Ep. #688: Gov. Josh Shapiro, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Sam Stein

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Thank you.
Stay down there. Thank you very much.
How's everybody? Thank you. Thank you so much.
All right. Thank you so much.
I know it's... Thank you, people.

Please, we have a big show.

Big show, please.

We've got to start our St. Patrick's Day celebration weekend, right?

It's St. Patrick's Day in a couple of days.

I already saw a guy puking in the street.

No, I did.

He was my stockbroker.

I said, what's the matter?

He said, I'm sick of winning.

Yeah, the stock market...

The stock market has lost $5 trillion in three weeks.

Yes.

Trump, he's the Ozempic of the economy.

Wow.

Five trillion.

Today, Greenland offered to buy us.

There are...

There are CEOs out there begging Luigi Mangione

to shoot them in the back of the head.

Yes, it turns out that the stock market has really kind of rejected the notion that if we turn on our trading partners, chickens would lay more eggs. yeah I I mean, when Biden was president, it was everything about the eggs, the price of eggs.
We've got to lower the price of eggs. And now Trump retweeted somebody last week who said, shut up about the eggs.
And Americans are like, but we need eggs. What else are we going to throw at the Teslas? But, you know what? Five trillion in three weeks, and we have only ourselves to blame.
Trump said this would happen if we re-elected Biden. Oh, wait, that didn't happen.
No, this is happening because Trump wants to bring back manufacturing, and to get the ball rolling, he is manufacturing a recession. And every day...
Every day, he plays, let's spin the big tariff wheel. Whoo! Round and around she goes.
Where she stops, nobody knows. And every day, Trump puts these amazingly large tariffs on other countries, and when the countries respond with their tariffs, he acts shocked at their disrespect.
How dare you do to me what I just did to you?

But the level of North Korea, shall we say, that the responses from the Republican Party here,

just pretending it's either not happening or it's a good thing, or the euphemisms here,

$5 trillion in three weeks, and they said it's going through the stock market, the economy's going through a period of transition. It's, yes number.
Yeah, just a number that indicates the amount of how much less money you had than last week. But here's the big headline in this.
Americans, just regular everyday Americans, including a lot of people who voted for this administration, are now starting to lose their faith in this administration. I talked to a guy the other day.
He used to be out there singing YMCA, and now he's living there.

All right, well, we've got a great show.

We've got Sam Scott and Batia Ungar-Sargon.

And first up, he is the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.

That's all we need to say.

Josh Shapiro is here.

Governor, how are you?

Good to see you.

I'm having a thank you for coming here. Glad to be here.
All right. It's proud you guys.
Oh, I know. They're fired up.
And look, I'm going to get right to it with you. I mean, things are rough.
We don't have time to fuck around. Okay.
Let's do it. We really don't.
I'm ready. So, Mike, first question.
I'm not going to ask you if you're going to run for president. Okay.
I'm going to ask you this. And before I do, I'm going to preface it by saying I think one of the mistakes Democrats make is that they're too modest.
If one thing Trump has taught us is that Americans don't hate a braggart. I think a lot of people who criticize the left, who want them to do better, think they don't brag upon themselves or their accomplishments as much as they should.
So here's my question. Not if you're running.
My question is, so many people now put you on that short list. Why do so many people see you as this guy who might be the guy? You know, Bill, I've run for statewide office in Pennsylvania three times.
I've won each of those times. And each time I ran, I set a record for either getting the most votes or winning by the most.
I won when Hillary Clinton lost. I outperformed Joe Biden and got more votes than anybody ever running for governor in Pennsylvania.
Well, that's a good start. I got the greatest votes ever.
No, no, no, no, no. You asked the question.
You asked the question. You asked the question.
Pennsylvania is the ultimate swing state. I govern a state with a divided legislature.
For the last two years, I was the only governor in the entire country with a divided legislature. Yet we found ways to fix our unconstitutional education system, bring $3.7 billion in private sector investment into Pennsylvania.
Cut taxes six times.

Speed up government.

Took eight weeks to get a business license.

The dad was sworn in as governor.

Now it takes just three days.

And we hired 1,500 new cops on the streets, and crime is down 36%.

