Ep. #461: Clint Watts, Dambisa Moyo

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

Start the clock.

I have no idea what you're so happy about. The world is completely falling apart, thank you.
There's a shooting in Texas, a volcano in Hawaii, an outbreak of Ebola in the Congo.

But don't worry, Trump is monitoring it all by tweet.

Oh, wait, wait, I'm just getting this just in. Yeah, I'm getting his Twitter rulings.
Ebola, incredible.

Volcano, tremendous.

Shooting whatever the NRA wants.

I mean.

Is it any wonder people aren't having kids anymore? Did you see this this week? The fertility rate is at a record low for the second straight year.

The infant shortage is so bad now, airlines have to play tapes of baby crying.

And speaking of babies, Trump administration, you know, while they're doing the other shitty stuff that's getting all the headlines, fucking you a billion different ways, announced they're now cutting off federal funding for clinics that provide abortions or even refer patients to places that do abortions.

That's right. No money for abortions.
That money has to come from Michael Cohen.

And

I think Trump may have skipped health class.

Did you see Bill Gates, what Bill Gates said? Bill Gates met with Trump recently, and he said Trump asked him several times if HIV was the same as HPV.

That's who our president is: a man who has to have the talk at the age of 71.

Gates tried to answer the question. He tried to put it in a way Trump could understand.
He said, Mr. President, HPV, that's what you get for sleeping with a porn star.

HIV, that's what you get from sleeping with Hannity.

Oh, and

the big feather in in his cap is blowing away. His Korean big deal looks like it's falling apart.
Kim Jong-un says now that he will not dismantle his nuclear weapons unless U.S.

military threats are removed from South Korea. And Trump says his politics will not be dictated by North Korea.
That's a new job for Fox and Friends.

Oh, Trump is working on jobs in China.

Did you see this? He tweeted, President Xi and I are are working together, too many jobs lost in China.

Wait, jobs lost? Where? Did you say? I'm sorry. What country are we making great again?

You know why this is? Because China, this is so naked. China invested half a billion dollars in a Trump resort project in Indonesia.

And like the next day, Trump lifts sanctions on their telecom company, ZTE, which is spying on you. That's why our spy agencies are against it.

I mean, you can tell this one is really shady because it keeps referring to the Chinese leader as President Zhi Kaqing.

And then

the nerve this guy has to then throw tantrums about he's being investigated. How dare me? Investigated a clean whistle like me? I mean,

it's the year anniversary of the Mueller investigation and Trump, of course, the greatest witch hunt in American history. Of course, everything is the greatest in history.

Well, maybe it's the greatest witch hunt in history, but it's got so far 17 indictments and five guilty pleas. If it's hunting witches, it's finding them.

The latest theory from the bubble

that the FBI has planted a spy in the Trump campaign.

No, not a spy. This is just what the FBI does for a living.

You know, that's what they do.

Trump, sorry, man, you have ties to the American mob, the Russian mob, to Russian hookers, to the Kremlin, to indicted co-conspirators, to fucking goons, and shady lawyers, and tax evaders, and fraudulent businesses, and fake charities, and bribes, and harsh money, and porn stars.

This is what the FBI does.

they investigate shady people like you

it's like owning an ice cream truck and going why are all these kids following me all the time

are they chasing me for

yes there's a spy that's it's that's the new reality show the apprentice is so old hat it's the mole

who's the mole in the white house tune in next week you know i tell you a mole i'm in a dysfunctional relationship with donald trump the more weed i smoke the more paranoid he gets.

There's something wrong there.

And then there's the royal wedding. To say I am excited would not be accurate.

I already have my alarm set, so I'll know exactly when to start not giving a shit.

But

on the bright side, the queen finally found a job for Charles.

Did you see? He'll be walking Megan Markle down the aisle because who better as a happy marriage, good luck, Jarm,

than Prince Charles?

Trump was not invited to the wedding. He said that's okay.
Not invited to the royal wedding. He said in their honor, he would continue to royally screw America.

So, look, I don't want to be the wet blank. Enjoy the hell out of it tomorrow.
Are you going to watch? Of course you are.

It's going to be great when a B-list actress marries a man who will never be king in a country that doesn't even matter.

An event so unimportant, even the Russians aren't fixing it. All right, we got a great show.
Dan Savage, Gary Weiss, and Evan McMullen are here.

And a little lady will be sticking with economist and author Gambisa Moyo.

But first up, he is the former FBI special agent and author of Messing with the Enemy, Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News. Clint Watts.

Clint Watts.

Hey, thank you. Nice to look at you.
See you all the time. You're not for everything you've done.
Thank you.

All right. So listen,

in light of this shooting, we don't know a lot about it, but it is, of course, involved with social media as everything is. And your book is a lot about that.

You have something, a phrase I thought was very interesting, clickbait populism. You think this applies here? Would you tell us what that is? It does.

You know, we could not have Donald Trump as president before the era of social media, and there are audiences that have powered him.

What he's been able to do, and what other leaders, like the leader of the Islamic State, have been able to do, is use social media to power their agenda and win a crowd. Leaders aren't born anymore.

They're accrued through retweets, likes, and shares.

And what we're seeing today are audiences taking on the tactics, the same tactics we saw with the Russians, and using it for their own partisan purposes.

We don't really need to worry about the Russians at this point because everybody's copying that playbook.

