Ep. #504: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Michael Render (a.k.a Killer Mike)

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

Start the clock.

Right here with me.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate you putting thank you.

I love you too.

Appreciate you putting on this brave face because it's a tough day.

John Hickenlooper

has dropped out of the presidential race.

It was a huge blow to his supporter.

But he said he just wants to go back to what he does best, looping Hickens.

And I don't know what's up there.

But

it's

Trump has been

tweeting

about me and talking about me at his rally, so my anxiety level is very high.

I'm hoping he'll get distracted by his new plan.

I'm not making this up.

He wants to buy Greenland

and rename it Nuavanka.

Really?

He wants to buy Greenland.

Okay.

Oh,

he had two Nuremberg rallies this week, and

the highlight for me is that the one last night he told a protester, you have a weight problem.

This is like mocking virgins at Comic-Con, isn't it?

Really?

He pointed to a guy

and he said, that guy's got a serious weight problem.

Go home and start exercising.

Also pay your taxes, read a book, and stay married.

But he broke another norm this week when he pressured another country, Israel, to not let in two congresspeople.

This never happened before.

I don't know if you saw the story, but Congresswoman Rashida Talib from Detroit, I believe, wanted to go to the West Bank where her grandmother lives, and Trump told Israel they shouldn't let her in.

So Israel, not their finest moment, said she couldn't go.

And then they got blowback, so then they said she could go.

And then she got blowback because she was going to go, so now she says she's not going to go.

It's so confusing.

The racists at his rally don't know what to chant.

They're like,

send her back.

Don't send her back.

Wait, I'm sorry.

Lock her up there.

Lock.

And Trump, never informed really about any foreign country, doesn't know a lot about Israel.

When he went to the whaling wall, he brought a harpoon.

He's not well informed.

And I don't understand Trump's followers on this kind of stuff because they hate foreigners, they hate other religions, and they hate people who think they're so smart.

But they love the Jews.

I guess you'll think about that one on the way home.

But Trump, the financial genius, is driving the economy over the cliff.

Have you seen that?

I mean, for years, every one of the world's economies has been doing fucking great, growing.

Nobody, they said, could screw it up.

Enter Trump saying, hold my beer.

His new slogan is, Make America Atlantic City Again.

Well, did you see what happened in the stock market this week?

I mean, I spent more time gasping for breath than Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh, okay.

Oohing into applause.

You don't hear that a lot, but we do it here.

But yes, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell.

They say America can't do anything anymore.

Yes, and Attorney General William Barr, He has called for a thorough investigation to which he has already written the summary.

I don't get that.

And of course, the conspiracy theories are abounding already because this Jeffrey Epstein guy knew everybody.

Clinton, Trump, Prince Andrew, Dershowitz.

It was a who's who of ooh-ooh.

No, this Epstein guy was a weirdo.

I mean, besides the pedophilia, besides the Sex Island, besides the plane, the Lolita Express, they called it, he had a ranch in New Mexico.

Did you read this?

I'm not making this up, where he was gathering scientists and Nubile young women in a plan to repopulate the earth from his spawn.

And Schwarzenegger said, Or you could just hop on the maid.

Now,

of course, Trump, the conspiracy theorist, retweeting that the Clintons killed Jeffrey Epstein.

I mean, of all the right-wing conspiracy theories that have been going around, this is the stupidest.

The idea that the Clintons go around killing their enemies.

First of all, it makes them look cool.

Nobody ever accused Mitt Romney of murdering his way to the top.

And

finally,

Congressman Steve King, not Stephen King the author.

He's the second scariest Steve King.

Congressman, this guy outdoes himself.

He said, humanity this week, this was his quote, humanity, not a quote, but I'm paraphrasing, humanity might not exist if not for rape and incest throughout human history.

And then his sister bolted out of the room.

All right, we've got a great show, Betsy Wonderforth.

Our host and Rick Wilson are here, and a little later I'll be speaking with our friend from Run the Duels, Killer Mike, is backstage.

But first up,

he is the Democratic senator from Rhode Island on our show, and author of Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy.

Now in paperback, Sheldon Whitehouse.

Senator, how are you?

All right, much appreciated.

Now,

good to be here.

All right.

Now, why aren't you running for president?

What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you?

Slogan is so easy.

White House, right?

Put one in there.

No, you don't.

They say every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president.

We've

not suffering from a shortage of candidates.

No, we are not.

Okay.

Well, I want to get into that.

I mean, you are someone who I think is good because you do criticize your own party, and I think they need a lot of criticism.

For example, the 2009 bipartisan, I think it was, climate bill, right?

You think the Democrats could have gotten that done?

Yeah.

So what happened?

It was through the House.

God bless Nancy Pelosi for getting it done.

It cost a few Democratic members of Congress their jobs to do it, but they did.

It came over to the Senate, and we never took up anything.

Why?

You can do just a practically empty bill.

to get it into conference and then work on something.

I think there was

conflict fatigue at the White House.

From Obamacare?

Yep.

From fighting that one.

Okay.

And they just didn't want to have another fight as a

senior person in the White House said, Sheldon, we just don't want to take on any fights.

We're not sure we can win.

Really?

And you don't think that's the right philosophy?

No, I kind of don't.