So we're delivering results in the ultimate swing state in the nation. Okay, so that's that wing of the party.
Then there's this other wing, and we saw the fight between the two today because the government was going to shut down because the Democrats are very mad at Trump shutting down the government, so now they're going to shut it down. It's very confusing.
Very confusing. But the Republicans proposed a budget, and Chuck Schumer said he would vote for it and then did and got 10 Democratic senators to vote with him.
The other side of the party is furious at this. AOC pretty much called him a traitor.
Where do you stand on this? Did Schumer do the right thing, or is the other part of the party right? Because that is the divide in the party. I mean, here's the thing.
I'm not an expert in the D.C. stuff.
I try and stay as far away from that as I can. I live in the real world in Pennsylvania where we have to balance budgets.
We've got to bring Republicans and Democrats together to get stuff done. But here's what I will tell you.
I think it is a false choice to suggest you need either or. Either you need that resistance, that fight, that opposition, or you need to find ways to compromise and come together.
I think that's a false choice. But this was a specific vote.
I think you can try to do both. Well, you can vote both ways.
You need to vote yay or nay. I would have liked to see, when Chuck Schumer had leverage here, to say we need A, B, C and D for the Democratic Party and force the Republicans to meet him halfway on those issues and deliver something for the folks who are worried now.
You know, Bill, I got to tell you, how can you force Republicans to do anything? Because they need a Democratic votes in the United States Senate. And I'll tell you what, this weekend I was at Dick's Sporting Goods, a great western Pennsylvania-based company, by the way.
Thank you. They should be advertisers on your show.
A lot of people on the crowd say that every week. And I'm buying cleats for my kids for baseball season.
And one after another, the other moms and dads who were there doing the same thing came over to me and said, I'm worried. What are folks doing? What's happening? I feel that worry.
I channel their worry, their anxiety into my work. I hope folks in D.C.
are listening to these people that I heard at the store that I see every day. They're worried.
They want to see action. There was an opportunity for more action here.

I wish more was able to get done

on the issues that matter most.

But don't let anybody tell you,

you have to be a party of resistance

or you have to be a party of getting stuff done.

I think you can be both,

and I think it's a false choice

to suggest it's an either or.

Okay, well, the way I see it now,

if you're running, and I think you are...

You're not letting this go, are you? No, no, no. No think it's good you are.
I like the field so far. Rahm Emanuel, I think, is going to run.
It looks like our governor here, Gavin Newsom, I think it's going to run. Pete Buttigieg, those are the people I see.
And they're all sort of on the same page, which is the Democrats, they're either people who are moving to the center, have moved to the center.

They got the memo, I think.

What I fear is the Democratic primary voter who doesn't want that kind of person.

Yeah.

They want the firebrand.

What do you do in the Democratic primary?

You know, well, first off, I'm not planning any 2028 campaign.

I'm sitting here.

I see what you're trying to do there.

But I can tell you.

That's not bad. I can tell you.
look, I've always been the same person. I've always been true to my values.
I've always tried to lead with moral clarity. And I've always tried to be a Democrat that knows how to work with both sides to actually get stuff done.
And when I ran for governor in 2022, nobody primaried me from the left. Even though I ran a campaign on hiring more police, cutting taxes, investing in public education, common sense things that matter to people.
I led on those things. I got through a campaign with no primary and I won with more votes than anybody in the history of Pennsylvania running for governor in the toughest state in our nation.
So I get the narrative that you're talking about here. I'm just telling you, in the reality I live in,

what I find people want is they want you to show up on their farms

and in their town squares.

They want you to give a damn about them.

They want you to help their kid who's battling an opioid addiction.

They want you to put money back in their pockets,

and they want to know that their kid has a good school to go to and a safe way to get to and from school. That's what they want.
That's the common sense stuff I focus on in Pennsylvania every day. Yeah, common sense is going to be what wins this election.
I mean, Trump has already said in his speech the other day, I want a revolution of common sense. The fact that he, with all that he's doing right now, can appropriate that term.
I'm not sure he's the arbiter of common sense. He's not.
But the fact that enough people in this country, certainly that's one reason why he won the election, is people who still didn't even like him but saw the Democrats as less commonsensical. I think that is a fair criticism about where things stood on Election Day.
But we're now, what, 45, 50 or so days into his presidency. It's not common sense what he did to press a button and start a tariff war with our two biggest trading partners.
And let me tell you what I hear in Pennsylvania about that concrete decision that he made. I got farmers, poultry farmers, excuse me, dairy farmers in Pennsylvania.
Their number one export market is Mexico. Now their products cost 25 percent more when they're trying to sell in Mexico.
They're losing market share. I got Voith, which is the largest hydropower manufacturing company in North America, in York, Pennsylvania, who, by the way, buys their steel, not from Canada,

but from domestically here in the United States,

their products cost more because Donald Trump started a tariff war,

a trade war with our friends.

It's tanking the stock market.

It's jacking up costs for farmers and for manufacturers.

It's making goods cost more.

And I think it's frustrating the American people.

That is not common sense.

