Ep. #435: Reverend Jesse Jackson, Frank Bruni

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

Start the clock.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

What a crowd.

Yes.

Hey, we're at a show.

I know.

It's exciting.

But before we get to all that, I just have to say, you know what?

I play Texas a lot.

Spent a lot of time down there.

I love it down there.

So they're having a hurricane.

So our thoughts are with them.

Hurricane Harvey's already wreaked a lot of havoc there.

Trump came out with a very strong statement condemning the violence on both sides.

Now this is

This is Trump's first natural disaster.

The others he all cost himself.

And

he has a message for the people of Texas in their time of need.

He stands ready to tweet if he gets any shitty coverage.

And that FEMA is standing by to provide bottles of Trump water at only slightly higher than retail prices.

It's a very good deal.

Very good deal.

And

speaking of very good deals, it looks like, it looks like this week, did you see the two Trumps thing that they're all talking about?

You know, General Kelly took over as the chief of staff a couple of weeks ago.

You know, it looks like he made a deal with General Kelly that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I will be

teleprompter Trump.

And the other days, I'll be able to free to tweet crazy bat shit and shout bullshit at rednecks and airplane hangers.

So Monday, Teleprompter Trump made a foreign policy speech that was very normal and reassuring.

And then the next day he went to Arizona for a rebuttal.

A rebuttal

to himself.

That's the world we're living.

And he was actually bragging about it.

He tweeted the other day, too bad for the Dems.

They have no one who can change tones.

Yeah, it's called schizophrenia dips.

No,

it has gotten so bad that this week the tabloids were describing Shia LaBeouf's behavior as erratic, bordering on presidential.

Very serious.

It is at the point where when he is merely hypocritical, it is reassuring.

I mean, for years, he never stopped tweeting about how he had to get out of Afghanistan, get out of Afghanistan, how stupid Obama was to be there, stupid Obama.

Well, now we're staying.

Turns out, if you like your endless war in Afghanistan, you can keep your endless war in Afghanistan.

And, you know, this war has been going on for 16 years.

16 years.

Republicans, I got to say,

they do like their war.

Wives come and go, but war they're willing to work at.

So that was Monday, the big Afghan speech, and then Tuesday, the big rally in Phoenix.

The fans loved it.

Info Wars gave it four and a half straitjackets.

And Trump was in rare form.

He was blasting the fake news media for how they misrepresented his response to Charlotteville.

Right.

And hey, you know, when people are unfairly saying you like Nazis, what better way to dispel that notion than to host a hate rally in Arizona with all white people?

Perfect.

Oh, yeah.

People keep calling me a slut.

I'll show them.

I'm going to the roadhouse and fuck all the bikers.

And I tell you, I give it to his fans.

They do love him.

It was hot.

It was like 107.

It was so hot, his fans were chanting, Jews, please replace us.

Ah, that guy gets it.

No, but here's my little wisp of hope for this week.

At the rally, this is the first time I've seen this.

His fans, they got bored and started to leave early.

Maybe the magic spell is wearing off.

Because they're so sick of hearing the same old shit.

The news is fake.

Foreigners are taking your jobs.

I'm being treated unfairly.

By the time he gets to build the wall, people are like, you know, if we leave during drain the swamp,

we can beat the traffic.

I mean, when he finally started in on Hillary, they were like, wrap it up.

wrap it up.

All right, we got a great show.

Paul Bagala, Nayira Huck, and Matt Welch are here.

In a little, maybe speaking with the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, but first up, he is the founder of the Rainbow Push Coalition.

When Charlottesville happened, I was watching it on TV.

I said, you know who I want to talk about this?

I want to get him on.

Jesse Jackson, everybody.

Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Look at that, Jesse.

Okay.

All right.

You're not going to do a stage dive, are you?

I mean, I.

All right, so listen.

I'm nervous.

You're nervous?

Why?

You've never done this?

It's been a while?

Fake news.

Fake news.

All right.

But listen, I meant what I said.

I was watching that that Saturday, and I was like, you know who I got to hear on this is you.

You worked alongside, of course, Martin Luther King.

You were there at the moment of the assassination.

And this seemed like, I mean, his quote, it's the letter from the Birmingham Jail.

I'm sure you know it better than all of us.

He once said, and I thought it was apropos to this situation, he said, I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block is not the Ku Kux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.

The context

of that was those who hypocritically are embarrassed by behavior that's that's ugly with vote in other directions.

For example, there are those who

decried Trump's statement about, a non-statement about Charlottesville,

but they also voted for Jefferson Beauregard sessions to be Attorney General.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

Right, the Attorney General

named after Jefferson Davis and the general, the Confederate judge generally.

Beauregard.

Yeah, those who are against Trump's statements, but then vote for shift health care money from the poor to wealth care for the rich.

They're moderate.

They're nice guys.

They don't like to be.

They're embarrassed, but they're not change agents.

Dr.

King said, we need change agents, not just people who are embarrassed, because that's personal.

You know,

we saw these people marching, and they were, you know, they were not wearing the hoods.

They were carrying the tiki torches and the sometimes Nazi flags, shouting horrible things.

