Ep. #498: Andrew Yang, Bret Easton Ellis

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

Start the clock.

Right here with me.

Thank you, Mr.

Demon Aquarius.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

you.

All right.

Thank you, folks.

Okay.

All right, all right.

Thank you.

You can sit down.

Thank you.

I appreciate your enthusiasm.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

I know why you're happy

because the president, Donald Trump, is home

from his trip to England and Ireland and France.

They're now fumigating Europe.

Wow, this week, you know, he went over there, it was the anniversary, a lot of anniversaries this week, the 75th anniversary of D-Day, but also this week, 100th anniversary of women getting the vote in America.

Or as Republicans call it, D-Day.

It's their D-Day.

Well, you've got to get right with the women's issue.

Boy, Joe Biden, you see that?

Did a real flip-flop on the abortion thing.

You know, the Hyde Amendment, which is like the federal government will not pay for abortions.

He was always for that.

Now he's against that.

Roe versus Wade, he said he was always for it, but he's Catholic.

It's complicated.

Joe's old school.

He believes conception begins when a guy smells a woman's hair.

Also,

Mike Pence's birthday today, he blew out the candles,

and

Mayor Pete turned into a pillar of salt.

I don't know what.

If there was groaning, you should leave now because it's going to be a rough show for you people, a very rough show.

But no, it's Pride weekend here, is it not?

I know.

Traffic was crazy.

I think it's all over the country.

It's certainly here in L.A.

You know, this is true.

In Boston, a group of guys got together and they want to have a straight pride parade.

This is coming from a group called Super Happy Fun America.

I cannot think of a gayer name.

That's true.

But, you know, I always want to say to people like this: you know, gay pride is a response to being shamed.

How can you really have a straight pride because no one has ever shamed you?

You know, it's like wanting a welcome home party when you've never left the couch.

But I'm trying to put off talking about the story that depressed me all week, more than any, which is Donald Trump overseas, England's royal family met America's royal fuck-up.

Trump continued the time-honored condition, tradition he has now started of embarrassing this country in every possible shape, form, and way possible.

First, he drags his whole family over there.

Did you see that?

They all, even Tiffany.

Really?

Ivanka,

Eric, Don Jr., I know it.

We're all thinking the same thing.

How did they ever get time off from their jobs?

But

he's just...

He's just such the uglyest American ever.

He gets over there.

he insults the mayor of London right away.

Loser.

Insults Princess Megan, says she's nasty.

And then the worst, he mistook the Queen for Stonehenge.

That's...

You know what?

Fuck them two.

Fuck the royal family.

I hate those fuckers.

What is this?

They're assholes.

What is this?

You know, you have to bow.

Your Your highness, another human being I'm supposed to call your highness, don't talk to her unless she talks to you first.

Fuck all that.

You know,

the only reason I think they keep the royal family, it's good for tourism.

I've been to Buckingham Palace.

It's not good.

It doesn't look good, but it's like a zoo.

People are like, oh, maybe they'll come out today.

But look,

the whole point of this trip trip to England and Europe was planned around the fact that yesterday was June 6th, 2019.

This day will never come again.

This is the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a real day that honors the sacrifice of the greatest generation.

And all of Europe gathered yesterday to remember how armies of the free world came together to fight a common enemy.

Bette Midler.

And

that's right.

While they were doing that, Trump was tweeting about a washed up psycho.

See, that's why Donald Trump is the new Churchill, because he opened up a second front in the war on Rosie O'Donnell.

And it just

sucks that on a day honoring America's best, we sent America's worst.

And his knowledge of history.

History and economics and science, all on great display at a moment like this.

he said while we honored the people of D-Day freeing Europe from Nazi control it would have been much more easily handled by tariffs

see you didn't know if he really said that that was a joke but he could have said that that's the sad part of it

he could have said that

and the most galling thing of all is that his own service or lack of came up and he spit on the graves that he was walking through by saying that Vietnam, he said, was an affair.

It was so far away, but I would have been honored, would have been honored.

Darn the luck.

There weren't any wars going on at the time.

In the 60s.

Never mind.

Anyway,

but in Trump's defense, he did see action in the trenches of Studio 54.

He was the guy in charge of defending the VIP room from the bridge and tunnel crap.

Anyway, we've got a great show.

Katie Porter, Charles Blow, and Quit Watts are here.

And And a little later, we'll be speaking with author Brett Easton Ellis.

But first up, he is a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and author of The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is Our Future.

That's all the time we have, ladies and gentlemen.

Andrew Yang, ladies and gentlemen, Andrew.

Thank you.

Andrew.

Thank you.

I haven't read your book, but I read the title.

I think I get it all now.

No.

Okay, so I'm going to ask you the same question I've asked many of the contenders who've been on our show, 23 of them.

I'm going to run.

It'll be 23 and me.

But you have some votes.

23 people are running.

Why you?

I'm running for president because I'm focused on solving the problem that got Donald Trump elected in the first place in 2016.

He's our president because we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, all the swing states that he needed to win.

And my friends in technology know we're about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs, and on and on.

We have to wake America up to the fact that it is not immigrants that are causing these problems.

It's not immigrants.

Am I right?

It's technology and they're advancing.

It's kind of hard to get them to applaud.

And so we need to solve these problems for the American people, and that's how we beat Trump in 2020.

That's how we move the country forward.