That leaves most of the good fights off the table.

And what about now?

Is there, because, I mean, the news about climate is just horrible.

Now we have, I think, a real opportunity,

but you got to think about it in terms of a jailbreak

you've got 10 or 12 Republican senators who want out who want to do a climate bill

and on the other side of the wire you've got a getaway car that most people accept which is a big price on carbon that's revenue neutral and border adjustable but between them and that is barbed wire gun towers, searchlights, attack dogs, all maintained by the fossil fuel industry.

Literally.

Literally.

Literally attack dogs.

Funded by, well, no, literally the fossil fuel industry.

That's what I was asking.

That's good to know.

But there's a lot of fear about who might be the one to take the run for the wire and get wiped out.

Bob Inglis in Congress was legendarily wiped out by them.

Yeah.

So the trick is, how do you find a way for these 10 or 12 Republican senators to get there?

And that means knocking back the crooked,

rough effort that the fossil fuel industry continues to do.

By the way, if you have heard the big oil CEOs say they support a price on carbon, they are not telling you the truth.

Their whole apparatus is still dedicated to stopping it.

And if you look at the rest of corporate America, they are doing essentially nothing to push back on what the fossil fuel guys have done.

And in many cases, their trade associations are actually our enemies.

So you have good companies with good climate policies and nifty websites who send trade associations to Washington that say, no, nothing on climate change.

And you think a lot of this is because of the dark money in politics, right?

I think it's virtually entirely because of the dark money in politics.

You turn on the light in the kitchen and the cockroaches scuttle.

You put the light on who's putting the money to these things, and a lot of the companies and big donors who are behind this, they don't want to be seen, they're going to hide, they're going to scuttle for the exits.

I mean, that heat wave they had in Europe a few weeks ago, which was something they've never seen.

And they don't have air conditioning over there.

Yeah.

And they smell bad enough in France.

Not going there.

I'm not going there either.

They smell bad and it's hot.

But then Matt Heatway moved over to Greece, Greece.

Greenland.

Greenland.

Yeah.

Which is for sale.

Yes.

Well, it's not for sale.

What do you think about it?

Do you think that's crazy to buy, to say I want to buy Greenland?

Not by his standards.

I mean,

but why is it?

I mean, there's so many things he actually does wrong and crazy.

I don't know why we have to be so reflexive.

Harry Truman wanted to buy Greenland in 1946.

And we bought Alaska in like 1857.

They called it Seward's Folly.

But it wasn't really a folly, was it?

And the Louisiana purchase.

Yeah, right.

Anyway,

Greenland is melting.

Yes.

12 billion gallons a day of water coming off that ice sheet at the peak, I heard Rob.

They said it was melting at a level that the models hadn't predicted to happen until 2070.

Yeah.

So think of yourself living in 2070.

Yeah.

And if we reached that, the sea levels would rise by 20 feet.

Yeah.

Which is why it's urgent to get after this dark money nonsense, because that is what is holding us back.

And

as Democrats, that ought to be our daily focus.

If you were playing a video game and zombies were attacking you in the video game and they were all powered by the same power source, you'd be a lousy player if all you did was fight the zombies but didn't attack the power source.

That's their power source.

So

what is your advice to the Democrats?

I have tried week after week here.

I think you know this,

to kind of be their coach, saying things like, go on Fox Fox News.

Yeah.

You would agree with that?

You got to go where the people are.

Okay.

My Rhode Island colleague David Cicillini does a very good job going on Fox News for the House Democrats.

Okay, good.

Stop apologizing for everything?

Correct?

You believe that?

You believe there's too much purity testing?

Yep, way too much.

Okay.

So what about...

Particular firing score.

We can't waste time fighting with each other when we have the situation we face now with this White House and when we have the problem we have with the dark money.

I mean, in some respects, Trump is almost a distraction from the other problem.

He's awful.

He's

really dazzling in his crudity.

And

a lot of attention goes to him.

In the meanwhile, here are all these big special interests spending unlimited amounts of money to influence the Supreme Court, to take over the EPA, to control Congress and eliminate solutions to climate change.

Sometimes people, I think, wonder, why do so many conservatives still like him?

Well, he gives them a lot.

He gives them a lot.

That they want.

Not that we want.

And he scares them a lot.

Yeah, he does that.

And look at a couple of my colleagues, like Bob Corker,

Jeff Flake.

No, he basically is.

He's an intimidator.

He put him out.

So I've long said that one of the structural reasons why the Democrats have such an uphill battle is because we have 40 million people here in California and only two senators.

How many in your state?

One million.

One million.

And they get two senators.

Yeah.

Can I

depersonalize it for a minute?

I don't have the numbers right now, but I remember giving a speech on the Senate floor when I did have the numbers.

There was a Republican majority in the Senate, and when you added up the number of Americans that those Republican senators represented, it was 40 million people fewer,

fewer, than the Democratic minority minority represented.

So yeah, we have a representation problem.

We've had presidents who got elected without having won the popular vote.

After Red Map, we had the House taken over after losing the popular vote by a million.

And we have the Senate with this baked-in problem.

The Republicans do a really determined job of winning power with fewer voters.

And we don't take on that.

infrastructure and we don't take on that strategy.

We're too happy fighting the fight of the minute.