But we saw their faces, and in this day and age, you can match those faces.

We could look these people up and probably get them fired at their jobs.

Is that a wise thing?

Well, they feel emboldened.

They feel they have protection from the White House.

Right.

And that is a lot of threat to have.

Today, Apeo, the sheriff of

Arizona, was pardoned

in spite of his

record on immigration, in spite of his racial profiling.

And so they feel protected by the president.

And so when he put more focus on being a fan of David Duke than Heather Haya, that says something about a climate in the country that's poisonous and we deserve, we deserve much better.

I read a poll that said 45% of Trump fans, his voters,

think that whites are more discriminated against, that they are the most discriminated against.

And Christians are the religion that's most discriminated against.

54% said that.

You've got to have a special kind of chip on your shoulder

as a white Christian to think you're the one who got dealt a bad hand.

There may be something else going on though.

Really, 78% of Americans, 78% live paycheck to paycheck.

51% make $30,000 a year or less.

There's a deep sense of anxiety where you've had, we've globalized the economy.

without any sense of care for these persons.

They feel locked out and they feel, and they start scapegoating.

Well, my problem is the Muslims are coming.

My problem is the Jews are coming up.

And so

they are being exploited, but there's tremendous economic anxiety that must not be ignored.

Okay.

Let me ask you about some other issues that are in the news.

Colin Kaepernick, I want to know what you think about that.

Because, first of all, I predict he's going to get picked up by a team.

It's becoming too big.

He's actually not a bad player.

And

The fact of the matter is, he should have the right to express himself.

He's not burning a flag.

He's not hustling drugs to teammates.

He's not shooting people with guns.

Jack Robertson once said that he would not salute the flag, sang the national anthem, because he felt it was not protecting him.

That's Thomas Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics showing their fists.

Right.

That's Ali saying, I will not go to the war because...

Muhammad Ali, right, did not go.

And so there's a lineage of athletes who've taken their stands.

That is,

the reason athletes get all of this super money today,

because Kurt Floyd said he would not be sold.

You have the right to sell him.

So all the free agency comes from a guy who stood up.

So maybe the

cave naked is that one guy who stands up, he should not, the owners have colluded.

They have decided to not let him play, and he should have the right to play and express himself at the same time.

And it just seems so mean-spirited.

I mean considering how black people have been treated in this country, the whole stadium should get on their knee for the national anthem.

Well I think that

the silence, the silence of the

Players Association is a kind of betrayal.

They are too silent in light of what they face.

They always face some issue that affects them personally, but never quite as noble as the issue of

Kepernick.

He's saying that blacks are shot down and it was lied about until the cameras exposed it.

He said it's not right.

You look at the case of Trayvon Martin, killed, and the killer walks free.

Look at the case in Ferguson, Missouri, and the killer walks free.

Somebody says Black Lives Matter.

He says it's not right.

We deserve equal protection under the law.

We should honor Keepernick.

But

here's my last question to you.

I agree with that, but Steve Bannon, who just left the White House,

his

exiting statement was, I hope the Democrats keep pursuing identity politics.

Race is a loser for them.

They play that card, and we're going to kill them in the next election.

What do you say to that?

Well, Hillary puts it.

Have the Democrats played identity politics too much?

No, we live in a multiracial, multicultural society.

Hillary won by 3 million votes.

Trump lost lost by three million votes.

When the Republicans want to embrace the statues of Confederates who engage in secession and slavery and segregation and sedition, that's identity politics.

When they have no regard for the rights of immigrants, They will build a war between us and our next-door neighbor Mexico.

They suggest that

a federal judge whose Mexican cannot dispense justice.

That's identical to politics.

And so we fight for gender politics and race politics.

We fight for

multiracial, multicultural society, and it's the right thing to do.

Thank you for coming here, brother.

You're an icon, and you deserve to be.

Jesse Jackson, everybody.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Thank you for this.

All right.

Okay, here they are.

He's the editor-at-large of Reason Magazine and co-host of the Reason podcast.

Matt Welch is over here.

He's a Democratic strategist and a CNN contributor.

He could have been a comedian.

Paul Bagall is over here.

No, seriously.

I've known some funny people.

He's one of them.

She's the former White House Senior Director and State Department Senior Advisor, Nayera Huck.

How are you doing?

All right, don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

Okay, guys, which Donald Trump should we talk about this week?

Teleprompter Trump or his evil twin?

Now, the evil twin, just today, oh, do we have our news dump?

You know, they love to, you know what a news dump is, everybody, right?

It's like.

I was going to say what it is, but fuck it.

We have the picture.

It's like they dump the news on Friday when no one's paying attention.

Okay, so he pardoned Joe Arpaio.

Doubled down on no transgenders in the military.

How brave of you.

You're my heroes.

He threatened a government jutdown earlier the week about the wall.

I thought the Mexico was going to pay for the wall.

What happened to that?

Now if we don't pay for it, we're shutting the government down.

So

is the best we can do Trump sane half the time?

Is that where we're at?

Is that where the bar is?

I think the bar is lower than that.

I mean,

there's five days in a week, Bill.