Yeah, you got your lane.

You got an issue that I think nobody else has,

which is they're coming for your jobs.

And what jobs are we talking about?

I know you talk about in your book jobs that involve a routine, right?

Something that is repetitive.

Those are the jobs that can be replaced by machines and

information and artificial intelligence.

Yes.

What areas are we talking about?

44% of American jobs fall into either repetitive manual work or repetitive cognitive work.

So we're talking about retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs.

Retail?

Well, retail, 30% of American malls are closing in the next four years because Amazon's sucking up $20 billion in commerce every year.

And you don't think of that as an automation thing because the robot's not coming in and doing the same thing.

That's fine.

I still think of retailers go to the mall, and how could a machine, if I asked, do I look cute in this?

You know,

does this make me look fat?

No, but you're, yeah, people don't care about that anymore.

They buy everything online.

Yeah, and if you go to the Amazon Fulfillment Center, it's wall-to-wall robots.

So that's why retail is also being automated away.

Okay.

So that's part of your plan.

And then the thing that's in your book, UBI, which sounds like a bowel disease, I got it.

I didn't name it.

I know, but every time I hear UBI, I think, ugh.

Well, it's one reason why we've rebranded it the Freedom Dividend.

And it's a plan where everyone gets $1,000 a month.

Everybody gets a thousand.

Everybody.

Rich, poor?

Yes, you too.

You need it.

I know, no.

I got my eye on these Tom Ford cufflinks.

Because I saw they were 12 grand.

It was too rich for my blood, but if I get that bonus, I'm going to go.

No,

okay, so everybody get, and I understand that.

How much would that cost in total for a year in this country?

Well, the headline cost gets a lot lower than people think because a lot of this money is just going to go back right into the economy.

It's the trickle-up economy.

Right.

Poor people spend it.

Yes.

If I gave you $1,000 a month, you might not even notice.

But if you put $1,000 a month in the average American consumer's hands, it's going to get spent right in their main street businesses.

It's going to create 2 million new jobs because that money is just going to go to tutoring and car repairs and the occasional night out.

And it's going to circulate.

Okay, but how much right off the bat does we have to spend to do this?

So the headline cost is around $1.5 trillion.

That's a lot.

A year?

A year.

Wow, yeah, that's real money.

But we just gave away a trillion in a tax cut to people who will never see it.

Yes.

And defense, you could take a trillion out.

They wouldn't notice it either.

Well, the way we get the money is if you look around, how much did Amazon pay in federal taxes last year?

Zero.

So think about a trillion-dollar tech company paying zero in taxes.

That's right.

So if

they must be making it hand over fist.

So we have to create a mechanism where the American public actually benefits from artificial intelligence and all these new automations.

So if we had even a mild value-added tax and gave the American public a tiny slice of every Amazon sale, every Google search, every Facebook ad, every robot truck mile, it would generate over $800 billion in new revenue, which would be enough to pay for the vast majority of this dividend of $1,000.

Okay, but to me, this is only part of the problem.

You're saying people are going to be thrown out of work.

Call it a tsunami of unemployment.

I think you're right.

Because of automation, robots, and so forth.

So now we're making sure they don't starve.

We give them money.

But what do they do all day?

It's not just money.

People have to have a purpose in life.

You have to have a reason to get up in the morning.

I had no idea that was such a controversial point.

People need a reason to get up.

Yes, Bill, finally, someone has said it.

Yeah.

I'm Asian, so you know I like to work.

They're ruining you, and you did it on yourself.

That's very politically correct.

Americans need structure, purpose, fulfillment, all the things that jobs provide.

But the biggest misconception about the freedom dividend is that it's somehow going to reduce work.

It's actually going to create 2 million new jobs.

It's going to recognize the kind of work that my wife does.

Yeah, because of the economic growth in the economy, just having more buying power.

Okay, so what jobs are we getting now that we're...

So those jobs happily will keep some of the main street stores open that would otherwise close, but it would also start to recognize the kind of work that my wife does.

My wife's at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic.

And right now, the market values her work at zero, it values all caregiving at essentially zero.

And so by having this dividend in place, not only do we create new jobs, we also start recognizing and rewarding the work that's already going on in our families and communities.

We can actually expand what we think of as work.

Okay.

So

one thing I like about when I listen to you is that you are asking a question I've asked many, many times on this show, which is why in so much of this country is a D

next to a politician's name so toxic?

So toxic that no matter who they're running against, I mean Roy Moore squeaked a victory out.

A child molester.

That much.

He lost by.

Why is the D so toxic?

And you talk about this too.

I've been shocked, Bill, when I go around the country how working class Americans feel like the Democratic Party does not care about people like them, is not talking to them.

And when I was growing up, the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, the little guy or gal.

We need to get back to that.

I can't tell you how much credit Donald Trump got just for calling out the pain that many of these communities are in.

And so if the Democratic Party stops condescending and says, look, we're here to actually work on solving your problems, we can go very, very far with many of the people who voted for Donald Trump.

Is this because of identity politics?

Well, so I'm the son of immigrants.

I understand the impulse behind identity politics, but Democrats have to know that identity politics is a very poor way to approach winning national elections, and it's a very poor way to bring our country together.

We have to enact solutions that will help all Americans.

And when Martin Luther King championed a guaranteed minimum income in the 60s, which is almost exactly like my freedom dividend, he didn't do it for any subset of Americans.

