Ep. #468: Lawrence O’Donnell, Steven Pinker

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Thank you.

I know.

I know.

It's just the...

I love you too.

I love you, man.

I know.

Shut the fuck up.

It's just...

Because I'm not buying this.

It's just cool in here.

We all know what it's like out there.

I mean,

I hate to start off with the bad news, but it's all bad news these days.

And anyway, we need to keep our eye on this.

This July, we just had was the hottest month ever in California's history.

Applause?

A tardigrade, ladies and gentlemen, can survive in anything.

But

in Death Valley, they recorded the hottest temperature ever anywhere on Earth.

The smoke from our fires has now reached New York.

That should tell you something.

Even the smoke won't stop and fly over states.

I love the fly over states.

I did my special at Oklahoma.

I kid the fly over.

But no, our fires, I mean, this is just part of our life now, that it's hellfire in the summer in the entire western United States.

President Trump tweeted his condolences to the lost loved ones and praise for our brave firefighters.

I'm joking, of course.

That's what a normal president would do.

This psychopath, of course, blames the victim and tweets out that Trump says we're making our wildfires worse because we're allowing massive amounts of our available water to be diverted into the Pacific Ocean.

And LeBron James said, I'm the one with the low IQ.

Oh, Trump, you know, football is starting up again, and Trump is, of course, tweeting about the kneeling.

It's kneeling season.

He can't stand this.

He says his latest one, they wanted to show outrage at something most of them are unable to define.

Which is why I think they should take Trump's advice and have a nice long talk with Frederick Douglass.

Yeah,

in the middle of all this this week, Amarosa is out.

I'm sorry, ex-White House official Amarosa

is out with a book that she's pushing with a big reveal that Trump is a racist.

Which begs the question, what is the opposite of breaking news?

Could we have a Chiron breaking Duh?

But, you know.

Trump has to tweet this shit because he has to distract people, because he's got so many legal problems swirling around his head.

The Washington Post says this week that he was worried that Don Jr., you know,

Duschberg von Fuckfeist

worried that Dodd had, I love this, wandered into legal jeopardy.

Yes, poor people commit crimes.

Rich people wander into legal jeopardy.

And so he

tweets and, of course, makes it worse for him and his own son last Sunday at 5.35 a.m.

Because Crack of Dawn is more than just a Stormy Daniels movie.

So at 5.35, undoubtedly on the toilet, he tweets his latest version of what happened when the Russians came to Trump Tower.

And this is his final offer.

The other eight versions are fake news now.

Throw them out like a sharper image clock radio that charges your iPhone 3.

They're just ridiculous.

He says, this is this right now.

This was a meeting to get information on my opponent.

Totally legal.

Not.

Done all the time in politics.

Not.

Yeah, this is his idea of truth.

I know we denied it, that it ever happened, and then I dictated a statement that it was only about adoption, and then I lied about dictating it, but I'm telling you the truth now.

I've grown up a lot since last July.

We all do foolish things when we're 70.

So we've kind of...

We've gone from hope and change to hope and change your story.

And Trump's people around the world are just begging him to shut the fuck up about the trial and stop tweeting about it.

I mean, stop giving Rudy Giuliani every day more to explain.

He wasn't that fast on his feet when he was alive.

Oh, Rudy.

Rudy Giuliani, he's got a new offer for Bob Mueller that Trump is willing to sit down to do the interview, but some topics have to be off limits, like why Trump fired Comey, what what Trump said to Comey, and anything to do with obstruction of justice.

My client has nothing to hide as long as you don't ask him about the things he wants to hide.

It's just like saying,

it's like saying, I am willing to do the prostate exam as long as I don't have to take off my pants.

But

everybody around this guy is such a crook.

What about your thieves and grifters?

If you're watching watching this Manafort trial, his assistant, Manafort was the campaign manager.

They like to say he was nothing.

He was the campaign manager.

His deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, he's the star witness for the prosecution.

Manafort stole from everybody, defrauded the country, stole from IRS, all that stuff.

Gates is saying, yes, I was with Manafort.

I stole with Manafort.

And then it comes out this week, oh, yes, and I also stole from Manafort.

And Manafort started to suspect this when his ostrich went missing.

But

what a bunch of fucking thieves.

You see, this guy, this congressman, Chris Collins, one of Trump's earliest supporters, who wasn't Russian,

got arrested for insider trading from the White House lawn.

He's doing it.

Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, he stands accused of stealing over $100 million from people.

That guy, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt.

Remember him?

Michael Cohen, Manafort.

He hasn't drained the swamp.

He swamped the drain.

All right, let's...

Let's move on.

We're going to go on to the next.

Okay, we got a great show.

D.L.

Hughley, Christina Bellentoni, and Seth Moulton are here.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with author and Harvard professor Steven Pinker.

But first up, he is the host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell.

His book, Deadly Force, a Police Shooting and My Family's Search for the Truth is now reissued.

Lawrence O'Donnell.

There he is.

Oh, yes.

We'd love to have you.

Lawrence O'Donnell.

Did you get the note from Giuliani about the questions I want to answer?