So like the crazy Trump, I think, is the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

We've seen the Friday trend.

And the Tuesday and Thursday flip.

No, the Arpaio thing tells us a lot about this president.

He went outside to the normal process here.

Normally, when you're going to pardon somebody, you go through the Justice Department.

The person may express a little bit of remorse and

you kind of do it this way, or you wait until the sentencing is up.

None of this happened, right?

Joe Arpaio was gleeful about his activities.

Donald Trump said he was punished for doing his job.

So let's be clear about what his job, that Joe Arpaio, had done.

He violated the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens of the United States as well as residents by pulling them over because they maybe kind of looked a little bit illegal immigranty and then would detain them and then hand them over to the feds in defiance of a court order month after month after month.

So if you're going to go and you're going to suspend the normal process to pardon that guy, you're saying, you're telling every law enforcement in the country, look, civil liberties don't really matter here as long as you are breaking things a little bit if you're going after illegal immigrants and immigrants.

That's who this president is.

He'll do that in a teleprompter.

He'll do that as a rally.

That is the core of his personality.

It's something to worry about.

And it's an insight into an actual ideology that Donald Trump might have.

And it's not a Republican or conservative ideology.

It's the ideology that serves him as an autocrat.

He attacks the fourth estate and media and tries to break that down, remove trust that people can have as the media as their protector.

He's already been talking about the judicial system as being activist, right, in the Ninth Circuit.

In all of these instances, he doesn't like the judiciary, which has been the last place of resort for people of color, immigrants in particular, other people of color, and women when it comes to any civil liberties issues.

So by pardoning Joe Arpaio, a vigilante who flouts the rule of law, Trump has said it no longer matters if you are holding to a standard of rule of law.

And it's scares, frankly, it's very scary for people of color to try to understand where you can go for recourse if the president is going to override the judicial system.

Yeah, but

it's so funny, you know, all the talk about building the wall, whoever's going to put it, they don't need the wall.

Just making life miserable and terrifying for anyone of dark skin has actually worked.

But long before.

They're not coming anymore.

By the way, long before Donald Trump became president, when Barack Obama was president, illegal immigration from Mexico was going down.

Trump's wall will only slow down their departure.

And maybe mine.

I don't know.

But I think on the Arpya thing, yes, he has a soft spot for white nationalists.

We already knew that.

And yes, he wants to flat the rule of law, and he's an autocrat wannabe.

I think there's a larger game here he's playing.

He wants to send a signal to the targets of the Mueller investigation that if you hold tight and don't roll on me, I'll pardon you.

Oh, wow.

Because Mueller is going after Trump associates first.

That's what they do in these things.

It's all about Russia.

It is.

All roads lead to Russia.

This guy is so true.

It's the Rosetta Stone of his poor mangled brain is he's always always thinking about Russia.

And that's what I do think he's going to be thinking about it.

Well, he's right to be worried about that.

Because, I mean, whatever we know about it, he knows way more and he knows what he did.

And what he did was bad.

What he did was basically he owed Russia money and instead of paying them, he gave them America.

Okay.

So

let me ask about another country because he did make this big speech about Afghanistan this week.

And, you know, I must tell you, I'm of two minds about Afghanistan.

On the one hand, we've been there for 16 years.

I think of the John Kerry statement, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a lie?

On the other hand, you know, all these presidents, they talk about when they're running, they want to get out.

And then when they get in, the generals take them in a little room, and I'm like, what do they tell them?

And I think what they tell them is

it's all bullshit about Afghanistan.

We're there to babysit Pakistan.

Pakistan already has the Taliban in there.

They have nuclear weapons.

They asked Obama once, what keeps you up at night?

And he wouldn't answer, and he wouldn't answer.

And he finally said, Pakistan, because they have nuclear weapons.

And we can't let the Taliban take over that country with nuclear weapons.

I'm kind of down with that, I must say.

But if you notice in that speech in which Donald Trump committed us, frankly, to endless war,

he did not give any details of how we would be getting out of Afghanistan in the long run.

In fact, repeated several times.

You're going for the fake thing.

It's It's not about Afghanistan.

We're not trying to end the war.

That's the bullshit for the people.

We are there forever because Pakistan has the nuclear weapons and the Taliban.

And Donald Trump did not actually

single out the Taliban as the actual enemy.

And that, I think, is a very important point to underscore when you talk broadly about terrorism.

So 9-11 happens.

United States goes in under the Bush administration to take out these terrorist safe havens.

The decision is made that a ground war is the best way to do that.

The Taliban becomes the number one enemy.

Several years go by, Obama administration comes in and realizes actually Osama bin Laden was housed by the Taliban, but we need to go after al-Qaeda, dismantle those terrorist networks.

Yes, Osama bin Laden found in Pakistan.

Now we have a president who has not said who is the actual enemy.

Is it ISIS?

What are these terrorist networks we are going after?

Because frankly, a ground war is not what we do anywhere else in the world to attack and track down terrorists.

Again, we're not really there because we think we can change Afghanistan or win anything.

We're there because we need troops on the border of the country that might get taken over by crazy Taliban people who then have nuclear weapons.