It's second-grade soccer, chasing the ball, and they are planning ahead.

Will you get after them?

Please do.

Senator Whitehouse, thank you very much.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey, Rick.

How are you?

Hello.

Hey, everybody.

Hello.

Okay, he is a Republican strategist and author of the New York Times best-selling book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.

Rick Wilston.

What do you mean by that, Rick?

It's very vague.

Subtle.

Okay, he is the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and author of Confirmation Bias Inside Washington's War over the Supreme Court from Scalia's death to Justice Kavanaugh.

Carl Hulse, great to have you on, Carl.

And she's a Daily Beast politics reporter and MSNBC contributor.

Betsy Woodruff is here, Betsy.

Hi.

Okay, so let's get into this thing with Israel and Trump and the congresswomen going over there.

First, they were going to go and then they couldn't go and now they don't want to go.

So I think we all agree Israel could have been the big one in this and let them in.

So let's not argue about that if we all agree that.

Let's talk about the BDS, because that's what's behind this.

That's why Israel said they wouldn't let her in, because she supports BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divest, and Sanction of Israel because of the occupation of the Palestinian territory.

Is that fair?

To not let her in?

No.

No.

To boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.

I think this is something that's growing in the United States, and you see it a lot on college campuses where there are people who are saying, you know, we can't have this relationship with Israel without getting pressure on them over Palestine.

I don't know whether.

Is it fair?

Is it the right thing to do?

Does Israel desire?

I don't know that it's the right thing to do.

I will say this about this whole controversy.

To me, this is really dangerous for Israel.

My experience is the one thing that there's been super bipartisanship in Congress always has been Israel.

It's not, do you support Israel?

It's like, I love Israel the most.

No, I love Israel the most.

And now you have this division occurring that I think, you know, Israel, we're dependent on them.

They are very dependent on us for money.

And I just think if the Israeli government becomes seen as just allied to conservatives and Trump in the United States,

it's going to be a struggle for them.

And that's where this boycott might actually take hold.

And I would say that that ship has actually sailed.

Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump are almost indistinguishable.

And Netanyahu has an election coming up in September.

And his entire plan is to be as close to Trump as possible.

People forget that Trump is way more popular in Israel than he is in the United States.

And the election there that's coming up is all about who is closest to Trump.

So the challenge that this presents for the U.S.-Israel relationship, which the BDS movement really heightens, is that you have these two two heads of state who could not be more myopic about their relationship.

Baby is making every single decision based on what's going to happen a month from now.

Trump makes decisions based on the next news cycle.

And that means that the U.S.-Israel relationship is being managed in a very manic way.

This is also an indicator of the kind of politics Trump wants to play.

He wants to elevate Talib.

He wants to make her a star.

He wants to make her the running mate of whoever the nominee is this time.

He wants to elevate the squad because he thinks that they're great targets to make his audience, to make his base furious.

And

he wants that feeling

that there's an enemy out there and he can put his finger on them.

Okay, since no one's answering my question,

I'm going to answer it myself.

It's a bullshit purity test.

BDS is a bullshit purity test by people who want to appear woke but actually slept through history class.

It's good.

Thank you.

It's predicated on this notion, I think it's very shallow thinking, that the Jews are in Israel mostly white, and the Palestinians are browner, so they must be innocent and correct, and the Jews must be wrong.

As if the occupation came right out of the blue, that this completely peaceful people found themselves occupied.

Forget about the infitatas and the suicide bombings

and the rockets and how many wars.

And let me read, Omar Barghudi is one of the co-founders of the movement.

His quote, no Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a Salel Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.

So that's where that comes from, this movement.

Someone who doesn't even want

a Jewish state at all.

Somehow this side never gets presented in the American media.

It's very odd.

Well, I think it's absolutely become one of these litmus tests inside the hard progressive movement now that they need the the enemies of the enemies of Trump and and before that the enemies of Bush

you know they looked at

hard progressives looked at Israel as a strong ally for both Trump and for Bush prior to that and so it's been brewing a long time this has been coming up into the you know sort of percolating up to the progressive left for a long time and I and I think you're right it is largely ahistorical it doesn't it does not focus on the fact that that there are two players in this dance and and two sets of behaviors in this dance you got to look at.

What he said.

No, but I do think you're right on the ahistorical part.

People don't understand history anymore.

I mean, the entire...

Well, shouldn't that come into play?

Why aren't we saying it then?

I don't get it.

I mean, I think that we explain...

You know, I work for the New York Times.

You know, we tend to explain the history of this conflict, but I think people, when they see Netanyahu, and, you know, the Democrats in Washington are still really mad about that speech that, remember when John Boehner invited him and sort of went around Obama?

And they just feel that

this administration's been playing.

I mean, Saudi Arabia wouldn't let Jews into the kingdom.

I'm not sure they still do.

They don't.

They don't.

No.

Okay.

Isn't that something?

I mean, I have a list here of Jews in the Middle East prior to 1948.

Morocco, there was 250,000 to 350,000.

These are a little old statistics, but last tally, 2,500.

Iraq had 150,000.

In 03, they had 34.

Tunisia had 100,000, and they had 900.

Egypt had 75,000 to 80,000, then 40,000.

Iran had 150,000, then 9,000.