It was going to be shorter than you.

Well, you know, conservatives do watch this show, and they're going to see us talk about Trump.

And then, you know what they're going to say?

Trump derangement syndrome.

This is the thing with them.

If you watch Fox News, I have to a little bit, you have to see what they're saying.

This is what they think.

They think we're deranged.

And I wanted to ask you, what do you do about that?

Because you can't say to people, we have the truth, because then you sound like the guy in Jesus camp.

You ignore it because it's just a device.

They have nothing good to say.

They have nothing worthy to say in defense of the president or in defense of what you were just saying about Wilbur Ross, right?

No one's going to, from that side, is going to come back with any facts.

for you about that $120 million that Wilbur Ross is accused of playing around with.

So they're going to say that you are just deranged and you're saying this because he's associated with Trump.

You just don't fall for that.

You just keep going and detail what that $120 million is about.

That's what we're doing in my hour of TV, and Rachel Maddow does the most masterful job of that every night.

She never, she never gets distracted by any of that or by any of the accusations, any of the adjectives.

She is just on the fact case of this, and she's a model for all of us.

So,

so, all right, so if we can't convince them, how about convincing our side?

You can't convince them, by the way.

No, I'm saying

the case.

So, you're trying to get, you know, roughly 51%.

If you can get that, that's supposed to work in a democracy.

You know, and anything you get more than that is great.

But you know, a big runaway, the biggest landslide presidential elections of my lifetime were the high 50s.

60% was the highest anybody ever got while I've been alive.

But they say now you can't convince them.

But they say now that the Democrats actually have to win by 12 just to win because of gerrymandering and voter suppression and felons can't vote.

They have so many ways of cheating and they're so much better at playing the game.

Sometimes they just better outplay us.

I mean, Hillary didn't go to Wisconsin.

That wasn't a good thing.

But they also know how to cheat better and are much more open to doing cheating.

And we have an incredibly cheatable system

thanks to the enduring Electoral College, which is,

look,

they made,

those guys made some mistakes.

You know, slavery was one of them, right?

But they also did some things that made perfect sense at the time.

You You know, when Rhode Island was this big and New York was this big.

They had no idea there was going to be a thing called California that was going to be this big.

And then they were going to have these little Dakotas

that had a lot of land and very few people.

They didn't know that that was going to be the mix of the Electoral College so that a majority of voters could be denied their choice of who the president should be.

Well, there shouldn't be two Dakotas.

There's that.

One is ridiculous enough.

But I always, no, really, I always say,

that's where we need to start.

We need to start with the Dakotas.

But also, I must say,

if the situation was reversed and Puerto Ricans and people in Washington, D.C.

voted Republican, Republicans would have found a way to make them states by now.

But Democrats don't play that game.

Well, but here's how they would have found the way to do it.

Because Democrats would have done the honorable thing and said to Puerto Rico what we've said to them from the start, which is you are not a colony.

You have your own ability to make a choice about your relationship to this country.

You can choose Commonwealth status, which is what they choose.

You could choose independence and have nothing to do with us if you want to.

Or you can choose statehood.

We've always said it's up to them to vote on it.

And so if Puerto Rico voted for statehood now, Republicans would say, absolutely not.

We're not giving it to you.

Democrats would have done the honorable thing all the way through because they actually take principles like that to be to be real things and to be serious.

This is a new level of political corruption because it's a corruption of ideas.

We've always had ways of trying to get at the money corruption and we pay a lot of attention to it.

But what happens when the ideas of a party or a group of political actors are completely corrupted?

And that's what we're seeing.

You saw it with Merrick Garland.

You saw it with you don't get a vote on a Supreme Court justice

and now you're seeing it with they're going to rush one and violate their own principles of not obtaining all the kind of documents that they used to obtain on Supreme Court nominees.

Chuck Rassley, chairman of the committee, just said, oh, oh, we can't get them in time.

Never mind.

We'll just have the hearing right after Labor Day anyway.

I could go on and on.

Yeah, I.

So the

election is in 90 days or something like that.

How do you think the Democrats are going to blow it?

I mean, they're so good at it, and there's this blue wave predicted.

And, you know, I think you and I are very close on policy.

We're not always close on prediction.

What do you think is going to happen?

I do think

the Democrats will.

Well, you know, this is

I'll predict something, but I've never predicted congressional elections because I worked in the Congress, I worked in the Senate.

I know how complex that is.

And so I'd never made an attempt to try to figure out what are all those districts going to do and who's going to flip and all that.

And there are experts who do it, and like Charlie Cook, and I just kind of listened to them.

And I really have never had an original thought about this thing, about who's going to win in a House race coming up.

And so, and you've got a congressman coming on who's going to answer that for you.

So

all the indicators, all the political arithmetic, everything we see.

Hillary was going to be president.

No, but this is.

Well, no, no, it didn't.

No, it didn't, because Hillary was always

polling within the margin of error against Donald Trump.

She was always polling within that margin.

She never cleared a lead over him that was outside of the margin of error.

So the polls are never telling you a specific number.

They're telling you a band of possibility.

