and my children are fighting over

a defined thing as opposed to an expanded view of what the country and the world is.

And right now, we can beat Trumpism.

Trump beaten.

Forget it.

He's done.

No chance.

But we've got to win big enough that that the Republican Party never wants to embrace this kind of toxic philosophy again.

What worries you,

Wes, about this?

I mean, it looks so good right now.

What's on your mind that is troubling?

Voter suppression, Georgia.

Georgia better get its act together.

Kentucky had a primary.

It went actually.

pretty doggone well.

Georgia is 0 for 2 in elections, and they got to get their acts brake because we're going to pick up two Senate seats in Georgia.

We're going to win the presidency.

But they're going to try to do everything they can to stop people from voting.

They're going to try everything they can to have foreign influence on their side.

They're going to do all of that.

We are on guard.

All right.

We're posting sentries all over this country.

There's so many lawyers around there you wouldn't believe.

Well, they did it to us in 16.

You know, they're not going to do it to us in 20.

We're up and running and ready to go here, Bill.

I'm serious.

serious you know you don't have to worry about winning you just got to worry about winning big okay wes no but but but actually i i think you do need to worry about winning and and the reason i say that um is is this is the election is still five months away uh you know when we think about it look at where we were five months ago And I don't think anyone could have predicted five months ago that we'd be where we are right now.

You know, we saw that the election in 2016 was a cataclysmic event in American history.

The coronavirus has been a cataclysmic event in American history, in world history.

The movement we're seeing right now for Black Lives is a cataclysmic event in American history.

And so

I actually don't think that November is any form of a slam dunk because the reality is it's still five months away.

We have to be so deliberate on the points that you brought up, James, on making sure that we're doing two things every single day going into the rest of this year.

One is making sure that we're preserving the right to vote, but also two, making sure we're giving people something to vote for.

Because that's going to, those two factors right there are going to determine how this election goes and what things look like the day after election day.

Yeah,

Barr, the Attorney General, said foreign countries can easily make counterfeit ballots.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know how they would do it.

I don't know how they'd get them in the election.

Even if you saw them, wouldn't you see the real ballot and then know something was afoot it seems to me like these guys do know that they can't be beat there's too many apartments have flooded on the titanic this is going to go down and their only way is to cheat uh you see it that way

i do absolutely that's the only chance they have i respected this word captain more he's a captain i'm a corporate so he outranks me but

I got some strike from the campaign.

But that's, of course they're going to do that.

And the reason that bar is saying that is because they don't want to do mail-in ballots because they're scared people are going to vote.

Right.

That's what that's what's behind all of this.

So, okay.

Tuesday, black candidates in Virginia and New York swept primary races.

People were absolutely surprised.

These are primaries, of course.

But it seems to me like Democratic voters are channeling a lot of the anti-racist furor that came out after the Floyd killing and the protests that followed into the ballot box.

Now, in 2018, they said it was the year of the woman.

Democrats, 106 out of 280 deaths.

Hey, guys, Phil, let's, I got to cope with the rain and the interference.

I just got to change.

I'm sorry.

Well, I'll talk to Wes while you try to get your signal back.

I hope it's only the signal.

So anyway, women in 2018,

big year for them, that 38%

of the

Congress.

Blacks, 19%.

What do you think that's going to be after the election in 2020?

What percentage?

I mean, I think the thing that we're seeing right now emerge is there's a rethinking and a reshaping of what it means to be progressive.

You know, and whether elected leaders, often representing

democratic strongholds, whether they really represent the politics and the interests of the communities.

You know, I think no one is entitled to their seat.

No one is entitled to their elected office.

And progressive wins by these political newcomers, I just think reinforce that reality.

And so this tide that we're seeing is not even just about a demographic tide.

I think what's also clear is that on the mind of the electorate, on the mind of people voting, is that elected officials have under delivered for far too long and people want accountable leaders.

You know, people don't want to continue having conversations about whether or not we should have people, why we should not have everyone fully covered by health insurance, whether or not we still have 23 percent of people who lost their jobs during covet 19 were people who were living in poverty before covet 19.

so this is this is the working poor people who are working in many cases multiple jobs and still living below the poverty line people want to address that they want to address climate change and i think what we're seeing right now is is both a demographic shift but also an ideological shift that people are tired of the small ball and people want to actually have aggressive progressive candidates uh who are going to, who are not just going to think about change and hope for it, but actually bring something together to bring about real change in people's lives.