He did it for all Americans.

And that's, again, how we move the country forward.

Thank you.

Good luck with your campaign.

I'm glad you're in it.

You're doing good.

All right.

Andrew Yang, let's meet our panel.

Hey, Clint, how you doing?

Charles?

How are you?

Okay.

He is an MSNBC National Security Analyst, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and author of Messing with the Enemy, now on paperback.

Clint Watts.

Clint, how are you doing?

He's a New York Times columnist and author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

Charles Blow, right over here, Charles.

And she is a first-term Democratic congresswoman representing California's 45th district.

Katie Porter.

8089.

Okay.

So I have, this happened about a half hour before we came on the air.

I'll just read it.

We don't have to talk about it a long time.

I don't think it's a real big story, but it was last week that Trump was going to put tariffs on Mexico unless they solve the immigration problem for us.

Now he says a half hour ago, I am pleased to inform you the U.S.

has reached an agreement with Mexico that tariffs are scheduled to be, are implemented, are hereby, because he's a king,

hereby, the scroll indefinitely suspended.

It sounds like he just gave up because they talked him out of it.

He had a brain fart last week, and now it's all over.

I guess my first question is this.

Speaking of negotiations,

reported last week Kim Jong-un had his entire negotiating team killed.

What if Trump killed his negotiating team?

What if he killed Mike Pompeo and John Bolton?

What would Mitch McConnell say or do?

Is that the real question?

Yeah, it is.

Mitch McConnell doesn't ever say or do anything.

What would Lindsey Graham

say?

Would it spring us into some sort of stability where everything was calm?

I'm just asking.

Would it make things worse?

I don't know.

I'm just asking.

All right.

Let's move on to D-Day

because this I take a little personally.

I try not to start shows with, oh, Trump sucks, because you could do it every week.

But this week, I'm sorry, Trump sucks,

because I am the son of two veterans who were both in the European campaign, a soldier and an Army nurse.

So when I see this.

Thank you.

When I see this powdered clown over there,

it makes me angry.

And you know, presidents are always to a degree, I think, reflections of people who vote for them.

Do you agree with me?

It is unimaginable that the people of 1940 would have elected a man like Donald Trump?

It is unimaginable that the people 10 years ago would have elected.

10 years ago.

Right.

But I think that we make a mistake when we look at Donald Trump and say, I can't believe, and what are his supporters thinking?

Because we put so much, we centered his support, his base to a degree that is not healthy for the rest of us who are sane and looking at this through the normal prism of morality and character because they are not right as i've said before

they treat donald trump as folk hero the folk hero does not have to play by the same rules of morality that the rest of us do the folk hero is allowed to do things that you wouldn't allow in your own home right you wouldn't allow with you between you and your boss they know he's lying but they don't allow their sons and daughters to lie to them and they don't go to work and lie to their bosses but because he has transcended in their minds to that level, the only sin that the folk hero can can commit is to is to betray the folk.

Right.

But they know it's wrong.

They know it's wrong.

I wonder if a week like this changes anything.

Is it just more of it?

You had a president go sit on the beach with the crosses,

star David in the background, and he criticized Director Mueller, a

Vietnam Marine, a veteran, FBI director for 12 years, nominated by Republicans, stayed for a Democrat.

He would not show up on that battlefield.

He wouldn't show up on that beach.

He found a way not to be there, and he called Mueller a fool.

I think his base knows.

I think his base knows that that's the wrong answer.

But

it doesn't bother them.

It does bother them.

No, it doesn't.

If it bothered him,

they wouldn't be voting for him

in the same level.

It's slowly going down in his approval.

Wait, one second.

The polls are going down.

What polls of his?

Are polls polls of his against Biden?

He's losing technology.

He's losing tech in the line.

And

then,

in the matchups, the Democrats are doing well against him.

His personal approval rating, particularly among Republicans, is as rock solid as the day he was.

Actually,

evangelicals went down to 55%.

That was his big part of his base.

Right, but I'm talking about people who identify as Republican.

That's evangelicals.

Right, but I'm saying of that group, now you're still above 80%

who support Trump.

That's a lot, but it is.

That's a lot.

It's an enormous amount.

Okay, all right.

I'm not.

I was the one who said he was going to win the first time.

What are you talking about?

I get it.

He's a monster.

I was just going to say that I didn't think one of the refreshing things about President Trump is it's so hard to find anything nice that we can say, but I think the refreshing thing about him is he's very consistently on brand.

So this is somebody who went to the Boy Scouts and managed to make Boy Scouts an American.

He goes to D-Day, and when he chips and dies, it's going to be on apple pie.

Because this is somebody who literally encounters every American institution and manages it

to screw up his relationship.

I mean, Fuzzy Kitten, like that's that's going down.

Like everything he comes into contact with.

Oh, I didn't know you'd be funny like that.

That's good.

Okay.

So

there's a poll that came out this week, Pew, the Pew People, they do very good polls.

I must say I was.

I got to McGallow.

Where were you on that joke that I fucked up in the monologue?

We need to keep him in the house all the time.

The people came out with this poll.

Percentages say that the following issue is a big problem.

This is the big problem, Paul.

I would never have guessed this.

Number one, by a large margin, drug addiction.

Drug addiction.

More than

healthcare, by a little.

Healthcare was second, but more than violent crime, climate change, racism, terrorism, sexism, immigration.