You know, it's not like when we take your temperature and it's 98.6.

It's as if we took your temperature and we said it's anywhere between 92 and 98.

And that's what polling is.

And for the sake of public consumption, they specify a number, but it never.

Well, let me ask you to predict it.

How will the Trump era end, or will it?

Well,

I gave up predicting when I remember sitting on Morning Joe when Donald Trump in the primaries went from 6% to 12% in the polls.

And I said, with all the authority I could muster, you don't think it's going to get any higher than that, do you?

And

I think Joe did, and others did, and I didn't.

So I gave up predicting shortly after that when he was at 24 and

and and if but if I have to

I would say the most likely ending of it is when Elizabeth Warren or whoever the Democratic nominee is beats him in the next election you think he'll leave

so you think he'll

okay so we are getting into predictions yeah you think if he loses the election he will just greet her at the door on January 20th it's yeah it's not up to him has nothing to do with him oh it has nothing to do with him really because yeah because

she becomes president because of the time of day, not because of anything he does.

When it's

12,

the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court will administer the oath to her no matter where it is.

And he doesn't have to show up.

He never has to concede, doesn't have to do a thing.

The second she takes that oath, she's the president.

He isn't any longer.

Secret Service will physically remove him from the building if he's still there.

If he's still there.

Listen,

did you ever have to remove a tick from your dog?

I never have.

It's going to be like that.

All right.

I just want to...

Yeah, the Secret Service is good at that.

Okay.

Your book, very important book, we're going to talk about issues like that on the panel, but it was the first one 25 years ago that really talked about police brutality in the black community.

Yeah.

And you've reissued it.

Yeah, I wrote this book over 30 years ago, Deadly Force, the first book out there about the problems involved with police use of deadly force.

The first thing I ever wrote was an op-ed piece for the New York Times in 1979.

It was about police use of deadly force.

It was the first time that the New York Times in print acknowledged that there was a problem.

And so I've been on it for a long time.

And four years ago, this week was when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.

That changed everything.

And it changed everything because of the community's reaction to it.

We hadn't seen a reaction to a police shooting like that since the invention of of cable news.

We had seen them before.

We had giant community reaction around the country, but it was localized for Arthur McDuffie in Miami in 1980 and others around the country.

This was the first time all of the apparatus of modern media, social media, was there and on the street covering every minute of it.

And so finally, America woke up only four years ago.

And by America, of course, I mean white America, because black America always knew there was this problem.

They always knew that police officers in their community were much more inclined to serve and protect themselves than the people that they were assigned to serve.

Well, I'm glad it's back in drink and glad you're on the air.

Lawrence O'Donnell, everybody.

Okay.

Thank you, Lawrence, for coming up.

Hey, everybody.

Okay.

Hi, everybody.

How are you going?

All right, here they are.

He is an actor and comedian, a hell of a comedian, I must say.

He'll be at the comedy Get Down in L.A.

on August 17th, an author of How Not to Get Shot

and other advice from white people.

D.L.

Hughling's over here.

He was assistant managing editor at the L.A.

Times, who will soon be a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

Christina Belantoni.

How about you?

And he was a Marine captain who served four tours of duty in Iraq and is now a second-term U.S.

rep for Massachusetts's 6th District, the latest Democratic rising star, Seth Moulton.

Great to see you.

Okay, don't forget this has done as your questions for tonight's overtime, so we're going to answer them after the show.

on YouTube.

I think the theme of the show tonight I would like to be is how cocky the Republicans are because they pretty much control everything.

They think they can do everything out in public.

Trump's tweets are pretty much a timeline of obstruction of justice.

This Devon Nunes tape, I hope we have time to talk about that, where he's openly saying we have to stop the truth from coming out.

The corruption that's so on the White House lawn.

But I want to start with what Lawrence and I were just talking about there, because we've seen so many videos lately of emboldened,

I don't want to say rednecks, but

white folks who are just yelling at black folks for just existing in America.

There's a video like that every day.

And then Laura Ingram this week said something, well, you know, why don't we just let Laura speak for herself?

Because everybody's talking about this video and we'll just show it and then we can react.

Because in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore.

Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people.

And they're changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like.

So, is the dog whistle dead?

We're just saying it outright.

And then she got offended that David Duke would support her.

Her being offended that David Duke supports her is like Bill Cosby being offended that R.

Kelly supported him.

It's ridiculous.

You're saying the same shit,

only you're trying to keep a hold of your one advertiser.

I think the one advertise you had sells tiki torches and sheets with holding.

But, well, it's ridiculous.

And demographic change is a very specific concept, right?

Demographic change is not about the immigration debate that is going on at the policy levels of government.

Demographic change is about this country and lots of different people.

You know, my son is half Chinese.

He is demographic change.

You know, is he being foisted on the American people?

Like, that's kind of

an insightful dog whistle type message to people.

And then she goes back and says, well, that's not what I meant.

That was interpreted differently by this particular person.

Well, actually, what you say really does matter.

It doesn't matter what you meant.

It actually does matter the words that come out of your mouth if you are somebody in the other side.

And what she said is.

