Transcript of Overtime – Episode #748: Ali Vitali, Coleman Hughes

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

All right, she is MS Now's senior Capitol Hill reporter and the host of Way Too Early, Ali Vitali, and he's the host of the Conversations with Coleman podcast and a contributor to Free Press Coleman Hughes. Okay. Thank you. All right, here are the questions from the people. Gavin Newsom has commuted every death sentence in California to life without parole. I heard that. Why do you think Newsom made this decision?

Well, I mean, please. Should I go? I mean, he was locked out of the news cycle. He wants to be one of the presidential contenders. He wants to have some credibility with a left cause. And so, you know, good timing. Good. I mean, it doesn't hurt anything. I mean, we were not going to put these people to death anyway. I mean, some of them have been on death row for 20 years. So, I mean, that would. But as I said in the show, I think the Tuesday results are not good for him because it shows that it is the moderates that the party is going to get behind if they know what they're doing.

And his record in California is really tough to stand by. I mean, if you ask a Republican, like, what's the one thing you don't want to happen to your city in a red state, they're going to tell you San Francisco, right? And so to preside over that, it's just at minimum, it's bad optics. And that's why you look at someone like Jon Ossoff or Josh Shapiro and you think this is the direction the party should go.

And San Francisco, which was always stories we heard about San Francisco for years when it was governed by the far left. Then they got this new mayor, Lurie, Daniel Lurie, changed everything back to, oh, normal, you know, let's arrest criminals, not let people, like, sleep on everything. And people love him. And so, you know, San Francisco. Coleman, as a rapper yourself, what do you think of Jay-Z being the Super Bowl halftime show?

I mean, what can you say? It's Jay-Z. I mean, he's not exactly in his prime anymore, but I'm going to tune in.

Well, you looked like you were shocked that he said not in his prime.

Well, I mean, I don't know. I still think it's exciting. We're like, also.

It is exciting.

We're like, also of the age. We're like, the Super Bowl halftime shows are supposed to be for us.

I just hope he takes it seriously because he is the man who once said, my presence is a gift. So I hope he really brings the heat.

With a Beyoncé cameo.

Yes. That would be great.

What are the panel's thoughts on Nithya Raman, who was endorsed by the DSA being the next? Yes, we have a new mayor here in LA. Wow. You get two choices in LA.

Yeah.

Left or further left.

DC2. It's the same way there.

I don't know. I mean.

Look, my issues are high rents and crime. Socialists don't tend to be good on those issues because they institute policies like rent control, which sound good and then end up increasing the rents in the long run. And we got 100 years of data on socialism. It's not good for the economy. It's not a new idea. Young people think it's this cool new idea. What we've been doing isn't working. Let's try this new thing, socialism. Hate to break it to you, Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in like 1860.

No, 1848.

1848. So it's even older.

No, and again, socialism, we already have a lot of socialism and a lot of it is appropriate. That's not what these people are selling, these far left people. They like to use that term, socialism. Socialism is Medicare, Social Security. It's the Marine Corps. I mean, it's anything the government does and the private sector doesn't. You just read what they say in their manifesto. They want the government to take over everything. That is a prescription for failure. And to me, this is an indictment of our educational system.

Right.

Like, I felt I knew where I was on the planet when I was in school. Okay, you're in the United States. There's other countries. This is how many people there are in the world. You know, I could place myself. I don't think they know and they don't care.

I mean, a lot of kids go to underperforming public schools, which is our euphemism for government-funded daycare centers with occasional school-like activities. And we're, you know, Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote this piece about sending her daughter to one of the most struggling underperforming schools in Brooklyn.

As a noble gesture, she could have sent her to a rich school. She has the money, but she wanted to do that.

Noble to an ideal, a disservice to her daughter.

To her daughter, correct.

But it ended up being a public service by her publishing the results of that experiment, which were terrible. It's not just like she got a bad education. She got no education.

I mean.

She had years where she was asking for homework and they just weren't giving it to her.

Well, and just the quotes that I read in your piece from her, I mean, just running around like wild banshees in the cafeteria.

Yeah.

No adult supervision, or they're sitting there just watching it. It was like Lord of the Flies.

Right.

It was worse than even I am. I knew they weren't learning anything, but they're just, you know, it's like a daycare center and not a good one.

Yeah. And I think people on the left want to blame funding because that's the easy issue. But the truth is this school was well-funded. You know, it was 50,000 per pupil at this school. The problem isn't the funding. It's that you can't fire anyone bad.

Yes. And that's the essence of your article. And I've been saying it for years. The problem is the union, the teachers' union, is too powerful. We've seen it in results in states where the union is less powerful, the schools do better.

I call it the chalkboard mafia.

Yeah. The problem, the unions protect bad schools and bad teachers and the party protects the union. It's almost impossible in a lot of these cities to fire a teacher. I mean, literally, like you could sell drugs to a kid and it's got to be two offenses before you get.

It wasn't that long ago that the unions lobbied for a law in New York State to ban even collecting data that you would use to assess which teachers are better than others. You can't even get the data, right? So obviously the teachers' unions serve the teachers. They don't serve the students. And if you're a Democrat or any American that's serious about public school reform, you have to challenge the teachers' union, period.

And I think in this school, where they were learning nothing with no supervision and absentee principals and teachers.

Yeah.

I mean, spending $50,000 per year per student. It's not money. That's what you always hear from the left. Oh, it's underfunded. It's not the funding. The funding isn't the issue. And.

No, it hasn't been for a very long time.

I think this is the kind of thing I will never hear on MS Now.

I think you hear a lot of perspectives on MS Now.

I don't think I ever hear that one.

As the person who has interviewed everyone from Speaker Johnson to prominent Democrats, I can promise you there's a range of perspective. But I do think that the other piece of this, right, is that you're clearly so steeped in this policy conversation and debate. This is not where Washington's focus is. I mean, when has there last been a truly serious conversation about tackling education in a real way from a federal perspective? I mean, W. Bush.

George Bush, yeah.

Right? I mean, that's not where this party is going. The last presidential election for Democrats, the biggest debate was around what healthcare should look like. Is it a public option or Medicare for all? I imagine it's going to look a little bit similar in the coming weeks, months, years. And so it's a crucially important issue. I myself think that unions help to protect teachers. And as someone with many teachers in my family, they have benefited from that.

Me too.

Right?

Yeah, I agree. My sister is a teacher. Absolutely. A lot of great teachers.

It's a noble profession, but teachers' unions also.

It's out of hand.

Sometimes they prevent the best teachers from being awarded for being the best. So for instance, in Wisconsin, they passed Act 10 in 2011 where they had this novel idea, which is we should pay the best teachers more. And what happened? When you incentivize quality, the teachers got better, they attracted better teachers, and the students did better, right? Let's make it work just a little bit more how other jobs work, right?

Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. We'll see you next week.