Yeah, I saw that within 20 minutes of this shooting, there was fake information about the shooter.

The right wing is always trying to make these people into leftists, so they faked him with a Hillary hat on. Right.

And people don't really check this stuff out. They are going to sites, first of all, that confirm what they want to believe to begin with, right? Right.

This is all about confirmation bias and implicit bias. Confirmation bias is: I only pick that what I want to hear.

Implicit bias is if it comes from my friends, family, or people that look like me and talk like me, then I will take it on and believe it to be true. And no one can shout that down.

So, the first thing you see is what you tend to believe is true, and that what you see the most often.

And that's why this social media misinformation we see today can mislead people, defame people, it can ruin people's lives, and yet none of it is true, and it's very hard to correct that falsehood.

Yeah, this

This shooter had two subjects on his Instagram account, guns and Trump.

I don't know what that means, but I don't think it's good.

No.

I mean, what we've seen across all of this populism, whether it's jihadi populism, we used to talk about with ISIS, the Islamic State, or with the extremist groups in the United States, it's violence and it's the promotion of violence.

And we've got easy access to weapons, we've got unlimited access to social media, very easy ability to make content. It's a dangerous mix.

And just the way they micro-target for selling products, they do it with people's opinions too. I know you've said that Alex Jones, for example, is perfect for

what Russia is doing because he will lead them right to the gullible idiots. That's right.
People that are falling for this oftentimes are new to these information sources.

They don't really know how to evaluate them. They're new to social media and they're hyper-partisan.
They really want to be part of what I call a social media nation.

And the more time people spend on cell phones and with their virtual friends, the more connected they come with them.

And that starts to overtake literally Trump physical nations, those people that live around them like Americans.

So you start to identify not by, you know, the American flag or common beliefs and values in democracy, but hashtags, avatars, bios, and pictures.

If you want to know who an ISIS supporter is, that's easy. Go look for bin Laden pictures, Aliki pictures, Baghdadi pictures, and ISIS flags.

If you want to know who a Trump supporter is, well, that's MAGA HATS, MAGA Trump Train, and a handful of other hashtags. And the next one to come up is the resistance.

I mean, if you want to understand how Trump overtook the GOP, it's the same way ISIS overtook Al-Qaeda and how the resistance could overtake the Democrats.

That's the next real social media bubble that's coming up. What do you mean the resistance could overtake? You mean I thought the resistance was the Democrats.
Jesus, it's worse than I thought. Well,

it's true. I mean,

are they different? It's that you can understand there's more of an identity attached to those social media nationalism than there is to these actual traditional organizations.

So, al-Qaeda used to say, How do we know these people are in Al-Qaeda? The GOP says, We don't actually believe in these things, Trump supporters say.

And now we have the resistance, which oftentimes is that you know, battles with traditional Democrats

and the mainstream left. So, as a long-time FBI man, what do you think this week when Trump says there was a mole from the FBI in my campaign? FBI doesn't do moles and campaigns, do they?

No, it's a bunch of nonsense. I mean, it's

you know, I've been saying that the Russians

The Russians don't need to make fake news because the president makes plenty for them to use.

And so, the new threat really is that we have American active measures. We have Americans that are destroying U.S.
institutions with complete falsehoods.

The FBI's mission is to protect the United States.

So if they had tips that there might be a Russian infiltration into the United States to meddle with our election, which has been found out, then they should go after that.

So using a confidential informant, a trusted source, to go test out those leads, it would be negligent for them not to do that. And they were doing what they should be doing, protecting our country.

It's amazing

isn't how quickly it has turned around about the FBI. I mean, I was freaking out when Trump won the election because at that moment, I thought the FBI was in his pocket.

They were calling the FBI Trump Landia. Yeah.
Remember that? Trumpville, New York City. Right.

They were saying that Comey released that letter 11 days before the election that sunk Hillary because he was losing control.

of the FBI and he had to do that from pressure within his own organization. I don't know if that's true.
Right.

But how did the FBI completely turn around? This is so scary that they are so quickly able to change people's minds on a fundamental matter. Like,

who is the FBI with? Yeah, it's interesting that the president likes to pick on people that can't fight back, namely the intelligence community and the FBI. They can't come out and defend themselves.

Who can? Well, the Mueller investigation can, but they're going to do things properly, right? They're going to go through sources. They're going to go through methods.

And traditionally, from what I remember, it's a very conservative organization.

I remember going to the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters with a green shirt one day and they were like, white or blue here? Yeah. No green.
What are you doing?

Yes. I've always been a big fan of squares.

Squares keep society going. That's right.
In ways I could not.

That might be true.

It is very true. I'm not the hunter.
I'm drawing on the cave of the wall, but that's not essential. What you did was much more essential.
What do you think about Rudy Rudy Giuliani saying

a guy just threw up at the name of Did you hear that?

I heard a man literally throw up in his mouth. Yeah.

Right? Am I right? Okay.

And you are correct, sir, by the way. But

him saying that you can get information from a foreign government. And that's perfectly legal.
He said, you know, when I ran, people tried to get dirt on me. It's not nice, but it's the way it is.

It doesn't matter if it's a Russian or a German. That's crazy, too, right? No.

America first means Americans first.

And you don't take anything from a foreign country that's trying to destroy our institutions, destroy and put divisions between our own people so that they fight each other, so that they can break us up into pieces, divide and conquer us.