I mean, this is nothing new.

This is nothing new from her.

But what if she had said, the scale and speed of immigration over the past few decades is a real issue.

Just since 1990, the share of foreign-born people in America has gone from 9% to 15%.

Most of the new immigrants do come from cultures that are distant and different, and societies can only take so much change in a generation.

Because that's Fareed Zakari, and he's a liberal.

But that's what makes America make America.

That's what's made us strong.

I mean, if you're not going to be able to do it.

No, no, no.

I'm just saying this is not totally dissimilar from what she's saying without some of the ugliness to it, but policy-wise, it's not that different.

And Fareed is a liberal and the son of immigrants.

It's always funny when I hear the immigration debate.

Like, we want our, I saw white supremacists, we want our country back.

I'm like, hey, motherfucker, we didn't take a cruise here on purpose.

Like, we, like,

we didn't go, oh, they hiding in America.

Get on the boat.

It's so ridiculous.

We're here because you wouldn't do the shit you needed us to do.

Right.

And then like when you, like, you have, like, when people say dumb shit, like, slavery is a choice.

So if slavery is a choice, I guess Harriet Tubman was just a travel agent.

You know what I'm saying?

But

it really is this.

This country is getting browner and browner and darker.

And people are, and that's just the way it is.

So, instead of Republicans trying to fuck over poor people, they should get the fucking.

I don't understand that.

They should

have at it.

I don't understand why.

It's a congressman.

come on.

Don't say bad words in front of him.

I'm just glad to be the congressman before the indictments come down.

But I think that they...

But what is the Democratic plan on immigration?

Because I mean,

I get what they're saying, and Laura Ingram is not a good person for what she's saying.

But what are the Democrats suggesting?

Because I think what Fareed was getting at here is that people only have two choices in this country.

And if the Democrats don't have a plan, if their plan is just, if you can't explain it to me without saying kids in cages in two words,

then

I don't know what you're proposing.

It can't just be, I'm a better person because immigration is at 15% and I think it should be 20.

We actually do have a plan.

We passed it through the Senate a few years ago with bipartisan support.

And it had a pathway to citizenship.

It also meant strengthening our borders.

You know, I went down to the border, spent two days down there on the streets.

We really need strengthening our borders.

I mean, I hear all the Democrats say that just the way they they always first say, I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment.

How about you saying

it's not a problem?

Immigration isn't a problem from Mexico.

We need those people.

They want to be here.

But we want them to come here.

We want them to come here legally.

You know, I was down at the border where customs and borders agents were up there at the bridge stopping asylum seekers, people who are not coming here to take our jobs, people who are fleeing for their lives from making that last final step into our country because if they prevented them from making that last final step, they couldn't legally seek asylum.

We need to make sure that that is a possibility, that we encourage legal immigration, and then you know, we can

get the people that

have to have courage enough to say what's wrong.

I mean, the very scriptures that they use to put black men in chains, they use to put immigrants in cages.

And

ultimately,

they are here because

they will do things that, like in America, you can work if you'll do something people won't or you're capable of doing something they can't.

So if you won't pick a strawberry and you can't write an app, you shit out of luck.

The fear part that Fareed gets to and that she maybe is trying to make a point about, it's an economic argument, right?

Yes, there are people that are afraid of what they're seeing with their jobs or different types of people that are working all across America.

But that's a very different conversation to have.

It just turns into a lot of people.

I don't think it is a whole discussion.

I really don't.

I mean, last week I did a whole thing about how the Russia issue for republics, how they're so willing to throw in with Russia, is really racial, because Russia is like one of the last countries in the world to say we're white and we're proud and we're staying that way.

I don't think, I don't, I think economic, I think that's the fig leaf.

I think they look at TV and they're like, why is Telemundo on my TV?

Why are there crazy rich Asians on my TV?

I did a thing one night where we showed a,

we showed a thing from hip-hop Squares.

It was the Hollywood Squares.

And they're like, these people just look at that and go, that is wrong, because the black people were having a great amount of fun.

They were dancing around.

They weren't dancing like that.

But you know, they remember Hollywood Squares was a staid, laid-back show with a closet or homosexual in the middle, and that was Hollywood Squares.

And they just, I don't think it's on that level.

America hated the Kenyans so much, they gave her to the Kremlin.

They hated Obama so much that they're willing to do whatever to have white supremacy.

Listen,

Obama was what we aspire to be.

Trump is who we are.

There are...

Well, I think...

Having...

There are Americans who are better now.

You know, on the immigration thing, who creates more jobs?

Who creates more jobs in America?

Immigrants?

Sure.

Or old white men.

So actually, the economic argument is really strong.

It's just in favor of immigration.

But make that argument and have it be a commercial.

Like, if you were running for president, that would be what they said to you.

They would run that and say he's against what?

We have to decide either we're a nation that we say we are.

Like, America's like this great, like, you see these great brochures on Priceline, and then you get to the room and it's a dead body in it.

Because

we say a thing and then don't want to be what we say we are.

Or we say both.

We say both.

Trump does it all the time.

Right.

He says one thing and the next thing.

