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Hello foodie Lions 🦁! Happy Tuesday. Welcome to today's show.🥗🍲🫕
This is the #threadcast for Day 551 of the #foodtalk on Leo, 30/12/2025 for 27/12/2025. It's time for some meal inspirations and food conversation. Don't forget to use #foodtalk in your comments.
Discussion
Be part of the Food Talk Show On Leo. Here is Day 550 that leads you to the previous threadcasts.
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Macaroni with spicy and tasty chicken stew made with fresh tomatoes, fresh pepper, onions, green peas, carrot, sweet corn, and some spices. It was so delicious. 😋
Oh, you need to be intentional about what you eat. High cholesterol should be from foods with saturated fats (like fried foods, cheese, sausage, baked goods and processed foods). I also learned that those with high cholesterol need to have a moderate quantity of eggs, if they must be taken.
Some rabbit legs and veggies. I'm excited. It's been a long time since I got a real grill and not this electric grill which doesn't get good heat.
!BBH
The Russian Ministry of Justice has proposed imposing penalties for illegal cryptocurrency mining, including fines of up to 1.5 million rubles or up to two years of compulsory labor. In cases involving especially large profits or organized criminal groups, the maximum sentence could reach five years in prison. The proposed sanctions are included in draft amendments to the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code published on Russia’s official legal and regulatory draft portal.
Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi published his 2026 crypto and AI outlook, forecasting BTC could top $150,000 by year-end while its dominance declines. He expects ETH and Solana to remain strong, but several “fintech L1s” to underdeliver, and predicts at least one Big Tech firm will launch or acquire a crypto wallet as more Fortune 100 companies adopt blockchain rails.
A traveler comes across three stonecutters at a construction site and asks what they’re doing. The first one says, “I’m cutting stone.” The second one says, “I’m building a wall.” The third one says, “I’m building a grand cathedral.” Same work, very different vision. You get to choose the way you connect the actions of the days to the vision of the years. Choose wisely.
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. All right, here we are. A staff writer at the Atlantic whose latest book is called The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory, Tim Alberta. She is CNN's chief legal analyst who anchors Laura Coates live on CNN. Laura Coates. And he hosts the nicely dedicated radio program, The Clay, Travis and Buck Sexton Show, Buck Sexton. All right. Okay, here are the questions from the people. What did you think of Obama's comments on the campaign trail that black men should get over their reluctance to vote for Kamala? Will that be effective? Yeah, he was pretty scoldy. You don't usually see him like that. You usually see him kind of take this opposite end. Wall Street Journal and the New York Times poll most recently has overall black support for Trump, over 20%, by the way. I think it might have been his last. That's just men. I'm sorry, men. But we're speaking about the Obama speaking to the issue of black men and (1/23)
their support of Kamala Harris. So Trump is making inroads with that demographic voting-wise. He oddly does better each time with immigrants, minority groups, people have called. The people who you... Maybe it's not so odd. I mean, it tells me that the Democrats are a little bit nervous, right? When you're losing four to one, you're still losing badly. You are. Come on. It's just relatively, yeah. I mean, he... I mean, Democrats seem, perhaps there's anxiety, but there's also the realization that I think people are criticizing Obama because there is blame to go around for why people choose not to support a particular candidate. It might be sexism. It might be racism. It might be other factors as well. So I think to single out a particular group has ruffled some feathers. Having said that, if you're part of the group that believes you should not vote for someone on account of those factors, then perhaps the scolding could be doled out more diplomatically, but you should hear it as well. (2/23)
But what is the attraction? To Obama? I can well hold on to it. No, no, no. To Trump. Machismo. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. I mean... He's a baller. Success. Alpha dog. The whole thing. Yes. That is the appeal. I mean... And I mean, every time people have this, it's like the guy was... He's a billionaire. He's a global celebrity. He's been president. He's married a supermodel. Yeah, like, I don't know. Democrats need to stop thinking that this is some big shock. Who doesn't want to commit crimes and not go to jail? Ah, we didn't even talk about law fair today. We didn't even talk about law fair. Just think about where we are as a society, that the criteria for being the president of the United States, where we dare to say the leader of the free world, our president, is somebody that you are drawn to simply because of bravado. Not because of policy, not because of what they can do for you, not just your neighbor, what they can do for you and beyond. That's really what... That's a (3/23)
devolution of what we think about in terms of what she is in books like. Can I just... On the, like, sexism, racism thing, which we're going to start hearing a lot as the polls get worse for Kamala, the Democrat party overwhelming... Democratic party. I'm sorry. Sorry. Democratic party. I don't know why that's such a burn. I don't know why... It's not a burn, just the way it's all... No, but, like, all Republicans do that. I don't know why they think that's such a burn. I honestly... I've never heard anyone who cared about it before. This is the first time. Really? Yeah. Really? Yeah. It just seems so... It's just... Your listeners haven't... I mean, like, maybe a few here and there, but it's kind of a potato-potato situation. I know, but it just seems... I don't give a shit. Okay, but can I... The point I was trying to make is the Democrat part, it is possible... Sorry. The Democratic party, it is possible that Kamala Harris just is not good at this, and Democrats recognize that in (4/23)
2020, and to say racism, sexism right now after the performance she's put on is just preposterous. And many people are voting for the Republic party for that reason. What did you make of Melania's new book, where she indicates that she is pro-choice? I didn't read that about her book. I read a few things about her book. I don't know why she's putting out a book. I thought she was, like, super proud. I don't care what first ladies think about policy as a rule. Like, I don't... I mean, and I don't mean that. Democrat, Republican, first lady, very nice, hopefully do some good charity work, or first husband, Doug Emhoff. No, it's true. They're not elected officials. I don't care what they think about it, just because they're married to somebody who's been given a lot of power to represent people. So I would just say it doesn't matter to me. There's a lot of scuttlebutt in the news this week about Doug. Mm-hmm. Believe All Women, except when it comes to one who says that someone hit her (5/23)
across the face. Right. Well, of course, we don't know if that's true. She says that it happened. I'm not saying that it happened. I'm just saying that the standard used to be Believe All Women. No, if people don't know what is going on, The Daily Mail is reporting that three women that she talked to contemporaneously, which has been the standard very often in these cases, that she said back in, I think, 2011 or something, they were at the Con Film Festival. He slapped her. He thought she was flirting with the valet. And he knocked up the nanny, right? That's confirmed. That's confirmed. Yeah. He definitely knocked up the nanny. Yes. That's, you know, I mean. But, no, I don't know. Nobody ever knows. Toxic masculinity. Okay. What I'm saying is, if this becomes more credible, and we don't know yet, I mean, a lot of the conservative outlets still aren't reporting it. So I wouldn't go after anybody for not reporting it yet, because these things have to be checked out. But if it becomes (6/23)
more credible, certainly on the level of Brett Kavanaugh, which was, that kind of thing, was reported by everybody pretty quickly, does the liberal media keep ignoring it? Yes. They will. Absolutely. No question. Wouldn't that make it look worse? Well, first of all, I think that, I mean, just to your point, yes, it is prudent to be cautious about any story that's reported until you have the supporting details so that the audience is able to effectively judge the veracity of a statement. I think it is fair to investigate and look into matters that involve allegations of assault or otherwise. I think that's fair to do so. What I don't think is fair is to, and I'm consistent on this on all accounts, is to tar and feather without more. I think you have to give information to people, and you have to actually do your homework and background. I don't think by not reporting, and again, I'm not familiar with all of the allegations that are involved here, but I think it is appropriate to (7/23)
investigate as it is appropriate to be cautious before you simply put something into the ether that has no substantiation. Just be clear, though. I mean, let me ask you. Just politically speaking, this is a problem for the Harris campaign in large part because she is so ill-defined. We see that in poll after poll after poll for months now, right? Americans are trying to fill in the gaps. Around her, around her family, this is an issue for the campaign that they're going to have to deal with now in the last four or five weeks of the election. I'm just saying, regardless of whether more people come forward, regardless of what's confirmed or not confirmed, I think that there is now a little bit of blood in the water. The nanny thing was the first drop, and now there's some more, and it's not going to be long now. I can guarantee you that there are investigative teams at the Times and the Post and elsewhere that are looking into the issue. But the media is basically the worst kind of (8/23)
office sexist predator guy. Daily Mail reported on that based on interviews for people that work at his law firm. So, again, these are allegations. I understand this. I do think it's very convenient that allegations demand more study, demand more evidence, when it's really important for a Democrat that we don't all say, hold on a second, this guy seems like a huge jerk, and he is being used as a surrogate on the campaign for masculinity and talking about great things are. He is not going to be president. And the guy on the republic side, who's running for president, did these things himself. I mean, certainly was accused by more, I mean, there was so many women who said he did. But, yeah, you know, he had in part, at least in one instance shocking about due process in a court of law. It was a civil matter in one instance. It was a criminal matter in another, and you have more pending. So it's not as if that only that grace, so it's because afforded to a Democrat, that's part of what (9/23)
the process has been when you're looking at, as you call lawfare of someone like Trump and many other Republicans and Democrats alike who have had accusations floated and have had to confront them. Well, I mean, for example, there were all, it was, there was mountains of evidence against Hunter Biden. We were told, hold on, hold on, hold on. I mean, the guy broke a whole bunch of different laws and actually should have gone to prison for a long time, but he was Joe Biden's son. No, he stood trial. No, he stood trial after the political pressure was ratcheted up so much when they had already let a number of the most serious crimes, including money laundering, lapse from the statute of limitations. So, but hold on, on the lawfare thing, I just, cause this is important, we didn't get to this at all today. What is more likely that Donald Trump went almost 80 years of his life, never once having a criminal indictment, because he's a guy who, you know. He was president. Things changed. Well, (10/23)
I mean, all of a sudden he's never committed a felony and then he's running for office again. He becomes president and the circumstances are the same? No, they were going after things that were long before he was president, but okay, fine. If you don't like that argument, there's one other argument. They held all of these charges until the election. It is clear manipulation. All of the charges except the dressing room, right? Which they extended the statute of limitations and then she was funded. The whole thing was a hit. All the other ones have to do with he was in office. He was the president. He asked for civil trial for Trump. I mean, there was a civil thing with the Trump founding. There are so many that it's hard to know what to talk about. No, the feature of the investigations dealt with factual allegations that surrounded his term in office and beyond. Yes, there is a reason he was never investigated for having interfered with the presidential election because he wasn't (11/23)
running that time. You also can't have it both ways because when the house moves to impeach Trump on January 13th, the cry from the right is where's the due process? Why are you moving so fast? What's the deal? But then when Merrick Garland chooses to take his time and be deliberate in bringing these indictments, Republicans are saying, oh, you're dragging your feet now to wait until it's election season. So which is it? I hope you do sports betting or something because the idea that a number of these different cases, all of these charges involve conduct that was what? I mean, all of them. There's all these four different criminal cases. At least four years ago, you're going to tell me that all this had to wait until the election year to bring the charges? You're going to tell me that Jack Smith, Jack Smith, for those who don't know, was moving at lightning speed with the help of Judge Chuck in D.C. They were moving. Ask any federal prosecutor, ask anybody who has actually looked at (12/23)
how long. I'm just talking about timelines, by the way. The whole thing was meant to kneecap him before he could actually get to election day and it was meant to destroy him for political reasons in an election year. And yet it's only helped him. It is the biggest own goal the Democrats have ever had in their lives. But let's ask a federal prosecutor. One's here. Why this was delayed, in part, was not simply a matter of proactive or affirmative motions by the prosecution. There was a defense team in multiple different jurisdictions who were filing motions to then delay and ask for delays in delay after delay. If the calendar had been such that what the prosecution alone wanted, you would have had earlier resolution, at least in the form of trial, not necessarily a conviction, but he's filed motions to defend himself. And Matt has also delayed the calendar. Hold on. There are four different criminal proceedings against Donald Trump, okay? Four of them. And there's New York, there's (13/23)
D.C., there's Atlanta, there's Florida. Florida's been tossed out, by the way. So that's what a great trial, that's what a great case that was. These were all... By a real Trump rubbage. Well, I mean, but you know, but you can't have it both ways. I mean, Judge Chucky clearly hates Trump and was sending January 6th, some of them nonviolent detainees, into the prison system for like 18 months. Can I ask you a more philosophical question? Yeah, sure. Because there are people who are watching this who... I know people, because I live in Los Angeles and Hollywood and all that, and they will say, why are you even talking to him? And I just have no patience for people like this. They can kiss my ass. I will talk to you all day. First of all, half the country agrees with you. Are they all going to self-deport if one of the people... No, and honestly, could I... First of all, thank you for that. I just would add to it, like, the people who are saying that he's Hitler and the country's going to (14/23)
end, it's not true. It's going to be OK. He's already been president. If he becomes president again, you'll probably have a Democrat who comes around in four years. It's not the end of the Republic. Let's start placing bets. It could be. When are you going to start a new one? It could be. You want to place some money on this one? I know you've got a bankroll, buddy. Oh, I do. You know what I mean? I hear stories. I do. I do. That's my mess. OK. No, well, first of all, he could. Absolutely. He's too erratic. There's just no way you can say he's not going to do this or not going to do that. But... He's going to destroy the country. He's going to do a great job, actually, but you don't agree with that. What's your definition of destroying the country? Is sabotaging the peaceful transition of power the hallmark of American democracy? Is sabotaging that not in service of destroying the country? I mean, how else would you define it? Joe Biden became president and has had four years and the (15/23)
country has marched on and everything has been fine. And the January 6th, which we didn't talk about, I know there's a lot of things to talk about, but there's a part of this that's left out. I do have a lot of Democrat friends and Democrat people that I talk to. I know this is something... I have co-hosted... I have co-hosted... I'm going to throw them under the bus. I have co-hosted shows with Mark von Hill. I've co-hosted... No, but I'm just saying... I was going to say something nice about you before... No, I was just going to say... No, look, these people who don't want me to talk and they don't want you to talk to anybody who they don't already agree with, who isn't on this side. And first of all, you have done more for this country than I have, than all of those people have, and I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Anyone who fought for this country... CIA, but I tried to help out over there. CIA is pretty rough. We do lose people. It's a real thing. It's not the PTA. Yeah, it (16/23)
is not the PTA. But thank you for that. Yes, absolutely. But the frustration people have, though, to be fair, is not your mere presence, which is not... I'm sorry to say, though... I just thought it was like one minute. No, only because he asked... That's nice. Because this is part of the frustration. Tim asked you a question. You didn't answer it. I was about to, actually. No, no, no. No, I mean, I can. That was the frustration. He asked you what was your definition of destroying the country. Is there a certain standard? I mean, that's a pretty broad question, to be fair. Well, welcome to the land of broad. Right. And that's the frustration. Sorry, though. Jesus. No, no, no. What I was going to say is that January 6 is held at a concert. First of all, I condemned January 6 as it happened, every day since it's happened. The people who broke laws and hurt people and committed federal crimes should pay the price for that. I've never waived from that. It's absolutely the case. Should he? (17/23)
I don't believe Donald Trump broke any laws. What is the law that Donald Trump broke? And by the way, whenever I say this to people, they look at me and they say... That's a problem, perhaps, with the law. Okay, but I mean... And I'm not even talking about January 6 itself. To me, that was never... That's a bit of a red herring. The thing that he did so wrong is the thing he still does every day. He still has not conceded that election. He did not concede that election. And you are fomenting something in this country that is unprecedented. So here is the context, and this is where I'm trying, I swear, I'm trying to come around to your point, and that is that the 2020 election cannot be taken out of the context of a 2016 election that Hillary at different times absolutely did not concede, that some of my, unfortunately, former bosses in the intelligence community working with the Democrat Party decided to bring this absurd... The Russia collusion investigation was insane. Nothing came (18/23)
out of this. There were no charges out of this. The whole thing was a scam. And Hillary didn't accept that she had lost the election in the early days afterwards. Except she showed up to the inauguration. No, she showed up to the inauguration. She showed up that night before the cock crowed she conceded. But there was also, in 2020... Good reference. In 2022... There is a... You got your boy in there. In 2020, January 6 was a riot. Riots are bad. Riots are illegal. That should not happen. It came after months of riots that were effectively a Democrat mobilization of the BLM party. Well, I mean, I lived on my... I was on my block, and people came around, and they shattered all the windows, they stole stuff, and yeah, this is for social justice. And then there were people who were boarding up their stores because they were afraid that if Donald Trump won that election, then in cities across America there would be rioting. So the election was effectively held under a degree of duress to (19/23)
begin with, and Democrats were all in favor of the riots, not only in favor of the riots that were going on, but we had the public health experts during COVID saying, oh, it's so important that we had these lunatics running around, breaking things and letting them on fire, that all of a sudden the public gathering statutes... When do you fact you made that comment? I mean, when are these experts you're talking about... This absolutely happened. I mean, any of you can go check it out. Mayor Bill de Blasio said it. I mean, this absolutely... One of the things that's exhausting, frankly, is that... and this is real... is that overtalking does not make your argument more persuasive. That's what's happening here, Bucks. I'm not overtalking anybody. You're absolutely not overtalking right now. Exactly. That was sarcasm. No, no, no. My response, you weren't overtalking me with sarcasm. My point is this. You are saying all these different aspects of it, of how, you know, you're conflating (20/23)
January 6 with BLM, with health experts, and you actually just said that the election was held under duress. Yeah. In what specific ways was the election held under duress? Because people were concerned about the trajectory of America and they felt that they had to turn out. Duress is actually a legal term, and you know this quite well, in terms of how it would be used from your background, the CIA and otherwise, to suggest that our democracy, that people were turning out simply because they were under duress, that's the kind of fomenting of dishonesty that makes people, A, feel very disenchanted with the entire process, B, make them frustrated by the lunacy of simply bald assertions with no substantiation, and C, wonder where you're getting your information from. All of those are valid points that you have to address before you go out and just say, this is all happening and everyone sees it, when everyone does not see what you're seeing. Well, I may respond. I may respond. What you (21/23)
said ignored everything that I said before you started talking, which is that there were riots all through the summer of 2020 and there were business owners who were, and there are photos of this, you can see this, this is very obvious, this isn't like I'm coming up some conspiracy, that were boarding up their businesses because, God forbid, if Donald Trump wins. There was psychic damage done to the American people by a combination of the COVID hysteria, which it was hysteria in a lot of context, by the way, we don't have time to get into everything COVID here right now, schools absolutely should have been open, the mask mandates were bullshit, the lockdowns were absolutely pointless, this was all total garbage. Beyond that, there was a sense that the left gets to riot and Kamala Harris raises money for them when they're supposed to get out on bail in Minnesota. They burned down Minneapolis, why? By the way, I'm not clear on what any of this has to do with sabotaging the transition of (22/23)
power. How did we get to this point? You just changed, you just changed. No, you're not. I was talking about the election. I'm talking about the election too. You're talking about what happened on January 6th, I'm talking about what happened leading up to November. I'm talking about November 3rd through January 6th, I've studied election law in all 50 states, I know better than either of you, no offense, what happened in the election and what didn't happen. I wasn't talking about anything after November, I'm talking about the election hell. I have a note. There's lots of important things to get to. Do you think the Benendez brothers deserve to be paroled? Here we go. (23/23)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Here's the former CNN anchor who is running for Congress in New York's first district, John Adlon. Here's the editor-in-chief of National Review and host of the editor's podcast, Rick Slattery. And the former White House National Security Advisor under President Trump, whose new book, At War With Ourselves, General H.R. McMaster. Okay, this is for everybody. I just mentioned Hitler in the editorial. What's with Tucker Carlson embracing a revisionist historian? Does anybody remember the guy's name? I read this story today. Tucker Carlson. He does like to push the envelope, doesn't he? He had on a guy who introduced something like one of the most important historians of today. I'd never heard of the guy. He's not a real historian. Well, he believes Winston Churchill was the bad guy and Hitler was the good guy. The real villain. I think people who think revisionism is just the way to get attention. Like, (1/26)
whatever you say, I can undo it and say it's better. You know what? You think men can't get pregnant? Oh. Stop it. Stop it. Is he Hitler as the bad guy? Yeah, intriguing concept. This is junk history that's getting peddled and there are people who gravitate to this, but he elevates it. And I think that's his business model for him. It's his business model. You talking about Tucker? Tucker Carlson. He's a grifter, he's a charlatan, he's a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. We saw him sit across from him and supposedly he's knowledgeable about history, but he bought into that whole, I call it, did you ever see the show Drunk History? No, I loved it. But it's like he bought into Putin's drunk history. And this guy seems to think Churchill's in power in Britain all on the run up to the war and he was pushing all the buttons and he was making Hitler invade. England went to him as a war leader because the war had started already because of Hitler. And I actually disagree with you. I think (2/26)
Tucker's sincere in this stuff and I think it goes to a deep disaffection that parts of the right have, unfortunately, with America at its foundations. They've come to believe the country is fundamentally corrupt, so every piece of received wisdom, and I think some narratives are wrong and should be pushed back against, but every piece of received wisdom, including that, I was going to say H.R. McMaster, but that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest figures in Western history, has to be questioned. Which he was, but this is… Churchill was not one of the great? Oh, of course he was. They're questioning him. But this is this weird, like, when did sort of Hating America become hip on the far right? This is this mirror image sort of like feedback loop between the far right and the far left that's absolutely crazy. The people are totally… They all meet. I mean, the sort of the nativist far right meets the self-loathing far left. Yes. And you can't tell who says what. You're exactly (3/26)
right. They say the same thing. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I don't like about Hitler. Everybody else had to do that salute and he just went like that. I thought it was very privileged. It was so superior. It was so superior. Exactly. I think it's important to make fun of these kind of, you know, authoritarian, horrible people. And this is why I think Mel Brooks' work is just so brilliant. Charlie Chaplin. Was the judge in Trump's hush money trail right to delay sentencing? Oh, yeah, that happened today until November 26 in order to avoid interfering in the election. Man, all those trials and nothing happened. Nothing. Well, they indicted him and they wanted to try him on a political schedule. They literally, if they could have, they would have had him in courtrooms from March to October, a presidential candidate of the United States. And it's just not how the court system works, thank God. This thing shouldn't be sentenced now. It's absurd. They took a misdemeanor that the statute (4/26)
of limitations should have expired on and they bootstrapped it up to 34 felonies and one to sentence him to jail for it. I'm not a huge Trump guy, but this I think is absurd and wrong. The larger issue obviously is January 6th, right? And the problem is with the immunity decision, history is really clear. If you don't hold people accountable when they indulge in political violence, then you get more political violence. And I'm really curious about the – do you think conservatives will end up supporting the constitutional amendment to overturn the immunity decision if a Democrat is president? I wonder if they will. I think the way these kind of decisions work, we saw it with the independent counsel statute decision the Supreme Court has. In Washington eventually this stuff always comes around and bites the other side. So right now Democrats are so upset the Supreme Court has done this, then if Kamala Harris is elected and some Republican prosecutor somewhere in the middle of red America (5/26)
wants to indict her and prosecute her for some official act, the Supreme Court will say no and Democrats will suddenly, wait a minute, maybe that decision wasn't so outrageous. What we've seen is this tendency on both ends of the political spectrum to score partisan points at the expense of confidence in our institutions. But Trump really does commit crimes. Let's have to get that little part of it. They're actual crimes. We're 60 days out from an election and I think we've normalized this a little bit and it's far too freaking dangerous. He really does commit crimes is one thing and two, if the positions were reversed and a Democrat did this, not only would the Republicans go after him, but they would have done it instead of what the Democrats did. Talk about feckless, General. This is feckless. You had four years to bring four trials and we get none of them? And it's because they were afraid of politicizing it. Look, that's the thing is that if Democrats did what Donald Trump did, (6/26)
you would be opposing them totally and by the way, so would I. And I think that's the issue. I'm so extensively on the record about January 6th. I'm completely appalled by it. But you're still in doors like you're not so appalled that you don't vote. You're not going to vote for Trump. So you're not a poll. No, I am a poll. But you're still going to vote for him. January 6th didn't happen. You still oppose Trump. You don't like him on policy, right? No, no. No, no, no. From where I sit... I don't. Mostly, no. But you support Trump's policies? I said no, mostly. But you consider voting for him absent January 6th? No. Right. Well, consider... I'm a conservative Republican. That's the difference between us. If he conceded elections, he would not be the boogeyman that he is. He would just not be the villain he is. That's the main thing. He politicizes the Justice Department and he does not concede elections. These are two very new things. Now you can carp all you want. Or very old things. (7/26)
And you can, what about the bullshit about, well, the Democrats say that he wasn't a legitimate president. That's different than actually trying to stay in office. He is completely unprecedented. And it completely disqualifies him to even consider voting for him. I don't know how anyone can. Well, we've got an election lie being used as a litmus test for party loyalty and everyone's acting like it's normal. It's not. It can't be. What do you think of Trump announcing plans for Elon Musk to lead a commission on government efficiency to cut regulations and spending? There is a lot in there, isn't there? Government is inefficient. I remember when Al Gore was going to reinvent government. Remember that? He was given that task. Al Gore, you go reinvent government. How'd that go? We have a lot of really dedicated civil servants, but in most government agencies you could randomly kidnap people out of them and nobody would know the difference. The secretary of defense disappears for like a (8/26)
week. I think this is a good idea, though. I mean, if you look at Elon, he's revolutionized the U.S. satellite program, right? NASA has been remade by injecting kind of this private sector and entrepreneurial energy into it. So I think we could use that across government. Yeah, I mean, but to your point, I remember, I forget who it was, maybe it was Bolton, somebody like that said years ago, if you took out 10 stories from the U.N., would we know? Or would it might even be better? It's an America-hating organization. But it is true. And by the way, not that this is a pattern we should follow, but yesterday I was driving to work and as sometimes happens here, the light goes out on a major thoroughfare and everyone just coped. Like, oh, okay, you go and then I go and then we just ad-libbed it and I'm not saying that's how you should run the film. There's still an amazing resiliency to American civil society. Yes, totally. But how, you know, we're a dagger drawn over politics. Most (9/26)
people, it doesn't matter, they treat each other fairly and honorably and as fellow Americans. Yeah, but leadership matters. A lot of dirt bags too. We can't wait for the political class to do it. I don't think they're going to do it. So I think we all need to convene discussions. Who fires themselves? That's the problem. But let's start taking action, stepping up, building guardrails to strengthen American democracy and take it seriously. Because this is fucking important. We've got one country. What are the panel's predictions for the debate next week? I think Trump's going to be an asshole. That's my prediction. Plenty of it. I'm going out on a limb. Well, you know, foreign policy doesn't sign elections usually, but foreign policy is really critical at this moment. I believe there is this, as you mentioned earlier, this axis of aggressors that is supporting each other. They're supporting each other in ways that are unprecedented. And I believe these cascading crises from Europe to (10/26)
the Middle East have a very high potential of cascading further into the Indo-Pacific before inauguration. I think we're entering a period of maximum danger. We have a president who sadly has diminished cognitive capacity. We have ourselves at each other's throats. Then we're going to have a period maybe after the election, and I think this Russian report is a setup for post-election. Because the Russians, what they really want is most of us to doubt the result of the election. So I think that period between election and inauguration is very dangerous. But the next 60 days, to your point, right? I mean, part of the goal of Russian disinformation and autocratic disinformation is to divide our democracy, to make it dysfunctional. And that's why that division and dysfunction is something we need to confront. And the stakes of the election do determine the trajectory of the 21st century. It is about autocracy versus democracy at home and abroad. Okay. I hope we get asked those questions. (11/26)
What will your policy be on Iran? What were you discussing earlier? I think, Bill, it is key that the whole debate over the mics being open or closed, and it's obvious why Kamala Harris wanted them open. If the mics had been open in the first debate, there's no way Joe Biden ever, in this course of rambling, answer with lots of pauses, would have finally been able to say, look, we finally beat Medicare. Trump would have interrupted him like five times before he got it and saved him. And by the way, if Trump loses to Kamala Harris, that debate victory for him in June will be the most catastrophic success in American politics. He won the debate. Biden leaves and he gets a much tougher opponent. Yeah, they really screwed themselves. He should not have debated Biden that early. That was dumb because Biden revealed himself. They would have said, let's do it in October. And this is the thing, all the people now who acknowledge Biden's not up to it, all the same people, Democrats, they'd be (12/26)
insisting right now the way they did the entirety of the year, he's great, he's hale and hearty. He didn't wander off. He didn't really mess it up. And so would you if it was your guy. What's that? And so would you if it was your guy. Don't make it sound like it. Maybe, but this was like, he's not up for the job. I mean, he literally can't do it and they told us he was. Speaking as an American historian, you know, I think this is one of the most significant cover ups in recent American history. You know, to perpetuate the appearance that the president was fit. I disagree. He's not unable to be president. He's unable to run for president. He's unable to do a debate. He's not a vegetable who can't think or make decisions. He just can't do the kind of thing. And by the way, once all of a sudden it wasn't a Biden-Trump rematch, all of a sudden the whole election changes because it's about new versus old. It's about hope versus fear. And that's been energizing people. Trump needs to connect (13/26)
her to the current administration, which has disastrous approval ratings, and say you're the unacceptable status quo, not the future. But this thematic debate will have a huge role in play. Have Democrats succeeded in reclaiming the patriotic label? Well, yes, their convention was much better. I mean, it's interesting. If you had told me before the convention that I would hear Kamala Harris say the word privilege, I would say, oh, I'm sure. And it was going to be about the usual, you know, white privilege. No. She said it's a privilege to be an American. I mean, she said those kind of things that Obama used to say about only in this country is my story possible. And I'm going to say it was music to my ears. I like America. I like America. I don't care who goes there. It is absolutely essential. I've been big on reclaiming the American flag because it belongs to all of us and it can't be a partisan signifier. But the smartest thing Democrats have done is take back freedom, right? It's (14/26)
about reproductive freedom. It's taking back the word freedom, taking back the flag, taking back patriotism. And all of a sudden, actually, she's refusing to take the bait on identity politics. And Trump is the one who's focused on it. That flipping the script is very healthy. You have to be clear, though, that this really is a group, a party that has been pushing identity politics extensively. Yes. And that's been the biggest thing. And so what they've tried to do is valorize victimhood. And I'm afraid of this ideology, this postmodernist, postcolonial, neo-Marxist kind of ideology. It robs our young people of agency. I agree. I agree 100 percent. You have to tear it down. And so what does that leave young people with? A toxic combination of anger and resignation. So let's restore agency. And the ironic thing is, this is where the whole shooting comes. The far right is now resembling the far left in this. I have to say, it's hard to take to hear Tim Walz, given his record in (15/26)
Minnesota, which had nothing libertarian about it whatsoever, to portray himself as this great champion of freedom. It reminded me, Bill Buckley had this old line that, liberals don't care what you do so long as it's mandatory. And that's how Tim Walz got it. The guy represented one of the most Republican districts for six terms. But once he was governor with a unified legislature behind him, all bets were off. And it'll be the same thing with Kamala. She sounds like a moderate now. She's flip-flopped on like ten things without explanation. But if she gets a unified Congress, she'll be the new FDR and the new LBJ. Once they're in there, they convince themselves they have to be transformational presidents. That's all posed. The alternative being Donald Trump is a totally different ballgame. That's rewarding someone who tried to overturn an election on a lie that led to an attack on her capitol. That's the stark choice. But one of the problems with the patriotism issue, I think that we (16/26)
were just about to talk about with the Democrats, goes back to what we were talking about in the show with education. You see interviews with young people, they think America is very often like the worst country in the world. And they think it's the worst time to ever be living in. This is just rank ignorance. They are not, again, common sense. They don't teach the kids basic things in school. They don't know that this is the best time to be alive. The average person alive today lives like kings did, like just a hot shower a hundred years ago. It was a giant luxury. The amount of entertainment we have, the amount of caloric intake we have, the speed of travel, communication, porn on the phone. But no, we do need to think about education. Partly is we're educating students to become active citizens in a self-governing society, right? Washington says enlightened opinion is necessary for a self-governing society. So we need to actually start teaching them history, the good, the bad, and (17/26)
the ugly, but that we're a great country. We've got to acknowledge, right, it's the far left that pushed this ahistorical thesis that our country was founded to preserve slavery rather than founded on principles that made that criminal institution unsustainable. I don't think we should replace that with a contrived happy view of history. No, you instantly had school districts around the country adopting that as part of the curriculum. It's a lie about we're the first society in history to lie about ourselves. I'm not a partisan guy. What parties were pushing that agenda? That's, I think, where we get to the revolt of the reasonable, right? Let's start teaching Ken Burns in school. Let's start having a sense that we are imperfect people trying to form a more perfect union. But educating folks about the full capacity of our history is a good thing. What Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, he used to say, he said, do I apologize for defending a less than perfect democracy? I do not. Find (18/26)
me a better one. That's how I feel. But he's right. It is one side that did that. And that's the weakness on the far left. I completely agree. And what I worry about too, we were talking about military rate, it's military service, you know. If you teach your young people that your country is not worth defending, who's going to defend you, right? Who's going to defend you? And I think this is related to some of the recruiting issues we've had. Just the attacks on the Founding Fathers, who of course were imperfect. By the way, at this time that they were doing what they did, they were not that different than anybody else in the world. Exactly. Including people of color in other parts of the world who had slaves. It's not like we invented it in 16. Slavery was endemic to the human condition throughout all human history. What was new was when we began to turn against it. The British first began to get into slave trade, and then finally... But we fought a most destructive war in our history (19/26)
to emancipate one million of our fellow Americans. Now, then you teach the failure of Reconstruction, you teach the rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, separate but unequal. And by the way, that was all the Democratic Party. Yes, at the time, they were conservative Republicans. But it explains a lot, right? If you understand Reconstruction, we need to study more, because the resistance to multiracial democracy is also a defining factor of our country. We are a great country. I am a very patriotic guy. The fullness of American history is what we need, because because we're the First Nation founded on idea, not a tribal identity, we need unifying stories, so we need to teach those stories. And that's where we've been screwing up. We'll move on. What are your thoughts on Dick Cheney saying that he'll be voting for Kamala? Yeah, Liz Cheney said she would, and then she'd... What do you think of that? Come on. You lose Dick Cheney, Rich. Come on. Come on, man. Isn't politics funny, (20/26)
though? If someone had told you 20 years ago Dick Cheney would be endorsing the Democratic candidate for president? Look, I get their... They can't stand Donald Trump and not being on board with Donald Trump. I do not get conservative Republicans supporting Kamala Harris. Hold on. Let's work through it. It's not just about... One person wants to strengthen NATO and all the multilateral security arrangements that have helped keep the peace for the best part, for the most part since the Second World War. The other wants to sell out to a lot of these autocratic countries. That's a personal, not political decision. I think that's actually consistent. Also, I think it's healthy, because who... You know, I think you get more Republicans endorsing Democrats, it makes the point that this election is about something bigger. It's about building a broad patriotic coalition. Again, the U.S. military was stronger and more lethal when Trump was done with his first term, and he was actually... He (21/26)
said a lot of dumb things about Putin, but he supported Ukraine more than Obama did, and he was harder on China than any prior president, and now that position has become... We have someone who... Well, I mean, this is a big part of the book. I mean, he actually did. He's the first one who provided defensive capabilities to... I try to tell you guys, but you don't believe it until HR says it. No, but then he did suspend that assistance to get dirt on the Biden's. So, you know, you said... I wouldn't say reckless, but I would say inconsistent, erratic versus fecklessness, and I do think that when you talk about coddling authoritarian regimes, look at what this administration has done with the Iranians. I mean, the supreme leader has gotten an easy ride from the Biden administration. They didn't even want to acknowledge Iran's role in October 7th at the beginning. They still have not really reimposed or actually enforced the sanctions against the Iranians since October 7th, and with them (22/26)
having the whole Middle East on fire. So I think it's a more complicated situation is what I'm saying, John. Well, but sometimes... You can't just make these broad statements. Hold on, HR. I love you, man, but hold on. Like, we've got one guy saying we should pull out of NATO, right? We should not... Putin can do whatever the hell he wants, basically giving a yellow light to China on Taiwan. I mean, you know, the autocratic alliance you warn about is, in many cases, rooting for Donald Trump, because they think it leads to American division and decline. Tell me where I'm wrong. Well, what I'm saying is there were some things, right? There are some things where Donald Trump's right. I mean, there are some things where he's right. There are some things where he's completely erratic and inconsistent. Where does he write on? I think he's been right on energy security, for example. I think he's been right on reciprocity and trade. He's been right on burden sharing, but then again, with (23/26)
Donald Trump, he's so disruptive, right? He disrupts what needs to be disrupted sometimes, but then he goes on to disrupt himself, and he becomes kind of the antagonist in his own story. So, I mean, so you've got a choice, right, in this election. People have to make the choice between what I would say are really self-destructive policies at times for the Biden administration on the Middle East, on the war in Israel, but really the war in the region, and kind of the erratic nature of President Trump. But these are the questions. These candidates have to be asked, what are their positions on these issues, on NATO, on Ukraine, on the war in the Middle East? I think this, you know more than I do, but the hit on Soleimani, I think, was shocking. It wasn't a major war. One hit, one guy. I think everyone with American blood on their hands around the world slept less easily after that hit, and it just went to the fact that he had deterrent force. People were scared or worried about him in a (24/26)
way they haven't been of Joe Biden. Look, the bipartisan consensus on more American foreign policy is we should stand up against tyrants and terrorists, right? And I do believe that. And I do think that there's, we learned a lot in the wake of the Iraq war. But the fact is that right now, if you're strong on national security, one party's leader seems to be trying to weaken NATO, and the other party has expanded it and strengthened it. A lot of that is working them to try to get them to spend more. But I don't see, the Afghan withdrawal, does this compute at all in your role? There's no reason Pompeo should have negotiated with the Taliban alone in Doha. It was a conditions-based thing. Biden didn't accept anything else that Trump did, except he was supposedly forced by Trump to do a withdrawal. It was done badly. That was a totally incompetent, dishonorable disgrace. His presidency has not recovered from it since, and our position abroad hasn't recovered. And I think you can draw a (25/26)
direct line from that disastrous, humiliating withdrawal to the re-invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. I mean, I think what's weakness, what is provocative, is the perception of weakness. So, what I would love to hear from both candidates is their commitment. And, if I may, 61 Americans were killed when Trump was in office in Afghanistan, 13 under Biden. So, there's that. Good luck with the campaign. You're running as a Democrat? Thank you. I am. Come and join us, Democrats. Thank you. Good luck at home with that. All right. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (26/26)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. ...about Florida right now. A category five liberal hoax is about to hit. No, this is serious. If you are watching me in Florida, stop. Get the fuck out right now. No, seriously, this is really serious stuff there. And not just that hurricane. There are three hurricanes lined up. Irma in Florida, Jose in the Caribbean, and Katia coming to Mexico. I'm just saying, if you're a coke smuggler, take the weekend off. This is not a good time to be out. And these are like, they say this Irma's the most serious storm ever. Like, I'm seeing colors on the hurricane maps I've never seen before. Here's a little guide. If you see yellow like Trump's hair, take extra care. If you see orange like his face, shelter in place. Red like his ties to Russia, just evacuate now. It's about to hit Florida this storm, but Trump says not to worry. We are completely prepared. The National Guard is in place. FEMA is well supplied. (1/27)
Melania has her stilettos on. I call them flood me pumps. It's got the flood me pumps. But you know, the people in Florida can take solace in the fact that they will soon get a visit from Donald Trump, the comforter in chief, they're calling him. Because you know, when I think of comfort and empathy and warm, fuzzy feelings, nobody comes to mind like Donald Trump. He's a Snuggie in human form. This guy, did you see him in Houston? He brought the first lady. I've never seen a president do that. He brought a date to a flood. Honey. And of course, his fans loved it. They thought he was very brave to face his greatest nemesis of the last 30 years, wind. I tell you, who did not look too good there in Houston was Mr. Pastor, I should say, Joel Osteen. You know this guy? He wouldn't, he's got a mega church. He wouldn't let people shelter in his church during a storm, Mr. Christian. And this church, boy, talk about mega. It seats 17,000 people. And on Sunday, he fills it up three times. He (2/27)
preaches to 52,000 people. The Catholics are like, wow, we're molesting the wrong people. Oh, speaking of molesting the wrong people, this week with North Korea exploding a hydrogen bomb and these weather catastrophes all over the country, who does Trump go after? The dreamers. You saw this? He threatened to end the program we referred to as DACA. People don't know what that stands for. It's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Says the same thing on my condoms. I point it like I'm wearing one now. I don't trust you people. I'm wearing a condom. No. DACA is the program that President Obama started to allow the children of undocumented immigrants, who have never known any of the country, to stay here. They spent their entire lives in this country. They're so Americanized, their car horns play Taylor Swift. You know what I was trying to say. It's the condom. It's fucking me. But they're leading very productive lives, more than most people. Over 90% are employed. A lot of them are in (3/27)
the military. They're very well educated. They almost all believe in climate change. Yeah, this is so interesting. Climate change. The deniers all have beach houses in the way of... No, did you read this? All in the way of the storm. Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and Coulter, the Koch brothers, all have houses that are going to be wiped out, probably. I'm not bloating. It's just an inconvenient truth. I'm not trying to... No, Trump has a $28 million compound on the island of St. Martins, and it looks like it's gonna get completely wiped out. Today, he said, Darn, that's where I keep my tax returns. But you know, even though everything that scientists said was going to happen, that the waters were gonna get warmer, and it's gonna soup up the storms, and that Irma's the worst storm ever, and Harvey was a 500 to one shot, and they've had three years in a row with 500 to one shots, the right-wingers are still, no, we can't blame climate change. Yes, I agree. My theory has something to do with (4/27)
Hillary's emails. Right. Really, I'm not... Rush Limbaugh has been telling his listeners all week that Irma is a liberal hoax to promote their climate change agenda, but that he had to evacuate his house, which for Rush, has gotta be a tough pill to swallow, but if anybody knows about swallowing pills... All right, we got a great show. S.E. Cuff and Adam Gottfried are here, and a little later, we'll be speaking with author and earth guardian, Sotescott Martinez, but first up, he went viral as the undecided voter in the red sweater who questioned both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at the presidential debate last year. Please welcome Ken Bone is back with us. Great to meet you. You wore the sweater, thank you. I couldn't not wear it. No, no, I requested you. That is your symbol, and I know you're, I read your tweets this week, I know you wonder why you're here. Uh, yeah, for sure. I've wondered why this whole thing happened. Well, you became sort of emblematic as the independent (5/27)
voter. You were at that famous debate, and it was all independents who hadn't made up their mind, and to me, you're a gettable voter. I'll be honest with you, I have a dog in this fight. I wanna convince you that you should have voted for Hillary instead of Godzilla. Well, I didn't, I'll tell you that much, I didn't vote for Godzilla. I didn't vote for Jill Stein either. Not Godzilla and not Jill Stein, but I'm not saying any more. Are you gonna reveal who you did vote for? No, I'm waiting for my book deal to come through. Is that true? No, not at all. I promised before the election that I wouldn't say who I voted for, because like it or not, we're obsessed with celebrities in this country, and even like an F-list celebrity like me, people put stock in my opinion, and it's not fair to the democratic process if I tell them what to believe. Like, you're an informer, that is your job to inform people, educate them, entertain them. I'm a random dude that works at the power plant. People (6/27)
don't need to be informed by me. Who did you vote for? No. That was a wonderful speech, Ken, but who did you vote, I'm not leaving, I'm not gonna leave here at the, you're not getting out of California, my friend. It's only an hour show, Bill, what are we? Really, okay, but you didn't vote for Trump, so you voted, you didn't vote for Jill Stein, you didn't vote for fucking Aleppo dude, did you? I voted for either Johnson or Clinton or Trump, one of the big three, well the big two and then the one. Okay, all right, well, you keep your secrets, Ken. But I wanted to have you here because you are what I call a gettable voter. You're not totally in the Trump camp at all. I think there are things that you don't like about him at all and yet it puzzles me that you were still undecided that late and you still don't wanna tell us who you wanted to vote for and you're the person we need to get. And when I say we, I mean the Democrats, the liberals, we wanna turn this country around because I (7/27)
think it's on a very, very bad path. What path do you think the country's on under Trump? Well, one of the weird things about being undecided is they ask you like, who are you gonna vote for? And that's the last human being I've ever told who I was gonna vote for, was this person doing the survey to determine if I could be at the debate. And they said, how likely are you to change your mind? And I said, I don't know, like two. Probably not gonna change my mind, but I wanna keep an open mind. They said, well, in this super polarizing election, a two out of 10 likelihood of changing your mind is still undecided. So there was nobody on that stage that was above a four. But I wouldn't be like two in a million if it was Donald Trump. I can totally understand that, but one of the reasons why I wanted to wait and make up my mind, make my final decision, is in Canada you have an 80-day election campaign and they complain that it's too long. Ours started on November 10th and it's already going (8/27)
again. People are like, who are you gonna vote for in 2020? I don't wanna feed that fire because that turns our political process into TMZ. It creates people like me and it creates nothing but sound bites and sniping back and forth and it doesn't help solve the issues. All right, Ken, but we... But we paid for your offer out here. You're gonna answer my question. I've been exposed enough to politics to know how to not answer questions. Just tell me this. What is it about Hillary? Because Hillary Clinton's book is coming out this week and she made a statement this week which sounded a lot like something I've said about her in the past, which is, future historians I feel will be very puzzled at why people hated her as much as they did. I could see not liking her terribly much because she's not a great politician, but I mean, I've said it before, if you really hate Hillary Clinton, you were molested by a real estate lady. I just don't get it. She's a bland centrist. This is not Che (9/27)
Guevara in a pantsuit. What about her irked you so much that you were willing to just be independent into the last minute? Well, I never really hated Hillary. Like, I was, you know, I'm willing to wait until the investigations come out on any charges against anybody because we're supposed to have this presumption of innocence, especially if you, you know, look like you're part of the right demographic in this country. Uh, so, you know... What does that mean? You have a presumption of innocence if you're a white people, basically, according to our justice system. It's supposed to be for everybody and we're working on it, but I try to give that benefit of the doubt to everyone. And we have trouble extending that to polarizing figures like politicians. And even someone who has moderate or centrist opinions relative to the Democratic Party, like Hillary Clinton, is gonna be a polarizing figure and people just wanna jump on her. Like, and Donald Trump was the master of getting people to (10/27)
look at her instead of look at him. Did that work on you? I try to dig a little deeper, you know. I don't believe anything that I hear the first time. So did you think the emails were very important? It was never really a big issue to me. I was willing to let the investigation play out. Okay, well, it did. James Comey got up there and he said, we looked at it, he scolded her a little bit and he said, no prosecutor would bring charges. And then 10 days before the election, he brought it up again. Yeah, I thought that was a really weird move, especially since it looked for all the world like she was gonna win at that point. They're like, what are you doing? Why are you bringing this up if you don't have anything? And then it turned out he didn't have anything. So I still don't see the sense in it. Well, what about, okay, so what about Russia? I saw this, we were off last week and there was a big story about a focus group that somebody did. And they had voters, even the ones who voted for (11/27)
Trump, very disillusioned with him. And then the guy said, what about Russia? And you can say about Russia, you think it's something big, you don't think it's something big, or you can say, I don't know. And every one of the Trump people said, I don't know. Because when you watch Fox News, you don't know. Yeah. They just don't report it. Where do you get your news? I try to dig as far as I can on everything. I'll get the sound bites from Fox News and then I'll think, okay, what's wrong with this particular one? And that puts you on the track of what are we ignoring. And then you can watch your MSNBCs and kind of get, you know, you have your Trump, or you have your Fox News way over on the right and then you have your center, and then you have your left wing news, you know, they're not quite as far tilted. But they give you leads, things that are, what are we trying to ignore on both sides? So do you think there is something to the Russia story? Oh, absolutely. Foreign governments have (12/27)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series Real Time with Bill Maher. You are surprisingly fresh for a week that included a lot of heavy drinking. It was Cinco de Mayo yesterday and also Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. So they don't make Corona strong enough for that. That's right. Did you see Donald Trump yesterday? For Cinco de Mayo, he tweeted out a picture of him eating a taco bowl and said, Happy Cinco de Mayo. I love Hispanics. And they love him. Oh, they love him. He's at all the children's parties here in L.A. As the pinata. But you know, they said it couldn't happen. They said it wouldn't happen. It happened. Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. You know, I have taken a lot of crap over the years for saying this is a stupid country. I should have trademarked it. Everybody keeps saying it's a reality show. Yeah, Fear Factor. I feel like I know how Dracula got to run Transylvania. They had primaries, there was debates and (1/34)
then the other vampires just couldn't stand Ted Cruz. I mean, yeah, that's what happened. It all ended Tuesday night in Indiana. Ted Cruz bid it bad. I mean, the Republicans, all they had to do was come up with one motherfucker who was more popular than Donald Trump and they couldn't do that. If you're wondering why even Republicans could not stand Ted Cruz, he said it is concession speech. I am not making this up. This is why we hate politicians. He said, just a few days ago, two young kids, four and six, handed me two envelopes full of change, all of their earnings from their lemonade stand. Right. A four year old is concerned with the direction of the country. Here, Mr. Quus, take all my money, use it to defeat Donald Trump. He's not a true conservative. The six year old said he would have done it sooner, but he was waiting to see if Bloomberg got in. Now, I am beginning to think this whole election is taking place inside the mind of a disturbed child. And that child, of course, is (2/34)
Dr. Ben Carson. Yes, gentle Ben was, he's been appointed to find Trump's vice president. We're at the point now where the crazy people are appointing each other to do jobs. And so on the short list, of course, is Chris Christie. He was the first on the Trump train. Trump and plump. It'll be quite a campaign. Chris Christie has already assured Donald Trump that he does not have any skeletons in the closet. Baby back ribs in the bed. Yes. I mean, this is the reality we're living in. They're talking about Trump's vice president. They're talking about what he's going to do in his first hundred days. He said by the end of his first hundred days, the wall with Mexico will be designed, immigration ban on Muslims will be in place, and the repeal of Obamacare will be in motion, and all of us will be in Canada. And by the way, there may be quite a few Republicans with us. The party is split in a way I have never seen before. The Republican establishment is not necessarily going along supporting (3/34)
Donald Trump. He's racist, he's sexist, he's belligerent. There are also some things about him they don't like. It's true. The last two Republican presidents, Bush senior and Bush junior, they're not going to the convention. The last two nominees, Mitt Romney, John McCain, they don't want any part of it. They're not going to the convention. Lindsey Graham says he won't go, but that's just because he has nothing to wear. Nothing to do with politics. No, I mean, Paul Ryan, he is the leading Republican in the country, the Speaker of the House. He is the chairman of the convention. Yesterday he said he will not endorse Donald Trump. He said he wants to. He hopes to. He said he's not there yet. He doesn't want to rush into it. This Donald Trump, tell me more. I've not heard enough about who is this Donald Trump? Like Trump is going to change? This is what magical thinking gets you. When you believe in a talking snake, you believe an orangutan can transform into a statesman. I almost feel (4/34)
sorry for them, but you know what? This is what you get. Republicans spent years whipping their voters into sexist, xenophobic, self-righteous frenzy and now they're stuck with Donald Trump. It's like finally convincing your wife to have a threesome and then she brings home a guy. All right, we've got a great show. Ann Coulter, Dan Savage and Nick D'Alessio are here. And a little of that, we're sticking with the immensely talented Bryan Cranston is backstage. But first up, for the last 11 years, he has run one of the most successful drug treatment clinics in America. Please welcome the founder and CEO of the Cliffside Malibu Treatment Center and co-author of Ending Addiction for Good, Richard Tate. Richard, how are you, sir? Great to have you here. Thank you. I think you know why you're here. It's an intervention for me. No, I'm kidding. No, it's because there's an epidemic in America and it is about drug abuse and you know more about this than possibly anybody because you yourself (5/34)
were an addict. And then you started a treatment center. You're like the hair club for men guy, but with heroin. So tell us about your drug days and why you didn't find them fun. I did actually find them fun. Okay. Right. Drugs are fun. Drugs are fun. That's the problem. Right. No one admits that. Drugs are fun. Drugs are fun. Thank you for being here. But like anything else, it stops working after a certain period of time. Especially drugs. There's always this honeymoon period. That's right. Some drugs have like, liquor always works. Sure. Pot always works, but it does diminish. But there are some drugs like opiates we're going to get into, cocaine, where it's like you only get like three months. It's a balloon payment and then it falls right off the chart, right? Right. Well, the thing about the prescription drug epidemic. It's so bad. When Cliffside Malibu opened in 2005, about 20% of the people that came to us had a problem with prescription opiates. Today, it's 90%. Right. Right. (6/34)
Yeah. I mean, you know how I knew it was bad? I was watching the Super Bowl this year and there was a commercial for opioid-induced constipation. Right. I said, wow, because a Super Bowl commercial, the most expensive thing in the world. I said, if this is this widespread, that on the Super Bowl they're doing ads for people who can't shit because they're on... Right. No. And when we talk opiate, what are the actual names of the drugs we're talking about? Oxycontin? Oxycontin. Percocet. Percocet. Right. Codeine. Fentanyl. Right. And these constipate you, apparently. Yes. Right. But here's the thing to know. You've got the heroin over here that's enriching the drug cartels and then you've got all this litany of pills that are enriching the pharmaceutical companies. So what they say is, don't use this, use this. Same thing, by the way. Same thing. Just legal heroin. They always called Oxycontin hillbilly heroin. It certainly is. I mean, I've done heroin, I've done Oxycontin, and they're (7/34)
the same thing. Same thing. So I don't think I know. I know I know. I've done it. Right. Right. And then you get off that and you get on to heroin light, which is Suboxone. They call it harm reduction. And then... Like methadone? Absolutely. It's modern day methadone. Right. And then they say, oh, wait a minute, you're not going to be able to defecate, so you've got to use this pill. I actually took a picture of that commercial and put it on my Facebook. I was, it was blown away by it. Too much information, man. Okay. No, I'm kidding. It's the least of the information. But yeah, I mean, we see this on the news every day that, you know, white people are doing heroin. Right. And then when you read the background to this, it's because they started on the prescription drug pills because, you know, no one wants pain. And of course, who wants pain? Nobody wants pain. But then they can't afford it or they get cut off by their doctor, so what do they do? They go to the drug that, as you just (8/34)
said, is the same thing, which is heroin. Right. The thing about this, and I get your point and it's well taken, the thing about it is you can be black or white, rich or poor, straight or gay. This thing, this epidemic that we've got right now doesn't discriminate. Right. It's killing everybody. Prince was all of them and he was on it. Right. And look, I mean, look, people get very emotional when their rock stars die. I mean, I was a big Prince fan. We all were. Right. And we're not talking out of school. The autopsy report is not back yet, if there ever is going to be one, but it's pretty clear that he was on, I think it was Percocet, he had it on his body when they found him in his house. I've done a lot of drugs too, Doc. Let me tell you something. When you got the drugs on you in your house, it's one thing when you go out of the house. When you don't think you can make it to the next room, it's like, I don't know. That coffee table is far away. Let me just put these in my bathroom. (9/34)