You don't do that. And what we have seen is even in other cases, let's go back to Gore versus Bush.
There was a Gore staffer who received a playbook essentially for the debate. What did he do?

He said, I'm turning this over to the FBI and I will recuse myself from the debate because I don't want one to be seen as doing dirty tricks and two, I don't want anyone to think that there was something up when the debate comes.

That was the exact scenario.

If the Russians show up at your building called Trump Tower as Russian government attorneys, the first call you make is the FBI and the last thing you do is shut the door and don't let those people in.

Well, you're a real patriot. I hope you and and I are not sharing a cell someday.
And watch. Thank you very much, sir.
All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey, everybody, how you doing?

Okay,

he is a former CIA. Wow, we got the FBI and the CIA in the house tonight.
CIA operations officer ran as an independent in the 2016 presidential election. Please welcome Evan McMullen.

He He is the Savage Love columnist and host of the podcast Savage Lovecast. Dan Savage is over here.

And she is the staff editor and writer for the New York Times opinion section. Barry Weiss is back with us again.
How are you doing?

Okay, so am I getting too paranoid? Is it really that scary out there? Or is it me? Am I having a bad week?

Because I tell you,

I feel like Trump is winning. You know, I feel like he's remaking this country into his own ugly image.
There have been school shootings before, of course, but we've had, this is the 16th this year.

That's the most ever.

I read that November 9th, the day after his election,

the most hate crimes recorded that year. You know, he calls immigrants animals.

I saw this guy ranting about the... The New York lawyer.
The New York lawyer ranting about you're speaking Spanish. And he says, my next call is to ICE.

Would someone have even done that? I don't know if someone like that survives in New York City. Get the hell out of Spanish triggers you.
That is what we're proud of being in New York.

I don't think five years ago any, I mean, they were bigots, but I don't think they would go, I'm going to call ICE on you. I think that's a gift from Donald J.C.

examples all across the country of white people calling the police on black people who happen to be walking down the street, carrying their bags to a car after staying in a

hotel overnight.

Trump has been the great disinhibitor and what he's disinhibited is a lot of ugliness

that was under the surface and a little bottled up and should be bottled up because it's a poison.

And Trump has just opened the floodgates and the poison is coursing through the veins of our body politic and our citizens and it's horrifying and I am depressed.

I think it's worse for us here on the West Coast because we wake up to Trump's early morning tweets. It's the first thing we see.

People on the East Coast can brace themselves for five minutes before the tweets come in.

well i i think what dan says is absolutely correct i think some of these sentiments have been corked up and sort of hidden in caves for a long time and in dark corners of our politics but it's not just trump it's all the leaders especially i i hate to say republican leaders who sit by silently of course as these things are said

and so so

There needs to be more of a counterbalance. It has to come from the right.
It has to come from Republican leaders.

Otherwise, there's going to be a segment of our population that increasingly is going to be led down this path i have to call bullshit

already yes already in your face you're remissing and i was just saying like republicans have been cranking up the racist mob for 40 50 years the southern strategy um they have been saying like dog whistle dog whistle dog whistle along comes trump who takes the dog whistle and throws it over his shoulder and picks up a bullhorn and just

really

he's the logical conclusion of republican politics over 50 years and republicans can't be how did this happen?

I happen to agree. I happen to see him more as of a symptom as opposed to a cause.
But I do think it is circular, and he is making things worse. And we do need more leaders to stand up.

One of the most troubling statistics I've seen during the era of Trump came in a Quinnipiac poll in January of this year.

72% of Republican voters believed that Trump was a positive role model for children. If that isn't a leading indicator of trouble, I don't know what is.
And you know, his poll numbers keep going up.

He's in the mid-40s now. That's normal territory for presidents.
And Americans, 13% of them, think he's honest. They don't care.

They don't care.

I wonder if they'll start to care if we continue to have these school shootings. I mean, like, the sort of...

We talk about, you know,

one of the things that made me totally unable to vote for Trump was the famous, you know, the Hollywood reporter tape, right? Well, the NRA,

access Hollywood, excuse me. Well, the NRA has grabbed, has Donald Trump grabbed by the pussy, okay? And it is absolutely,

it's appalling. The fact that we are not trying to do everything possible to try and stop these shootings is disgusting.
You have to be 25 years old to rent a car.

Why don't you have to be 25 years old to buy a gun? We should try and do...

I'm destroying everything. You know,

the Parkland parents today put out a press release saying, let's stop naming the names of school shooters because all they want is that notoriety. Let's try that.

Let's try maybe even holding people like the one that just happened today. He was using the gun of his father.
Why don't we hold people criminally liable?

Why don't we hold the father criminally liable? Why don't we hold gun manufacturers?

The Republicans passed a law that made it impossible to sue gun manufacturers for liable, and they can't be held to the same standards that any other company producing a product for the consumer market in this country.

Right, and again, we had shootings before Donald Trump, but I just think if you made a Venn diagram of Trump and what he's brought about, and then alt-right types, and then just these internet unhappy types.

Right, but we don't want to say that Obama's responsible for Sandy or Clinton's responsible for Columbine. I mean, no, we're not saying that at all.
We're just saying what you said before.

What was the word you used? Disinhibitor. Disinhibitor.
Yeah, and also 2017 was, I think, the worst year in terms of casualties for mass shootings.