It's not a one-way street here, is it?

And Congresswoman Omar has said things like, it's all about the Benjamins.

Israel has hypnotized the world.

May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.

She apologized for it, but it's out there.

Jews control the world.

Jews control the money.

I can see why they don't get a hero's welcome.

And it presents a really major challenge for the Democratic Party because the vast majority of Democratic members of the House of Representatives would very much share your views on this movement.

But now there are these two new young members who have significant support among the progressive base who are making the case for the BDS movement.

And that's extremely challenging for Nancy Pelosi.

It's extremely challenging for the moderate Democrats who flipped the House in part because they persuaded Republican voters that the Democratic Party was a more moderate party.

And it's something that's going to be a major challenge for the Democratic Party going forward.

How do they handle these new members making the case for this argument that doesn't have wide purchase within the party?

Okay.

So

I've been saying for about two years that I hope we have a recession.

And people get mad at me as Sean Hannity thinks I'm actually causing a recession.

I do not have this power but he seems to be wanting to blame it on me like I'm a genie.

I can make it happen.

I'm just saying we can survive a recession.

We've had 47 of them.

We've had one every time there's a Republican president.

They don't last forever.

You know what lasts forever?

Wiping out species and people.

But this week, the UN report came out.

More than a million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction.

So Trump, of course, did what any evil villain would do.

He rolled back the protections of the Endangered Species Act.

This has saved the green sea turtle, the American alligator, the peregrine falcon, bald eagles, grizzly bears, gray wolves, humpback whales.

And this is just the animals.

There's now, it's going to be a new word in the language, flintwater.

There's now flintwater in Newark.

So yes, a recession would be very worth getting rid of Donald Trump and these kind of policies.

And it would get rid of him.

You know, Bill, a recession would definitely knock him out of office.

I got to say,

bring on the recession if it means that you replace,

and I say this as a Republican of the Teddy Roosevelt variety, if you replace a goddamn oil lobbyist who runs the fucking EPA right now

with a human being.

Well, that's what would happen.

Outrageous.

That's outrageous.

And Donald Trump can piss me off 50 times a day, but when I read the the environmental species thing, I'm like, this is just punitive dickishness by these people.

They're just doing this to be assholes.

They want their base to be like, we're taking them regulations away.

And so, you know what?

I'm from Florida.

I hunt.

I fish.

I go outside.

I like it.

I like the eagles in my backyard, okay?

And you're not killing them.

No, I like Florida Panthers.

I like the fact that we have a big, diverse ecosystem.

These guys are just doing this.

It is just performative assholery.

It is not,

it's not even a regular commercial.

I think it's more than that, though.

I think it's also to help the oil and gas extraction industry.

I mean, this is, there's a niche there.

So, this is to me, and you kind of hit on this, this is to me where the chickens come home to roost, if we're going to talk species, on the Trump administration.

You know, you can have the chaos every day and the outrage, whatever.

This is policy, and this is a big change in policy.

And this is a rare federal law success story.

It's really had great impacts.

And it hasn't only saved the grizzly bear, which I'm going to mention in a second, the eagle.

I was just in Colorado.

People like seeing their eagles fly around and they wouldn't be there.

But this has taught people to think differently about species.

And to roll this back, and Republicans, though, have always looked at this as a weight on the economy and on the right-hand side.

But no person was clamoring for it.

No voter.

Only lobbyists.

Only the people with the power of the people.

It's a very powerful thing in a small niche.

So

Liz Cheney, the daughter of the ex-vice president and representative now from Wyoming, a member of the House leadership,

she had a great comment the other day.

She lost, there was a suit that Native tribes and some lawyers brought to get, to stop the delisting of the grizzly bear outside Yellowstone.

And

she's very angry about this, and she said that the selfish natives out there were destroying our Western way of life.

Without the irony.

Wait a second.

That's right.

That's a quote.

Okay, so.

I can tell you, Donald Trump literally thinks that enforcing the Endangered Species Act is a joke.

In private conversations, he'll say things like, oh, they couldn't drill because there was a frog, and the environmentalists were mad about the frog.

Or he'll say, oh, there was a puddle, and something might have grown in it.

Like, he doesn't, he thinks it's funny that it's not.

He thinks the wind is connected to your TV.

That if we had wind power and the wind wasn't blowing, the TV would go off.

I don't know.

Rachel Carson, he is not.

I'm old enough to remember when it was the terrible thing to pick winners and losers in the economy.

Right.

Yes.

And here's he's picking oil and gas.

Okay, so this week when Epstein died, he treated that it was the Clintons.

And people noticed that this is not the first time he has jumped on a conspiracy theory.

He really never met a conspiracy theory.

He didn't like, look at that.

23, is that the Washington Post?

23 bizarre conspiracy theories.

And I think they need a little better researcher because that is not all.

We found all of them.

Would you like to have a full list?

Okay, well, yeah, I'm glad.

For example,

he believes the conspiracy, the DNA testing on Monica Lewinsky's dress revealed a second shooter.

He believes

that.

He believes the theory that all the plastic in the ocean is from mermaids having work done.

That's...

He thinks the moon landing was fake, but not landing was real.

That's...

Donald Trump thinks the alphabet is a secret code used to communicate messages.