That's a serious drug problem. So here's the important takeaway, right? We know that he was probably on those opiates for hip pain. We also have reports that he had sleep problems. Sleep medication with prescription opiates is a disaster. It's lethal. You can't take those two at the same time. Why did he die? Because the opiates slowly sort of suffocate you? They suppress respiration, is that right? Right, but they're not made, these opiates are not made for long term care. So the CDC just came out and offered up a report in the last, I think, 30 days. And what they said was, three days to seven days. That's it. The FDA comes out and says, we like what you just said. Why don't we get all these doctors together and start coaching them up and nip this epidemic in the bud? Sure. And what happened was, is the pharmaceutical industry, the lobby, came out and pushed back against it and said- Of course. Right? It's like all of a sudden they're the AMA lobby. Right? I mean, they were really (10/34)
concerned. Well, I mean, it's important to note that America's 5% of the world's population uses 75% of the prescription drugs in the world. That's a pretty amazing statistic. At least. And what's even more important is that right now you've got 27 million people in the country who are abusing these drugs, but only 2.5 million were able to get treatment. Every candidate, the president, the drugs czar, everybody thinks we need more treatment. And then there are these local communities, even in California, a liberal place like California, they just introduced a bill, AB 2403, that's going to decimate, I mean, take away thousands of treatment beds that we need. Let me ask you one last question that's a little broader about society. I mean, I was a kid in the 60s. The drugs were LSD and marijuana, psychedelic, stuff like that. Sure. You moved into cocaine and quaaludes, in the 90s it was ecstasy, and now it's opiates. What does the fact that opiates is the drug of choice say about our (11/34)
society now as opposed to our society in other decades? So I think that we are a society that is depressed. We're a depressive society. I don't know if it has to do with... Trump. It all comes back to Trump. Right, for sure. I don't know if it has to do with income inequality or the lack of opportunity or just life on life's terms because it can be hard sometimes, right? Capitalism, when you don't ameliorate it with some things, is pretty rough on people. There's a lot of losers in society and that's the way we want it here in America apparently, but yeah, I get your point. Well when you're depressed you have this type of learned helplessness, if you will, right? And when you take a painkiller, they call it painkillers for a reason, and it actually works better on emotional pain than it does on physical pain. So when you take the painkiller and you're depressed, you go, okay, I'm good, and you're hooked. All right. I'll see you after the show at the parking lot. All right. Thank you. I (12/34)
appreciate it. Let's meet our panel. Terrible things I say. I don't know why I do it. All right. Let's meet our panel. He is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and co-author of the Declaration of Independence. Nick Gillespie is back with us. Nick, how you doing? He writes the nationally syndicated column Savage Love and hosts the Savage Love cast podcast. Dan Savage is back. And she is the author of Adios America, the Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hell Hole. Ann Coulter is over here. Come on. Remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. All right. I'm going to break format tonight and start with a clip. This is from our overtime. We do overtime, which is something we do for the internet after the show. If people want to like, I don't know why they do this, turn off HBO and turn on your computer. But this is from the last time you were on the show. This is when there were many, many, many (13/34)
Republican presidential candidates still in the race. And here's the question that someone asked, and I relate it to you. And here's what happened. Okay. Here we are. In which Republican candidate has the best chance of winning the general election? Of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump. You gloats eat crow. You want to get your stock tips from me now? Yeah. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, a lot of people apparently have, because a lot of people said he wouldn't even win a primary. So last week, Rob Reiner, who I love, was here and we ended the show by saying, I think Hillary's going to win in a landslide. And I said, don't say that. So I'm giving you credit for that. And I also want to use you to scare liberals. But I ask you right now, can Trump win the general election? It's possible. I don't know. Hear that? You sound a lot less certain. No, I mean, what I would say about Trump is, and that's why I'm so glad it's Trump. I (14/34)
think he will do better than any other Republican could have as the results of this primary election show. He does represent not only the Republican Party, but large segments of the Democratic Party that has been being ignored, ignored. We have been asking for the wall. We've been asking for a decrease in immigration. And time after time, the people rise up, shut down amnesty, throw out Dave Brat beats Eric Cantor and they can't learn. Well, I think we know now the wall is popular. We have a time out on immigration. We already have one because our economy sucks worse than Mexico. So there's been net out migration of Mexicans. They're going back to Mexico. It's true. It's not true. It is. Our economy sucks worse than Mexico's? There has been a net out. Why don't you move there? Yeah. You know what, because I don't speak the language. He's wrong about that. Our economy is not worse than Mexico's, but we have one million fewer Mexican immigrants leaving now than we did seven years ago. (15/34)
That's what the government says. And the government says we have 11 million illegals. They're wrong about that too. Can the party win that is so split? I mean, George will is somebody I've been reading my whole life. I don't always agree with him, but sometimes he's persuasive. He's an amazing thinker. He hates me, by the way, which I love. I wouldn't have it any other way. Even more. Right. And he said that he is against Trump big time. He said this is a time for prudence, which demands the prevention of a Trump presidency. He says conservatives have two tasks. The first is to help him lose 50 states and keep Hillary to one term. How can you win when a party is split this much? The party is not split. Trump has gotten more votes than anyone else running in a Republican primary. You were talking about a few sore losers. Not a few. Now they know how I feel when McCain was running. Oh, and. So I hope they're enjoying it. By the way, I wasn't as much of a little bitch as George will is. (16/34)
But and Bobby Bobby Jindal says Donald Trump is a narcissist and he's an egomaniac. I wouldn't want his fingers on the nuclear codes, but he's going to vote for him. Right. And Peter King. Wait, Peter King, a guy with calls Trump a guy with no knowledge of what's going on, but he's going to vote for Rick Perry. Calls him a cancer on conservative. But he's going to vote for cancer. And he offered to be his running mate. Yeah. He offered to be cancer's running mate. Is this putting country first? OK, let's look at what Sanders said about Hillary. Point one. But point two, Trump is crushing the primaries. He got half a million more votes than Romney did in Florida. He got half a million more votes in the Republican primary in Florida than the Democrats got. Trump. He's the party. OK. Nobody is going to be like, oh, I'm with Jindal. Whatever Jindal wants, I'll do. I mean, these are like loser candidates. But what Trump is good at, and I dislike Trump because he is a perfect Republican. (17/34)
Every one of his points from the stupid wall to bombing countries, et cetera, he's just doing exactly what the Republicans have said that we should be doing for a long time. Not at all. Yes. What the base has been saying and they've been ignored. That's the difference. And that's the problem for the Republican Party because they've reached a point where they need to, like Bertolt Brecht said, they need to dissolve the base and elect a new one. And they can't. The problem is the base. They've been cranking up, gathering together every rube, racist, nut job sexist homophobe in the country, calling them Republicans. And finally, they voted for one of their own. But wait. But he's the less. He's the least. He could be the spokesman for Hillary Clinton with that line. But wait, 20. That's going to be a big hit for the American people who are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. 20 percent. The GOP base, which is overwhelmingly rubes, idiots, sexist, racists, are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. (18/34)
The American people are not going to overwhelmingly vote for Trump. I'm with you. I'm a Catholic. I'm not into jinxing things. So I'm not going to say Hillary is going to win in a landslide. But the American people are not the GOP base, which is what you're arguing. In Massachusetts, no I'm not. I'm saying in Massachusetts, 20,000 Democrats switched their registration to Republican to vote for Trump. In Pennsylvania, 60,000 Democrats switched their registration to vote for Trump. And how many of them were monkey-wrenching? This is the story. This is the country. Hillary is widely disliked. She's got like a 55 percent unfavorability rating. The minute she starts talking, that will go higher. She's awful. I think she's as bad as Trump in different ways. But what Trump has going for him, just as a tactician, he knows how, like he knows next week you've got another episode. And he's going to throw something out there and he's going to mix it up every time he was written off. Next week. (19/34)
Next hour. Yeah. Isn't it fun? It's not fun. It is fun. The odds are against him. He will run like the greatest, most entertaining campaign of all time. But this is not entertainment. This is supposed to be a country. It is important to be entertaining. You make serious points and you are a full-time comedian. But I'm not running for president. No, I know. I'm saying that. But people watch you. They start laughing. In the case of Trump, you're watching because he's fun and entertaining. And then you start thinking, wait, I agree with that. He has 30,000 people at his rallies. So what? You know, I could let loose a zoo animal and there would be people... I don't think you could. I couldn't? I don't think there would be 30,000 people coming out and cheering every time he talks about the wall that zoo animal would be on. Historically, a lot of people coming to your rallies can be problematic. Oh, like Obama? Not necessarily a big upside to that. Yeah, like Obama. Okay. Okay, but 20% of (20/34)
Republicans say they will vote for Hillary. And there are Republicans like Kelly Ayotte who say she will not endorse him, but she supports him, which is a little like saying, I'll fuck you, but I won't be seen in public with you. Paul Ryan, as I mentioned in the monologue, this is the titular head of the party. No, he isn't. He is so hated by the base. He's third in line to the president. He's not hated by the base. Yes, he is absolutely hated. He's the next Eric Cantor who was the highest member of leadership ever to lose in a prime area. What you are seeing here and quite possibly within Ann herself, it's the implosion of the Republican party. No, it isn't. It is breaking down. And by the way, as a libertarian, I can't wait for this to happen because the Republican party for years has always talked to libertarian line where you want small government this and that. And all they have done on every level, on personal liberties as well as wars and in terms of regulation. Yeah, they're (21/34)
not libertarian. No. They're terrible. So I want to see it implode and I hope neither of the two halves come back to life. And then I want to see the Democratic party. We're getting rid of the dead wood is all. Does it matter to you that Trump is going to crash the markets? Because let me tell you something, what the markets hate. They hate volatility. He is personification of volatility. They hate uncertainty. That's exactly who we are. He threatened today to default on the US debt. Exactly. They hate trade wars. They hate debt. He is all those things put together. Right. Who would, who but Donald Trump would threaten to default on our bonds? The one thing that the world buys because they are known to be the safest thing in the world. And he talks about them like he's negotiating with some guy who's putting in a stairway in a building of his. Because he doesn't know what they are. Right. He's the great businessman. He doesn't know anything about money. He thinks we can get rid of our (22/34)
debt in eight years. If you're born with enough money, you don't really have to know anything about it. That's so true. That's the hard proof. You know something about it. Well, he doesn't have 10 billion. That's bullshit you bought. Well, I don't really care, but he sure owns a lot of property that seems to be worth a lot of money. Anyway, I think you're misunderstanding what you're calling volatility. He's saying unpredictability in foreign policy. And yeah, okay, we're not going to tell ISIS what we're doing. We're going to negotiate tough with China. I don't think our foreign policy should be based on what Wall Street wants. Okay, but he's already in a feud with the Speaker of the House. This is not something that the market... No, he's not. He's been very nice. I think the problem is with the Speaker of the House. You also have to understand the Republicans now, the leadership, they have until the convention to kind of negotiate with him a little bit, they have no leverage. He's (23/34)
run the table. Zero. So they're going to be like, oh, you know, I'm holding off a little bit. Paul Ryan has already said, I'm not endorsing him yet. You know he's going to. You know, you don't want H.W. Bush or W. Bush at that convention if you want to win in the fall, just as a straight strategy. Right. So he's doing a good job. Okay, but we're past the part where we're talking about winning. Now we're talking about what he's going to do, what this great businessman is going to do. Okay, first we're going to deport 11 million people, so there will be a lot of openings for nannies and gardeners and short-stops. And their children. Right. Okay, that's number one. And we'll need a police force and the institution of a police state, unlike anything we've ever seen in this country, to round up... And then China, there's going to be a trade war, so a dildo at Walmart will be $200, but a small price to pay for making America great again. Okay, may I answer these? Yes, please do. Okay, number (24/34)
one, there's not going to be a police force. All he needs to do is enforce the law on the books. We're going to have a wall, he's going to tell ICE how to do their job. How do you enforce the law on the books without a police force to enforce the law on the books? We already have ICE, they're being stopped. Last week, ICE released illegal aliens convicted of murder in this country. How many hundreds of thousands of ICE agents will you have to hire to round up 11 million? You don't need to hire them, tell them they can do their jobs now. That is a real... These are laws on the book and I just don't understand... The only way that this happens is where every one of us at every time and every job hire, every job firing, every cross into a new thing, there's going to be a lockdown. There has to be. If our highest... Thank you, people are saying... If it's not... If it's... Can we back up? Why do we want to throw these 11 million people out of the country? They contribute more to our (25/34)
economy than they take out. They pay more in taxes than they receive in services. They're... They commit fewer crimes? Illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita. Native born, American born Americans, not native born Americans, are two and a half times more likely committed by a crime, two and a half times more likely to be in prison than illegal immigrants. Those are all false facts. They're not false facts, they're fact facts. Not only are they false facts, but even if they are true facts, then you need to go and elect people who will change the laws and say we have open borders. But your rationale for building this giant wall is bullshit. No, the rationale is he's the commander in chief, he protects the borders. Those are the laws. All he's saying is, I will be the only person who will enforce the law. And I know you all want to pay your maids even less, but most Americans... No, I want a path... Don't say, this is useful. You know what, I don't want a fucking path to (26/34)
citizenship, I just want to give them citizenship. Okay, all right. I have to swear on that. Well, that's why they're all low wage workers. That means our salaries go up, your maid salary goes down. A path to shut up now. So listen, we have a tradition here when a primary ends, and obviously Kasich and Ted Cruz said uncle this week, so it is Donald Trump. You get credit for predicting that. But every time this happens here on Real Time, our tradition is we then say a fond goodbye to the people who made it so memorable. And so please help us right now say goodbye to the people who made this possibly the most fucked up election ever. When I was a teenager, I almost stabbed someone. A lot of people who go into prison, go into prison straight, and when they come out, they're gay. Please clap. That's it. Thank you. Are you kicking me out the door? The party is going bat shit crazy. And you know what they say about men with small hands. I hope the president's watching tonight, because here's (27/34)
what I'd like to tell him. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House, and we're going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. I hope the president's watching tonight, because here's what I'd like to tell him. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House come this fall. Nobody knows me. It's Kasich. It rhymes with Basin. President of the United States, Ted. It's that basketball ring here in Indiana. It's the same height as it is in New York City and every other place in this country. His role is LBJ in the HBO film All the Way, premiering May 21st. Bryan Cranston is over there. I was giving out free Oxycontin. Well, they love you because you are a great thespian. I said thespian. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (28/34)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. It's exciting. It's very, well, it's Mother's Day Sunday, isn't that? Uh, yeah. Do the right thing. Pick up the phone and call your mom. Or if you're Gen Z, just go upstairs. Get the kids. They love it. I'll tell you. Uh, yeah, Mother's Day, a little different in Texas this year. It's called, if you don't go through there, you'll be in jail day. And Kristi Noem, her kids got her a lot. Everybody celebrates Mother's Day. They got her a lovely gift from a shoe store, her favorite brand, Hush Puppies. But let's get to what you came here to hear about. Stormy Daniels, this is the week in the Trump trial. We finally heard from Stormy Daniels. Trump posted, the whole world is watching. I hate to tell you, Dawn, not even your family is watching. But Stormy had a lot to get off her chest. I mean, she's serious. We heard all about her background. She grew up in Louisiana. She started dancing at the strip clubs (1/38)
at 18. Moved into adult films at 23. What in Louisiana they call the career fast track. I get Louisiana. I love Louisiana. But then we got to, you know, we had to hear about the actual sex with Donald Trump. And she said, well, it was not exactly consensual. It was unwanted. But she did not resist what most women call married sex. And now, of course, the looming question is, will Trump take the stand? And we know for sure he will not, because he said he would. That's how we know for sure he will not. But come on. Trump take the stand, he put his hand on the Bible, and he sizzled like a fajita. Here's the thing. Now, because the details from Stormy were so salacious, I mean, even the judge had to say to her, honey, TMI. You know, I mean, there's kids watching. But now Trump's team is pushing for a mistrial. Oh, and by the way, mistrial is also Trump's drag name. Oh, look. As mistrial. But you know, Trump has been cited 10 times for contempt of court, because he, you know, can't keep his (2/38)
mouth shut. And anybody else who 10 times, they would put you in jail. And I think he wants to go to jail, because it would make him a martyr. He's practically begging the judge to put him in jail. There's a switch. Lock me up. And I love this. Over on Fox News, Jesse Waters. Have you seen this guy? Interesting guy. We keep finding him over there. He said, if Trump does go to jail, he's going to work out a lot. And he'll come out ripped. You're right, I could just stop with that. But no, Jesse Waters said he's going to come out ripped with a jail bod. Oh, gosh. Fox election coverage. Your number one source for gay fan fiction. And there's a development in the presidential race I didn't see forthcoming. Bobby Kennedy. Right. So this revealed some medical news this week. He said he's fine to run. But full disclosure, a worm did eat his brain. I'm not making that up. No. I mean, not reason. This was like 15 years ago. And the worm is dead. The worm is dead, ladies and gentlemen. No (3/38)
worries about the worm. I think this says everything about the presidential race. The 70-year-old man with a worm-eaten brain is the youth candidate. And Kristi Noem now says we've got to shoot him because he has worms. All right. We've got a great show. We have Frank Bruni and Douglas Murray are here. But first up, he's a contributing writer at The Atlantic, author of the bestseller Fast Food Nation, and producer of the documentary Food, Ink, Too, which is available to stream now. Eric Schwasser, Eric. Big fan of Fast Food Nation, by the way. Love that book. How are you today? I'm good. Oh, yeah? Well, I want to ask you about, I wanted to have you here, basically, because we have a presidential election, which seems to be a lot about eggs. Yeah. This seems to be what the whole thing is turning on people. Eggs and worms. Well, I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. Well, let's go to that first, because it is on my mind. Not in my mind, I hope. But I mean, the bird flu is now in the (4/38)
milk. Could the worm, how do you get a worm in your brain? Let's just go right there. You know, you have to ask Bobby. I mean, I'm sorry that you couldn't talk to him about this when he was on your show. Maybe some bad sushi, maybe uncooked pork, but of all the Right, it is food. That's how you do it. Yeah, but of all the food borne problems we've got in the United States, worm in the brain is not in the top 5,000. We have avian influenza being spread by cows. And scientists had no idea until a few weeks ago that this influenza could even be in cows at all. How do they get from the birds to the cows? Well, that's a very good question. There are wild birds that overfly dairies. There's all this intermixture of viruses that's going on. And what's very concerning about it is right now the federal government is not allowed to go into these mega dairies that have 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 cows and test them for avian influenza. The federal government can't go onto these mega dairies and test (5/38)
the workers, many of whom are undocumented and quite fearful of if they test positive what's gonna happen to them. You have big ag and the big dairy companies preventing the CDC from investigating what could be a life-threatening illness eventually to people. And it's a perfect example of how the public health is being threatened by private interests. Yeah, I mean, of all the industries that own the government, I have to say pharmaceuticals very high up, but nobody higher than the food. Well, the food companies spend more on lobbying than the defense industry. Right. Yeah, and I feel like the big picture story from your book, your movie, is that this system really works for nobody. It's not good for the land. Right. It's certainly not good for the animals. Right. It's not good for the workers who work in the factory, even in fast food. And the farm workers. And it's not good for the consumer. It's not good for the person who eats this food. It's good for a handful of enormous (6/38)
corporations that have basically taken over our food supply in the last 40 years. That sounds crazy. That sounds conspiratorial. But when you go into a supermarket and you see thousands of different products, they're all being made by three or four different companies. And they hide behind these different brands. I mean, I just found out from this book that I read recently called Barons by Austin Freewick, a great book, that the biggest seller of coffee in the United States is a German company, not Starbucks. But they sell it under all these different brands. So you think that there's choice. But it's really an illusion of choice. And I feel like the problem at bottom is that food is too delicious. That's why people don't care, is that we're seduced by the food. The Trojan horse is in our stomach. So I mean, we have these. I mean, you mentioned it. Cigarettes are great, too, by the way. I used to smoke. I mean, I love them. But these food companies are carefully formulating these (7/38)
ultra-processed foods so that they taste really good and you want to eat them again and again and again. OK, that's a word I just came across recently from reading you. I've heard processed food. I've never heard ultra-processed. Is that something new, or is it just a word we hadn't heard before? And how is it different than just processed? It is new. So a processed food would be something like canned corn. They cook the corn. They add some salt and some water. It's in the can. You open it up. You eat it. That's just fine. An ultra-processed. That's fine? Yeah. I mean, frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, as long as they don't have all kinds of additives, that's healthy. I disagree vehemently. Well, vegetables have to be eaten fresh, or it's just shit. And corn is shit to begin with. No, but ideally, yes. But in terms of harming your health, it's not going to hurt you. What's going to hurt you? If you look at the label, and there are all these chemical names that you would never have (8/38)
in your kitchen, that's an ultra-processed food. And what they're doing is they're creating flavor additives at these factories, mainly in New Jersey, that you- Hey. Hey. No offense. There are some wonderful things that have come out of that state, but flavor additives may not be it. Trust me, there are worse smells than the food factory. I'm a native. I can say that. And in New Jersey, you can tell where you are on the New Jersey turnpike by what it smells like. Anyway, flavor additives, emulsifiers, all these artificial sweeteners that human beings have never consumed before. So we're basically guinea pigs for these chemical additives. And who knows what they're doing to our body? But now, increasingly, people are concerned that they have all kinds of bad health effects. They're giving it cancer. Obesity. Well, yes. And maybe all kinds of neurological problems, too. Right. Lots of problems. But I think there's a direct link between that, the prevalence of cancer, and the shit we eat. (9/38)
And the problem is when you eat these foods, I think, is that you're not getting nutrients. You're getting calories. So your body still wants more food, because it wants nutrients. Wants the good stuff. So you keep eating, you get fat. And here's where Ozempic comes in, which I know is the wonder drug, and we all love it. I don't see it that way. It's an enabler. It's an enabler to keep eating shitty food. It's this miracle where you can keep, or maybe you don't eat as much, but you don't have to improve the diet. So I don't think it's gonna make us healthier in the future. It might make you thinner. I don't think you're still not getting the nutrients that you should. Well, you know, we keep on creating problems with technology, and then looking for a new technology to solve them. So this ultra-processed food is absolutely linked to obesity. So people become obese, and then the pharmaceutical companies come up with a drug to help with obesity. Now, I'm not an expert on Ozempic, but I (10/38)
think that for people who are severely obese already, that what's the choice? Gastric band surgery, or terrible health problems, or taking this drug? We don't know what the long-term implications of being on this drug is gonna be, but the long-term implications of being obese are really bad. The people who probably shouldn't be injecting this drug are people who are maybe a little too vain, and are probably already slender, and wanna be even more slender. But for people who are really unhealthy because of their weight, it may be a good thing. But what we need to do is prevent children from becoming obese. And that means in schools, we need to be serving real foods, not these ultra-processed foods. Right now, in the American diet, the typical American child is getting 60 to 70% of their calories from ultra-processed food, and that's just a recipe for disaster. And also, there's no variety. You know, our diet needs variety. You know, when we were nomadic, we had a great variety. This is (11/38)
in that great book, Sapiens. He makes that great point that once we settle down and factory, well, not factory-farmed, but farmed originally, and then factory-farmed, we'd like three things. We'd cows, pigs, and chickens. So fucking sick of chickens. Right, and you know. I mean, poor chickens. You get them at breakfast, you get them at dinner, you get them, I mean, that's not good for the body. It's not good for the body. And as the co-producer of this film, and my friend Michael Pollan put it, we should be eating real food, not so much, mainly plants. And you know, the latest science is that you should be having 30 different types of plant in one week, because it's so much better to get your vitamins from real foods than to get them from supplements or additives, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So I remember at the very beginning of the COVID epidemic four years ago, the very first editorial I did here, well, I don't think it was here, it was in my backyard. That's right, because we were (12/38)
his tent home. But it was all about factory farming. It was about, look, because we thought at the time it came from the Wuhan wet market, and maybe it did. We don't know, it either came from the lab or the market. It shouldn't be a political issue, scientific issue, we still don't know. But certainly that didn't help. And my point was, as long as you keep torturing animals, we are going to be the ones to suffer. Even if you don't have compassion for animals. You're totally right. OK, so what's the future here? Because I worry that the next one is coming, or it's worse. The next one may be right now percolating in Texas, where this avian influenza was discovered in cows accidentally by a veterinarian. And you should look up the Secretary of Agriculture in Texas, who's this far right wing, conservative, I don't mind that he's conservative, conspiracy theorist who is basically blocking and trying to block the CDC from investigating this epidemic. Factory farms are a crime against nature. (13/38)
And I'm not a vegan, I'm not a vegetarian. These are sentient creatures that we're treating like industrial commodities. And Mother Nature is going to get back at us for us. All right, thank you. We needed to hear that message, I appreciate it. Great work as always, Eric. Eric Schlosser. All right, let's meet our panel. Hi guys, how are you two? All right, he is a columnist for the New York Post and bestselling author of the book, The War on the West. Douglas Murray's back with us. How you doing? And he's a contributing writer at the New York Times and author of the bestseller, The Age of Grievance. Frank Bruni, our returning champion. OK, so let's start off talking about Israel and Gaza because we finally have someone here on the show who was there. That's not something you find a lot in the media. I find a lot in the media these days. It's very hard to get into Gaza, very hard to know what's going on there. So I just want to ask you before we get to the politics of it all, because (14/38)
there's a lot of that this week, what does it look like there? Are people starving? And if they are, whose fault is that? First, I've been in Israel and Gaza for the last six months since the war began. I can't speak to whether anyone is starving. It's a bad situation in Gaza because Hamas started a war. And Israel is stuck in this very, very strange position of having to supply food to the area controlled by its enemy. And are they? Yes, they are. I mean, food trucks going through all the time. But I mean, of course the situation is terrible because the situation could end at any point if Hamas did what they've been asked to do repeatedly for six months, which is to give back the hostages. And now, you know, my view is that there's, and I've seen the conflict up close, and I still believe that, I mean, first of all, you can't just put out 80% of a fire. You have to put out the whole thing. You can't destroy 80% of Hamas. You can't not get the leader who masterminded the seventh, (15/38)
Sinwar. And that's all in Rafah. And the second thing is, you know, I don't think there's any law of war that says you can start a war, and then when you begin to lose it, you say, let's pretend we didn't start it. But that is always what Israel faces. Sure. I mean, it's very strange. A year before I was in Ukraine, I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they were retaking land from the Russians, and nobody was saying, oh, hold on, don't win too much. Everyone was egging them on. Every Western leader gets a shot of testosterone whenever they talk about the Ukrainian armed forces. And yet, the Israelis never allowed to win. Yeah. Very strange. What do we attribute that to? Is that anti-Semitism, would you say? Why they have a set of rules for them? I mean, they truly are the chosen people. They're chosen to not win the war. I agree. Yeah. I mean, for some reason, I think anti-Semitism is one of the reasons. Whenever Israel is involved in a conflict, the whole world goes bananas. And (16/38)
you can't even have a Eurovision song contest without it becoming an Israel-Gaza thing. It's crazy. Everyone gets obsessed with this conflict. And I think one reason is, by the way, is because a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans and people of all stripes, have said for a generation, until the Palestinian-Israeli issue is solved, there won't be peace in the Middle East. As if you solve the Palestinian-Israeli issue, and then the economy of Yemen starts to boom. And then the Iranian mullahs give women rights. And the Saudis become really keen on the gays. No. It's an issue, for sure. So Biden says he's going to stop giving armaments now to Israel. What do you think about that? Is that appropriate? I don't think it's going to please anybody, do you? No, of course not. I mean, he's obviously trying to, you know, he believes famously in a two-state solution, which is Minnesota and Michigan. And he's trying to please a few hundred thousand people in America. I don't think he's going (17/38)
to please anyone. But the fact that he gave a speech on Tuesday saying that he would always defend the right of the Jewish people to defend themselves, and later that day stopped arms shipments to Israel, suggests to me that, I mean, this is a problem. You can't, it's devastating if the end of this conflict comes about in another stalemate. If there's a stalemate at the end of this, Hamas is still in control in the Gaza, the war will happen again in two years' time, and again two years after that. And on and on for the rest of our lives. Please. I don't disagree with any of that. But you were asking about the ire at Israel and the criticism of Israel. I think there's one other thing going on, which is right now there's this paradigm that people like to apply to every situation. If you have more power, you're probably in the wrong. And if you have less, you're probably in the right. If you have more affluence, you're probably in the wrong. And if you have less, you're probably in the (18/38)
right. There are situations. And skin tone. Right, there are situations to which that paradigm applies. But the problem is we apply it indiscriminately, wantonly, regardless of the circumstances. And what has been so strange to me about all of this is almost, so October 7th happens, and from October 8th forward, people are blaming Israel. There was a ceasefire in place. We're looking for one now. There was one in place. Hamas crossed the border, invaded, and the savagery, the brutality, was incredible. We have to have a conversation now about the magnitude of the retaliation, about how many civilian casualties there are, about whether this is indiscriminate. But let us not forget how this began. And so much of the conversation seems to wipe October 7th off the plate. Absolutely. Finally, I couldn't agree more. I mean, remember about 10 years ago, Boko Haram stole 300 schoolchildren in Nigeria. Bring back our girls. Everyone, bring back our girls, everywhere. Where has been the (19/38)
celebrity response, the Hollywood response, the decent people response, any reasonable person response of bring back the Jewish children? Where is it? Well, it's not a Columbia. No. Here's a bulletin from academia, yes. Columbia in New York City announced Monday they are canceling their graduation. USC also canceled commencement here in Los Angeles. Emory University in Atlanta, changing the location of its ceremony. I don't know, I guess it's that dangerous. I mean, what can I tell you? These kids are such drama queens. I mean, the student editors at the Columbia Law Review, they said that they were the ones who agitated for canceling the finals. They said because the violence of the police clearing it wasn't violent, left them irrevocably shaken. Even if you were this fragile, would you say it out loud? I mean, you would? Well, today I would because we live in a culture where if you can portray yourself as the victim and as the person who's been taken advantage of, it somehow has (20/38)
cultural and political currency. So they're just doing what they see politicians do every day. But it's not just the fragility, it's the narcissism. I mean, who the hell is so badly brought up that they honestly believe that if they holler on a corner of a campus in America, the war cabinet in Israel is gonna stop? Like maybe Benjamin Netanyahu, whatever you think of him, does not take his lead from a 19-year-old student whose parents have remortgaged the house in order to send them to college to become stupid. But they're not thinking strategically, they're not thinking tactically. They like to holler, right? This is a moment where everyone likes to holler. And the message that people get from the way our Congress behaves, look at them, is that they who shout the loudest and use the most hyperbolic language and are the most provocative win the news cycle. Say hello to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, I mean, of course. There's no bigger whiny little bitch than you know who. Those are (21/38)
your words, not mine. My words, and I said them a million times, and I'll repeat them a million times. He's the winiest little bitch that ever was. She's an emblem of our time. I'm talking about Trump, is who I prefer. He's an emblem of our time. I mean, we shouldn't overestimate the power of politicians. I don't think that the average student looks to Congress for behavior, do they? I think they get permission. I don't think they look and say, that's what I want to be like, but I think a kind of culture is set, a kind of tone is set, in which confrontation is confused with conviction, in which being provocative is confused with being bold and brave. I think that is a culture that our politicians absolutely feed. So let me read a quote from, just in case people think that we're making this up or this isn't really prevalent, but it really is. And I thought of it because I've been reading your book and your book is about grievance, the age of grievance. Okay, this is a 20-year-old UCLA (22/38)
student. When you are a part of any oppressed group, I don't know what this person's background is, I assume she is a part of some group that she sees herself as oppressed, especially people that are experiencing direct state violence, okay? Kids call everything violence, so right there you lose any credibility with me because you think everything is violence. Like being part of the Pan-African diaspora within the United States, that certainly happened in the United States, there are shameful history, which is built on enslavement and dehumanization and degradation of African peoples that does politicize you. I'm just asking, does this reflect America in 2024? Who raises a child to feel this way about the country right now? I keep saying, can we just live in the year we're living in? Not whitewash the past, but live in the present. I mean, that someone feels, you're at UCLA, who's oppressing you? Let's not... Okay? The question isn't just who raises them to feel this way, it's who (23/38)
educates them to feel this way, right? If you look at curricula in a lot of secondary schools, probably the kind of secondary school that a lot of Ivy League students have been to, if you look at the curricula at a lot of elite schools, and I teach at one of them, there is the paradigm I spoke of before. There are all of these buzzwords, and that's what produces this in part. What are the other buzzwords? You mean like... Oppressed or oppressed, colonized or colonized, victim, victimizer, everything falls into this binary, and if you can claim the top victim status, then you win. Whereas, you know, in America, and in Britain and other countries in the West, we used to celebrate heroism and achievement. I still like those, but... But there's a... And by the way, and also, I mean, I think we should also realize that some people are, you know, they used to be said in the history of warfare that people fight the last war. You know, like in Iraq, you fight Vietnam, and in Vietnam, you fight (24/38)
Korea, and so on. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of wars go wrong. I'd argue also that people are fighting the last culture war. I mean, a lot of people would just love the clarity of 1968. You know, and they honestly believe that they would be the heroes, whereas, of course, they'd just most likely be like everyone else and not particularly interested. Well, you've written recently about Alan Bloom, right? Yeah, of course. That's the late 80s, early 90s. You had a show called Politically Incorrect, right? If you go back, and I do in the book, if you go back and you look at the late 80s and the early 90s, it's the same conversation we're having now, just different words. So I was watching a video of Robert Bork the other day from, I think, the early 1990s, and he was talking about radical egalitarianism. He was inveighing against it. That's just wokeness with more syllables, right? So the more things change, the more they remain the same. Also, one of the very interesting things (25/38)
about that with Bork, Bloom, and others is that they diagnose, people diagnosed this in the 1980s, as you know, and we've known the problems that are going on, this victimhood culture. We've known this for 40 years now, and everyone's been great at diagnosing it, but we haven't solved it. We haven't reversed it. It's just got worse. Well, I mean, we have an ex-president, maybe to be a next president, who's the victim in chief, right, whose entire political currency is making himself the world's biggest victim of the deep state of those awful elites, of Democrats, of everyone, right? He won election because people saw themselves in him, and he encouraged that, and he said, I am like, I'm a symbol of your victimization. Vote for me, and it is your revenge against the people who oppress you, and he said it more bluntly than ever this cycle. He said, I am your retribution. I think those are some of the most meaningful words we've heard in a long time. And that's why I think he wants to be (26/38)
sent to jail for a night. Well, I don't know that he wants to use the jail toilet. I don't know. No, I mean, like, that's got to be in his head. We'll talk about that in a minute, but I did mention graduation. Most of the colleges are still having graduation, but it's a little different this year. Now, every year, as a custom on the show, we show the hats, you know, when kids graduate. They're some of the real ones that they have. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Hire me. On to the next adventure. This year, they're a little different. Would you like to see some of that? OK. I thought you would. I thought you would. Um, like, hide your weed, Mom and Dad. I'm coming home. I'm Gen Z, and I might possibly vote. Love to my family, death to America. Not anti-Semitic. I just hate Jews. Oh, wow. It's a very different year. Thanks for the checks, Mr. Gates. The job I haven't started yet already sucks. I quit. They said I couldn't do it, and that's why I cheated. Ready to cancel speakers in the real world (27/38)
from the river to my parents' basement. And excited to see what I'll complain about next. All right. So let's talk about, OK, I know I talk about this a lot on this show, but I have to do it again. I did it last week. I tore Merrick Garland a new asshole because, I mean, the Democrats have had four years to put Trump on trial, and it is all just going away. They blew it at every turn. Here's what's happened this week. Georgia, that one, OK, they're going to take up Trump's argument about Fannie Willis. Now, she's the prosecutor. She's having an affair with the guy she hired. I mean, it's not really relevant to the case, but they left an opening. And now that one's going to be delayed. The stolen documents one, that's never going to happen because that's a Trumpy judge down there. So it's Stormy or bust. I saw what you did there. It just comes out. I'm not trying. If this one doesn't work, and she's a bad witness, because let me show you a little video. This is when I had Stormy on in (28/38)
And first I asked her why she had sex with Trump. Listen to that, and then listen to what she says after that. And then we're going to talk about the trial, because it's quite a variance of what she said to me in 2018. Why did you fuck Donald Trump? I have no idea. OK, but you say it's not a me too case. It is not a me too case. I mean, I wasn't assaulted. I wasn't attacked or raped or coerced or blackmailed. They tried to shove me in the me too box at first on their own agenda. And first of all, I didn't want any part of that because it's not the truth, and I'm not a victim. And that regard. That's not what she's saying now. She's talking about he was bigger and blocking the way. It's all the me too buzzwords. She said there was a power imbalance of power for sure. My hands were shaking so hard. She said she blacked out. Blacked out? She's a porn star. That doesn't mean she's been subjected to the likes of Donald Trump. I might black out too. Do you really think she blacked out? (29/38)
I mean, a porn star is used to having sex with people she does not know. That's the job. It's kind of like Stormy Bob. Bob Stormy, fuck. Action, and let's go, and we're losing the light. So I just think she's not a good witness. No, yesterday wasn't a good day for her in court. She wasn't a good witness. She has contradicted things she's said in the past. And everyone who is hanging on the hope of Stormy Daniels being the way to get Trump in prison is going to have another disappointment coming, I think. This feels to me as a kind of last chance, as you say, for the people who it's clear to a lot of the country think, let's say, that there is just an aim to make sure that Donald Trump is not on the ballot later this year. And it'll be done anyway. But as you say, to end up with a Stormy Daniels case as the main hope is, if I was the main person wanting to get Trump in prison, that would not be the thing I would want to hang this on. I worry about another aspect of her testimony, which (30/38)
is the detail, the gratuitous detail. I keep having flashbacks to Lewinsky Clinton, right? And one of the reasons I think Bill Clinton was able to survive that whole Monica Lewinsky chapter was because Ken Starr and his Republican pursuers were so lascivious and overzealous. I mean, we saw the details of the Starr Report are nothing. I mean, what she said on the witness stand is nothing compared to that. I don't think that- You know who wrote that? What? You know who wrote that? The Starr Report? Brett Kavanaugh. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's the one who wrote all about- That's Justice Kavanaugh to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. (31/38)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill maw Maybe losing it tonight. All I can say to start this show is welcome to another week of yes. This is really happening. I Don't know if you saw what happened this morning But Donald Trump a 70 year old man and father of five when apeshit on Twitter between 320 and 530 in the morning slut-shaming Miss Universe 1996 that's the true part Remember Hillary's ad from 2008. Who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 a.m. How about someone who's not already enraged in a hissy fit? How about Getting ahead of myself, let me go back to the beginning America used to be a country no Not that far. Let's just go back to Monday night Did you see the debate? Okay the debate interesting debate Hillary made her case for being president that she has the experience and the temperament to be the commander-in-chief Donald Trump made his case. I hate Rosie O'Donnell, but she started it is This really happening Trump (1/39)
interrupted her 51 times at one point. She had to say mommy's talking Mommy He actually had a meltdown Donald Trump had a meltdown about what a great temperament he has It was like watching someone carve. I'm not a psycho into their Process it anymore and even though all the polls say that Hillary won the debate. No, he won He won and if and if he didn't win totally not his fault the moderator asked the wrong questions He had a bad microphone the whole system is rigged. She had the questions beforehand the Sun was in my eyes The coke wore off I mean even Ryan Lochte was like stop with the bullshit about being wrong You whiny little bitch I mean Well, I don't know Hillary got a big bump after the debate and Trump looked like he did a big bump before the debate I'm Hearing I don't know it for a fact. I hope it's not true. A lot of people are saying it Lot of people are saying it. That's all I know. I hope it's not true. Well, you know, he was sniffing a lot It was either that or he's (2/39)
allergic to facts. I think it may be the case Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his nose Well, I only say that because I mean he came out Absolutely manic the first half-hour charging like a rapid weasel sniffling cottonmouth kept drinking rambling like the guy you can't get out of your apartment and Most tellingly 30 minutes in crashed. Did you notice that? Ironically the guy who wants to build the wall hit a wall Which Which was actually the best part of the whole night because he went after Hillary on stamina Stamina she was Bruce Springsteen just getting warmed up after 90 minutes He was fat Elvis forgetting the lyrics to are you lonesome tonight? Which brings me back to Miss Universe? With what I was starting with. Yes, so he went after the stamina thing So she said you know what? This is really about what you were talking about with women for years looks and he said in night She said you called Miss Universe 1996 Miss Piggy Okay, that was Monday here it is Friday (3/39)
morning and this nincompoop is still Obsessed with it. He was tweeting all night about Miss 1996 she's disgusting imploring people to check out her sex tape Yes Donald Trump Major party nominee who wants to be the president of the United States is urging the American public to check out a sex tape That doesn't exist from a Venezuelan reality show Republicans out there. Thank you so much for this Thank you so much. You must be so fucking proud That your candidate finally takes a concrete position on something and it's no fat chicks And This is how Trump treats? Pageant contestants imagine how he treats poor Melania. She knows six words and two of them are cupcake bad great show Steve Moore Hamby is here are here and it'll be speaking with my good friend. Sarah Silverman's back But first up he is an oscar-winning actor Wow on our show Some actor a lot of people would say the best actor of his generation He narrates the new audiobook by first-time author papi pariah called Bob, honey Who (4/39)
just do stuff it's available for free can't beat that price at audible.com He always runs toward the fire Sean Penn All right now Sean let's get right to what people are thinking why are you plugging someone else's book Well, this is a book that came to me in a kind of mysterious way It was somebody I had met one time and I knew a lot right serious thing mysterious things somebody had met once in 1979 and who had through a longer story had the address of my mother and Then sometime in early May this year I got a manuscript and Connected to some lawyers in the Cayman Islands and so on and so forth and I read this book That he wanted. I think I was the only quote unquote celebrity He'd ever met and so after reading the book he thought of this guy He met in 1979 who then realized had become it was the guy he'd met after I started becoming a you're his surrogate In a sense he can't get this book sold Well, I guess this was the idea and so I read it and what I was reading was In essence the (5/39)
book I would have written if I was writing a book I just felt like finally somebody but you're a great writer. You could write a book. Oh, I couldn't write this book This is this is the book. What is it? Is it a memoir? Is it a novel? He calls it in memoir What well? My suspicion is that much of what's in it might be true but exposed highly illegal activities On his part and so he's made it a fiction. Oh, I see Ramon, a clay Exactly. Okay. So why did it move you so much? Well, here's the thing. You know what and I was watching your monologue. It's it's a toy you had to you were standing right there It was not a choice but yeah, but I could have tuned it out. Yeah, you could have The earbuds in that would it was so often at this time when one's watching the news you just feel like the reporter Or the pundit should not be continuing to speak but actually running to pull the fire alarm And and and say, you know, what the hell is happening here. So this book By the time I got to the end of (6/39)
it I realized that almost everything that his His character Bob Honey is Doing and believing and and and the thought process Was in sync with what I thought but I was only I wasn't hearing it on the news I was hearing it from a character who is clearly a sociopath and I thought well when the sociopaths are making more sense Than anything we're seeing in mainstream news media it's time to Hear them out and heal it. Well, that could be a defense for Trump. I mean, there's a sociopath Yeah, and he's a kind of a character in the book, but that's a 12 year old sociopath We're on the side of the mature sociopaths, okay So, um, so I read it also, I mean I was fascinated by it first of all, it's short which I love Yeah, I like that too. No, I do. I mean who has time anymore books are slow and long It is it is beautifully written and and it's sort of a fever dream I'm not sure I got all of it, but you know, you're right He's a guy who seems to be in an intelligence agency, right was at some (7/39)
point he kills people so, you know He's he's he's as you say maybe a sociopath, but he has a moral code. Oh, yes, I think he has a clear moral code What is that? How would you describe that? Well in in he He has a clear moral code that has to do with something that we've always had trouble with in terms of Morality, which is the principle of triage Triage triage, but I think you treat first what you treat first and also I think that what's also Unique about the character is that for example, he talks about words being as lethal as a gun But nobody needs a background check for the words. He talks about not having that understanding that if we truly want to see less gun violence then some Legitimate controls may be in place But he's not sure in the greater advertising environment if people genuinely want to stop seeing gun violence There's a kind of exploration of the chaotic part of what's happening in a culture where now we're seeing people who I mean the for example The Trump voters (8/39)
and quite clearly one of the characters in the book is is Donald Trump The young voters I think in the pappy pariah scheme of it or in his character Bob Honey scheme is Those voters are one and one of two categories They are either the highly uninformed and you could use a less polite word for some of them deplorables. Yeah And I think it was asked yeah, and you're also looking at a country of people who are truly unwittingly willing to Dismiss their love for their children to engage in a kind of a political temper tantrum and to to You know as he says in the book look at me. I'm a pisser on a tree Ouch goes the human heart. And so I think that we're in that time now and I read that read to read this book And also the title got me Bob Honey who just do stuff because that's what it's about. He just do stuff and And you do stuff you do a lot of stuff I mean I said in your intro you run toward the fire, you know, you always do that You go where it seems like it's most dangerous I mean I (9/39)
could read a list of countries that you've gone to and not and sometimes it's our country Katrina You went there we saw you in the rowboat. You went to Haiti you went to Cuba. You went to Venezuela Iran Iraq What's wrong with you? Why Do you? Always run toward the danger. It's it an adrenaline thing Sean I think we can't count on Bill Maher alone to tell us the truth and I got nowhere else to go So yeah, I you know when I need a break from you I go and find out there because you're not gonna get it. I'm not coming with you. You know me I'm not no, I don't I don't have that kind of courage. I mean, you know, it's a physical courage. It's just a verbal courage well, I think it's also I have a Certain inability to focus unless I have a kind of cultural reference, you know with my own Experience there and once I I can read the book about it once I've been there and seen it, right? I have a tough time doing it in reverse. Okay, so this book you we're talking about you're gonna be doing a (10/39)
reading at black Well, yeah, that right. What is that the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art? No, I'm that's over six Yeah, it's October tomorrow, please I can only take one more fucking month of this life Sean, thank you for being here He's snapchats head of news where he holds good luck America what a perfect title for this show Peter Hamby. Hi Peter. Hey She is the CNN political commentator and CEO of impact strategies Angela rye is back with us And he's one of our longtime friends here on this panel He's a Trump economic advisor and co-author of fueling freedom exposing the mad war on energy Steve Moore back with us Steve Okay There is no overtime tonight because I am actually on stage at the Mirage in Vegas How's that gonna happen tonight at 10 o'clock you going on the truck? Not the Trump jet All right, so I mentioned I'm There's only a month left. I'm about to lose it Seriously, I just have one question for you Steve because I know you're a Trump supporter. Have you lost (11/39)
your goddamn mind? What tell me He's brave enough to be here in the Lions then but seriously What did you think when you saw today when you what time you get up in the morning early? I was in Denver, so I don't I didn't see You saw that what Trump was doing between 3 20 and 5 30 when people should be sleeping Even I'm sleeping at that hour and he is just saying check out this sex tape You really think this person should be the president of the United States. I'm frustrated you pause I am frustrated because we have such huge problems in this country right now and look you look at the debate on Monday I mean Trump look Trump got off track and a lot of things but when I think everybody would agree when it came To the economy he killed Hillary right? I mean Hillary's trying to defend We want to cut taxes she wants to raise them This week we had a not even rich people agree Who does working-class people what Trump is not that Trump is not the candidate the rich he is the class Candidate of (12/39)
the working class. That's where he's getting His money no, no, wait a second. Trump is killing it with small donors. Let's get the facts on Hillary's doing killing Yeah, he should have been better than any Republican ever did better than Hillary He should have been raising money online a year ago because he would be rolling in dough now. What's really interesting I'd be interested in your opinion on this He is almost to the left of Bernie Sanders on trade or the way he talks about he's completely redefined Republican economic dogma it's remarkable and it's had a deep appeal Especially in places like Ohio where he's cutting into Hillary's lead in counties, especially Northeast Ohio that Barack Obama won by 30 points The 90s though was Like applauding Bill Clinton and what he was doing with the economy because he said in the 90s that he was very successful I wish he might be the candidate for the working class, but that's because they're deceived So as soon as they find out They've seen (13/39)
the worst recovery Only the top 20% have made gains in the way I must fucking stop you I Again I hear this all the time from Trump at the debate from other Republicans. I heard this fucking moron Larry Kudlow One of my best friends. I'm sure he is Really everyone I said fucking idiot tonight is gonna I know I say that too much but it's true So you're gonna defend this economy wait Yes Go to Pennsylvania, Ohio You can talk to voters who are misinformed Let me read the facts from the Census Bureau, all right, okay Very Big news a couple of weeks ago It destroyed a lot of talking points that Republicans have had for years Like all the wealth is going to the top percent the middle class is stuck in 2015 middle-class incomes had their fastest increase ever recorded the median family got a $3,000 raise the highest income growth was among the poorest 10% poverty had its deepest decline since 1968 in 2015 both the poor and the middle class made greater gains percentage-wise than the rich Larry (14/39)
Kudlow said folks are not happy. They want to change the one thing that has been tried We had the Obama stimulus package. We had all the infrastructure spending. It didn't work It did work. We have 40 million people in poverty today. We had with the average American bill you talk We didn't make things perfect. Yeah, 40 million people in poverty is not making 40 million people in poverty and the average American worker over the last ten years since 2007 has not had a pay raise and your candidate doesn't want to raise their wages either. Yes, it does We want to get control of the border. We want to cut taxes I know you're really clear. I'm really excited. He's okay. This is not the Monday night debate and I'm not Hillary Clinton So I'm just being very clear with you. I have something to say and I need you to let me talk When your candidate was asked whether or not he wanted to raise the minimum wage He initially said no now he wants a slight increase if you want to talk about ways to (15/39)
raise the minimum We want to let me be in ways. We want to raise the minute We want to raise wages for middle-class for this is gonna be a great conversation Multiple independent analysts let her get her okay finish your thought. It's fine Peter. Go ahead No, no finish your thought and then that the only point that I'm raising here is your candidate has deceived His voter base. He has been Really? Donald Trump on Monday and this is what he did. He interrupted Hillary 29 times. I think you've interrupted me 53 So my point is very simple. He's deceived his base because they're angry. They need someone to blame Unfortunately, this guy who's been sued 82 times alone Just in federal court has been sued because he's taken advantage of the very people who he says he's setting out to help small business owners who he said Allowed the services and the goods to be provided they didn't do their jobs He knows that they were gonna sue him and would run out of money He takes advantage of the people (16/39)
who are in his basement What fascinates me is that The Republican establishment Wall Street Journal readers the green eyeshade class of the Republican Party in Washington, which has always been obsessed with managing the debt and policy You know independent analysts have said that Trump's tax cuts would drive up the debt Significantly higher Republican senators, you're gonna lecture me on the debt when Donald and when Barack Obama doubled the debt in eight years Protests when Barack Obama raised the debt. All right buy more money than every president George Washington by Republicans I Ask you this why? How come he should be the hero of big business the top 100 fortune 500 companies None of them will endorse him. Why aren't these leaders backing him? He's giving them a giant tax cut You know why because they know he's gonna crash the economy because in the billionaire boys club, they know he's a crook He doesn't pay his bills He's gonna default on the debt if he was elected in November (17/39)
the economy would crash before he took office We saw we saw large companies Who were associated with Trump's brands and pageants run screaming from him during the primaries one to the business community chamber of commerce class they value stability and Trump is deeply unpredictable well Hillary Hillary wants to invest in infrastructure Look you can you can question raising tax plans with business We had $200 billion on infrastructure, we still got the worst infrastructure what happened all that money immigration reform Spending money on roads and bridges all I'm answering bills question, which is the Chamber of Commerce community the centrist business class Values those things. I know what happened to that money because I live on a street where it was fixed. Okay, so Of course there are still potholes and there is We missed all that money. Here's the point I would make to you Of course big businesses for Hillary Clinton big businesses for Hillary big labor Special interest groups in (18/39)
Washington are for Hillary Clinton, of course, they are because Donald Trump is Funny is she is Macy's doesn't even want anything to do with the Trump tie like that's the funny part. So the reality Doesn't have any goodwill left with fortune 1000. Oh, let me ask you this question How many jobs has Hillary Clinton ever ever created? She was not Point she knows nothing about your point Right, she's right she's been in power. No, you're right. You're right. You were right. She has been in power Politicians She's been a professional politician for the last 20 years Ronald Reagan your like She has been a professional politician Donald Trump is a businessman. We need Off of politics, okay No, Donald Trump got got rich by creating businesses Hillary and Bill Clinton got rich off of power And he also got rich by stealing from small businesses. I made that He also steals from his own charity then there's that Come on oh my god, you're gonna say that Donald Trump is stealing from his yes The (19/39)
stupidest talking point the media falls for that there's something shady about the Clinton Foundation All the money I was supposed to go to Haiti 88% of what they take There is no pay for play because she was never paid Before this election, you know who else supported the Clinton Foundation Donald Trump he gave He has not given a dime to his own Trump foundation since 2008 and then he gives money people give the money to the Trump Foundation He writes a check people think oh, it's from Donald Trump It's not from him and he's taking their money to buy shit for himself Yeah, the reason why people won't do business with him and same reason why they want to they don't want to do business in Russia It's shady. You don't know what's gonna happen She is truly the Napoleon of crime but It's interesting that five that I count so far very conservative newspapers who have not supported endorsed a Democrat for a long time the Arizona Republic since 1896 Cincinnati Enquirer 1916 Dallas Morning (20/39)
News 1940 the Houston Chronicle the San Diego Union Tribune never support the demo they are doing it Magazine USA Today yeah has never endorsed they still don't but they said don't vote for this one, right? And then magazines Rolling Stone The Advocate Wired have come out for Hillary Rolling Stone who would have ever thought that Okay, but here but just show that just to show that the equal time There are some lesser-known magazines that have come out for Donald Trump. Would you like to see? For example for Donald Trump car and liar They say mr. Trump owns lots of cars and he lies his ass off what's not to like Unpopular science is for Donald They rave you can make up practically anything about climate change and this shithead will retweet it Is the obvious choice Wine aficionado they say you don't see this many bitches at the dog show American sociopath Their endorsement reads while we can't sense or process normal human emotion something about this Trump family just feels right Good (21/39)
housekeeper magazine We hardly endorse in your Trump because if we don't he'll have us deported Modern mail-order bride magazine They say we've done business with this man and the check clears This magazine translates as highlights for child laborers And they say we support the orange American who's whose name we sew on the neck Barrett fancy magazine says Oh Make him one of us, but what's on his head most certainly does all right He'll be appearing at the Sanger Theatre in New Orleans on October 16th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas October 21st, Sarah Silverman Look at you playing Vegas the MGM great. I am so proud. I'm not taking a jet there tonight But but I'm very proud of you come on We thought we worked hard and we played by the rules you taught me how to exfoliate with the dry brush before my shower I mean it was like we're on the bet it was you you bullied me into her in a basketball court You're like you don't exfoliate with the dry brush before you shower This is the honk you (22/39)