And four of the five worst in history, worst mass shootings in our history happened within the last five or six years. I mean, this problem is getting worse.
And again, 2017 was the worst on the US.

The most appalling thing I read today was that more high school students have died in school shootings in America this year than U.S.

service members have died in the two wars that are still underway that we're involved in.

High schools are more dangerous than Iraq and Afghanistan for America.

Did you see the interview of the one student today where the person asked asked her, Did you ever think this would happen in your school? And her answer was,

yes.

I mean, that is unbelievable.

What was so appalling about it was the reporter was asking for the comforting banality so that the viewer at home could like relax about this not happening where I live or like return to the sort of normal expectation this isn't something that happens every day.

And this is something that fucking happens every day in this country because of the NRA and the GOP. Okay, can I ask another subject that's related? Because

I always like it when there's a sex expert on the show.

And that would be you.

I'm an amateur sex. I was going to browse you.

So this incel thing, if you haven't heard about incels, it stands for involuntarily celibate. We did a little bit about it a few weeks ago on the show.
And there was a tragedy, two of them now.

A guy in Toronto, only a couple of months ago or last month, I think he ran a car through a bunch of people because they're angry. They're angry that women don't like them and they can't get laid.

They want to.

And there was one a few years ago in Santa Barbara. And this is a social movement now.
And they want the government to provide prostitutes for them.

Not quite prostitutes. Your move, Bernie Sanders.

They're handmade's tail. They're beyond prostitutes.
They're not quite prostitutes. They talk about redistributing sex as a commodity.
And it's about really enslaving women.

It's handmade's tail stuff, not about sex workers. It's about the government giving you a woman as a slave, not the government giving you a voucher so you can go see a sexist.
They're nasty.

They think women are receptacles. Right.

That's it. And they wonder why I can't get laid.
Exactly.

Exactly.

If we can zoom out for a second, as a, you know, I write a sex advice column, I do a sex advice podcast. I hear every day from people who are miserable because they haven't been touched ever.

They're virgins or they haven't had a relationship in 20 years. Sexual deprivation and romantic deprivation does make people miserable.

Not all of those people become incels, become part of the involuntary celibate movement, But this is truly emiserating that kind of loneliness and that kind of despair.

So we have to figure out: there's a lot of people out there who don't have sex, who don't have relationships, there's this tiny percentage who become active in this incel community.

What's the difference? The way men are socialized to believe that women are their property and they're entitled to women's bodies.

And that meets with the black mold of misogyny that grows all over the internet. And those are the two places we need to really intervene.

How men are socialized to express what they expect from women and the misogyny that runs riot on the internet. That creates the insults, not sexual deprivation.

But what changed when I couldn't get laid?

I thought, okay, well, start a band, become a doctor.

What? Be a stand-up. Yeah, you know, I mean.

Everyone wants to date a poor comic. Get a job in a restaurant.
They're always fucking each other, the half-staffed restaurants, if you can't get laid. Make yourself worthy of being fucked.

Right, make yourself worthy of being fucked. Yes, again, you silver-tongued it, as you'll always do.

The problem, though, like, I think one of the things we need to do besides socializing males differently is we need to destigmatize and decriminalize sex work.

Because, you know, you have social skills. Most people have social skills.
Even if they're in a dry patch and they can't get laid, they're going to be able to get laid eventually.

You know, there are people out there who don't have any social skills. The Venn diagram of no social skills in incels is a circle.
And

we.

And that's a lot because of the phone. Look,

you spend all day on the phone, you don't have social skills.

You know, when you think of sex work and sex workers and decriminalizing, destigmatizing, it's not just destigmatizing sex work for the sex worker, but also for the sex buyer.

And what the culture says about someone who buys sex, he's a criminal, he's a misogynist, he's a monster, he's a loser.

And so one of the things that gets said about the incels is why don't they just go see sex workers? Well, they already feel like losers.

So going to a sex worker is only going to make that worse, especially if they're prosecuted.

We need to decrit, I don't want to like lock my friends who are sex workers in rooms with violent, rage-filled incels, but in the same way if we re-socialize men or not stop socializing and expect women on their property and destigmatize sex workers and sex work, there are some people who the only way they will ever get laid is to buy it, is to pay for it.

And that shouldn't be stigmatized.

Think of people who are quadriplegics, like the movie The Hour or The Sessions with Helen Hunt, Oscar nominations, quadriplegic.

The only way this person was ever going to have sex in his life is if he buys it, because he's so physically disabled.

Well, some people are so socially disabled that their only outlet for any sort of sex or human contact is buying.

Yeah, I mean, we have an expert here on these issues, so I'll let those comments stand just as they are. But

I have to say, this isn't new. I mean, people struggle to get.
What's the Mormon point of view? Yeah, be right.

People struggle to get dates.

I have to say, I'm evidence that you don't need to look like Dan to get a date. I mean,

you can get a date. And so I have a less complex answer.
Just run a few laps, brush your teeth, and get out there. You'll be fine.

It's not that complicated. It's really not.
It is that complicated for people who are socially maladapted that they are repulsive.

Right, but the other thing I have to say about this is, again, this challenge I don't think is new.

What has brought it out in this sort of way? In the past couple of weeks, learning for the first time about this incel movement, I felt so old because it just seems so darn crazy.