He says the exact opposite thing.

When he's standing next to Putin, he'll say, oh, our intelligence agencies, they're full of shit.

I'm with you.

And then he gets home and say, oh, fuck, I misspoke.

I don't know what.

Here's the thing about America.

I mean, Americans are complicated.

This is a complicated country.

And the reason why what President Lincoln said in his second inaugural is one of the most famous things in American political history, that we need to call out the better angels in people's nature, is because that's what we need leaders to do.

That we do have dark angels in our nature.

But it's up to leaders to inspire the better angels in our nature.

What?

We do it.

It's always funny whenever somebody quotes Lincoln to me, like, if you're still quoting the dude on the penny, we need to update our resume.

Wait,

I will give you that.

That's ridiculous.

Why shouldn't you?

Really?

People still.

They quote Cicero.

They still quote your boy Jesus.

That's 2,000 years old.

But you know what?

There are, I mean, when you look at these midterms, and you're asking, you know, Lawrence,

are we going to screw it up again?

There are great new...

Fair question.

Okay.

Fair question.

We've done it before.

But there are great new Democrats stepping up to lead again.

You know, I'm supporting these veterans who are running across the country.

People like M.J.

Hager down in Texas,

heroic helicopter pilot, another Navy helicopter pilot up in New Jersey.

Does that matter to people?

Trump is a giant draft Dodger?

No, it matters because they're winning.

Because they're already winning these races.

Dan McCready, a Marine down in North Carolina, running in a district that the party, the Democratic Party said, you don't have a prayer?

He's already had seven points in the polls, like three months after the election.

So there are people stepping up, they're Democrats stepping up, to start leading this country again.

And I think when Democrats start leading, we'll start winning.

Let me ask you about this Devin Noonet's quote.

They caught him on tape, right?

He was at a fundraiser.

So again, this idea, they don't think anyone's listening, but we hear what they have to say.

And he said, if sessions won't unrecuse,

is that even a thing?

Unrecuse?

Like unmasturbating.

I don't think it's.

What is that?

If sessions won't unrecuse and Mueller won't clear the president, we're the only ones.

Won't clear the president.

What about what the report says?

It's like they don't, what if the report comes back and it says he was burying little boys in the backyard?

And this is the

way I don't care what it says.

Local elections matter, but the broader picture matters.

And that's what he's saying.

He's doing a fundraiser for another member of Republican leadership, or for a member of Republican leadership.

He's a chairman.

And he's basically saying, like, we are the last defense of this president, and every voter should hear that.

And if they don't want that to happen, they can go out there and make a choice.

People always speak more honestly when they are in front of their supporters who give money.

We've seen it with Barack Obama, we saw it with Nitt Romney, et cetera.

And this is something that his actions have actually played out in that.

We've seen him attempt to protect Trump even in the face of the facts.

I just think given the back of the optics that have, we had a porno star saying she had unprotected sex with the president.

Like

if you are not worried about Ghana, how the fuck are you going to help us with North Korea?

In comparable,

you slipped in a joke from your act there.

I always.

I think you did.

But I call illegal spirits on that one.

But even, even, look at all the things we've seen people say.

Like Roseanne can call somebody an Abe and then say I was on Ambien.

Look at all the things that we've heard people say.

In comparison,

that's so mild that all he's doing is saying is what he does out in public.

So I don't understand why we would even be shocked that he actually did what he said he was going to do.

Well, maybe we shouldn't be shocked, but there's one thing we can do with Devin Nunes, and it's beat him in November.

That's right.

Let's bring out Steven Pinker.

He is the Harvard professor, psychology professor, whose news bestseller is Enlightenment Now, the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker.

Professor.

How are you, sir?

Great to meet you.

I have been following you for a very long time, and I've always felt you were a necessary corrective to the kind of society we live in, where the media is, of course, by their nature, never reporting the good news.

And you're the guy who has, and whenever I've quoted you to people, I must say, you can tell it's shocking because they're shocked.

The good news is what is shocking to people.

So, why don't you give us like the top few things that I know you talk about, poverty and health around the world, that have greatly improved in the 21st century that people are not really that aware of?

Well, we can begin with life itself through most of human history.

Right.

Life expectancy at birth was around 30.

Now it's 71 worldwide and 80 in the more developed parts of the world.

Education, through most of human history, the vast majority of people were illiterate.

Now 90% of people under 25 in the world can read and write.

Wealth and poverty.

By the way,

and in polls show that virtually no one knows these facts, that people do worse than, as Hans Rosling put it, chimpanzees picking bananas, because the chimpanzees pick at random and people are systematically too pessimistic.

Wealth and poverty.

200 years ago, 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty.

Now it's 10%.

And in fact, the rate has been reduced by about 50% just in the last 25 years.

Every day, 137,000 people escape from extreme poverty.

That's more than a billion people just in the last couple of decades.

And by the way, this is somewhat connected to Trump voters, because one reason why people are in less poverty around the world is because jobs do go there.

Jobs that we used to have here are now people who used to work at subsistence level, now they're working in a sweatshop and that's actually a step up, right?