Do you think

that is going to stop that from happening?

Do you think that's going to give us some kind of tactical advantage?

We're in a sink there.

I don't agree with you.

If the Taliban took over,

I would feel better if we had thousands of troops nearby.

Crazy people run Pakistan and they have nukes.

what's just

a nice thing.

But the people of Pakistan,

so the counterterrorism cooperation the United States has with Pakistan is critically important throughout the region.

We do not have permanent military bases the way we do in the Middle East right now to be launching and doing activities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

And to be fair, the Pakistan

civilians and the military have made many, many sacrifices in the war on terror, for which the United States often reimburses monetarily.

But there is a duplicity to this entire process, which is what has has always gotten under the military's skin.

And the duplicity is you have leadership in place that refuses to lose the power base of mullahs being able to turn out voters.

So it is a, since the 1980s, this is a very tense and complicated relationship and a dance in which both sides are benefiting, but both sides are being duplicitous.

Issue three.

The eclipse.

Turning into John McLaughlin.

He's making me crazy.

Trump is making me crazy, by the way.

I I so resent the fact that we just have to talk about him every week.

That whatever brain fart comes out of his head, we have to all debate it because he's a five-year-old and we're the man his mother brought home from the bar.

And we have to

pretend to be interested in what he says.

Anyway, which is why he's never going to resign.

You know, a lot of my family liberals think he's going to resign.

Oh, please, he loves it.

He's going to spend more time with it.

And she's more.

Yes.

Okay, so.

All right.

Ivanka Trump.

greatest disappointment so far.

I mean, really, Ivanka, you couldn't even stop the transgender in the military thing.

I thought this was your area.

Probably she has no sway over daddy.

But listen, for the eclipse, she tweeted, excited for eclipse.

Remember to wear your glasses.

Didn't get that note to dad either.

And then hashtag NASA.

Well, you know, NASA, you mean the group that your father rejects their climate change studies?

Because the eclipse, essentially about the eclipse, scientists predicted something would happen.

And then it happened.

They didn't take a poll or go to a town hall and ask the people if they thought it was a hoax.

They predicted it would happen and it did.

Could we apply that to anything else?

It's a cheap laugh.

It's a cheap.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was making the same point.

I think it's a cheap laugh.

Because if you look at the way...

It's a cheap laugh?

Yeah, okay, there is no such thing as a cheap laugh.

I'm sorry.

No, there is.

In the sense that people, when they make predictions about climate change, which is real and which is the world's getting warmer and man is causing this,

but when they make predictions about it, those predictions are difficult.

They don't happen like clockwork, like eclipses do.

It's a different type of predictive.

The actual science behind climate change is

99%

of scientists agree on climate change 94% agree that tobacco causes cancer so it is actually in scientific ways more certain that tobacco

point yes thank you but here's what's happening

what are you talking about

Of course, there's a hurricane now.

Do we know if that hurricane was specifically souped up by climate change?

No, because there are always going to be hurricanes, but we know that the weather is going to get more horrible because of climate change.

We actually know the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has studied hurricanes and have said there's no reported observed effect change in the intensity and frequency of hurricanes over the last 100 years.

It's because they're scientists, just like epidemiologists would hate to say, well, your lung cancer, not particularly because you smoke, but there is a causal link.

Here's what bothers me as a political person.

The percentage of Republicans who deny climate science doubled.

between 2015 and 2016.

There wasn't new science that said, oh gee, we were wrong.

It was Mr.

Trump.

It's a Trump effect.

Stupidity is contagious.

Okay?

And he is a typhoid married stupid.

He's going across the country, feeding this garbage to people.

I'm from Southeast Texas.

I'm glad of what you said.

I have family and friends in the path of that storm, and my heart is with them now, too.

And you're right, you can't say Harvey is caused by

the USA.

Climate change has gotten to the point where the CIA and the military are actively working.

The The military, right.

The military is actually looking at climate change as a national security issue.

They're on the back.

Water levels rise, droughts happen.

These are the types of issues.

Refugees, things that are going to involve them.

Trump's golf course in Scotland is dealing with climate change.

He had to try to get some variants to try to build a seawall or something to protect them from the rising tide.

So

golf course Trump, businessman Trump, if he can make a buck, he's going to be for it.

But find a way.

I don't know what it is.

Find a way that he makes money off of climate change.

He'll switch like that.

So uh we have a uh treasury

uh we have a treasury secretary great looking guy steve minuchin uh who

who is a uh a newlywed he's a very rich man steve he was a partner at goldman sachs you know this and he was rich enough to also be a movie producer and i guess on the set he he met an actress uh who uh Louise Linton, who grew up in Scotland, a castle in Scotland.

And they fell in love and they got married in June.

It was presided over by Mike Pence.

Wow, very exciting.

So last week, the newlyweds decided to take a little day trip and they took a government plane to Fort Knox to look at the money.

I am not making this up, which was bad enough, but when

Mrs.

Mnuchin got off the plane, she posted an Instagram pic, getting off the plane, and hashtagged all all the designer stuff she was wearing.