But

what I think it is, is we have a misogynistic leader, a president who scapegoats people for one problem or the other.

And you combine this sort of thing, this misogyny and this scapegoating, blaming other people for your problems, and it gives rise to the

vocalizing of these feelings that I think. And it's a confusing thing when the misogynist who happens to be our president has had many wives and has, as we know, has had sex with many women.

And paid for it. And paid for it.
So, yes, and paid for it, but it's a confusing message when misogynists

paid in the case of Trump. They paid to be silent.
He also said he tried to offer money to Stormy and Karen McDougall. I'm just saying Trump's misogyny has not turned women off of him.

That's confusing. Okay,

let me interrupt for a piece of comedy.

But I do enjoy these. We've done this many times.
You know,

Us magazine should send me a friggin' fruit basket. I plug, because we do this bit all the time, 25 Things

you don't know about me. Have you seen that bit?

Okay, so this week we're doing Michael Cohen.

25 things

you don't know about me.

Michael Cohen, my kids use air quotes when they call me a lawyer.

The reason I have 16 cell phones is because I dropped the first 15 in the toilet.

Based on that Stormy Daniels sketch, I can't believe how hot I used to look.

I can get you some clean urine.

I was 45 years old before I found out ice picks can also be used to pick ice.

I do crossroad puzzles when I'm waiting for lime to dissolve a body.

Did I mention he's a slezy lawyer? I think you do.

When I'm stealing a ring off a corpse's hand and it gets stuck, I run it through Don Jr.'s hair.

These things you didn't know.

I'm a Jew who acts Italian. My nickname in high school was Mashuga de Parmesan.

My first media appearance was me dragging a slice of pizza down a flight of stairs.

Indict me all you want, bitches. I'm already in Russia.
All right, she is a global economist.

An author on Edge of Chaos, Why Democracy is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth and How to Fix It. Danbisa Moyo.

Hey.

Hi, Dan Beesa. Great to have you back on our show.
Congratulations on your book. It's terrific.
I think you have the right topic. I'm also worried about democracy's dying.

Tell me why so many people aren't concerned. And like,

when you say democracy is in trouble, I think a lot of people, it seems so abstract. How do we make it personal to them and let them know it's important to their actual lives?

Well, there are a whole host of factors that are suggesting that democracy is under siege. For one thing, voters' participation rates are down considerably.
They're around 50%.

Everywhere or here? Well, mainly the United States is the vanguard of liberal democracy, so I'm particularly focused on the U.S.

But of course, across Western Europe, where democracy is also prevalent, we are seeing very low

participation rates.

For low-income households, it's even worse. It's less than 30% by some studies.
And the deep concern there is that this is really far from the one-man, one-vote mantra of democracy.

But the other issue is that money has seeped into politics. There are about 158 families in this country that are responsible for 50%

of the political contributions to the president in 2016. Lobbying has doubled in the past couple of decades.
But people feel disconnected. Absolutely disaffected.

And there are studies from Pew, the think tank, that 80% of Americans just don't even trust the federal government to do what's right on a regular basis. And we don't really teach civics as

we should anymore. So I don't think people know what's missing because they didn't know it was there to begin with.

I think that's absolutely right. And issues around civics and education, but also there are really no minimum standards for being a politician anymore in the way that they used to be.

We don't have politicians who have experience in agriculture as farmers and teachers and lawyers. We now have professional politicians, and I think that's a great disservice to us as well.

So a lot of people around the world, younger people, they look to China now because China gets things done, but it's not a democracy.

So you're hitting on exactly the central part of a thesis of my book, which is this myopia in political, illiberal political systems is particularly problematic.

All the problems that the global economy and the United States is facing over the next decades are long-term intergenerational problems, things like the amount of debt, income inequality worsening, the risk of technology killing off jobs.

I mean, those are all very, very deep structural problems, and yet our politicians are very short-term. They're thinking about the next election, and this creates this schism.

Yeah, how do we make them not do that? How do we, I mean, that's when.

But really, I mean, that's why China succeeds, because, I mean, of course, you know, if you have a dictatorship, you don't have to ask somebody if we should do it.

They go, well, let's switch from coal and let's do it tomorrow. And they can do that.
Or they can bring people out of poverty, which they have. Yes, but you don't want to live in a country.

I wouldn't want to live in a country without formal government. Exactly.
And we live here because we want to... But they can think 25 years ahead.
We don't think 25 months ahead. Yes.

How do we incentivize politicians? Well, I think we can incentivize them by linking their pay to longer-term outcomes.

I think one of the problems here is, well, their compensation, I think, should be higher, but they should be forced to justify their compensation just the way we are forced to justify

in the private sector. Yeah, exactly.

We don't get the dregs in that. Right.
Exactly. But also in Singapore, for example,

the politicians are actually paid bonuses at the end of the year based on long-term outcomes. What happened to life expectancy? What happened to GDP?

I mean, in this country, our politicians are actually paid bonuses. We get people like this Scott Pruitt guy.
You know this guy, the head of the EPA?

Who I think he's in government just because this is as good as it's going to get. I'm flying first class.
You know, he's in it for the purpose.

Well, you know, I think there's been so much of a revolution around compensation in the private sector. I don't see why we shouldn't apply such stringent rules to the public sector as well.