plan to come out here with no I don't know what the drug yeah, I've done it all I don't know. I just saw you and I remembered it because I think of you every time I do it Let's talk politics That's right isn't he brave yeah, so you're for Trump right all right Trump is the product of a long tradition of pointing at other people and accusing them of doing what you're doing and that's You know here you're a You know that ever since fuck it. Oh, what's upon this? No, it's a good thing ever since you were at the the Democratic Convention and you've pointed at the Bernie people and said you're being ridiculous, and I thought it was wonderful and But but is that do you wear the crown heavily now that you've been anointed as a Lead us in our political thinking Yeah, of course Yeah, no, I don't know I mean there's no one more Bernie than me. I'm Inspired every day by Bernie Sanders the good news is People who change the world are almost never the president you know so we don't have them for (23/39)
four years We have them forever is that so bad to settle for well actually people The The president is someone who changes the world yes We remember it throughout history that have changed our world are almost never the president that's completely not true And I'm the very the very reason we're so afraid of Trump is because that it is true that the oh I see your line of thinking, but I'm thinking President Martin Luther King you know some of those people changed the world But Martin Luther King didn't send troops into the south to make sure that the black people could go to college Are you sure President Kennedy did that because of president? Bernie needs an ally in office. That's right. That's why I don't understand these Bernie or bust people you know I don't know what their long game is. I don't know what their perfect dream scenario is I earnestly am asking Or am I being obtuse no you but it seems that it would be good to have an ally To talk to them because what are you 28 29 now? (24/39)
You're almost That's a big funny joke You're a millennial and one with stamina Now let me read that the polls here on Clinton 18 to 34 people Clinton 31% uh-huh Trump 26 Gary Johnson 29% Gary Johnson Gary Johnson, Gary Johnson listen is a fucking idiot I Like him he's a nice guy, but he's another in my basket of fucking idiots And I I voted and I believe you did in 2000 for Ralph Nader. Yes, but this is not He wasn't right and he wasn't an idiot, but he also wasn't gonna win and it was a mistake But our conscience and I admitted it. Yeah, it was a mistake okay, but Gary Johnson Can I show you a little we put a little montage of Gary? Just to remind and we thought thought he was a cool guy. You know he smokes pot. He was the pot He's not making pot look good Right pot is cool pot is cool, but it doesn't make you know what's also cool reading yeah Here's a little bit of Gary Johnson for those thinking of voting for him a Lepo and what is a leppo a leppo? Not knowing that there's a city (25/39)
in between The the the two forces who's your favorite foreign leader? Who's my favorite anybody pick any leader? I'm having a brain Box I think I could sign up there for the whole today Really and By the way for the people 29% 18 to 34 who I assume a lot of them were Bernie people right okay? Here's some minimum wage Hillary's with Bernie not Gary Johnson believes in no minimum wage TPP he's for that Hillary and Bernie are against it Citizens United All the money you want in politic Gun control once none of that financial regulation universal health care he's from rupees for repealing Obamacare free college He's against that he's for nothing that you fucking people want No one's even misinforming them about him like they are would like with your friend. You know it's like people Yeah Yeah, no, that's true What you were saying was exactly right people vote because they're totally misinformed and that is a real thing You know there's something called Brexit that people voted for totally (26/39)
against their best Self-government They promised they had huge signs on the sides of buses that said you know 325 million dollars go to the EU that we could could be going to our health care They had no intention and said they had no intention when spread said was voted through then people are googling What brexit is after they voted in Gary John? Don't show my neck my neck goes crazy when I have passion you know you know You know what would help that a lot exfoliating Gary Johnson is clearly unfit to be president vote exasperates me about Gary Johnson not knowing these things and The collective exasperation about it is that neither does Donald Trump and the right is that a year ago? Right people should be giving Donald Trump pop quizzes Name me five countries in NATO right what's the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah? How does a bill become a law? He's on serious Way the professor People who do book learning yes, it's not you know what somebody who knows how to create jobs You're (27/39)
just you don't have enough jobs Bill you know it's not when you count the field when you count the people who? Drive out of the workforce when you count people who have jobs because of Obamacare so the real unemployment rate this country When the Democrats know that when a Democrat is president. We don't count the stats from the we have Artisan government record number of people drop out of the workforce But you know what else you know that here's the bigger problem to argue that point. Here's the bigger problem his candidate Also counts students who are in high school and who are in college and you count them and then you say black people's Unemployment is at 51% lies. We are also in school, so that's the other problem Black Americans have the biggest decline of income under Barack Obama of any group I'm not even anything black Americans are doing well today What I'm not gonna allow you all to continue to do is to make it seem like I walk out my door There's gunfire immediately I'm (28/39)
not gonna let you say I walk out the door and I can't read your candidate can't read I walk out the door I can't afford like you're just not gonna do it like we do have challenges in our community But what are the big one of the Democrats done for your community? You got no jobs. You've got no So what I'm gonna tell you is very clearly and I say this all the time and hopefully this will bless your life and change Racism is a bipartisan problem. This isn't about what Democrats did or did not do Republicans have done this Congratulations run for Chicago 60 years. You've got 3,000 And where did the guns come from and it's so funny The stop-and-fist policy Is against that because This I didn't want this show to turn into ones where everyone's screaming and you're anybody says my fault my fault I started screaming What we talking about? Okay, but let's let's go to the point of false equivalency because I think The very relevant to what you're talking about and I have one more fucking idiot (29/39)
I want to get Tweeted he's a fucking idiot and he is Colin Kaepernick. I'm for Yeah, but not for the same room, okay, yes, he is he's a fucking idiot I'm for his protest I'm taking the knee but here's what he says on race You have Hillary who was called black teens or black kids super predators and you have Donald Trump who's openly racist This is the false equivalency. He says both are proven liars and it almost seems like they're trying to debate who's less racist Okay, they're not both proven liars Politico has put a fact that's like this. Okay. She lies less than most politicians He lies more than anyone they've ever seen And they're not both Racists yeah, Donald Trump is a racist Hillary Clinton works her whole life for the opposite. Okay the work She's been a public servant for almost three decades. He is not Have created a situation On the street where we have no good jobs in this country. I was down Crime is down. Oh, yeah You pick the one place Ten percent last it's not gonna (30/39)
be unless you're trying to horn in on someone's territory Steve What has he done I think he's one of the greatest businesses Not gonna let you finish isn't being present I mean the president should create jobs there should be economic growth but in presence about more than yes That the borders are out of control His whole campaign hangs on this myth that things are so desperate in this country Which they are not that we need this giant asshole Like the Magnificent Seven and save the town Out of Los Angeles get out of security I get out of Los Angeles every weekend go to places like your, Pennsylvania There are people hurting in the Rust Belt there is a sense of there's a sense of economic stagnation However, it is a mythology that in the Midwest outside of New York in LA that everything is just a wasteland Ohio has a humming to people modern economy with with investments in solar and technology older You would think out it from the shale hell gas revolution not tell that's a governor (31/39)
case it Think by listening to Trump and all these Republicans that America is a place where there is always I Don't know I thought I'm talking to these voters they are angry though They're misinformed not only are they missin for but they're racist they're xenophobes, I mean Much more than that That's a good winning message for the Democrats people are still there Well, I'm saying I'm saying that you have at least half of your supporters that are in the basket of Really would like I need you to let me finish My point is not only are they misinformed there are voters who are angry in many instances human beings are angry Then there's that but I think at the end of the day you have a situation where people need someone to blame There are folks in your camp who have chosen to blame Barack Obama because he's not a US citizen There are folks in your camp who have chosen to blame black people because we're takers Paul Ryan Yeah, he apologized for it, but there are supporters who still (32/39)
believe that that is the problem all right We got to move to new rules everybody There are my facebook friends have to stop posting this picture of Michelle Obama Hugging George Bush like a lion made friends with a pony She's not hugging him because she likes him she smelled gin on his breath again, and she's stopping him from dancing Okay this one addresses the point we were just discussing about people new rule if you're this dumb prepared with an explanation from President Obama, and we never got one from him did we what does he have to explain? Where he was born just show his birth certificate I have mine at home at my safety did show it no Then you can't have a dog Because it's smarter than you and that's not how this whole master petting is supposed to work Or maybe I'm confused and the dog rescued you from a box behind the seven Neural the 21 year old Australian man who was just bitten by a poisonous spider on his penis For the second time this year Must be told that there are (33/39)
easier ways to get people to suck it Neural President Obama must admit that this this look doesn't say I have deep respect for Native American culture and traditions It says yes Republicans now. I am just fucking with you Neural Parisians must stop thinking they're so enlightened now that Paris has approved a clothing-free zone within its city limits here in America Hundreds of cities already have clothing-free zones. They're called Walmarts And finally new rule and this one's for Trump voters if you think you hate the establishment now Wait until he wins and the Trump surrogates that basket of inexplicable He sends out every day to speak for him Become the establishment wait until Steve Cortez and Katrina Pearson and Chris Christie and Ama Rosa are Trundling down the corridors of power bumping into the walls. We're thinking of giving these people the reins of power I wouldn't put them on the bus without asking the driver to make sure they don't miss their stop In examining all of (34/39)
Donald Trump's surrogates. It's very helpful to remember that Trump actually once said this Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you do you understand that? Well, it does explain Rudy Giuliani Rudy Giuliani who claims America never had a problem with terror attacks until Obama came along Really? You can't even think of what? I'll give you a hint Rudy you make your living off of it Donald Trump also once said sometimes people will come into my office and they'll look great sound great dress beautifully Everything is great. Then after you hire them they turn out to be morons Which explains his sons who day in Cusack mean Trump senior in the White House is bad enough without these two American psychos putting Putting plastic over the furniture so they can axe murder prostitutes while discussing Phil Collins And how about the Non-professionals have you seen pastor Mark Burns? He's the pastor who gave the benediction at the Republican Convention and I'm not (35/39)
saying he's a total charlatan It's possible that the free vial of holy oil available from his website can cure the sick And if not, you can always use it as righteous lube but But he does seem to have lied about everything Again the bio that's on your website claims that you you earned a Bachelor of Science degree Did you make that claim? I? Asked you just a moment ago as we were just opened up this and first of all I said we were off the record. I didn't agree to that. Yeah, but I did I did Did you catch that the interviewer says I didn't agree. This was off the record and he says yeah, but I did right What do you think for him Secretary of State maybe? head of NASA perhaps Another familiar face on CNN for the Trump campaign is Margo Gutierrez a leader of Trump's Hispanic Advisory Council and Quite a spokesman for his peeps he is he once said my culture is very dominant culture and it's causing problems If you don't do something about it, you're gonna have a taco truck on every corner (36/39)
Okay, first of all, would that be such a bad thing? You Mean When I'm drunk, I don't have to wander around LA looking for a taco truck. That's the best argument for Hillary. I've heard yet But beyond that mr. Gutierrez is a real estate scam artist who's filed for bankruptcy 14 times He's not just a Latino for Trump. He's a Latino Trump And there's a little Kayleigh McEnany a kind of Ann Coulter without the empathy And another young woman defending Trump campaign spokesman someone's crazy ex-girlfriend Sorry, I mean Katrina Pearson who wears a necklace made out of bullets from the Chanel don't tread on me collection And Once defended it by tweeting maybe I'll wear a fetus next time about About Trump's proposed Muslim ban. She said you know what so what they're Muslim In 2012 she tweeted perfect Obama's dad born in Africa Mitt Romney's dad born in Mexico any pure breeds left A pure breeds, where do you study your talking points by the light from a burning cross? She also blames Obama for (37/39)
launching the war in Afghanistan even though it was four years before he was even in the Senate and Has said about nuclear weapons what good is having them if you're not gonna use them If this were the hundred thousand dollar pyramid, I'd say things a mental patient So, what do you think ambassador the UN for her But I'd have to say that of all the surrogates my favorite has to be mr. Michael Cohen Just just take a look at him in action on CNN But you guys are down and it makes sense that there would Says most of them all of them says who? I just told you I answered your question. Okay, which polls? all of them Well played sir He's a lawyer. In fact, he's the head lawyer at the Trump organization So we know he's awfully busy with lawsuits like the one Trump filed against me in 2013 Remember that lawsuit. Okay, a lot of people remember it as a defamation Defamation so it wasn't he was suing me to collect five million dollars because I offered that to him if he could prove that his (38/39)
mother didn't in fact fuck and So he went into court this happened He went into court and produced his birth certificate As if it was gonna say orangutan on Yes, I made Donald Trump produce his birth certificate Tonight somehow and tomorrow night that at Foxwoods in Connecticut October 22nd at the palace in Albany, November 6 I want to thank Peter Hamby Angela rice Steve Moore Sarah Silverman and Sean Penn Catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO comm (39/39)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Long enough, let's do a fucking show. I mean, it's been a long time. Let's not ever be apart this long forever. And of course, right on cue, always when we come back, big news, Dianne Feinstein, our senator for some... No, don't laugh. No, she was a great serving senator here, died today. First female mayor of San Francisco and everyone there today observed a minute of no shoplifting. Let me tell you, when she was mayor of San Francisco, she had that city under control. When there was poop in the street, it was because John Waters was making a movie. Also, a senator for 31 years in politics for 54 years, not once was she caught on tape giving a handjob at a musical. I think that has to count. Well, you saw, you've seen Lauren Boebert, she's the MAGA congressman. I guess she's a 36-year-old grandmother. She is from Colorado, a family's value Republican, was caught on tape. She was at Beetlejuice, like, (1/41)
getting her tit grabbed, vaping, grabbing cock. I'm not making this up. This is your government at work. So they threw her out of the theater and on the way out, she gave them the finger and said, do you know who I am? See, there's a difference between Republicans and Democrats. When Biden says that, he's genuinely asking. But, okay, good news and bad news about our government. There's going to be a government shutdown again. Why do we always go through this? I know it's terrible for a lot of people. On the bright side, the Senate approved a dress code, solving a problem they created last week. Although it was just for the men. Kyrsten Sinema, are you familiar with her? She retains the right to dress like Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie. There was a Republican debate this week. Ron DeSantis is here. He was on it. Apparently he won it, according to the polls. But it was a shit show. Was it not? Did you see this? I couldn't get through it. I mean, they were just talking over each other. It (2/41)
made me so tense I had to calm down by watching a video of Britney Spears dancing with knives. I always played the Republican debate drinking game. That's where you take a drink every time you go, oh, God, I need a drink. The weirdest part was they got onto the subject of education and Mike Pence. Mike Pence says, full disclosure, I've been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years. Why bring Mike Pence? But people don't realize, now they looked into this. He's very kinky. He and the wife, sometimes she dresses up like Trump and tries to hang him. Now, I feel like it's my job to watch these debates. I couldn't get through it. I mean, I got through like 30 minutes of the 90 minutes or whatever it was. Also, at that point, Lauren Boebert said to me, my hand's getting tired, let's beat the traffic. Trump, of course, skipped the debate as his custom is now. Instead, he had one of his rallies, or as I call them, drag queen story hour. He had a bad week, really. A New York judge, listen to this, (3/41)
shocking, said he's a complete fraud. I know. Apparently, he's inflated his property values and made him a fraud. Apparently, he's inflated his property values in New York over the years by $2.2 billion. They canceled the Trump organization's business certification. Wow, that's pretty big news that didn't get much coverage. Still not the biggest crook of the week. That would be the senator from my home state of New Jersey, Bob Menendez. Did you see this story? I love this guy. Old school. Old school. No intricate laundering schemes here, no offshore accounts. I'll just stuff these gold bars in my wife's bra. I fucking love this guy. He had this, his house was full of cash stuffed into his clothes and gold bars. Who accepts gold bars? I've never been anywhere where they went. Yes, we take Visa, MasterCard, and gold bars. They said, why did you have all this cash around the house and gold bars? He said, for emergencies. Like, what sort of emergency requires cash and gold bars? If a rap (4/41)
video breaks out? We have a great show. It's so great to be back. We have Sam Harris, Mary Katherine Ham. And first up, he is the governor of Florida, who is, wow, currently on our show? Currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. Governor Ron DeSantis. I know, I know. Welcome back. All right. On a scale of 9 to 10, what did you think of my monologue? Honestly, I was laughing. I'll give you that. Right. Laughing on both sides of the aisle, too. So it was good. And welcome back to the show. I know you guys were on hiatus for a while. Thank you. I do got to put in a plug. Like, if you ever have problems in California, you know, in Florida, not only do we have no income tax, no Vax mandates allowed in the state of Florida. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. I know, but people do wear cowboy boots with a suit. That's right. So, I'm not going to fly. Okay, that's just a crazy thing. We're proud of it, too. We're proud of it. But there were no (5/41)
cowboys in Florida, Ron. Oh, yeah, you should try Florida. We're one of the top cattle states in America. Really? You go from the beach, you go the interior of Florida, nothing but cattle ranches. Oh, all right. Well, I stand corrected. Because I'm wearing orthopedic shoes. There you go. Okay, so, the debate. It was a shit show, but I- right. I mean, even you said you would have turned it off if you were watching it. I mean, people screaming over each other. I couldn't hear what anyone was saying. It was terrible. But I heard you won. I heard the polling said you won. What did you win? With Trump- no, honestly, with Trump not in the race, what did you win? Well, but I think that, you know, he's not showing up. He's missing an action. He owes it to voters to show up and defend his record. And I think he thinks he can take a juice poll and then people don't get to vote. That's not the way the system works. You got to go earn votes. So, I'm showing up, I'm showing that- and that's- here's (6/41)
the thing. In the midst of all the show that happened, I was the one guy that people said, you know what, this guy's actually acting like a president when the rest were not. And so, okay, there I am. I told Donald, let's do a debate. I'm debating your governor, Gavin Newsom, soon. We're going to get to that. But let's do a debate with me and him. I'll do it. All right, but this- can I ask you one thing about these debates? Can you get rid of this guy, Doug Burgum? This guy- this bugs me. He is not going to be president. This guy could start dating Taylor Swift. No one would care. North Dakota. It's not even this guy. All right. But you know, the thing is, you did not take my advice. What was it? I was on this show a few times when we talked. I said, this guy's crazy to run this time. He's, what are you, 45 years old? You just had a birthday, right? You could run for the next 20 years. If you were Biden, the next 40. Okay, why run against Trump? You're trying to thread this needle that (7/41)
will never happen. Well, for a couple reasons. You can't disavow him because that's the base, and yet you're running against him. And that's why, I mean, let's face it, Ron. If this campaign was going well, you wouldn't be on this show. Oh, that's not true. So, one, I don't think he can win the election. I could win the election. Two, I don't think he could actually get the job done that we need to do. For example, COVID. I think we need accountability for what this government did to this country with the COVID restrictions, mandates and lockdowns. Donald Trump is not going to do that. He says he did everything right. He says he saved millions of lives with lockdowns. He claims his MNRA shot saved 100 million lives. He's not going to clean house at CDC, NIH, FDA or any of that. I will do that. I will get the job done and a lot of other things we do. The one thing about me in Florida, and even my critics will acknowledge, if he says he's going to do something, he will follow through and (8/41)
get the job done. So it's about the country. Are we going to get the country turned around or not? I don't think he's a vehicle that's doing. And I have been, when I supported him on the things I liked, I've said it, but I've been critical about the things that he didn't do, and I'll continue to do that. Okay, but you campaigned for election deniers in 2022. This I do not forgive, to quote the Godfather. I mean, Carrie Lake, who said Biden is an illegitimate president, Trump didn't. Well, now she's attacking me, so maybe I did make a mistake there, because she's out there saying, she's trying to say that we mandated vax in Florida. We did the opposite. We protected people even from private mandates, so that may have been. But Trump lost the election, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so why did you campaign for people? Because I wanted to see Republicans win key races. I think it's important. And that's not a deal breaker issue for you? That's not democracy? Okay, well let's go back to 2016. (9/41)
Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the electoral college to vote against Trump in the electoral college because it was stolen. They said Russia stole the election. For years they said that. So don't act like this is a unique thing in modern history of the country. First of all, Ron, I have no friends in Hollywood. You do remember those commercials now. I remember them. Okay, but the thing that you seem to stake your campaign on is where woke goes to die. And look, I'm fed up with woke too. That's why I have trouble with friends in Hollywood. I'm an old school liberal and that's a whole different thing than woke. And I'm sympathetic to you because you very often take on an issue where I feel like, yeah, there is crazy stuff going on in schools. There is crazy stuff. But the problem is it doesn't resonate with a lot of people who don't see it for whatever reason. And so they're like, why is this guy picking a fight with Mickey Mouse? Right? Well, they picked a fight with (10/41)
us. But well, listen, so first of all, I do a lot more than just that. I think that's a little bit of a caricature. But this idea of ideology corrupting institutions, I see it in Los Angeles with the amount of crime that's here and the homelessness. There are people that commit crimes who are not prosecuted like they would be in Florida. Our state's crime rate's at a 50 year low. You elect these people like Gascon and what they did in San Francisco. You can break into somebody's house or mug somebody and you don't end up going to jail. That doesn't work. But that's driven by ideology. So it's not just we're having just a philosophical debate. I think woke ideology is corrupted institutions. I think it's corrupted things like the CDC with how they handled COVID with the nonsense that they did. So it's a broader issue than just a philosophical fight. You keep wanting to get back to that. And I don't blame you because you're right. We're on the same page there. And I think it's unfair (11/41)
what they did to you because you did handle it better. You did handle it better. You were right. You were like, let's target the people, protect the people who are most vulnerable, and everybody else can go on with their lives a little better. You open schools sooner. And a lot of the stuff that's come in, the information we have after now, we've had a few years to look at it. You were more right. And they won't give you credit for that. It's not about credit for me, though. It's not about credit for me. It's about them admitting that they were wrong because they are setting us up. If this happened again, they would repeat the same playbook all over again. And if we don't have accountability, that's what's going to happen. So I'll bring accountability so it never happens in our country again. I saw the New York Times did such a despicable hit piece on you that I saw because I forget what the lead headline was, but it was basically Ron DeSantis fucked up the pandemic. And then at the (12/41)
very end, it says Florida's death rate overall was better than the national average. Now, if you're going to do an article about Florida and the pandemic, shouldn't that be the lead? Shouldn't that be the — I mean, talk about burying the lead. It shouldn't be that we're the number one state for in-migration. I mean, if we did so bad, people would have been leaving Florida. People are coming, wealth's moving into the state, our economy's done better than any other large state, and education. We're now ranked, I think, in the top five on most metrics in education. Now, that wasn't true when I was a kid growing up in Florida. So we did it right, but what we did is we understood you can't stop society because of one respiratory virus. That's not even the way to help health overall. Well, you could if it was bad enough, but not that one. Right. Well, they were wrong on the death rate. They were wrong on closures. They were wrong on everything. And yet we act like, what, we're just going to (13/41)
shrug our shoulders and move along? So, like, that's the part of you I like. And then there's the part of you, like, where you're going after — I mean, your state voted to restore voting rights to felons. And then through some political bullshit jujitsu, that got undone. Now you're like — No, no, no, that's not true. It is true. No, no. And you're going after people now. I mean, you have some sort of — I didn't qualify, though, so that amendment did not include murderers and sex offenders. So we had sex offenders, convicted sex offenders who voted who were not eligible under that amendment, so we held them accountable. But that was absolutely consistent with the law. But there really isn't in-person voter fraud. Like, 11 million people voted in Florida, and I think you found 41 people. I mean, that's point — Right, but if you have somebody that's illegally in the country and they vote, should they be held accountable or not? I think they should be held accountable. I mean, that's point (14/41)
0.00002%. Not in a statewide race, but we've had local elections decided by 15, 20, 30 votes in the last few years. And so I think we want legal people to vote. I know, but — If you're not a citizen of this country, you should not be voting in American elections. OK, but that's not the biggest issue we have, is it? I mean — No one's saying it's the biggest. We take on all kinds of issues in Florida. But it looks like you're just trying to stop black people from voting. Oh, that's nonsense. That's nonsense. I don't think it's nonsense. Black folks don't vote for the Republican Party in very big numbers. But I got a bigger percentage than other Republicans have gotten when I ran for re-election. Whoop-de-doo. That's not a — I wouldn't brag about that. We're making progress, man. And then the abortion thing, a six-week abortion ban. I don't get that either, because six weeks — like, if you're — I know you say it's a case of conviction. If it's conviction, wouldn't it be moment of (15/41)
conception? That's what conviction is to me. Like, if you believe the second — you know, before the guy can get the towel, there's a third person in that room. Well, no. I mean, it's a legislative issue, so they have to figure out what they think. And so the legislature identified the moment where there's a detectable heartbeat as the time where there's legal protections. Now, they did provide exceptions for all the difficult cases that you hear about, but basically, once there's a heartbeat, it shouldn't be used as a form of birth control. OK. So you're going to debate Newsom. We are. You know he's taller and better looking. Good luck. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Ed. Governor Ron DeSantis, everybody. Good luck out there. All right. Let's meet our panel. OK. We're back, and here they are. She is the co-host of the podcast, Getting Hammered. The co-author of End of Discussion, How the Left's Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free and (16/41)
Fun. Mary Katherine Hamm. And he's the host of the Making Sense podcast, the best podcast where the host isn't totally baked. Sam Harris is over here, ladies and gentlemen. Well, it's great to be back. First of all, I want to thank everybody who made this possible to be back. You know, I'm talking about my brilliant staff, writers and non-writers who scrambled the jets so we could be on in two days. And the union folks who expedited the paperwork so we could get back so quickly. So thank you. All right. So I want to talk about Dianne Feinstein. That was the big news that happened today. I mean, it's kind of spooky. Our last show, April 28th. And what was the last thing I talked about on the editorial? Dianne Feinstein. And it wasn't just about that she should resign. It was about the fact that people in the Democratic Party were kind of playing an outdated woman card about her. I remember quoting Nancy Pelosi said, I've never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that (17/41)
way. Bullshit. Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, obviously Biden, but we'll save that to the end of the show. Our Congresswoman here in L.A. said, when women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside. When men age or get sick, they get a promotion. Where did that ever happen? Yeah, they just make this shit up. Well, it's the quickest way to sort of get out of trouble is to play the card you have, right? And Menendez is a perfect example. Senator Menendez this week was like, how could the Democrats push out a proud Latino American who has made it this far in his career, right? Never mind the gold bars. Guys don't pay attention. But it's not a bad play strategically. I don't think it's right morally. Okay. So now our governor says he's going to appoint a black woman to the seat. Do we still need this kind of identity politics as opposed to the best person? Maybe we do. I don't know. I'm amazed that people don't recognize that it's insulting to the candidate that gets picked. So (18/41)
Biden did that with Kamala Harris. So you say you're going to filter in advance by sex and race. Just pick someone as though they're the best person. And lo and behold, they're a black woman or whatever the template is. It's just, it seems, I mean, it's not even implicitly insulting. It's actually just right on the surface and no one seems to comment on it. Well, it's like, it's racism, but for the right reasons. It's like, it's still the thing. I mean, we still do need to even things out from our despicable past. But even them out, even if that's your agenda, just do that and never make it explicit that you cut out whatever 85% of the contestants in advance. Well, you can make it explicit that you've created a generous pool from which to pick that includes many, many minority folks. That would be easy in the state of California. It's just, I keep coming back to this concept of the zombie lie. I used to get on the Republicans about it. They still do it. Like tax cuts for the rich will (19/41)
increase revenues of zombie lie. That was one that was never was true. Then there are zombie lies that are things that used to be true, but are no longer true. And I think we still get caught in those with especially race issues. I saw in the paper after the 2020 riots, corporate America pledged to hire more people of color. And boy did they. Like 94% or something like that? Of the 300,000 people from S&P companies, I think that's 100 companies that were surveyed, 94%. I ain't mad at it. I'm just saying, can we acknowledge that, I mean, if this was such a horribly racist country, could you be guilted into doing this? You know, can we just acknowledge we are in the year we're living in and not some year that has passed? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know what the remedy is in each case. There was a time, I think, where affirmative action was totally defensible. And you could be honest about it and you didn't have to, I mean, you're redressing a wrong that was historically obvious. But we (20/41)
have to acknowledge that we're in a different situation now. We're pretending that there's a disadvantage based on race. I mean, to take one variable. And for basically as long as, virtually as long as I've been alive, that has not been true. Right? So it's like this is something, there's no medical school in this country that is filtering against race to the disadvantage of black people. Quite the opposite. It's quite the opposite. And for a very long time. And so there is a kind of gaslighting when you're pretending the disparity is opposite to what it is. And I was amazed at that figure too. I mean, 94% is amazing. And may I say to the people who are saying, well, three white people are talking about this. Exactly. So fucking what? White people can talk. I'm sorry, you know, that's just a ridiculous talking point. Like, how could you possibly have this discussion? We can have this discussion. Any person who was here in addition to us might add something to that discussion that we (21/41)
are not adding. But it shouldn't stop people from just talking. You can be cognizant of that without being quite so insulting as you're pointing out that this can be. In fact, in this case, I think he said he's going to pick a black woman for sure, but just a placeholder. So it's like, well, I'm going to pick a black woman, but I'm not probably not going to pick Barbara Lee, who is actively running against two white people because that might give her too much of an advantage to have actual power in the future. I don't know what the theory is here, but it seems insulting. Yeah. So another zombie lie I was picking on when we were off with, I saw Barbie, which I enjoyed very much. You got to say that part. I got to say that part. Well, no, it was cute. I liked it. I mean, I wasn't trying to attack it. And it is, look, give it credit. I mean, there are hits, there are monster hits, and then there's phenomenons. This is a phenomenon. But it is a zombie lie. That was the point. I wrote a (22/41)
tweet and they all went batshit about this tweet. Just saying, because I looked up something. That's really what they got mad at because the movie is based on the premise that we live in a patriarchy. So let's just talk about it. Maybe we do. I don't know. But in the movie, Barbie goes to Mattel headquarters, who made her, to confront the patriarchy, which is the boardroom. And she breaks into the boardroom and it's 12 men. The patriarchy. So I got home and I was like, Mattel's a real company. I bet you you could look up who's on the board. Of course, it's like six and six. Maybe it was seven and five or six, I think. But the CEO is a man, but he's not. But it was almost or basically even. Then I looked up how many women were added to Fortune 500 board seats in 2021. I think it was the last year I looked up. It's 45 percent. So maybe not exactly even. But I mean, if these are the stats and of course, nobody who attacked me engaged with those ideas. Well, the writer, Megan Dom, who I (23/41)
think you might have had on the show. She's great. She wrote, you remember, America Ferreira's piece, her speech in the film where it was just kind of this anthem for feminism. So Megan wrote it from a guy's point of view, proving that it was really this kind of political pablum that it was a kind of a zombie speech because it worked just as well for a guy with almost no changes to the text. So it was well, first of all, I don't know, except that I regret to inform you, I am the only person on stage who's allowed to talk about this. I felt like, first of all, Mattel's happy to come in for that sort of abuse in the movie because there's this alignment of sort of corporate views and lefty leaning activism. And that was sort of packaged into this movie. I have complicated feelings about Barbie. For instance, I never played with Barbies, but my daughters do. And I was conflicted. And so I got them only Barbies with flat shoes, because that's the secret to feminism, guys. But I think Barbie (24/41)
gave a lot of women feelings. We were like, why am I having feelings about Barbie? Did I get dressed up as Rodeo Barbie with a pink cowboy hat and go to a movie with my friends? Yes, I did. And some of it really hit me over the head with the patriarchy, and I found that insulting. But there were parts of it that were a little more sneaky. Things like the fact that that is interchangeable for men, that speech where I went, this is a movie about how being human is hard. And in fact, for men in the current time, and this is what you're speaking to, which I wish the movie had tapped into a bit more, when it comes to despair, loneliness, suicides in some demos, academic achievement, men are having a lot of problems. And I have three daughters and one son, and I would like them to be equally successful and have equal chances. And I don't think that my son deserves any sort of comeuppance, because things might have been harder in the past for women. I saw it with my nine-year-old daughter, so (25/41)
I had rolfed my brain into the appropriate shape before seeing it. I enjoyed it. I loved it. You did? Yeah, I laughed way more than I thought I was going to laugh. Purposely? No, no, I mean, I just, listen, half of it was going over my daughter's head because she's nine, so I was sort of having my own experience. But it's interesting to just, I mean, you're in the most charitable possible mood when you're seeing a movie like that with your daughter. Yes, and again, I enjoyed it. I just thought it was 2008. You know, it just wasn't up to the times. At one point, I remember the Barbies have to get the Ken's back, and they do it by pretending to be helpless about stuff. Like, I don't know how to use a computer. And the woman I saw it with said to me, I don't know any woman who acts like that anymore. So how could a movie that's not with the times be that successful, but I guess people just, they want to believe what they want to believe. It's emotional truth. Yeah, but I do think that (26/41)
could be a critique of both of those gender stereotypes, right? In some respects as well. And I did, the thing I liked about the movie is that it was interesting where it was allowed to be complicated, and it was not as interesting where we tried to gender stereotype in this really specific way. Although, like, what is gender anymore anyway? You also can't have two sexes that are not. So, I don't know. It's confusing in these modern times. Well, I want to show the Lauren Bulbert video because it's funny. I just do. So, this is Lauren Bulbert about a week ago watching Beetlejuice. There you go. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. (27/41)
Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and (28/41)
to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back (29/41)
and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the (30/41)
right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back (31/41)
and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the (32/41)
right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back (33/41)
and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the (34/41)
right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. New Rule. Before you judge how many kids in the US are overweight, check out Australia where it's reported that childhood obesity will double by 2035. In fact, it's so bad that they're remaking that Meryl Streep movie and now she says, help, a baby ate my dingo. Google it kids, it's funny. New Rule, if like Virginia legislative candidate Susanna Gibson, you've live streamed yourself having sex and also asked viewers to pay you money to perform specific sex acts on chatter bait. You don't have to campaign anymore, I'm already (35/41)
voting for you. Because talk about being responsive to your constituents. Some guy asked you to blow him into reverse cowgirl and you did. All I want from you is a permit to hook up my solar. And finally, New Rule, someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he's going to turn the country back over to Trump. And go down in history as Ruth Bader Biden. The person who doesn't know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country. All of us who like Joe Biden have been struggling lately with the political situation in the Democratic Party. An incumbent we admire who acquitted himself well in the first term but who even members of his own party don't want to see run for a second. Despite a touching letter of recommendation from Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. I kid, they shouldn't have gotten shit for that. If you ask me, do I think Joe Biden can do the job of president? My answer is an unequivocal yes, he can do the job. Do I love everything? No. (36/41)
But that's every president. But government work is done in small quiet rooms like the Oval Office. And in that setting, Joe's compassion and centuries of experience are pluses. And he's generally made good decisions that got us out of Afghanistan, handled Ukraine, kept the economy chugging, finally got us rebuilding infrastructure, returned a sense of normalcy. There's a term for Joe Biden, but not two. Because while he can do the job, what he can't do is run for it. Our campaign season is long and it gets icy in New Hampshire. To those who say he beat Trump once, he'll do it again. I say things change. They always do. The parade moves on. 2024 is not 2020 in so many key ways, including, yes, Biden being four years older. You can be a national treasure and still be too old for the job. If I'm on a plane and the pilot says, this is your captain, Buzz Aldrin, I'm getting off. Mitch McConnell has served Satan well, but when he starts buffering during a speech and it appears his soul is (37/41)
leaving his body, it's time. I have made it a theme on this show to rail against ageism, the last acceptable prejudice in America. I've tried to make the argument that judging by age is wrong because we all age so differently. Some people are old when they're 45 and others are spry at 90. So it should always be a case by case basis. But the credibility of my argument against ageism rests on the honest calling out of people when it is time to go. That's what case by case means. At an event last weekend, Biden referred to LL Cool J as LL J Cool J. Say what you want about Trump, but he remembers Kanye's name. Look, at some point, perception becomes reality. What matters is voters think Biden's too old. What matters is he's going to lose to Trump, who's almost the same age, but his age just doesn't read like Biden's. Maybe it's because Trump is insane. Maybe it's because he's always a ball of white hot anger. But for whatever reason, he looks robust and Joe looks like his own skeletal (38/41)
remains. If this was 1860, when Joe first ran, this would not be an issue. You didn't have to look good, and there was no ubiquitous media to pick on every little mistake. The only people who saw the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the people who went to them. But Joe's debates next year will be televised to all, and I don't think he's going to look good. Yes, Trump is old too, but Trump is like Kiss. He puts on the face paint in the wig, and he looks the same as he did in 1978. Far from being the only one who could beat Trump in 2024, Biden may well be the only Democrat who would lose to him. James Carville told me any centrist Democrat around 50 or 60 would get 55% of the vote, and I believe him. You know that future headlines bit we do? Well, the most predictable headline ever is presidential race tied. Two weeks before every election, it's always tied. No matter who is running, the vast majority just vote for the D or the R. But Biden is the one Democrat who gives pause to so many (39/41)
people, even in his own party. Andrew Sullivan makes the necessary point that a new nominee for the Democrats would shift the dynamic immediately. Trump would be the tired, old guy retread hanging on to the past, and the Democrat would now be the future. Let the Republicans be the party with the candidate who babbles nonsense, shouts at the TV, and can't do ramps. Joe, you did noble service for your country, and you checked that big box, the President of the United States. Of course, as a politician, you're naturally going to say, but the work is not finished. Of course not. It never is. But it's time to let someone else finish it. You don't want to go down as Ruth Bader Biden. America is calling, Joe, and it's saying, that's not our car, grandpa, we're over here. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Fox in St. Louis, October 7th. Wow, coming up. The Orpheum in Omaha on the 8th, and the MGM Grand in Vegas on the 3rd and 4th. I want to thank Mary Katherine Ham, Sam Harris, and Ron (40/41)
DeSantis. We've got Keegan-Michael Key and his wife, Al, Matt Welch, and Sarah Isger next week. Thank you very much, folks. Great to be back. Thank you. (41/41)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Good afternoon. At the tone, time will be real. You just say, thank you for really applauding and not Rand Pauling it. You know what I'm talking about? This is an amazing week. A week of a lot of fake scandals and one real one. We'll get to that. But here's my favorite fake one. You saw on Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Israel spoke before Congress. The Republicans fucking love this guy. I thought they were gay for Reagan, but I mean, they were jumping up and down like they're at a Taylor Swift concert. And okay, but here's the scandal. The next day, all these conservative outlets got on Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, because he wasn't clapping enthusiastically enough. Because we live in North Korea now, people. And the next day, Rand Paul said, I gave the man 50 standing ovations. One for each Jew in Kentucky. What do you want me to do, play Tevye and Fiddler on the roof? I mean, apparently they do. (1/41)
I mean, the Republicans went all out. Ted Cruz was wearing Star of David face paint and a clip on beard. Lindsey Graham was throwing his panties right at Bebe. It was amazing. Mitch McConnell was running around showing everybody his circumcision. I mean, of course they did it to get Obama's goat. But you know, Obama got the last laugh this week because another fantastic jobs report came out. Analysts say the economy is an ideal shape for a Republican to come in and wreck it again in 2016. Isn't that good? Now listen to this. 295,000 new jobs last month. Unemployment is down to 5.5%, which the Fed says is full employment. For the first time since 1977, private sector job growth has exceeded 200,000 for 12 consecutive months. Or as they report on Fox News, Hillary used the wrong email. Oh, the humanity. She used her own email address instead of the office one. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a calamity the likes of which this country has never seen. I'll never forget where I was when I (2/41)
learned that four brave Americans were CC'd on the wrong server. Yes, it turns out the Clintons had set up their own personal Clinton email dot com account and people are shocked. Democrats got a website to work. Now, Hillary says it was all a big mistake. She said after Bill used the Internet, the keyboard keys would stick. And that's why she. Today, I heard John McCain yesterday. He said McCain said he doesn't use email at all. He said, because, you know, my temper, I just don't trust it. OK, you know what, grandpa? We know that's not why you don't use email. Republicans are not the most tech savvy people in the world. McCain thinks megabytes is the Secret Service code name for Chris Christie. So we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. No one can forget the no one can forget the images from that horrible day when police with fire hoses and dogs and clubs viciously attacked Bill O'Reilly. So President Obama and dozens of (3/41)
people from Congress are gathering there to commemorate the event. And police from Ferguson, Missouri, say they'll also be there to hand out jaywalking tickets. Yeah, now that's the real scandal I was talking about. Do you see what went on? The Justice Department released a report about what was going on in Ferguson, Missouri. Apparently, the entire town is basically a scheme run by racist cops to arrest black people, not just arrest them and harass them, but then finance the town with the tickets and the fines on the police cars right on the side. It said to collect and serve. All right. And now what you really care about. Harrison Ford. He's fine. His condition has been upgraded from cranky to grumpy. As I am sure you know, by now, Harrison Ford owns a vintage World War Two era, as most of us do, plane which crashed at a golf course here in L.A. And he's something of a hero because when the engine failed, he managed to avoid crashing into houses, thus preserving the rights of future (4/41)
celebrities to fly dangerous antique aircraft over major cities. How about that, ladies and gentlemen? Hero. Now, it really is an amazing story because when the plane crashed, two doctors who happened to be golfing, rescued him and treated him and possibly saved his life. People are calling it a miracle. Doctors working on their golf day? All right. We've got a great show. David Axelrod, Genevieve Wood, Matt Taibbi are here. A little later, he'll be speaking with writer director John Ridley. All right, let's meet our panel. All right, he is a contributing to Roller Stone, Rolling Stone magazine and author of The Divide, American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Matt Taibbi is with us. Hey, Matt. She is a senior contributor to the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal and our old friend from Politically Incorrect, been too long, Genevieve Wood. Hey, how you doing? Welcome back. He's the former senior advisor to President Barack Obama and author of Believer, My Forty Years in (5/41)
Politics. David Axelrod is over here. Okay, so I mentioned in the monologue that was a few scandals this week, a few I thought were fake and one that was real. We should talk about the real one first. That's Ferguson, but let's wait till John comes out to do that because let's be honest, he's black and we're not. So let's talk about Hillary and her emails first. Now, I say it's a fake scandal. Maybe it's not. Let's just ask that question. Is it, is there any there there? Should we be talking about it? I think there's there there. I mean, we don't know what's there yet. But no, I think this is a real scandal. I think it's a real problem. Hillary Clinton basically did not do what she even told her own staff at the State Department to do, which is do not use personal email for official business. Yet the whole time she's doing it. And you know, whether there was a law before and after while she was in that office, a law was out there that said you should not be using your personal email (6/41)
for this kind of activity. Was it a law? It was a statute. It's a rule. A rule. It's a rule. It's a rule. It's not a law. It's an employee. It's an employee handbook. Yeah, it's not in the Constitution. It's in the employee's handbook. That you would think, you would think a leader would follow. And I think, look, this is something. We already kind of fudged it from rule to law. We already kind of. I'll give you that one. But these are national security secrets that we're talking about here. We don't, you know, it could be easier to hack into her email than the government's. It's one thing I think the government should be doing is making sure that our leaders are secure. Genevieve's worried about national security here. Well, I am worried about national security. It just seems our scandals have gotten so lame. Deflategate and emails and, you know, I long for the day of the blowjob. Anyway, I'm also very curious as to why some scandals capture the imagination and others don't. Because (7/41)
this seems to me like not a lot. But here's something that happened this week. I take it a little personally because it happened very close to where I grew up in northern New Jersey. For the last 10 years, there's been a lawsuit to recover almost $9 billion from ExxonMobil because they environmentally contaminated, as they do, the wetlands in that part of the country. Chris Christie intervened this week and settled for $250 million from almost $9 billion. That to me seems like a bigger scandal. So the difference here is that you have to read past the third paragraph of the news story to understand the Christie issue. No, that's why it's not resonating with people. I mean, the Hillary thing, people immediately understand what that's all about because it's Hillary emails, secrets, wow. This is actually... And she's running for president. And she's running for president. I mean, Chris Christie is running for president, too, but he's not the presumptive nominee. Right, exactly. So I mean, (8/41)
that's why. I mean, national security is important, but... She hasn't said she's running for president. She could be faking these last 67 years. She's setting up a new email account for her campaign. I just suspect the outrage would be a little bit different had she... Was she not in a position to be running for president, being the nominee? But that seems like something, this Chris Christie thing, that actually affects people and people's lives. And the other one is kind of nothing. It might affect someone if we find out, but I have a feeling, you know, the last laugh is going to be for Hillary when we find out that her emails are just as boring as the rest of her life. She's just not that interesting. Here's what I don't know... Bill's emails. Those would be... Here's what I don't understand. You got Chris Christie. He's got a multi-billion dollar pension problem. He's been downgraded eight times. You'd think he'd want to get their money. He needs their money. Right. To take their (9/41)
money. Well, apparently the reason for that, though, is that he's getting the money more quickly than he would otherwise. That's right. And let's be clear. I mean, it was, as you said, almost a nine. It was like an $8.9 billion lawsuit that they wanted. But lawsuits always start out at a really high dollar amount. Exxon came back and said, hey, how about we give you three million? That's how different... So they ended up with about 250. It would happen to be the highest amount New Jersey's ever gotten from one of these kind of suits. Three cents on the dollar. They spent 10 years on this lawsuit. But Bill, the same week, they got another 190 million from another energy firm. So I mean, the money is coming in there. And I think the point... No, but you made a good one. This could have... This has been in court since 2004. All right. So I couldn't help notice another irony this week as Fox News loved the Hillary story, obviously. They were like a dog with the new chew toy. And yet not a (10/41)
word about the Bill O'Reilly situation. Let me read to you Bill O'Reilly's words. And you tell me if he is not just a blatant, bald-ass liar. He said, I've reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands. No, you haven't. There's no gray area here. A war zone is where the war is going on. You were in the capital of a country as it was at war. But the war was 1,200 miles away. Two, Bill O'Reilly, I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head. No, you saw pictures of that. Bill O'Reilly, I've seen Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with... No, again, you saw pictures of it. It's not the same thing. I've seen pictures of the Hindenburg. I don't say, I saw the Hindenburg go down. I mean, one last one. Okay, there was a guy who was a friend of a Russian guy in America. He was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. So as you might imagine, he's been of some interest to reporters for all the years after the Kennedy assassination. Maybe that's (11/41)
why in 1977, he killed himself. Okay, here's Bill O'Reilly on that in his book Killing Kennedy. As the reporter knocked on the door, he's talking about this guy's house. He heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of this Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald will never be fully understood. By the way, that reporter's name was Bill O'Reilly. No, it plainly wasn't. There is a tape of him on the phone with someone talking about this, which happened in Florida when Bill O'Reilly was in Dallas, with Bill O'Reilly saying, I got to get on a plane to cover this. These are out-and-out lies. Now, I understand why Fox News backs him, because they're not really a news service. So they're like, they're like, you expect the truth? That's not what we do here. But why isn't the mainstream media going after him with the same ferocity, the supposedly liberal media, as they did to Brian Williams? Because it, well, I suspect, I suspect it's because they know what you just (12/41)
said, which is Fox News isn't a real news organization, and Bill O'Reilly isn't a real journalist. Yeah, I think so. Bill O'Reilly being full of shit about something is not a news story. It just isn't. Okay, but it seems amazing the way this guy gets away. Remember that sex scandal he had did the same thing. Just intimidated people, bullied them. I mean, he said about this one to the New York Times reporter, I'm going after you with everything I have. You can take that as a threat. If a liberal reporter said they were in a war zone, what would the Fox News crowd be saying? They'd be saying, oh, this is an insult to troops who are really in the war zone, this bad American. You guys don't care. No, no, no, no, no. I think there's a bigger deal too here, though, I think, Bill, in the sense that this is, you know, O'Reilly has said that everything you just said is not true. He said that he can back up his stuff. And I know you, I've read the stories as well. Brian Williams actually came (13/41)
out and said, you know what? I did do this stuff and I'm apologizing for it. So NBC News, I think, had less that they could deal. I mean, they had to either accept that and go with it. Fox is going to defend him as long as he's saying, but I did what I said I did and nobody else is really able to challenge. I'll move on. But just so we know, there is no gray area here. He said, I was on a doorstep when there's proof he wasn't. He said he saw things when there's proof he wasn't. He claims that evidence doesn't exist. So, and there's clearly a, I mean, I think any journalist knows the difference between being in a war zone and not being in a war zone. And O'Reilly, if you're in a war zone, you notice. You notice. Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about Bibi Netanyahu this week. It was certainly unusual. I've never seen anything like this in American history, where one party invited a foreign leader to bitch about the current president and then they stood for him 50 times. But here's, let me (14/41)
quote from Bibi's speech to Congress. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country and only for the Middle East, but for all mankind. The deadline of attending this goal is getting extremely close. Of course, he said that in 1996. He didn't even have to rewrite the speech. I guess my question is, you know, if he was so wrong then, why are we so believing him now? Who's believing him? Well, every Republican. Look, the fact is that what happened in Washington was it had little to do with Iran. It had a lot to do with the existential threat to Bibi's political career. He's got an election in two weeks. This was a big rally for him and an opportunity for the Republicans to simulate the experience of having a president of their own party deliver a State of the Union speech. And that's really what it was. Since when does the U.S. Congress become a campaign stop for the Israeli president? I mean, that's since now. Yeah. Look, (15/41)
he's spoken before. I don't think this is about his election. I think this is about the fact that he truly believed. Not about his election. They timed it so that it would be shown at dinner time. But there's also another timing, which is we're coming up against this deal with Iran. The clock is ticking. And the reality is Iran is a real threat to this country. And the reason he's given that speech before is because Iran's been a nemesis for a very long time. It's been Republicans and Democratic presidents that had to deal with them. I mean, that's a reality. The problem is he said nothing new. And he didn't offer an alternative to what if the talks don't work? He didn't offer a realistic alternative that would suggest that he knew he had a better idea for how to stop them. At least the program stalled right now while we're having talks. That wasn't true before. We don't know that it stalled. We're taking the word of the Iranians that it stalled. Everybody agrees on that. Everybody (16/41)
agrees on that now. No, not everybody agrees on that. But I understand why Netanyahu is paranoid. He lives in Israel. I would be, too, if I lived there. Yeah. But this is America. Shouldn't we have a little more objectivity about this? And, you know, there is some history. In 2005, there was a deal on the table that was pretty good because Iran had a somewhat, you know, what they call a moderate president back then, too. Bush scuttled it. Back then, they had 164 centrifuges. Now they have 19,000. You know, this is what Republicans always do. This is how they negotiate. I get absolutely everything or the deal is off. Remember the 10 to 1? Guys, we'll give you 10 to 1 revenue to taxes. No, not good enough. But basically, you're saying it's the opposite, though, with the Democrats. Basically, Iran's getting everything they want, including continue to run out the clock. We have already released—we've already relaxed a sanction. So what was working in the past that could keep them in check, (17/41)
we've basically already taken that off the table. You know, when I was with the president when we traveled around the world and he got world leaders to join in these sanctions, we were being ridiculed because everybody said it was naïve to think that you could get withering sanctions that would impact on Iran. And now Republicans can't say enough about the sanctions. Now they're all for sanctions. I would be for even stronger sanctions. It was 10 years, this deal. 10 years of inspections. Why is that a bad deal? Because, Bill, first of all, they have to agree to go along with it. What happens when they don't? What is our part of the deal when they say, you know what, those inspectors we were going to let in, we're now not going to? We're going to let them see this room, but we're not going to let them see that. And they have a history of doing that, just like any deals that we've made with Syria. But we don't know that that isn't going to be part of what comes forward here. The thing (18/41)
is, they haven't concluded a deal yet. And there may not be a deal. That's right. And I don't think there should be a deal if it's a bad deal. But you also have to wonder what's going to happen if there's not a deal. And there are people who believe that, you know, every problem in the world is a nail and the American military is a hammer. And we ought to be very, very, we ask our questions. What comes next? You know, this just shows everybody sees what they want to see. How about that dress, ladies and gentlemen? How many, how about that for a segue? How many thought that dress was blue and black? OK, what about white and gold? Where am I white? Really? So plainly blue and black. OK. Anyway, we did a little research into this and we found out that actually liberals and conservatives see these things differently. So we want to show you a few of these and there's optical illusions and pictures and I'll show you what I mean. For example, liberals see this as blue and black mostly and (19/41)
conservatives see a slut who wants the government to pay for her contraception. Look at this one. Conservatives see an owl's face in a cup of coffee. Liberals see Newt Gingrich's wife. Look at this one. Liberals say this is a black teenager with an orange soda. Conservatives say, oh my God, he's got a gun. Shoot now. Bowing into applause, my favorite reaction. Conservatives look at this and see an elephant with five legs. Liberals see the governor of New Jersey. Liberals say these two lines are actually the same length. Conservatives say this Chinese guy is watching me. Look at this one. Liberals see two elderly people. Conservatives see two young people. Oh, here's a famous one. People argued this for years. Is it a rabbit or is it a duck? Liberals say it's a duck. Conservatives say, who cares, let's deep fry it in oil. Liberals see Cory Booker rescuing a dog. Conservatives see Cory Booker stealing a dog. Look at this one. Liberals see a woman's face. You see the woman's face? (20/41)
Conservatives see Bill Clinton playing the saxophone with an erection. OK. Now, before I bring out John, I just want to say something. I don't often mention the cause that is dear to my heart, which is animal rights. I figure I don't want to bore the people with the thing that I like the most. And I'm a PETA board member. It was a great week for animals. Ringling Brothers has decided not to use elephants anymore. PETA deserves the credit for that. And McDonald's is not going to get chickens with antibiotics in them anymore, or at least human animals. So if they stick to that, I'm going to do something I've never done, go to the circus and eat a fucking chicken McNugget. All right. He is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave, who was the creator, writer, and director of ABC's new dramatic series, American Crime. Please welcome John Ridley. There he is. John, how you doing, sir? Great to see you. How are you? I am very anxious to see your show. It is highly anticipated. And (21/41)
I think it says a lot about television that you are coming off a Oscar win. You won for 12 Years a Slave last year. You got the statue there. Years ago, no one who just came off an Oscar win would ever go to television. Paddy Chavsky didn't write Network and then Zoda, hey, I'm going to want to do a Rockford Files now. Says something about TV, right, and where it's come? In all the platforms, broadcast, cable, streaming, it is a new world, and it's great to be there. I will say ABC invited me to be part of this long before the Oscar was on the horizon. So the fact that they wanted to tackle subject matter that's about who we are, where we are, how we view each other, and it's complicated, really says a lot about, again, where TV is going. What they wanted to tackle is getting more money. And what happened in TV is that, I must say, this network for years has done shows like this, and then everybody got the idea, oh, that's what American people want to see. So you saw it now on other (22/41)