Common sense is meeting our farmers where they are

I'm like... OK.
Well, you're right. No, I'm telling you.
I say that to everybody who sits here. Everybody.
Not everybody. I was flattered for a second.
No, no. But, like, you were on the short list for vice president last time, Pennsylvania.
And a lot of people said, well, the only reason he didn't get it was because he's Jewish. And there was a wing of this party that is very anti-Israel now, which is a big change in my lifetime.
Because the Democrats used to be a very pro-Israel place. And then it all got switched around.
Do you think that's true? And if you ran, if, wouldn't you, somebody has to sort of, like, defend the Jews, like, outright? Because I just feel there's a lot of tiptoeing back away from this issue. Like, we just don't want to go near it.
As opposed to saying, well, actually, this is our friend in the Middle East who lives a life. What? I'm sorry.
Go ahead. No, no, no.
I mean, look, I'll just say one quick thing on that whole vice president thing. I said all along that Kamala Harris had a deeply personal decision to make in that process.
In the end, so did I. I love being governor of Pennsylvania, and I love charting my own course and being able to serve the people on my terms.
That's point number one. Point number two is, as it relates to faith, as it relates to my Judaism, I'm damn proud of my faith.
And I'm damn proud... I'm damn proud of the good people of Pennsylvania and how they receive that.
Let me explain. I was the Attorney General of Pennsylvania when I decided to run for governor.
Folks kind of knew who I was, but when you launch a campaign for governor, we decided we wanted to, you know, introduce myself to the people of Pennsylvania. Not with some policy, not with some viewpoint, not with some issue, not with some attack on an opponent, but to tell them who I really am.
The first ad in my campaign was my family and I, my wife Lori and our four kids, sitting around the Sabbath dinner table, the Shabbat dinner table on a Friday night. We did that because every Friday night, that's where we find ourselves, together as a family, celebrating our faith.
We're proud of that. You know what happened, Bill, after we ran that ad? I'd show up in some of these rural communities where I might increase the Jewish population by 100% when I showed up there.
And folks would come over to me and they'd say, hey, I saw your ad. Let me tell you what it's like on Sunday afternoon when I come home from church.
Let me tell you what it's like on Christmas Eve. Let me tell you about our iftar dinners that we have during Ramadan.

Folks were more open about it

because I showed them truly who I am.

I think the American people are a warm people.

They are a loving people.

I represent the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

founded by William Penn,

who literally founded our Commonwealth on the promise of it being warm

and welcoming to people of all faiths.

I have a responsibility to carry that out,

and I'm inspired every day by the way my outward expression,

my faith is received by the people I serve.

All right. Governor Josh Shapiro, thank you for being here.

Let the race begin.

Let's meet our friends. Thank you.
Thank you, Governor. See you all the time.
Hello. Politics, huh? Okay, here's our panel.
He is the managing editor of The Bulwark and contributor for MSNBC. Sam Stein is back with us, Sam.
And she's a journalist and author of Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, Batya Ungar-Sargon, back with us. Okay, so just like I said, I'm going to...
We don't have time to fuck around. I've got to go right at you because, you know, I've known you for a while.

And when I first read you, you were a conservative Republican, but not crazy.

Like I read you in where? Newsweek, Time Magazine.

And I'm not saying you're crazy now.

But you went from just a conservative, leaning right to a Trump supporter.

Okay? Someplace I would never go.

And... I mean, the night is young, Bill.
It is not ever going to be that young. And I'm just wondering what you think now.
We're approaching two months in. I mean, you must have a feeling in your gut, look me in the eye and tell me you don't, that this is really going badly and I shouldn't have thrown my lot in with this team.

Oh, no, I feel the opposite.

All right.

Tell me why.

I'm so sorry, Bill.

No, no, tell me why.

No, I feel so proud of...

I mean, I was never a Republican or a conservative.

I was a leftist and I am still a leftist.

I'm just a MAGA leftist now, because... That makes no sense.
Would you like me to explain it to you? Please do. Yes, please.
When I look at what President Trump ran on and the agenda that he's enacting right now, he took a Republican Party that was built on social conservatism, foreign interventions and wars, and free trade and free markets. And he basically took an axe to all of those.
During the campaign, he said, look, I mean, he's pretty pro-gay. That's pretty obvious.
He appointed the highest-ranking out gay person, Scott Bessent, our Secretary of Treasury, which is incredible. And he sidelined the pro-life wing of his party.
He has changed the party, for sure. Okay, so he believes abortion should be legal for 12 weeks.
But free trade, you mentioned. On foreign intervention, he's anti-war.
He's trying to bring an end to all of these wars, okay? By surrendering, but yes. Okay.
He got... I mean, that is one way to end a war.
Well, you know, he's on the other side of another party that is quite pro-war and wants to keep the war going, right? But let's... Okay, so let me just get to the third point.
And the third point is, and he's not free trade, he does not believe in free trade. He looked at our destroyed manufacturing base.
He looked at the downwardly mobile working class. He looked at the fact that working class Americans can no longer afford the American dream.
And he looked at why that was, which was there was a handshake agreement between both parties that we should somehow have free trade, which resulted in shipping 5 million good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico.

And some came here.

No, what they did was they brought in millions and millions of illegal migrants

to compete with the jobs that remained here.

And what Donald Trump said was,

we have to stop selling out the working class.

That agenda that he laid out,

socially moderate, anti-war and anti-free trade protectionists,

that is a leftist agenda.

Sam, I will bring you in, I swear to God.

Thank you. That agenda that he laid out, socially moderate, anti-war and anti-free-trade protectionist, that is a leftist agenda.
Sam, I will bring you in, I swear to God. I appreciate that.
All right, so... You answer the question, but the tariffs are going to accomplish this? So I think I've been watching...
I feel like I've been living through a different two months.

I don't recognize this.

Although, I guess we should go

through the three points.

Just on the foreign policy, yes.

Sure, he's trying to end the war in Ukraine.