But some of your fixes for democracy sound like going backwards, or at least they sound like it. Maybe they're not.

But you're talking about weighted voting, which is where some people who are experts, but how do you determine that sometimes, get more of a vote, and what they used to call a poll tax.

You know, giving people an exam before they can vote. I can certainly see this.

I hear you huffing and puffing already. I heard that.

Well, we certainly don't want that. I mean, I think I'd be the first person disenfranchised if I actually started proposing weighted voting.

So, we don't want it in a way that adjectives such as wealth, or race, or gender are the guidelines. But as an immigrant coming to this country, you are required to take a civics test.

And essentially, I think it's really about showing engagement and caring about the civics and also the political process. And that's really what I think is worth considering.

Okay, and you're originally from Zambia?

Okay.

So, that sounds like a good neutral place to weigh in and maybe start the

refereeing of the Gaza issue because, of course, this week we opened the American Embassy in Jerusalem,

which did cause a riot, as was predicted. And of course, people are blaming both sides.
What's your view? Well, when is there not a riot in that region of the world? I mean, I think it's

what I was thinking about.

It's incredibly infuriating to me that we tend to be so short-term on these issues.

Why don't we have a set of proposals that are longer-term that actually can stick in a way that is much more fruitful? I mean,

these are Band-Aid interventions, and I do understand that they're irksome, but I've been to Jerusalem. I know that people are living cheek by jowl from very different religions.

I don't see why we keep coming back with these very short-term policies that we know are going to be problematic in the long term.

What do you think?

Phil.

I love you, but the riots were not caused by the embassy move. No, I said they were linked.
They're not linked. They are.
No, they're not.

They were made much worse. These demonstrations were going on, but they exploded.

When Hamas attacked Israel in 2008, when Hamas attacked Israel in 2012, and it attacked Israel in 2014, the embassy was in Tel Aviv all of those times. Okay?

This was, no, this was an intentional.

First of all, these protests had been going on for six weeks, and they intentionally moved up the day so that it would coincide with the opening of the embassy move so that we would all be disgusted and heartbroken when we saw this horrible split screen of Ivanka Trump looking like she was at a country club next to poor desperate people dying in the world.

I agree with you. They planned that, absolutely.
Right, and I'm just saying let's not fall for a trap that is being set by a theocratic authoritarian group that is sending

women and children. I don't think I'm falling for a trap.

I couldn't agree more with all of that.

What I'm saying is that there is this idea, and I would call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.

I've said that before when people booed me on this subject, but I think they're the bigots when they just assume that if something goes on in this part of the world, as you said, there's going to be riots.

And you can't organize your foreign policy around, geez, what is Muhammad Atta going to do?

Wow. I'm letting you guys.

That shut everybody up.

We're wondering why now.

Why did the U.S. government move the embassy to Jerusalem now? Look, this was going to happen.

Previously, past administrations had thought, okay, we'll do it, but we'll do it as a part of a larger peace deal. That was sort of where the right and the left on foreign policy were.

But we have a different situation here now.

We have a president who's increasingly vulnerable because he and his people, his family, his administration, his campaign are being investigated by Mueller and the special counsel and everybody else.

Midterms are approaching. The Democrats may take the House back and he'll be at risk of impeachment.
He was throwing red meat to his base.

That's what was driving.

That's true, but Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel, and every country needs to decide if it's happening.

But we've got to be able to dissect what the right policy is there for the United States and what's motivating Trump and that movement now and the way it was done.

Because in my view, we could have done that and we could have done it now, but we could have done it in a way that maybe extended an olive branch to the Palestinian Authority.

Maybe not Hamas, but the Palestinian Authority. I agree, although don't forget it's the Palestinian Authority that's immiserating Gazans.
They're the ones who are cutting off...

Abbas is the one cutting off the electricity to Gaza, not as a... But for complex reasons, you have a terrorist organization running Gaza.
So

it's complex, as you understand. But you know, Evan, in 1948, Harry Truman recognized Israel when it was first announcing it was a country.

And a lot of people in America said, if you do that, there's going to be riots. And there were riots.

Now, would you go back in time and say Harry Truman shouldn't do that because there were going to be riots? We shouldn't have thrown moving the embassy away.

It was something Israel and Netanyahu wanted desperately. And so it was a point of leverage.
Yeah, he's the worst dealmaker ever. Yeah, he's the worst dealmaker ever.
It's amazing.

Some concession out of Israel to try to tamp down the violence or come back to the table and negotiate in good faith with not Hamas, but the Palestinian Authority, which they're not doing.

And so Trump just threw that away and didn't use it as a point of leverage and no longer looks like an honest broker.

We don't look like an honest broker. Someone who's considered a bad deal maker, he's got some pretty good deals over the last couple of weeks.
I mean, he's got... Deals for him.
Yeah, absolutely.

I just think that I wouldn't dismiss him as outright being a bad deal maker. No, I mean,

I'm not sure. No, I beg your pardon.
Yes, I misunderstood. But actually, what's the problem?

I trumped too, to the extent that, you know, I think that's exactly the right point.

His base,

a direct audience, would have loved exactly what happened. You know, he's made promises and he is keeping them, like it or not.
That's the bottom.

Right, and what kills me is that he's inviting these crazy, I mean, it's not just evangelicals. it's like

it's Hagee, it's that guy Jeffers, it's it's Islam is born in a pit of hell and Hitler caused Israel.