cable networks, and now we're seeing it. This is a broadcast network for the first time that's doing something. But I might say, though, I don't have a problem with a network wanting to make more money if part of that strategy is having shows that have people of color in front of the camera, behind the camera, talking about issues that are not only important to us but important to everybody. NBC is doing that. So I don't want to sound like a shill for the mouse house. But we all love money. We're Americans, and there is nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with loving money. Unless it's a police department that is making more money. We're going to get to that, yes. But I just want to ask you one more question about this show. It seems like it's going to be, I think, in the mouse house. I can see critics saying humanizing crime, because usually in America, the criminal is just a prop for the good guy to get off a one-liner and blow his head off. You're going a little deeper. I (23/41)
mean, this show, it shows crime. But unlike other shows, it shows the aftermath, the effects on the victims, how it bleeds into the life of people around the event. You think America is ready for that, for actually humanizing crime and looking into the reasons why crimes are committed? I hope so, because the things that we are seeing happening across the country, they are not of any one thing or the other. They are complicated. They're complex issues. As you said earlier, they go beyond the headlines. We have the advantage of being able to turn the page. But the people who are in these circumstances, the families of the victims, the accused, the families of the accused, it doesn't go away in 45 minutes. So I think that audiences, I mean, look, we had an amazing number last night. Almost 9 million people watched the show. I think audiences are ready for something more. And I appreciate that they chose the show to examine these things. I mean, as someone who's done so much research, I'm (24/41)
sure you have, as you always do, on crime. Why do you think crime has gone down, as it has almost across the board in this country, for years now? I mean, there are theories for everything from abortion is legal, so less unwanted babies are born, to lead in paint. I've heard that. I've heard that. I'm just asking what you would say. I would say there are many things. The aging demographics, access, the fact that even though we are in difficult times, that the economy is better. I think, unfortunately, you're still seeing people who are at disadvantage, who get locked in a cycle. Young people of color, once you get convicted of a crime, if you go to jail, it becomes that much harder to get a job. So there are cycles that continue. But we are all sold on the fear. It's violent crime. It's all out there. The FBI statistics say, no, we are a safer society. We are actually a more respectful society. But again, you look at something like Ferguson, beyond an individual getting shot, the (25/41)
surprising thing about these reports is just the daily indignities that are heaped upon, and I mean heaped upon a community that no one would pay attention to until and unless a young man, unfortunately again, an unarmed black man, is killed in the streets, and people rise up. But it is unfortunate because the cycle exists. And when our show came up, it was after Trayvon Martin. And there was a part of me that thought, well, maybe we're past something. But to go back into the cycle, I think we have to look at why. Even if crime is going down, why do we still see the same effects on a particular group over and over again? Well, let's talk about that now. Because obviously, this was the big story of the week, I thought, the Justice Department report from Ferguson. And to me, it is the smoking gun about racism that I think we need in this country. Because when you look at recent polls about what Republicans, especially conservatives, think, 61% in a Pew story say the issue of race has (26/41)
gotten too much attention. Millennials, 58%, millennials, discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks. There is this view, right, that reverse racism somehow is worse than real racism. This, to me, is the smoking gun that we found out here's Eric Holder. These are his words. He said, a community where local authorities consistently approach law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way to generate revenue. That is particularly sick to just harass people just trying to get to and from a minimum wage job. And instead of paying taxes, nobody wants to pay taxes anymore, use the police department as a shakedown organization against the poorest members of society. It's just ugly. I mean, it is. And again, the cascade effect. And in this report, you hear about individuals who get hit with a $150 fine, which nobody wants to pay that kind of money. But for a lot of people, it's not as easy as going on a website and (27/41)
putting in your credit card and paying that. And if you can't make it to court, if you can't afford that, if you go to court, you arrive late and it's shut down, that $151 then becomes $250, $300. There was a report of a woman started at $151, ended up $1,000. She's still paying it off. People lose their jobs over things like this. It is a smoking gun, I think, to some people. I think to a lot of people, a lot of people of color, this is business as usual. It is. The question I'd like to ask, and let me ask everybody this one. How likely is it that Ferguson is the one town where this is going on? That we just happen to stumble upon the one place where this kind of racism exists? How many Fergusons are there? I know it isn't because I did a lot of research in this from my last book. I spent about a year and a half sitting in the courts of New York. And I heard story after story that's just like that. I actually met a guy who spent a year trying to go to jail because he couldn't afford a (28/41)
$150 fine for riding a bicycle the wrong way down the sidewalk. And there's courtrooms full of these people every single day. The thing about Ferguson that's really stunning is you've got a town that's 2-thirds black and a police department that's almost entirely white. 90% of the arrests are in the black community. So I mean, just on the face of it, you see the prescription for the kinds of abuses that we've seen. And clearly, it's not just Ferguson. This is happening in other places. But I think we do have to be careful. I mean, there are the example of New Orleans, for example, where it's pretty evenly divided. I mean, the city was around 60% black. It was like in 2010. And the police force was about 59% black. And yet, the Justice Department under Eric Holder actually went down and said, we've got racial issues there of black officers dealing with black citizens there. So it's not always a black-white thing. But I do think it's a real issue. And I think the larger issue, too, is (29/41)
even just the civil forfeiture generally is an issue that I think we need to take on of people's property being seized, their cars, their homes. And they're not guilty. But what it takes to go get that back, they're being afforded. It seems like if these were white people, this would be a Tea Party issue. This would be big government, right? No? Well, civil forfeiture. I think civil forfeiture reform is something Republicans and Democrats would be a part of. I actually think problems within the criminal justice system have actually united. You see Rand Paul out there on sentencing reform. So there is a coming together of the left and right on this particular issue. For example, the Selma anniversary. Why didn't any Republican leaders go with Obama to Selma? It seems like an obvious. It's not even something you actually have to. If it actually occurs that way, it is both shameful and it's just plain stupid. I mean, it's shameful is just the way you should be dealing with other human (30/41)
beings and recognizing that. But it's also stupid if you're a political party that says you want to do outreach and you're kidding me? You've got nobody there? I heard last minute that maybe Kevin McCarthy or somebody's going to go. But the fact it's last minute is a shame. Probably going to go now. After that. Let me read you a quote. This is from Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach. He said, under Obama, this is a reaction, I guess, to the Ferguson events this week. Under Obama, the word is going to come down that there won't be any prosecutions of black criminals. Wild guess which party. I always say not every Republican is a racist. But if you're a racist and you're looking for a party, it just is not that hard. OK, last issue, the Obamacare suit. Before the Supreme Court started to hear about Obamacare, this is the second time this has come up for the Supreme Court. As we know, a few years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts saved the day. Liberals got to give him a pound for that (31/41)
one, right? I'm sure a lot of conservatives still hate him for that. We don't know how it's going to go this time. Now, it's a little too boring to get into the minutiae of this case. But if the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare on this specific ruling, they say, the experts all say, the whole thing will unravel. What's interesting is that when you go before the court, you have to have what's called standing, which means you have to have a legitimate case. Just any fool can't go up there. And yet, the case has been brought by four fools. Listen to this, one of the people bringing this case against Obamacare wrote that Obama is the Antichrist. I rest my case. The Antichrist who won his election by getting his Muslim people to vote for him. And he's a veteran. He's a veteran, which means he doesn't have standing, because veterans already have their health care. It doesn't affect him. He's already getting socialism. There's four folks in this case, and I think there is standing. Look, (32/41)
the federal judge prior. Let me just read the other ones. The second one is also a veteran, also getting socialism. The third one is getting Medicare in June, another case of getting the socialism that everybody should be getting. Because the veteran affairs program is so fabulous for our veterans, right? Yeah. Well, actually, the VA program is pretty good for most. No? No. Does anybody talk about a scandal? It's better than nothing. That's our answer to our veterans, that it's better than nothing? Yeah, but this whole thing is about uninsured people. It's about people having to do it. But why doesn't everybody have it? I don't understand. Poor people get socialism. Veterans, soldiers get socialism, old people. Why am I out of the picture? Why am I preg? What is the prejudice against me? I'm not a soldier, and I'm not poor, and I'm not old, and I'm not disabled. So fuck you. You're on your own. Beyond which the whole case is predicated. You're a rich white guy, and you're being (33/41)
prosecuted for it. That's why you're a rich white guy. Thank God. You cannot catch a break, and I'm sick of it. The whole case is predicated on this notion that Congress didn't intend people to get subsidies who were in the exchanges, on these federal exchanges. Nobody believes that Congress didn't intend everybody in the exchanges to get these subsidies. And so the court would have to go back on its basic precedent, which is legislative intent. This is just a way to try and unravel Obamacare. Let me tell you, when I was young, and I had a child with a very serious illness, I was one of those people who almost went bankrupt. And I had insurance, because the insurance was lousy. I couldn't switch, because she had a pre-existing condition. And I think there are millions of Americans who are in the same position, who have a lot riding on this. And it's more than just a game for ideologues to play. But this is a law in this country, and I'm all for health care reform. But this is a law (34/41)
that was not ready for prime time. Nobody read it before they voted for it, which is one reason the statement's been questioned today. People are now saying it doesn't mean what we said it means. You can keep your doctor, but no, now you can't. Look, this has been challenged in courts hundreds of times around the country, not just twice before the Supreme Court. It is a law that even now the CBO is coming out saying, we're talking about the uninsured. By 2025, over 30 million Americans still will be uninsured under this law. Among those are undocumented Americans. Some of those, that's 10 to 12 million. So what about the other 20? Let me ask one last question, since we brought up the subject and it is about socialism. You saw the statistics on the economy. I recited them in the monologue. A pretty amazing economy. Republicans always said Obama was a socialist. Does that mean they were wrong about that, or does socialism work? Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm- (35/41)
hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yes. Really needs a 24-hour waiting period before he gets another tattoo. Because his other tattoos are New Coke, the choice of the next generation, MySpace, the social network of tomorrow, and Bill Cosby is USA Dad number one forever. Newer Bill O'Reilly and Brian Williams must co-host a new evening news program called Eyewitness News. Not Eyewitness News, this is Eyewitness News, where the two anchors take turns describing events they saw in photos or happened to other people. Watch Bill O'Reilly in the studio throw to Bill O'Reilly reporting from Syria, who tosses to Brian Williams, who's live in Tokyo, who then throws back to the newsroom and your host, Brian Williams. After 30 years of trying, Paul McCartney has to admit that he should stick to singing with white people. You'll get it later. Anyway, New World, don't be upset if you just found out that (36/41)
Radio Shack went bankrupt and they're no longer honoring their gift cards. Be upset that someone thought so little of you that they gave you a Radio Shack gift card. New World North Korea's Kim Jong-un must admit that, at this point, he's just daring someone to laugh at his haircut so he can have them killed. And also that he just sits down in the barber chair, points to the brush and says, make me look like that. And finally, New World, some conservative somewhere has to explain to me why they think Barack Obama doesn't love America. Because every time I hear him talk about America, my reaction is, get a room. He says things like, you know, the country on earth is my story even possible and America remains the one indispensable nation. And yet, 69% of Republicans say he doesn't love our country and only 11% say he loves it the right way. But what is the right way? How much should we love our country and how often? What if we want to love it but it's tired and had a long day? And most (37/41)
importantly, should we love it from behind or is that demeaning? Now, for the last couple of weeks, as the oceans die, the debt balloons and we skid back into Iraq, Republicans have been obsessed with a much bigger issue. Does the president love it? It started with America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who implied... It does kind of look like him. Rudy Giuliani, who implied that if you criticize America in any way, it means you don't love her. But that's not how grown-ups think about a country. It's the way 13-year-old girls think about One Direction. Obama loves America. It just doesn't make him do this. Because he's an adult and he knows the difference between his country and his mommy. Liberals love America plenty. They just think Paris is a more interesting vacation spot than Branson. I have no problem listing what I love about my country. For one, we aren't ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The Bushes and Clintons take turns. Two, we come to the aid of people in need. I mean, you know, on (38/41)
a case-by-case basis. Sorry, Rwanda, we'll get you next time. And three, two words, freedom. Face it, we complain. But if you had a choice of any country to be born in for the last 200 years, you'd choose, well, Canada. But after that, totally the U.S. of A. Which is not to say we're perfect. There's a lot to love about it and a lot not to. Like our legacy of genocide, slavery and racism, our income inequality, militarism, environmental damage, and the worst mass incarceration on earth. We lead the world in obesity and use 19% of the world's energy just getting up the stairs. And don't get me started on the guys who paint your house number on the curb without asking first. But there I go, loving my country in the wrong way with my head instead of my heart. Which is how conservatives do it. They love America like those parents who think their kid can never do wrong. When a note comes home from school reporting bad behavior, they go in and yell at the teacher. Or in the case of the (39/41)
school board in Oklahoma, yell at the people who wrote the American history textbook. Yes, the conservatives in Oklahoma these days are waging a battle to get rid of the current textbook because they say it focuses too much on negative aspects in America's past. Like it mentions Japanese internment camps. Why bring that up? It's just going to make things awkward down at the sushi place. You know, when it comes to American conservatives, they're a little like blackout drinkers. They remember all the good stuff about the night before. The laughs, the winning at beer pong, but no recollection of the bad. The pissing in the lobby fountain, groping co-workers, wiping out the Indians. Which is a shame because you can't turn the page on America's bad stuff if you won't print the page to begin with. If you won't acknowledge that many of the good things America has done are actually reversals of bad things America did. I think it's great that we gave the Indians the casino business in America. (40/41)
And I'm proud of the Emancipation Proclamation. I'm proud of women's suffrage, of the Civil Rights Act, of legal gay marriage in 37 states and counting. But all of that wouldn't have been necessary if we hadn't been dicks in the first place. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Holt Center in Eugene, Oregon April 18th at the Kiva Auditorium in Albuquerque, May 2nd at the Bayou in Houston, May 3rd. I want to thank my guests Matt Taibbi, Genevieve Wood, David Axelrod, John Ridley, and Lawrence Wright. Join us now on Overtime at HBO.com. Thank you, folks. For more info, log on to HBO.com. (41/41)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maughan. Call yourselves human. Now you're excited. It's President's Day weekend and it's a good time to reflect how far we've come from our first president who said I cannot tell a lot. And you know, I know it's fun to watch the wheels come off the Trump car until we remember we're riding in the back. That it's not so fucking fun anymore. And as usual, you know, there's the circus that happens every week, the distractions that take us away from knowing what's really important, which is there is an unprecedented state of crisis in this country. There is. The national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned because of his illegal contacts with Russia. I know the president would like to say that's fake news. That's not fake news. This is the most serious political scandal we've ever had in the United States. And now the question turns to how deep was the involvement of President Trump or as Russia calls him, (1/42)
Agent Orange. What is going on in this country is the intelligence agencies are leaking like crazy because they are trying to send a desperate message that this is not just a different kind of president as the Republican enablers like it's a different kind of president. No, he's fucking nuts and he's dangerous. And they know it. And they're trying to tell us that. You know what makes the intelligence agencies go nuts? Seems like this from Mar-a-Lago this last weekend when he was with the Japanese prime minister and they got news at dinner that the North Koreans had launched a missile. So Trump thought he would, you know, just handle it at dinner in an open air restaurant. He's with the Japanese prime minister. They probably handle intelligence briefings like they do at their steak houses right there at your table. This is crazy shit. And yet foreign heads of state keep coming to America as if it's normal, as if things are... Netanyahu from Israel was here this weekend. You know, Trump (2/42)
doesn't know anything. That's the other little bad part about him. They asked him about the two-state solution. He said, it works for me and Melania. And then Justin Trudeau, where are my Canadians here? I know they're... They're small but enthusiastic. But he came here and sat down with the president. You know, he had that same look on his face that all the leaders have like, oh fuck. And I'm sure it came up that they have floated, seriously in the White House, Sarah Palin as the first ambassador... Not the first, the last ambassador to Canada, which I'm sure Trudeau takes more as a threat. Sarah Palin, ambassador. The first ambassador in history to require a security deposit. No, that's what they do. They love these distractions. Look at crazy Sarah Palin over here. Meanwhile, they're doing this shit like the Senate confirmed just today, Scott Pruitt to be head of the environmental... Head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Scott Pruitt is a man who despises the Environmental (3/42)
Protection Agency. So it's less like public service and more like community service. This is a guy who is completely in the tank for the extraction industry. That's how they roll. The new head of the APA is completely in the tank with the oil and the coal... That's how Republicans work with Donald Trump. While you're watching the clown screw the pony, they're breaking into your car. Just remember that. Now in other cabinet news, Andy Puzner is out. That sounds like something somebody says to you when your fly is open. Andy Puzner is out. No, he was the anti-labor guy they put up to be labor secretary. And now they're putting up a guy, Alexander Acosta. I have no idea how this guy slipped through because he's qualified and Hispanic. So it's going to be a very tough confirmation process and an even tougher border patrol. And then there was the press conference. Did you see Donald Trump's press conference? Press conference, an impromptu 77 minute brain fart. You know your Facebook friend (4/42)
who said he thought Trump was Hitler? He was optimistic. Actually, what we have here is a mental patient who thinks he's Hitler. The kid in the YouTube video who's high from the dentist made more sense. It was... And of course it was this long, whiny, whiny little bitchy airing of grievances against the press and the courts and the Democrats and Hillary. Just this non-stop pissing and moaning and pissing and moaning. There's less pissing and moaning when he's with his Russian hooker. And then in the middle of it, he says the White House is running like a fine-tuned machine. Yes, specifically a Samsung Galaxy. Alright, we've got a great show. Larry Wilmore, Jack Kingston and Malcolm Nancer here. And a little later we'll be speaking with Leah Remini who's backstage. But first up, here's the controversial senior Redditor of Breitbart News and author of the upcoming book Dangerous, Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo, how you doing? How are you? Nice to meet you. Yes, happy to have you here. You're (5/42)
very controversial. I don't know why. Well, we're gonna... I don't know why, I'm lovely. I know. Well, we'll find that out. I'm gonna start with an open mind because honestly, I only heard of you about a year ago. You're all of what, 31? 32, but thank you. Okay. 27 officially. Okay. You look like Bruno. He said he was 19. You know I told her to dial down the contouring. She didn't listen. Your makeup lady was just crazy. Alright. So, about a year ago, people started to tell me, are you gonna get this guy, Milo, you know, on your show? And I started to look into, you know, what you're saying. And look, I think you're colossally wrong on a number of things. That's okay. But if, exactly, if I banned everyone from my show who I thought was colossally wrong, I would be talking to myself. Well, you wouldn't have Ann Coulter on, which is the only time I watch the show. I wouldn't have Jack Kingston on who's on tonight. Of course. Wonderful. So, let's start with the contradictions about you, (6/42)
which is pretty crazy, because you're gay and you're, uh, spoiler alert. Oh, come on. You can do better than that. What tipped you off? I've been reading about you. I mean, your mother's Jewish. You have a black Muslim boyfriend. No, but I haven't done one now. You did. Still black, not Muslim. Not Muslim. But he was Muslim? He was somebody once. Okay. But you've spoken out... We don't talk about it. You've spoken out against all these people. You say you don't hire gay people. Oh, no, you can't trust them to show up to work on time. Too much drugs, too much sex, they never show up to work, always making excuses. No, no, no. I mean, not as bad as women, but no, I don't hire gays. But you know that's not, I mean... Oh, there we go. But, you know, that's just... Just kidding. You're easy. You're very easy. Very easily triggered. It's pathetic. Well, let's get to that. There's so many things I could start an argument with you about, but... Because I know gay people who do show up to work. (7/42)
Okay, but, yes, but that is the reaction. You are so, let's say, helped by the fact that liberals just always take the bait. Of course. Now, you're a conservative. I'm a liberal. That's the difference. I mean, I don't know if I'm conservative. I mean, I'm authoritarian. You work for Breitbart and you're a Trump supporter. Well, it's interesting. You're a conservative. Well, it's interesting that the radical gay editorials, you know, saying interesting provocative things about gays are now being published by Breitbart. And I don't think really that you can call Trump a traditional conservative. He's not that Republican. No, you're correct about that. So I don't know if that's fair. He's very dangerous. All I care about is free speech and free expression. I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything. These days, you're right, that's a conservative position. I care about the environment and living also. But free speech... But I mean, you're right. I mean, you know, we've both... (8/42)
That's a conservative position now, free speech. We have both been disbarred at Berkeley. You know, I gave the commencement address... Much more dramatically, I'd just like to say. I mean, they just disinvited you. I had riots. People got beaten up. Right. No, you do... It's horrendous. OK, you win, babe. You beat me out there. There were no riots. It's not a competition. No, it's not a competition. But like, when you make liberals crazy... Yes. For that part of liberalism that has gone off the deep end. Most of it. Yeah. Well, I don't know about... You're the only good one. No, I... You're literally the only good one. Your sight has gone insane. The Democrats of the party of Lena Dunham, these people are mental, hideous people. The more that America sees of Lena Dunham, the fewer votes the Democrat party is ever going to get. This is the people that she has points around. Let's not pick on fellow HBO stars. There are so many other people... Was I supposed to... Was I not supposed to (9/42)
do that? No, of course you're... They didn't brief me about that. I'm sorry, but she is awful. Because we don't... Because... Excuse me. Because we don't brief here. Because it is free speech. Well, I like that. I appreciate it. I know. Shall we go with Amy Schumer instead? But I'm not... See, another thing. I love Amy Schumer. Her show... But that's OK. We disagree. No, but these people used to be funny before they contracted feminism. It's like Sarah Silverman. She was really, really funny when she was cracking... Another someone I'm a fan of. Let's get off this. Let's talk about your humor. Because I think a lot of people do miss your humor. And I'm a guy who always defends jokes right up to the point where they pointlessly hurt people. Do you think you've ever... No, I hurt people. I have my whole career. I hurt people for a reason. But... No, I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll. But if somebody gets hurt because of truth needs to be said, like religion. I've always (10/42)
attacked religion. Yes. Well, you're sound on Islam, unlike most of the people on your side. Yes. Right. That's true. But all religion, I always say, is stupid and dangerous. That hurts me. Except Catholicism, which is awesome, but otherwise, yes. OK. Well, that shows you. And I hope when you look in the mirror tonight... I'm very happy with what I see in the mirror. I don't see Bruno in the mirror. I'm not talking about what you see. I'm talking what's in your head. When you recognize that you are a Catholic, I hope you say to yourself, gee, I'm also capable of bullshit, stupid thinking. Well, everyone's capable of bullshit, stupid thinking. OK, great. You know? And that's OK. You know, it's a characteristic of the modern left, I think, requiring, you know, this absolute consistency, and forgetting that people are messy and complicated, and forgetting also some obvious other human truths, I think, some realities of human psychology. Like, for instance, you know, the reason they want (11/42)
to police humor, you know, which is very important to both of us, is that they can't control it, because the one thing that authoritarians hate is the sound of laughter, because they can't control what people find funny. And also because when people laugh, they know it's true. Yeah, of course. Because laughter... Nothing annoys people or amuses people like the truth. Laughter is involuntary. Exactly. When you laugh, even if you don't really agree in that part of your mind to go, ooh, shit, man. Exactly. And so I get, in my college talks, you've got the professors at the front who are there to kind of monitor me to make sure I don't go off the rails, and I make a joke about Ted Cruz or something, and they're like, you know, you can see it. You can see it. And the other thing that's really important is not just that, but the other thing is, you know, humor isn't how you drive people apart. You know, these sort of policing humor for racism and sexism is utterly wrongheaded, not just (12/42)
because normally it isn't there, but because that's how we build bridges, not how we break them. You know, when you make a joke, that's how you connect with somebody. You know, you make jokes at the bar, you make awkward small talk. Humor is what brings people together, not what drives them apart. And these basic, you know, fundamental human psychological insights, the progressive ones, it's just for God. I mean, the one area where I'm a little concerned is when you go after people individually. Because, like I said, if it's in the cause of a greater truth, you know, if people are hurt as, you know, collateral damage, I'll go there. But, like, I didn't understand, like, the Ghostbusters thing. First of all, who gives a fuck about Ghostbusters? I wrote a bad review of a movie. Am I not entitled to do that? I don't know. And I said she looked like a dude. She does. You know, I said that she was barely literate. She is. And I simply don't accept, I do not accept, that a Hollywood, you (13/42)
know, that the star of a Hollywood blockbuster, that an A-list mega-celebrity is sitting in a Hollywood mansion crying over mean words on the internet. Get over it. And if you aren't over it, which I suggest you are, which I suspect you are, because it's not really the case that she's sitting there upset about mean words on the internet. Actually, she's been deployed by the studio because the movie's tanking. You know, you've just got to accept, I'm sorry, you've just got to accept, mean words on the internet don't hurt anyone. And also... Your Twitter feed, my Twitter feed, these are ugly, horrible things. Every Twitter feed is. No, they're not. They're wonderful. When I had a Twitter, it was the funniest thing in America. It was fabulous. But you know, what actually hurts people is things that happen in the real world. I mean, I don't go on about it because I'm not a professional victim. But I do get syringes through my door, dead animals through my door. You say you get mean tweets. (14/42)
That's okay. It's not a competition. But what actually hurts people is like murder, violence, you know, that kind of stuff. Mean words doesn't hurt people. Which some people would say you have incited. What? How? I'm just saying some people would say... Well, they would be idiots. Well... They would be idiots. Yeah. Okay. You know, and I agree with you about the Twitter thing. I mean, I stopped reading most of my Twitter feed a long time ago because if I want to cry myself to sleep every night, I could just read my Twitter feed. No, I love it. I get off on it. I love it. You know, I give my trolls marks out of ten. But that's you and you're a special kind of animal. I'm a little broken. I'm a little broken. I give the marks out of ten. I used to retweet. A little broken. I used to... You're a little broken and you're very wrong about certain things. Well, like Black Lives Matter is a hate group and that there's no such thing as white privilege. I mean, you do know that that's wrong. (15/42)
We're happy to... You know, look, we can disagree on those things and that's wonderful. The one thing that should unite us, the one thing that I think that you and I can both agree on, and the one thing that was so remarkable when that... I mean, I've never heard of him before. That silly man who had a hissy fit this week who refused to come on the show, but doesn't understand is that... Yes. If you don't show up to debate, you lose. Right. And if you don't... And also, stop taking debate liberals. The fact that they all flipped out... Oh my goodness. Wasn't it pathetic? ...about this little impish British fag. You fucking schoolgirls. You schoolgirls. It's so ridiculous. Right? The only... Look, if I am... You know what? If I'm any... Somebody sent me this, which is so funny because they knew you were coming on. Okay. The one thing is Joan Rivers, who, by the way, when she died, Obama... The liberal president that we all love commented. They don't comment when someone dies. She's a (16/42)
tranny. Unless they're a national treasure. Yeah. He said, not only did she make us laugh, she made us think. Here's what she said on Michelle Obama. Blackie O, you know Michelle is a tranny. Robin Quivers, bitch, you look like a fucking mudslide. I hate Houston. It's crawling with bugs. Oh wait, that's Whitney Houston. You know, my favorite... Exactly, but that's the person we find to be a national treasure. I'm just saying the line is kind of blurred. And some of it's context, you know. Because somebody is perceived to have conservative politics, which I think I've said it... It's at least questionable in my case. Because somebody is perceived to have conservative politics, there are different rules. You can't make jokes... But you should get off the Trump train. Because for a guy who loves free speech... He's fabulous. For a guy who loves free speech, you've picked a weird voice. No, no, no, no, no. He's not gonna come out... No, no, no. No time to debate. We'll do it again. All (17/42)
right, well let's meet our panel. You think he's the former U.S. Counterterrorism... Did you just come? Because that was a... It was a kind of a... It's the Russians. He's the former U.S. Counterterrorism Intelligence Officer and author of The Plot to Hack America How Putin, Cyberspies, and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election. Tried. Malcolm Nance is over here. He is a producer, comedian, and writer. One of my favorites. Larry Wilmore is back with us. Larry Wilmore. And the Republican who served ten terms as the U.S. Congressman representing Georgia's first districts. He's got balls to come here. Jack Kingston. Hey, Jack. How you doing? Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show. Okay, let's talk about the Russians. No, really, you know, I want to repeat myself, but I do feel an obligation to, as I never have in my long career, to put the facts ahead of the entertainment. I always try to get both in, but I feel like our (18/42)
country is hanging by a thread right now. So if I have to repeat myself, I'm going to. Stop looking at the distractions and the clown show and look at what matters. Which is, I would say, this is the worst political scandal in American history and it's not going away. I agree. Is that true? I agree. I think all of this talk about fake news, it distracts us from the real stories. Like, why is Harrison Ford allowed to fly a plane at 102? All right, Mr. Funny. No, you're absolutely right. I completely agree. There you go, being part of the problem. But yeah, I mean, I keep hearing on the news, you know, the cover-up is worse than the crime. No, the crime is worse. The crime is treason. The crime is colluding with Russia to fix an American election. How is this not? Well, I got to say, I absolutely, the Russians were trying to influence the election. In September, they were at a G20 meeting. You're right. And the president calls Putin to the side and says, you got to cut that out. What is (19/42)
that for foreign policy? You got to cut that out. I totally agree. He was late on that. He was very late. Now, the second issue of Flynn having a conversation with Kislyak, the ambassador, we don't know exactly what went on. It's illegal for us to know what went on, as you know. And it's bringing up sanctions or not bringing up sanctions. Jack is always going to stand and say that there was nothing wrong with that. Let me put it into context. No, what I'm saying, Malcolm, is we didn't know. First, put you into context. Now, you've been part of the intelligence community for a long time. A few decades. So deeply, I don't even know what agency you were. What agency were you with? I started out in naval intelligence and worked for the National Security Agency. And from time to time, I was loaned to other people. Black guy that spoke Arabic. Loaned to other people. All right, so you know where the bodies are buried. I know where some of them are. Well, what I was about to say was, the way (20/42)
that you characterized it at the beginning of your monologue, I think was rather mild. I think what we are, and you say it's the greatest scandal in American history. Well, we can put secession aside. This may possibly be the greatest scandal of presidential history, where for the first time in 240 years, we have a president who may have actually had influence and had been elected with the direct assistance, not just of a foreign power, of a foreign intelligence agency. The four FISA warrant investigations that are going on right now, people hear the word FISA and they hear FBI and they think, okay, that's great. That's just an investigation. This is this nation's spy hunters are investigating these people. Not just regular gumshoe FBI agents. These are people looking for foreign spies. When the intelligence agencies are leaking like this, it seems like they are crying out that we don't want to do a coup. And Bill, let's be honest. You bring up Obama. No, let's keep it 100 in this. If (21/42)
Obama in 2008 thought he was colluding with the Russians, I mean, he was already called a commie at that point. Yeah. Do you think he ever would have been elected? I mean, this was called a character's religion. Let me put that to you, Jack. What if it was Hillary Clinton, who was just what we absolutely know? What would you be saying about it? Well, number one, very, very important, Barack Obama did absolutely know that the Russians were potentially interfering. Doesn't answer my question. And in terms of Republicans asking, you know, I think you're right, shoes on the other foot. There's going to be hell raisin. So I agree with you on that. But to say, I think it's way, way too early and way too dramatic to be saying this is the biggest scandal in American history. What is a scandal? Everybody talks about the load you have. The scandal is that the Russians fixed the election for one party. No, no, you're right. We don't have the proof of that. But the dots are all there. No, the (22/42)
intelligence agencies, and Malcolm will back me up on this, I certainly hope. Maybe, maybe not. Good luck with that. But the intelligence agency said while they did seek to interfere with the elections, it cannot be shown that they affected the election. It didn't affect? That's what the intelligence agency says. No, no. Malcolm back me up on this. No, I won't back you up on that. No, they're saying that the results were not affected by it. The results were not affected. That is such bullshit. They act like, here's what happens, this really gets me upset. No, because these talking points always act like we don't have eyes and we can't hear things. That's what it acts like. No, no, no, I was there. I'm not a researcher. I was a witness. I saw the election happen. Did you tell Hillary Clinton not to go to Wisconsin? No, Hillary Clinton took her work home. That's what people were mad at. Yes, that's right. She spent August at Hollywood in Nantucket. Wait, can I put this in perspective? (23/42)
When Kennedy was president, he wasn't fucking around with the Russians, but he was fucking around. Yes, he was. The intelligence agencies, we don't know what happened to Jack Kennedy, but that was one theory, because they couldn't trust him, because he was fucking East German spies and mafia couriers. And they were like, this guy has a pussy problem, and this cannot stand. He is too much of a danger to America. Now, I feel like that's where the intelligence agencies are now. Now, they should not be violent, don't get me wrong, but they are saying through their leaks, this man cannot be president. And you know why they're saying that? Because what we have is a situation here where the person they would have to report to, the absolute pinnacle, the commander in chief, is a person who himself cannot be reported to. What they're doing is they're reporting, and they're taking it above his head to the ultimate commander in chief, which is the American people. This is an accurate case, you (24/42)
know. That is J. Edgar Hoover. That's J. Edgar Hoover. And you know what? J. Edgar Hoover? Yeah. Yeah, use intel information to blackmail politicians to affect American policy. And that's Russia, that's Putin. Malcolm, you should be outraged to think, number one, that they're spying on an American person. Now, they can say, okay, he was collateral damage, that we were really spying on the Russian ambassador, but they do not have the right to disclose what a... Even if they find treason? Why do you think these things are being leaked to the first place? There was no spying going on on an American citizen. This was own force monitoring, and we have FBI with a warrant... You're not allowed to disclose your name to an American citizen, and you know that. Let's redirect back here to, again, let's not lose focus here. We are now in the place... He's a national security adviser, I think you're allowed to say that. He was a private citizen at the time, but you're not allowed to say that. You (25/42)
still cannot do that. I mean, that's the law. America is now in this place, where we have watched other countries who we had our nose up about, Egypt and Turkey, places where we thought, oh, you know, the dictator is crazy. So the intelligence services, that's not really the best option. Oh, wait, it is the best option. They're like our last line of defense now. And I... Trump floated the idea this week that he's going to put this guy, Steven Feinberg, who's some hedge fund buddy of his. He wants him to oversee the intelligence. It looks like a purge in the making, so that he can take over. Can, my question to you, sir, can Trump put his people in charge of the intelligence agencies? Because then we have no line of defense between the total coup. Well, every president puts people in charge of intelligence agencies, and they control that little seat that they're sitting in, and maybe a couple of seats around them. The people who come in every day, day in, day out, who walk past the (26/42)
statue of Nathan Hale over at CIA, who walk past the wall of honor over at the National Security Agency, they are not in this in order that, you know, the president of the United States goes out and disparages them day to day. They are here to protect this nation. They do it well. And what we're saying now is, they are now in an act of self-defense for the nation. They are loyal to the Constitution, not the man. Are you saying that they all got together and they said, hey, we're so worried about this guy that we're going to start breaking the law ourselves? Yes. That's what you're saying? That's exactly what you're saying. Wait, wait, wait. Why do you think people who are in the Trump circle, the people that he trusted are leaking? Why do you think that's happening? And by the way, let me point this out. Because you're saying, what the fuck is going on? Let me tell somebody. I got to move on, but let me point this out for you. The people in the intelligence agencies, by and large, are (27/42)
not liberals. No. They are not liberals. So when they're leaking, you know they're freaked out. Okay, so Kurt Vonnegut. There may be Obama holdovers. Yeah, right. I just leave it at that. That's what it is. Right. Like James Comey, the Republican who fucked Hillary. I'm not sure that's the right name. Kurt Vonnegut once said, true terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. Yes. On cue this week, we met this guy, Stephen Miller. He's 30 or 31 years old. He's the senior advisor there in the White House. This is a brown-noser on a scale I have never seen. And this is what he said. This is his debut on national TV. The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned. You're not scared by that? The powers of the president will not be questioned. We don't have checks and balances anymore? Checks and balances, Jack? No, listen, I'm with you on that. Great. But what I'm saying, if he is (28/42)
referring to section code 1182, that gives the president broad authority to control who comes into the border, then he's correct in that context. Okay, well anyway. I've had to defend that. I've had to defend that. It's not a whatever, Tim. It's US code 1182. Can I just say what's happening here, please? Okay. What's happening with Trump and a lot of this stuff is a complete assault on the truth is what's going on. And they're doing it in several ways. Let me tell you, the first way, like Trump does this casual lying that, and he puts the pressure on us to figure out what he's talking about. Like we have to be his fucking Rosetta Stone to carry through his lies. And then there's this exhaustion of fact checking that's going on because of the casual lying, where America's going to be tired of smart people fact checking him all the time. And finally, no, the last thing is taking facts as facts and turning them into what I call ammunition for ideological points, right? So in other words, (29/42)
if you say it rained today, that's a fucking fact, right? But Trump will say, now this is what Trump will say, well you're just saying that because you want us to fail. If Hillary was president, you wouldn't say it's raining. Yes, we would because it's fucking raining today. You would. It's fake rain Larry. Yes, it's fake rain. I was outside and I felt it. That was fake rain. But you know, if I could just add baby gerbils there that you had on the TV screen. I've seen these guys. I was in Baghdad at the Republican palace when they had 25 and 26 year old kids, interns. I remember walking into the office of the Iraqi banking sector and these kids were running $20 billion of cash and gold. And they were just interns because they were family members and friends of the Bush administration. We're going to see a lot more of that. And then they worship Orange Julius Caesar like he's the second coming. That's the most bizarre statement I've ever heard. And it's true. And I was at that palace. I (30/42)
went to Iraq and not wearing a uniform but went many times. I didn't see any 26 year olds carrying around billions of dollars in cash. I saw stacks of it but that was... They weren't touching it. No, we did it. That was a lot of street cash. No, it was a bunch of kids. No, the Iraqi government treasure was run by a couple of these. Are you talking about a drug deal? Stacks of cash. But we had to have street money. But my dad, Malcolm knows that. I found out something very interesting this week. The Ways and Means Committee in Congress has the power to look at Donald Trump's tax returns. Which would be very helpful at this moment when we're trying to get to the bottom of the biggest scandal ever. But they won't do it. The Republicans in Congress are the cover up. They are enablers. Where are the patriots? I mean, I know Donald Trump is not a patriot. Trump is not a patriot. Because a true patriot would say to Russia, look, even though you're helping me, that's not the way we win (31/42)
elections here. But that's not him. That's not who he is. But where is, like John McCain. Please, John McCain. I've seen John McCain be a guy I loved. A real patriot. And I've seen him be a party hack. John, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Seriously. I need those people to step forward and put country above party. You are always one of the sane ones, Jack. We're going to make America great again and you're going to be so happy when it happens. As a friend, get off the Trump train. As a friend, it is not, do you really think it's going to turn out well? Did you see the press conference? I think it's going to turn out well. Did you see the press conference? I thought it was great. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you love Donald Trump, you love the press conference. And if you hate Donald Trump, you didn't like it. That's just the way it goes. It was an attack on the media and then today he tweeted, the fake news media failing New York Times, NBC News. I noticed he said, NBC News. He (32/42)
leaves out the entertainment division because he's not getting a check. ABC, CBS, CNN is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people. Okay, this is what they say in Zimbabwe about the media. The enemy of the people. Do you think that is appropriate to say the media, which is in the Constitution, by the way. The press is in the Constitution as the enemy of the media. You dare to say Obama was divisive? It's a libertarian's first move. Exactly. I think you're overthinking it. I really do. Overthinking it? I really do. If you look at that press conference yesterday, he was taunting the media. He was in his element. He was having fun with it. His element as president of the United States. And it won. Not a run. And it won. Lenin himself used that phrase in 1917. What's that? That he attacks the press as an enemy of the people. This comes straight from the Vladimir Putin playbook. Oh, good God. Every dictator. Yeah, of course. But Masha Gessen recently just wrote an article called, (33/42)
Autocracy, a Survival Guide, where she said the first year of Putin's reign, he spent one year dismantling the press through legal precedents, through lawsuits, and he carved them back into the Pravda-like organization they are. That's what they're doing with Fox News. And they're deliberately eroding all other press. He also called the people his enemies in another tweet. He said, congratulations to my enemies. Remember that? It was New Year's or something. It's like he's going to Melbourne, Florida, to get in his rally this weekend. He won the election. I don't think anybody told him that. But he's still having a campaign rally. And those people who come to the rally, in his view, that's America. But that's 39% of America. 60% of America, we're the enemies. Can you govern when 60% of the country is considered the enemy? I don't think you can. I didn't follow your math on how you got there. Well, he's got about a 40% approval rating. His fans. An interesting poll that came out today (34/42)
showed that 45% of the people trust him more than the media. 42% trust the media. 42% trust the media. 45% trust Trump. But the same poll said 55% of the people. Well, 45 versus 42%. But that doesn't mean they're right, Jack. That doesn't mean it's true. Who do you trust more? 42% of the people said the media. And 45% said Trump. 60% believe the Noah's Ark story is real. And speaking of religion, I must break away here. We have a very special guest. I've been wanting to have her on for a long time. She's an actress and the creator and host of A&E's Scientology and the Aftermath. Please welcome Leah Remini. Switching gears. Thank you for having me. You're so sweet. Let me try to calm down from the panel. Yes, take a moment. Do you need some water? No, I do. Screaming and arguing to be with someone who I admire greatly. Because I've been watching your show and I am telling you I am such an admirer of what you are doing. Thank you. I think when the history of Scientology is finally (35/42)
written, it's going to show that fate chose you. Thank you. To come in like in Act 5. Right. You're like Reagan with tear down that wall. Thank you. And we had Going Clear, that documentary on our network. Yes. It was awesome and it started to break the wall down. Exactly. But I feel like what you are doing is putting a human face on the people who suffer from this awful cult. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And you're right. It's about families, right? It's about families but it's about the damage that it does to people as individuals. I mean we're all still kind of managing who we are from being in a cult. It's not an easy thing. But you were a child. I was a child and most people are who get in. Right. Because it really was a religion, I use that loosely, of its time. Right. So I think they're going to be hard pressed to find new members. However, I felt a responsibility because as somebody who was a Scientologist for over 35 years, what they disseminate was that we were (36/42)
responsible for mankind. And helping. Yes. And you thought you were helping. We thought we were helping and that's why it's hard to come out. I'm in a tough position because on one hand I'm attacking this cult and at the same time I know that the people who we're still in are under the spell of doing good for the world because that's what the organization is doing. That's another great thing that came out in your show that really explained a lot to me about how otherwise intelligent people who I knew, some of them, could be in this cult. I mean I would say any religion, but especially this one. And you really put this out there that what it is is you're audited. They're always questioning you. What did you do? What did you see? So it just doesn't pay to look on the internet because you know you're going to have to answer that question in an audit. So you just don't look. So you just don't know. Somebody told me the first time you found out something about Scientology was when you saw (37/42)
my movie, Religulous. Exactly. Well first of all I wasn't allowed, Scientologists are not allowed to look at things like this. We're not allowed to look or listen to people who are critics of Scientology. So I watched it because I was a troublemaker apparently, always. And I watched it. Now I wasn't at the level that you were, what you were revealing in your documentary. I wasn't even at that level yet. So you seemed a little crazy to me because I didn't know what you were saying was true. So I was like, that shit's crazy. Right? But then as you get to the upper levels, and now I want you to know that it's confidential. So a lot of people don't even reach this confidential level in Scientology. And you were like, Bill Maher's got the real shit. Right, right. Although you were technically correct in the way you said it. And I should tell you, and this is just a, I want to say this to the press and people who talk about Scientology. Is you should always talk to somebody who was in, (38/42)
because if you don't get the nomenclature 100% correct, we have a way of just kind of discrediting you from the, if you're not using it correctly. So you didn't say exactly, but you were on the right track. Okay? But you don't know this until $300,000 later and then you're really immersed into it. That's another great thing I learned from your show. You said, it always sticks with me. You said when you go to a Scientology event and you look in the parking lot, every one of the cars is a cheap shitty old car because Scientology sucks all the money out of all of this. Correct. My mother's laughing because she's in the audience and she's the only one in a nice car because I bought it for her. But that is, I mean, it reminded me a lot of communism. Because like communism, first of all, you're poor, they take all your money. And also the snitching on each other. Everybody's watching each other. I mean, again, this is the great thing about your show. It showed this disconnecting. That (39/42)
people, that they ask you to disconnect from your own family. It's families against each other. Yes, they don't ask you. It's a requirement. And they, the church thinks they have outsmarted the press because it is incorrect to say that across all boards, you have to disconnect from anyone who talks about Scientology. The truth of the matter is the policies, because everything is run by policy in Scientology, there's no room for assimilation. There's no, what did you think? What did you get from that? You know, it's what the fuck does it say? And if you don't understand it, you know, do a clay demo of it. And you get checked out on policies. Like what does the word and mean? And you need to know 25 definitions of the word and and its derivations. So, yes. So it's almost, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, (40/42)
it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is (41/42)
is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is (42/42)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. As always with Donald Trump, there's just too much news to get to. I mean this administration happens in like dog ears, you know I mean, there's so much fucking crazy. It's like three weeks of Trump is like five years of Nixon But you know what? This was a good week for the resistance This was a good week for checks and balances, a good week for maybe surviving President Man Baby Because the federal appeals court unanimously ruled against his Muslim ban Which means refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia are once again free to come here and be uber drivers How about that? Turns out a law isn't just something Steve Bannon writes on a napkin And Donald Trump signs while making his smart face So Trump is now lost twice in court We found out this week his closest advisor Kellyanne Conway and his national security advisor Mike Flynn are being investigated for ethical misconduct They (1/42)
told Donald Trump today that his wall, his beautiful wall, is gonna cost twice as much that he thought It's almost like he's losing so much. He's tired of losing. Is that? And you know, this is a guy who takes losing well, doesn't he? Yeah, when the ruling came down from the court he was like, I'll see you in court. See you in court They're judges. Of course you're going to see them in court It's like saying, hey Chris Christie, I'll see you at the Cheesecake Factory There's so much, you know, how about this one? Sean Spicer his Press secretary will not confirm or deny that he is considering Sarah Palin to be ambassador of Canada He said it'll take her a while to learn the language, but we think It's gonna go smoothly after that. I mean other countries are Literally rolling their eyes I mean that literally. Trump met today with the Japanese Prime Minister and he held his hand for a handshake for 18 seconds until, yeah, look There we go That says it all. Back and to the right. Back and (2/42)
to the right. I mean, what do we tell other countries? America's under new management It's like you ever pull into a Holiday Inn and a rainstorm and you think it's a Holiday Inn But no, now it's a have a stay in And there are hookers in the lobby and Crime scene tape and black mold and the remote smells like lube. That's American now But you'll be glad to know that the president finally got down to the issue that's really plaguing America Which retailers are carrying Ivanka's clothing line? Now if you didn't know about this Donald Trump's daughter wife Ivanka She had a Clothing line which was dropped by department stores including Nordstrom. Of course Trump went apeshit on Twitter about this You know what of all the people mr. Businessman She he should understand they dropped it because the merchandise just wasn't moving The only one interested in getting into Ivanka's pants is him And then of course he had poor Sean Spicer go up there and say this is a direct attack on the president's (3/42)
Policies and his family and it's not acceptable. Okay, first of all, it's not an attack on his policies And if it was so what is a free country don't work for Donald Trump. We have to buy his kids Girl Scout cookies And then Kellyanne Conway he goes on Fox News and says go buy Ivanka stuff go buy it everybody Well, first of all the jokes on you Ivanka doesn't make Fox viewers a size triple X but also, this is Patently illegal for a federal employee to so go buy a product from I mean now liberals are chanting lock her up Lock her up and You know Trump voters, of course now are boycotting Nordstrom All of Trump friends are lining up behind him for this Vladimir Putin said today. He's gonna buy all his poison at Macy's But you know, I mean in his Nordstrom tweet it happened during the intelligence briefing we know this He's getting the intelligence briefing and he's tweeting about this. That's the president We have now ladies and gentlemen enough about the Middle East. What's the latest (4/42)
on women's ready-to-wear? Mr. President if North Korea gets a hold of that plutonium. Shut up. I'm writing a Yelp review But here's the thing that pissed me off the most this week Did you see this Mitch McConnell told Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up, right? Okay, he said she was warned she persisted Yeah, that's a meme now And then he pulled some ancient congressional rule out of his turtle ass That said you can't accuse another senator of conduct unbecoming his senator, but that's not what Elizabeth Warren was doing She just read a letter from Coretta Scott King. That was super pertinent to the case She was making against confirming Jeff Sessions. This is supposed to be the world's most Deliverative body but Mitch McConnell needs a safe space With a speech code so your microaggressions doesn't trigger his hurt feelings whiny little bitches Nothing is changed Bitches And Donald Trump's Nordstrom tweet. He said my daughter Ivanka's been treated so unfairly. She's a great person (5/42)
She's always pushing me to do the right thing Hey Ivanka push harder Show we got piers morgan john waters and kareem john pierre and a little later speaking with the very funny. Mr Jim Jeffries, but first up he is the junior senator from Minnesota who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee We love the Honorable Al Franken over here Hi bill, you said it all those years ago, but it's going to turn out to be the Al Franken decade It's the Al Franken millennium Okay All right, so Al, you know, I've talked to you personally about how you know Yeah, I'm a great admirer because you do things that the rest of us wouldn't do like have lunch with Republican senators So, you know what they're saying behind closed doors They must be they must be kind of going batshit over this Donald Trump administration To give us a little insight into what's happening behind the scenes Well, there's a range And what they'll say and some will Say that he's not right mentally And then some are harsher That was a (6/42)
cheap that was cheap Cheap that was cheap. There are some who I guess don't talk to me and You know, I haven't heard a lot of good things and I've heard some great concern About about the president's temperament. Okay. Well, that's very diplomatic of you Not very what I don't think this was diplomatic, but okay. I'll take it. I'll take it. I saw this today 51% of Trump voters Think Trump should personally be able to overturn decisions By judges, I know you and I are both people who believe in civics because we're old enough to remember when they taught civics in School, I remember when you used to be I've seen you do this on TV draw a map of the United States From that's geography Civics No, okay, I'm with you I'm with you why you're in the Senate on my HBO No, well what's interesting about that I saw that I think it came out last night or something and and this is apropos the decision by the Ninth Circuit That That didn't surprise me that 52 or 51 percent of Trump voters. What was (7/42)
heartening was that It was only about 25 percent of Americans so that means that It was only about five or ten percent of Americans Didn't understand civics or didn't understand the that that a federal the federal judiciary is independent Okay, I mean it was frightening to me that anybody in America would basically be saying we should make this man of all people a dictator Because that's what this says I know but it says that 48 or 49 percent of Trump voters Understood understood this and that's good. That's good. I I really you know that I boy Washington has really made you an optimist al and I Appreciate that it's half full. Yeah. Yeah tactful. Okay, so alright, so I don't know what they're half full of but they're half full So You're gonna meet with the man that Donald Trump wants to put on the Supreme Court, right? Yes, you're on that committee. Okay. Yeah, I'm hoping you're gonna say to him your name is not Merrick Garland So I can't vote for you. I Was asked by the White House (8/42)
Council who because I'm on the Judiciary Committee who I would like to see a point and I did say Merrick Garland and Or someone like Merrick Garland who's a consensus guy but my feeling we're gonna have hearings You know, I think this guy I don't want another 5-4 Conservative activist judiciary that is that votes to Citizens United and that so I This guy's gonna have to overcome a huge bar for me, okay, but isn't it not about the qualifications But about the fact that that pick was stolen yes, and You know, I mean I agree with you But what is what are we going to do about the Democrats cannot let that stand? we cannot have two rules one for Republicans and one for Democrats and I Hear everybody applauding but just why before just stop applauding for a second they they have the majority and We can't stop them from having hearings. And so we're going to have hearings now what I'm saying is is that the Roberts court has been a pro Activist pro corporate pro pollution pro big money in in (9/42)
in campaigns and in elections and I'm not gonna Okay another 5-4 Roberts court, okay So Time magazine came out for impeaching Donald Trump Number and cover I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton was president they would already have begun impeachment and hearings It doesn't matter about what they just would have done it Time says the emoluments clause which basically and obviously the Trump family is in violation of this You cannot take gifts from foreign countries. They're doing it all the time To say nothing of the mental problem Now when will the impeachment hearings start Let me remind you again that the Republicans are in the majority So I think it'll be it's months and months away I know every I know everybody wants a quick fix on this But this is going to be a bit of a marathon, but I'm so encouraged. You're right That what what this week has been incredibly encouraging and the energy around the country We're seeing red Districts where people are showing up at the town halls (10/42)
hundreds of people are showing up at the town halls There's a tremendous amount of energy and I want to encourage people to To keep that up right and it really helps and we got Thousand hundreds of thousands of calls about Betsy DeVos at the Senate and that makes a difference Because she is on notice now and She's not going to be able to do a lot of the things that I think she wanted to do because of that like walk Oh, what you people do makes a huge difference She couldn't even do that today It would have been the first time. Okay, so Donald Trump first time in a public school. Yes, she could she there were protesters wouldn't let her walk into the school Yeah, and it would have been the first time I got the joke now So I was the audience is laughing. All right last question now, then I'll let you go. I appreciate your time Okay Politico says that there was a meeting yesterday and Donald Trump with ten senators six of whom were Democrats and Donald Trump said to Kelly Ayotte who was (11/42)
the senator Republican senator from New Hampshire who lost narrowly as he did in message in New Hampshire Donald Trump said in this meeting thousands of people Were brought in on buses from neighboring Massachusetts to illegally vote in New Hampshire so once again, the president is seeing multitudes that no one else sees and It said there was an awkward silence an awkward silence and there were six Democratic senators in the room I was hope that you if you were one of those senators You wouldn't have just been awkwardly silent and you would have said no, excuse me. Mr. President that didn't happen. I Would have said something like that you would have I would have said oh, come on What? You got to stop doing this. Mr. President, right, you know, just stop it. I mean the three to five million illegal people didn't show up and and And vote for Hill all of them for Hillary and it didn't happen and just stop doing that It is It's very disturbing and I asked Jeff Sessions about this in the (12/42)
judiciary hearings and I said did you know you The Attorney General is the one in charge of the laws in this country including election laws Did you kind of discuss this with him? You know, you know, are are you concerned about this and this is very very very Disturbing that the president has a habit of Either imagining things or making stuff up. That's not we it's really outside the norm Not just of presidents but of human being All right, you were great at the hearings we love you for it senator Al Franken everybody Our panel, okay. Oh look the applause died soon All right, let's meet the panel he is a filmmaker a filmmaker please an auteur a maestro a Trailblazer, I'll fire whoever wrote that Thank and one of my first gay friends An author whose annual Valentine's Day comedy tour will hit Seattle this coming Monday John Waters is over She is a senior adviser and national spokesman for move on dot dot org Corrine John Pierre great to see He's the US editor-at-large for daily (13/42)