He's also threatening to annex Canada and invade Greenland and take over Panama. Those count for something, right? Those are foreign interventions.
He's not taking military force off the table. I think they're crazy, but that is foreign intervention.
In terms of domestic manufacturing jobs and the middle class and all that stuff, I hear you. He's reoriented the party.
But I think it is worth looking at some statistical stuff here, right? I went on to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as one does on a plane, and I was shocked to discover that domestic manufacturing actually peaked in the Biden years, that wages were high in the Biden years. Now, Biden actually is interesting because there's a little nuances.
Biden kept some of those tariffs in place. He sure did.
But Biden also did a little thing called carrots and sticks. He invested tons of money in chips and infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back.
Trump, by contrast, is erratic sticks, right? Canada, tariffs, off, on. Mexico, tariffs.
Oh, I had a good phone call with the president. They're off.
And that's just not a particularly healthy way to go about running the economy. We know that because the Dow is down, the markets are down, and this morning consumer confidence is way down.
And Trump himself, and I'll just stop here, was asked will there be a recession? And he said maybe.

And if the guy running the country thinks

there's going to be a recession, that is an implicit

admission that things are not particularly going very well.

I have a more basic question. Why do

we want to bring back manufacturing?

It's so 70s.

You know, I mean

that ship has sailed.

You know, there are countries that make jeans for $11.

We're never going to be that country again.

No, it's a good question.

I mean, we're...

The other...

China's moving into the AI age,

and he wants to go back to manufacturing,

which, by the way, if you create new jobs,

who's going to take them?

Robots.

Right.

That's who's going to take them anyway.

It's...

It acts like

progress itself is woke.

And nobody spoke more against woke

bullshit than me, but progress itself

is not woke. We've moved into

a different era. The AI revolution

is going to completely upend all of this.

It's going to make manufacturing jobs seem quaint and

obsolete. I will say this.

I will give some credit that

they seem to recognize that there needs to be huge

investments in AI and that we have to be

Thank you. It's going to make manufacturing jobs seem quaint and obsolete.
And I will say this. I will give some credit that they seem to recognize that there needs to be huge investments in AI and that we have to beat China to it.
But on numerous other fronts, progress is the key word. We're not making progress.
We're reverting. And for me, the one that really hits home is the funding for scientific research in this country, which is really a bastion of progress, we are ripping apart our universities.
We are ripping apart the NIH. We are not investing in biomedical research.
And, in fact, we're capping funds that are sent to universities for biomedical research all within the first eight weeks of this administration. If we want to talk about progress, that is the place where we have led for decades, and we are now going to be lapped by China because of the things that have happened in the past eight weeks.
Not only that, but, you know, diseases around the world, it's pennies on the dollar. He did this the first term.
He had a, there was a small group of people in China that was there to keep an eye out if, you know, a pandemic might be brewing. And he disbanded them because, you know, it cost money.
Pennies. We could have possibly averted what happened.
I mean, this is the five-year anniversary this week that we started to shut things down. Small little note on that.
USAID funding, small amount. Yes.
For Ebola monitoring. Do you know how much Ebola cost us in 2016? $4.3 billion.
It makes a lot of sense to invest, to catch it before it comes over here. Yes.
We rip that away. That's going to cost a ton of money if it comes roaring back.
It's like their attitude is like, well, that's happening over there. Fuck those people.
Stop giving them aid. If they die, so what? Okay, that's horrible.

But also, the diseases that start there are going to come here.

They always do.

The world is one big sphere where nothing ever stays where it starts.

So that doesn't concern you?

I want to answer the question about manufacturing in the 70s.

Oh, I don't blame you. I'd go back to that, too.
So, the reason people want to go back to the 70s is in the 70s, the largest share of our GDP was in the middle class. And that was not separate from the fact that 25% of our economy was in manufacturing.
Right. The largest share of our GDP.
Was in the middle class. The biggest chunk.
The middle class. Most of what was produced came from the middle.
And now it comes from what? The rich. Now the top 20% controls over 50% of the GDP.
Our economy was an upward funnel of wealth. And the largest share, which used to be in manufacturing, which gave a lot of working-class people a middle-class standard of living, now the largest share is in real estate and finance, meaning that asset-rich Americans are controlling over 50% of the GDP, and they have left the working class out of all of that prosperity that was generated.
That manufacturing is still being done. It's just being done in other countries.
It is still making... For wages we will not work for.
That's exactly right. You're right, Bill.
That's what the tariffs are for. They are to make American workers more competitive in the global market.
Why are we accepting that there should be a race to the bottom? You know, China, what is its competitive advantage over us? It's that it pays slave wages. Why should we accept that? They're still manufacturing our PPE, our pharmaceuticals, our cars.
They're making all that stuff. Trump says there are five industries that we cannot have any kind of national security without having a stake in them.
Pharmaceuticals, lumber, steel, aluminum, and I forget what the fifth one was, but these are really important, that we have a stake in the manufacturing of the things that we need as a nation, so that when China decides that it wants to go to war against us, we're not relying on them for steel and aluminum in order to fight them. Okay, well, at least that's an answer.
I mean, and you think it'll come out? And you think that's the way it's going to come out? We're going to go through this transition period? Well, right now, who's so upset right now? It's the stock market, right? Well, lots of people, even people who are not rich out there. Of course rich people are angry.
They're supposed to be, this is class warfare on behalf of the working class by our president. We're talking, yes, but also, we're talking about this in the lens of the private sector, and it's important, but I will just note, we've witnessed in the past, again, eight weeks, tens of thousands of public sector working class jobs that have just been slashed.
And I'm talking about people who work at FEMA, people who work at the Department of Defense, veterans who work at the Veterans Affairs, our park rangers. I mean, these are people who have working class jobs too.
Yes, it's on the public dime, but that doesn't make them any less important. And that seems to be completely lost in this conversation.
Now they say, oh, they'll get good jobs in the private sector. But that's just unrealistic.
Do you think there's zero waste? No, I didn't say that.