But one of the people that Trump invited to the opening of the embassy to give a prayer was this Reverend Hage who got tossed off the McCain campaign because he said that Hitler, or God sent Hitler to hunt the Jews because they rejected Christ.

And he's the dude, and Netanyahu's fine with this. He's the dude that Trump invites to the embassy to give it the Jesus.

And Robert Jeffers. I mean, it's all a show.
It's a a production for the base. That's what this is.
Yes. Okay.

So I.

Not to say that the policy of moving the embassy to Jerusalem isn't the right thing.

We have to be able to separate that.

What kills me, and the reason I growled a second ago, excuse me, it's just that it kills me that Trump and the Republican Party are turning Israel, which should be a progressive issue, into a right-wing one.

And I think it's outrageous.

That happened in a while ago. Yeah, but it's now, not one single Democratic politician shows up.

Israel did that under Obama, went to war with Obama and the Democrats. If anyone turned Israel into a right-wing issue over the last eight, nine years, it was

the hypocrisy of people who have this position and like, where would you rather live if you're in the Middle East?

In Gaza? Right, there's not a lot of Sharia law or private views. Or Tel Aviv.

It's not your values that they're defending.

Okay, so I once had Queen Noor of Jordan on the show, and they said, you know, you'll address her as Your Highness, and I said, I fucking will not.

And I bring, not because it's Queen Noor of that area, just because any queen, and I bring this up because the royal wedding is tomorrow, and we did something on the show a couple of weeks ago about grandfathering in stuff from old times and not getting upset about how everything has to be

how we used to think back in the day. And I made the point that people are doing things today that are going to look terrible.
I think the way we treat animals is not going to look good in the future.

I mentioned beauty pageants. You know, we still have them, and it's going to look bad.
And I think calling people Your Highness, I know it's not the biggest issue in the world, but it bugs me.

And I think it really stands out like a sore thumb when we're trying to get egalitarian about everything else, and we're happy to do it. Americans love the royalty more than the British.

Oh, yeah, because we desperately want a first family, and they're our surrogates right now. Well, don't know.
That's what it is.

You know,

I'll step forward to defend monarchy just a little bit.

There is something to be said for taking the power and the trappings and the majesty, really, of that role of head of state and pushing it away from political parties and political power.

That the trappings of Air Force One and the White House, the palace, benefits the Republicans or benefits the Democrats depending on who's in power.

In the UK and other constitutional monarchies in Northern Europe, that is the the royal family's shit.

And the politicians don't get to get their grubby hands all over it and exploit it for political gain and political benefit.

And there's something to be said for that, the role of head of state being separated from political... But do other European countries subsidize the monarchy the way the British do?

I mean, it costs them a lot. That's a big house, that queen has.

And that's not the only house. They got summer castles and giant plates.

Why? And the prime minister is like in an office park.

It's really like 10 down down the street. That's where the monarchy should live.
Would you like to see Donald Trump in an office park as opposed to Donald Trump in the White House?

Yeah, but I mean, it just seems ass backwards to me. And I don't know why they foot the bill for that.
Okay, last issue.

Gina Haspell

was confirmed. She is now going to be the head of the CIA, your CIA.
I mean, there was a lot of controversy about that because she did run a black site, apparently.

She was somebody who was overseeing torture in 2003 when it was all the rage.

And, you know, I think it's okay just because whoever is behind her would be worse. At least she wasn't on Dancing with the Stars.
Yeah.

Yeah, well, look, you know, there are complex issues here. I'm glad we had the national discussion again about the enhanced terrogation and torture and all of that.

I mean, we were not in the right place before as a country. It wasn't just the CIA.
It was DOJ, our elected officials on both parties actually who were aware of this.

We've moved on from there, mostly. The president still talks of torture, but as a country we've moved on.
I hope we never go back to that.

But I will say that my concern with Gina Haspel not being confirmed was that President Trump would then nominate a political loyalist, somebody who would use the great powers of the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization at which I was proud to serve for over a decade, and perhaps turn those on the American people on behalf of the president for political purposes.

We can't allow allow that to happen. I don't believe Gina, an experienced professional, having gone through her 30-plus years of experience there, having experienced sort of a national mistake with

right now. Is that enough? Or do we still

have to say, if I may, you know, I think it's not over. I mean, you're intimating that.
No, it isn't over because the president says he still wants to do it. It's not just about the president.

I think the United States for decades in the past has been the vanguard of truth, justice, and values. And what we've seen over the last several decades has actually been quite disheartening.

As somebody who comes from one of the poorest regions of the world, you know, we expect much more from the United States. It's not just about legality, it's also about morals and ethics.

And this country traditionally

used to stand for things that were right. And that's

that, by the way, is where we get

the moral authority to tell other countries, you can't have nuclear weapons. Because when we first started doing that, it was like everybody understood we're the good people.
Exactly.

We're the people who would never use them except we're the ones who did one and we're the people who always stand for right and good and we're not that people we don't have that authority anymore.

I'm not for other countries getting nuclear weapons but I can see why Iran goes why should you be telling us to have nuclear weapons?

You're a dirty place now too. One of the enhanced interrogation, it's not enhanced interrogation and torture.
Enhanced interrogation is torture.

One of the techniques that was described was locking people in these boxes where they couldn't move much or sit down or stand.