Wow.

I must live in a little bit of a bubble here.

But part of that.

And I'm supposed to be the drug.

Yeah, part of that poll that's fascinating, though, is it's the two Americas.

That's the only thing that everyone agreed on.

Drug addiction and college affordability.

If you look at everything else in that poll, complete disagreement, 80-20.

Democrats and liberals believe this.

Republicans, conservatives believe this, which means we've got two different Americas right now.

It's very hard to do any policy as we see, but that's reflected in our public opinion.

And

what do you think this is because of?

I think it's less right-left, and I think

people are not completely grasping how big of a problem drug addiction is among white people in the country.

Still 70 plus percent of the population, and it is ravaging

parts

of that population.

And ironically,

racism played a backward role here, right?

So

study after study after study kept finding that doctors would not prescribe the strongest drugs to black people.

Minority people.

That's it.

Even for fractures of leg, fractures,

things that they knew was causing pain, and they would under-prescribe, and they wouldn't prescribe the most

heavy drugs and would over prescribe it to white people.

And now, ha ha ha!

Racism doesn't always put up.

Yeah, no,

I didn't know that.

That's it.

I just think for me, a lot of this is the polling is a lagging indicator, right?

So in Congress, I've often said, if we had a motto, and I really hope we don't get one, but if we have a motto, it would be something like trying to solve tomorrow, yesterday's problems, tomorrow, maybe.

So it's that we're thinking about, well, gee, you know, in 2005, 2002, opalate prescriptions were a real problem.

But now I've woken up to this because I read some book, I saw it finally, like, there's just a lag.

So the real problems that are coming that we need to be solving now so that we don't have them are not even listed in that poll as choices.

Right.

Well, here's something interesting.

Also, where Democrats do better, I think this is interesting.

This is the trust part of it.

Education, they kill Republicans.

52% trust Democrats.

24%

trust Republicans.

Healthcare, 47 to 33.

Environment, 52 to 24.

They're crushing on this issue.

Well, don't you think it's true?

Because we're just not trying to take all those things away.

You mean like air and health?

Okay, right.

Clean water.

Okay.

Healthcare.

But that's what I'm getting the one that they think you are trying to take away, guns.

That's about even.

40%.

You were trying to take away dead people.

No, I understand.

I understand.

Okay.

I understand that.

But

I'm just telling you, as a winner issue, 40% trust Democrats, 41% trust Republicans on gun policy.

It's a distinction a lot of people don't see.

Trump was was asked the other day by Piers Morgan when he was in London about guns.

Piers Morgan is a terrible ass kisser for Trump, but he actually challenged him on this.

He's anti-gun, and he said, you know, why do people need guns?

And Trump said, a lot of them use it for entertainment.

They go out and shoot.

And Piers Morgan went,

you find that entertaining?

I don't either.

I don't like guns.

Have some.

Don't like them.

Have it for an emergency, like an antibiotic.

Don't like them.

I don't polish my amoxicillin.

I just have it.

Okay,

but some people do.

Lots of people do.

And their view is, yes, there is a violence problem with guns, but not me.

And you're going after me.

And I'm just saying,

some of the solutions, all of the solutions, I don't know if it would solve the gun problem.

And to die on this hill and lose an election, because we've lost elections before on this issue, which is not a winning issue for Democrats.

Just keep that in mind.

But what is the option, though, not to

make it a central part of the campaign?

No, but just, first of all, the liberals should learn more about guns.

I don't know much about guns because, again, I don't care.

I don't like them.

But I hear this from gun people.

They're fun.

I don't find them fun, but they do find them fun.

But Corey Booker was on with Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper asked him a couple of times,

what in your plan would have stopped the massacre that we had last week at Virginia Beach?

And Corey Booker took a very long time to not be able to answer.

But can I just say this?

It would not, because it was...

Journalists have to stop asking that horrible question why that is a horrible question because because what we're doing is picking out one incident out of 30 000 deaths per year and saying how could you solve this one thing that is not the objective of gun control the objective of gun control is to reduce capacity to kill people who should not be killed and once you reframe it that way maybe the the proposal i have today will not solve that problem but it cuts into this massive number of people that we're losing to gun violence that is the question you should have to ask

But you're seriously saying

you shouldn't be able to answer the question as a politician, how will your plan specifically stop this specific...

But

the framing of the question is wrong.

I'm saying that what the politicians should say if somebody asked them that wrong question is to say, let me say, I don't know what might have,

would have prevented this person,

and I don't know all the issues involved in that.

But what I know is that what the science tells us about access and capacity to kill,

If we do certain things, we will reduce the number

of people.

Right.

Somewhat just.

You really don't think it's that simple.

It's complicated.

If you did everything that the Democrats wanted, and I support all of that,

I still think you would have this problem.

Because it's much more complicated than just

killing.

You're going to be disappointed if you think just doing what they want gun-wise is going to solve.

You're not going to get rid of all the volumes.

You can't solve the lunatic problem.

You're not going to get rid of all gun violence

right but that's not that's not the that's not the promise the promise here is to reduce preventable gun death just saying i want to win i want to win this election and i want to fight it on the issues we're going to win i won my election standing up for gun violence in orange county california

so

i'm a Cub Scout leader for crying out loud.

I let a grown-up give my six-year-old a BB gun and I cowered for my life.