He has many times spoken privately about his belief that the pyramids aren't structures built by man.

They're the Earth's tits.

That is...

He believes, listen to this conspiracy theory, that when Starbucks ask you, do you want room for cream, they give you the same amount of coffee no matter what you say.

And he believes a nocturnal emission means that in your sleep you were jerked off by a ghost.

Okay.

he is one half of Run the Jewels and host of the Netflix show trigger warning Michael Render, aka Killer Mike is over here.

Big Mike

There's that thousand watt smile.

How are you?

I'm doing how y'all doing?

All right, Mike, so glad you're here.

I'm glad to be here.

How do you know representing there?

This is, man, this is.

I know we're going to get around to talk about capitalism at some point.

Well,

a couple kids sent me a big and tall streetwear brand called Brand.

So they're chubby.

They figured chubby kids could buy expensive shoes.

So I invested in their company.

I bought some of them.

Wow.

Big of you.

Yeah.

Literally.

So, all right, I got a million things I want to ask you.

Let's just start with Jay-Z, because that's all in the news.

Jay-Z has partnered with the NFL.

Yes.

I understand Robert Kraft is the one who brought them together.

Robert's gotten a lot of hip-hop points this past couple years.

Isn't that amazing?

He's a known.

Got meek-free, got jerked off,

all in line with rapper shit.

You know you like that one.

Okay, so

but the internet is on Jay-Z

like a Beyoncé sister in an elevator.

I mean,

because

of course,

we had the Super Bowl and Colin Kaepernick still doesn't have a job in the NFL.

And there was a lot of pressure from a lot of people saying, you artists, you've Maroon 5, played the gig, but they got shit for doing it.

Some people stayed away.

Some people are now saying that Jay-Z is giving NFL cover Eric Reed.

He's a pro bowler for the Panthers.

He's a hell of a player.

He said, it looks like your goal talking to Jay-Z was to make millions by assisting the NFL in burying Colin's career.

I don't agree with that, but I want your take.

Being a black American is a duality, right?

And I navigate it because I was raised in Atlanta.

So an Atlanta Super Bowl came last year.

I stood up in one of the meetings and I raised hell about there not being a social climate involved.

Meaning I said at least you could have 12 kids shadow producers and learn how to produce a show.

We have an arts and theater school that Outcast came out of, Tri-City.

My school, Frederick Douglass High School, arts program.

I was like, simple as that, you can do that, right?

I saw how our communities got decimated when Major League Baseball kind of pulled out years ago.

They found another genetic pool down in the Dominican Republic.

They could get much cheaper, right?

Are we still talking about Jay-Z?

Yeah, we are.

Because what we're really talking about is sports plantations and what fuels them, right?

So the NFL is fueled by talent from black kids and poor and working class white kids that make good.

Jay-Z has been a capitalist his entire career and a celebrated one because he was one of us that made it out the streets, made it in the rooms, and he did what he could when he should.

When the Grammys did not show the hip-hop portion, Jay-Z boycotted.

I know because I boycotted that same year.

Only Grammy I ever won.

I was sad as hell after.

But I stood in solidarity.

Jay-Z's play, I believe, not only gives us a seat at the table, young people, young black America, it doesn't destroy what Cap kneeled for.

What he knelt for was proper treatment of us by state agents, but police.

That does not end with him getting a job.

The same way him kneeling is not an insult to the military.

It is as an American asserting your First Amendment rights, saying something is wrong.

So on both sides of this polarized issue that we're giving to narrow these narrow issues to these wide issues and given this narrow frame to argue like Chomsky said, we shouldn't do that.

Look for the tertiary agreements.

I believe that if Jay-Z becomes his team owner, Cap gets a tryout.

Yeah, well, okay.

Well,

I just, I mean, I won't read this whole quote, but the quote is basically saying,

time for action.

Yes.

And to me, it sounds like he's been talking to Obama.

No.

Jay-Z has.

No.

Because this is Obama to me.

Let's do something real.

Let's get something done.

Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But the African-American community will argue that Obama didn't do that.

There are elements, the same elements that would argue that Jay-Z is betraying.

There's a negative element in the African-American community that's not very pleased with Obama.

Now, I'm not here to castigate it.

I'm just simply saying we are not

monolithic.

No.

We have different views.

And around Jay-Z, there was a mayor in Atlanta named Maynard Jackson.

When he took mayorialship, this is what he said.

We're going to have a seat at this table, so 29% of any contract that comes across the city has to be African-American participated and owned.

He couldn't find one African-American architecture firm at that time.

So, you know what he did?

Hired black contractors to build the runways.

He said, if you can build a driveway, you can build a runway.

So, although he couldn't include us in architecture, he got black companies like the Herman Russell Company working to build Fulton County Stadium to build that.

And that's what Jay's doing.

And with that said, I'm a huge supporter of Capernaum.

All right.

May I ask a second question?

You'll get more questions.

Okay, so

guns.

Yes.

Every time you're here, we have to talk about guns because

there was a shooting last week and Corey Booker, Kamala Harris have gun plans out and they're talking about these red flag laws.

I bet you I know that you're not down with that.

I can't be.

I'm an African-American male.

I live in a progressive city in the deep south.