If you go to Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich, there is a room full of the boxes that they locked people in to torture them. The things that we're describing is enhanced terrogation.

When the Nazis did it, it was torture. It's still torture.
When we did it, it was torture. Okay, thank you, panel.
You were very enlightening. It is time now for New Rules.

A little comedy after the torture discussion.

Okay.

New Roll, this Arizona woman accused of going on one date with a man and then sending him 65,000 text messages and

showing up nude in his bathtub must be thanked for providing the answer to the question: what is the opposite of playing hard to get?

Neural, someone has to make a border-themed reality show called So You Think You Can Catch.

I love that picture. New rural commuters on Hawaii's big island have to stop complaining about that volcano.
Hey, there are days here in LA when I pray for hot lava.

You know what I'm talking about. And look on the bright side, if it weren't for volcanoes, your beautiful state wouldn't look like this.
It would look like this.

New rules of the Chinese family that claims it bought a puppy and raised it for two years before they realized it was a bear.

Have to admit, they're more cat people.

And the next time someone corrects me when I say Taekwondo was Japanese or Judo was Korean, I get to say they didn't know their dog was a bear.

Neurolog, this boy who was taken to a Trump rally in Indiana, has to tell us, at what point during Trump's speech did he realize, oh my god, my dad is an asshole.

And finally, new rule of all the fairy tales we've told ourselves here in America, the one we most need to get rid of now is, in America, no one is above the law.

Let conservatives get weepy-eyed about this magic, infallible Constitution that Jesus personally delivered to the Capitol.

It's incumbent on the rest of us to remain clear-eyed about its flaws. And when you don't have to follow the orders of law enforcement, as Trump clearly doesn't, you are above the law.
I am.

I'm tired of hearing TV lawyers say the president can't refuse a subpoena. Even Rudy Giuliani said that.
He said, you got to do it. I mean, you don't have a choice.

Except that was in 1998 1998 when Clinton was president.

Now, Rudy says, we don't have to. He's the president of the United States.

As Rudy's three ex-wives can tell you, he's not really good at being married to anything.

I know liberals have this vision of Trump forced out of the White House and arrested, but that's not going to happen no matter how many cartoons of it you post on your Facebook feed.

The noose is tightening, I hear people say. No, the noose is not tightening.
His face is always that color.

The Constitution does not give permission to indict or prosecute a president. You can't legally resist arrest, but he can.
Could you ignore a subpoena? Could you pardon yourself?

If your obedience to the law is strictly voluntary or compelled by shame, of which he has none, you are above the law.

If you don't believe me, the next time a cop is writing you a ticket, try saying, I don't think so, officer, your traffic stop is a witch hunt.

And don't bother arresting me either, I've already pardoned myself. Executive privilege, bitch.

Checks and balances is a cute theory, but have you met Paul Ryan?

The Constitution only has two recourses for an evil president.

The 25th Amendment, which allows the cabinet to remove a president who was crazy and incapacitated, which might work if Trump's cabinet wasn't crazy and incapacitated.

And impeachment. But impeachment means nothing without conviction.

which requires 67 votes in the Senate, which even after the best blue-wave election ever, would mean at least a dozen Republicans crossing party lines. Not going to happen.

We're on the honor system and Republicans are fresh out of honor.

John Adams had it right back in 1780 when he said, there is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties. But that's what happened.

And even the founders couldn't foresee our current level of tribalism, where half half of us would hear Laurel and half would hear Yanni.

They never imagined a Congress full of shameless partisan enablers who wouldn't turn on Trump if they found out he was using the eternal flame to light farts.

And in

that atmosphere, this president doesn't have to do anything, anything, except explore how far he can go until he's stopped, like the way he used to walk into the dressing room at the Miss Universe pageant.

Oh, I know, I know. We're playing 3D chess.
And he, yeah, he's playing I tip the board over.

Because here's what's going to happen. Mueller will request an interview.
Trump will say no. Mueller will then subpoena him.
Trump will say, go fish.

It goes to the Supreme Court. They're partisan partisan now too.
We learned that in Bush versus Gore, but say they do the right thing and order him to honor the subpoena. And he still says no.

What do we do then? Call dog the bounty hunter?

That's when the same experts will be saying a president has never defied the Supreme Court. Stop telling me he'll never do that.
He always does that.

It's not normal is not an argument that works on Donald Trump. That's the kind of dare that makes him hard.

It's like a penis pump that runs on coal.

If the Supreme Court rules against him, he'll attack them. Just like he did the FBI and the Justice Department.
The Supreme Court will be the new deep state enemy, and their rulings will be fake news.

This year, when President Xi of China made himself president for life, Trump said, president for life, I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday.

A month later, he suggested he should have four terms like FDR. People say he's joking about this stuff, but when has Trump ever told a joke?

His idea of a funny gag is making Mike Pence kiss his ass in public.

Maybe the reason he keeps saying he wants to be president for life is because he wants to be president for life. Think about that the week we're off.

All right, that's our show. We are off next week and back on June 1st.

I'll be at the Windstar World Casino in Thackerville, July 6th, the Brady Theater in Tulsa, July 7th, at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., July 14th.

I feel Evan McMarland, Dan Savage, Berry Ways, Tevi Samoyo, and Clint Watts. No overtime.
I gotta go to Vegas.

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