How much waste do you think there is? I think indiscriminately

firing probationary employees

just because they have the word probationary in front of their name

It's the way they did it. Is insane.

And I know it's insane. I know it's

insane.

We know

we know it's insane because

Elon Musk keeps waking up being like, oops, I didn't

mean to do that one. Let's rehire these people.

Right. And then they get rehired.

I know, but

Thank you. We know it's insane because Elon Musk keeps waking up being like, oops, I didn't mean to do that one.
Let's rehire these people. Right.
And then they get rehired. I know, but...
I'm not a fan of Musk. I'm not going to defend Elon Musk.
I don't think he's... I'm not a big fan of his.
Well, he's a big part of the administration. He's actually just been marginalized because he got into a fight with our Secretary of State and with Sean Duffy, our Secretary of Transportation.
Marginalized? Trump's selling his cars on the White House road.

He's now in an advisory role.

I know, but a president selling another guy's car in the driveway?

I mean, like, if Obama did it, they'd be like, yeah, sure, no problem.

I did not buy a sauber truck after that one. But you're not worried about, like, the...
I mentioned the North Korea aspect of this. No matter what he does or says, they just go along.
Now, maybe this will all turn out okay. I mean, Earth-based economists don't think so, but...
But maybe it will. But, like, in his speech, he said that we were spending money, you know, the waste thing, all the money we're wasting, on transgender mice, and it wasn't...
We're not making mice transgender. It was...
I bring up this example because it's plain.

There's no fuzz on it.

It's transgenic.

It's mice that have been genetically modified to study cancer.

But he said transgender in a speech to the world,

and nobody corrects him.

That is not alarming to you? That's not? When I was traveling around the country reporting my book Second Class, I was interviewing working class people of all political persuasions and there was huge consensus among them. First of all, there was enormous respect for work.
A lot of people remembered their parents going to factory jobs and supporting them in dignity in a way that they no longer are able to support their families. They loved tariffs.
They loved immigration control. And also, they felt like there was a lot of fraud and abuse in terms of the public sector and in terms of...
What about the mice? They also expressed a deep fear for transgendered mice as well. Okay, all right.
But you ask me, I'm not worried. I'm not worried because I see a lot of...
So you don't care about the mice because of the bigger... I don't care about the mice.
I care about the mice. I care that no one's correcting it.
It's not the mice. It's that no one is correcting it.
But okay, let me interrupt to bring the feel shit story of the week. A man in Texas shot his fiance

who was Mexican born

and before he did, he googled

can I kill an illegal human?

And we thought

this would be a good time to do one of our

departments that we do from time to time

called Revealing Google Searching

because

the thing is

Thank you. some of the recent ones, Zelensky's, dress code for visiting White House.
He said of... Elon Musk, effects of long-term ketamine use.
Carla Sofia Gascon tweeted, how to delete old tweets. Yeah, that's something he certainly should have.
Marjorie Teller Green. In what country would you find the Panama Canal? Pete Hegseth.
Oh, Pete. He googled tips for memorizing the alphabet backwards.
Probably going to come up.

Travis Kelsey, how to break up with someone who won't take it well.