mail.com. We used to see him on CNN. I was on there all the time I even hosted it once here's Morgan is over here So we can answer them after the show on YouTube So as I said, it was a pretty good day for those of us who think we're in the resistance You know, they said that old cliche the Constitution was created by geniuses So that idiots could run it and we're giving that a good test aren't we? The judicial branch really did check the executive branch and that's what we want to happen The lesson I think here is that it is personal People think they're so high-minded He insulted judges When he said that thing about the just so-called judge and if something happens blame him I think every judge in the country was like, you know what? There are other people than you Donald Trump who have an ego He's insulted so many people. He's insulted the CIA and heads of corporations and senators and now the judiciary I just don't think you can insult people like this for that long and ever have (14/42)
any sort of success doing anything What about what we've just heard though. We just had a senator say he's mentally ill right is an idiot I mean, it's the two-way street, isn't it? No, I wouldn't have personally voted for Donald Trump He's not my politics and I'm not even American so I couldn't vote for me I wanted to but you know I didn't think anything could match the hysteria that I've seen in Britain since we left Europe and I voted to stay in but this Hysteria about these racist sexist neanderthals who've seized control of our country And now I come to Los Angeles where if you don't say that Trump's the new Hitler you get tarred Feathered and dragged to Santa Monica Pier and you get drowned I just think it's time. Everybody took a massive gigantic chill pill, but he is He's a president of the United States he won a free Democratic election You don't think kings can be mentally ill we King George the third had a few problems and if he hadn't if he hadn't we Might still be ruling (15/42)
America He takes it personally and you know says terrorists about everything and and to me I can understand in some way Like I sometimes wonder moderate Muslims aren't they against all gay people? But still I don't say they can't come in as a Catholics have been terrorizing me for decades But that's an interesting point of view I have not heard before you know And I think you know you're on the page with a lot of Republicans because I think what they can do is separate the crazy You may call it. Oh not mentally ill but it is crazy There is crazy out there and they think well, you know We can put that in the box over here and just use him for policy But I don't think that works because eventually the crazy is going to sabotage the policy Even if the policy was good Yeah, I just wanted to say to to Pierce's point I think the thing to understand is that if you are not white male straight you are you fear a Donald Trump's presidency because there is no place for you and a And I think (16/42)
that's the thing that you're missing and if you look at the 18 months of what Donald Trump did and what he said He ran the most anti-immigration Campaign that we have ever seen he talked about Mexicans calling them Rapists and criminals he talked about Muslim bands and it is it is it is fearful for me He's also he was also the first Republican president to stand there on Inauguration Day and actually talk about the lesbian and gay community of America now, I'm not expecting But he did say it and he got absolutely Zero even acknowledgement for saying okay, so I say look if you want to terrorize him and demonize him fine But it has to be fair to be effective and all this squealing and howling The president of the United States. He needs to put his big boy pants on Let me just show you first let me just show you something he said this week show the taper I was a good student. I think it starts with these reacting to the most to your point about whether he is mentally ill or not. I (17/42)
Understand things I comprehend very well Okay Better than I think almost anybody Mentally ill but it reminded me of this movie Other presidents have lost in court before Here's how a former president Who was so much more mature than the president we have now who we so wish we had back Handled it when he lost in court First of all, the Supreme Court decision will abide by the court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it I thought you're gonna do Nixon. That's right. Okay, but isn't that something we're at a place where we're missing George Bush? Yeah I mean Barbara It bothers me that you're trying to make the case that this is somehow normal. This is not normal We're not wrong to be saying that we worked are trying to cling to some sort of normalization Okay, but let me throw you back at George Bush there because people say Trump's a monster, right? He's the new Hitler and so on George W Was the one that took this country and my country into an illegal unethical immoral (18/42)
war in Iraq which killed a million people a thousands of troops let me finish my point and Killed a million people. Yeah, and thousands of troops, right? That is a monstrous act It was taken as revenge against a country that had nothing to do with 9-eleven That is the act Trump's been there three weeks right time. My point is You're talking about making him see where this is going when somebody says I'm the smartest person ever in the history of the world My point is you have to save the outrage for genuinely outrageous things We all get fed up with the outrage, but we're comparing him to Hitler, but I'm sick of talking about Trump everywhere you go That's all people talk about but I'm sure that the you know The gypsies and the homosexuals are tired of talking about Hitler, too When you notice I didn't mention the Jews because he didn't either when he talked about the Holocaust You know, it's tempting to say he puts out so much crazy shit every week We're just gonna throw up our hands (19/42)
and ignore it. No, I'm not there yet put up the list We made a list of the crazy and the lies. This is just from one week. Here's the crazy list. Okay crazy number one So-called judge he called a judge a so-called judge Keep going let's hear the list if something happens blame him blame the court. That's insane See you in court. He said to them You think our country is so innocent. That's what he said to Bill O'Reilly. What's crazy about that? Well when I said it they fucking threw me off ABC Okay, you're right you think America's in it seriously About the Iraq war you think that's innocent. No, but I just think that America has done bad things It was in response to a question and when Bill O'Reilly said Putin's a killer and he said yeah A lot of people are killers. You think we're so innocent. I don't think America is innocent Britain's not innocent This is something Neum Chomsky says yeah, it just shows that the Republican good or bad So it just shows the Republican Party has no (20/42)
principles. No principles. It's just about who wins What as opposed to the Democrats who are currently behaving in exactly the histrionic way that they warned us Trump and his supporters would behave When they lost this goes back Back to what Bill was saying. This is not business as usual We have we have someone who is disrespecting the people of this country You know what you're so British The Trump voters are confusing usual with normal. Yes, it's good to like upset business as usual But it's not normal when the CIA says we can't tell the president's secrets Because we don't know if he will share them with Russia that is time to panic Let me connect how the lies, you know, you say that this is what the Republicans want to do They just want to put that in a box the crazy the lies. I'm a Republican Well, you sure sound like I'm not a Republican I wouldn't have voted for him I'm not a Republican I'm actually I watch your show every week. I agree with almost everything you ever say, (21/42)
right? That's not my point My point is the hysteria is not gonna get the Democrats back into power. It's gonna have the opposite It will empower Trump Marching every time No We won the court order last night it is working it is working if it wasn't for what Democrats were doing this week We would have never heard of Betsy DeVos. We never finished a list of lies. Let's do our list of lies He said this week the murder rate is highest. It's been it's actually the lowest it's been Yeah, okay, then he said the media doesn't report terrorism Then he said any negative polls are fake news this is in one week Then he said the cabinet longest cabinet delay in history factually just wrong. He's that thing. I just told Al Franken about Bussing illegal people. These are all just out and out lies and here's the thing you could say. Oh, they're just crazy lies Does it matter? Here's the connection Jeff Sessions our new attorney general said about crime I wish the rise that we're seeing in crime was (22/42)
some sort of aberration or blip which it exactly is Show the chart. There's a chart that we see of crime. Okay? But Jeff Sessions says no my best judgment is this is a dangerous permanent trend Wait a second Sean Spicer saying the Yemen raid which was a giant dismal failure We didn't get the guy we were going after who's now gloating and talking about the fool in the White House We killed children and women they knew we were coming. It was not a success, but he's saying Because Trump says it's a success. We all why have you left out the fact that they killed 12 Al Qaeda operatives Is that not significant? They killed 12 Al Qaeda. I did. Yeah, why have you left that out? Probably because they were eight years old because it sounds better to say they just But what the best not true and my point about the crime figures is what the crime figures true Is that the crime figures in 2015 rose by the highest spike since 71 the figures for? 2016 are likely for serious murder and gun-ready crime (23/42)
also like it arrives by similar amount I think everyone should be worried about the massive spike in crime Look at the chart Charred up doesn't walk Look where it was. Look where it is. Look at the little T50 yes, I spiking crime serious crime in this look 71 Where it was look where it is the last two years for fuck's sake Yeah, can I just put in one one thing that basically I live in Baltimore the gun violence is terrible One is too much every family that had their kid killed they don't care if it went up or down Can I give one advice to the guy the new Attorney General hire more gay cops Lavender blue can make black lives even better. Here's what? What the White House and the Attorney General is trying to do it they're trying to stoke fears in to the American Fear is what they're trying to do What he wants to do is he wants to make sure that they put policies forth That's going to hurt the black community and the Latino community. That is what's happening You know, we were talking on (24/42)
the show last week that everything is politicized now and that includes Valentine's Day You know marriages have broken up because of being a Trump being elected wives just wouldn't stand it They told their husband they said you know what if you vote for this asshole I will personally take it and I will might leave you and husbands dug in and now they hate each other So here are the cards for them And you know car, you know Here's the ones from the conservative husband to my liberal wife treat my penis like your election day loss Put it behind you Wow our lifetime together hasn't changed you at all your ass isn't big it's alternative small You're the love of my life there's no refuting I love you more than Trump loves Putin, okay All right, and here's the opposite when these are one from the liberal wife To their conservative husband having kids with the Trump voter made me so sad until I remembered you're not really their dad I Roses are red violets are blue. I'm fucking the gardener (25/42)
to get back at you He may be rich but your president's stupid and both of you him and you are hung just like you I Must be or a Syrian refugee of love because you never let me come You've got a heart like a lion and a dick like a cannon but your ideas repulse me go fuck Steve Bannon He's the Australian community Minneapolis on February 24th Jim Jeffries Okay, how you doing I wanted to have you here because I thought last week we were going to be in a war with Australia I'm happy to be here before the Australian travel ban comes in actually I wanted to have a friend on that side of the world. What are they saying about that in Australia? Well, they're actually happy Because two weeks ago you didn't know who Malcolm Turnbull was No one in America knew who the Prime Minister of Australia was right now it's like a big deal It's like he's approval rings through the roof because he told Trump to fuck off. Is that right? Yeah Yeah, they love him now like because this is like the Mexican like (26/42)
like he said like America's not innocent Britain's not innocent, but Australia is fucking innocent Like Like today so not to its own people right the Well, yeah, that was that was when there were British people killing him. We became Australians a lot later But it's it's it's weird because there's only one country that has been an ally of America since the Second World War who's been in every war with America since the Second World War and that's Australia, right? Because other countries are dipped out like Britain did not go to Vietnam Australia went to Vietnam Right France did not go to the war in Iraq. Although I feel they might go to the next one and But Australia has always been there. There's one other country New Zealand Australians love Americans. We've always heard that and and and the proof is that most of our actors you don't know I love Americans. I mean you live here. Why why did let me ask you that? Why did you choose? I mean you it's not like you came from some third (27/42)
world. Hellhole. You came from Australia Why do you want to live in America? I love America I have my son's American and plus I can make a lot of money out here in comparison to Australia my actually got that order wrong My son that I love America no, I like America is a great place man. And let me ask you I know you talk about religion You're not for it as I am not and I've been having atheists on my shows for 23 years Even before people knew what atheists were almost it shouldn't really be a word for it. That's what I find weird There shouldn't be a word for believing in nothing, right? You're right It shouldn't be a thing I I hate people who are really adamant atheists who try to convert people at parties and stuff like that I think one I think one of the privileges of being an atheist is you don't have to do anything on Sunday Right and a lot of people feel that way I mean, you know, it's very surprising when you ask an audience, huh? Let's see how many are atheists agnostic or (28/42)
none just write none America didn't used to be that way. Well, I don't I like a this but I'm not a big fan of agnostics Just what is that fucking side? Like if you're an agnostic you're not getting into heaven there's no way you're getting into heaven going. Ah good you here You know what I mean like Like at least I'm committed right to the bitter end. I feel like just don't hedge your bets pick a fucking side. Okay? So, um, you have a rant about guns, which is went crazy viral. Yeah Especially the liberal folks love and I know you have this feeling that anyone who has a gun Just loves their gun, but you know, there are people in America who have a gun who don't love their gun. Well, I Assured one I assume they like their gun. They wouldn't have it if I don't like my antibiotics, but I Case I need them I but you love the result But that's different you love the result well the thing is if I had a gun I'd probably kill myself So I wouldn't love the result. That's why I feel like these (29/42)
people at times sure because most gun deaths are suicides Of course, yeah, yeah, whether it be yourself or you get a cop to shoot you or what have you I look I I'm Yeah It's very easy to do it in America, yeah little blackface No, I look What what I think about a joke in support of what you actually believe It's very simple, right? So in Australia there hasn't been the Mass shootings since the Port Arthur attack and that's when we again that when we banned guns So that makes sense that it hasn't happened since then. Maybe it could be a coincidence But America can't do that you had that well you had the same amount of police shootings and Fatalities in the first month of January than Australia's had in the first last 25 years. Oh, yeah, where'd the gun country? Yeah, and so people can say black lives matter and all this type of stuff But it really comes down to it is racism in some parts, but it also has to do that Everybody has a gun, but I always think that someone's gonna be shooting (30/42)
Yeah If you think someone's gonna shoot you you're gonna shoot so a little racist to say that Everyone who has a gun loves a gun because there are people who live in poorer neighborhoods than you do who really need a gun Well, I when you live in a shitty neighborhood where the cops don't show up. I'm new money bill I didn't always live in rich neighborhoods and I never had a gun. Why is it? Why is it on guns because I had a big thing about gun control at CNM when I was there Went down like a lead balloon. Yeah It's why I Know love with the commonwealth The Australians the Australians were British convicts. We know the back That's right. But the point I make was this it seems to me on the guns thing. There is a massive inconsistency nay hypocrisy between the president's stance about dangerous people coming into this country needing extreme betting and at the same time there is the Absolute opposite when it comes to checking who is buying guns in this country. I agree Why? Why would it (31/42)
not just be absolutely consistent with extreme betting to prevent violence to just bring in universal? background checks on every gun purchase in America to make sure the people buying them aren't criminals or mentally insane people and yet it's not happening and 32,000 people a year die of gun violence in America another 70,000 get hit by gunfire to put it in perspective Britain, which is one-fifth of the size of the United States We have 32 gun deaths a year Yeah, you have 85 people dying from guns a day in this country know about this group called gag Two guys which is here which is called gag which is gays against gun you people Republicans think it's fellatio on firearms I Just wondered if you knew about that's a good group right gag. They're here. I've I've gotten different things up. Yeah, I could bet yeah, okay Can I ask about a real issue because we you know It's important to talk about Donald Trump and it's also important to talk not about Donald Trump Not that he doesn't (32/42)
affect everything because I'm talking about Obamacare now But this is a real issue that affects a lot of people's lives and it's interesting that the Republicans are really pulling back on this Now because of course they never had an alternative plan and now people are showing up at the town halls Screaming at them because we have our own Tea Party now, which is awesome What could Trump care be if you think about it? It does when you get an operation the the doctor brands his name on your organ Free facelift It's easy to make fun of his hair, but if you notice recently it's different He has like a ducktail now a juvenile delinquent. It looks like Johnny Depp and crybaby hooked up with Bob's big boy It's really impeachable But it came out that 35% of Americans said that they thought Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act Were two different things You know They do have two different names But I'll give I'll give the Republicans just one credit which is they've been able to do something (33/42)
that Democrats and President Obama was not able to do which is sell the importance of ACA and Obamacare and now you have Republicans as you were mentioning running away from their town halls because they can't They can't explain why they are going to repeal Obamacare without a replacement And they are very much the dog that caught the car and for six years. They never did anything They didn't work with the Democrats. They just decided we're going to repeal repeal repeal with nothing to Follow that up with and now they're realizing rhetoric is not policy and they cannot govern but but the truth about Obamacare That is true and I come from a country where universal health care is for all so we you know I totally applaud the idea of Obamacare the problem with it was the implementation Has led to people having Do it right the problem was and always will be that we still had to cut in private industry Yeah, the profit motive you cannot have life and death pitted against the profit motive (34/42)
This would be a great time for the Democrats. It wouldn't pass but people would like it to introduce single-payer. Why do people? Why do people Have great misgivings about Obamacare, but love Medicare because Medicare is simple Yeah, it's simple Medicaid Social Security simple you get a check Okay, Obamacare just too complicated people don't like complicated and it will always be complicated as long as we have expensive, right? We can be unaffordable care rice for many people. So it hasn't been without flaws, right? We all know it hasn't been without flaws. What I'm saying is Republicans refuse to work with Democrats for six years That is the fact. Well, I don't see many Democrats working with Republicans That's because Republicans haven't offered anything they just said we'll repeat repeal so what is it show us what's the rip? It would be great to Washington would now come together for the sake of the health of the American people, wouldn't it? That would be a great thing There are (35/42)
clearly parts of Obamacare which work very well there are parts of it that don't work well and it's become Unaffordable for many Americans again, you know, you've got to get in there with the Democrats and you gotta work it out Where you stop and do that stop the gouging I mean it was in the news this week remember the EpiPen It went up from I don't know what to some 10 times as much that's gouging They just did it with the there's you know, people who have opioid addiction Yeah, and they need it basically in their EpiPen for junkies That went up from like several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars that cannot stand Yeah, and this could I ask this one last question? The people who said during the campaign that Hillary Clinton was the lesser of two evils Could we get the apology right now? Why As if are you serious? Like Hillary Clinton would have a cabinet with Betsy DeVos and and fucking Rick Perry They wouldn't have a Muslim band they wouldn't be Doing this shit with Russia. (36/42)
Are you crazy? There is no Muslim ban if there was The hysteria I'm talking about 85% You say he hasn't done this he hasn't done that he's not gonna do all these things give him a fucking chance mate I know he didn't kill the Jews on the first day. He worked up to it That is the exact ridiculous hysterical nonsense You just like you just like that you won the apprentice and you have a famous friend mate, that's all you fucking like Losing your audience Sounding unpleasant This might be The worst thing that could happen and you all haven't even considered this just suppose just suppose That Donald Trump and these horrible white men and the one black man. That's even worse Ben Carlson That they made everything better. Wouldn't that be awful? New rule New rule before you get on your high horse and start criticizing this man's decision to support Donald Trump Show me one other time when he made a bad choice New rule the international symbol for choking must be changed from this to this New (37/42)
rule you can buy these lollipops to celebrate the brand-new Chinese year of the rooster, but you have to call them what they are Cocksuckers New rule Sean Spicer has to stop sounding like he's using the white guy voice that black comedians use When they make fun of how white people talk No one had numbers because the National Park Service which controls the National Mall does not put any out. I Don't even think that Sean Spicer. I think that's Dave Chappelle in white face New rule now that we've all seen this picture of the Yes, it's real of a young Donald Trump in his bathrobe Lying across pink pillowcases with a come hither. Look he has to answer this question. How was he? Neuro, someone has to tell the owners of this Chinese food restaurant how much we appreciate their honesty You didn't You didn't promise the world and we weren't expecting it We're in a strip mall at 2 in the morning. We're high does the beef in your beef and broccoli contain any beef at all? Yes, then in the words (38/42)
of President Trump we want deal And finally new rule with Valentine's Day coming up. Everyone must take a minute and remember their first love I sure remember mine. I went off to college at 18 and I fell hard Not for a girl that would have been my first choice But I was a slow developer socially, you know those letters that college guys send to penthouse magazine that begin I never thought this would happen to me. Yeah. Well that never happened to me But I did fall I did fall in love with books and ideas and Knowledge and also my hand that's true But there is no doubt that it is a truly a kind of love affair when you go off to a place where you have intellectual epiphanies because learning is so revered and the celebrities are the smartest people I Might have been able to get a blowjob in college, but I got my mind blown on a regular basis But you know that was another country One of the saddest things about the one we live in now is we don't seem to want smart people in our lives (39/42)
anymore Smart presidents can't have that Scientists, what do they know? newspaper editors liars fake news You know people used to get their news from newspapers because professional newsrooms took separating fact from fiction seriously and Employed people who had studied how to do that But now people get their news on Facebook by sharing or as it used to be called hearsay Instead of all the news that's fit to print you click on a link from your cousin Jody who runs the tilted world Why waste money in a subscription to a newspaper when they would just blow it on war correspondence? Honor the Ben Bradleys of the world who brought a president to his knees way before Monica Lewinsky did A student in a social media focus group one said if the news is important. It will find me Except it doesn't and that's how we wound up with President Bannon and his dummy Donnie It's not surprising that it can't find you since on social media news competes with videos of Russian car crashes creepy clowns (40/42)
and a rabbi doing the mannequin challenge And you know how they say you can't make this shit up Turns out you can By Election Day last year the top fake news on Facebook was getting more shares clicks and comments than the real news Millions of people believed some straight-up bullshit that the Pope had endorsed Trump When in fact after Trump won what the Pope said was I'm praying for his enlightenment To which God said I've done a lot of miracles, but give me a fucking break We used to respect Scientists that's why every stoner in the 70s had a poster of Einstein on the wall Right next to the one of the naked black chick with the huge afro But now only 36% of Americans say they have a lot of trust that information from Scientists is reliable well 98% of scientists say humans evolved over the millennia But that view is shared by not nearly as many real Americans Trump supporters don't think species can change over time But they do think Trump used to be all about himself, but now he's (41/42)
working for us This Valentine's Day can we please fall in love with knowledge again? You know under President Obama the Secretary of Energy was first a Nobel Prize winner And then a nuclear physicist not that Trump's pick for the job doesn't have impressive credentials How did it happen we went from being led by the smartest person in the room To the biggest jackass on Twitter All right, that's our show The New Orleans March 18th at the Civic Center in Oklahoma City April 9th I want to thank John Waters, Kareem Jean-Pierre, Piers Morgan, Jim Jeffries, and Al Frank And join us now for overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO.com (42/42)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Start the clock. Good afternoon. After two, time will be... Thank you. I know it's a... I love you, too. You have Halloween fever. Who doesn't? It's Halloween weekend. We love it out here in Los Angeles. Halloween, when people get the cake on makeup and pretend they're something they're not, or... or as Trump calls it, campaigning. Yeah! I got a great costume this year. I'm gonna terrify Republicans. I'm going as a science book. I... But... I think it is rather appropriate that this election is so close to Halloween, because what happens in every scary movie? You think you killed the monster. You killed him ten times. And then a tiny orange hand comes out of the brain. Oh, yeah. Oh. Believe me. For Hillary, today was nightmare on E-mail Street. Did you see what happened today? Okay, the FBI, if you didn't do this, was all over the news today. Giant story. The FBI found some more Hillary e-mails. So (1/43)
they're reopening the investigation. Great, huh? Hillary's e-mails are like unreleased Tupac songs. Just when you think they have them all, they found a few more. And you'll never believe where they found these new ones. On Anthony Weiner's computer. I'm not making that up. On Anthony Weiner's compu... No one thought to look among the dick pics. That's where the e-mails are. Now, for those of you who are not political junkies, you might be asking, why? Why on Anthony Weiner's computer? Because Anthony Weiner is under investigation. That's right. Yeah, man, I don't bullshit here, okay? No high school dance. Yeah, Anthony Weiner's under investigation for sexting with a underage girl across straight... state lines. So the FBI seized all his computers. He is married, or was married, to Uma Amadeen. Uma Amadeen, who is Hillary Clinton's aide. And they were using the same computer, which begs my first question. Why was Uma using Anthony's computer if you... One thing she didn't want to go (2/43)
near, it would be his computer. So Hillary's e-mails are intermingled with Anthony Weiner's sexting? No wonder why she had her server wiped. I'd have it boiled. But, you know, this... this is the world we live in now. Hillary Clinton's aide's estranged husband is a freak, so we get to read Hillary Clinton's e-mails. I wish Hillary would send a text to Donald Trump. Maybe then we would see his taxes. And... And, you know, we don't know what is in these e-mails. Maybe nothing. James Comey, the director of the FBI, he's the one who made this announcement today. He said they appear pertinent, but, quote, I can't say that they're significant. Well, take your time, man. There's nothing riding on it. I mean, it's so ironic. Weiner's one excuse when he was just sexting was he never actually fucked anyone. Well, now he has. Planet Earth. You know... I... I don't know if Weiner's dick is big, but it certainly casts a long shadow, I'll say that. Wait a second. I do know his dick is big. We've all (3/43)
seen it a hundred times, but... But, of course, you know, Trump and Cruz and the whole gang on the right are all making hay out of this about its corruption and criminal conduct. Only Republicans could look at an investigation into sexually propositioning a minor and say, yeah, did you find anything really disgusting? Like mishandled e-mails, something that would really revolt people. So, once again, Hillary's political fortunes are driven by out-of-control cocks. Right? This poor woman. I mean, first it was her husband, then it was Donald Trump's, and now it's Anthony Weiner's, or what she calls the my-basket-of-deplorable-horn-dogs. So, you know what? I don't know what they're gonna find, and I don't care. She's got a server in her basement. I don't care if she's got John Benet Ramsey in her basement. I'm still not voting for Donald Trump. Here, Kristen Saldis Anderson and Rick Lazio and who I'll be speaking with. I'm so glad she's here. Good friend of mine, Chelsea Handler, is (4/43)
backstage. But first up, he is the founder of the Dream Corps and a CNN contributor. You all know Van Jones. How are you, pal? Great to see you. Yeah, man. All right. So, first of all, what is your reaction to today's news? Well, she's got four men in her life. Trump, who's a pervert. Clinton, who's got a racy past. You've got Weiner, whose name speaks for itself. And Barack Obama. And for once, the black guy is the one guy not in trouble. You don't have to be that black about it. You've made your point. But, I mean, honestly, I mean, so, even before this, the Republicans were saying that they're gonna obstruct her. Yep. Investigate her. I mean, I picture them doing it right away, like Inauguration Day. Like, she'll be testifying in a ball gown. That's their wish, you know. Yeah, listen, they have forgotten the difference between being a party of opposition and a party of obstruction. There's great honor in being a party of opposition, you know, saying, listen, we think your ideas are (5/43)
wrong, we can make them better. But when you just stop the entire government from functioning, there's a word for that. Treason. That's the word, it's treason. You have to do your job. You have to do your job, you take an oath, period. Well, I mean, and that gets us to the Supreme Court. I mean, they took an oath to at least give a hearing on a Supreme Court justice, and now I heard John McCain. John McCain, who's supposed to be one of the reasonable ones this week, say, whoever Hillary puts up, they're gonna block it. And I guess they're okay with, I mean, the Supreme Court is supposed to be nine, now it's eight. We could get down to, when they start dying, it could be four. It looks like they're never going to even allow a hearing on anybody, this is insane. I think they, listen, honestly, at a certain point, the Democrats just have to say, listen, guess what, especially if we get the Senate, guess what, if you guys don't wanna show up and do your jobs, we'll do it for you, we're (6/43)
gonna suspend all those rules, we are going to let the Supreme Court function, period. You can't have one branch of government stop two. That's called a tyranny of a branch. The reality is the President of the United States is supposed to appoint, those justices are supposed to serve, and if you're giving advice and consent, listen, you can waive that if you want to, but we're gonna go forward. Yeah, I mean, it is pretty amazing, when you think about it, how they can really take anybody. Now, I don't know what's in these emails. In the past emails, I'm always trying to find something that in one sentence I could say, well, she did that. You know, she's not completely clean, but you are someone who has some familiarity with this. I mean, you were in the, we forget that we know you because you were in the Obama administration, and you were sort of the first Gary Black man that they went after. I mean, you were head of the green jobs, I mean, they said you were a czar, Glenn Beck did like (7/43)
14 shows on you. 1400, I think. Fox News. So you know what it's like. Well, first of all, let me say two things. First of all, at that time, Glenn Beck was on TV every night and I wasn't, and now... You're proposing. And... Yeah, well, I mean... But second of all, the whole idea of me being a green jobs czar, part of it is that they did not want to have the conversation about climate. They did not want to have the conversation about... I do. Well, you do. And by the way, you're the only person who has consistently, given her, consistently been a climate champion on the national airway. I think we agree that's the most important issue. It is the most important. And there was not one question about it in any of the debate. Which I, listen, I think that's going to be, going to go down in history as a huge mistake and my network was a part of it, but I will say this. Part of it is people just don't understand how sexy the climate solutions are. Listen, this is not boring stuff. Here in (8/43)
California, nobody knows this, in California, we did three sexy things on climate. We have a cabin trade program here where we took money from the polluters and said, give it to us, that's sexy. Nyeh. Two. Two. We said we're going to use the money. You grabbed without asking. See? You see? Apparently that's all... You don't even ask. Apparently that's all it raised. You just put a chick-tack in your mouth. Exactly. Grab that money. See? Apparently. Okay. Number two, we took the money and we invested it and we've now got a billion dollars from polluters in California, put it in poor communities. Cheap and low-cost solar panels in the hood. Farm workers getting carpools. We've got bus passes for low-income people. So you can save the people and save the planet at the same time if you do the right thing with climate policy. The danger that you have is that now you've got places like Washington State, they want to take the money from polluters, give it to corporations. That's wrong. Take (9/43)
the money from polluters, give it to the people, build a big movement and stop climate change. That's the way forward. That's the way forward. Okay. Another thing we think alike about, I think, is, you know, comparison shopping with the candidates. I had Ann Coulter sitting in your chair here about two weeks ago. And it was pretty soon after Pussygate had broken in the news. And I said to her, look me in the eye, Ann, and tell me that if there was a tape they found of Barack Obama saying, hey, give me a tic-tac, because, you know what, when you're a community organizer, you don't even have to ask. They just let you do whatever you want, grab their pussies. And you put out a rant about if Trump was black. Same idea. And I think it's something people need to hear. But listen, first of all, I was just mad, and I just put the thing on, and I talked for 13 minutes. That thing got 11, 12 million views. But the reason is very simple. If Trump were black, you would call him a thug. That's what (10/43)
you would call him. Any African American going around bragging about sexual assault, every African American would have to come on the air and apologize for the failure of black men and the violence of black. This is, so, what you have here is a classic case. He came on the scene to get famous. He said these African American boys in Central Park were what, sexual assaulters. Then he said that the Mexicans coming into the country were rapists and sexual assaulters. It turns out it was the white dude who was a sexual assaulter the whole time. It was projection. Projection, yeah. And part of, I think, the reason people get so upset is a double standard. For instance, you've got these Native Americans who are out there fighting to stop that horrific pipeline. They're getting beat up, they're getting arrested. They are national heroes. At the same time, you've got 11 white dudes that go and get guns and take over a whole part of the federal government. The Oregon thing. Yes, in Oregon. And (11/43)
guess what? Beginning of the year, these guys, these militia types, Amen Bundy, Cliven Bundy was his father. They had a protest earlier. Yeah, they took over a wildlife refuge. With guns. With guns. Federal property. Acquitted today. They walk. They walk. They walk. Pookie. Pookie. Snoopy. Snoopy. Shanay-nay. Run-run. I mean, if they had been named that and not Bundy, they would be in prison for the rest of their lives. That's all I'm saying. Pookie, thank you for being here. You're a great guest. And I love to watch you on CNN. All right, Ben Jones, everybody. The next congressman, one of our favorites, actually, from New York, Rick Lazier rejoined us. Hey, Rick, how you doing? Good to be on. She is a Republican pollster and columnist for the Washington Examiner, also one of our favorite guests. Kristen Soltis Anderson is back with us. And you know this man, he won an Oscar, and his new film is Michael Moore in Trumpland. I highly recommend it. It's awesome. Michael Moore is right (12/43)
over there. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime. So we're going to answer them after the show on YouTube. Before I get to you guys, a couple of quick program notes. I have been calling Donald Trump a whiny little bitch. I have a well-trained audience, really, for about a year. Well, now it's a comedy special. You know, I'm going to do it on Facebook Live on November 2nd. I hope you're Facebook fans. You know, I go around the country all the time doing my stand-up back. I was like, I have an hour of awesome fucking Trump jokes, and it's just going to go to waste after the election. So I'm giving it to my Facebook fans. Also, next week, we have a special guest on our show. We've been trying to get him for quite a while, like eight years. We sent out a petition. You can't guess? That's right. Yes, we finally landed that big show. President Obama, there was just a standing ovation for getting you on the show. We haven't said anything yet, so OK. Now, about the (13/43)
week's news, this Friday, always a big day around here, Friday, because we do our show, and it seems the news breaks. The FBI director said this email that he's looking through are pertinent, but he doesn't know if they're significant. I guess Putin hasn't read them yet. What do you make of this panel? There's been so many Clinton scandals, which I have to, in my own head, go, is this something or is this nothing? This is just another one of these things. She has been attacked and abused for 30 years. I'm sick of it. I don't want to hear this 11 days before the election. And it's just, I'll tell you what, let me take that back. Let me take that back. Now, that sounds partisan. If these, well, I'm going to take a little bit, if these emails, these new emails, can prove that she started a war because a dictator threatened to kill her daddy, or she war profiteered on behalf of Halliburton, or maybe she yelled at an aide to get her more Tic Tacs. Maybe then I want to read the emails. But (14/43)
other than that, Bill, this is just such bullshit. I doubt that there is anything that you just described in those emails. But I'm trying to imagine if two weeks from now, the FBI had come out and said, by the way, two weeks ago, we found some stuff on Anthony Weiner's computer. Sorry we didn't tell you at the time. We didn't want to mess with this election. But now we're going to tell you. People would be outraged on the right, and I think justifiably so. I think there was really no good way to go about this, except as soon as you know, the FBI says, we found out yesterday that there was a potential of something going on. If they didn't say something, and it got to after election day, that's only going to fuel the fire more and more for Trump to come out and say, look, this whole thing was rigged. What does Anthony Weiner have to do with Hillary Clinton? That's what I don't get. It's so hard to imagine Anthony Weiner CC-ing Hillary on a dick pic he's sending to a team. Right, but it's (15/43)
not. But it's not. I'm going to do you like your homework. It's likely not Weiner. What do you mean? It's because the point is that his then wife had access to the same computer. They seized them because she was a top personal aide to Hillary Clinton. But we've already read so many of her emails, and what they show is her aides email each other back and forth. This is from WikiLeaks. A lot about appearances and ethics, which is, I guess, what aides should do. Are they careful? Yes, they're careful. I certainly can't blame them for being careful. But if there's nothing, there won't be any charges. The fact that Comey, he went through concortions to explain why he was not the aide. So it's wrong for the Republicans as they're already out there today saying that it's criminal. We have no idea what's in these. So that's wrong, to say it's criminal. I would agree. I would only say that Hillary Clinton is a scandal factory. And you just look through her life. That may not be her fault. Well, (16/43)
the cattle fusion is a scandal factory. The cattle futures... The cattle futures. I can't go back there. I can't go back there. I forgot about the cattle futures. Let me ask a bigger picture. I withdraw my support of Hillary Clinton. I forgot about the cattle futures. All the way to the current. Right. You're right. Let's elect the pussy grabber. Okay. By the way, there's videotape of him as he's passing a 10-year-old going down the escalator. Oh, I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (17/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (18/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (19/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (20/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (21/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (22/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (23/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (24/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that that bomber in New Jersey, the father, he reported his own son to the FBI. The Unabomber's brother turned him in. That's the highest level of principle when you turn on your own family because principle is even higher than that. Okay, let me ask- There's still 11 days for her to do that. She's watching. Do you know that the Trump people- Hey, hey, great idea. Do you know that the Trump people are saying you're a Trump supporter now? Yes. I don't know if you've seen- Yeah, of course. Of course I've seen it. Yes, of course. It says it so clearly I am. Well, no, but I mean, it's funny the way they ... You try to do a good deed. We all, in our own bubble, we go after Trump. And you, I thought it was great. You really tried to understand the Trump voter and say, hey, there is something there. We wouldn't vote for Trump, but there is (25/43)
something why ... And of course, they turn it around and try to make you into something you're not. Trump thanked me yesterday for- He'll probably call and thank me for this appearance. Once Ivanka goes on TV, no, you're going to be given the credit for that. Thank you. But he thanked me. I don't think he's seen my film. I think what he did was he saw that his name was in the title and that was like- That's all he needs. Yeah. So it was very weird. Let me say something about that. The idea that this man congratulates himself every time there's a loss for a win and credits himself with winning debates that he doesn't win or, oh, that was triumphant or this didn't happen when there's recordings of the very thing that he's denying, he said on television. It's like he's living in another planet. And the fact that he dances around these subjects accuses Hillary of the very thing she does to him. You know that Ginger Rogers quote about- Dancing backwards and I do. She goes, yeah, I'm doing (26/43)
everything he was doing. Who's the guy? Dancing backwards and heels. No, the guy she was dancing with. That's your era. Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire. He was in the door. He was in the door. He was in the door. I'm doing everything he's doing, but I'm dancing backward and heels. Like Hillary Clinton is a fucking bad ass. Right. She gets her everything. That's right. And is still fighting. And the fact that the right wing claims that she's killed 46 people on the internet. If you type in her name and murderer, 46 names come up. When I saw that, I thought that is really bad ass. That's what I want is my commander in chief. Somebody is going to go in there. ISIS is going to shit. Here's a question I want to ask when I'm going to go back to Washington in a couple of days to interview the president of the White House. One question I want to ask him and any Democrat is even if Trump loses, he's going to win 20 states probably. There are some people, I feel like he is the acid (27/43)
test. If you can put up a candidate like Donald Trump and people still vote for him, don't the Democrats have to ask what we asked after 9-11? Why do they hate us? Why do they hate in America the Democrats so badly that even Donald Trump will get your vote? He will get 40 to 50 million votes. He will. I think Democrats need to ask themselves that question. So I think Donald Trump is an unacceptable candidate. As a lifelong Republican, I will say that. I will also say that I think that Democrats do almost nothing to speak to people outside their base. They don't talk about growth. They don't talk about small business. They don't talk about empowerment. They don't talk about any of these things. They don't talk about, I mean, the amount of opportunities that were missed with this administration. They talk about those things all the time. I think the bigger problem is. And that's why people feel more empowered these days because Barack Obama has been in the White House for eight years. (28/43)
He's inspired. If people felt that way, Michael, two-thirds of Americans wouldn't think we're on the wrong track. No, no, no, no, no. Wait a second. Wait one second. Barack Obama, Barack Obama, if, first of all, if you voted for Barack Obama, first and foremost, you owe, if you did, you owe that he's asking you to go and vote for Hillary Clinton. You owe him and his legacy that vote. If you want him not to be disavowed in the future, you can't have a guy like Barack Obama and then Trump come in. That means we live on Venus. Let's talk about the other bad news that came out for Hillary this week, which was Obamacare. Premiums for a mid-level plan are set to rise 25 percent in 2017, nationally. This is in the 39 states that use healthcare.gov. It could go up as much as 116 percent in Arizona. Now, these projections don't factor in the subsidies. And 83 percent of Obamacare enrollees get subsidies. So the best way the Democrats can spin this is, well, it's going to cost the taxpayers (29/43)
more. There's two ways to fix this, none of, neither which is very palatable politically. One is you can force people by having higher penalties or more subsidies, which is higher taxes. Well, so think about what is there a lot of in Arizona? Older people. Right. And this is a big part of the problem. So right now... Snakes. It costs six times as much to provide healthcare for someone who's 64 compared to someone who's 19. But the way the law is set up, you can't charge someone more than three times what you charge the youngest person in your pool. So young people are paying for twice as much for their insurance compared to the care that they're getting, and that's why so few of them are actually enrolling. The projections were you were going to have 21 million people in these pools. You've had nine million short. It's mostly those young, healthy people, which is why these pools are short. And many of them are down to one healthcare provider because they've so over-regulated these (30/43)
insurance companies that they don't give them different... No, there's not... What do you think Donald Trump's plan for healthcare is? I don't know what Donald Trump's plan is. Wait, I have Donald Trump's... I mean, plans like this have kinks. It takes years for these things to work themselves out. I have Donald Trump's plan right here. Dana Bash asked him, so you're in the Oval Office, you're saying Obamacare, Trump, it's got to go, Bash, it's got to go repeal and replace with something terrific. Terrific. Now, he has said this before. The first time he said it, I kind of let it go. When you say it more than once, that's your policy. That's the other policy that people have to look at when they're choosing. His policy is something terrific. The problem with Obamacare is that the insurance companies are still calling the shots. As long as we leave our healthcare in the hands of private insurance companies, this is the problem we're going to have. But let me point out something else. (31/43)
The state of California is not going to go up 25%, according to the LA Times this week, because you have a Democratic governor. This is what happens when you have a Democratic executive branch and both houses of the California Assembly are Democrats. It's not just Democratic. Now, listen, hang on. They have put so many good regulations on the insurance companies here, it will go up only 5% in California next year. Well, part of that's because insurance is already really expensive. We've got the insurance companies by the throat, and that is not what's going on in Alabama or Mississippi. But you want the facts. The facts are that the people are a lot more sick and using it more than was expected. It's not actuarially sound. So you can look at it two ways. It was not actuarially or estimated to get the same losses as they're actually getting. And in some of these states like Michigan, where you've got a 40% premium increase, that is going to overwhelm people that are not getting those (32/43)
subsidies. So you're right, Bill. If you're honest about it, there are two things. If you want to keep what you have, you're either going to raise taxes, increase subsidies, or single payer. Or you're going to turn it out. But that's not going to change the fact that you can still have. There's a plan in place. There's a plan in place. You have to give it time. So fix it. Fix the problem. We are fixing it. She will fix it. Donald and Obama and Trump are not going to fix it. The medical device tax. Nobody will make it terrific. And she can't fix it either because she needs Congress people to vote. The only thing the Republican Congress voted to do about it is repeal it 60 times. What's interesting is, let's take the reason why these premiums are going up, the fact that so many young people don't want to get in the pools. You could pass a tiny fix that says, look, if insurance companies want to be able to offer plans that are a lot cheaper, instead of keeping this, it's got to be one- (33/43)
third rule. Get rid of that rule. So many young people can get more affordable health care. The problem is, A, I don't think that you could get a fix like that through with President Obama in the White House because it's his law. It's got his name on it, which is why the possibility of a new president, I think, means there's more of a chance that you could get some of these fixes. But you also have to get Republicans in Congress who I think have a right to say, this wasn't our law. Or we could end Republican control of Congress in 11 days. And why is it that why is it that why is it that why is it that there's so many on the left who don't want to give people choice in health care or in education or in things like employment training, which is where we've got like three million jobs that are posted and we can't fill them because we don't have we have a mismatch between skills and what the private sector actually needs? Because first of all, to push back against your thinking about the (34/43)
insurance companies, it's not most that's not the biggest problem. It's it's the gouging from doctors and hospitals until you until you put a cap on how much people can charge. I mean, they've done studies on this from one hospital in one city to another. It can be like a thousand percent. I told you they can charge whatever they want here. We saw it with the EpiPen. We saw it with. But that's what we have. The government in charge. We have the government in charge. When you have the government in charge, then you have one hospital, one city can't do one thing. The EpiPen situation happened because you had the government saying, we've got to buy EpiPens. We've got to buy them from this company. And there was no competition. So they said, cool, we can make EpiPens cost a couple hundred bucks a pop. If you have the ability to have someone else making EpiPens, then they can't. And you don't have government. It's got to come from this company. Because government's involved in the (35/43)
government's administration, because government controls Medicare and Medicaid, that's what keeps the price of drugs down for old people and poor people. If the government was involved in controlling what the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies do. You're going to have the same problem. Wait, one second, one second. One second. We're talking about actual real issues. OK, so it's a great point to make that Donald Trump has no idea about what you're talking about right now. No idea. No. No idea. That's kind of important. That's kind of important. This is a great conversation. If we were dealing with two intellects that were running for president. Right. We are it. We're dealing with an animal. But last lunatic. Something terrific. And somebody who's been training for 30 years to be a politician. Last year. I'm sorry, Rick, I have to stop our discussion. Sorry, I'll meet you back in my room. It's time for New Rules, everybody. New Rules. Tim Kaine has to cool it with the (36/43)
harmonica. No one enjoys harmonica except the guy playing it. It's like seeing homeless people having sex. The kindest reaction is, how nice for you. New Rule. Before rolling your eyes at the new men's fashion. The new men's fashion trend of shorts made out of old Afghans. Consider the fact that they're perfect for those times that you're nuts. Want to feel like they're taking a nap on grandma's couch. All right, man. That's ugly. New Rule. As long as we're getting rid of obsolete technology like coal, let's also get rid of the handkerchief. I mean, come on. It's gross. We have Kleenex now. Why do you want to have snot in your pocket? And while we're on the topic, the hankies' elitist cousin, the pocket square, can also take a hike. This doesn't say I'm a man of style and elegance. It says I don't have the guts to be a transvestite. New Rule. The stall for your black Republican committee has to have at least one black person in it. Even worse, if you look at the picture, it looks like (37/43)
there may have been a black person there before, and now the white people are trying to decide who made the offensive remark that made them leave. New Rule. This Halloween, certain people are not allowed to give out certain candies because it's just a little too on the nose. Like Donald Trump can't give out Tic Tacs. Don Trump Jr. can't give out Skittles. Melania can't give out Sugar Daddies. Chris Christie can't give out Jelly Bellies. Anthony Weiner can't give out hard candy. And finally, New Rule. Presidential debates need some new rules, starting with each candidate gets three times in the debate when they can call, let's go to the video tape. Good idea. So that when this happens... But he also went after a disabled reporter, mocked and mimicked him on national television. She can throw the red flag in his orange face and say, wrong, tape please. I don't know what I said. I don't remember. People can actually see Trump saying one thing a second after he claimed the opposite. They'd (38/43)
stop pretending there's really any other choice in this election, Rick, than to vote for Hillary Clinton. OK. So Politifact tabulates that Hillary says something at least somewhat false 27% of the time. You know who's at 28%? Bernie, the ultimate straight shooter. 27 is pretty good for a politician. Trump is at 71. His pants are a raging wildfire that cannot be contained. She lies about a quarter of the time. He's Donald Trump. So he grabs her pussy and says, your pussy fell on his hand. Does Hillary play the game with complete honesty? No. To put it in football terms, she's deflated a few balls in her time. And also that thing Tom Brady did. But she's still a really good quarterback. And speaking of quarterbacks, why does a guy like Colin Kaepernick, who's brave enough to lead a smart protest, say things like, it almost seems like Hillary and Trump are trying to debate who's less racist. You have to pick the lesser of two evils, but in the end it's still evil. Really? Hillary's evil? (39/43)
You sound like someone on Christian TV. Hillary Clinton, as I was thinking about this earlier today, two names kind of came up. One was Jezebel and the other was Athaliah. You know your Bible, you know who she was. Yeah, I didn't. But I looked it up. Athaliah was the daughter of Jezebel and she seized power by murdering her grandchildren, you know, just like Hillary does. I'm so, I am so tired of hearing, so tired of hearing, I know Trump's a creep, but Hillary doesn't seem genuine. Grow the fuck up, she's a civil servant, not a craft beer. You know, whenever I'm out with my millennial friends, chasing the pokey man, or getting our nipples pierced, shaving our pubes, or arranging action figures while sending out dick pics, when the talk turns to the election, I hear some version of, ugh, they're both bad, or ugh, they deserve each other, or there's an election? Republicans have one path to victory in this election and it's called false equivalency. They can't deny Trump is horrible, (40/43)
it's on tape. So they want voters to believe Hillary is just as bad, and in pursuit of that goal, they have a very powerful ally, lazy people. People who like to say they're all bad, because when you say that, you don't have to do any homework. Say they're all the same, and then you can sound justifiably jaded by the entire process when really, you just don't know anything. You say you're cynical about politics, don't flatter yourself. Cynical comes when you know too much. You on the other hand, haven't bothered to learn anything, which Americans, by the way, are capable of. Noam Chomsky once observed that when he listens to a sports call-in show, he said, it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know all sorts of complicated details. On the other hand, he said, when I hear people talk about international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief. In other words, we're not clueless, we just apply (41/43)
our brainpower to bullshit. It's true. Before people go out for a taco, they will spend an hour on Yelp, researching for the most authentic one, all for something that'll be out of your body in 15 minutes. People will use six different websites to get a plane ticket for a weekend trip, but they don't care who runs the world for four years. I don't get how millennials who can't tell these candidates apart have a hundred different sub-genres for music that sounds like this. Is that dubstep or techno-dub or acid-techno? Because it all sounds like the same shit to me, but they can tell the difference when it comes to that. All right, that's our show. Tune in to WANi Facebook Live, November 2nd at 7 p.m. Oh, yes, 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 Eastern. I want to thank Rick Lazio, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Michael Moore, and Chelsea Handler. Oh, next week, Obama. And Ben Jones. Obama next week, that's right. Watch us on YouTube now. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every (42/43)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. We have it. Hey, we made it to May! I think that's an accomplishment. It's May 1st, for those of you still clinging to the concept of time. Every... I tell you, every morning, I go in the bathroom, I sit on the toilet and think, different shit, same day. Yeah, I am so sorry I ever dared that guy in Wuhan to eat that bat. Worst bar bet ever. I'm filling it. But, uh, here's some kind of good news. Uh, Trump's approval rating is way down, which means that America may finally have reached turd immunity. And, uh, yeah, he's not po... You know who else is not popular this week? Mike Pence. Not popular. Went to the Mayo Clinic. Everyone was wearing a mask. Of course, it's the Mayo Clinic, or everywhere. And he did not have a mask. Mike Pence said, no, it's okay, I've been tested. And besides, they're called bare-faced lies. Trump was very upset this week, because the New York Times printed this article that (1/43)
said that he spends... This certainly doesn't sound like the Trump I know. Spends all morning in bed, watching television and eating french fries. And Mark Meadows... Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, said, that is some bullshit right there. That is fake news. This man barely spends ten minutes for lunch. And he says, I can prove it, and I've got the tape. Yeah, don't fuck with lunch. Trump, this week, I love, you know, the War Powers Act, which is at his disposal. He could use it for, you know, masks, ventilators, testing, no. He used it this week to make sure that the meat packing plants were kept open. Because meat, now it's personal. You step on Donald Trump's meat hose, and shit just got real. But here's something kind of good. Dr. Fauci says, in his words, that he is very optimistic about this experimental new drug called Remdesivir, I think it's the pronunciation, close. Okay, Remdesivir, whatever it is, Trump says, you know what, there's another drug I know about that's even (2/43)
newer and better. In fact, it's so new, it just goes by the name Formula 409. Yes. This incomparably stupid man actually suggested, and he's the president of the United States, I don't know if you know that, but he actually suggested this week that people ingest cleaning disinfectants. And his voters started calling poison control centers to see if that was okay. Deplorables, nothing unbleachable. So it was interesting that this is the week then that Hillary chose to endorse Joe Biden. And all I could think of was, really? What took you this long? I mean, he hasn't even had an opponent for a month. Yeah, Hillary said it was a close decision, but at the end of the day, she broke for the guy who doesn't urge angry mobs to lock her up. But look, things are changing in America. States are starting to open up for business again. Georgia, leading the way, they have opened up the tattoo parlors and the beauty salons in the South, what they call the high-tech sector. And it's good to see that (3/43)
in Georgia, things are becoming normal again. And when I say becoming normal, I mean being able to get a tattoo of Jesus wrestling a snake. So if you're in, oh, and bowling alleys in Georgia, if you're in Georgia, bowling alleys are open, barbershops, and tattoo parlors. Because what could be safer businesses than ones involving razors, needles, and sticking your fingers in other people's balls? All right, we got a great show tonight. We have Eric Holder, Brett Stevens, and Matt Taibbi. Let's get right to it. Okay, my first guest, honored to have him, the former attorney general under President Obama, who's now chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Eric Holder, great to see you, Mr. Attorney General. Thanks for doing this. Good to see you too, Bill. Well, so one of the problems I find with the pandemic is that it's very hard to have a conversation even with anybody about anything else. It's the only issue that people talk about. And I think we are losing sight of (4/43)
the fact we're six months from an election. Right. Which I know you are trying to make sure comes out fair and square. Is that what your committee is all about, or is it a fancy way of saying gerrymandering? Well, we wanna try to combat what happened in 2011 when the Republicans really gerrymandered to a degree that we've not seen in recent memory. But we're also focused on this presidential election and the elections more generally in November to try to make sure that everybody who wants to cast a ballot in November has the ability to do so and can do so in a safe way. Again, our focus is on gerrymandering, but we don't wanna just fight for structures that we wanna put in place and then have an election in November that doesn't go well, and that will scuttle all of the work that we're doing. So we've really kind of broadened what it is we are doing, fighting for a fair, safe election in November, as well as concentrating, continue to concentrate on our anti-gerrymandering efforts. So (5/43)
you think there is a scenario where that election does go well? Because I don't see any scenario where it does, because as I've been saying for years now, I don't think Trump, I cannot picture that man gracefully conceding and walking away. And I keep asking Democrats, you're probably the one with the most law enforcement experience I've ever asked this, what do you do if he says, it was rigged, blah, blah, blah, it's not safe for me to leave, whatever bullshit he's gonna come up with and refuses to leave? I want to know what the plan is. Well, I think he will certainly say when he loses that it was rigged, that it was unfair. He'll come up with all kinds of reasons why he will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. And I'm really worried about what happens between November, his defeat, and when he actually leaves office in January. That I think is the period we should be focused on. He'll still have presidential power and God only knows how he'll use it. On the day of the (6/43)
inauguration, I actually think that he will leave. And if he doesn't leave, the United States Marshall Service, the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, DC, the Secret Service, all have the ability to pull him out of the White House and will get on with the inauguration and the presidency of Joe Biden. Do they have the ability? Do they have the will? I mean, you mentioned the police department. Police love his dirty draws. You really think they're gonna pull him out of the White House? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because I think people in law enforcement positions, people with the power to do those kinds of things, will really, as I always say, they'll check to the power. And the power will move on the inauguration day. And my guess would be that all the people, all the organizations that have that capacity will do the right thing, the constitutional thing, and listen to the orders of the new president and understand that there has been, again, a peaceful (7/43)
transition of power, regardless of what it is that Trump might wanna do. Okay, we'll color you more optimistic than I am. I don't see him, that two months you're describing between the election and the inauguration day, he's just gonna be ranting and raving and his people are gonna be in the streets. Okay, but we'll move on. So New York State canceled their primary. 16 states have postponed them. This is rather unprecedented. I wonder if you think this is a dangerous precedent. We Americans have voted through everything, civil war, Spanish flu, depression. Canceling an election, I think, is a, well, what do you think? Well, I think postponing these elections makes sense to do them at a time when people are less vulnerable to the pandemic, coming up with alternative ways that people can cast a ballot. So we don't have a repeat. What we had in Wisconsin, when people had to stand in line for extended periods of time to cast a vote, and we know now that in Wisconsin, at least 30 people (8/43)