And COVID-19 really exposed that.

Well, I'll tell you, one good thing COVID-19 did, I think, is keep Joe Biden inside.

And I'll tell you, no, seriously, because first of all, a campaign is a marathon.

You know that.

I don't think he was up for a marathon.

I think he would have been worn down already in the campaign by this time if he had to be out there every day.

Plus, let's be honest, he's a bit of a gaffe machine.

He'd be saying all sorts of different things.

What people want is not Donald Trump.

And Joe Biden is that guy, not Donald Trump.

It's the idea of Joe Biden that we like.

Maybe not the guy himself so much.

Now, you could comment on that or not, but that's my view.

No, but I honestly, I think that this last final stretch right now, this is going to be a really important stretch, Bill, because this election will not be won or lost

depending on how people feel about the incumbent.

You've got to give them what is the alternative.

And the alternative just cannot be just not the other guy.

You've got to come up with really hard, concrete, not just policy positions, but evidence you can actually get this stuff done.

That's what's getting people to the polls.

That's what's getting people to vote.

And so this final stretch is going to be an incredibly important one for the Biden campaign to really be able to put meat on what exactly true change is going to look like and why people should get energized around it.

I will take a little bit of a contrarian view.

First of all, I think Biden's campaign has actually been pretty smart so far.

I think his performance in the debates, particularly in the debate before South Carolina, was quite strong.

I think his appearances so far, albeit limited, have been really good.

And by the way, he's running on the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.

All right.

It's not like he's not for a lot of things that progressives can be excited about.

So in our field is, you know, we've got some primaries left to go, but by and large, we got to get a vote count in Kentucky, and we've got a primary in Colorado, a couple other places.

But I mean, we're set to go.

We got to whip this baby into shape

in November and then pick up a bunch of seats.

And then we can have a huge argument on the future of the Democratic Party.

Hopefully.

the argument of the Republican Party, as we know it, would be destroyed and they can have their argument on how to rebuild it.

Our argument will be how do we build on what we have?

But I am, I'm so far, would have to count myself as pretty pleased with the direction of the Biden campaign.

And I really mean that.

I really mean that.

Well, I hope they learned to play a little dirtier.

And they could have learned it this week from a bunch of teenagers.

You know, in Tulsa, where Trump had his big rally last week, he got punked.

He was saying there's going to be a million people, or at least a million people,

had requested tickets.

And it was a bunch of teenagers on TikTok who were

putting on

a fake news thing on Trump.

And he fell for it and said all these people are writing in, asking for tickets, and it was all a fake.

Why didn't the Democrats think of that?

That's something Roger Stone would have thought of and done.

Oh, James looks like he's rosy.

Either James is now in Madame Tussaud's museum or or we are having technical difficulties again.

Wes, why don't you take that one?

You think Democrats should play dirtier?

Well, no, I mean, I actually think that

what's on the ballot right now, honestly, Bill, is truth.

Truth is going to be on the ballot in November.

And we can't win

by telling lies or telling better lies or lies that we just think are smaller lies than the other side.

I think that what people are yearning for right now, what people are craving for right now,

is truth and it's transparency and it's honesty.

And I think actually the ingredient to win is going to be to give people that, not just be able to say we actually can spin better than the other side.

Okay.

So

this week we found out that the spiking rates of COVID again are prompting the European Union to perhaps, it looks like it's going to happen, ban Americans from coming into European countries.

They're going to put us on the same list as Russia and Brazil.

And obviously, we have handled this so much worse than every other country.

Rob Ford, by the way, the governor of, conservative governor of Ontario, Canada, said months ago, no, I don't want any Americans in Ontario.

Why?

How did we become the loser country?

Don't answer that, I know.

I'm sorry, do answer it, and then we'll let you go or freeze you.

Well, I tell you, I think it's a perfect example where leadership matters.

There's nothing new that we're learning about the virus.

The thing that we are continuing to learn is for those who take it seriously, this is actually something that can be controlled.

For those who don't, you will continue watching rates spike, and also you'll continue to watch death spike.