Hashtag Roland Murray pants, Tom Ford Sonnies, Hermes Scarf, Valentino Rock stud heels, Valentino.

Of course she got killed on social media for being a clueless entitled Marie Antoinette,

at which time she posted a response that was even worse.

She wrote, do you think this was a personal trip?

Adorable.

Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband?

I'm pretty sure we paid more taxes today on our day trip than you did.

Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice per year is a lot more than you'd be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours.

This chick has balls, let me tell you.

But this wasn't her first arrogant post.

We had our real-time Russian hackers

dig up

some of the recent Instagrams from Mrs.

Mnuchin that she had deleted, but we got them again.

Would you like to hear them?

Because, oh,

like she put this on Instagram, Fort Knox, bitches, he literally showed me the money.

Hashtag gold-fingered.

Back off, girls, he's mine.

Jews will not replace me.

Hashtag locks him up.

That moment you fire one of the help for stealing your Gucci sunglasses, then realize they were on your head the whole time.

Hashtag help wanted.

Had three orgasms on our honeymoon night, and I was just looking at his financial statements.

Hashtag rocks my World Bank.

This is me on the set of Cabin Fever.

This isn't a scene from the film, I'm Shooting the Caterer.

I said no gluten.

It costs a fortune and dozens of workmen to maintain this.

The castle's expensive, too.

Hashtag, rock the moat.

Good morning, hey, Atavanka Trump.

Mine didn't make me convert to Jewism.

Jealous much?

Hashtag getting piggy with it.

When you rent the whole beach and some whale washes.

Hashtag flea willie.

And you think I don't work?

Try fucking this.

Hashtag fake America great again.

All right.

Scream out Frank.

He is a best-selling author and New York Times columnist.

Frank Brudy is over here.

Frank.

How are you, sir?

Great pleasure to meet you.

Nice to see you.

Okay.

Well, Frank, I've wanted you here for a long time, but not more than lately because you have written two columns that were such music to my ears.

The first one was called, I'm a White Man, Hear Me Out.

What, about this new phenomenon that as a white man, somehow we're just disqualified for being in the debate, and somebody's got to speak up for the white men without the tiki torches.

I mean, we'd still have something going on.

Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

All right, we'll talk about it.

All right.

No, no, I wrote that because there are a lot of debates that happen these days.

I mean, you've listened to them, I think you've commented on them.

Where you get the message that if you are not part of a minority group, if you haven't suffered in that exact way, you can't possibly be empathetic and you can't possibly understand.

And I think that's one of the things right now that divides us.

I agreed with just about everything Reverend Jackson said.

I'm a white person, and that needs to be acknowledged that I'm not the enemy.

He's not saying I am, but often, you know, you go on Twitter, it's, of course, easy to talk about Twitter because it's such a flea market.

But you go on Twitter and you see this sort of oppression Olympics, where if you are not as oppressed as I am,

then don't tell me you can be on my side.

What I said in that column, I'm a white man, and so a lot of people say you have nothing to say.

I'm also a gay man, right?

So that brings about this assumption that I have some experience.

But you know what?

My being a white man.

Thank you, Bill.

We're seeing each other after the show.

Why, has something changed?

No.

In you.

No, I mean,

I am white, and I need to be cognizant of the fact that certain privileges, utterly unearned, have come with that.

I am gay, and so I understand perhaps what it means to be an outsider.

Neither one of those things tells you anything about my character, right?

My character is what matters, not what category I fit into.

A category isn't a credential.

Right.

So

you quote Mark Lillow.

Yeah.

Okay.

Who is Mark Lilla?

He's a Columbia University professor.

Okay.

I should know him better if you know him.

Okay.

So,

and he wrote this great thing.

He kind of summed it up.

He said, we're kind of confronted with this demand.

You must understand my experience, and you can't understand my experience, which does put us in a crazy position that we can't possibly fulfill.

It gives you no real estate to stand on.

Okay.

So,

the other column you wrote that I really loved was called These Campus Inquisitions Must Stop.

And I've been on this page for many, many years.

I've noticed.

Yes.

And I was myself disinvited to speak at Berkeley before they re-invited me.

And it just seems to me like what you learn at college for maybe $60,000 a year is that if you can find anyone anywhere who is less sensitive than you, you can get them fired.

Because the best person is always the one who censors the most things.

And this is tearing this country apart, I think.

I agree.

I agree.

Well, I wrote that column specifically about something that happened at Evergreen State College.

I think maybe some people

know what happened there

in Washington, right?

Yeah.

There's something that happens every year there called the Day of Remembrance, and it's a day devoted to racial healing, and usually black students voluntarily leave campus to have discussions and all that about that sort of stuff.

This year someone suggested that maybe white students should leave instead and a white biology professor said, you know, I don't like the sounds of that.

That feels to me like someone suggesting segregation.

Now you can agree or disagree with what he said.

What came back at him for simply kind of you know putting that out there for debate, what came back at him was that he was a racist, that he was a white supremacist.

This was shouted at him.

You can see the videos on YouTube.

He had to stay away from campus for a while.