have come down with the virus that can be directly traced to their having to stand in line. I'm sure that number is gonna grow. But canceling, that's not something that I think we oughta do. Now, I understand that what happened in New York was they just simply canceled the primary with regard to the presidential primary. I'm there with the result. We already know what it is. But the rest of what is supposed to occur on primary day in New York, as I understand it, gonna continue to go on. So I would be not in favor of canceling things, but I do understand how there might be the need to postpone and then put in place alternative means so that people can vote safely. Okay, you mentioned that we already know the outcome, and that's true. It's Joe Biden, who you're very familiar with, served in the same administration, of course. A couple of months ago, an allegation was made against him, a sexual allegation from someone named Tara Reid. I thought it was the chicken shark NATO, but it's a (9/43)
completely different one. And at first, I thought it was ridiculous that it would go away and no one would pay any attention to it, but it's being paid attention to. I wonder if you would share your thoughts on that and what he should do and the appropriateness at this moment when we're in such a crisis in America of having this injected into a campaign at all. Well, I mean, it's interesting that the people who are trying to fan this thing are the very people who support Donald Trump and, of course, who say nothing about the allegations that have been raised, I think, very credibly against Trump for a number of women over a long period of time. I mean, all of these allegations have to be taken seriously. People who raise them should be treated sensitively. I've known Joe Biden for 20, 25 years. What has been described is inconsistent with the person who I've come to know and who I've worked with. I think media is doing the correct job looking at the allegations, finding out a variety (10/43)
of things. The Vice President has denied that it actually did occur. And as I said, his denial is consistent with the Joe Biden that I know. Okay, so Joe Biden is for decriminalization but not legalization of marijuana. This issue really sticks in my craw and not for the obvious reasons people are gonna say that too but I just think as a national issue, I've said for quite a while, I think it would be our version of guns for the right, something that would bring out single issue voters. It's something very personal. I think you could win elections with it by putting it on the ballot. First of all, I don't understand the difference between, I do understand technically between decriminalization and legalization but why not encourage Joe Biden to come out full-throatedly for legalization? I think this is something he doesn't excite younger voters. As someone who was in charge of this issue for a long time, what is your feeling on this? Well, I think our laws need to catch up with where (11/43)
the American people are. And I suspect, I think all the polling tends to show that the American people support legalization of marijuana. There's also another reason why I think we need to be moving in that direction and that's because of the harm, the disproportionate harm that was done to communities of color, where people again use marijuana same degree that the white folks do and yet people of color go to jail at a rate of more than four times their white counterparts. And so there are substantive reasons why I think we need to move towards legalization. I think it probably, as you say, would probably be something that will garner a pretty substantial amount of support. I think not only from young people, maybe young people in particular, but I think really across the spectrum. So I think our laws need to move in that direction. It's one of the reasons why when I was Attorney General and Colorado and Washington moved towards legalization in those states, I held back the federal (12/43)
authority that I had to try to fight that to allow those states to experiment. And I think based on the experiments that we've seen in Washington and Colorado, this nation ought to be ready to move towards legalization. Sounds wise to me. You toyed with running this past cycle. You decided against it, why? Well, it's interesting. You always hear people say this, but it really is true. You don't decide it in a vacuum. You have to decide it along with your family. And I thought I'd make a good candidate and could run a successful campaign. I think people in this household thought the same, but I didn't have five votes here. I only had one out of the five. They had had enough of their father, their husband being Attorney General. And so based on the reactions that I got from them, I decided not to put my hat in the ring. Well, I vote that you should next time. So there's that vote. I know I'm not in the house, but okay. Thank you for joining us. I'll come live with you. I'll come live (13/43)
with you. Yeah, I could use the company right about now. Thank you very much for doing this and for what you're doing there on the committee. Important work. Thank you. Always good to see you. Okay, Eric Holder. All right, my next guest is a New York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor. Please welcome our friend from back in the studio. Brett Stevens is at his home in New York City. How you doing, Brett? Good to see you there. I'm perfectly fine right here in New York. Good. So you wrote about the city you live in, the city I lived in twice, the city I still love. I certainly have a lot of friends back there, my sisters back there, feel for that city. The point of your column this week though, was that the devastation of New York is atypical from the rest of the country and the rest of the country should therefore not have to play by the same rules. Is that about right? Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, look at Westchester County, just north of the city. It's a commuter county. It has (14/43)
suffered more deaths than the entire state of Texas. Nassau or Suffolk County on Long Island, they've suffered more deaths than the entire state of California. So obviously the combination of factors, but especially population density in New York City makes it just a completely different situation from the rest of America. And so it means that New York has to be sort of thought of and treated differently than say the middle of the country. Or I mean, I'm in LA, I read in your column that the death rate is 16 times in New York what it is in LA per 100,000 people. Which I guess is because of density, right? And we don't ride subways and we're not in elevators as much. Well, I mean, the moment you stop to think about it, it's obvious, right? I don't, when I used to go to work, I didn't go to work in a car. I jammed into a subway with 100 other people or however many people per car. I jammed into elevators to get to my office. So all of that is just completely different from LA. LA is the (15/43)
second largest city in the country, but it's just a very different story. And so if you're treating everyone in a kind of one size fits all approach, you're gonna make some very large mistakes because it's simply a different type of situation from the standpoint of the spread of disease in one part of the country than the other. To me, this kind of seemed like a fairly obvious, not even a controversial point, but not all of my readers felt the same way. No, I'm sure they did. There's a lot of group think, and I'm glad, you know, Tom Friedman was writing about Sweden as many people are now. And I noticed at the end of the column, he felt the need to say, I'm writing about Sweden, not because I'm saying it has the magic answer, but because I think we should debate all sides of this. I'm like, yeah, do we really have to say that now? But yes, we do. That's the atmosphere we're in and we should debate all sides. So let's talk about Sweden. It's the hot new country for how they're handling (16/43)
it, which is different. They let, they're going for herd immunity, which at the end of the day, I think we're gonna find out you have to have to defeat this thing anyway. I don't know if we have the time with the state of our economy to wait for vaccines and all the testing. It would be wonderful if we had a competent president and a brilliant electorate and the people were in great physical shape to begin with and the vaccine was right around the corner. We don't have any of that. Well, that's right. And the thinking was, well, you can sort of stop the economy for, I don't know, two or three weeks and suddenly a miracle is going to present itself in the form of an effective therapy or a vaccine. And we can treat, and we could have treated this episode as kind of an extended sabbatical or a vacation, but we might not get a vaccine, nevermind in 18 months. It could be many, many years. There is only so long. You can ask people effectively not to breathe, not to go to work, not to draw a (17/43)
salary without creating a problem, which is vastly larger, even the disease itself. And I'm not some kind of COVID denier. I'm not a booster, as you well know, for the administration, but we can't simply shut off our brains here. People say, well, Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors, Norway and Finland, which is true. It's also done about the same as Ireland, which is in lockdown, and it's done much better than France and Britain. So I'm glad the Swedes are providing us with a model of an alternative approach to this problem. And at some point we have to move from a strategy of trying to protect everyone, Bill, which I don't think is going to work. It might've bought us some time, but it's not going to work, to looking at vulnerable populations, the elderly people who are immunocompromised, have other health issues, and focus our efforts on them without wrecking unbelievable damage on the country in the process. Right, because I wonder that if, that we've sat home here for (18/43)
two months, as most of the country has, and they say, well, it might come back in the fall, and it probably will, because by staying home, we haven't achieved that herd immunity. So to me, where the rubber reached the road now is, what do people say about this fall? If it comes back, do you lock down the economy again? I'd love to hear one politician say, no, I'm sorry, but we did it once, and we may have already screwed the pooch on the economy with that one time, but we just can't do it again. We have to think of something else or try something else. We just have to, we have to be strong. Well, I think that's, you know, one reaction I have had to my column, which kind of staggers me, is people say, you're putting the economy over people's lives. And that's just false. The economy means food on the table for your family. The economy is essential for human health and wellbeing. We're not weighing lives versus the economy. We're weighing lives versus lives, one form of hardship against (19/43)
another. And the idea that we're gonna repeat this exercise in November and December as we move into flu season, if in fact this thing is seasonal, we're not really sure yet, seems to be like a recipe for a catastrophe that will haunt us for a century. I mean, have people looked at 30 million jobless Americans, the figures that are coming in? It's staggering. And I think it should be frightening to people who care about public health as more than just a matter of COVID. Well, excuse me, if I'm repeating something you may have said a minute ago, cause you went out of the sound there for me, cause we are of course using ancient or very modern, no, not your fault. You know, again, I'm not, well, I'll just get to the point. It was in the front page of your paper today. 30% GDP contraction is what they're looking for in the next quarter. They just got the results from this one, which isn't as bad as they said, but this one is a piece of cake. Even though if you look at this one in normal (20/43)
times, you'd go, oh my God, we are going into a horrible recession. This is the easy quarter. It's the next one. I mean, we're looking, as you said, about numbers. I don't get it. I think the world has gone mad if they think that everyone can be out of work at the same time. And yeah, we weren't prepared for this to begin with. People don't have that kind of money and they're not getting it from the government. And look, you know, there's no end of blame to be assigned to the Trump administration, to all kinds of people. But you actually, that aside, you have to sort of think ahead and say, if the Great Depression is what gave us the rise of fascism and a certain chancellor in Germany, what is the next Great Depression going to do to our politics? We were already moving in a populist and neo-authoritarian direction when the economy was relatively good. What happens when you have tens of billions of people who are out of work and desperate, not just economically, but also politically? (21/43)
So people have to start thinking about the balance of risk. That's something no one likes to contemplate because they say, well, if you choose one, if you balance it in one way, people are going to suffer and people are going to die. And that is almost certainly true. But there are risks to simply pretending that we can hold our breath forever and not hurt ourselves. Right now, this is a strategy out of the Vietnam War. We're trying to destroy the village in order to save it. And I don't remember that ending very well. Right, I read a headline in, I think it was NBC News. It said, starving, angry, and cannibalistic, America's rats are getting desperate because there's less food everywhere. So, and I thought, oh my God, this could be a harbinger. People are going to get desperate and starving, and I hope not cannibalistic. But let me ask you one final question about that and I'll let you go. So we used to argue about the environment, and I never understood how somebody who I liked so (22/43)
much and who wrote so many things and not being a liberal, and I'm mostly a liberal, I agreed with. But on the environment, I never could quite get you to where I wanted you to be. Has this changed your opinion on that at all? On which part of the environment? I'm in favor of it. Well, that we better treat the environment way better than we have, or else we're the ones who are going to die from it. Well, actually, believe it or not, maybe there's a giant failure of communication on my part. I've always believed that. I grew up in Mexico City where the environment is pretty horrible, and you see the consequences of that. I think we've got to treat mother nature with a great deal of respect, but I think we're also learning that productive, healthy economies and robust scientific establishments are also a big part of helping ourselves coexist well with the environment. So look, I think this is going to scramble our politics in a lot of ways, and one thing that I should say, and I think (23/43)
any honest person should say, is that if we all emerge from the situation with the same convictions that we've had before, it means we're just not thinking, and so this has prompted new thinking on my part. I'm sure it has on yours, but we need to maybe move out of all of our respective ideological boxes because what just happened was 1929. Things have changed, and if your thinking doesn't adapt, you have problems of your own in addition to the problems of the world. Okay, well, I appreciate you coming on. Not that you really had anywhere else to go. Here I am, here I'll stay. I know, it's so easy to get guests these days. Hey, are you available? Am I available? Of course, everyone's available, but you're always a great guest. I thank you, I'll see you in the studio soon, I hope. Thanks, Bill, be well. Okay. Okay, well, with the election only six months away, we thought it would be a good time to shed a little light on Joe Biden, upon whom all our hopes are arresting, and Joe's been (24/43)
running for president for a very long time and has been on the public scene since, well, before anyone can remember. And yet, a lot of people don't know everything about Joe Biden, so we thought it'd be a great day to do 24 things you don't know, 24 things you don't know about Joe Biden. Okay, for example, I was asked to social distance even before the virus. My defense whenever I suddenly fall asleep is it's five o'clock somewhere. Sometimes I'll walk into a room and completely forget why I'm running for president. My first idea for a campaign slogan was, I'm on her. When they told me I got Hillary's endorsement, I thought they meant Sir Edmund Hillary. I like to think of myself as a cross between JFK and your second husband. About 45 seconds into a sentence, even I'm asking, where is this going? Bernie Sanders and I don't agree on everything, but we are united in our belief that they screwed the lids on pickle jars way too tight. They call me Amtrak Joe because I love riding trains (25/43)
and also because I'm usually late and I smell like pee. You think I'm in cognitive decline, you should see the other guy. Okay, he is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and co-host of Rolling Stone's podcast, The Useful Idiots, Matt Taibbi. Matt, how you doing? Hope your sequestering's going good. I'm doing well, Bill. Thank you very much. Yourself? How's it going? Oh, I love it here all by myself. Anyway, so I want to talk about the money. I was just chatting with Brett Stevens and we were talking about the news today that GDP is going to contract by over 30% next quarter. Just crazy numbers. And of course we've written a lot of checks so far and you'd be a perfect one to talk about this. You wrote so eloquently about the bailouts in 2008. I was once talking to somebody who does not follow politics too closely. And I said, you know, Matt Taibbi, you should read his book. And he said, the vampire squid guy? So what is the vampire? I know it's going to be written on my gravestone, (26/43)
unfortunately, but yeah. Is the vampire squid back in play here? Is that what's going on? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, the basic conception of this bailout package is very similar to what they did in 2008. Obviously there's a main street component to the rescue. They're giving away some money to actual human beings this time. But the significantly larger part of the rescue package, you know, the roughly $4 trillion they're going to spend through the Fed, that's mostly all going to propping up the financial markets in Wall Street. And it's with the same basic concept they used last time, except more radical this time. They're buying junk bonds instead of just mortgages this time as well. So it's bigger, but the same thing. It always seems like it's trickle down. We never give money to people directly. And I guess you shouldn't expect anything different from people like Steve Mnuchin is the treasure secretary, right? And he's in charge of the whole thing. And this is what I know about (27/43)
him. He's the guy who took his trophy wife to get a picture, a selfie with the money at Fort Knox. You know, he's what they call him the adult in the room, you know, in the Trump administration. Are you confident in a guy like that running a show this big? Yeah, you're absolutely right about it being a trickle down. That's the concept, right? Like, you know, last time around, we had all this pain after the financial crisis where we had millions of people who were in foreclosure. We could have, with about a trillion and a half dollars paid off every subprime mortgage in existence and basically solve the problem. But they instead spent about 10 times that bailing out Wall Street. And this time around, the concept is basically the same. Let's just throw a ton of money at the capital markets and eventually it'll work its way down to regular people. But I'm not sure that's gonna work. And it didn't work terribly well last time. It didn't even seem to work its way around to smaller (28/43)
companies. The big problem with the small business bailout so far was that it went to big business. There was a corporate bailout of 500 billion, one of the bills. And I read, you know, the Democrats say, well, we got oversight in there. It's one guy. His name is Bharat Ramamurti. He must be busy. One guy to oversee $500 billion? Your thoughts. For a while, he was the only person and all he had, he didn't even have an office. He just had an unverified Twitter account. And I actually DMed him on Twitter. And I was like, did you get anything else yet? Did you have more than an office? You have, you know, supplies? And he says, nope. He actually answered, you know. Wow. They've since added Donna Shalala. She's also part of the oversight committee. But there really isn't anybody overseeing this amount of money. You have to be an absolute expert in this kind of stuff to even have a chance at catching the fraud that's gonna happen. I talked to the last bailout inspector who said we should (29/43)
expect tens of billions of lost to fraud with these programs. And why don't these, I get it why the mom and pop store needs money right away, perhaps, you know, you're running on a small margin, a grocer or something, but why do these big companies, I mean, they don't have any rainy day fund? You're a billion, multi-billion dollar companies. They got nothing in the kitty. They need something. They can't go a week. Well, I think the real scandal here is the amount of money that these companies have spent on stock buybacks over the last decade or so. Wall Street has flooded corporate America with easy money ever since the last bailout. And you take an industry like the airlines and they've, you know, the top four airlines spent something like $50 billion in the last eight years on stock buybacks, which is money that just went straight to their shareholders in the form of, you know, distributions and that's money they don't have now for this rainy day that this very rainy day that they're (30/43)
in. So this enormous amount of money that we're pumping into all these companies from and banks and financial companies, a lot of it is because the money's gone. It's been taken by the shareholders. As soon as they had the opportunity to do so. And so I think that's something if ordinary people understood that better, they'd be a lot more angry. And as a guy who has never been afraid to criticize both sides, wouldn't you agree that if a Democrat was president, they never would have voted this kind of money? They would have fought it. The Republicans would have been playing there. We can't go into debt game. No? It's possible. I think the amount that they're going to spend and the conception of this is probably a little bit more radical than the Democrats might have countenanced. It's certainly bigger than what they did last time. Although, you know, to be honest, the bailout last time was done in two parts. One part was done under Bush and the second part was done under Obama. And they (31/43)
basically agreed on that. Although I think you're right. I think this time around, this is an enormous ballot and it's going to continue to get bigger. And it's probably true that it wouldn't have been this big under Democrats. When the crisis started, I remember thinking, oh, I hope we don't get sucked into being politicized even about this. Like, do we really have to have a woke contest about this? And of course we do. We wouldn't be American if we didn't have a woke contest about everything. And I was talking to Brett about Sweden and everyone's talking about Sweden now. And I find this is a good example of it because forever Sweden and the Nordic countries have been what the far left has pointed to with we gotta be more like them. Sweden, they do everything great in Sweden. We wanna be more like the Swedes, but now the Swedes are kind of acting like a red state with the virus. And it's like, I don't know, I thought Sweden was great. What do you think about Sweden, what they're (32/43)
doing? Well, I think what's so interesting is the coverage of it is just astounding because they cannot get away from the narrative of this red blue argument. Like they can't just tell us whether or not Sweden's approach is working. They have to couch every headline. They're always saying things like, conservatives see hope in progressive Sweden. And then if you read the body of the article, it will say something like, yes, it's working, but what the right wing doesn't understand is that this culture depends upon a strong belief in the role of the state and society. In other words, they're seeing, they're couching the whole story as, what the important thing is, is whether conservatives are right or wrong about Sweden. Whereas that's not what's important. What's important is, is there a program working or not? And I think that's been a problem throughout this crisis. We cannot excise Donald Trump and the Trump argument from anything that we talk about with this crisis, whether it's (33/43)
hydroxychloroquine or the WHO or whatever. And that's a real problem. Yes, and I wish as infuriating as it is to see what he does every week and he tops himself. I mean, this week with the drinking, the Clorox. If I wrote that in a sketch three years ago, no one would buy it. If I said it about George W. Bush, who was known to be the dumb president, it still wouldn't have flown. Okay, but he's not going away. I feel like people need to just accept because you can't do anything else. It's the given, it's the net in tennis. It's gonna be there. And you're right about this. If he says something, even though he is a crazy person, if he says we should get back to work, our answer can't be dependent on, well, he said it, it has to be wrong. Yeah, we're reverse engineering our attitudes on all these things, right? So you take something like hydroxychloroquine. When I first heard about this drug and I looked at the news stories, as soon as I saw that it was referred to in headlines as the drug (34/43)
touted by Trump, I knew that it was gonna be impossible to get any real information in the American news media about it because the Fox slash Daily Caller people were gonna say that it worked and the people on the other side were gonna say that it was a conspiracy theory. You literally have to go to foreign news sources to try to figure out whether this drug actually works or not because that's the important question, whether Trump is right or wrong here. And it's the same with a lot of issues that are important in this pandemic crisis, but Trump has to be at the center of every part of our reporting and I think that's been a major blow to our business. Yes, and he puts himself there. It's very hard to ignore that. The meeting they had about two weeks ago, and again, this is so indicative of where we are because it didn't really get picked up very much, but he had a meeting with the business leaders to tell them how he was gonna give them free money. Naturally, co-chaired by his (35/43)
daughter, which everyone just accepts, who he introduces by saying that she created 15 million jobs, which would be 10% of the jobs in America. And this is considered normal. That's what you have to realize is this is, okay, I'm not gonna go into another rant about it, but we're gonna have to find a way to solve this around that, not through it, because it's not going anywhere. All right, let me ask you this. Mitch McConnell said, and he said it a few times, I think he's always ranting about what he says is, stop blue state bailouts. What does he mean by that? Because I don't speak that Fox News thing where they get the code words. What do you read that as? I think what he's talking about is a preferential tax treatment that's been debated in Congress, where the issue has to do with how you treat the tax treatment of people like nannies. And there are certain tax breaks that have been argued for by the Democratic leadership that would disproportionately help people who are wealthy and (36/43)
live in, let's just say coastal blue states. And that's been something that the right wing has pushed back on. But who knows what Mitch McConnell's talking about in a larger sense? I think from a net perspective, there's more money coming out of states like New York and California, obviously, than there is going into it. So it doesn't really make any sense. Right. Well, you make a lot of sense always about the economy and other things. You look like you're doing okay there. Hope it ends soon. And thank you for doing it, Matt. Always great to see you. Likewise. Thanks a lot, Bill, and good luck to you. Okay. Okay, now it's time for New Rule. Okay, here they are. New Rule, legal weed sellers must cut down on the packaging. You know, putting a joint in a plastic tube inside a cardboard box with a cellophane wrapper is not environmentally friendly or stoner friendly. You have to quit smoking weed just to open your weed. If I want to get high on something hard to open, I'll drink wine. New (37/43)
Rule, stop speculating about whether or not Kim Jong-un is dead. It doesn't matter that he's not exactly the picture of health, or that we haven't seen him in public in weeks, or that we have no plan in the event he is dead. I'm sorry, I'm thinking of Biden. New Rule, if this is the future of basketball, NBA players must admit they wasted a lot of money on tattoos. New Rule, you don't have to tell me what Quibi is. I was sort of interested for a second, but it passed. Let me guess, some assholes with MBAs raised a lot of money for an app that wastes teenagers' time. Yeah, my second guess, just going by the name, tiny country in the Middle East that lends money to Jared. New Rule, the Muslims going to mosques in Pakistan, the Christians holding services in the south, and the Orthodox Jews having funerals in Brooklyn have to agree that whichever faith loses the fewest members to COVID-19 is the one true religion, and the other two have to go away. Finally, finally, we can settle this (38/43)
once and for all. Although I'm not gonna pretend it makes up for canceling March Madness. And finally, New Rule, the next time we have a worldwide pandemic, we have to come up with a better solution than everyone becomes Howie Mandel. You know Howie, I know Howie. Who doesn't love Howie, the world's most famous germaphobe who was social distancing before it was cool? Well, now of course everybody's making the joke that Howie Mandel had it right all along. No, Howie would be the first to tell you he has a disease, OCD, that fucks up your life. He can't touch a doorknob or wear shoes with laces because they might touch the ground. When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, it's to clean it. No wonder he says, it was always a curse. That behavior didn't allow me to date or go out with anybody when I was young or really even have friends. He also said, I'm always on the verge of death in my head. I worry that the past two months of quarantine have given people the idea that the way for (39/43)
humans to win our million year war with microbes is to avoid them completely. And I'm here to tell you, you can't. The key to beating COVID isn't dining through glass or never going to a concert or a ball game again. It's your immune system. You hear people say COVID-19 is a new virus so the immune system doesn't know how to handle it. Bullshit, of course it does. That's why the vast majority of people who've had it either recovered or didn't even know they had it. What do you think did that? The human immune system. Now, there are people with immune systems that can't do the job and we should make it a priority to protect those people. But compulsively washing, being scared of your own hands, that can't become the new normal. In his later years when he was peeing into jars and wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes, we pitied Howard Hughes because it was pitiful. In the seventies, they made a TV movie with John Travolta about a sick kid called the boy in the plastic bubble. Let me tell you, (40/43)
if they start selling these things on Amazon, we're in trouble. I see there's a hot new item for sale online, disinfecting shoe mats, because COVID can get on your feet. Yes, it can get everywhere. Microbes are ubiquitous. You can keep discovering new places to scare people into buying protection for, but we're solving the problem from the wrong end. This is a health problem. We can't sanitize the universe. Governors should declare keeping our bodies in good health an essential job, because that's the only way we are going to win this. We've all read the articles. Your sink has 500,000 bacteria per square inch. Your toothbrush has feces on it. E. coli has been found in makeup, carpets, bedding, the remote, cutting boards. The average pillow has 350,000 bacteria colonies. They're filled with more shit than the guy selling them. Your phone has 10 times the bacteria of your toilet, which your dog drinks out of, and then licks you. I could see right over there, right now, one of my dogs (41/43)
lying on the driveway like a dead fucking fly. The driveway, where cars with God knows what on their tires pull in, and then that idiot rolls in it. And the other one, I don't know where he is, which means he's into something worse. Sometimes I see a dead mouse in the driveway. I don't have a cat. Something here killed it. I'm not pointing fingers, but there's only the three of us. My point is, God knows what is all over your pets and in their mouth, and then you invite them on the bed and they try to French kiss you, and sometimes succeed. And some people don't even fight it. But what's the point of a pet if you're not going to pet it? It's in the name. And what's the point of life if you can't live it? Have you ever had sex in a hotel? Did you wash your hands first? Well, the last couple didn't either. And yet you're still alive because your immune system said we got this. So this weekend, do something nice for your immune system. Go outside, that mysterious land beyond your curtains (42/43)
where the Grubhub drivers live, and get some fresh air and vitamin D, and break a sweat doing something besides eating hot chicken. Because at the end of the day, you can't keep all the pathogens out. It would be as silly as thinking you could stop immigration with a wall. Okay, that's our show. I wanna thank my guests, Eric Holder, Brett Stevens, and Matt Taibbi. We'll be back next week from the yard. Good night. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (43/43)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Facebook is out here in California. We know this is a bad week. It's the start of fire season. It's what we're applauding, fire season? All week, their stories were about down in Laguna. They said, you know, fires are destroying multimillion dollar homes, or as we call them in California, homes. I hate fire season. I mean, the air quality, air quality's already bad. On the bright side, it helps Amber heard with her fake cry. I like it. This is a people. This is a crisis we have. We're running out of water. But water parks are asking kids to pee in the pool. And it's really, this water thing, it's so tragic because FEMA says we would have been OK. But during COVID, we used up all the water scrubbing the mail. Now we're out of in this country? Baby formula. Perfect. Perfect. Just when the Supreme Court comes up with a formula for more babies. Yes, ladies, you're in America now. Not only do we make you (1/43)
carry the baby to term, now we're going to make you breastfeed the little thing, OK? Everybody wants to know, why are we out of the, you know, baby formula? Well, a few issues. Supply chain issues, which are real. Contamination, that happened in a couple of places. That's real. And of course, Nick Cannon. So that's very right. But you know, I mean, inflation, is that not what is on everybody's mind? That's like the subject of the day everywhere. Prices are up 11%. That's a really big jump. We haven't had that in decades and decades. I'll say this for Donald Trump. When he was president, America felt cheap. The gasoline, whoa, that has people very upset. I was valleying my, I was valleying my car the other day. And the valle guy said, pull it up a little. I said, I can't afford it. You know what we always have money for is Ukraine. We all support Ukraine. Of course, I don't. But boy, there are now 40 billion more going there, which will bring in the total that we've given them so far to (2/43)
over 50 billion. The defense budget of Russia is only 61 billion. Can we pay them to leave? Is that completely out of the question? It's like, and look at this. In the 40 billion, almost $1 billion, $900 million goes to buying, I guess, or paying translators for the Ukrainian refugees we're going to bring here. So if your kid is in a shitty school that's underfunded in America, here's what you do. Send them to Moldova, wait for Russia to invade, then bring them back. And finally, before we start the big show, I should remind you, this is Friday the 13th. They like fire, they like Friday the 13th. This is just a hopped up crowd. No, you know, a lot of things bad luck. Be careful of a bad luck. You need to step on a crack, if a mirror breaks, you know? Oh, and this year, if you break a condom, 18 years bad luck. All right, we got a great show here. He is a two time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and one of the best selling music artists of all time. He returns to his residency at Caesars (3/43)
Palette tonight and then kicks off his North American summer tour in June. I can't believe he came here. Rod Stewart is on the show. He's so proud. Wasn't that the best monologue? I tell you. All right. I see you haven't sold out. It's like you went for seats. We're here to talk. That's for COVID. Oh, OK. That's it. We're here to talk about you. This is a big night for you. You're starting your big world tour for 2022 and you're in Caesars Palette. Thank you so much. Because you've got to like fly out of here. You're on stage tonight at Caesars Palace. Well, they put it back. Usually I go on stage at 7.30. They put it back to 8.30. But I still have to do sound check, check all the girls' costumes. Let's be honest. The show really doesn't start till you get there. Well, it doesn't. But I don't want to be late. I don't like to keep my customers waiting. I mean, rock stars are known for keeping audiences waiting. What is your history of that over the years? Were you pretty prompt with (4/43)
your concerts? Yeah, always. First of all, it's people who've paid a lot of money. They've got babysitters, hired cars, and bicycles, and they get there on time. You don't want to keep them waiting. You want to get out there before you're supposed to go on to keep them happy. That's great because that's not what most rock stars do. Well, that's their business. It's not me. Yeah, I just think great. And how long is the show that you do? Tonight will be per hour and a half. But we're only allowed to do an hour and a half at Caesars Palace because they get you on stage. Right, because they want everyone to go back into the old, you know, spend the money. Exactly. But on the road, it's a little more if you're not at a gambling casino? Oh, yeah, we play two hours, 15. That's amazing. What was it when you started? Because like, you know what the Beatles did when they were touring? 15 minutes. 25. Yeah, that's what we used to do, yeah. Yeah. That's nuts. No, it is nuts. And here you are all (5/43)
these years later. I mean, I have your latest album. I'm so glad you went back to making an album of new material. Yeah, fantastic. The Hercules album, you sound the same. You haven't lost anything. Well, I look the same. Well, your hair is. You know, you know, you know, let me tell you something. You know what the Queen of England and I have got in common? We both had the same haircut for 60 years. I remember when I first came out here in 1983. I'd never been here, and I never saw a palm tree. And I looked, and I went, oh, it looks like Rod Stewart's head. It does. Yeah, it does, yeah. I'm eternally grateful it's still up there. No, unbelievable. Could you laugh? And the show is called The Hits at the University, which is fantastic. I mean, that's what people want to see. Oh, of course, yeah. And very few people in music have 90 minutes or two hours of just the hits. You do. I mean, I've seen you in concert, and there's no good time to go to the bathroom. No, absolutely. That's, you (6/43)
should put that on the sign. Rod Stewart. You'll never want to go to the bathroom. Sure. Sure. You never want to go to the bathroom. You know, I always think my idols were, you know, Sam Cooke, you know, East Reading, and Muddy Waters, all the really great black singers. If I went to see them, I would want to hear their hits. I don't really know stuff, really. That's why I try and give my crowd. And, you know, you, over the years, have been a sort of equal opportunity recorder of your own material or other people. You did a lot of covers. But I was going through the stuff, and like all the big ones, you know, Maggie Mae, and You Wear It Well, and Hot Legs, and Do You Think I'm Sexy, and Tonight's the Night, and, you know, those were your songs. I feel like you, as a songwriter, needs a better publicist. I don't think my... Yeah, I don't think... The greatest publishers are the people by the records. Yes. They're the ones, mate. They make a big hit singles. I don't think that people (7/43)
think of you as a songwriter as much as you are. No, I think it's what I look like, you know, look. Well... I... What else could I have been for a rock star? You know what I mean? I know. I brought you something. Really? That... That I had been hanging around my house for 51 years. Oh, my God. That's my... And it smells old, too. Is it... It's Maggie Mae. That's Maggie. I bought that when I was 15. No. Well, yeah, how do you think I got it? It didn't... He was 15 when he bought this. Right. I was 26. I know, but how does it feel... Do you feel anything when you see an artist that is about something that was so important in your life? Yeah, it... When it went to number one in the UK and America, I remember I was driving through London and it came on the radio. It was number one. I just turned my car around and went back to my mom and dad's little house and gave them the biggest kiss and they were all crying. It was Maggie at last. And that song, I mean, this bitterness, the... The... (8/43)
The... The... The... The... This bitterness that you had about Maggie Mae, you know, I don't want to see your face anymore and, you know, the morning sun really makes you look old. I mean, it's some nasty fucking stuff in there. It is. Really nasty about that. It is. It really is. And it's nearly a true story. It was my first chat. It was back that time. Yeah. Lasted about four seconds. You're a nasty stain on the floor. Considering all the women you've had since then, are you over the bitterness to Maggie? I feel like you got your revenge on her with... Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know what? Yeah. Yeah. Because I read your book, your autobiography. I mean, oh, my God, the women. I... I came just reading this book. I... I... I mean, I remember in my life thinking, oh, yeah, I always sort of knew who your girlfriend was. Like, I could mark chapters in my life. Oh, yeah, I remember when he was Bert Ackland and... those supermodels. Yeah. I've been very lucky because I don't really (9/43)
think I'm that attractive that must have something about me. Maybe it's the old nose. Are you kidding? At one time, you were dating two supermodels named Kelly. That's a lot of Kellys at one time. Let me tell you, Bill, looking back, it was nothing to be proud of. You know, it was really serious. Stop it! I mean, you see, there's a part where you talk about going to... I remember the Dome. Yeah. Was the rest... Was the hot restaurant in the 80s. Yeah. And you said they kind of had a bathroom just private for the beautiful people. And you talk about having sex between courses. No. That's... You're exaggerating now. That's what you wrote. No. Between courses. No, I never did that. I'd like to check the book. No, I don't think I ever did that. I'm sort of embarrassed about what I did and I'm sort of proud. It was a different era. Okay. You know, it was a totally different era. But you do love being a rock star. Yeah, I do. Really, right, I do. And I remember... And I met... Also, when you (10/43)
broke, you said you never thought about it, except you went to see this new band, The Rolling Stones. Before, they were like what we know as The Rolling Stones. You said they were sitting on stools wearing cardigans. Yeah. And you saw Mick Jagger and you went, I can do that. Yeah, exactly. There's only 12 people in the audience. My girlfriend was girlfriend... Friends with Mick's girlfriend, Chrissy Shrimpton, at the time. She said, come and see my boyfriend. Or my boyfriend sings. Come and see him in the band. Totally unknown. There's 12 people in the audience. And then, shush, they went off. They're still great. But... New English really seemed to have a work ethic. Like the people... You don't look at it like, oh, I'm a big star. You look at it like this is my craft. I mean, when I look at your discography, I mean, almost every year you put out an album. Those first five years that we knew you, you were also in a band while you were a single artist. The Faces was a great band. Well, (11/43)
it's... It's a love affair that surely hasn't gone away yet. I love... I can't wait to get on the stage to know. Well, I'm very, really nervous tonight. I'll bet. We've changed all the running order and it's... We'll be glad when it's over. But I truly love what I do and I feel blessed. Well, you're playing with the house money. I think they're gonna love you. And, you know, I know... I know your big hobby is trains, right? Model railroads. Model railroads. You know who else, what other great singer had that hobby? Louis Young. Frank Sinatra. Frank, yeah. Yeah. I'm having some as well. Yeah. Well, like you, a great ladies man. A lot of his life in the tabloids, but he also always put in the work. Yeah. Like you do. I mean, it's all there. Thank you. We thank you for that. Have a great residency there and a great tour. Thanks. Great to see you, my friend. Greg Spiller. Thank you. Wow, that's fine. Oh, no, it's not. You have your own. Look at our panel. The owner and president of Eurasia (12/43)
Group and author of the new book, The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World, Ian Bremmer. She served nine terms as the California Congresswoman and was a ranking member of the House Intelligence Commission. She is the author of Insanity Defense, Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe, Jane Harman. Thanks, Jane. All right, so last week I started this job by saying nobody likes to talk about abortion, and then we did. So let's do it again. I don't really want to, but I mean, it's just what's on everybody's mind. I would say it's a big issue. It's so big that it makes me think about the Civil War, you know, pre-Civil War, because we seem to be going toward this place in America where we're going to be two countries, one where you're a free woman and one where it's a Dred Scott situation, you know? I mean, when you look at some of the things that are being proposed in some of these states, I mean, Louisiana says (13/43)
flat out it's a homicide. So when you drive from L.A. to Nevada on one side of the border, you're just a free person. The other side, you're a criminal. You can fly across the country and gain and lose your reproductive rights 20 times. How can America sustain that? It can't, and it's wrong. And what's wrong with this is that it will get worse unless the Supreme Court, let's pray, let's pray, comes out with a different decision from the draft opinion, one that is more to the center. I think it could happen. I think there are institutionalists on the court and this will absolutely politicize the court for years to come. I think that already happened. Well, I actually don't. You don't think the court has been politicized? Yes, but the hearing process politicizes choosing justices and when they get on the court, they have firm views, but they can change. For example, I'll just stop with this. Harry Blackmun, who wrote Roe v. Wade, was a Republican appointee of Richard Nixon. And I don't (14/43)
think anyone expected him to write that opinion, and he did. And it was, for the time, radical and important for women. So that's the Democratic plan hope. I accept that that's what happened when Roe vs. Wade was written, but that was a time when jurisprudence actually held sway among the Supreme Court justices. We don't appoint Supreme Court justices that way anymore. It is all Dems or all Republicans. The process has become subverted. We know that. And if you read the draft opinion, I know you did, that Alito had leaked, I mean, it reads like a culture war document by an analyst. It doesn't read like it was written by a jurist. I mean, it refers to Plessy and Ferguson and makes it sound like people that support abortion rights are racists and eugenicists. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary, which is why I am hoping it won't survive the process. But here's what's going on. Here's what's actually happening in states. I mean, let's just take Missouri. Now, of course, a lot of these (15/43)
states, it's going to be a race to the bottom to see who can get the harshest treatment or give out the harshest treatment in Missouri. It would restrict you even if you were a nonresident and you had sex in Missouri. You have to prove to the state of Missouri you didn't fuck there. It is the show me state. Also, you couldn't get telemedicine. I mean, a lot of times women get the morning after pill. You just have to call up with a consultation with the doctor over the phone. You would have to use a phone from another state. Next on the agenda, reining in big government. And a lot of the Waffle House states are going to have laws like this or worse. I just wonder that this issue gives a tangible sort of concrete pretext to the people who are already talking about some kind of division of this country, some kind of civil war, some kind of secession, some kind of we can't live together. So this gives a real issue to it. I wonder where this is going. I think there are real issues that are (16/43)
dividing our country. Our totally dysfunctional Congress is one of them. But I would say in this case, 75 percent of Americans support the right to choose. And I don't know under some conditions, but Roe v. Wade was not under all Roe v. Wade was not abortion on demand. It was abortion until if a woman chooses that, until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which was about the third trimester. Let me just say, Bill, I just want to say one thing. I got elected on this issue. I did. What year? 1992. OK. Let me just tell you the story for one second. 1992 open seat. Mel Levine had retired and there were seven Republicans and five Democrats in a lean Republican district. One of the Republicans was Maureen Reagan, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, who was still pretty vital and was helping her. She lost the primary. She was pro-choice. And the woman who won the primary was anti-choice. And all of a sudden, all the Republican pro-choice women who supported her came and asked me if they could (17/43)
be Republicans for Harmon. Thank you, Republican women. That's why I love it. But that's — you're kind of making my point. That's just not where we are now. In fact, the Democrats aren't there either. The phrase in that era, Clinton era, his phrase, safe, legal and rare. And I think that's when Democrats were aligned with most Americans. I think that's what most Americans want. Safe, legal and rare. That's not where the Democrats are now. They don't say that anymore. In fact, their own caucus on this in the House this week said, we don't want to call it choice anymore because something, something racism. Decision now. They're even talking about using pro-abortion. No one should be pro-abortion. The Senate had the ability to get Joe Manchin, to get a number of Republican senators if they had just put out legislation that said, are you in favor of maintaining Roe versus Wade? And they didn't do that. And they didn't do it because the progressives wanted to be able to drive more of a (18/43)
spike on this issue. So much of what we're seeing right now is unprecedented compared to the days of 1992. You didn't have opinions leaked. You didn't have people, masses demonstrated outside of the houses of Supreme Court. So what do you think about that? Should there be allowed, because certainly the press spokesman at the White House is down with this. Jen Psaki said, asked about this. These are people who are demonstrating outside the houses of the Supreme Court justices. She said, I don't have an official U.S. government position on where people protest, but we do. Yeah, I think we do. It's wrong. It's intimidation. It's against the law. I mean, do we have some footage of what, I mean, look, it's not, it's not, it's not terribly violent, obviously, but would you want this outside your house? No, there's a 1950 law that says you can't protest outside, outside a residence to influence a judge. There probably is a constitutional challenge that, that could win against that, or there (19/43)
possibly is, but it would be much better as is now going to happen in Washington to have a major rally. I might even be there to protest what could happen at the Supreme Court. What's that going to do? You know, let's just wait a month and see what the final decision is. Bill, what it might do is it might lose the Republicans, the Senate and the midterms, right? I mean, that's what it really comes down to. The Republicans have not wanted, in swing states, they don't want to run on this issue. They haven't had accountability. They haven't had responsibility. They've had settled law of the land and they can complain about it. That's generally where you want to be in a midterm election. So this is a challenge for the Senate. For the House, it's a wave for the Republicans either way, but this is dangerous for them. And I agree with you, Ian, that a clean bill is a better idea and it may still happen. And if it does happen, just maybe they can get 60 votes to reflect the views of 75 percent (20/43)
of the country. That would be a good idea. That would be a good idea. So what do you think about Elon Musk saying that he's going to restore Trump back to Twitter? Well, given that he said this morning that he's thinking, rethinking about whether or not he really wants to buy Twitter, Snoop Dogg is out now saying he might have to buy it. So he's going to buy it. You think he's going to buy it? I don't know if he's going to buy it. He just muses out loud a lot more. Yeah, about buying it. He's already got it. About buying it. Well, about everything. He's got 100 million followers. He doesn't need to pay $42 billion to get 150 million followers. Well, I think he wants something a little bigger. He's looking for something about free speech that's sort of important to liberals at one point in this country. It should still be important to liberals in this country. I hope so. Well, it doesn't look like it sometimes. It doesn't seem important to anybody in this country except this audience (21/43)
and the three of us. I've read an awful lot of shit written about Elon Musk. One column called him a not too bright billionaire. Oh, really? Column writer? You mean the guy who figured out Tesla and how to put a fucking rocket on the moon and send it back? He's the not too bright guy? I really want to see him spending more time changing our planet. And that's what he's been doing. It's extraordinary. I take the under if he buys Twitter on whether he'll be able to restore civil society on that site in the U.S. He says he's for the 80% that aren't on the extremes. But if you watch his behavior on Twitter, his bromanship on Twitter, his shit poster in chief on Twitter, he doesn't actually act that way. What are we talking about? Well, I mean, when he chose, for example, his anti-woke is among all of the he picks selectively all of the flags and issues that are on one side of the extreme, but doesn't pick any on the right side of the extreme. He just has a different perspective. Possibly (22/43)
it's because Twitter is very left wing to begin with. He's talking. He's talking. It's the same thing I do here is like some people say, oh, you know, you never used to make fun of the left so much. They didn't use to be so fucking nuts. I mean, I go where the comedy is. I go where the material is. And also, I want the audience is mostly liberal. I want to say the things that they don't hear because they're in a bubble. We're all in bubbles now. And then it's much better to get out of our bubbles and sit up. But on Elon Musk, he's brilliant. And he took his PayPal money and built the best in show rocket company and car company and all that. But watch out if he be careful what he wishes for, if he heads Twitter and all of a sudden all kinds of crazy stuff, you know, tear down the government and anti white supremacists and other stuff comes back there. His shareholders are going to sell their stock in his companies. And so I don't understand what he gets out of this. He's already got a (23/43)
huge audience. But that is what free speech is. It's defending the speech we hate. I mean, you must. I agree with that. OK, well, you just said no, no inciting people to riot. Well, in fact, it's already against the law inciting people to riot. No one's no one's even suggesting that. Well, that's why Trump. These are straw men. But the first thing he tweeted when he bought this, he said, you know, now I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and put the Coke back in. I thought when I read that, I thought, OK, daddy's home, because this is exactly what Twitter was at the beginning, what it should be irreverent, funny. I'm sure there are people like, OK, it is not funny. Addiction, all this. And it's like, if you don't think that's funny or that belongs on Twitter, you have always been the problem with Twitter. You are a square. You are a hater. You're too much full of anxiety. You don't know what fun is. If Twitter goes back to that, it would be a let alone. Let's understand what the problem is. The (24/43)
fundamental problem is advertising drives the business model and advertising is driven by your addiction on these social platforms, which requires more extremism and requires more outrage. It makes us more anxious. I don't think he's going to be able, if he buys it, I don't think he will be able to have a sustainable business model that isn't advertisement driven, that doesn't have all the bots on it. And I'm willing to make you a bet, I don't have any inside information, that he's not going to buy it. So there'll be some advertising on it. He's advertising. He says he's going to make the algorithm that drives things to you more transparent. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. All right. So if I may change this subject. We're coming up on Pride Month. June is Pride Month all over the country, all over the world, I guess. And it used to be there was one flag for Pride Month. It was this, the pride flag. And I noticed recently, talk about mission creep. Look at this. There's 96 (25/43)
flags now for, I know, for all the, and some of these, you know, one thing, it's one thing to have a sexual orientation, and then there's just things you like, like here's some of these, these are real. These are real. Sapiosexual. Attracted to intelligent people. You mean just like anyone who isn't a fucking moron? Okay, yes. Rubber Pride. This is a real flag for people who are into rubber and latex. That's it. Wow. One of the odds that three fifths of the audience is into rubber and latex. Really? Okay. It's the Rod Stewart effect, I feel. A queer platonic. These are ambiguously romantic or non-romantic relationships. I think we used to call that marriage. But anyway, let's, let's romantics. Romantic attraction without desire for reciprocation, whatever that word is. Reciprocation. I think they should spend more time on grammar and less on gender, but I don't even know what that means. I don't think those people should get a flag. I swear to God. I think we should throw them out of (26/43)
the U-Ed. Anyway, but we feel, at real time here, that this is not enough. This is, I'm sorry, we feel like being very exclusionary to some other groups who should be represented. Would you like to see their flags? We have some of their flags. For example, why isn't there a flag for quasi-homomotosexuals? Women who are turned on by gay hunchbacks should get a flag. Antisexuals, couples that only experience arousal if the dog is watching, should get a flag. Retrosexuals, these are cisgender women who always end up fucking the DJ at a wedding. Litereosexuals, gay or straight people who will only do it with a partner who has hidden an actual salami. I mentioned saposexual, the real one where you're attracted to, you know, intelligence, is also doofusexual, attracted to a total man. Cisgender men who intentionally overcook their balls in Tucker Carlson's classical channel. Harisexuals, men like Harry Styles who seem to be attracted to women but act very gay, also known as British. So we've (27/43)
finished our discussion of Elon Musk. What about the related issue of the Disinformation Governance Board? Now, people are calling this the Ministry of Truth. This came out a couple of weeks ago. The Department of Homeland Security, which by the way itself was always a creepy name. We just got used to it. Right? Department of Homeland Security. Okay. Now they've got an even creepier one. Disinformation Governance Board, yes, they're right to compare this to Orwell and the Ministry of Truth. It's exactly what it sounds like. Now, when they first explained it, they mentioned two things that they were going to go after. Russian disinformation, I said, okay, I'm all right with that. The Russia, that's not us and they are our adversary and they're trying to hurt us. And then traffickers, okay, I get that. People coming across the border, you can tell them misinformation, that's bad. But then here's from the Department of Homeland Security, disinformation is defined as false information that (28/43)
is deliberately spread with the intention to deceive or mislead. Well, you could have said that about if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, if you didn't like that. It said also, here's a phrase, can take many forms. Okay. Now, we're going faster down the slippery slope, including but not limited to the two I mentioned. Russia. Okay. So government should not be involved in deciding what's true or not true. As I think what a lot of people are saying. And my follow up question would be, who do you think the truth is going to be in 2025? Look, I like Voice of America. It had a role at a time when countries around the world- Voice of America? Yeah. But that was broadcast overseas. Broadcast overseas. Exactly. And people that needed good information turned to the Americans just to understand what the hell was going on. But this is a very different story. This is Americans becoming politicized in governments as to what information is and isn't true. And of course, it'll change (29/43)
constantly on the basis of being performative. We don't want that. It's not our country. Well, full disclosure, I'm on the Homeland Security bad name advisory committee. I was in Congress when the agency was set up and it has performed well. I don't get this piece. I wasn't consulted. It was leaked before it was rolled out. And if it were confined to a few missions that you mentioned, Bill, I think it'd be fine. And maybe that's what they will intend. But I certainly agree that something very broad scale that could become something like HUAC, the old Richard Nixon thing, would be highly unfortunate. And I don't think that's where it's going. And to bring it back to Twitter, the czar, Nina Jankowicz says she'd like some committee there within this governing board with the power to, quote, edit Twitter and add context. You mean like what Twitter is? Somebody says something and then you add context. These are not bright people in our government. OK, so speaking of mission creep, you're (30/43)
two experts on foreign affairs. Let me ask you about Ukraine. I mentioned in the monologue. It's interesting because this seems to be one of the few issues now that is has bipartisan support. And I mentioned we're now going to send 40 billion, I think. Maybe Rand Paul is a holdout here, but that probably no. No, it'll go through. It'll go through. So then we are coming up to almost giving Ukraine the amount of money that Russia spends on their entire defense budget, which I assume is to defend all 13 time zones and not just used to be. But, well, increasingly all of their troops are focused on Ukraine. Right. But I'm sure they still have to worry about things that are not just Ukraine. Oh, no. They've got no problems. Yes. OK. So I guess what I'm asking is, is there any limit? What is the Biden doctrine? If you most presidents have a doctrine, you know, Bush had don't fuck with Texas and, you know, whatever it was. Is there a Biden doctrine? And if so, what is it? The Biden doctrine is (31/43)
to ensure that the Ukrainian government continues to exist, that it's able to actually. But that's not a doctrine. That's a policy about one country. Oh, I thought you meant about Ukraine specifically. No, a Biden doctrine. A doctrine, you know, the Monroe Doctrine. You can't come into North America. That was our doctrine. You know, you can't mess with usually our doctrines are about you can't mess with us. I mean, he certainly I would say the most important thing in foreign policy has been to show that the United States is committed to its allies around the world, committed to the multilateral institutions that existed for a long time and that have eroded dramatically of the course of the last several decades. So I wrote a book about this, this book called Insanity Defense. Thank you for the soft. And my point is that since the end of the Cold War, we have not had a strategy for U.S. global leadership and we still don't have one. That's four and a half presidents in what Biden has is (32/43)
a policy on Ukraine. And Ian is right. We have reconnected and we should have to our partners and allies around the world, mostly in Europe. And it's a good thing that NATO is stronger. And it's a good thing that the EU is stronger. However, if you look at the vote in the United Nations in the General Assembly about whether to condemn Russia, 140 countries voted with us, 35 abstained and five voted against us. The 35 represent more than half the population of the world. Therefore, I don't think we yet have a doctrine for U.S. global leadership. And I think we urgently need one, regardless of how Ukraine comes out. And let's pray that Ukraine holds Russia back. Can I just go back to the money for a second? Because last week, the end of my show was all about the COVID money and like how much it was just stolen and how we just write checks for incredible amounts that we never even conceived of even 10 years ago. And I don't know, I don't trust anyone. I don't know. I mentioned the 900 (33/43)
million dollars for translators for Ukrainian refugees, who I guess will be coming here. That seems like an awful lot of money for that. Would we even have known about that if I didn't put it in the monologue? You know, it just seems like, it just seems like the first mission creep always happens. The request from the Biden administration was 33 billion. And Republicans said, no, it's not enough. We need three and a half billion more for the military. And the Democrats said, well, no, you've got to give an equal amount for humanitarian aid. You got to throw three and a half billion more in. So it goes to 40. That's literally, that's seven billion dollars. That's not nothing. No. That's stupid. So it should be 33. It shouldn't be 40. That's Congress acting irresponsibly. Why shouldn't it be 33? How do I know? It used to be a liberal thing to be suspicious of defense contractors. I mean, I can tell you what 33 is. They always had their snouts in the trough and they just want more money (34/43)
for... I can tell you what 33 actually is. Really? 33 actually is you look at the amount of spend in the first three months of the military campaign in Ukraine against Russia, and it is how can they keep going at that level for six more months? And by the way, if peace breaks out, we're not going to continue. You don't know that. You don't know how many javelin missiles would they cost. They know how many they've sent and they know how many they have to replace to Eastern Europe. That is actually what they're trying to do. But do you know what they really cost? Do you know what it really should be if they weren't being grafted? We don't know any of that. I don't, I don't agree with that. I just don't. I think our defense budget is probably too high. I represented a defense district. You always got a history on everything. Well, I do. I know. I've been in the U.S. for a long time. That's true. And I'm happy to be home, folks. But anyway, my point is that we still protect legacy programs (35/43)
to fight the last war. What we should be doing is figuring out current and future threats, a lot of them from technology, a big point in Ian's book, and funding that. And a current threat is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because if it doesn't stop there, it's going to Europe and our freedom agenda is dead. And we're for freedom. If you want to talk about money and what the Americans spend, literally we have had for how many administrations begging the Germans, the Europeans, to pay their fair share for NATO defense and they wouldn't do it. Begging them to take responsibility internationally, they wouldn't do it. And finally, not because of Biden, not because of Trump, not because of Obama, but because of Putin, the Germans and the rest are saying, my God, we have to spend on defense. And they're the ones with the economic sanctions, we're spending, we're getting more money because we're going to produce more oil and gas and we're going to send it to them and they're going to pay for (36/43)
it, market price. And they're the ones that had the trade with Russia. They're the ones that are taking on their sin. Finally, the Europeans are starting to pay and people like you and me and James should be applauding that. That's a good thing. I'm applauding him and I'm applauding you. Thank you very much. But it's time to get a new rules, everybody. New rules. Family Dollar Chain is being sued for having a warehouse invested with over a thousand rats. Their defense has to be, we're Family Dollar. You want baby formula that hasn't been gnawed on by rodents? Go to Target. You want the absolute lowest, the absolute lowest prices on slightly nibbled goods? Come see us. And remember, if we find out it kills the rats, we don't sell it. That's the Family Dollar Play. New rule. Men need a sideline reporter for when they say the wrong thing in bed. And it looks like Tammy's headed into the bathroom early as the injury from Ted's remark. Well, Troy, trainers tell me Tammy was deeply wounded (37/43)