Yes, free trade has been not been good for everyone, but it's been on average good for humanity as a whole.

Peace, even though there are horrific wars that continue to go on, the rate of death in war worldwide is about a quarter of what it was in the 80s, about a seventh seventh of what it was in the 1970s during the war in Vietnam, to say nothing about what it was in the early 50s, during the Korean War, or World War II.

Safety: we are about 95% less likely to be killed in a car accident, a plane crash, to be mowed down on the sidewalk,

to die in an industrial accident, even to be struck by a bolt of lightning.

We're 99% safer than our ancestors were a century ago.

Why lightning?

I don't think it's that Zeus has been less angry.

Mainly

fewer people work outdoors, but fewer of us are farmers.

But I tell you, I was trying to figure out a way for a few years to do something on the show about what I called issue fatigue, because there's so many issues, and our audience is a caring audience.

They are.

If they weren't, they wouldn't be watching this show.

There's lots of stupid shit they could watch.

So

I wrote down

just in one week, I just wrote down all the things you could worry about that I read about.

ISIS, ice caps melting, depleted groundwater, identity theft, Russian meddling, rape on campus, opioid addiction.

I'm not done.

Antibiotic-resistant germs, coral reefs are dying, colony collapse disorder, the bees are dying, violence at football, drought, flooding, brain-eating amoebas.

A billion people still defecate in the street.

Police racism.

Oceans are lawless and polluted.

Solitary confinement is overdone.

The EU is breaking up.

Refugees, church pedophiles,

PTSD and veteran suicide.

We should worry about it.

Bullying, homophobia, sinkholes, infrastructure crumbling, longer commutes, factory farm runoff.

Plastic taxes,

endocrine disruptors, teen driving, running out of water.

and then I read that we're running out of sand because that's what they make glass out of.

We're running out of sand, and then I saw this cover of Newsweek,

your office is killing.

I was like, oh, fuck.

This is the problem, right?

The Onion had a headline, CNN holds morning meeting to decide what viewers should panic about for the future.

I mean, we should worry about all these things, but it's kind of a cheap trick because at any point in history, if you list all of the worst things happening

in the world, it can sound pretty sick.

But I think I could burst your bubble with just two.

Nukes and pollution.

Because all this good stuff, as true as it is, and it's great that you're saying it, all it takes is a few nuclear bombs to go off, and it wouldn't just screw up where they went off.

It would screw up the whole planet.

Well, it would take more than pollution.

It wouldn't screw the whole planet.

Yeah, but

if India and Pakistan exchanged their nuclear weapons and

it wouldn't just be those countries that died died of.

I talk about that and.

And that's possible.

That is possible, and we should be giving much more attention to it than we do to terrorism and emails and a host of other issues.

And also, I don't know how the people who are walk, they walk back the idea that they said 10, 15 years ago, we only have 10 more years before we have to do something drastic about climate change.

Well, that was 15 years ago.

I mean, what's going on in the world today, I mentioned a little bit in the monologue, the record heats, I mean people dying in Japan and places where they never did from heat.

We're not even starting on that.

Well we are starting on it.

We're not doing nearly enough and it is the greatest threat facing humanity.

But there are roadmaps to decarbonizing the economy that we have to implement and accelerate.

They include both policy measures like a carbon tax so that every economic decision that everyone on the planet makes factors in the middle of the year.

But we're not doing it.

That's the thing.

There is no carbon tax.

Let's start.

Yeah.

Are you for a carbon tax?

I am.

I am.

Look, there's a good Democrat.

She just.

Yeah, not that hard.

And everything that's being done in California, I mean, this is one of the reasons Trump is attacking California so much because at every level, the legislature, the governor, Jerry Brown considers himself the unofficial climate ambassador of this country.

No offense to Congress, but it's not happening there.

And this is something where California is actually saying, we need real solutions because otherwise we're in real big trouble.

Right.

It's also why we've got to get Democrats elected in 2018 and in 2020, because we need to lead on these issues.

And

I'm pessimistic, but the stakes are high.

I sit on the Armed Services Committee.

One of the most frightening days I've ever had in this job was when we went and toured our nuclear infrastructure.

And the Air Force is very proud of the fact that their system can't be hacked.

In fact, at one point, a colonel said to me, it's basically foolproof,

unless the guy at the top is a fool.

And that's what we've got right now.

And so that's why it's so important that people get out, get involved, and make democracy work so the Democrats win in November 2018 and then we get rid of Trump in 2020.

Okay, so one other area where someone could

push back a little on your thesis that things are getting better is democracy.

I'm worried about it in this country as so many people are.

And of course we've seen many countries where it's going in reverse.

Poland, Hungary, the Philippines.

I could name others.

But you think democracy is still on the march?

It is.

I mean, there is pushback.

There is some regression in the last couple of years.

But the world has never been more democratic than it has been in this decade.

Now, that might seem interesting.

Real democracy,

because

just because you elect somebody.

Hitler was elected.

The Chinese, you know, they find ways to sort of have a dictatorship, but with a capitalist economy.