I'm surrounded by white gun owners who have owned guns for generations, who agree with the president that's being compared to nationalistic and Nazi-like.

I would be a fool to then give my guns to said government.

It doesn't mean I have anything personally against the lobby to get Kamala, and Corey in, whether it be a Senate seat or presidency.

It means that I simply cannot, in my support of black participation in politics, that is an issue I cannot support.

Because a red flag means they're going to find reasons to take guns.

Well, they already have.

I know you would say that they're going to find more reasons with...

Easy.

Gun laws affect African Americans worse than first.

You know how Dr.

King got guns to be an issue?

He filed for a concealed carry permit.

You know that in the deep south 70, 80 years ago, black men could buy shotguns.

They could not buy rifles.

Well, what's the difference?

They both kill people.

A shotgun can kill the Klan once they're 30 yards away.

A rifle could kill the Klan at 100 yards away.

I would want a dead Klansman 100 yards away so that he never gets within 30 yards of shooting my wife and children.

And

yeah.

And, you know, we already have, in my view, too many police.

You know, there are five police forces.

forces between Malibu and this studio.

I've been pulled over by four of them.

Is that true?

They all let me keep my weed, though.

That's how I knew you guys were much more progressive.

You know, there's the FBI and the DEA and the ATF and the TSA and ICE and federal

and sheriff's department and the federal marshals and borders.

But, you know, that's a lot of people with a license to kill who don't really share my politics, and they all love Trump.

Absolutely.

Well, I can't say all, but a lot.

Like, I know that cop called me last week, who's a constitutionalist.

Cops love love Trump.

He voted Trump.

Yeah.

Okay, so

you're Atlanta.

Yeah.

There was a big

conclave today with Mayor Pete was there.

Yeah.

I'll be there tomorrow.

Oh, you will be there tomorrow.

I'll leave right after you to fly home.

My wife's not happy about that.

She wants to stay at Malibu and smoke weed.

Why would it be different in Malta?

Weed is weed.

That's what's great about it.

You better get better weed.

Yeah, we got better strip clubs.

You got better weed.

We should meet in the middle.

Green weed and black women, man.

Okay.

That's right.

All right, all right.

Okay, so Mayor Pete.

Yeah.

What do you think about Mayor Pete?

Because every time I turn in the news, they're talking about him, and they say, well, he's got a problem.

You know, he's not down with the Brown.

I like his personality.

I don't know enough of his policy.

I know he ran into some issues around the police and

in the South Bend area.

My thing is, with police forces and any mayor, why do they seem to to have control and volley over the mayor's office versus the other way around?

Now, in my city, police seem to be taken to task more, right?

There were a group of policemen who accidentally killed

a black old lady on a false premise drug raid.

They were sent to jail.

Policemen killed the kid who was falsely accused of stealing a car and went to jail.

That doesn't happen in other places.

New York, de Blasio, could have done something quicker.

He did not.

So he showed his cowardice.

And Mayor Pete's growth into a national politician, he's going to have to get out in front of this and be tough and square.

Dick Gregory said something years ago, God bless the dead.

If you attack insurance companies and the police pensions, you will see a deceleration.

Because he said, it's funny, you never see black cops accidentally keep killing white kids, not that they're more spiritual or smarter.

They understand that white people are not going to tolerate it.

And the way that you don't tolerate things in capitalism is attack the money.

If your police force is misabusing and using you and they don't look like you, find ways to attack their money.

find ways to attack their unions, their pensions, find ways to attack the city's money, and you'll see change.

Okay.

So let me ask this.

I kind of want to defend a couple of friends of mine here.

Everybody can get on in this one.

After the shootings last week, Neil deGrasse Tyson, good friend of mine, great friend of our show.

Yeah.

Boy, did he get in trouble on Twitter?

He said, in the past 48 hours, the U.S.

horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

Then he said, on average, across any 40 hours, we also lose 500 to medical average, fear and to flu, 250 to suicide, car accidents, platforms.

He said, often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

Okay, but he didn't voice the one true opinion.

This country's now a place where there's just one acceptable opinion.

God forbid you have nuance or think outside the box.

So fuck all you all.

This is just, you can express a different opinion.

But he wasn't saying, I'm glad children are dead.

It's the gotcha culture.

It's everybody has to mobilize their mob at any given moment.

And he got dragged because he didn't, right, he didn't say immediately, why don't we have gun control, why don't we do this?

He didn't utter the magic spell that would have protected him.

Can I say though, when we're talking about cancel culture and gotcha culture, it's not concentrated on one side.

No, it's not.

Just for the last two weeks, the president himself literally got a movie canceled because he hadn't seen it and Fox News decided that it wasn't nice to conservatives, even though it presented liberals as being mean to conservatives, which I guess for some reason that didn't match with what the the president was saying.

I mean, there are always going to be outrage mobs on the internet, but when you literally have the most powerful person in the free world,

60 million Twitter followers.

When he triggers somebody, they pull a trigger.

But it hurts more when it's the people on my side who are supposed to be for free speech.

I'm sorry about that.

There's no sense of proportion.

to anything.

Everything hits DEF CON one immediately.

Right, right.

You know, we had this really objectionable headline last week or so about Trump, you know, and giving him too much credit.

And,

you know, the New York Times, I've been there a long time.