when Ted asked, who's my dirty slut? And it looks like she will not be returning for the second half. Movie fans must admit that one of the dumbest tropes in science fiction is there's always some unelected old powerful tribunal that meets in secret and issues decrees to control the people. Wait, did I say dumbest? I meant tragically accurate. New rule. Before ordering the litter-made 9,000 automatic self-cleaning litter box, be aware you might just be training the cat to shit in your printer. So, Hunter Biden has to explain why he made the password to get into one of his laptops, analfuck69. Yes, he really did that. My question is, why that particular password and not something a little less easy for the people trying to break into guess. Take it into this laptop. Whose is it? Hunter Biden. Try analfuck69. If you haven't seen all the crime happening lately on your TV, it's probably because someone stole it. As we head into the midterm election season, one issue that has risen to the (38/43)
top of voter concerns is a general feeling these days that the social order is breaking down, that there are no more safe spaces anywhere. Street crime, home invasions, carjacking, porch pirates, medical staff attacked at hospitals, incivility at sports arenas, and I think the Grubhub driver is eating my french fries. On airplanes now, the in-flight entertainment is a fistfight. This year, the LA City Council voted that every homeless tent had to be removed from dozens of locations, yet every freeway overpass still looks like history's saddest Coachella. The homeless are both preyed upon and, frankly, a concern that they will do God knows what. You go out for a run in your neighborhood and you have to wonder whether that guy eyeing you on the corner is going to be this guy or this guy. We have a new thing in LA called follow home robberies, where gang members stake out nice restaurants and then follow home the people who leave inexpensive cars and force their way into their houses. (39/43)
That's why Paris Hilton now drives a 2009 PT Cruiser and eats a ceballo. A day doesn't go by where you can't find video of the latest smash and grab robbery, where thieves in broad daylight just smash the front windows of ritzy stores and take all the jewelry they can carry. They went to Jared. And when did they legalize shoplifting? They used to be shamed in shoplifting, or at least some skill. Now criminals just brazenly walk out of Walgreens again in broad daylight with a trash bag full of aisle three, while the security guard just watches. They have to keep even the most mundane products all caged up. CVS isn't a store, it's a zoo for teeth whitening strips. San Francisco in the last few years has seen 11 Walgreens and six CVS stores just give up and close because that town seems simply beyond law, which is heartbreaking because I like so many people love that city and I don't think it's corny to admit, yes, I left my heart in San Francisco. Also my wallet and iPhone. Many area (40/43)
citizens have been complaining in recent years about all the human feces in the streets, but now the streets are full of something else. They call it San Francisco snow. It's glass, piles and piles of shattered glass everywhere from car windows being smashed. It's so routine to have this happen to any parked car that people purposefully leave the windows down and the glove compartment open so thieves can see there's nothing of value or they leave a note on the car politely assuring the thief that there's nothing worth stealing and please don't break the windows. Dear Mr. Criminal, I hope this note finds you well. Please don't break my windows. Thanks, you're the best. P.S. there's a Walgreens around the corner if you want to hit that. What is so disturbing here is not just that there's more crime and mayhem, it's the audacity of it all. Like there's no lines anymore that can't be crossed. Like don't walk on a stage during a live show. Or don't fuck with Mike Tyson. I mean who needs the (41/43)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Facebook is out here in California. We know this is a bad week. It's the start of fire season. It's what we're applauding, fire season? All week, their stories were about down in Laguna. They said, you know, fires are destroying multimillion dollar homes, or as we call them in California, homes. I hate fire season. I mean, the air quality, air quality's already bad. On the bright side, it helps Amber heard with her fake cry. I like it. This is a people. This is a crisis we have. We're running out of water. But water parks are asking kids to pee in the pool. And it's really, this water thing, it's so tragic because FEMA says we would have been OK. But during COVID, we used up all the water scrubbing the mail. Now we're out of in this country? Baby formula. Perfect. Perfect. Just when the Supreme Court comes up with a formula for more babies. Yes, ladies, you're in America now. Not only do we make you (1/43)
carry the baby to term, now we're going to make you breastfeed the little thing, OK? Everybody wants to know, why are we out of the, you know, baby formula? Well, a few issues. Supply chain issues, which are real. Contamination, that happened in a couple of places. That's real. And of course, Nick Cannon. So that's very right. But you know, I mean, inflation, is that not what is on everybody's mind? That's like the subject of the day everywhere. Prices are up 11%. That's a really big jump. We haven't had that in decades and decades. I'll say this for Donald Trump. When he was president, America felt cheap. The gasoline, whoa, that has people very upset. I was valleying my, I was valleying my car the other day. And the valle guy said, pull it up a little. I said, I can't afford it. You know what we always have money for is Ukraine. We all support Ukraine. Of course, I don't. But boy, there are now 40 billion more going there, which will bring in the total that we've given them so far to (2/43)
over 50 billion. The defense budget of Russia is only 61 billion. Can we pay them to leave? Is that completely out of the question? It's like, and look at this. In the 40 billion, almost $1 billion, $900 million goes to buying, I guess, or paying translators for the Ukrainian refugees we're going to bring here. So if your kid is in a shitty school that's underfunded in America, here's what you do. Send them to Moldova, wait for Russia to invade, then bring them back. And finally, before we start the big show, I should remind you, this is Friday the 13th. They like fire, they like Friday the 13th. This is just a hopped up crowd. No, you know, a lot of things bad luck. Be careful of a bad luck. You need to step on a crack, if a mirror breaks, you know? Oh, and this year, if you break a condom, 18 years bad luck. All right, we got a great show here. He is a two time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and one of the best selling music artists of all time. He returns to his residency at Caesars (3/43)
Palette tonight and then kicks off his North American summer tour in June. I can't believe he came here. Rod Stewart is on the show. He's so proud. Wasn't that the best monologue? I tell you. All right. I see you haven't sold out. It's like you went for seats. We're here to talk. That's for COVID. Oh, OK. That's it. We're here to talk about you. This is a big night for you. You're starting your big world tour for 2022 and you're in Caesars Palette. Thank you so much. Because you've got to like fly out of here. You're on stage tonight at Caesars Palace. Well, they put it back. Usually I go on stage at 7.30. They put it back to 8.30. But I still have to do sound check, check all the girls' costumes. Let's be honest. The show really doesn't start till you get there. Well, it doesn't. But I don't want to be late. I don't like to keep my customers waiting. I mean, rock stars are known for keeping audiences waiting. What is your history of that over the years? Were you pretty prompt with (4/43)
your concerts? Yeah, always. First of all, it's people who've paid a lot of money. They've got babysitters, hired cars, and bicycles, and they get there on time. You don't want to keep them waiting. You want to get out there before you're supposed to go on to keep them happy. That's great because that's not what most rock stars do. Well, that's their business. It's not me. Yeah, I just think great. And how long is the show that you do? Tonight will be per hour and a half. But we're only allowed to do an hour and a half at Caesars Palace because they get you on stage. Right, because they want everyone to go back into the old, you know, spend the money. Exactly. But on the road, it's a little more if you're not at a gambling casino? Oh, yeah, we play two hours, 15. That's amazing. What was it when you started? Because like, you know what the Beatles did when they were touring? 15 minutes. 25. Yeah, that's what we used to do, yeah. Yeah. That's nuts. No, it is nuts. And here you are all (5/43)
these years later. I mean, I have your latest album. I'm so glad you went back to making an album of new material. Yeah, fantastic. The Hercules album, you sound the same. You haven't lost anything. Well, I look the same. Well, your hair is. You know, you know, you know, let me tell you something. You know what the Queen of England and I have got in common? We both had the same haircut for 60 years. I remember when I first came out here in 1983. I'd never been here, and I never saw a palm tree. And I looked, and I went, oh, it looks like Rod Stewart's head. It does. Yeah, it does, yeah. I'm eternally grateful it's still up there. No, unbelievable. Could you laugh? And the show is called The Hits at the University, which is fantastic. I mean, that's what people want to see. Oh, of course, yeah. And very few people in music have 90 minutes or two hours of just the hits. You do. I mean, I've seen you in concert, and there's no good time to go to the bathroom. No, absolutely. That's, you (6/43)
should put that on the sign. Rod Stewart. You'll never want to go to the bathroom. Sure. Sure. You never want to go to the bathroom. You know, I always think my idols were, you know, Sam Cooke, you know, East Reading, and Muddy Waters, all the really great black singers. If I went to see them, I would want to hear their hits. I don't really know stuff, really. That's why I try and give my crowd. And, you know, you, over the years, have been a sort of equal opportunity recorder of your own material or other people. You did a lot of covers. But I was going through the stuff, and like all the big ones, you know, Maggie Mae, and You Wear It Well, and Hot Legs, and Do You Think I'm Sexy, and Tonight's the Night, and, you know, those were your songs. I feel like you, as a songwriter, needs a better publicist. I don't think my... Yeah, I don't think... The greatest publishers are the people by the records. Yes. They're the ones, mate. They make a big hit singles. I don't think that people (7/43)
think of you as a songwriter as much as you are. No, I think it's what I look like, you know, look. Well... I... What else could I have been for a rock star? You know what I mean? I know. I brought you something. Really? That... That I had been hanging around my house for 51 years. Oh, my God. That's my... And it smells old, too. Is it... It's Maggie Mae. That's Maggie. I bought that when I was 15. No. Well, yeah, how do you think I got it? It didn't... He was 15 when he bought this. Right. I was 26. I know, but how does it feel... Do you feel anything when you see an artist that is about something that was so important in your life? Yeah, it... When it went to number one in the UK and America, I remember I was driving through London and it came on the radio. It was number one. I just turned my car around and went back to my mom and dad's little house and gave them the biggest kiss and they were all crying. It was Maggie at last. And that song, I mean, this bitterness, the... The... (8/43)
The... The... The... The... This bitterness that you had about Maggie Mae, you know, I don't want to see your face anymore and, you know, the morning sun really makes you look old. I mean, it's some nasty fucking stuff in there. It is. Really nasty about that. It is. It really is. And it's nearly a true story. It was my first chat. It was back that time. Yeah. Lasted about four seconds. You're a nasty stain on the floor. Considering all the women you've had since then, are you over the bitterness to Maggie? I feel like you got your revenge on her with... Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know what? Yeah. Yeah. Because I read your book, your autobiography. I mean, oh, my God, the women. I... I came just reading this book. I... I... I mean, I remember in my life thinking, oh, yeah, I always sort of knew who your girlfriend was. Like, I could mark chapters in my life. Oh, yeah, I remember when he was Bert Ackland and... those supermodels. Yeah. I've been very lucky because I don't really (9/43)
think I'm that attractive that must have something about me. Maybe it's the old nose. Are you kidding? At one time, you were dating two supermodels named Kelly. That's a lot of Kellys at one time. Let me tell you, Bill, looking back, it was nothing to be proud of. You know, it was really serious. Stop it! I mean, you see, there's a part where you talk about going to... I remember the Dome. Yeah. Was the rest... Was the hot restaurant in the 80s. Yeah. And you said they kind of had a bathroom just private for the beautiful people. And you talk about having sex between courses. No. That's... You're exaggerating now. That's what you wrote. No. Between courses. No, I never did that. I'd like to check the book. No, I don't think I ever did that. I'm sort of embarrassed about what I did and I'm sort of proud. It was a different era. Okay. You know, it was a totally different era. But you do love being a rock star. Yeah, I do. Really, right, I do. And I remember... And I met... Also, when you (10/43)
broke, you said you never thought about it, except you went to see this new band, The Rolling Stones. Before, they were like what we know as The Rolling Stones. You said they were sitting on stools wearing cardigans. Yeah. And you saw Mick Jagger and you went, I can do that. Yeah, exactly. There's only 12 people in the audience. My girlfriend was girlfriend... Friends with Mick's girlfriend, Chrissy Shrimpton, at the time. She said, come and see my boyfriend. Or my boyfriend sings. Come and see him in the band. Totally unknown. There's 12 people in the audience. And then, shush, they went off. They're still great. But... New English really seemed to have a work ethic. Like the people... You don't look at it like, oh, I'm a big star. You look at it like this is my craft. I mean, when I look at your discography, I mean, almost every year you put out an album. Those first five years that we knew you, you were also in a band while you were a single artist. The Faces was a great band. Well, (11/43)
it's... It's a love affair that surely hasn't gone away yet. I love... I can't wait to get on the stage to know. Well, I'm very, really nervous tonight. I'll bet. We've changed all the running order and it's... We'll be glad when it's over. But I truly love what I do and I feel blessed. Well, you're playing with the house money. I think they're gonna love you. And, you know, I know... I know your big hobby is trains, right? Model railroads. Model railroads. You know who else, what other great singer had that hobby? Louis Young. Frank Sinatra. Frank, yeah. Yeah. I'm having some as well. Yeah. Well, like you, a great ladies man. A lot of his life in the tabloids, but he also always put in the work. Yeah. Like you do. I mean, it's all there. Thank you. We thank you for that. Have a great residency there and a great tour. Thanks. Great to see you, my friend. Greg Spiller. Thank you. Wow, that's fine. Oh, no, it's not. You have your own. Look at our panel. The owner and president of Eurasia (12/43)
Group and author of the new book, The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World, Ian Bremmer. She served nine terms as the California Congresswoman and was a ranking member of the House Intelligence Commission. She is the author of Insanity Defense, Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe, Jane Harman. Thanks, Jane. All right, so last week I started this job by saying nobody likes to talk about abortion, and then we did. So let's do it again. I don't really want to, but I mean, it's just what's on everybody's mind. I would say it's a big issue. It's so big that it makes me think about the Civil War, you know, pre-Civil War, because we seem to be going toward this place in America where we're going to be two countries, one where you're a free woman and one where it's a Dred Scott situation, you know? I mean, when you look at some of the things that are being proposed in some of these states, I mean, Louisiana says (13/43)
flat out it's a homicide. So when you drive from L.A. to Nevada on one side of the border, you're just a free person. The other side, you're a criminal. You can fly across the country and gain and lose your reproductive rights 20 times. How can America sustain that? It can't, and it's wrong. And what's wrong with this is that it will get worse unless the Supreme Court, let's pray, let's pray, comes out with a different decision from the draft opinion, one that is more to the center. I think it could happen. I think there are institutionalists on the court and this will absolutely politicize the court for years to come. I think that already happened. Well, I actually don't. You don't think the court has been politicized? Yes, but the hearing process politicizes choosing justices and when they get on the court, they have firm views, but they can change. For example, I'll just stop with this. Harry Blackmun, who wrote Roe v. Wade, was a Republican appointee of Richard Nixon. And I don't (14/43)
think anyone expected him to write that opinion, and he did. And it was, for the time, radical and important for women. So that's the Democratic plan hope. I accept that that's what happened when Roe vs. Wade was written, but that was a time when jurisprudence actually held sway among the Supreme Court justices. We don't appoint Supreme Court justices that way anymore. It is all Dems or all Republicans. The process has become subverted. We know that. And if you read the draft opinion, I know you did, that Alito had leaked, I mean, it reads like a culture war document by an analyst. It doesn't read like it was written by a jurist. I mean, it refers to Plessy and Ferguson and makes it sound like people that support abortion rights are racists and eugenicists. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary, which is why I am hoping it won't survive the process. But here's what's going on. Here's what's actually happening in states. I mean, let's just take Missouri. Now, of course, a lot of these (15/43)
states, it's going to be a race to the bottom to see who can get the harshest treatment or give out the harshest treatment in Missouri. It would restrict you even if you were a nonresident and you had sex in Missouri. You have to prove to the state of Missouri you didn't fuck there. It is the show me state. Also, you couldn't get telemedicine. I mean, a lot of times women get the morning after pill. You just have to call up with a consultation with the doctor over the phone. You would have to use a phone from another state. Next on the agenda, reining in big government. And a lot of the Waffle House states are going to have laws like this or worse. I just wonder that this issue gives a tangible sort of concrete pretext to the people who are already talking about some kind of division of this country, some kind of civil war, some kind of secession, some kind of we can't live together. So this gives a real issue to it. I wonder where this is going. I think there are real issues that are (16/43)
dividing our country. Our totally dysfunctional Congress is one of them. But I would say in this case, 75 percent of Americans support the right to choose. And I don't know under some conditions, but Roe v. Wade was not under all Roe v. Wade was not abortion on demand. It was abortion until if a woman chooses that, until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which was about the third trimester. Let me just say, Bill, I just want to say one thing. I got elected on this issue. I did. What year? 1992. OK. Let me just tell you the story for one second. 1992 open seat. Mel Levine had retired and there were seven Republicans and five Democrats in a lean Republican district. One of the Republicans was Maureen Reagan, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, who was still pretty vital and was helping her. She lost the primary. She was pro-choice. And the woman who won the primary was anti-choice. And all of a sudden, all the Republican pro-choice women who supported her came and asked me if they could (17/43)
be Republicans for Harmon. Thank you, Republican women. That's why I love it. But that's — you're kind of making my point. That's just not where we are now. In fact, the Democrats aren't there either. The phrase in that era, Clinton era, his phrase, safe, legal and rare. And I think that's when Democrats were aligned with most Americans. I think that's what most Americans want. Safe, legal and rare. That's not where the Democrats are now. They don't say that anymore. In fact, their own caucus on this in the House this week said, we don't want to call it choice anymore because something, something racism. Decision now. They're even talking about using pro-abortion. No one should be pro-abortion. The Senate had the ability to get Joe Manchin, to get a number of Republican senators if they had just put out legislation that said, are you in favor of maintaining Roe versus Wade? And they didn't do that. And they didn't do it because the progressives wanted to be able to drive more of a (18/43)
spike on this issue. So much of what we're seeing right now is unprecedented compared to the days of 1992. You didn't have opinions leaked. You didn't have people, masses demonstrated outside of the houses of Supreme Court. So what do you think about that? Should there be allowed, because certainly the press spokesman at the White House is down with this. Jen Psaki said, asked about this. These are people who are demonstrating outside the houses of the Supreme Court justices. She said, I don't have an official U.S. government position on where people protest, but we do. Yeah, I think we do. It's wrong. It's intimidation. It's against the law. I mean, do we have some footage of what, I mean, look, it's not, it's not, it's not terribly violent, obviously, but would you want this outside your house? No, there's a 1950 law that says you can't protest outside, outside a residence to influence a judge. There probably is a constitutional challenge that, that could win against that, or there (19/43)
possibly is, but it would be much better as is now going to happen in Washington to have a major rally. I might even be there to protest what could happen at the Supreme Court. What's that going to do? You know, let's just wait a month and see what the final decision is. Bill, what it might do is it might lose the Republicans, the Senate and the midterms, right? I mean, that's what it really comes down to. The Republicans have not wanted, in swing states, they don't want to run on this issue. They haven't had accountability. They haven't had responsibility. They've had settled law of the land and they can complain about it. That's generally where you want to be in a midterm election. So this is a challenge for the Senate. For the House, it's a wave for the Republicans either way, but this is dangerous for them. And I agree with you, Ian, that a clean bill is a better idea and it may still happen. And if it does happen, just maybe they can get 60 votes to reflect the views of 75 percent (20/43)
of the country. That would be a good idea. That would be a good idea. So what do you think about Elon Musk saying that he's going to restore Trump back to Twitter? Well, given that he said this morning that he's thinking, rethinking about whether or not he really wants to buy Twitter, Snoop Dogg is out now saying he might have to buy it. So he's going to buy it. You think he's going to buy it? I don't know if he's going to buy it. He just muses out loud a lot more. Yeah, about buying it. He's already got it. About buying it. Well, about everything. He's got 100 million followers. He doesn't need to pay $42 billion to get 150 million followers. Well, I think he wants something a little bigger. He's looking for something about free speech that's sort of important to liberals at one point in this country. It should still be important to liberals in this country. I hope so. Well, it doesn't look like it sometimes. It doesn't seem important to anybody in this country except this audience (21/43)
and the three of us. I've read an awful lot of shit written about Elon Musk. One column called him a not too bright billionaire. Oh, really? Column writer? You mean the guy who figured out Tesla and how to put a fucking rocket on the moon and send it back? He's the not too bright guy? I really want to see him spending more time changing our planet. And that's what he's been doing. It's extraordinary. I take the under if he buys Twitter on whether he'll be able to restore civil society on that site in the U.S. He says he's for the 80% that aren't on the extremes. But if you watch his behavior on Twitter, his bromanship on Twitter, his shit poster in chief on Twitter, he doesn't actually act that way. What are we talking about? Well, I mean, when he chose, for example, his anti-woke is among all of the he picks selectively all of the flags and issues that are on one side of the extreme, but doesn't pick any on the right side of the extreme. He just has a different perspective. Possibly (22/43)
it's because Twitter is very left wing to begin with. He's talking. He's talking. It's the same thing I do here is like some people say, oh, you know, you never used to make fun of the left so much. They didn't use to be so fucking nuts. I mean, I go where the comedy is. I go where the material is. And also, I want the audience is mostly liberal. I want to say the things that they don't hear because they're in a bubble. We're all in bubbles now. And then it's much better to get out of our bubbles and sit up. But on Elon Musk, he's brilliant. And he took his PayPal money and built the best in show rocket company and car company and all that. But watch out if he be careful what he wishes for, if he heads Twitter and all of a sudden all kinds of crazy stuff, you know, tear down the government and anti white supremacists and other stuff comes back there. His shareholders are going to sell their stock in his companies. And so I don't understand what he gets out of this. He's already got a (23/43)
huge audience. But that is what free speech is. It's defending the speech we hate. I mean, you must. I agree with that. OK, well, you just said no, no inciting people to riot. Well, in fact, it's already against the law inciting people to riot. No one's no one's even suggesting that. Well, that's why Trump. These are straw men. But the first thing he tweeted when he bought this, he said, you know, now I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and put the Coke back in. I thought when I read that, I thought, OK, daddy's home, because this is exactly what Twitter was at the beginning, what it should be irreverent, funny. I'm sure there are people like, OK, it is not funny. Addiction, all this. And it's like, if you don't think that's funny or that belongs on Twitter, you have always been the problem with Twitter. You are a square. You are a hater. You're too much full of anxiety. You don't know what fun is. If Twitter goes back to that, it would be a let alone. Let's understand what the problem is. The (24/43)
fundamental problem is advertising drives the business model and advertising is driven by your addiction on these social platforms, which requires more extremism and requires more outrage. It makes us more anxious. I don't think he's going to be able, if he buys it, I don't think he will be able to have a sustainable business model that isn't advertisement driven, that doesn't have all the bots on it. And I'm willing to make you a bet, I don't have any inside information, that he's not going to buy it. So there'll be some advertising on it. He's advertising. He says he's going to make the algorithm that drives things to you more transparent. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. All right. So if I may change this subject. We're coming up on Pride Month. June is Pride Month all over the country, all over the world, I guess. And it used to be there was one flag for Pride Month. It was this, the pride flag. And I noticed recently, talk about mission creep. Look at this. There's 96 (25/43)
flags now for, I know, for all the, and some of these, you know, one thing, it's one thing to have a sexual orientation, and then there's just things you like, like here's some of these, these are real. These are real. Sapiosexual. Attracted to intelligent people. You mean just like anyone who isn't a fucking moron? Okay, yes. Rubber Pride. This is a real flag for people who are into rubber and latex. That's it. Wow. One of the odds that three fifths of the audience is into rubber and latex. Really? Okay. It's the Rod Stewart effect, I feel. A queer platonic. These are ambiguously romantic or non-romantic relationships. I think we used to call that marriage. But anyway, let's, let's romantics. Romantic attraction without desire for reciprocation, whatever that word is. Reciprocation. I think they should spend more time on grammar and less on gender, but I don't even know what that means. I don't think those people should get a flag. I swear to God. I think we should throw them out of (26/43)
the U-Ed. Anyway, but we feel, at real time here, that this is not enough. This is, I'm sorry, we feel like being very exclusionary to some other groups who should be represented. Would you like to see their flags? We have some of their flags. For example, why isn't there a flag for quasi-homomotosexuals? Women who are turned on by gay hunchbacks should get a flag. Antisexuals, couples that only experience arousal if the dog is watching, should get a flag. Retrosexuals, these are cisgender women who always end up fucking the DJ at a wedding. Litereosexuals, gay or straight people who will only do it with a partner who has hidden an actual salami. I mentioned saposexual, the real one where you're attracted to, you know, intelligence, is also doofusexual, attracted to a total man. Cisgender men who intentionally overcook their balls in Tucker Carlson's classical channel. Harisexuals, men like Harry Styles who seem to be attracted to women but act very gay, also known as British. So we've (27/43)
finished our discussion of Elon Musk. What about the related issue of the Disinformation Governance Board? Now, people are calling this the Ministry of Truth. This came out a couple of weeks ago. The Department of Homeland Security, which by the way itself was always a creepy name. We just got used to it. Right? Department of Homeland Security. Okay. Now they've got an even creepier one. Disinformation Governance Board, yes, they're right to compare this to Orwell and the Ministry of Truth. It's exactly what it sounds like. Now, when they first explained it, they mentioned two things that they were going to go after. Russian disinformation, I said, okay, I'm all right with that. The Russia, that's not us and they are our adversary and they're trying to hurt us. And then traffickers, okay, I get that. People coming across the border, you can tell them misinformation, that's bad. But then here's from the Department of Homeland Security, disinformation is defined as false information that (28/43)
is deliberately spread with the intention to deceive or mislead. Well, you could have said that about if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, if you didn't like that. It said also, here's a phrase, can take many forms. Okay. Now, we're going faster down the slippery slope, including but not limited to the two I mentioned. Russia. Okay. So government should not be involved in deciding what's true or not true. As I think what a lot of people are saying. And my follow up question would be, who do you think the truth is going to be in 2025? Look, I like Voice of America. It had a role at a time when countries around the world- Voice of America? Yeah. But that was broadcast overseas. Broadcast overseas. Exactly. And people that needed good information turned to the Americans just to understand what the hell was going on. But this is a very different story. This is Americans becoming politicized in governments as to what information is and isn't true. And of course, it'll change (29/43)
constantly on the basis of being performative. We don't want that. It's not our country. Well, full disclosure, I'm on the Homeland Security bad name advisory committee. I was in Congress when the agency was set up and it has performed well. I don't get this piece. I wasn't consulted. It was leaked before it was rolled out. And if it were confined to a few missions that you mentioned, Bill, I think it'd be fine. And maybe that's what they will intend. But I certainly agree that something very broad scale that could become something like HUAC, the old Richard Nixon thing, would be highly unfortunate. And I don't think that's where it's going. And to bring it back to Twitter, the czar, Nina Jankowicz says she'd like some committee there within this governing board with the power to, quote, edit Twitter and add context. You mean like what Twitter is? Somebody says something and then you add context. These are not bright people in our government. OK, so speaking of mission creep, you're (30/43)
two experts on foreign affairs. Let me ask you about Ukraine. I mentioned in the monologue. It's interesting because this seems to be one of the few issues now that is has bipartisan support. And I mentioned we're now going to send 40 billion, I think. Maybe Rand Paul is a holdout here, but that probably no. No, it'll go through. It'll go through. So then we are coming up to almost giving Ukraine the amount of money that Russia spends on their entire defense budget, which I assume is to defend all 13 time zones and not just used to be. But, well, increasingly all of their troops are focused on Ukraine. Right. But I'm sure they still have to worry about things that are not just Ukraine. Oh, no. They've got no problems. Yes. OK. So I guess what I'm asking is, is there any limit? What is the Biden doctrine? If you most presidents have a doctrine, you know, Bush had don't fuck with Texas and, you know, whatever it was. Is there a Biden doctrine? And if so, what is it? The Biden doctrine is (31/43)
to ensure that the Ukrainian government continues to exist, that it's able to actually. But that's not a doctrine. That's a policy about one country. Oh, I thought you meant about Ukraine specifically. No, a Biden doctrine. A doctrine, you know, the Monroe Doctrine. You can't come into North America. That was our doctrine. You know, you can't mess with usually our doctrines are about you can't mess with us. I mean, he certainly I would say the most important thing in foreign policy has been to show that the United States is committed to its allies around the world, committed to the multilateral institutions that existed for a long time and that have eroded dramatically of the course of the last several decades. So I wrote a book about this, this book called Insanity Defense. Thank you for the soft. And my point is that since the end of the Cold War, we have not had a strategy for U.S. global leadership and we still don't have one. That's four and a half presidents in what Biden has is (32/43)
a policy on Ukraine. And Ian is right. We have reconnected and we should have to our partners and allies around the world, mostly in Europe. And it's a good thing that NATO is stronger. And it's a good thing that the EU is stronger. However, if you look at the vote in the United Nations in the General Assembly about whether to condemn Russia, 140 countries voted with us, 35 abstained and five voted against us. The 35 represent more than half the population of the world. Therefore, I don't think we yet have a doctrine for U.S. global leadership. And I think we urgently need one, regardless of how Ukraine comes out. And let's pray that Ukraine holds Russia back. Can I just go back to the money for a second? Because last week, the end of my show was all about the COVID money and like how much it was just stolen and how we just write checks for incredible amounts that we never even conceived of even 10 years ago. And I don't know, I don't trust anyone. I don't know. I mentioned the 900 (33/43)
million dollars for translators for Ukrainian refugees, who I guess will be coming here. That seems like an awful lot of money for that. Would we even have known about that if I didn't put it in the monologue? You know, it just seems like, it just seems like the first mission creep always happens. The request from the Biden administration was 33 billion. And Republicans said, no, it's not enough. We need three and a half billion more for the military. And the Democrats said, well, no, you've got to give an equal amount for humanitarian aid. You got to throw three and a half billion more in. So it goes to 40. That's literally, that's seven billion dollars. That's not nothing. No. That's stupid. So it should be 33. It shouldn't be 40. That's Congress acting irresponsibly. Why shouldn't it be 33? How do I know? It used to be a liberal thing to be suspicious of defense contractors. I mean, I can tell you what 33 is. They always had their snouts in the trough and they just want more money (34/43)
for... I can tell you what 33 actually is. Really? 33 actually is you look at the amount of spend in the first three months of the military campaign in Ukraine against Russia, and it is how can they keep going at that level for six more months? And by the way, if peace breaks out, we're not going to continue. You don't know that. You don't know how many javelin missiles would they cost. They know how many they've sent and they know how many they have to replace to Eastern Europe. That is actually what they're trying to do. But do you know what they really cost? Do you know what it really should be if they weren't being grafted? We don't know any of that. I don't, I don't agree with that. I just don't. I think our defense budget is probably too high. I represented a defense district. You always got a history on everything. Well, I do. I know. I've been in the U.S. for a long time. That's true. And I'm happy to be home, folks. But anyway, my point is that we still protect legacy programs (35/43)
to fight the last war. What we should be doing is figuring out current and future threats, a lot of them from technology, a big point in Ian's book, and funding that. And a current threat is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because if it doesn't stop there, it's going to Europe and our freedom agenda is dead. And we're for freedom. If you want to talk about money and what the Americans spend, literally we have had for how many administrations begging the Germans, the Europeans, to pay their fair share for NATO defense and they wouldn't do it. Begging them to take responsibility internationally, they wouldn't do it. And finally, not because of Biden, not because of Trump, not because of Obama, but because of Putin, the Germans and the rest are saying, my God, we have to spend on defense. And they're the ones with the economic sanctions, we're spending, we're getting more money because we're going to produce more oil and gas and we're going to send it to them and they're going to pay for (36/43)
it, market price. And they're the ones that had the trade with Russia. They're the ones that are taking on their sin. Finally, the Europeans are starting to pay and people like you and me and James should be applauding that. That's a good thing. I'm applauding him and I'm applauding you. Thank you very much. But it's time to get a new rules, everybody. New rules. Family Dollar Chain is being sued for having a warehouse invested with over a thousand rats. Their defense has to be, we're Family Dollar. You want baby formula that hasn't been gnawed on by rodents? Go to Target. You want the absolute lowest, the absolute lowest prices on slightly nibbled goods? Come see us. And remember, if we find out it kills the rats, we don't sell it. That's the Family Dollar Play. New rule. Men need a sideline reporter for when they say the wrong thing in bed. And it looks like Tammy's headed into the bathroom early as the injury from Ted's remark. Well, Troy, trainers tell me Tammy was deeply wounded (37/43)
when Ted asked, who's my dirty slut? And it looks like she will not be returning for the second half. Movie fans must admit that one of the dumbest tropes in science fiction is there's always some unelected old powerful tribunal that meets in secret and issues decrees to control the people. Wait, did I say dumbest? I meant tragically accurate. New rule. Before ordering the litter-made 9,000 automatic self-cleaning litter box, be aware you might just be training the cat to shit in your printer. So, Hunter Biden has to explain why he made the password to get into one of his laptops, analfuck69. Yes, he really did that. My question is, why that particular password and not something a little less easy for the people trying to break into guess. Take it into this laptop. Whose is it? Hunter Biden. Try analfuck69. If you haven't seen all the crime happening lately on your TV, it's probably because someone stole it. As we head into the midterm election season, one issue that has risen to the (38/43)
top of voter concerns is a general feeling these days that the social order is breaking down, that there are no more safe spaces anywhere. Street crime, home invasions, carjacking, porch pirates, medical staff attacked at hospitals, incivility at sports arenas, and I think the Grubhub driver is eating my french fries. On airplanes now, the in-flight entertainment is a fistfight. This year, the LA City Council voted that every homeless tent had to be removed from dozens of locations, yet every freeway overpass still looks like history's saddest Coachella. The homeless are both preyed upon and, frankly, a concern that they will do God knows what. You go out for a run in your neighborhood and you have to wonder whether that guy eyeing you on the corner is going to be this guy or this guy. We have a new thing in LA called follow home robberies, where gang members stake out nice restaurants and then follow home the people who leave inexpensive cars and force their way into their houses. (39/43)
That's why Paris Hilton now drives a 2009 PT Cruiser and eats a ceballo. A day doesn't go by where you can't find video of the latest smash and grab robbery, where thieves in broad daylight just smash the front windows of ritzy stores and take all the jewelry they can carry. They went to Jared. And when did they legalize shoplifting? They used to be shamed in shoplifting, or at least some skill. Now criminals just brazenly walk out of Walgreens again in broad daylight with a trash bag full of aisle three, while the security guard just watches. They have to keep even the most mundane products all caged up. CVS isn't a store, it's a zoo for teeth whitening strips. San Francisco in the last few years has seen 11 Walgreens and six CVS stores just give up and close because that town seems simply beyond law, which is heartbreaking because I like so many people love that city and I don't think it's corny to admit, yes, I left my heart in San Francisco. Also my wallet and iPhone. Many area (40/43)
citizens have been complaining in recent years about all the human feces in the streets, but now the streets are full of something else. They call it San Francisco snow. It's glass, piles and piles of shattered glass everywhere from car windows being smashed. It's so routine to have this happen to any parked car that people purposefully leave the windows down and the glove compartment open so thieves can see there's nothing of value or they leave a note on the car politely assuring the thief that there's nothing worth stealing and please don't break the windows. Dear Mr. Criminal, I hope this note finds you well. Please don't break my windows. Thanks, you're the best. P.S. there's a Walgreens around the corner if you want to hit that. What is so disturbing here is not just that there's more crime and mayhem, it's the audacity of it all. Like there's no lines anymore that can't be crossed. Like don't walk on a stage during a live show. Or don't fuck with Mike Tyson. I mean who needs the (41/43)
metaverse when you can do whatever you want in real life? The police still need reform, yes, but we can't just allow them to be hunted and targeted for assassination as has happened over a hundred times in 2021. I know there are big issues behind crime like income inequality and racism that need to be addressed but let's not get so wrapped up in becoming great again or building back better that we forget not to become El Salvador. Democrats like to point out that crime has actually been worse before. Yes, true, and who gives a fuck? I'm not living before, I'm living now. In 2020 America experienced its largest annual increase in homicides ever. Assaults are up, mass shootings are up, voters' focus is safe streets, not making women swimming safe for men. Democrats can tell voters it's not so bad or that they're stupid and racist and we don't want their votes anyway but this guy does. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. Yeah, I'll keep the shit to shoe level. That (42/43)
is a powerful campaign theme when there's that feeling that things are descending into every man for himself, lawlessness. New York was like that in the Son of Sam 70s, only back then we had Taxi Driver. Now we have Uber driver. He doesn't kill pimps but his podcast is called Are You Talking to Me? Thank you very much. I'll be at the State Theater in Minneapolis June 4th at the New Jersey Performing Arts in Newark July 8th at the Wang Center in Boston July 9th. I want to thank Ian Bremmer, Jane Harman and Sir Rod Stewart. Go to YouTube and join us on Overtime. Thank you folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (43/43)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill Maher I'm excited. I think I know why you're happy tonight because they finally started to shut up about the damn eclipse Was this really so interesting? Ooh Darkness Wow And of course of course being America it can't just happen in Eclipse have to be a million conspiracy theories about an eclipse Marjorie Taylor Greene said It's not an eclipse the Sun was hit by a cargo ship But on to actually more much more sober news that they say Iran is about to attack Israel Yeah, I Know and one reason they know a Harvard completely sold out of turbans Yes, Gary stuff the White House White House says they are watching the situation very very closely and if it works there They're gonna try it on our own border What's gonna happen? I just know this if Netanyahu goes no nuclear I bet you next year There's a movie called be behind her but on to the new really Shocking news of the week OJ Simpson died yesterday I know it was (1/44)
a complete shock to people and because he had just posted a video Saying that he felt great. It makes you wonder if there was anything else he ever lied about Hey He's a controversial figure still a hero to a lot of men a lot of married guys Fantasize about killing their wife and not getting caught but he actually did it. Oh Here's some sad marriage news the Golden Bachelor Getting divorced Rosie gave her lasted longer than the marriage I It's still in that thing on the kitchen table, ah, man, this one hit me hard I mean, I thought of all the sham phony artificial trumped-up Hollywood marriages. This was one of the good ones Well, I guess be careful with your love life I feel like that's the theme of the show this week Because I don't know if you saw what's going on in Arizona anybody here from Arizona of birth and age Whoa because the Arizona Supreme Court they breathed new life ironically into a very old law that says basically abortion Absolutely. No way no how that's the new (2/44)
Republican slogan on abortion life begins at reconstruction Because The law is from 1864 1864 Lincoln was months away from getting shot women and minorities couldn't vote the age of consent was 10 Finally we have an answer to the Maga nation question. Oh, when was America great? No, you know this has Republican screaming is a terrible issue for Republicans people don't like this because they hate kids. That's my They just don't want and this law I mean no exception for rape or incest even Trump said that went too far because those are my hobbies and Of course we finally get to see him on trial starting on Monday one of the thread the hush money trial The hush money that's of course the stormy Daniels trial that starts on Monday and Donald Trump says he is very confident He will get off and stormy said that makes one of us First up my first guest is the subject of the new documents where you can call me bill and whose album so fragile so blue Recorded live with the National Symphony (3/44)
Orchestra at the Kennedy Center comes out April 19th The man the national treasure the legend William Shatner ladies Here we are so great to see you are you were galloping out there, I mean you make Biden look good We Could go another 10 years and I can't keep up with you the last time I talked to you You were just had just come back from space Yes, right Since then you have swam Since then you swam with the Sharks. Yes, and now you're going to Antarctica I hear the Christmas week Antarctica the voyage of a lifetime It's going to be fantastic. What the fuck? Why that that to but But on an iceberg if you can imagine why I mean Antarctica, that's they can't be a four seasons there Describe the trip and why you want to go well, it's It's to the Antarctic. Yeah, I know what it is. That's why I don't want to go No, but there's all kinds of things you've never seen before. Did you get to see anything take pictures for me? Take pictures and send them to me describe them first perfect. I would (4/44)
love that But it's a it's something nobody does very often and we're doing that Open to the public it costs a bit of money But there are some wonderful scientists going and speaking of the money. I when you went into space you went on the blue origin, right? I hope you got paid a lot of money for that Because I mean the marketing of Captain Kirk going into space and who else could have been I hope you got a fortune Because we know I went around with a small cup Because Talk about iconic. Did you see what the Japanese Prime Minister at the state dinner said today? No, we missed this that we had a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Japan and Sort of out of the blue he just said I hope our relationship will boldly go where no Countries have gone before or something, but it was definitely a story. Tell of my book out there now boldly go Yeah, well, I was gonna ask you about that. I mean you are a guy who boldly goes I mean When you got the part of Captain Kirk Did you think that that (5/44)
was was that? Synchronicity was that they recognize that quality in you or by being that and playing that did then you just Become this person who was so bold don't know anything. You're going to step out of the studio After the show, you don't know that a car isn't gonna hit you Or a bus not only some big guy who says you've said enough bang right on the head You you don't know you don't know the future the future is Unheralded. Yeah. Well, that's so true But I was talking more about your personality and whether it was shaped by that character or word was it in your character and they Recognized that when you audition they went that's a guy there's a boldly going guy I want to ask about you. What about me leaving the studio? Well, I just wanted to show you how haphazard things can be so you Taking as an actor taking a job. They take the job. Well, maybe it'll be successful I'll do the best I can and then invariably the the Numbers are it mostly fails and then every so often something (6/44)
is successful. In fact, it's Star Trek became a show biz Phenomena that it lasted what at 60 years There's all these other shows and all these other actors and who knew nobody knew Yeah But one thing you say in this documentary which is riveting and I've talked to you in person for hours at a time We've been to dinner and but this is great because it's distilled. It's a documentary The document you're talking about is you can call me bill. Yeah. Yeah, it's out there now. I'm we're plugging it. Oh We're speaking of it at the moment In fact, I would encourage people to turn us off right now and watch it No, but I mean it's interesting because I mean you talk about that you when men landed on the moon, which is July 20th 1969 oh, look at you It's a pretty famous date and then Okay But what's amazing to me is that you said you were so down on your luck at the time because Star Trek had been Canceled and watched it from your truck. You're talking now about the moon landing July 20th 1969 (7/44)
okay. I watched it In a pasture on Long Island Through a window in my little truck Where I was sleeping with my dog. Okay, but my question is Star Trek only was canceled like six months before How did you actually how did you fall so fast from TV star to with living in your rate precision? How did I know that I was gonna get divorced and How did I know that all that would you know, just circumstances of life, but that's quick. That was Yeah, because it was only I also was reading about because you talked about it and I wanted to know all the background on the famous kiss episode where you kissed lieutenant Uhura because this was a Major moment in American culture. It was it was well, yes Well, it was it was the first time in a scripted moment a white man had kissed a black woman. You imagine that We can't imagine it and we lived through it and for those who say nothing has changed Watch it because obviously and the reaction of people things have changed a lot There's still things we (8/44)
have to do of course, but things have changed a lot. But that moment you were brave because From what I understand NBC of course was nervous about it I mean we had seen before when southern stations would cancel shows or not show them for something like that And you kind of stuck to your guns and did the kiss. Yes. I puckered up my lips and I Mean She's no longer with us but in her lifetime, she was a remarkably attractive lady. Yeah, but that's not really the issue. Oh The issue is that I'm guess I want to know like if you had not insisted on doing it Yes, would it have not got done? It would have not have got done. Well, there you go. There we go. We applaud So tell me about now you have another record you've had a lot I've got more than one record I've got many children's record. You have it. You have a Christmas record. You did the blues record You did a country record just happens that way. I've got this I mean, that's what happens when you when you live along. Yeah, and live long (9/44)
and prosper I Make a living Choke that's it's a living. Yeah, but I have an album a children's album called Where will the animals sleep Which is the the one of the big songs on the album if we destroy our environment? We asked children which comes with a book by the way Where will the animals sleep and that it's an album filled with songs about animals that's so fragile so blue There's another Album Which is an album of the performance I did at Kennedy Center some while ago, right and it's called That's called so fragile so blue so there's where will the animals sleep and so fragile so and this movie and what do you think? The answer is to solving our problems with the climate Conservation just what we've been you know, there's no way out except Technology, that's what I thought. Yeah, people don't don't really understand. They don't firsthand see the The Tsunami, you know, the beach is empty. The fish are flopping on the shore. I'm going out there, but there's a wave coming and And (10/44)
I've been asked if I would go back up into space and I said keep saying no because it was such an event for Me but then I thought if I went up again, I would promulgate the Idea the the concept that there's so much going on By science and scientists and businesses to try and correct global warming that there is an element of hope That I cling to it's true and it's in you're always interested in tomorrow I think that's the key to you and that's why you've lived so long. I mean, you don't look nearly your age 93 I Don't mind I don't mind you that you say my age, you know, but when they clap Thank you my friend you're the best First up, okay. Yeah. Sorry, I'll get to you in a second He's a New York Post columnist and host appears Morgan uncensored on YouTube Piers Morgan She is the provost of Kings College Cambridge and columnist for the Financial Times Jillian Tett back with us Okay to you guys in a second. I have been plugging other people's books on this show for 20 years Now it's my (11/44)
turn I Miss committee in some circuit. Yes. I finally did this I've been threatening to do this for the people who've been saying to me for years Why don't you take those editorials you do on the end of the show gather them together edit them? Differently put them in chapters. It is it's an encyclopedia of every goddamn good thing. I said I Know well tested And it comes out on May 21st But you can pre-order it now from my guess Simon and Schuster calm or wherever you get books Okay, so let's get to the issues. Sorry had to do that No, I'm happy I did that and you're gonna fuck So we gotta talk about Iran and Israel because can we just mention the fact that William Shatner is 34 years older than me and looks younger than me I want to be that guy. I think we also mentioned that means that you have still got a couple more sequels to go If you're gonna live as long as him And not a nuclear war But honestly, I mean they said before I went out here They said, you know before you walk out (12/44)
tonight. This is Friday, April 12th at five o'clock or 415 something LA time. Okay. So we don't know it looks like it's imminent this This has been simmering between Israel and Iran some people say for 30 years Iran is really the bad guy in the region to my view and they have all these proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis not quite Hamas because they're Sunni and the other ones are Shiite But they're all kind of on the same page. They don't want Israel to exist So, let me just ask these two international scholars and what happens next what does happen? Is this attack coming and if it does what does the United States do if there's an Iran Israel war? Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize it is not just about Iran What you have actually developing is this axis of evil between Iran Russia? And North Korea and There really needs to be a serious conversation about how the West collectively deals with that broader axis of evil rather than just trying to do a whack-a-mole and (13/44)
Responding after crisis after crisis. So you're saying we go to war with all of those countries No I think it means that America has to firstly stand up and defend Freedom and democracy and all the things that the rest of the world has been looking to America for we had this astonishing speech Militarily stand up Yeah we had this astonishing speech from the Japanese and leader this week in the United Nations saying we thought the rest of the world looked to America as being a beacon for liberty and democracy and freedom and What the hell has happened in the last few months in the you know Congress? And then secondly there has to be a smart strategy to try and contain and respond to the axis of evil and that means doing things like standing up to Russia in Ukraine I Would imagine you concur with that Yeah, I was gonna mention Ukraine. I mean you look at the the on passing Congress and I'm scratching my head and thinking let me get this straight there is a large number of American (14/44)
lawmakers on the Republican side who historically would always be the first To want to stand up to a Russian dictator when they do something despicable But for some inexplicable reason a number of them now sound like they're almost part of the Kremlin press office And I don't get it. I don't get why So many Republicans in this country right now seem to think it's a good idea To let Vladimir Putin march into a sovereign democratic country in Europe Ukraine Steal a load of the land a third of the land so far and actually the solution is to let him have it and The concept that he might stop there is also for the birds and then if you want to bring the axis full circle you bring in Iran who are looking at all this Happening and they're going maybe America doesn't have the stomach for these fights anymore Which maybe a lot of Americans don't but America is a superpower It is the great superpower and we look at it from the UK for example You say if America doesn't be the global policeman (15/44)
Then who does and I urge American lawmakers to look at what's happening And to recognize the danger of letting Putin win in Ukraine because I'm sure that is what's emboldening Iran right now and other I would say I think Marjorie Taylor Greene's new nickname should be Marjorie Manchurian candidate green I actually spent part of my life in the former Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union and I've experienced the harsh end of Russian imperialism myself at first hand and I also watch a lot of Russian TV. It's kind of a late-night obsession of mine watching Russian TV. Really? I'm weird But I can tell you for those who haven't watched Russian TV They are openly celebrating on Russian mainstream TV shows like this This idea that they have co-opted parts of the American establishment the American Republican Party They are openly talking just this week about how if the Russia takes control of Ukraine It will then go further and talking about the fact that we don't just want to (16/44)
reconstitute the Russian Empire We'd quite like to get Finland. They've even said, California, so Let me tell you even Republicans themselves are calling this out Mike Turner not really familiar with him But he's on the House Intelligence Committee's are reporting from Ohio. I'm sure he's hard, right? Ohio's a very red state now. He said it's absolutely true We see directly coming from Russia pro-russian messages being uttered on the house floor This is a Republican calling out Republicans Michael McCaul. I have heard of him. He's a Republican from Texas again I'm guessing not a member of you know the left It's infected a good chunk of my party's base Russian propaganda Okay, so that's where we are now. Can I talk about American propaganda because there was a rally in? Dearborn Michigan it's a large Muslim population Chant of death to America I Feel like we've we passed something here You know I mean the left has gotten mad at me for many years for talking about Islam I try not to do (17/44)
it too much because I know it makes them go crazy, and I've made my point But it needs to be talked about now when you start chanting death to America in America I mean I got it Charlottesville was real bad when they were chanting death. What was it Jews will not replaces but on American soil here's the the Tarek Bazzi is the organizer of this This was at the end of Ramadan International Day of cuds al cuds Which was pronounced originally by he said this is why Iman Kamini, that's the Ayatollah Kamini Remember him the Ayatollah Kamini. He's the good guy now Kamini he would say to pour all your chance and all of your shouts upon the head of America. Yeah, I heard this before Not coming from America, but the great chastisement We will chastise the infidels, but now it's coming from inside America. Sorry got to talk about this again He said we live in one of the rottenest countries that ever existed on earth It's not just genocide Joe that has to go. It's the entire system that has to go (18/44)
No, it doesn't I like our system This is America And there are people who see me say this oh, he's a conservative now, I'm the concern I have not changed I always liked America and thought death to it was bad Why don't we say to them fine listen, we understand you're exercising a right to free speech Okay, you go to Gaza right now and you chant death to her mass See how many seconds you live right then you might realize? You might realize The power of living in a genuinely free democratic society that allows you to do what you just did I thought that was absolutely Shocking really is talking that such a large crowd would be going along with that right in the heart of America And you know, we're having the same thing in the UK huge huge weekly protests many people brazenly showing support for her mass Chanting from the river to the sea, you know in the UK There are nearly four million Muslims under three hundred thousand Jewish people and this this Attempt by people to conflate what the (19/44)
Israeli government is doing which is you can perfectly legitimately Criticize some of the stuff they're doing if not all of it But the idea this is then imposed on every Jewish person in the way that we're seeing is Terrifying for Jewish people and it has to stop but how about I mean the problem basically is at chanting death to anybody is Terrible, I mean that is just terrible and Part of the problem is that we've slid into a situation where everyone regards these geopolitical issues as being bit like a soccer match And you know the Israel Palestine situation is not a case of Arsenal versus Liverpool It's not the case that basically if you kick the other team then somehow your team is going to miraculously win Because the reality is there are no winners right now from this situation and each team has different Or team if you like has different people within them with different points of view So somehow we have to get out of this idea of treating geopolitics as just some kind of soccer (20/44)
match Yeah, but the problem is that we always expect Israel to act like no other nation would ever act I mean they gave back Gaza in 2005 They did land for peace and they got no peace They've been rocket attacked ever since and just live with it What other country would do that if we got rocket attack would we let it go on for 20 years? No, we would have Annihilated the people who did it immediately. I Mean, I was really shocked that literally within 24 hours of October the 7th outside the Israeli Embassy in London I live at the end of that road. There were vast crowds gathering and I assumed Stupidly that they were gathering to show support for Israel They were pro-palestinian people Screaming and chanting and celebrating in the streets of West London that this heinous terror attack had happened You know I've had a lot of people from both sides on my show debating this and they can you know get very passionate on both sides I understand that but I always ask the pro-palestinian people (21/44)
that come on one question Do you condemn what Hamas did on October the 7th? It is terrifying how many won't condemn it who won't accept the what that was was a terror attack so Catastrophic to the psyche of Israel that of course they were going to respond in a ferocious manner They knew that Hamas knew what was gonna have let me give one kudos before we wrap this bit up the mayor of Dearborn Condemn this that's what has to happen It doesn't mean when anything when I do it to Muslim Americans to many that probably because I'm not part of that Tribe he said and then the council said your messages of extremism do not resonate with us Thank you, sir, or a council whoever said that that's what has to happen Okay, if I can change the subject radically I was much more chipper I was I saw an interesting study in the paper this week about how to deal with anger sort of apropos to what we're talking About it. We do live in angry times and you know, I mean when you think about it anger management (22/44)
I didn't even exist like 50 years ago. We did now it's a cottage industry But of course not everybody can afford anger management So they were talking about there was a whole thing about what you could do if you get pissed off at something write a letter To the person who pisses you off or maybe just to the universe and then don't send it but get it out on paper So I sent out a team of investigators all across the country To Go through people's waste bag because I have them right here So would you like to hear some of the anger okay, so these are some of the angry notes that people would they bold them up and they Taylor Swift we got one from her Jesus Christ every time I pick up a guitar now meathead thinks I'm writing a joke about it a song about it This is from the of the CEO of Boeing Airlines Nobody ever talks about all our planes where the goddamn doors don't fall off this is This is from Lindsey Lindsey Graham, oh all of a sudden Tim Scott is getting married like I never thought (23/44)
of that This is this is from oh, this is from Joe Biden. Oh we got into the White House There's only one guy in this whole freaking country has to get on a plane by walking up a giant flight of stairs in front Of everybody you try it assholes It's just Oh P Diddy we got into his car Hey haters Priscilla Presley was 14. Where were the tanks on Elvis's long? Well This is from Oh Kamala Harris For look for the love of Christ you feeble old fuck. It's Kamala not koala This one is from Oh Morgan Wallen He said I thought rock stars were supposed to throw shit off roofs Led Zeppelin put a shark in a groupie's cooch calm the fuck down Oh Melania we got into Melania's garbage you said hey mushroom dick Did you also borrow hairspray from your porn horror girlfriend and never give it back Did we get this is from Oh Donald Trump He wrote Bill Maher is a low ratings. No charisma whack job And for the record my dance moves do not look like me jerking off two guys at once So let's talk about the big (24/44)
domestic issue this week for the folks who heard me referenced Arizona in the monologue and were like oh What what WTF what? Wait a second. Tell me more Yeah What happened is the Arizona Supreme Court gave a go-ahead to basically enforce a very long dormant law from? 1864 that says a board. Can you what was abortion even like? in 1864 this is before antibiotics before Doctors, I mean, I don't even know what they were having. I know you really want to know I mean, it's pretty grim Was it like Jesse James just pushing you down a flight of stairs or something? Okay, yeah, well whatever it was this is where this is where they are and they have just that I keep saying it They're the dog who caught the car for 50 years. They talked about getting rid of abortion They did it and it's super unpopular and now they have to basically lie. I mean Trump some of his Statements on this it sounds just like what he said about health care, you know, he's gonna make both sides happy He's gonna Get (25/44)