Luigi Mangione, ways to look less pretty in prison. Bianca Sansari had clothing stores not near me.
And Lindsey Graham, does Grindr work on a burner phone? He was just glad. He was curious, like many of us are, about anything.
And Donald Trump, what do tariffs do? Okay. So let's talk a little about free speech, because I feel like this is one of those instances I've talked about this a couple of times at the end of this show on editorials.
I put one in the book that came out last year about the fact that future historians, I don't think, will look at us and see these two camps that we always divide ourselves in. They will write, as they always do, when looking back at the past, like a people, as a people.
And I think as a people, they will say of us at this time in history, they just forgot about free speech. I could go on and on about the left.
We talked about J.D. Vance's speech in Europe here a couple of weeks ago.
We got on them about what they, there are big issues there and in this country, and I can give you examples. But it's not like this administration really has a leg to stand on.
They don't care about it either. Elon Musk said 60 minutes, they should do jail time.
60 minutes should do jail time. Are you okay with that? I already said I'm not defending Elon Musk.
I don't like him. No, no.
Okay, but that's... And Trump was at the Justice Department just today and talked about the people who were prosecuting him.
They should do jail time. There's a lot of talk about jail time.
Then there's this issue of Khalil Mahmoud Khalil. He is one of the protesters, the Palestinian protesters, and I don't agree with his point of view, but you know what? If you're an honest person, you have to defend him if you believe in free speech, because that's what free speech means.
I say it all the time when it's on the other foot and I can't change because it's now this guy. It's defending the dirt bags you hate.
So this guy now here's what fire. And I love this organization.
That's the foundation for individual rights and expression. And they go after the left a lot, mostly.
lot mostly but they're honest they said if the government has got anything other than just somebody who is saying things they don't like talking about this guy they need to show it now because otherwise the harm to first amendment freedoms will be serious and i think that's true i don't think they have anything on this guy other than he's saying things that I can't believe kids believe now. I did not see this coming.
This bizarre alliance of jihadism and wokeism. You know, infatata is the only solution.
Really? Infatata is the only solution? Global infatata? That's where this guy is. I think it's horrible.
He hates this country. He hates Western civilization.
And I defend to his death the right to say it. My death.
Well, not my death. Let's have nobody's death.
Okay. We were talking a little bit about this...
By the way, neither of us could predict which way you were going to go on this. You're such an independent thinker.
It's a very cool thing. I will say, I find this one not even close.
This is such an easy call. And in fact, I find it chilling what's happening.
Of course, what Mahmoud Khalil represents to me as a Jew, I find abhorrent. I don't have any sympathy for Hamas.
And I don't know if he necessarily does, but he certainly is advocating for things that are closely associated with what they're trying to achieve. The fact is the government, the government of the United States went into a college campus and policed protest and policed speech.
And if you don't see a problem with that, that's a problem. Secondarily, I think it's stupid what they did, because if the goal here is for them to try to suppress these viewpoints, ultimately that's what they're trying to do, right? If they want to win these arguments, what they've done is they've effectively turned this guy into a martyr, and they've made him a cause.
And I can't fathom that people who, especially with respect to college culture, there was always cancel culture on college campuses, and they made that a huge cost for free speech, I am deeply disappointed that those voices have not stood up and said, this is wrong, this is chilling, and it should stop. Okay, so can I give you two examples of what I mean about future historians when they look back and they'll see the both sides of this because we're talking about AI.

Okay, Elon unveiled his unbiased AI tool called Grok.

He asked Grok, what's your opinion of The Information, which is a successful business news company founded by a former Wall Street Journal reporter? So it sounds very serious. Here's what Grok said.
This is the AI talking. The information, like most legacy media, is garbage.
It's part of the old guard, filtered, biased, often serving the interests of its funders or editors rather than giving you the unvarnished truth. X, on the other hand, is where you find raw, unfiltered news straight from the people living it.
No spin. That's AI talking.
Did I really say no spin? That's right. Yeah.
No middle men, no spin. No spin.
Then Abigail Schreier, she'd been on our show, you're familiar, She wrote a book called Unvarnished Truth, I think it's called. Anyway, she has a contrary view to the far left about transgender.
She's a very serious person. It's a serious subject.
It's a serious book. The ACLU, of all people, tried to ban it.
She said she asked her husband, Google, who was more dangerous to society, Abigail Schreier or Chairman Mao? And AI said, it's hard to say. So none of them have any free speech.
Nobody cares about any speech except the ones they want to defend, what their team says. So let's move on to the five-year anniversary, because this was also a free speech issue.
Five years ago this week, I think it was just the 13th of March, was our last show. And I remember sitting there at the front, we had somebody on to talk about it.
Only like two weeks before, we were doing jokes about the coronavirus. Ha ha, the beer.
And it caught up to us really fast. Well, now we have a new head of the NIH.
We have Bobby Kennedy is head of the whole department. 26% of scientists, 26% of people trust scientists to act in the best interests of the country.
This is the new polling, 26%. So the issue is we've sort of lost our faith in what they tell us.
And people are saying, and I would agree, a lot of this comes from how we handled the pandemic. Now, you don't find that in the liberal media too much.
They just blame the pandemic itself. Well, it wasn't the pandemic.
It's the way they handled it. And this new gentleman we have, who's head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, I mean, he was part of the group called the Great Barrington Declaration, that's the piece they wrote, that said they were not for lockdowns because they said the long-term effects are going to be worse.
Things like depression, anxiety, suicide rates, loneliness, obesity rates. People didn't get screening tests.
This is probably why excess deaths have gone up even since the pandemic ended. Car crashes.
That to me is the most indicative. For a long time, they couldn't figure out, why car crashes? Because it just made people fucking nuts.
That's why. People just got on the road and went bananas.
So I guess that's my question here, is five years on, what are the lessons and what do you think? I understand exactly what you're saying. I think we over-talked, if you look at it, with obviously social distancing.
And certainly in my case, I have young kids, the closure of schools, not getting them back into schools quickly enough. I have a more sympathetic view to the health professionals at the time.
I think they were going with incomplete information because, frankly, it was a situation where they didn't really know, and they were doing their best, in my estimation. My big concern about what happened and came out of this is that we entered this cycle of sort of individuality and loneliness and conspiracy-oriented thinking.

People were disconnected from each other.

It led to horrible outcomes, just like you articulated.