And the really problematic thing for me, Bill, is that we continue to see that while this virus impacts everybody, it is not impacting everybody equally, right?

It is impacting communities of color disproportionately.

It is impacting people who are essential workers disproportionately.

It's impacting those who don't have the luxury to be able to do their work and to have their conversations from right here behind a computer screen disproportionately.

And so once again,

we are having, we are making this devil's bargain about who is it that we are willing to sacrifice?

Who is it that we are willing to put out there as long as we can get the economy going again?

And so the reality is that, again, there's nothing new we have learned about this virus over the past week.

I would push back on that.

I think what we've learned that masks work.

I think we've learned that.

We weren't sure about that at first.

At first, they told us, don't even wear them.

I think we learned that.

We learned, as I've been saying, being outside.

The protest areas, there was not a big spike, and a lot of people were not wearing masks.

So, being outside is very helpful.

Obviously, being outside with a mask would be really good.

We saw information come back from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where 1,270 cases were reported.

These are younger people.

I've been saying that, too.

Yes, it could happen to anybody.

One death out of 1,270.

Now, I wish it was no deaths, but this is also important information.

You know,

we do have more information than we did about this disease.

But the reality is that even things like, you know, the importance of masks, the importance of social distancing,

that isn't necessarily new information.

It's just we just never had a universal leadership that was telling us that that was actually how we were going to fight it.

If you look at places that have actually done a good job of controlling this virus, and you look at states, and there have been Democratic and Republican governors.

of states that have taken this seriously and you've watched how they have been able to control the spread.

I saw firsthand how Governor Puomo was very, very clear about what needed to happen.

I'm sorry, but maybe we're back up.

We're back up just in time for me to say goodbye.

All right, because let's be honest, even if I asked you a question, you'd just freeze up again, and it would all be fucked at the end.

So let's just say we tried, we did our best, we're doing our best.

Thank you, gentlemen.

And I hope I see you next time in a much more intimate setting.

Thank Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Not your fault James.

Okay we're about to take our summer break.

Nothing to do with the virus.

We always do this.

We take a month off.

We'll be back July 31st in about a month's time.

We're going to be back for the conventions, the campaign, the election, all the way through to the end of the Republic.

But for now, as we always do when we take a little break, we're going to give you future headlines because I'm not going to be here, so future headlines.

Okay.

Trump declares the end of coronavirus as he's hospitalized for coronavirus.

Border wall now keeping Americans from escaping to Mexico.

Trump says Fourth of July celebrates American independence, but most people don't know that.

Lindsey Graham debuts one-man show, Lindsay with a Y.

Airport to Barro reopens with the same two calzones from April.

Trump shoots men on Fifth Avenue.

Aides claim he was just joking.

All musicians on earth demand Trump stop playing their music at his rallies.

Rallies.

Protesters demand village people replace cop with social worker.

Very predictable.

Police free up 9-11.

I mean,

police free up.

I'm losing it.

We're going on vacation.

Police free up 9-1-1 by introducing Karen Hotline.

And Trump's doctor writes tell-all book, Penicillin Can't Cure Stupid.

All right, one of my favorite guests is here.

I mean, there.

She's co-host of the award-winning podcast, Pivot, and a columnist for the New York Times, Kara Swisher.

Kara, Kara, great to see you.

I keep reading about this dinner that Trump had last fall with Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, who is a Trump supporter and a Facebook board member.

What went on at that dinner?

Everybody seems to want to know.

I figure like you would be the one who would.

Yeah, well, you know, it's not just the dinner, though.

Let's be clear.

There's been so much contact between the Trump administration and

Facebook over the past year or so.

It's sort of led by a guy named Joel Kaplan, who's

sort of their man in Washington, who's very close to

everybody, everybody

on the Republican side.

And they hired him to do this.

And so this has been an ongoing thing.

And then he's visited Trump several times, Mark Zuckerberg has.

There was one meeting earlier than that, and then there was this dinner.

And while I don't think anything was like,

let's decide to not sort of like mutually assured not touching each other kind of thing.

I think there has been an understanding that Facebook would take the

hands-off approach to Trump's behavior and the Trump campaign's behavior online.

And it's just been like that.