Like, there is a way for people to use guns appropriately, and there are ways to have sensible gun violence prevention.

Nobody's going to come take your gun.

Maybe they should.

I don't know you well enough.

I mean, why shouldn't they take it a first time?

But my point is

to say things like that.

Gun violence prevention is the right thing to do.

And I will trade off winning an election for saving a life any day.

That's not what we're debating.

No one's against that here.

The strong man isn't here.

There's a lot of ground that can be gained with personal responsibility.

This is an issue that conservatives will go for.

Who was trained on that weapon?

How were they trained?

What are the safety mechanisms in the home?

And I'm a big fan of gun owner insurance.

We let people have a car?

No, not unless they have insurance.

We'll let them have a gun.

Do you got insurance if you have training?

Nope.

You just take it and you walk out the door.

Responsible gun owners will go for that.

I think that's a bad.

No, they won't, because to have it, you have to have registration.

And

the gun lobby has vociferously resisted any efforts to register guns because they say if the government knows where the guns are, it makes it easy for the government to come get them.

I'm saying that we have to go with that, at this conversation head-on, not ducking and diving, not saying we're going to solve every shooting, but we have to say

there's a real way to attack this to reduce the numbers.

Reduce the numbers.

If I save 10, 20, 100 lives, I think that's valuable to do and that person not get mowed down on the lawn or in the school or in a theater.

No argument.

All right.

Let's bring out Gret.

He is the author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero, who now hosts the Brett Easton Ellis podcast and just published his first work of nonfiction, White.

Please welcome Brett Easton Ellis.

Hey,

how are you?

Good to see you.

You know the panel, I'm sure.

Pleasure to meet you.

I've been a fan of yours for quite some time.

Oh, thank you.

Because I do read.

Yes.

I have guns and I do read.

You can do both.

And, you know, you were always kind of the bad boy of literature.

I was.

And I always liked that about you.

I like bad boys, and I like people who

push the envelope.

So

what I wanted to ask you about the new book, I've always known you as a novelist, and now you come out with a book that is non-fiction.

And it's sort of the inverse.

Remember Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities?

And he was always a non-fiction guy.

And it's like he came out with this great novel.

And I want to ask you kind of that question reverse.

Why couldn't you say about the subject matter you're addressing in this book, book, which is political correctness and social media and groupthink and that kind of stuff,

why couldn't you address that anymore in fiction?

Why did you go for non-fiction?

Well because I thought there was too much fiction out there in the world anyway.

There wasn't out fiction.

You really can't.

And so I wanted to write a book, and I think White is this book, about the trajectory of Gen X and how we were

born in the 60s, we came of age in the 70s in a time that was very free of parental guidance.

We were on our own.

The world wasn't made for children then, and so I think that aided in our independence.

We had an immense amount of freedom.

And then moving in through the

80s and then moving from the analog world into the digital world and then ending up in the summer of 2018 thinking, where in the fuck are we?

What happened?

You know, all of these freedoms, freedom of expression that we were allowed in the 70s and the 80s and to a degree in the 90s.

And suddenly we were stuck there in the summer of 2018 politically and culturally going, what the fuck happened?

How did this happen to us?

And that's really what the book is about.

It's about the trajectory of the...

How did that happen?

You talk a lot about the culture of victimhood.

Why did we become a victim culture?

Look, I think a lot of what happens

happens because one generation reacts against another.

And when we talk about social justice warriors or

victimhood, we're talking about a generation that is reacting against Generation X, which was very cool, very aloof, very indifferent to things, wasn't so overly emotional.

And

I think, yeah, no, I was Gen X.

I'm one of the first years, depending on what chart you see.

And I think the nihilism of Gen X was what millennials are reacting to, or reacting against.

There's a problem with social justice warriors.

Oh, no, I'm not saying there's a problem.

Believe me, I think resistance is great.

I think it's a good idea.

Well, sometimes they go too far.

I'll answer that question.

There's no overreach.

There's no overreach amongst.

us.

I mean, you criticized the movie, or not quit, but you said Black Panther on Twitter.

You said, you didn't think it deserved a best Oscar Nod.

I don't either.

I don't like any comic book movies.

They're not great movies.

Not one either.

But if you say that, somehow, that's somehow a hate crime.

Right, you're racist.

And I also, the things that I love here.

No, but can we go through the whole list of all the movies that got a best Oscar nod that never should have ever deserved to get it?

True.

I mean,

what did that mean?

But that's it.

Yes, you can.

But why is that irrelevant to this?

But I'm telling you, but I'm still on this social justice worry why that came up in the negative context.

I mean, am I wrong about hearing you?

I think it goes back to overreach because I did a podcast that was about two and a half hours long.

And for about two minutes, I talked about how in the town there was this perception of Black Panther as being overly representative of something in terms of the Oscars.

And that people were talking about that.

And then I talked about how much I thought it was a subpar Marvel movie, but I also talked about how much I liked those opening images of Wakanda.

We had never seen anything like that before.

No one talks about that.

They just talk about, you know, the racist douche who dissed a subpar Marvel movie.

And that's part of the problem with social justice work.

Here's what's wrong with social justice workers.

They're not interested in justice.

They're interested in clicks.

They're Richardson getting clicks.

Oh, please.

You don't think so?