He has to be allowed to bring up a point that's utterly worthy of debate without confronting those sorts of slurs.

And when I wrote about this, interestingly, one of the responses I got from a reader was, So many of the black students at Evergreen have experiences of suffering and all that.

Why are you wasting your sympathy on a white man?

And literally the reader wrote, he's white, he'll be fine.

That's the kind of thinking that I think is so divisive and destructive and that we have to do away with.

And it's also the kind of thinking that got whites, which are still 69% of the country, I think, to vote like a minority in 2016.

I think because they were, many of them felt like they were being treated that way, which is insane because they're not.

But I mean, this is a big problem the Democratic Party has to face.

Many Trump voters were absolutely out and out racist, but some, I think, were frustrated with these things that we're describing right now.

I think there are a lot of people out there of good heart, you know, who want to be able to have a conversation about all of this without feeling like they're stepping on eggshells all the time.

And I think right now we have a world of eggshells.

Exactly, yes.

And you know who else was called a racist during the campaign?

Was Hillary Clinton?

Yeah, because she used the word super predator in the past.

In 1996, and we won't even go into all that, but I mean, we saw these stats this week.

A poll finally came out.

12% of Bernie Sanders' voters didn't vote for Hillary.

They voted for Trump.

Yeah.

Enough to swing the election.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Remember that.

So speaking of Hillary, the book came out, or her book is coming out, so they released a little excerpt, and it was about

the time at the debate when Trump was behind her, lurking and skulking.

She said, he was literally breathing down my neck, my skin crawled, and she wondered, do you stay calm?

and keep smiling and carry on, even though,

even as he was repeatingly invading your space, or do you turn and look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, back up, you creep,

which would have been a better title for the book, by the way.

Back up you creep, right?

To me, I would say so much better B.

She chose A.

Say it.

In a world now, in a country absent where people have any knowledge of politics or policy of what's going on, what they go by is authenticity.

That would have been an authentic moment, and that to me is what cost her the election.

She was never authentic.

She never did what she felt.

Trump does everything he feels.

I think you're dead right on that.

I mean

she didn't need to say the word creep because I think we've all gotten that loud and clear.

And Donald Trump has never pulled up right behind me and my skin crawls every day nonetheless.

Right.

Right.

But you're right.

If she had said back up, you creep or anything, I think people crave those moments from her.

Remember her best moment in 2008 was when she teared up in New Hampshire and it wasn't about the tears.

It was about the real feeling.

I saw you make a fit.

I totally disagree.

First, she won the debates.

That's her best times in the campaign.

She wasn't the better stump speaker.

She wasn't the better this, that.

She clocked him in the debates.

And then lost the elections.

Well, yeah.

But if she had said that, first off, all the right-wing media would have been on her.

She cracked under pressure.

She can't do.

That was the authentic Hillary.

Hillary is careful.

She's reasoned.

She's cautious.

She's very careful about her words.

And that sounds really good to me right now, living under this president.

Okay, I would take that freaking heart.

And that goes, honestly, to the mixed messages.

The mixed messages that women have been getting for a long time, and that my generation of women are trying to wrestle with and figure out.

You are told, on the one hand, that if you're in a parking lot at night walking alone, take your keys and put them through your knuckles so you can knock that creeper out if he comes up against you.

But if you're in the daytime in a business setting, be like Teflon.

Just deal with it and move on because you don't want to be the woman who complains.

So

Hillary's generation, Hillary's generation, that was their model.

And the next generation of millennial women, we are taking a different tack.

I'm glad to see that authenticity matters, but we're only now seeing what that could look like for women in the public space.

But she didn't read the

next line in her book there, which I think would be more how she would be likely to play it.

It was something along the lines of, you will not intimidate me as you have intimidated so many other women.

It's like this robotic presentation that she's always...

That was the same debate, though.

The creeper moment was the same debate of this, I think it was a week of finding out about, where he called her a nasty woman, and where we found out about all the grabbing women's cards.

So, right, there's a lot of context around her saying, you're not going to do this to me.

But see, this is my point.

I want to push back against you a little.

I really think the Democrats are fighting the last war in a country that no longer exists.

In 2000, we all remember Hillary was debating Rick Lazio, and he walked over to her,

just walked over to her, and people were appalled.

Just like in the 50s, they saw McCarthy, Joe McCarthy on TV, and they were like, oh, we don't like this.

I think that's a civilization gone with the wind.

What I saw at that rally Tuesday night in Arizona was people chanting.

Now, this is not the majority of Americans, but there were plenty of people in that hall who weren't objecting to people chanting that John McCain.

who is suffering a war hero, native son, suffering from brain cancer, and they're chanting he should die, that he's a traitor they're looking at a guy who sold the country out to Russia and chanting that this guy is a traitor so I just don't think we're in that country anymore

that good country

I think that is a good point and Paul I mean just to push back you in a different way you said Hillary won the debate she did she won all three debates by miles right the problem is that's not what elections are all about and if Democrat I wanted her to win that election I want to create the debate I want Democrats to take back Congress in 2018 but they have to realize which electorate they're playing to.

And the debates aren't everything.