The decisions they've made have been very much in the favor of the Trump campaign and have been very against taking anything down, including...

false information,

stuff that's

just recently, I think they took down something just recently because it was Nazi symbolism they were using.

But when it comes to deciding what's the truth, I know you're for Facebook being more stringent and refereeing that, but it's very hard in politics to tell where the truth is because they all lie at some point to some degree.

I mean, when Obama said if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, it was not 100% true.

Should we have taken that down?

I think it's a question of what their rules are.

And again, you and I differ on this because I don't think they're public squares.

They are private companies owned by the richest people on earth in the history of the planet.

And so they make these decisions all the time anyway.

And I think that's the thing.

They have a lot of people being free speech warriors on their behalf, which I think they're a little bit not thinking that Facebook doesn't do this already.

And they already do this whenever they feel like it.

I think the issue is they don't stick by their own rules, which is some of them around against violence or threatening violence.

They don't stuff around false information, around say COVID, that's one of their rules, or vaccine, anti-vax stuff.

So it just depends on what their rules are.

And they often just pick and choose and cherry-pick among the issues.

Now, they have very strict rules around Nazi symbolism, and they did finally act.

They have strict rules around violence, but they sometimes say something's violent and they sometimes say they don't.

And so, my issue is that nothing is applied very fairly

or equally or in any way that makes any sense.

And I think that's the problem:

there's not a straight line and a very clear enforcement of anything they do.

So what is a public square then?

I mean, I think you

mentioned that you thought it was okay for the New York Times not to have printed the Tom Cotton editorial that caused a lot of controversy.

Tom Cotton is a senator from Arkansas who wrote a very controversial op-ed in the New York Times.

The managing editor who printed it got fired over that.

But Tom Cotton, again, a senator who went to Harvard.

I don't agree with him on much of anything, but he has a bronze star from Afghanistan.

And a majority of the Americans agree with what he was saying in his op-ed piece.

Shouldn't the paper of record print that?

Well, I think my issue was not not printing it.

I probably wouldn't have had him in, and that's just a choice that editorial pages make all the time of who

it's not like, again, a public square where anyone just can,

New York Times turns down people all the time you know all the time I've had stuff turned down by the New York Times stuff I've written too so I think the issue I had was that they weren't presenting the full Tom Cotton and that was what I was arguing in that he went he in the New York Times he was saying one thing and over on Twitter he was saying something different and the thing he was saying on Twitter was quite pertinent to what he was saying in the New York Times and he left it behind because they he didn't want to appear you know on Twitter he was talking about no quarter against against some of the protesters And that in, and he's a military person.

He knows what it means.

And then he's playing cute about what he meant and what he didn't mean and what I really meant was.

And so my whole issue was what I was writing about was aligning online and offline personalities.

And in my mind, it was a badly edited piece.

It had several mistakes in it.

There was, they didn't like, they didn't do a very good job in in putting the full Tom Cotton.

I think an interview would have been fine if they wanted to have Tom Cotton in the the pages, if the editors decide that.

So you could actually ask him about that.

But allowing him just to type whatever words he wanted and not be responsible for other words he said elsewhere, I think is him gaming the New York Times.

I think he did a great job at it.

And again, deciding whether to have him or not is an editorial decision, which they they make every day.

And, you know, just because I wouldn't have doesn't mean other people shouldn't.

It's just that if I was running it, I'd be like, oh, this guy is, you know, over on Twitter is doing this.

He can't come over here and do a different kind of show over here that is not the same as what he's doing over there.

Okay.

Can I read you what Barry Weiss said about this?

Because she, I think, was looking at the big picture and saying this battle that's going on in the New York Times is one that's going on in all media companies.

And it's between a mostly over 40 old guard, shall we call them, and a younger cadre who believe in different things.

And Barry says the old guard assumed they shared a worldview with the young, but it was an incorrect assumption.

The new guard has a different worldview.

Barry calls it safetyism, in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what was previously considered core liberal values like free speech.

I think a lot of people who were in those meetings disagreed with her depiction of what was happening.

I was not in those meetings.

I'm not a staffer.

But is that true in general?

But is that true in general, that there is this this thing called safetyism?

I'm 105 years old.

No, I was agreeing with a lot of the things the people were saying there.

And so I think

that's the narrative she likes to.

put out all the time to keep with the same narrative.