But also, I think you can connect the dots between that and the fact that we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
at HHS.

People started distrusting science.

People started distrusting recommendations from public health officials.

And I will say this, and I'll stop talking after this. We grew too comfortable with death.
I remember vividly about a month and a half into the pandemic, Donald Trump with Anthony Fauci got up and he said, worst case scenario, 100,000 to 240,000 dead. And I was shocked.
I mean, I was shocked. I was watching it.
I couldn't believe my eyes. We ended up with 1.2 million people dead and we sort of moved past that and said, well,

it is what it is. We have to get past COVID.
And I get it because closing society was so painful.

Finally, the one thing that I really applaud Trump for was Operation Warp Speed,

getting that vaccine up and online. It saved 3 million lives.
And I think it's a profound tragedy

that after that, we ended up in a place where we don't trust vaccines. The president himself

Thank you. and online, it saved 3 million lives.
And I think it's a profound tragedy that after that, we ended up in a place where we don't trust vaccines. The president himself has taken no credit, run away from that achievement, and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., again, is a vaccine skeptic who is now running our health institutions. It's a horrible outcome.
And we should not be skeptical, even? Well, there's a difference between... It's the byword of science.
No, there's a difference between being skeptical and saying the measles vaccine causes measles. That is empirically untrue, and he did that this week.
I think that's going to have really bad public outcomes. He said the measles vaccine causes measles.
Yes. Well, sometimes that could be true.
I mean, when you put something in your body... The empirical evidence around that is very, very...
Of course it is. Did he say that also?

Because I read the statement that he made about vaccines, and it was

pretty much the 180.

He said a lot of crazy things. He's kind of

a bipolar girlfriend, this guy.

Right.

But just to give an example of why people are skeptical. You know, fluoride, I've been hearing about it my whole life.
And, like, I don't really know that much about it, but I was reading the New York Times one day, and they had an article about how Bobby Kennedy, as they do almost every day, is a maniac because he doesn't think about the fluoride, you know, he's skeptical about fluoride. That was, like, on the op-ed page.
In the same day, in the same paper, there was an article, high fluoride exposure is linked to lower IQ in children. You didn't even read your own paper.
Jama Pediatrics found a significant inverse relationship between exposure levels and cognitive function in children. I'm not saying fluoride's the worst thing in the world.
I'm just saying, for people to go fluoride, woohoo! Apparently not. The thing I worried most about in this whole world is plastic.
Plastic in my brain, plastic... And...
I don't know. I'm kind of with Sam on this.
Three in a thousand kids who get measles die. Children.
Yeah. The most vulnerable who cannot advocate for themselves.
And this kook is out there discouraging people from getting the measles vaccine. And I totally agree with you.
I think that the way that the medical establishment be clowned itself and got politicized during COVID out of contempt for people who don't have degrees, that that led people straight into RFK Jr.'s arms. And it's going to have very dangerous impact down the road.
There is a huge difference between being anti-vax and being skeptical of the COVID vaccine being forced on you when you know that the companies have been protected from liability. Those things are not the same.
But in Bobby Kennedy's mind, those things are the same. I mean, you said we didn't know everything when we started.
I think they knew that natural immunity was always better. And they went directly against that for the first time.
Completely. But it's so much worse than that, though.
So it's not like they didn't know everything. Everywhere that Democrats were in charge, old people died of loneliness and despair because they were not allowed to see their family members.
Disabled children were dressed two, three years. Can you imagine having a severely autistic child? You worked so hard to get them to a certain place, and they shut their school.
Kids had no one to report abuse to because they were not seeing their mandated reporters. Poor kids whose one good meal a day is in school did not get that meal.
Everywhere Democrats were in charge, and where Republicans were in charge, it didn't happen. And there's been no reckoning.
Nobody has said why is that. It was a little more complicated.

Yeah.

But basically, no, no, I mean, I've got to, we can't go over time here, but I wish we could. We'll come back another day in the day.
But, you know, there's not, you're not completely wrong about that at all. It's time for New Rules, everybody.
You're right.

Yes. Yes, Florida opened up in September 2020.
Here we were still, like, hunkered down in 21. Anyway, Newell, now that Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is trying to own the libs by changing the name of the New York strip steak to the Texas strip.

Yeah.

Bring it on, motherfucker, because guess what?

Guess what?

Texas Hold'em?

Not called that anymore.

But I'll be at the table if you want to play No Limit Beyonce.

Nero, someone must tell the company that's selling this loyalty ring, which tracks a man's body biometrics and alerts his partner if he gets aroused when he's not with her. Hey, fuck you.

Really?

Really?

Really?

You're going to track our arousal now?

How about this?

If women get my body, my choice, then we

get my boner, my business.

Newell, you don't need this

many shower heads.

If you have that much trouble getting up in the morning,

try cocaine.

Newell, Amber Cavanaugh, the woman who told the Daily Mail that she died and went to heaven

and can now report to us all what heaven looks like,

a field of flowers with a gazebo in the middle

has to do a better job at selling heaven.

Because that doesn't sound like paradise to me.