We write bad headlines all the time.

It was fixed.

This is a common occurrence.

Right.

But immediately everyone is, we've got to fire the editor.

I'm canceling my subscription.

It's just

knee-jerky, over-the-top, and it's fueled by social media.

I really think it's unhealthy.

I worry about the money.

We have to go back to the original point of in a capitalistic society, they aren't just canceling because you offended and you hurt my feelings.

We were saying that in 1992 when Rodney King got his ass kicked.

It's canceled by the perception of I'm going to lose money.

So the way to cancel cancel culture is to not only enforce that we be more adamant about free speech, it is to then support the things that you want to support.

Thank God for Luke Campbell.

Thank God for Luke and the two live crews throw that dick.

Because Throw That Dick brought Broward County to take him to the Supreme Court.

And he and people like Larry Flint Flint fought the fight for us to say bullshit that gets us canceled.

First rough record I ever bought.

I love you guys.

I love ideas.

He's so horny.

He's so horny.

And the best proof of that argument, like the best evidence for it, is where cancel culture doesn't work.

Literally the governor and the attorney general of Virginia right now both have blackface problems and they both are still in power because they aren't responsive to the influences of the market.

Okay, so speaking of that and movies getting canceled, Sarah Silverman, another good friend of mine,

she

tweeted out this week she was about to start a movie, and she would have been great as Dora the Explorer.

No.

And then

this is the night before the movie was to start.

They called her up and said, no, we saw the sketch.

And this has been out there for quite a while.

She did a blackface sketch in 2007, a sketch that I don't remember anybody at the time objecting to, which,

okay, they changed the rules.

You know, the, it was in service of the liberal point of view.

It was an anti-racist sketch using blackface to make that point, okay?

It wasn't to bring back minstrel shows that she did it.

Back then, the rule was, okay, you can do that if it's in service of the right point of view.

Now, the rules have changed, and she loses her job.

Now, does everybody who did that?

Because Jimmy Kimmel did it, and Billy Crystal did it, and lots of Ted Danson did it, and

everybody should have known that

future Sarah should have.

should have a time machine to know that in the future the wokeness standard would change.

That's what I'm saying.

Which is your shit.

Which is, that is an infinitely recursive problem, and it will get worse and worse and worse.

And it won't be, oh, someday they'll find somebody who laughed at the blackface sketch.

And

now they have to be hired.

This is, it's just, it's just a, it endlessly responds to the microphone.

Where are you on that?

Where am I on this?

I'm on Sarah Silverman.

There's a black detergent in Atlanta called True Detergent, started by four black Muslim United States veterans, all men in their 60s and 70 years old.

She was one of the first and biggest people from Hollywood to make a mass purchase of their products, to put it on social media.

That helped not only that company grow.

Yeah, it's called True Detergent.

To get the black face on?

No, no, no, no.

No, my house, nigga.

No, my house, nigga.

Don't close it.

But had Sarah not done that, that company would not have gotten the extra funding they needed to then purchase a warehouse and would not be a cornerstone of the webyblack.com.

And y'all check that out and buy some.

So if Sarah, our ally, wouldn't have done that, I can forgive an ally for some shit she didn't even know

ten years later would be.

You know, it's not that big of a deal to cancel her.

We should not go see that movie on her behalf as black people, on behalf of my community.

I'm going to find out who produced that movie, and I'm never going to go see another movie.

I think that's

cancel culture.

Yes, exactly.

I'm going to get back at them.

But you might get the point that I keep thinking of.

If everybody always just gets fired for every mistake or banned, who's going to be left and who's going to take the chances?

The robots are going to be able to do it.

Exactly.

You have to take some chances.

Right.

Especially as artists.

Exactly.

You don't know where the line is until you cross it a little bit.

You wouldn't know that, though.

No, I wouldn't know that at all.

Okay, so.

But.

It's really creepy the way there's a show trial aspect to this.

When I read these, Neil deGrasse Tyson's, first of all, anybody's first apology, never good enough.

He wrote, I am,

long, long apology, I won't bore you about it.

He wrote, I am therefore thankful for the candor and depth of critical reactions shared in my Twitter feed.

This is what they used to do in the old Soviet Union.

Can I get out of the gulag now?

Thank you for educating me, re-educating me.

Now, he's not the first astrophysicist to get in trouble, Galileo.

And I read Galileo's apology is almost the same.

I have been enjoined by the Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the sun is the center.

I abjure, curse, and detest my said errors and heresies.

Can I get out of this cell now?

It's the cultural revolution in China.

The people are, you know, they're begging to be forgiven by Mao after he's killed their family.

Right.

You know, yes.

I'm so sorry they offended you.

So

it's you.

I mean, I don't know if it's totally fair to compare Neil deGrasse Tyson having to tweet something that's a little bit, you know, over the top to the Cultural Revolution in China.

That seems not exactly like these are the same thing.

No, I don't know.

I mean, that wasn't.

The start of a marathon

marathon is still both the marathon, though.

Right.

Like, you got to see it's a pathway that leads to closing and shedding scientists and artists up.

So that definitely is the beginning.

When people who have not graduated post-secondary education get to shame an astrophysicist into apologizing for simply stating facts.

Oh,

that's a sign we'll be trying to really say.