I think it was a lot more complex than that.

And it wasn't like this group of young, woke people coming in with pitch.

It just wasn't.

It just simply, nothing that I saw was like that.

And I had some insight into what was going on, although, again, I'm not an employee.

I do think it's a complex topic, and that's what the issue is.

And I think a lot of people try to be reductive about what's happening there.

And that's the problem is that nobody can have really, you know, cogent discussions because everybody has to take their particular side or their narrative or whatever song they like to sing all the time, which is often similar, like whichever side they're on.

And so I don't think she was depicting what was happening there well.

And I think I listen, a lot of people who were in these meetings thought it was just not what was happening.

And I think it's just reductive.

And at the same time, you really do need to talk about having difficult discussions within editorial pages.

You know, an editorial page, Fox News doesn't mind having just one side of the argument.

They don't have a lot of other voices.

The New York Times has decided to be bigger than that and host a lot of voices.

And when they do that, they're going to get

they're going to have problems like this.

And so that's the issue is how do you manage that?

And my only, the issue I had with the Tom Cotton thing was besides editing that I thought was not as good as it's been at the New York Times, and I get great editing, by the way,

is that

it didn't encompass everything he'd done.

And so, what he'd said just recently about the same topic, and I think without that noting of the no quarter, he got away with it.

And I, you know, he's a smart guy.

He went to Harvard.

I don't know why you should get into the New York Times because he went to Harvard, but

I think he played the Times pretty well and then he took advantage of it.

I don't want to give him kudos for that, but he certainly got his message through.

Okay.

Contact tracing, I want to ask you about that because

it seems like that could get a little big brothery.

You know,

I saw in the paper months ago, they were tracing us by what they could do following us on our phone.

Remember, you showed me how to turn that off on my phone, right?

It scared you.

Yeah, it did scare me.

But they knew where we were.

And, you know, when people are scared, as they are now, and in the interest of safety, people will give up all sorts of liberty.

I'm not sure even for that.

I want people to know where I am all the time.

And I have nothing to hide.

I'm not married.

I'm not cheating with anyone.

Well, you know,

you do spend an enormous amount of time at Chipotle, as I recall.

No, I'm kidding.

I think one of the issues around contact tracing is let's, because contact tracing has been going on for a long, long, long decades and decades.

It was in the 1918 epidemic.

They did contact tracing.

And a lot of contact tracing today is

by people going to see other people, like they hire people to do this.

And so I'm not so sure tech has that bigger role here, except to collate information.

And so I think being too scared of it is probably,

it's not as if

people want to respond to apps and things like that.

I don't think they're as effective as actual human beings going in and following someone.

And it does take a human touch to get people to cooperate.

New York is having enormous amounts of trouble getting people to say who they talk to, even just people.

And so it's on paper or they're using an app to do it.

I think the question is

how much cooperation you're going to get from people in the first place and truthful cooperation.

And therefore, you don't have good data.

The second part is, you know, as you said, we're followed around all the time.

We are always followed around.

They know what we're doing and where we're going.

So I don't know if this is a ton different than what's going on.

And if they do involve Google and Apple, who have been working on a contact tracing app that nobody seems to be using, I think it's just three states.

I think we have to be careful to protect what they're going to do with that data and the privacy.

I'm not particularly worried in this area, given how much other information people have, these companies have about us.

But I do think probably most of the really effective stuff is going to be done by actual human beings talking to actual human beings and doing contact tracing the old-fashioned way.

I think that's really how you get good data to be able to understand what's going on here.

Okay.

Always great to talk to you, Kara.

Thank you so much for not freezing on me.

I really

want

our last interview.

There's no

cases for a few days, and our internet is excellent.

Oh, you're great.

Okay.

Well, you were a great last interview before our summer break.

Thank you so much.

I'll see you soon.

Well, have a good summer.

Thank you.

Okay, time for new rules.

New rules, everybody.

All right, new rule.

In order to get Trump to start wearing a mask, make one with Putin's ass on it.

New Rule Bachelor Congressman Matt Gates has to come up with a better explanation for living with a Cuban teenager than our relationship as a family is defined by our love for each other, not by any paperwork.

You're trying too hard, Matt.

Just say you're Batman.

New rules, UPS trucks have to play ice cream truck music now.