They have to be practical and ruthless and relentless in a way that they're not often good at.

I totally get that, Frank.

Believe me.

But I also think if you try to make her into something, she's not, which is, she's not somebody who in a national stage is going to turn around and be

rude or tough like that.

I mean, she's very tough.

So let's talk about next time.

But yeah, so next time.

Next time, not that.

Maybe we need to, but Marco Rubio tried to answer him insult for insult.

Remember, mocked the size of our president's hands.

And it didn't work for him.

You get somebody good at it.

Yeah, but, you know,

don't get another bad person.

I totally get that.

But I think that the needs for the Democrats are much deeper.

And they're,

well, to begin with, we have to talk, as you said, we have to be able to break out of our own bubble.

And the Democratic Party, from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, and really Barack Obama, was minority working people and white working people.

And all of a sudden somehow we have,

Trump appealed to them, but we have also

dissed them.

Right there, their life expectancy is declining.

And we didn't say anything about it.

You know, so I think there's some of this is on the Democrats, but to come back to identity politics, that is not the answer for those folks, because they just played identity politics.

That's also the false assumption with the identity politics is that working class people are not diverse and do not understand or have experience with diversity.

There is an aspect of of losing equality, sorry, that losing privilege can feel like oppression.

So equality can feel like oppression to some.

It is not the same thing as actually genuinely being oppressed.

It is such delusion.

I mean that guy who committed the crime in Charlottesville, he had the money to travel there.

He had a Dodge Charger, I think.

The idea that this guy thinks he's the one who's been dealt a bad hand in America is just,

that is crazy delusion.

The answer is, as Frank said, is not victimization Olympics.

When I first started working for Bill Clinton, the Republicans were big on wedge issues.

And I said this to him, 1991.

He's the governor of Arkansas.

I said, Governor, we've got to find our wedges to divide their coalition.

He said, no.

And he stitched his fingers together.

And he does have extraordinarily large hands.

And

he does.

And he, I'm sorry, Mr.

Trump, but.

And he was not afraid to use me.

But he said

all over you, yeah.

He said, we don't need wedge issues, we need web issues.

The truth is, if we had spoken to the legitimate economic needs of a lot of those white working class, some of them would never be forced because some are, as you said, racist, but most of them are not.

They're good people who love their country, and we abandon them as much as they abandon us.

And I think if we reach out beyond identity to things that will stitch people back together, that's the only hope for Democrats.

The Republicans win by dividing.

It's the Democrats who have to be able to pull people back together.

Absolutely.

Democrats also need you.

Youth.

Yeah.

They need to to give you the youth.

Well, they have youth, they just need them to vote.

Well, they need to give the youth a chance to come to the foreground, you know?

Let me ask you one more thing.

The monuments issue is really kind of big in this country right now, and obviously they're talking about getting rid of the Civil War generals and so forth.

Now they're talking about getting rid of Frank Rizzo, who was the racist mayor of Philadelphia.

I guess there's a statue of him.

Columbus.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, Columbus discovered America.

First of all, he didn't.

Second of all, if he hadn't, it's not like somebody else wouldn't have.

You think we'd still be undiscovered in 2017?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I don't give a shit about statues.

I think they should all come down for these assholes.

They want to rename Nathaniel Hall.

But a friend of mine was saying last week, I was in New York, and we were kind of laughing at it.

He said, What about the statue of Ralph Cramden at the Port Authority bus station?

I mean,

his catchphrase to his wife was, I'm going to to punch you in the face.

To the moon, Alice.

And we were laughing.

I was like, yeah, but you could get that going in two seconds.

Trust me, it's on Twitter now.

Bring Ralph Bramden down.

Hashtag, no more mitting women into the moon.

I mean, you're talking about Democrats' problems in reaching out to people.

How do you make a situation in which the entire country is engaged in an absolutely proper revulsion at what happened in Charlottesville?

And also, I think critically or or rightly being critical of the president's reaction to that.

And then he tries to say, you know, how do you draw a line between George Washington and Robert E.

Lee?

Pretty easy line to draw.

Like

one guy was engaged in treason for slavery.

It's not so hard.

And so to take that and say, okay.

Let's go after all the statues now.

Let's actually engage in that slippery slope that he's warning us about ridiculously.

Don't do it.

We don't have to do that.

The Democrats should change their mascot from the donkey to the largemouth bass.

Because any shiny object Trump trolls in front of us, bam, we hit it.

No, can we just stick on Nazis are not very fine people, Mr.

President, right?

Before we worry about General Lee or not, they should all go their participation trophies, if you ask me.

Okay, I don't think that losers, they don't deserve those trophies.

But that's not the debate.

That's not what Trump wants.

It's not on the level.

And I don't understand why liberals don't understand that.

Trump is playing them.

Give one more quote.

I'm sorry.

This is because this does get personal to me.

And I would think everybody here, because we're all media or media adjacent.

He went went after the media again this week.

These are truly dishonest people.

They're bad people and I really think they don't like our country.

You know, this sort of dehumanizing,

the chanting about McCain,

where you have absolutely no compassion,

you know, this is what Rwanda and Nazi Germany and when you make it so that people don't feel any compassion for another group of people, you open the door for absolutely the worst demons to come.