We only have 30 seconds.

Just give me yes or no.

Was Jeffrey Epstein a suicide or is there something more nefarious?

Suicide.

Suicide but fishy.

Suicide, but the investigations will probably turn up interestingly.

Nickel, please.

time for new rules everybody new rules new rules

all right

new rule the selfie brush the plastic hairbrush that holds your iphone so you can take a selfie in between brush strokes

must come with the following disclaimer warning other people's interest in you is likely lower than you suspect

Attaching your cell phone to your hairbrush doesn't say, I'm a multitasker.

It says, Give me brain cancer, God, I dare you.

Neural scientists have to do a peer-reviewed study to determine what it is about the human mind that makes us keep thinking a nice cold LaCroix sounds good,

even though it always tastes like shit.

Neural married people who invite all their friends and family to witness the renewal of their wedding vows have to be honest on the invitation.

Neural, the jewel wasp, has to understand, we have a pretty pretty good idea why you asked to speak to us, and before you say anything, we just want you to know that your mother and I love you no matter what.

Rehearsal crowd loved that yesterday, and they were just people off the street.

Okay.

New Roll, since the app Shazam lets me know the name of a song I hear playing, they should make an app that lets me know if the artist of the song I'm listening to is problematic.

That's why I've invented Problam.

For example, let's play the song Ghost Whip the Whiskey.

But that's what's up when you ghost whip the whiskey.

I love that song.

But can I love the singer?

Let's ProBlam it.

Oh.

but it says the singer Clint Becker has made several tweets calling the Obama administration gay and once licked a woman's neck in a Walgreens.

Throw him in the pie with R.

Kelly and Wacko Jacko.

Now

play something I can enjoy with a clear conscience.

And finally, new rule, America must ask itself this question.

What do we do about the easy access to firearms by young men who simply feel like shit?

There's no shortage of reasons offered as to why America has a gun violence problem, but isn't it a lot of it?

Because America is an everyman-for-himself winner-take-all culture that chews up and spits out people who don't keep up.

You can fly as high as you want here, but if you fall by the wayside, our response is, sucks to be you, loser.

Unfollow.

You want a friend, get a gun.

42% of the people in America make $15 an hour or less.

How much of a life can you really have on that budget?

What is an American mass shooter, really, but a suicide bomber wearing axe body spray?

The NRA should change its slogan to guns don't kill people, seething loaners who can't get laid kill people.

Yes, we have too many guns, but America has an epidemic of gun violence

because it has an epidemic of guys who were picked last in gym.

We don't have gym violence at schools any better.

All right, I do it for them at home.

Forget red flags.

Just find the guys who cut their own bangs.

I know profiling is wrong, but if a guy takes his mother to the prom, he goes on the list.

Does your fondest sexual memory involve two other people you heard through a wall?

I'm going to get rid of of this fucking idea.

It's the last thing I do.

You've been selected for extra screening.

Armed and lonely is not a good combination.

America has a loneliness crisis.

22% of millennials say they don't have any friends.

25% say they don't even have an acquaintance.

10% didn't know that pizza comes in slices so someone else can have some.

And what is it that has made people so lonely?

It's their stupid phone,

which was supposed to connect people,

but which studies have found has made them more lonely.

It's like a vibrator designed by Mike Pence.

The internet is where young white men go from lonely and sad to radicalized and lethal.

Because we used to wake up, read the papers, see all the terrible things in the world, and say, well, at least my life is better than those poor slobs.

But now it's the opposite.

Social media tells you everyone is having more fun with more toys and more friends than you.

They're always in St.

Kitts having Mai Ties at sunset while you're in Canoga Park selling your plasma at dusk.

YOLO!

Before Instagram, you could be a loser but not feel it because the winners weren't always in your face.

Even the most mundane post of avocado toast in a hipster coffee shop sends the message, I'm having fun and you're not.

Enjoy your cup of noodles, fatty.

This is how the internet gets you coming and going.

Guys, watch the haves on Instagram and then go over to sites like 8chan to brood with the have-nots.

Being a loser used to just mean that you stayed home on Friday nights to get a head start on your Star Wars fanfiction.

You had a hard dick and no social skills,

but it wasn't a movement.

But now,

with sites like 8 Chan, it is.

8 Chan is where three of the mass shooters so far posted their manifestos.

It's where QAnon got started.

8 Chan is to lonely white men what the hometown buffet is to gastric bypass patients.

Both dangerous and inescapable.

And it's why people

need real friends.

Not chat room friends, not Facebook friends, not fellow paranoids feeding each other misinformation on a screen, but real human friends who can look you in the eye and tell you that your theories about the coming race war are horseshit.

And to tell you that social media isn't real.

So stop comparing yourself to a fantasy.

No one is having that much fun.

They're just distorting reality to big themselves up.

Trust me, anyone out there who's home tonight feeling left out, discarded, and disrespected, if you knew how much everybody else is faking it, you wouldn't want to join them anyway.

All right, thanks for showing on me at the Washington Pavilion and Superflows, August 18th, and at the Mirage in Vegas, September 6th in Summer.

I want to thank Rick Wilson, Carl Holst, Etsy Wooder of Killer Mike, and Sheldon House.

Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you very much.

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.