Well, I think that you're being completely overly broad about, because the people that I know know who do that work So are not the people who are interested in click and you've never heard their names because they're not trying to be on television and they're not trying to be in the spotlight and they're doing they're going to courthouses every day Okay, but we're not talking about that and you know that what you can't say justice warriors.

Well, who are you talking about?

Okay, if we're talking about that we agree give a name.

I don't I don't know who you're talking about because the people that I know are not doing what you're saying

because you know go for it.

Thank you.

It's your show.

It's all of our shows right now.

Well, we're not out here, it's all of our shows.

Okay.

Now, again, I don't know everything about this because I'm not an expert at social media, but I'm friends with Barry Weiss, right?

Okay, so I'm reading her profile in Vanity Fair.

I thought this said a lot.

A woman who I think is also a writer, her name is Gabriella Cameron, criticized Barry.

for something Barry said.

I don't think Barry is really that out there.

No.

But the social justice warriors hate and attack her.

I'm talking about the ones on Twitter, not your friends in the courtroom.

Okay.

Here's what this woman said to Barry White.

Tweeted, do feminism and the entire profession of journalism a favor and stop writing.

Stop writing in caps.

Okay, I first would like to point out, that's not a criticism.

Stop writing.

That's the best you can do.

All right.

Then she and Barry meet at a conference.

They get to know each other.

They're friends now.

She tweets, I was partially motivated, talking about her former tweet, I was partially motivated by the desire for likes and retweets, wanting to cultivate a brand on Twitter.

It was at Barry's expense, knowing that she, like me, is a complex person.

Well, Barry's a complex person.

I don't know about this.

But the problem you make is you put that person in the category of social justice warriors, and that's not what that is.

The social justice warrior is the person who shows.

There's a bit of an overlap.

No,

I think that

you're conflating the two, and there's no overlap.

That the people who do the work are the warriors.

Those are the real warriors.

Well, that's lots of other people would ascribe that name to themselves.

They're maybe social disguising themselves and taking the name of the name.

But I think we're social justice warriors, it is that.

But I think there has been an ironic use of the term social justice warrior.

And I think it's used ironically when there is a social justice warrior that does overreach and starts doing things like that.

What you're talking about is completely authentic and cool, but this stuff that goes on on Twitter, which is of course all toxic and all full of crap, is a different kind of social justice warrior.

fake It's populism.

It's a fake social justice.

It's people just

trying to build the reputation to be part of a social media nation that may or may not even be real and it's also dividing us apart.

Social media is not designed to bring us together.

It's to bring us to people.

It's not just Twitter.

It's battling each other.

It's not actually legitimate.

Legitimate internet sites do this too.

And it's an imagined preference.

Oh, if I support this, then I am part of this.

Whether I actually show up in the streets or not, that's a different story.

So it creates this confusion about what activism is, what's real activism, versus, oh yeah, I'll click on this, I'll tweet this, I'll send one down.

I'm very curious to get your reaction to this.

Draymond Green, among others, he's on the Warriors, playing in the championship, awesome player.

He says that owners of sports team, we should stop saying the word owner.

You shouldn't say owner.

Talking about the owner of a sports team.

Just because someone was taught that 100 years ago doesn't make that right today.

And so when you look at the word owner, it really dates back to slavery.

But people own things.

And

it's not always

the way slave owners own things.

What word should we use for owning something?

It's a switch, right?

So, this is what I mean about the owner.

You have to just simply

call those people who do something like that.

Social justice warrior, because they're real people who are

literally committing their lives to that work, and they have to be respected for having done that.

And if we can't do that here, then nobody's going to do that.

So you just can't, we cannot lump these random situations into that kind of category.

But there is an entertainment social justice war and I think that's what we're talking about.

All conversation involves some lumping.

We can't individually interview every single person.

That's fine.

That's fine.

Okay.

That's fine.

But isn't it interesting?

Let's lighten the mode in Movante.

Isn't it interesting though from that quote?

What's it?

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

20 years ago, it would have been conservatives trying to tell me what I could not say.

And now, it's oftentimes the extreme liberal end on social media is telling me what I can't say.

Exactly.

And I probably have no idea who they are.

I don't know if you feel this way, but I found that what's so exhausting about this is the lack of trust.

You know, when we're just with our own friends in a place that's not public, we're funny.

We're politically incorrect.

We all do it.

And then in public, and public now means on Twitter or social media, Facebook, I always say that's like our avatar.

It looks like us, sounds like us, but it's this whole other person who talks like a robot.

And can't you just trust me after all these years that I'm not on the wrong side of these issues?

And it's like, no, we can't, because we're just trying to get you, your scalp, and clicks.

Okay.

Funny subject, abortion.

Joe Biden, wait, this is big.

Joe Biden switched cams here.

He has been for the Hyde Amendment.

The Hyde Amendment, can you explain that what you're in Congress?

Yes.

The Hyde Amendment was a law passed in 1976 when I was two years old that has not been changed since that prohibits federal funds to be used to provide women with reproductive health care such as abortions.

There's no federal funds to abortion.

Joe Biden's position was, I'm a Catholic, but look, I get it, women want abortions, I'm pro-choice, but...

don't take my Catholic money and do it.

You know, that's where he kind of like straddled, and now he says, look, I can't do this anymore because I'm not going to get the nomination.

I mean, I'm saying, I think that's right.

He's saying, no what?

I'm not for the Hyde Amendment anymore.