Yes, because pandemics have taught us that the arrival of the UPS truck is the most exciting part of the day.

So let's add the music and bring back memories of that summer day when you and your best friend got ice cream and your priests paid for it and then...

okay maybe not that memory

new rule you can't retire the Segway scooter right now that's what they said they're gonna do no are you kidding these things not only bring Americans together through our shared love of not walking they achieve something nothing else in America can they make us feel sorry for cops

New Rule, if you want to get laid, don't pose with a cat in your Tinder profile.

According to a new study, women see men holding cats as less masculine, more neurotic, and less datable.

In particular, this man.

And finally, new rule, black people have to demand that white people stop culturally appropriating how mad they are about racism.

It's great that Caucasians have finally joined the fight for racial justice in unprecedented numbers, but hating racism the most?

You can't steal that.

Elvis Taking Little Richards Act, that was bad enough.

Victor Sengby is an Oakland resident who put up small loops for footholds on trees in a local park for exercise and games.

He says, Out of the dozens and hundreds and thousands of people that have walked by, no one

has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose.

But Oakland's mayor, Libby Schaff, wasn't going to let all that cheat her out of a chance to signal her virtue.

She said, these incidents will be investigated as a hate crime.

Why is this white woman seeing racism where a black man isn't?

The mayor also said, intentions don't matter, but they do matter.

And white people need to stop trying to cancel other white people whose heart is in the right place, but don't get it exactly right on the first try.

A few weeks ago, when everyone was posting a black square on Instagram, BuzzFeed wrote, influencers, it's a privilege to post a black square and then go back to your usual content.

As opposed to what?

Abandoning your life and just posting a black square every day?

People got called out for not posting the square, then for just posting it without speaking out, and then for posting it and speaking out, but not voicing their support in the exact way that was said in the new Dakota ring.

They were helping wrong.

Ellen DeGeneres felt enough pressure so that she erased a tweet that said, people of color in this country have faced injustice for far too long.

Okay, that may not be exactly Black Lives Matter, but it's also very true and pretty close to what we're trying to get everyone to understand.

Liberalism.

Should be about lifting people up, and you don't do that by slapping down people who are trying to say, I'm on your side.

No wonder white people right now are acting like a nervous waiter on their first day.

So scared of making a mistake they put a fork in your iced tea and a straw in your salad.

We don't want to chant the wrong chant or hold the wrong sign.

Hey, please, it's all we can do to clap on the right beat.

You want to be a good ally, but not too good or you're being a white savior.

Use your voice, but don't make it about yourself.

But speak up, unless it's your time to just listen.

And then silence is violence

even though sometimes silence just means someone works two jobs and has three kids they have baby food on their shirt not hate in their heart

some guy just wrote into the New York Post I am a senior level leader in an organization and feel compelled to speak up about racial injustice but I'm afraid to as a white man I'm afraid that I will say something that will be misinterpreted and I will do more harm than good for my career too

staying silent seems wrong but safer Am I alone in this?

Unfortunately, no.

There was a sports announcer in Sacramento who tweeted all lives matter and immediately got fired, even though he apologized and said he just didn't understand.

What he said came from a place of ignorance, not racism.

That difference is important.

Someone could have just explained to him why there's a deservedly special reason we single out black lives for protection.

But now, instead of a possible ally,

we create a bitter unemployed person.

Willow Smith, yes, Willow Smith said, I'm seeing people shaming others for what they are choosing to say or shaming people for not saying anything at all.

I feel like if we really want change, shaming doesn't lead to learning.

She gets it.

Surely people twice her age could make the effort.

I worry that the kind of tension that the guardians of Gotcha are creating is going to make people afraid to mingle at all and thrust us back towards a resegregation of sorts, where instead of just seeing a person and not a color, now we're only seeing color.

Maybe this is old school liberalism talking, but I don't think that's the way to go.

Let's hang out.

And if I fuck up, tell me why, not goodbye.

It's a gradual, years-long process, like Trump descending a ramp.

But things are better when the races get together, like when rappers sample Steely Dan.

All right, that's our show.

We're off for a month back on July 31st.

I want to thank my guests, John Bolton, Wesmore, Kyra Swisher, and James Cargill.

See you in a month, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.