You know, this comes from counts in which several criteria are aggregated, including freedom of the press, limits on the executive's power, and so on.

But if you just think back to when we were students in the 1970s, half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain run by totalitarian

communist dictatorships.

Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships, not fascist in the sense of the word that we use to criticize anyone to the right of us, but they really literally were fascist.

Greece was under the control of a military junta.

Most of Latin America were under the control of military juntas.

Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, all run by military dictatorships, all of them democratic today.

There are democracies in Africa, in the Caribbean.

If you count them, a majority of the world is more democratic than autocratic, and a majority of the world's people live in democracies.

Yes, sir.

But with all those advances, black men are still where they were in the 1970s.

Like,

they do it through.

the rate that black people, the earning potential of black people is about where it was, it's like we're stagnated.

It's like the way we're educated.

Black women are excelling, but black men virtually,

black African Americans in America are about what?

About where they were in

South Africa.

So all these advances are like Feeling good, wearing tight shoes so you feel good when you take them off.

But our situations are still the same.

We're still shot Disproportionately by the police.

We're still uneducated.

We're still, our communities are dirtier.

And our environment is a dirtier.

I don't think the data back that up.

I mean, there are still unconscionable racial gaps that we have to close.

What is that?

What is unconscionable racial gaps?

What does that mean?

Well, difference between whites and blacks.

But in terms of the well-being of African Americans now compared to the 1970s, African Americans are living longer, earning more.

Black men are living longer

than in the 1970s?

Are happier?

Wait, wait, we got to be happier?

Yes.

Yes, happier.

In fact,

the rate of happiness has increased more quickly among African Americans than among whites.

Just because Snoop got high and did this survey, don't mean.

No, but

it's interesting because

I wouldn't say that people feel that we are...

And I don't want this just to focus on one single issue, but I don't think that people feel like we're seeing, particularly in communities of color in urban communities that we we see this this optimistic vantage point that that this

actually in polls we we do

that people you live in a rich neighborhood yeah I know but when I go visit my mother

but

to say that things have improved that doesn't mean that they're acceptable now but they used to be worse rates of violence against African Americans were much worse than the 1970s including police shootings during some 60s, worse still during the riots.

But what has remained the same is that nobody's brought to account for those shootings.

Well, actually,

I'm not sure that's true.

In the 1960s, during the riots, police would pick off 10 or 15 African Americans at night, and people didn't care.

Now they do care.

But nobody goes to jail for it.

Caring isn't, listen, I love this data, but caring isn't saying this is horrible.

Caring is saying somebody needs to be accountable for it.

And virtually, statistically, people do not go to jail.

Police officers who shoot on armed men they don't go to jail.

They just don't, for whatever reason.

And they didn't in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

So how is this helping me?

Well, because there are at least half the country now is saying they should.

I mean, I did an editorial about the police a couple of weeks ago and said things that I don't think anybody ever said before about the police.

Like,

if they're mostly good, how come there are so many videos of them being bad?

And when you shoot shoot somebody in the back, it's cowardly.

And then you have a landlady.

I mean, I don't think that you could say that 10 years ago.

Listen, I understand.

And those thoughts and sentiments, I'm sure, are well intended.

But Philando Castile was an armed black man, legally armed, got shot on TV.

We saw him die.

We watched what happened.

And the officer still got acquitted.

A Kai Gurley was a kid in a stairwell in New York.

An officer shot him, called his union rep while he was dying.

They convicted him.

He still didn't go to jail.

So our lives still look pretty much the same as they did.

Now, people might care more or say they care more, but that's results.

And I think all we want, all anybody wants, is to be action behind the words that you expect.

Well, but what's that quote that Obama used to always say about the arc of justice bending slowly?

It also matters

how quickly it's bending, right?

And I'm looking I'm a white guy.

I'm not saying that I know this, but I spent, no, I mean, it's important knowledge.

But we're But we're still sentient beings.

We're sentient beings, even if we're white.

We can see things and make comments and study things.

It doesn't mean we have to recuse ourselves from America.

That's true.

We're all on the same side.

Fair enough.

But I don't know the black experience.

But I went down and spent some time in Atlanta with Congressman John Lewis, a true American hero alive today.

And when you walked around with him, you got the sense that, I don't know, maybe things are better, maybe they're worse.

But in the 60s, a lot of people were changing things and things were changing quickly.

And I think that things just aren't changing quickly right now, and they should be for black men.

But not even that.

Listen, and I certainly appreciate it.

If something's wrong, it should be wrong.

There should never have been a time

when committing an injustice to somebody was acceptable.

Because I remember one of the common refrains is, if you don't break the law, you wouldn't get killed.

But it used to be against the law to look at somebody in the eyes.

No, no.

It's just.

And no one's arguing.

So we're going to have to end that without arguing.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

It's time for new rules.

Here all, since apples look so much alike, we use stickers to identify them.

Let's do the same with chirpy blondes on Fox News.

Honey, Angela Earhart Earhurt is on.

Oh, never mind.

It's Sandra Smith.

Oh, that petered out quickly, didn't it?

New rules, Smokey the Bear has to look less like he's just been caught in a roadside sex sting.