My question is, when Joe Biden does this, now he's moving to the left because he does want the nomination, which is probably going to be controlled on the left.

Is he going to lose those centrist Democrats who were the ones who have him at the top of the poll and are his base?

Look,

this is just an issue of right and wrong.

I'm the only person sitting at this table who has ever had to face these kinds of health care decisions.

And Joe Biden is simply trying, Biden's trying to make a political decision here and failing still to recognize that this is a personal decision.

And even when he talked about it,

even when he talked about it, he couldn't quite get the word out.

It was like health care

for women that might involve, you know, some pieces of you that are sort of

it's like women cannot have social and economic equality without the right to control their bodies, without bodily autonomy, period.

Full stop.

And the fact that Biden

The fact that I mean, look, I was a professor, better late than never for the student who gets it on the last day of class.

But

literally,

if this is for him a reckoning that's coming out of political motivation

rather than out of understanding what it means to be, oh, I don't know, half of the world's population,

then that's a real problem.

Well, come on, there are many,

there are many women who are pro-choice.

I mean, pro-life.

I think that was not intended.

I think that was a

women who are pro-life.

It's true.

I mean, look, I am pro-choice, but I mean, I'm a little squishy and always have been because they told my mother, after my sister, very difficult birth, she shouldn't have another one.

So, knowing that I could have been on the cutting room floor, I'm

God.

Why is that so terrible?

But I get it.

As long as it's still in you, you.

Your mom made her choice.

Yes.

And we're all here

with the consequences of that choice.

I just want to say,

first of all, fuck you.

You can go watch another show.

We got a lot on the lot here if I'm not doing it for you.

I just want to say,

I'm asking the hard questions.

I'm blessed in Smart.

God bless her for having you.

I'm sure it wasn't easy.

I'm a mom with three kids.

It isn't easy.

But the point is, she and your father, and she made her choice.

Again, I'm not arguing what you're pretending I'm arguing for, all of you on this panel, and you assholes.

I don't think Let's send anything, so I don't think he should be blamed for that.

He's not.

I'm talking to you.

He's totally innocent.

That's why I stayed out of the frame over here.

What was the question?

You were excited about that.

Oh, yes.

I'm just asking the political side of this.

Is he going to lose the people?

No.

So you think he can keep them both?

You think he...

Well.

Yeah, Trump is so polarizing.

No one in the middle of the Democratic Party Party is going to budget all based on that.

But I think it's reflective of younger Democrats, right?

We have new people that are in play right now.

And what do we have as the main contenders?

Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump,

Joe Biden.

It's cocoon two, right?

It's a sequel, right?

And the whole time, the whole time I'm watching, I'm like, are they, if they have a debate, will they make it to the end of the debate, right?

Like, it's really

delayed.

All you enlightened people, but the last people that you could be prejudiced against and make jokes like that.

I'm not, but it's just so funny that you can do that.

We're talking about social media, right?

We're talking about climate change.

We're talking about all these issues right now, and we have people that have a record that goes back 30, 40 years.

I'm just saying it's a prejudice that you're allowed to indulge in.

Yes.

I'm the only one.

And I think we should also recognize that this push is not necessarily a far-left push, but it is a push in the right direction for equality.

Because what because Hyde himself, when this amendment was passed, said,

I would love to do it for rich women, for working class women, but the only place that I can really do it is on Medicaid.

They knew that this was about poor women.

They knew that this was about most,

particularly on Medicaid, and that most of those women are not white women.

that this was black women, brown women, who were poor, and that they were cutting off the access for those women because those are the ones that they could cut it off for.

The Hyde Amendment has always stood out as this really horrible thing that Democrats continued to support

even though they knew who it was affecting.

And I'm saying about damn time.

Okay.

I got two minutes to ask about

impeachment.

Nancy Pelosi said this week.

I don't know if she meant for this to get out, but I think she kind of did.

She said it behind closed doors, but it was out pretty quickly.

She said about Trump.

I don't want to see him impeached.

I want to see him in prison.

And many people have asked,

many people have asked, you know, can't you do both?

Or how could you do one without the other?

It seems to me that the movement to impeach hinges on,

okay, if we hear the testimony, it'll be different than just the Mueller report, which people didn't really read.

But it's been around a long time, the Mueller report and the findings in it.

The Mueller report wasn't new.

Will that take place or will people just shrug again?

I think he's a criminal and a traitor, but what do you think?

Where are you on impeachment?

So

where I'm on impeachment is I will do my duty to this country.

I ran to do my duty to this country, but I also ran to do my duty to this country on a whole host of issues.

So yes, we have a president who has obstructed justice.

That's what the Mueller report tells us.

There's substantial evidence that he has obstructed justice.

He is defying subpoenas.

He is instructing others to defy subpoenas.

He's refusing to provide his tax returns.

We know these facts.

The question is, how do we move forward to hold him accountable?

And I think...

I'm just saying people already know these and a lot of the country shrugged at them.

Will it change if we

I mean, I'm for it, but I just want to know if that's going to really pan out.

So part of an impeachment inquiry, if you look back even to the Nixon era, was to educate the public about it.

In our filter world right now, where we're in two Americas, a lot of one part of America doesn't really know what's in the Mueller report.

Nixon didn't have a Mueller report that preceded it for two years.

They were all hearing it for the first time as the hearings went on.