I don't think we're going to get machetes by the river, Bill, is the good news of that.

Not machetes.

We don't need

better stuff than that.

One of the kind of amusing things is that all that came about five minutes after he said that this is a movement built on love.

Went into that.

But then he pointed out or tried to point out the cameras, you know, they're turning them off.

They won't show the crowd size.

He says, as they're showing the crowd size, with the camera turned on, at some point, he just becomes kind of what the Cubans used to do with Fidel Castro, which is watch him talk on TV with the sound down and laugh at him because he looks like a jackass, just waving his hands like this all the time.

He's been playing these same things over and over again.

I think it's kind of losing its effect.

Okay, last word did you want to?

Yeah, I was gonna say that this is part of the danger, the cultural challenge that we're facing right now is a president who is insisting on undermining all the values of our democracy.

And he's laughing to the bank as we do it.

This is what happens in the developing world, and none of us want to be living there.

Okay, thank you very much.

Terrific panel, time for new rules.

All right.

New Rule, now that the dust has settled, let's all admit that this is really good lighting for white people.

It just is.

But put these guys outside in the daytime without the benefit of candlelight, and they look like this.

New Rule, if you want to play the Powerball lottery, stop selling the tickets in sketchy liquor stores.

If you go into this place and come out alive, you've already won the lottery.

New Rule,

parsley, we cover the waterfront here.

Parsley, oh, this is an issue I've been wanting to get to.

Parsley has to admit it's not a garnish.

It's just a weed that photobombs food.

If all you do is sit there and add color, you're not cuisine.

You're the black guy at a Trump rally.

Parsley.

New rules, someone has to help me decide who is the bigger dumbass, Trump, who looked directly at the eclipse

or Jeff Sessions who prayed to it.

New rule, Sears, just stop.

I know, we go way back, but this is getting sad.

It's like at the end when Sinatra couldn't remember the words.

At least make yourself useful.

Open the doors and let the homeless sleep on the silly postropedics.

And finally, New Rule, moving forward, every previously unwritten rule about the presidency must be written down.

If Donald Trump has taught everyone who ever dealt with him one thing, it's get it in writing.

And the American people are just the latest suckers to learn that the hard way.

The Declaration of Independence starts with the words, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Self-evident.

Because the founders assumed some things were so obviously repugnant, they would just be covered by a sense of shame.

And these were guys who owned slaves.

But Trump reminds us that some people will break every rule that's not specifically enumerated, from inviting Russian spies into the Oval Office, to not releasing his taxes, from insisting law enforcement be loyal to him personally, to maintaining a for-profit business empire while in office, we are learning nothing is just understood anymore.

It's like when they write do not eat on silica gel packs.

I wouldn't eat one, but apparently some people open a shipping box and say, great, my new sneakers are here, and they came with snacks.

When you're a babysitter, when you hire a babysitter, you write down a list of rules.

No boyfriend visits, no loud music, stay out of my greenhouse.

But no one thinks they have to write down, don't put the baby in the microwave.

Well, with Trump, you do.

He reminds me of that Disney movie, Gus.

Remember Gus about a mule who's signed by a football team to be their kicker?

You see, because the rule rule book never specifically said that the players had to be human

ready Gus

boys

and that's Trump

it is

He's the owner of a football team who signs a mule because it doesn't explicitly say he can't.

You think he's going to release his tax returns just because the others did?

Not as long as Gus keeps kicking those field goals.

Presidents certainly have the right to appoint who they want to top posts, but we forgot to write down, okay, but they can't all go to your son-in-law.

Nepotism is fine if you're a junk dealer like on Sanford and son.

It's not fine when NATO has a conference on bioterrorism and you send your daughter the purse designer.

American presidents, every one of them, just knew it was the right thing to divest themselves of all business holdings if they were so honored as to become president.

Because we don't want a president who's got his mind on his money and his money on his mind.

Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm.

George Bush sold his baseball team.

Sarah Palin closed down her meth lab.

We did not elect a swamp-draining reformer.

We gave our PIN number to a Nigerian prince.

There is no more self-evident.

We didn't think we had to write down when Russians or Nazis attack America, side with America.

We didn't think we had to write down, don't run your crime family from the Oval Office, don't threaten to throw your political opponents in jail, don't talk shit in front of children.

Don't,

well, fuck, I don't even know what this is, but don't do it.

And finally, a question that is asked a lot lately is: can a president pardon himself?

And again, we don't know, since no one ever had the balls or the bad taste to try.

Because Madison and Jefferson never thought the executive branch would fall into the hands of a mule that plays football.

But Trump actually asked his staff.

He said, Can I pardon myself?

And Steve Bannon told him, Why not?

I can blow myself.

All right, that's our show.

We're off next week and back September 8th.

I'll be at the Microsoft here in LA, October 7th, at a Madison Square Garden, November 11th in New York.

I want to thank Matt Welch, Paul Bagala, Nayera Hook, Frank Bruney, and Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Join us now for overtime.

Thank you.

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