Do you have something you want to tell us, Smokey?

Because you look guilty.

Walking out of the woods with no shirt on, holding a shovel, not cool, man.

You did not have to kill that guy.

He was just a married Republican who wanted some sex in the woods with a bear.

There.

Our gay friends are.

New role, stop making Melania pretend to do people things.

Like this totally...

Like this totally candid, unposed picture of gardening.

It's like putting a party hat on a cat.

It should be cute, but it's just sad.

New rule: everyone interviewing the pair of identical twins who married another pair of identical twins must ask the only question anyone wants the answer to:

Do you sometimes fuck the wrong one?

New rule, if you sell sex for money, don't call yourself a prostitute because that's illegal.

Call yourself a hoe because that word isn't in the criminal code, which means hoeing isn't a crime.

And that's just some of the expert legal advice you can expect when you call 1-844-GET Rudy.

Rudy Giuliani invented the legal defense of using a different word.

And he could make it work for you.

So stop by Rudy's office today.

His appointment policy is like his marriage policy.

Even if he's with someone else, he'll still see you.

And finally, new rule.

If Trump supporters don't want us to call them stupid, they have to stop coming up with things like Q.

Oh,

you heard?

Yeah, it was just a few months ago in this space that I was talking about how Republicans are now the conspiracy party and that there is literally nothing so ridiculous they won't swallow.

Birth certificate, chemtrails, jade helm, lizard people.

And now we have Q.

What is Q?

Well, Q is a person, but we don't know who it is.

We just know it's someone with super high Q level security clearance, so he knows all the shit that goes on in the deep state.

Namely, that our government is riddled with a rogue criminal element that is interested in evil in general, but their specialty is pedophilia.

And why not?

Almost half of Trump voters already believed that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor.

But it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg, and frankly, it would be easier to find a powerful person who isn't a pedophile.

George Soros is one, and so are the Rothschilds, J.P.

Morgan, John McCain, the Illuminati, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and every president since Reagan.

But not Trump.

Oh no.

Oh no.

In the Q world, he's the superhero whose whole life has been a cover so he could be in place to strike back against the pedophile race.

And then it starts to get weird.

Republicans, please help me.

Help me help you.

Help me help you.

Because like it or not, we are family and you are like a brother to me.

A sick alcoholic brother who's lost his fucking mind.

Trump rallies these days are full of these Q people holding up signs and defending their theory with ironclad logic.

Maybe it's not true because there's no evidence of it.

It's just stuff being talked about on the internet.

There hasn't been any non-evidence yet.

You heard the lady.

There's no non-evidence.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

I liked you people better when you were just religious nuts.

I mean it.

Can we have the old religion back?

Church is full of horrible, ridiculous ideas, but it's better than Reddit.

I mean, really?

The man they think is combating pedophilia is this guy?

I've said that if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.

She's six feet tall.

She's got the best body.

Well, I was going to say sex, but I can't relate that.

But wait, wait, wait.

Remember.

Remember what the dear leader keeps telling us.

What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.

Not what's happening.

Not what's happening.

Not what's happening.

That's right.

Donald Trump was just posing as a disgusting pervert for the last half century.

To gain credibility, so he'd go after the real perverts now.

The most important thing to always remember is that everything is the opposite of what it appears.

Every time Trump appears to be a dumb bumbling idiot, that's evidence of the exact opposite.

The exact opposite.

The exact opposite.

That's right.

The FBI are the traitors.

The real patriots are in Russia.

Trump is clean.

Mueller is dirty.

The only thing that would make more sense would be finding out that a Trump-loathing conservative baiter like me is Q.

Which is why it is true.

I am Q.

I am.

I am Q.

I'm revealing it now.

I am Q.

It's true.

You don't believe me?

Just ask yourself, is there any non-evidence that I'm not guilty?

I am

you.

It feels so good to finally be myself.

A computer whiz in a hoodie.

My entire life has been a sham that gave me the perfect cover to be your source for what's really happening in America.

The drugs, the atheism, the stuff at the Playboy Mansion.

I did that to throw everybody off the scent.

I'm actually a Presbyterian who goes to church every Sunday with my wife and our homeschooled twins,

Margaret and Thatcher.

The pot I smoke is oregano and the jokes in my monologue are actually coded messages.

Except for the ones about Chris Christie being fat.

Those I just like to tell.

So,

now that you real Americans know the truth, I, Q, need your help to make America great again.

Keep posting your memes.

Keep believing everything Trump tells you.

And above all, on Tuesday, November 6th, stay at home.

Stay at home.

Do not leave your house on November 6th for any reason, even to buy vape juice.

If you have a basement, go there, or better, get in the trunk of your car, close it, and don't leave for whatever reason.

Just stay in the trunk of your car until you hear from me.

Stay in the trunk.

Stay in trunk.

Stay in the trunk.

Okay,

that's our show.

I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas, September 7th and 8th at the Ovens in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 22nd.

I want to thank Dia Hube, Christina Belantoni, Seth Moulton, Steven Picker, and Lawrence O'Donnell.

Join us now for Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.