Sure, but I think the other part of it is, do we want checks and balances in this country or not?

Of course.

If the standard is now we don't pursue anything that comes in terms of obstruction, we're basically saying the president can do whatever he wants to win, and as long as he wins, he's free, the role of the president, and once they're in office, they can do pretty much whatever they want to obstruct, and they're free.

So if Congress doesn't want to actually keep their own power, then they will do nothing.

And that seems to be the path of the state.

Okay, thank you panel.

Time for new rules.

New rules.

Okay, new rules.

Someone has to tell me why the harder it is to get an abortion in a state, the more likely it is that the state brags about its hot sauce.

As if anyone cares about who has the hottest sauce, it's Louisiana, obviously.

Or else it wouldn't look like an exploded toilet.

New Roll, no message gets more powerful when you paint it on your car.

It's a mini-man, not a wishing well.

You'll never hear, well, it's on a Honda Odyssey, it must be true.

You'll just hear, that's okay, mom, I'll walk.

Nerul, your barbecue tools don't need an attaché case.

It's a spatula, not a sniper rifle.

This doesn't say, howdy, neighbor, welcome to the party.

It says salaam alaikum, welcome to the Saudi Embassy.

Nerul, someone must get me the initial sales figures for

GETO, the new Jeans Speedo, so I know whether or not to start a new dating website called gayfarmersonly.com.

Dyrule, now that Utah is drafting a rule that says cops can't masturbate in their cars,

they have to tell us how did this issue come up?

I always wondered what was taking so long when they went back to their car with my driver's license.

And finally, new rule, and this one goes out to all the new college grads, you don't need to get a sheepskin, you need to get a thick skin.

This year marks the first graduating class of Generation Z, the first generation to grow up on cell phones and iPads, devices which many have said parents use as pacifiers.

Now, in another era, parents used actual pacifiers, and when one fell on the floor, they'd pick it up and stick it right back in your mouth.

I'm no doctor, so I don't know what that does to a kid's immune system, but I do know this: we didn't all have peanut allergies.

If millennials were the generation with helicopter parents who hovered over them, Gen Z are the kids with bulldozer parents who don't just hover but clear the way

of all obstacles for their kids.

And since Gen Z is such a special class, I thought they deserved a special commencement address.

Thank you,

honored alumni, legacy students, parents, grandparents, step-parents, third wives, and drunk uncles.

I know it's traditional at graduation commencement ceremonies to break the ice with a joke.

So here goes.

A man walks into a bar.

Of course it doesn't have to be a man.

It absolutely could be a woman.

But then who am I to write a joke about a female when I don't have first-hand experience of a woman's struggle?

So a non-binary, non-gender conforming humanoid

walks into a bar and orders a drink and the bartender says, you took too long, we closed 20 minutes ago.

Well I see that about 50% of you are texting so I can tell already this will be somewhat pointless.

But it is my job as your graduation speaker to tell you that you're a very special group of young people and the future belongs to you.

But let's not kid ourselves.

You're not that special and the future belongs to China and our robot overseers.

But,

okay, okay, all right.

Let me see if I can fake it.

You're the smartest, you're the best, and thanks to that photography degree you now have, you're gonna change the world.

Now, I want you to look in the gallery today and find your two best friends, mom and dad.

They're the ones who worked and sacrificed to scrape together the half a million in bribes.

needed to get you into this thousand-dollar a year keg party they call a college.

And parents, I'm here today to tell you that the results of your parenting have been incredible for the pharmaceutical industry

because these kids are fucked up and need drugs.

Oh yeah.

They need drugs for the crushing levels of anxiety they have, brought on by the knowledge that after the way you pampered and spoiled them, life is going to crush them like the white kid in a spelling bee.

Hey.

I'm just trying to be your friend, which is someone who tells you the truth.

And the truth is the world is unfair.

It's not like college.

It's like the electoral college.

And you kids, you're about to enter freshman year of life.

And that can be very unsettling, much like the slap in the face that your parents should have given you the first time you swore at them.

But they didn't.

They didn't.

And so you became the, hey, buddy generation.

Hey, buddy, could you put your shoes on?

Hey buddy, could you get in the car?

But in real life, not everyone is your fucking buddy.

And that's why you're fucked.

No, I mean really fucked because no one ever told you no or you're wrong or you're in the way or that's not good enough or wait.

So you think the whole world is supposed to be your safe space where everything is wonderful and nobody even gets their feelings hurt.

Well kids I have some very bad news for you.

Mr.

Rogers is dead.

And so new graduates, as you look back at where you've been and where you're about to go, I want you to turn to your parents and take this opportunity to tell them.

Thank you.

Thank you for murdering any chance I had of actually making it in the real world.

Thank you for covering the walls of my childhood room with fake certificates and fade-up bullshit like third-grade gym superstar and

most improved finger painter and world champion paste eater.

Thank you for trophies I got for just showing up.

Thank you for the temper tantrums you let me throw in the cereal aisle.

Thank you for bitching out every teacher who ever gave me a B instead of an A, even though I really deserved a C.

And thank you for teaching me that any thought, word, or action or feelings I had was unfair.

Which didn't make me a liberal, it made me Donald Trump.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Devos Performing Hall in Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 23rd.

At the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, August 18th, I want to thank Clint Watts, Charles Blow, Katie Porter, Brett Easton Ellis, and Andrew Yerry.

Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.