It was a scatter-shot Real Time from Bill Maher on Friday night. During the course of his conversations, the blame game fell on just about everyone, from politicians to tech titans to those staging St. Patrick’s Day parades.
The night started with tech reporter Kara Swisher, host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, co-host of the podcast Pivot, and author of the memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.
Swisher’s dogged reporting has tech titans cringing, she claimed. “I think they’re scared a little bit,” and judging from her less-than-favorable comments on the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they may have good reason.
She characterized that a lot of moguls are “hugely narcissistic,” and said the yes-men that surround them pump them to the point that, “You start t think of yourself as a god.”
Swisher was not willing to balance their good works with that attitude. “I don’t think you have to give someone an out,” she said, noting that claims of wanting to change the world are a cover “for wanting to make money.”
Swisher allowed that she has high hopes for AI, but said it could also “go completely south.” There are no guard rails, she said, adding, “We’re the crash-test dummies of the digital age.”
The panel portion of the show featured Beto O’Rourke, former Democratic Congressman from Texas and founder of Powered by People; and Sarah Isgur, former lawyer at the U.S Department of Justice under President Trump, senior editor of The Dispatch, and host of its legal podcast, Advisory Opinions.
Both panelists are from Texas, and they swung back and forth on the immigration issue. On the one hand, O’Rourke said, we have to allow in more immigrants. But “We’ve got to do it the right way. It’s got to be orderly.”
Isgur pointed out that the current uncontrolled immigration amounts to basically “funding the cartels,” noting “We’ve set up the worse system we could possibly have.” She blamed Congress for that, and O’Rourke agreed, saying there’s no solution because “everyone gets to run on it. Ronald Reagan was the last president to preside over comprehensive immigration reform.” He added, “We need more legal pathways. Only Congress can do that.”
Later, he admitted that President Biden “has to step up now” and end the “chaos and confusion. He’s got to take charge, because if he doesn’t, this will hurt him in November.”
In his “New Rules” editorial, Maher called for an end to identity politics, saying the old silos have been breached by crossovers that blend identities rather than enforce them.
“I think now more than ever, we need to start honoring the things that make us the same.”
That means getting away from wearing Kente cloth, as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer did to pander, and changing up the interracial Subaru commercials.
Instead, he pointed to the crossovers of Beyoncé, Lil Nas X, Jelly Roll and more. “The new Captain America is Black, and Spider-Man is Black and Puerto Rican, just like the Google AI George Washington,” he noted.
RuPaul is fracking on his Wyoming ranch, and the leader of the conservative Proud Boys is Afro-Cuban, “so he burns a cross on his own lawn.”