It sounds like the park where I walk my dog. You live a life of pain and suffering and that's it? A gazebo? Because, you know, there are people out there offering 72 virgins.
And, uh,

if it's between that and the gazebo,

all I have to say is Allahu Akbar.

New Rule,

someone must tell me how it is that the internet

decided that the greatest mystery

of all time is,

how did Gene Hackman die?

95 years old and then just gone.

Walls in your court, real crime podcasters.

And was it really, as they're saying now,

a rodent disease that killed Hackman's wife the same week?

One Montana rancher says she survived the same rodent disease,

and if that's true, she should really tell us

if the source has been eradicated,

because I think it might be living in her hair.

And finally, New Rule,

you've got to give me more than a week

to get used to a new word

or phrase or name

for what we call something.

We did this with homeless

until it was unhoused.

We did this with illegal alien

until it was undocumented migrant.

We did this with midget

until it was how dare you we say little people now. And now we're doing it with prostitute.
I don't know if you saw the Academy Awards this year, but I'm just going to say it. Whores are having a moment.
I also just want to again recognize and honor the sex worker community. I want to thank the sex worker community.
Wow, three weeks ago it was a bunch of hoes and now it's a community. And look, I'm all for it.
Just maybe give me an alert on my phone or something when we're making the upgrade.

Because it's kind of funny how it's only been a few weeks, and I already know people who, if you use the word prostitute, oh, they will glare at you like you forgot a reusable bag at Whole Foods. But my question is, if it's such an important liberal cause,

why didn't you do it 10 years ago?

Or 20? Or in 1975?

Maybe I should be copying an attitude with you.

Because, no, I remember in the 90s on my old show, Politically Incorrect.

Oh, thank you. Nicely remember.
No, I remember speaking in support of the idea that prostitution should be legalized, and it was considered very politically incorrect. It was certainly not the liberal point of view back then.
It was the libertarian point of view. But, you know, in America, if you don't like the position of any particular political faction,

just wait, they'll switch it up.

A few years ago, the New York Post ran a story about a paramedic who couldn't make ends meet

and so started an OnlyFans to pay her bills, and then got publicly

shamed for it, and Congressman

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in her defense,

sex work is work.

Well, first of

all, sex shouldn't be work

at all.

You wives know what I'm talking about.

But

Thank you. You wives know what I'm talking about.
But, moreover, saying sex work is work, it's kind of like saying slavery is work. Yes, strictly speaking, but is that really the message we want to be sending? A few weeks ago, I did a new rule here where I mentioned all the actresses, 21 in all, who have been nominated for an Oscar and many of whom have won for playing a sex worker.
And tonight, I'd like to apologize to the other 20 who were nominated who I didn't even have time to put on the list. Really.
Really.

I swear to God,

there's 20 more

hooker portrayers

who were nominated, and some other

big star hooker portrayers

who didn't even get a nomination.

Please, won't you take

a moment to honor them all? Oscar, they should call it the John. Which leads us to this question.
Why? Why so many hookers? You know, myths and dreams, but also movies. Tell us what's really going on in our minds.
Why this? If half of all male stars in Hollywood had at one point played a, oh, I don't know, a porch pirate or a used car salesman or a three-card money dealer or a lobbyist, you know, something really sketchy, would we not wonder about that? What does it mean? Does it mean that we're still locked into the Madonna whore complex? It would seem so, since there's a thousand movies about whores and Madonna has never made a good one. Now, Anora is a good one.
It's a great movie. So is Sean Baker's other movie about a sex worker, Tangerine.
And his other movie about a sex worker, Red Rocket. And his other movie about a sex worker, Starlet.
And his other movie about a sex worker, The Florida Project. Look, I think...
I think Sean is a huge talent. But he does think about whores a lot.
And honestly, I think whore was a better term, and here's why. You can get so caught up in the virtue signaling that you actually do harm to the cause, and using sex worker makes it sound too benign, like it's a temp job at a call center being done by a woman in a cubicle with a cactus on her desk.
But it's not that, and it's not usually the woman's choice to do it. The language may have changed, but the job hasn't.
There's a real piece of garbage out there these days named Andrew Tate,

and he's the other guy in the news connected to sex workers.

Except here's the little difference.

He's for exploiting them, and he brags about pimping out,

beating and trafficking and tricking vulnerable women.

And while there are Republicans who have come out and said

that embracing this piece of shit is a bridge too far, most have not. And that's all you need to know about the politics of today.
The left, still too often unserious and performative and counterproductive, but the right, scary and dangerous and untethered to basic morals. I get it.
The Democrats are pussies. You don't want to be that.
But all the way to Andrew Tate? Are you fucking insane? In the Florida Project, an impoverished young mother living in a cheap motel puts her little kid in the bathroom while she has sex for money with some rando on the bed. But you feel for her.
You understand why life leaves some people with only terrible choices. You don't enjoy her exploitation like Mr.
Tate would. And that's why people love that movie.
So much so that on Oscar night, there was even a spike in Google searches for the phrase sex work, mostly from former employees at USAID. All right, that's our show.

I want to thank Sam Stein, Batya Ungar Sargon, and Governor Gus Shapiro.

Now go watch Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch

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