together with all groups are gonna negotiate something something terrific. I'm guessing it's very probably gonna be 15 weeks seems to be a number of people who agree Can he lie his way out of this because he also goes on record all the time. I Get credit for this for 54 years. He said the Supreme Court didn't do this and I made it happen It's crap crazy absolutely crazy. I mean he's trying to have it both ways and it's just not gonna wash I think with a lot of the voters Well, I was a shades of handmaids and tail coming back all over again. Arizona is definitely in play again They thought Arizona had gone fully red. I think this makes it a swing state I mean that changes the election a lot I mean you said it was the Democrats kryptonite against Republicans this issue because obviously and Trump I think Has recognized the peril of this issue Electorally for him in the in the upcoming election, which is why you're seeing him row back your question though Can he get away with it? (26/44)
Actually? I think what he's done this week is quite smart politics. I Actually agree with what Donald Trump used to say about abortion. I'm pro-choice I believe in a woman's right to do what she wants with her body This is what he used to believe and said so very proudly So he's done a complete u-turn on this for political expediency I suspect but I do actually think it's probably quite smart politics what he's doing is he's deliberately muddying the waters He thinks he's got the evangelical vote anyway Which I think he's probably right to assume and I think he thinks that independence as long as he can create an atmosphere That he's not draconian Even if some of these states are now behaving in a draconian way then it he may get away with it I think what's actually more interesting than what Donald Trump said is what Carrie Lake said and that she has been trying to carry like Himself, right? Well, she endorsed it and then she then she basically in the last few days to try to distance (27/44)
herself from it And that shows how worried they are about the electoral impact of this Okay. No Carrie Lake is the person who's going to be the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, right? So this is this is basically her campaign. This is this is make or break for her. Yeah two years ago She said she but that's what they all said They it was in theory. It was just a great idea Let's get rid of abortion and then they found out what people really thought about it and it's just it's this this to me this Election is going to come down to immigration versus abortion They're gonna run on the border and the repub and the Democrats are gonna one run on the woman's right to have an abortion I'm assuming issue. It never used to be such a hot issue in America abortion. It's only in the last few decades It's suddenly become this big political Fighting block thing really know and if you look at it's really if you go back like 30 40 years It wasn't such an incendiary issue Whereas if you take (28/44)
Europe, for example by comparison the 60 countries of Europe Actually, there are many countries in Europe where it's completely illegal to have an abortion Poland Malta, you know plays like Andorra You know So and if you look at Germany and France and countries like that It can be 10 12 weeks is the term limit that you're allowed to an abortion legally So America is not such an outlier. It does go to the states I think a lot of Americans on the left do think that this is somehow a really unique American problem or an issue that only pertains to them in terms of the legality of abortions actually comparative to Europe is not massively dissimilar But the thing that's crazy is at a time when America is facing so many huge bit geopolitical threats Where there's a huge tech revolution going on where the economy is faced with all kinds of challenges the idea that you're fighting an election around this issue Seems to be you know, just strange back to the 19th century None of you believe it's (29/44)
murder You know, that's why I don't understand the 15-week thing or the Trump's plan is let's leave it to the states You mean so killing babies is okay in some states like I can respect the the absolutist position I really can I Scold the left on when they say oh, you know what they just hate women people who aren't pro-life They do the pro choice. They just they don't hate women. They just made that up They think it's murder and it kind of is I'm just okay with that. I Am I mean there's 8 billion people in the world, I'm sorry, we won't miss you That's my position on what? Is that not your position if you're pro-choice mainly because you don't like children But if you are if you said you're pro-choice, that's your position to Also, I share I do respect people who completely disagree on this right one of those issues You know, they always say to English people don't come to America and start talking about guns and abortion. Yeah, here we go But I think it's something I can respect the (30/44)
other side of this absolutely But what I think I don't respect quite so much with Trump is that he's clearly danced a complete U-turn on this and I think it's for political reasons. He did it in 2016 to get the evangelicals with him He said I'm gonna pack my court I'm gonna get miss darling overturn Roe vs. Wade so they all came with him and I think now he feels he's got them And now you're seeing him and again I say look I don't support what he's doing But I do understand the political reasons he's doing it and I think it could be quite effective actually in neutralizing What is becoming a massive banana skin for the party and I think that's what he's recognized and he's getting ahead of it I think it could be what it could work for him and heaven as he knows what Ivanka Trump is thinking right now because of Course she tried to campaign for women's rights and present herself as very much You know part of upholding women's freedoms and also Joe Biden I mean, I'm sorry, but if he's (31/44)
gonna start making women's rights the centerpiece of his campaign, okay Let's talk about women's rights and the progressive left shall we about Allowing trans athletes to compete in women's sport and wrecking women's sport and the integrity of women's sport Because the president the United States at the moment thinks that's pretty much. Okay, and I don't think that is okay I think you should be protecting women's rights If I was Donald Trump, but I'm sure he will that would be an attack line for me if you care about women's rights Let's see how far that goes Well, I'm sure they're taking notes From British Comment, I just I do not think that the left in this country in the last few years have shown anything but disdain on that whole debate around women's sports and safe spaces and You know prisons and the rest of it this idea that you could be a biological male and Trant and I have full respect for trans people. Absolutely I want them to have fairness and equality in life, but not when (32/44)
it erodes the women's rights to fairness We think about OJ We know he did it now and now he's dead we can all say he did it and we don't get sued You got sued? He can't sue it so he's now dead I mean look I just think there was it was a travity of justice But it was fascinating how that played out in America and to watch that as I did from the other side of the pond to see how many people were Prepared to accept that he probably got away with it, but thought it was one in the eye back That's not what justice system. That's not what it was. Yeah. No, I don't think I don't think people ever really interpreted That the right way. I think what it was. I think black folks knew very well He did it and I don't blame them one bit for cheering him on I mean when you're on the wrong end of the justice system for as long as they had been When they finally got one even though he was Not exactly the best recipient of that I mean, of course it was I mean when we saw that split screen of white people (33/44)
going. Oh my god Oh my god Justice has not been done and black people screaming and joy totally understand You can't have two different complete histories in America and then expect people to have the same reaction to something like that And to be I just thought as yes It was a miscarriage of justice But for white people to be that upset about the one time the one time a black guy gets off I thought that was the gross part of it Has that changed today? Do you think that has changed today The reaction if something like that. No, that's a really interesting question If you're gonna ask about interracial kissing Star Trek, right, you know, and you think it's different now It is different now. Everything is different now There's a whole complete different generation that never experienced the kind of racism that the people alive in 1994 who were born in whatever 1964 and 1954 and anything like that They did experience so but would there still be a lot of that reaction of course for (34/44)
understandable reasons Do you think he did it? Of course, he did it There's no doubt that he did it. I mean Here's her blood was in his sock Verify what your position because I don't mind but That wasn't the issue and the jury knew it too It was payback and you asked and on a very larger scale that's happening in America and will happen for Decades to come because the legacy of our despicable racial past doesn't go away in a generation Yeah, it takes a very long time even people today younger people Maybe they didn't have anything terrible that happened to them, but they're like, yeah But I know what you did to my grandfather and that was some shit and I loved him. So I'm mad for him That's not gonna go away in my lifetime of yours, you know All of that is true, but let's not lose sight of the fact in the day There was a terrified woman who got murdered. Yes, that's true, too And that should not be forgotten and that was a travesty in a miscarriage of justice Karen no I Was watching (35/44)
the news reports of it and they showed the film of you know her trembling on the phone he's back I think you know him I mean the fact that it's also about that one reason why that story resonated so much was also about celebrity Yeah, what you could get away with where you were a football star and when the cops came to the house It was like hey, can I get an autograph right after I stopped you from beating your wife? You know, I mean there was a lot of that shit. Anyway, I got to go to new rules. Thank you very much Okay You know now that West Virginia passed a bill allowing residents to make moonshine in their home Someone has to break it to them that this won't help the whole West Virginia stereotype What's next you're the only state that doesn't ban bestiality Oh New really young people who are constantly taking pictures with their phone must be sentenced to six months with an old-school camera And have all their film developed at OSCO drug That's right. You only have 24 pictures (36/44)
and you won't get them back for two weeks Now who wants to take pictures of their food? They can't all be tens, you know New rule someone in marketing has to tell me why laundry detergent comes in powder pods pens liquid Gel foam spray, but salt just comes in the shape of salt Why didn't they make liquid salt? Oh wait they do New rule you can't pick apart every verbal gaff Joe Biden makes if you yourself have forgotten something in the past week or Ever walked into a room and thought why did I come in here? My Favorite is when someone says what was I just talking about? Oh, I don't know something so boring even you stop paying attention Now that we know that cicadas the large flying insects that come out every 17 years Possess a urine stream stronger than humans and I assume race horses And also have an STD that turns them into zombies They must consider moving to Venice Beach So I love Venice Beach, but it is nothing but zombies with STDs who smell like pee I kid the people of Venice (37/44)
Beach. You're nothing like cicadas except for the part about not working for the last 17 years And finally new rule if we want to save our country We should follow the advice good liberals have given for decades and learn from other countries Like Canada England and Scandinavia and I agree we should as long as we're honest about the lessons We're learning and as long as we're up to date on the current data Such as the unemployment rate in the u.s. Is 3.8% and in Canada at 6.1 And of the 15 North American cities with the worst air pollution 14 are in Canada. I'm not citing these stats because I have it out for Canada. I love Canada And it's people and always have But I hate zombie lies Zombie lies That's when things change but what people say about them doesn't yes for decades places like Vancouver and Amsterdam and Stockholm seemed idyllic because everything was free and all the energy We needed was produced by riding a bike to your job at the windmill Canada was where all the (38/44)
treasured goals of liberalism worked perfectly. It was like NPR come to life But with poutine Canada was the Statue of Liberty with a low-maintenance haircut in cross-country skis a Giant idealized blue state with single-payer healthcare gun control and abortion on polite demand Canada was where every woke white college kid wearing pajama pants outdoors Who'd had it up to here with America's racist patriarchy dreamt of living someday. I mean besides Gaza There's only one problem with thinking everything's better in Canada It's not not anymore Anyway, last year Canada added 1.3 million people which is a lot in one year the equivalent of the u.s Adding 11 million migrants in one year and now they're experiencing a housing crisis even worse than ours And we're sleeping in tents The median price of a home here is 346 grand in Canada converted to US dollars. It's 487 if Barbie moved to Winnipeg She wouldn't be able to afford her dream house and Ken would be working at Tim Hortons And (39/44)
Because of mortgage debt Canada has the highest debt to GDP ratio of any g7 nation I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad So does their vaunted health care system which ranks dead last among high-income countries and access to primary health care and Ability to see a doctor in a day or two and it's not for lack of spending of the 30 countries with universal coverage Canada spends over 13% of its economy on it, which is a lot of money for free health care Look, I'm not saying Canada still isn't a great country It is but those aren't paradise numbers if Canada was an apartment the lead feature might be America adjacent And if America was a rental car Canada would be America or similar and again, honestly Canada I'm not saying any of this because I enjoy it I don't because I've always enjoyed you but I need to cite you as a Cautionary tale to help my country and the moral of that tale is yes You can move too far left and when you do you wind up pushing the people in the middle to (40/44)
the right at its worst Canada is what American voters think happens when there's no one putting a check on extreme wokeness like the saga of Canadian shop teacher Kayla Lemieux Whose pronouns are she her and those Kayla's now back to being a guy named Carrie But two years ago when they showed up to teach children the progressive high school They taught at said that they they the school not the person Really you couldn't have found another word we were using that one anyway, okay They were committed to a safe environment for gender expression safe for who? What about the children? What about the equipment in that shop class you know there was You know There was once a weirdo D list movie producer in the 60s named Russ Meyer who made low-budget B movies like faster Pussycat kill kill and beyond the valley of the dolls always featuring women who look like this His Movies played in porn houses and were featured in Hustler and Playboy, okay fine But who says no when it comes to huge (41/44)
ridiculous tits, let's save that for the kids And this is why people vote for Trump They say in politics liberals are the gas pedal and conservatives are the brakes, and I'm generally with the gas pedal But not if we're driving off a cliff On the trans issue America is no ends ifs or buts app about it absolutely alone in the world now an outlier country Last month England's National Health Service announced that there's not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty blockers for third graders and that they were going to stop fumbling around with children's privates because that's Prince Andrew's job Sorry you two They're very sensitive about the royal family I'm telling you I found out So too with all the other good place countries in direct opposition to America's choice to affirm Children's wishes on switching gender no matter the age or psychiatric history the far left Which always like to use well Europe does it yeah? No that doesn't work on this one (42/44)
anymore Or on immigration Sweden opened its borders to over a million and a half immigrants since 2010 and now 20% of its citizens are foreign-born and its education system is tanking and it has Europe's highest rate of gangland killings and One result is that the far-right parties are in the government now there for the first time To which liberals say blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist Yeah, but is it true of Course it's true It's not a coincidence the quality of life went down after the Somali gangs started a drug turf war using hand grenades Calling it racist doesn't solve the problem it hands future elections to someone who will solve the problem and who I promise You are not going to like All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Achilles Theater in Salt Lake April 21st, Arizona financial and Phoenix May 4th, and I want to thank Pierce Morgan Jillian Ted Thank you folks Watch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him (43/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Moll. It's that Cinco de Mayo hangover, right? I mean, yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. I don't know about the rest of the country. Out here it's big shit, right? Cinco de Mayo? It is not. Oh, I mean if you don't do a promotion for whatever business it's in for Cinco de Mayo, my anal bleaching place, they said all weekend for free they'll put salt on your rim. Cinco de Mayo. You gotta watch that tequila. Whoa, that tequila's tough. Elon Musk passed out and when he woke up he had bought Radio Shack. Watch out for Cinco de Mayo. Oh yeah. And women, I gotta tell you, if you can't remember what you did last night, you might want to get the abortion now. I'm just saying, I mean that's the big news, right? The big news, right? They're gonna get rid of Roe vs. Wade after 49 years and as soon as this was leaked, protesters immediately gathered outside the Supreme Court. Memo to my Democratic friends, more effective when (1/44)
you're on the inside. Now it's just gonna be a race with the Waffle House states to just get more and more restrictive about abortion. Oklahoma already has one on the books. Six weeks. Can't get it after six weeks. Most women don't even know they're pregnant at six weeks. They don't even know if they like the guy. Six weeks. That's a quick hook. Oh, Louisiana wants to pass a law that says flat out if you get an abortion you get charged with murder. Wow. Suddenly getting the right pronoun doesn't seem so big, does it? But on the bright side, it's not really that big of a bright side, but in Louisiana, okay, if the fetus is absolutely a human being and you're driving alone to another state to get an abortion, you can use the carpool lane. So I'm just saying, America's getting chippy out there, right? Another attack on comedy. You saw Dave Chappelle get attacked on stage again. War on comedians keeps going on. And I love this. This is so America. The guy had a real knife inside of a fake (2/44)
gun. You want to sneak a knife in somewhere? Hide it in a gun. My new friend Madison Carthorn is back in the news. I don't know if you're familiar with this guy. He's kind of new on the scene. He's very young, under 30. I think one of the youngest Republican or any Congressman. And Christian conservative keeps getting caught doing things that don't seem exactly Christian conservative. We talked about it last week. This week, there's a new video out of him naked straddling another man's face and thrashing his pelvis into it. The Pornhub title was Republican Fuck Face, Fucks Face. He said, Madison already commented on this. I'm not joking. He said he was just trying to be funny. This is always, two weeks ago, he was caught in, there's a picture of him in women's lingerie, women's underwear, trying to be funny. He said it was a joke. Then last week, we had the video where he was in the car and he's saying, I want to feel the passion. And another guy is grabbing his dick. Joke. He said it (3/44)
was just a joke. Now we have him skull fucking a guy on tape. And again, I'm joking. I mean, there's infinite ways you can create a joke. His is always, what if I was gay? I got to say, comedically, this guy really commits to the bit. You know what I'm saying? He commits. I'm not saying he is gay at all. I'm just saying in Florida, they're not allowed to discuss him in school. Speaking of that stuff, did you see this five Republican senators now are trying to pass a bill that will have the FCC or I don't know, whoever it is that puts warnings, you know, head of TV shows, watch this shit you're about to see because it's got some shit in it that you should know about. OK. These five Republican senators want to put warning labels now on TV shows when there are LGBTQ characters in it. What's that going to be like? This show contains violence, adult content and catty comments about Judy Garland. Viewer discretion is advised. And before I go, I should it is Mother's Day Sunday, so let's hear (4/44)
it for moms. Oh, I saw I was in CBS doing some shoplifting. I saw some I saw a beautiful mother's day, a Republican Mother's Day card. It said, thank you for bringing me to term whether you wanted to or not. Anyway, got a great show. We got Paul Begala and Michelle Tafoya. First up, she is the Democratic state senator from Maine's 13th district and co-author of Dirt Road Revival. How to rebuild rural politics and why our future depends on a Chloe Maxman. Shake bump, you have to ask these days. All right, we'll do both. Well, what's your shake? You might as well not bump. Yeah, why not? Right. No, I'm all for everything. OK, so you are the youngest state senator, female state senator. Is that right from the state of Maine? That is true. Wow. But last time, I mean, you were here when you were just in college, right? I was. I know it was almost a decade ago. Oh, we saw you grow up on this show. Yeah. But you went back to home. You're like, welcome back, Cotter, except not Brooklyn, Maine. (5/44)
Why did you make that choice? Yeah. The day I graduated from college, I moved right back to my hometown, a small town in Maine of 1600 people. I love my home so much. I always wanted to go home and build my life there and do politics there. But you're not going to do politics anymore now, aren't you out of it? Didn't you say you're not going to keep going on the electoral ladder? Yes. I've served four years in the Maine legislature. I was first elected in 2018. I served a term in the House and a term in the Senate. But you know, I think there's so much power in getting lots of young people elected for all across rural America instead of just me. And so we wrote the book and we're going to do that. But don't they need you? Don't they need you, coach, in the game? I am still in the game. Just do it in a different way. Just making sure that candidates and campaigns have all the tools that they need to get young folks elected. I don't blame you if you're not wanting to do it either. Yeah. (6/44)
I don't. But just say that. It's a shitty job. Who wants to do it? OK. So let's talk about the book. It's called What Democrats Don't Know About Rural Voters. I guess that's the subtext of the subtitle. What's the title? The title is Dirt Road Revival, How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It. Oh. What did I say? Something different. Well, anyway, but that's really what it is. Right. I mean, you're and I think this is a great message that the Democrats need to hear because they are. I mean, it's just ridiculous how unpopular they are in places like. I mean, I mean, come on that Maine is very I mean, I think the black population of Maine consists of a bear. It's not a diverse state. It's a very white state. So what's the message to Democrats from your book? Yeah. You know, I grew up in a in a House district and a Senate district in Maine that voted for Trump. And we just went out and started talking to folks and listening to people who did vote to vote for Trump (7/44)
and just try and have more of an honest conversation about what was happening. And you know, we won in both of those seats. There were Trump signs next to Chloe signs. And we discovered all of this common ground with folks who we usually write off. And it was, you know, it was so sad to see my community left behind by the Democratic Party, but also so hopeful at all of this space that we can build relationships for durable political power. So you can win them over. You can win Trump voters that you thought you won actual Trump voters over. Yes. Wow. Yeah. Just through. And when we talk about rural, I mean, it's interesting what we think of it as well. Maybe I don't even know what rural is. I mean, I think of it as people playing in a jug band. Yeah. There are some stereotypes. But but it's more than that. You know, I mean, it's like where does the suburbs end? It's not the city. OK, it's not the city. But it's like, what is suburb? Like I grew up in the suburbs. But when I think about (8/44)
my youth, it was pretty kind of rural. There was woods behind my house. I played in dirt a lot. Dirt was a big part of my childhood. Was I rural? Was that rural? Maybe you were rural. I may be rural. Why is that? But so it's a lot more. But I'm just saying it's a lot more of America than what we think. Right. Yeah. It's not just Appalachia. I mean, rural is a big part of the country. Fly over it. Yeah. It's a huge part of our country, you know, and it's a it's a part of our country that has a lot of political influence and a lot of untold and unheard stories. And, you know, just growing up in that community and being able to represent it and hearing those stories as a Democrat. You know, sometimes I'll show up to a house and people will slam the door in my face because they know I'm a Democrat. It's a bad word. How do they know? Well, when you when you show up at a house. Wear the red. I know. I'm wearing red today, which is a bit ironic. But when you show up at a house, the first (9/44)
question is, are you a Democrat or a Republican? That's interesting. And I'm that's the first question. Oh, almost always. So I'm an honest politician. That says a lot about where we are in America. It's it's so polarizing. And one of the things that I love about rural communities and how I was raised is it's really all about values. You know, are you a good person? OK. Now that I said that in your book, I think is the most important thing is that Democrats are look, I've said this in a nice way. They're policy wonks at their best. Yeah. Republicans. Come on. They've not taken government. They don't take it that seriously. Reagan Bush, you know, fits on a one page paper. I read that. That's that's how much I know or care. Yeah. You think about Hillary Clinton and Obama. I mean, these big bill Clinton. I mean, they're wonks. They get it because government is complicated. And more, you know, the better you do. It's at their best. But they don't understand this very, very big difference (10/44)
that you're getting at policy. You talk policy. That's not what matters to a lot of the people in this country. It is values. It's values like self-reliance. Yes. And common sense, which the Republicans seem to lack. Yeah. Frigality. Religious. You know. I mean. Yeah. I mean, in my two campaigns, I've knocked about 20,000 doors. I've had a lot of conversations with Republicans and independents, and I have never heard a Republican say that they want expensive health care. So it's all about how we talk about the issues, because we can find that common ground if we take the time to do it. And of course, what we you know, the elephant in the room, I think with all of this stuff, but we're talking about values, Republican versus Democrat, slamming the door in your face. Are the people, the white people who are in this very white state, are they racist? Because their view, I think, is that just because we're white, we're seen as racist now, at least by the Democratic Party. You saw them up (11/44)
close and personal. Are they racist? That's a complicated question. You know, some people everywhere are. Yeah. But in general, the average person, even if they voted for Trump, would you say they were racist? I mean, I think we live in a society that has a lot of racist threads in it. You know, just the way that our country is built is built on racism. And so it's hard to, all that is intertwined with everything that we're doing. And a large- Yeah, but now in 2022, these people themselves, they weren't around when the country was built racially. Yes, we understand that. And yes, of course, there is still lots of racism in this society. Are they? Are they racist? Correct. That's what I'm asking. Yeah. Well- I'm getting applause just for the question. It's going to be a great answer. I think that there are a lot of narratives that have created racism in rural America, but I don't think that rural Americans are racist. OK. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure some are, but I think a lot of people (12/44)
just- look, when you're a politician, you're kind of like a lawyer, you know? You're representing people. I think a lot of these kind of people- again, you know these people better than me, because I got to the rural area long ago. Rural New Jersey. And I think their view is sort of like that the Democratic Party, they should be my lawyer, the way your lawyer represents you. But they're not. They're not really advocating for me. And that's OK. I don't hate them for it. But don't expect me to be voting for you because you're not my lawyer. And this other party, who I have problems with too, but at least they're representing me. That's my lawyer. And we only get two choices in America. You've got to pick one. So how did the Democrats fix that? I mean, what I think, and a big part of the book that I co-wrote with my campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, he's in the audience today. Our message is that there is a lot of hope and potential in how we campaign. Because every day we were talking (13/44)
to folks who had never been contacted by a Democrat or Democratic campaign in their entire voting history. But yet there were conversations there. And so if we start campaigning, if we start having conversations, and we don't just do that in an election year, but we do that every month of every year and really invest in rural America, that maybe we can find that common ground. What do you say to the person who, like, you knock on the door and they say, oh, wow, you look like a Democrat. And they start to slam the door. Yeah, this happened. Right. And you're like, wait a second. I just want to talk. Yeah. Here, have some of the moonshine. And you ask them what their issues are and they say, well, I hear a lot about white privilege. Have you looked around my trailer? Does it look like I'm privileged? What do you say to that person? Because that's the voter you have to get in the Democratic Party. Well, I think that's that's part of it, right, is that in rural America, there folks are (14/44)
feeling like there is a lot of unseen struggle and pain and the reality that folks are living. And that's a real struggle and that's a real reality. It also means that people of color in our country are also struggling. Those realities can exist at the same time. And I think there are these narratives that are pitting us against each other that are creating these decisions about, you know, how our money is invested and who gets what resources. But what I try and do and what our message is, is that we live in a very wealthy country and there is enough resources to go around and we can only find that common ground. We can only create that space for unity if you are face to face someone face to face with someone having an honest conversation. Like we do. Thank you very much. Chloe. All right. Good luck out there. We'll see you when you're the youngest something else, I'm sure. All right. Let's meet our panel. OK. Hello. All right. Here they are. He is a Democratic strategist and CNN poker (15/44)
tripper. One of our favorite guests, Paul Begala is over here. And she is a former NBC reporter, sports reporter, who will host the new podcast, Sideline Sanity, launching on all podcast platforms Monday, May 23rd. Michelle Tafoya. Begala and Tafoya. All right. All right. So people hate talking about abortion. So let's do it. I don't want to do it, but it's the big issue and we got to do it. And this is what happened. You know, it's interesting because until this memo was leaked and we found out that now, unless something very unforeseen happens, the Supreme Court is going to undo Roe versus Wade after forty nine years. We haven't really been focusing on it. Or maybe I'm projecting. I guess I haven't been enough because I learned things this week because this put it on the front page that are pretty basic things that I did not know about abortion. Like in Europe, the modern countries of Europe, way more restrictive than we are or what they're even proposing. If you are pro choice, you (16/44)
would like it a lot less in Germany and Italy and France and Spain and Switzerland. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's right. OK. I learned most people who are pro life are women. Did not know that. Most abortions are from, fitting for Mother's Day, mothers, people who have a kid. That makes sense. Well, I mean, it does. I'm sorry, but. And I thought this is interesting. Most abortions now, even when you go to a clinic, are done with the pill. Yeah, the pill. And pills are easy to get in America. We know that. So, you know, for the people who say we're going back to 1973, we're not. That's just factually inaccurate. And with how easy it is to get a pill, I'm wondering if this is what do you think? Is this going to be the galvanizing issue that the left think it's going to be? You want to start? Well, first, there are already Republicans talking about outlawing the pill as well. And many of these states will. And even whether they specifically outlaw the (17/44)
pill, it will still be a crime. We're not going back to 1973. We're going back to 1931 and before. Well, a lot of states, my state of Texas, where I grew up, they have a law that was not back to the 30s, but Michigan has a law that goes back to the 30s. Texas has one. Automatically, 30 days after Roe versus Wade is repealed, which will come out in June. 30 days. An abortion in Texas is a felony. No exception for rape, no exception for incest. Life in prison for the doc. That's Texas. In Texas. Well, that's 30 million people. Michigan has the same law. No exception for rape, no exception for incest. And we know that most Americans, including conservatives, do not believe that. They're not on that page. Most Americans... They voted it in in Texas not that long ago. And it's because they're not pro-life, Bill, they're pro-life in prison. They want to punish. They want to control. And they're going to be able to now. Well, OK, go ahead. I disagree. I don't think they want to punish and (18/44)
control. Look, I am pro-choice. But here we have a continuum, right? Somebody gets pregnant. And then there's birth. And that whole timeline in between, there should be a portion of that time, as there has been, when an abortion is legal, whether it's medical, the pill or surgical. There's got to be a point at which we say this is a human being capable of living outside the womb, where maybe we don't we don't do that. I think that's what you see a lot of in Europe. And a lot of people are kind of settling around, OK, 15 weeks maybe. Now, I have a good friend, lifelong liberal, who happens to be attached to a children's hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, and he has seen preemies in incubators five months along. They are born. They're there struggling to survive that are now 20 year olds walking the planet. And he feels very this is a lifelong liberal. And he feels very strongly about this, that once that baby is viable, why would you extinguish that life? Now, not everyone's going to (19/44)
agree on this. It's going to require some tough work. There are lots of questions. You just outlined what Roe v. Wade holds and what the Supreme Court is about to overturn. But that won't ban abortions. I realize there are snapback rules. States will. States have. Louisiana passed. You mentioned this in your monologue. A state assembly committee in Louisiana passed a bill yesterday, 72. It's not a final law yet that says life begins at fertilization, which means the IUD is murder. This is what they're voting on in these Republican states. If they had your kind of sensible, centrist position, I don't think people should be as upset. But they don't. The second largest state is going to make it a felony with life imprisonment. That's crazy. It is crazy. And again, just the perspective, most Americans think that's crazy. I would agree. I think probably even in Texas. Yes, they got it passed. We'll see. We'll see. In November, the Texas legislature is on the ballot. The Michigan (20/44)
legislature. Right. If you all don't want felony life in prison laws, you can vote them out. Right. Absolutely. Another thing I learned this week that I think I maybe knew this, but I forgot it, is that this didn't used to be a partisan issue at the time Roe versus Wade passed, but not a partisan issue. It became a partisan issue because of the Christian right. They made it a partisan issue. They made it so that it became where the Democrats were for abortion being safe and legal and Republicans were also when their mistresses got pregnant, of course. In general, it was not even partisan. There are a lot of things also that have changed since Roe v. Wade passed. And I think a lot of people are bringing this up, that now we have sonograms where you can see what this child actually looks like along the way. Whereas in 1973 or whatever it was, that wasn't the case. We know about- Meaning people would be given pause when they see- Perhaps. Perhaps they would, especially at a certain point (21/44)
along the line. Because it is a gut thing. I mean, you know, we talk about the Constitution and laws and rights and it really comes down to do you like women or do you like babies? You know, for me, I personally, maybe this is an outlier attitude, I never have thought life itself was particularly precious. I don't. I'm sorry. I don't. I really don't. I mean, no, I'm serious. I think life is for the living. Until you're born, you're not living. OK. I mean, yes, it's becoming a life, but you know, it's not. And you know, we wouldn't miss you if you're not born because we never knew you. You're not going to miss anything because you never were born. I'm serious. So that's my position. I get that that's not most people's position. But that's, I mean, that's- Most people's position is not what the Supreme Court is doing and I think that's what's got people so angry. If their legislatures have these kind of draconian laws, that's really a problem. But most people in their real life, I have a (22/44)
friend, very conservative, very pro-life. He says, well, I'm pro-life except for the standard three exceptions, rape, incest, and if my daughter gets in trouble. Oh, she's- Right. I'm like, well, you need row, buddy. No. That's- No, that's a lot of- You know- You can catch a lot of Republicans on tape. Contradict- Remember Herman Cain? Dan Quayle did it. Where they're actually explaining how they feel about it while they're trying to tow the pro-life line and they're describing pro-choice. Well, yeah- I think it should be between the family and they should have the- Yes, you just described our choice, moron. Yeah. I do think, look, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a huge supporter of abortion rights, felt that this law was created the wrong way and that rather than being attached to the privacy clause of the 14th Amendment, it should have been attached to the equality, equal treatment under the law so that, you know, women should have the choice whether or not to have a family just as a (23/44)
man would have a choice whether or not to have a family. And I agree with her. And I do think there is some middle ground, though. I don't- There was that Kermit, whoever, in Philadelphia who got thrown in prison because he was aborting babies at nine months, eight and a half months, breaking their necks and passing them along. Okay. Well, some of that is because it's not a viable- A lot of abortion takes place because the pregnancy went wrong. Yes, I agreed. And that should not even be on the table. No, exactly. Okay. So- But that wasn't what he was doing. So it was more abortion on demand. Someone decided late in the thing. Anyway, there are exceptions all over the place. This isn't a cut and dried cookie cutter. No one has the same situation. Right? I mean, I think. So look, the abortion pill, if they outlaw that they're going to, in states, they are going to pay at the ballot box. There is no question. It is going to be out on the ballot box. But it only begins with abortion. I (24/44)
read the draft opinion from Justice Alito. I actually have a law degree. The same rationale applies to marriage, Loving versus Virginia. It's the same privacy right that says I can marry anybody I want, whether they're black or a man, whether I can have contraception, whether I can even have sex. None of those words are in the Constitution, Justice Alito. Let's be specific and remember that there is a third party, an unborn child involved in this, and he specifically goes out of his way in this draft to say this is very specific to this. I know a lot of people- Just like when he was up for a hearing in confirmation, he said, oh, Roe has settled law until he unsettled it. It's the same philosophy that has to actually apply to Oberlefeld. Okay, but Loving and the other- Those issues aren't controversial. It's not really about the laws or the Constitution. Whenever I see a lawyer, whether it's on TV or in an ad, they're always in a room with an entire wall of law books behind them. An (25/44)
entire wall. It's what you fucking think, what you feel, and then you'll find something in that wall of books to back it up. This whole bullshit argument about, well, it's settled law, so was segregation. Plessy versus Ferguson was settled law in 1896 and thank God somebody said let's unsettle it. That's a bullshit argument. It's what you think. If you like babies, then you're pro-life, and if you like women, you're pro-choice. I like women. Are you saying ... You're sort of, I think, voicing what I've heard a lot this week. People have a sort of a worry about what I would call a domino theory of social rights. You think first it's abortion, and then it's gay rights, and then trans rights, and then weed goes, and then gay marriage, interracial marriage. Is that what you're worried about? Don't stir up fear now here. Be honest. The right to privacy is what abortion is founded on in the Constitution, right? If there's a right to privacy over a woman's choice whether to continue her (26/44)
pregnancy, it's the same, the whole same set of cases, the same legal philosophy that said Mr. and Mrs. Loving had a right to get married even though one was white, one was black, or Obergefell got to get married even though his husband was a guy, or gay people can have sex, or married people can use contraception. That was in the 1960s. That was a big case. Connecticut had outlawed contraception even for married couples. But Clarence Thomas, it's an interracial marriage. You think Clarence Thomas ... I guess what I'm saying is I really feel like abortion is unique. It is. It is because people either ... You just have this view that it's murder. I could put the argument on a hat when people talk about a woman's right. Murder isn't a right. If you think it's murder, I don't. Again, crazy me. But I'm telling you, we're not going to miss you. You were never here. I'm not feeling that safe up here all the time. And you're not going to miss anything because you were never here. You wouldn't (27/44)
miss us if we were gone. I would because you're already here. You're living. You're living. That's different. It's an interesting thing, okay? And you mentioned that the majority of ... or a lot of women who have abortions are already moms and they can't afford another child. I was- Or they just don't want one. Or they just said, to hell with this. Exactly. No, listen. In all seriousness, I had many, many problems conceiving. I won't go into details, although if you'd like, I can. No. Okay. So- Don't need that at all. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to have our son ... pure luck, okay? So then we said, let's adopt a little girl, Bogota, Colombia, South America, where the law there is 24 weeks you have that time to abort. God bless this woman who didn't. I would not tell her what choice to make. That was her choice to make and I'm all about it, okay? That was her choice to make. But I can't imagine my life without my daughter. But you could if you'd never had her. I could. Again, you (28/44)
wouldn't miss her because you didn't know she existed. All right. Let me interrupt here for one moment. Talk about ... It is one of our favorite refillables comes up at this time here because it's graduation time. Anyone here graduating college probably ... Oh, a couple ... Congratulations. What? I mean it. It's a big achievement. Or not. Anyway, so we've noticed over the years, they write things on their hats. Very often they're very basic things like, yeah, thanks mom and dad. They write on their graduation cap, hire me. And they've gotten a little more interesting, onto the next adventure I've seen and oh, the future is female. So we took our real time photographer out to some graduation ceremonies and we ... Would you like to see some of the other signs that are on the caps? I'm sure you would. For example, thanks mom, another mom. Goodbye term papers. Hello only fans. Just my luck, I majored in critical race theory. If you can read this, you're not me. Harvard Caucasians against (29/44)
white privilege. I stand with Zelens ... That guy in Ukraine. Amber Heard, you can shit on my bed anytime. Well that's ... Has nothing to do with graduation. It's kids. If only masks protected you from gonorrhea. Well that's ... Guess I picked the wrong time to need an abortion. Well that's a terrible thing to put on a hat. Of course, your Uber driver has arrived. So President Biden is under enormous pressure, speaking of college kids, to come up with a plan now to relieve college debt. And I'm wondering, especially what you think about this, because you are a strategist and have been one of the most successful ones for the Democratic Party. A lot of people are saying this is a loser issue. I'll give you some brief numbers here. Why that is, 13% of Americans have college debt, federal college debt. So that's not a lot of people you're working to. 65% don't go to college at all. 50% of the college debt goes to people going to grad school, which, come on, a lot of that is just (30/44)
bullshitting around. You don't know what to do and you can keep going to school for free. So it just looks like a loser issue for the party that is trying to win back the working class, that we're going to subsidize ... We who didn't go to college and didn't benefit from that are going to subsidize you to get your degree in gender studies and sports marketing and all the other bullshit that they take in college. I think it's a loser issue for Biden. What do you think? Yeah, well, and this is revealing a big secret, so don't tell anybody. We Democrats have a lab, two labs actually, secret labs, one in Berkeley and one in Brooklyn, where we come up with ideas to completely piss off the working class. And it's working wonderfully. Labs, you say, actual labs. Yes, oh yes, and they all have PhDs in pissing off the working class. Somehow in my lifetime, the Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory of Florida to being the party of the faculty lounge. I went last week, I spent (31/44)
Wednesday last week in Chicago with the machinist union, hung out with the machinists all day. Great guys. Not all one of them came up to me and said, gee, I really hope you take my tax dollars to pay off the debt of somebody who went to Stanford. Right. Okay, but I have ... So Biden's under enormous pressure. He's not for it. He didn't campaign for it. He says he'll relieve maybe $10,000, which I suppose is good, but would I much rather see Democrats do is go back to their roots, which is earn it. We're the party that created the GI Bill. Nobody called that free college because it wasn't. The guys who got the GI Bill earned it. Why don't we have a system where we say, you want to get out of your college debt, serve your country. Marine Corps, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, not everybody can carry a rifle, but you can mentor a kid. And you just give two years of service, then you will have earned that and expanded. So we have community college, job training. We need more mechanics, not MBAs. (32/44)
Yes. And that's where the Democrats focus on a beat. Well, that to me seems to be the underlying issue. I've said it on this show before. Did Democrats have this idea that you're a better person if you sit in class more and more and get more and more degrees and really the answer is not to make college cheaper, it's to make it more unnecessary because most of it is bullshit anyway. Well, right. And it's not necessary. No, that's absolutely the case. You know, and I'm with you from more vocational schools, more avenues for people to find ways to make a living. And, you know, look, here's how it worked for me. I was going to go to college. I knew what it was going to cost. My parents knew what it was going to cost. They put the money aside. Then I went to grad school and I knew what it was going to cost. And I, when I signed on that loan, that was, ooh, sorry, microphone. That was me saying, I will pay for this. This is mine to pay off because that's accountability and that's taking (33/44)
responsibility for your own life. So can I, can I ask you, what did you learn in grad school that helped you with your career as a sideline reporter? There's a story there. I would love to know what that had to do with Terrell Owens' bad ankle. Not a damn thing. Not a thing. It was my backup plan. It was my backup plan because it's not every day that you get a job in network sports. And I knew that. So I just had a backup. And did anything you took in college point you to that job? In college or grad school? I mean, well, anything in college, was it relevant to what you did? I mean, I took some communications courses, but no, what I did that was relevant. Total bullshit. Communications. Communications. I'm so happy to be called out on national television about my bullshit classes. It's not just you. It's everybody. No, it's true. And it's gotten worse. And I think a lot of people, the people you're talking about and the people we were talking about at the top, the rural people in (34/44)
America, they're resentful that, you know, you are, first of all, I'm going to pay now to have my kid, not my kid doesn't, I'm going to pay for some kid to go to an indoctrination center where they're indoctrinating kids into things. I don't even believe it where the courses are all in, you know, racist spotting one oh one and white privilege one on five. And you know what? And the thing about it too is college is way too damn expensive. And it got to damn expensive when all of these laws started being given out. It got to expensive when states stopped subsidizing. I went to the University of Texas. I love it. My whole career I owed the University of Texas at Austin and my law degree less so, but it helped. I can read the Supreme Court opinion and know that justice Alito is going after the gays next. Okay. Oh, enormously helpful. Wow. It's been enormously helpful. I'm serious. The law degree, but also my undergraduate degree. So I'm totally for college. I am pro college, but not at (35/44)
everybody else's expense. And what we ought to do, you know, schools used to be subsidized by the state much more. I'm old guy, but UT Austin cost me $4 a credit. I attended bar and easily paid my way through college. It wasn't even hard. I didn't have to go and get a bunch of student debt. So we ought to make college more affordable, but we ought to throw open the opportunities. Biden campaign on free community college. And that's what the Congress ought to pass. But I'll come back to the service. The other thing we would do if we had service in exchange for educational benefits, not only would we have smarter people and I am for knowledge for knowledge sake, I really am for more art history majors all for it, but throw them together in a service project with kids who grew up on a farm or kids who are in the city or kids are of different race and you will reunite this country. We can stitch ourselves back together again. It's the most important thing we could do. I'm interested to (36/44)
know how your degree helped you know that Alito was going to go after the gays next. Now he may, but I thought one part of this abortion debate we're having now I thought is interesting was we used to hear the line, if men could get pregnant, this wouldn't even be a debate. Well, now that men can. And there's a pregnant man emoji. How does that? Where's the uprising of the emoji pregnant man? I mean, where is the change the debate at all? You know? No, no, it doesn't. But listen, art history majors are fine. But you can learn a lot about art history by working in a museum and reading books. Just reading some books is a good idea. I agree with you. I think college has gotten too fluffy. It's way too damn expensive. All right. Thank you. Time for new rules. Everybody. Now that Tropicana is trying to make pouring orange juice on cereal a thing, milk must not take that lying down. Introducing the milk most champagne with milk. When you need something to settle your stomach after a night of (37/44)
drinking, but also want to say, fuck it. Let's keep drinking. I don't know exactly what happens at the Hindu festival of Lal Kosh in Bangladesh or what the purpose is, but I do know who sponsors it. Flamin' Hot Cheetos. New rule, nothing says I'm a woman of the people. Quite like having a black man in a face mask kneeling to adjust your ball gown. How come every time someone kneels in front of a Clinton, it becomes all about the dress? I'm just asking. If you augment your buttocks with non-surgical butt vacuum therapy, don't forget to tip your therapist because you think your job sucks ass and this job you actually suck ass. New rule, someone has to tell Alexa. She's getting too attached. She's suggesting songs I might like. She's reminding me to buy dog food. Lexi, honey, I'm not looking for a serious relationship. The other day I asked her, what's the capital of Egypt? And she said, why don't you ask your whore? And finally, new rule, since this is Mother's Day weekend, let's pause (38/44)
and take a moment to think about how your mother was always there for you, looking after you and keeping you safe. And then realize that's not Twitter's job. Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies from the truth is your job. When we talk about misinformation, we always focus on the producers, never the consumers. As if we're all helpless, dumb blondes ready to believe anything, like Donald Trump. Do lies spread faster than they used to? Of course, but so can truth, which in the internet age is always at your fingertips. You just have to learn how to use Google for something other than porn. But this idea that we can clean up Twitter and protect you from fake news and disinformation, it's so ridiculous. It's like fact checking the graffiti on the bathroom wall of a dive bar. We called this number and we didn't have a good time. People always lie. That's what people do. Every age is the misinformation age. And whenever a new means of communication comes along, some reach right for the (39/44)
sensor button. In 1858, the New York Times thought we couldn't handle the transatlantic telegraph. They said it was superficial and too fast for the truth. In 1487, the pope issued an order to stop the misuse of the printing press for the distribution of pernicious writing. You know, fake news. Like how the earth is a ball. In 1938, radio was the hot medium of the day and lots of people got plenty worked up about it, especially after Orson Welles presented what was obviously a fictitious drama about a Martian invasion of New Jersey and thousands of people thought it was real and panicked. You cannot censor away that level of naivete. The Martians had the whole universe to invade and they chose New Jersey. People on social media like to say, I did my research, but it doesn't count if you did your research on social media. I once did a stand up special called Be More Cynical. This is what I was talking about. Lies are ubiquitous and in that way they're quite analogous to germs and (40/44)
viruses. People think you can germ proof the world and never have to be in contact with the things that can hurt you, but you can't. You have to have a strong immune system. It's the reason babies who live in sterile environments are more likely to develop allergies than babies you're allowed to exist in the world as it is messy and impure. Lies are all around you. A better bullshit detector. That's a better solution than me giving up what I'm allowed to read. Who decides that? Who decides what gets the no evidence for that sticker slapped on it? Most people in this country still have a religion. They believe they have an imaginary best friend in the sky who they can talk to to help them with their problems. Nobody throws up a warning label on that that says there's no evidence for this. Conservatives do seem to have a special talent for embracing the real eye roll stuff like Hillary's pizza parlor pedophile ring or Democrats eat babies. Lizard people are running the world. But 41% of (41/44)
Democrats last year believed the hospitalization rate if you got COVID unvaccinated was over 50% when it was actually less than 1%. Somebody's misinformation got to those people. Sometimes misinformation is just history's first draft. I see a lot of things on social media and also on old fucks media. I don't completely believe any of it. Not right away. Not until I check it out. And when I ask, is it true? Usually the answer turns out to be, well, sort of, or yes, but yeah. See we've all become very adept at saying things that are technically true but lack context or that leave out half the story. So if we're going to ban on truth, does that include the half truth? The quarter truth? And wait, don't the wokest people in the world believe that what really matters is your truth? So yes, of course we should ban kiddie porn and libel and personal threats and calls for insurrection. That's a no brainer because they're already illegal. Just as it would be illegal in an actual town square to (42/44)
whip out your dick. And so should it be in the digital town square. And so should bots and deep fakes be banned and anything else that aren't really the people who say they are. But that's an entirely different thing than actual people expressing an opinion as repugnant or offensive or as misguided as some opinions may be. This is still America, where people have the right to express what they think, including to be wrong, to lie, and yes, the right to be an asshole. And if you think you know everything and no one else could possibly have some other truth, you should be glad for that protection because you're an asshole. All right, that's our show. If you want to hear more of me just bullshitting with people late at night, there's the Club Random podcast now. A lot of fun people, Mike Tyson will be there Monday. I want to thank my guests, Paul Begal, Michelle Kofoya, and Chloe Maxwell. I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas May 20th and 21st and at the Marat in Indianapolis June 5th. Now go to (43/44)
YouTube and join us on Overtime. Thank you, folks. New episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maher. I invited today because Trump's in LA today. That's yeah. Can you feel it? Doing some fundraising. Also, he's going to meet with the studio. She's got a great idea for a remake of The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Did you did you see the debate Tuesday night? Well, I'm just going by what CNN had 25 independents. Didn't had made their mind before the debate. She won 23 to 2. So that's pretty I haven't seen a woman beat an opponent that bad since that Olympic boxer with these suspicious high levels of testosterone. That's pretty bad for him. But halfway through it, he had a look on his face like boy, where's this sniper when you need one? I mean, nobody thought he did good. His teenage son, Baron was watching with some other kids in his dorm. And at one time, he jumped up and screamed. That's not my dad. That's not my dad. No, I thought I mean, she made Trump look so much like a bitch. But a Haitian migrant (1/44)
tried to eat him. Well, that's well, that's this is this is what he's basing his campaign on now that in Springfield, Illinois Springfield. Oh, yeah, what is the name of the town where the invasions come? Whether it's a body snatcher that now it's Haitian migrants. He says are eating. Eating the dogs and that's when the Korean migrants went. I was close. No, but today. I couldn't make this shit up today. I can't how could how can you top this today? Trump is walking it back. He said no, I'm sorry. It's not not that not the not the cats and the dogs at the reading. It's the it's the ducks and the geese. They're going to the pond. They're going to the pond and they're taking the geese to eat them. And this is what Trump supporters are doing now trying to prove that this Facebook mean this insanity that he's basing the campaign on is true. They're literally on a wild goose chase. As the list of animals keeps growing and growing like Noah's Ark. If Noah was a fat asshole. The most (2/44)
ridiculous part of this whole thing is Trump defending dogs Trump Trump hates dogs. He's the one guy in the world who hates dogs. The only president didn't have a dog. Everything bad. He's like a dog dogs dogs. They're rapists. And they bring drugs and some I assume are good boys. Where is he getting this from? Well, he's got a new bullshit whisperer. Laura Loomer, of course, that's her name. Laura Loomer. There she is. He's with her everywhere now for maggot people. It's she's like for people who find Marjorie Taylor Greene too intellectual. I mean, you name the crazy shit. She believes it at birth the wisdom. She's a 9-11 truther crisis actors. Pizza Gate rigged elections. You've heard of Florida man. She's Florida woman. Did you see this? She she ate dog food. Am I making that up? Do you saw that right? Like a Haitian? No, but listen to this. Now there's a bitch fight within the Republican Party. I love this because yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the voice of Sanity has come out (3/44)
against Laura Loomer says she's too far right. She says she's a racist. Now Loomer has accused Marjorie Taylor Greene. She says Marjorie Taylor Greene is an anti-semite and she cheats on her husband and she said, I can't believe I have to report this. She said her lady parts resemble an Arby's sandwich, which is so offensive to Arby's. And then Lindsey Graham, the other Real Housewives guest member got involved and he's attacking Laura Loomer says she's toxic and she posted back. We know you're gay Lindsey. Let's see David Mira fact check that. All right. We got a great show. We have Al Franklin and Kristin Sulters Anderson. But first up, he is the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies. Alex Carf is here. Alex, nice to meet you. How you doing? Now Alex, usually first guest here. People have some idea who that person is. These people don't know who you are. Not an insult. They should and we're going to fix that tonight. But say you're on a plane. You probably own your own plane (4/44)
because you're a rich guy, but say you're on a plane today and they hey, where you going? And you say I'm going to do the Bill Maher show and they go. I love that show because that's mostly what would happen. And they say to you. Why does Bill Maher want to have you on the show? What would you say? I'm a funny guy. Well, the Palantir was first of all. That's your company. Yeah, my company. I co-founded it. There's a cultural element. We were the first anti-woke, pro-American, pro-defense, successful. We went public company. So there's a cultural element. We defined Silicon Valley's reversal from I sell you something that makes you dumber, slower, stupider. And I tell you some platitude. You don't believe, you know, I don't believe it, but you still somehow you get to be rich. So we got rid of that. So there's also a cultural element. I've been the most vocal about the pagan religion that's infected our colleges. I've been most vocal about getting rid of the carcinogen TikTok. So (5/44)
there's a lot of cultural stuff. But then from a technical perspective, we were the first people to, we had the biggest impact on anti-terror of any company in the world. Europe, if you were European, the only reason you're not you stepping in your streets is because we stopped the terror attack that would have led to a change in government to the far right. Okay. So one more thing. If you are in favor of America defending its allies, whether they be Israel, Ukraine and others, those allies are being defended by our product on the battlefield. If you want to find a bad person, use our product to do it. Okay. I think I asked the right first question. And by the way, I'm going to agree with you on all this. That's why I wanted to have you on, because I think people should know this and I'm with you on all this. But what do you actually do, Alex? I mean, I understand a little bit, but I want you to explain it because Palantir Technologies, I've heard it's been called the AI arms dealer of (6/44)
the 21st century. That sounds evil. But you're using your power for good and not evil, right? If you are pro-West, pro-America, you think that Ukraine and Israel should defend themselves, you love us. And the reason you love us is because the way in which you find the adversary on the battlefield, so if the adversary is in the desert or in Ukraine, whether it's a general or terrorist, and the way you do it ethically before you take them out is you use our platform to use huge, huge, huge sets of data to drill down on the one person who's hidden and take them out. And you also use it, which is very important. That sounds like bin Laden. Were you involved in getting bin Laden? We are not, obviously can't discuss specifics. Oh, come on. Yeah. Well, in any case, we're on television. But Palantir is central to every conflict now where America is involved in finding adversaries, organizing our troops, bringing our troops home safely, and it's faster, cheaper, and better. And I'll tell you (7/44)
something else. The central advantage the U.S. has over China, Russia, Iran is our ability to produce weapons-grade software and use it on the battlefield. So this is your actual business, weapons-grade software? And then because it's weapons-grade, a lot of commercial people buy it. So like we have said, I mean, we have massive growth in U.S. commercials. So people use it to drill oil. People use it to organize their fleets. People use it for manufacturing. You can use our various products in the civilian. I know you're involved with the Defense Department, the intel agencies, ICE, Border Patrol, the FDA, the IRS. What do you do? What are these people buying from you? So for example, Operation Warp Speed, which arguably saved three and a half million. The vaccine. The vaccine. So how do you, so that the civilian use cases are like, how do you distribute a vaccine to the whole country? How do you distribute masks when you don't have enough? How do you do that overnight? The military (8/44)
use cases are where do you place your troops? How do you find somebody? And the civilian use cases are how do you make your business more efficient? How do you do it in a way that's cheaper? How do you get the car to the right place, the doctor to the right place at the right time when you have huge regulatory oversight? Could you do something here in the state of California? Because we could really use some of that. And I know you, you asked for one help to get it. I mean, you left California. I left California. Like another guy who's involved in some of this kind of stuff, which is Elon Musk. Yeah, we were the two biggest companies to leave California early. And the two biggest that are involved in the defense of our country. I mean, Starlink is very important. Well, I feel like, look, I owe California a great debt of gratitude. I went to school here. I built a company here. Obviously, California has gone in the past way too far on this kind of hyper woke. We can get nothing done, (9/44)
but we it doesn't have to work because we pretend it works because we're good people thing. And and I think and there are real consequences. So it's something like 87% of of of the most important tech companies in the world are American. And if you look at what should have happened, Germany and other places should have a tech scene. But you have to have rigorous thought, meritocracy, truth to build these companies. And that's what you have to we or if we've been fighting to preserve, because if you want to have Palantir or SpaceX or whatever you're going to build, you need to have a system where people can build things. It's rigorous. They keep the value of what they build and they share it with society. And I'm certainly with you on the over woke stuff, but if it is that constraining, how come what did you say? Eighty six percent of the 87 percent. OK, then how come we have been so successful if we're so we have the best immigrants, we organize people the best way. We we have a sense (10/44)
of fairness, togetherness. We're building the most creative people here. And that's why the companies develop here. But you say we could be even better. It could be even better. Right. And what I also love about your philosophy is that you're not afraid to say America is still the good guys, even though we've done horrible things. Everybody has. We're human. But have a little perspective. I feel like that is what is so lacking today. Well, look, of course, America, like every great nation, has done some really fucked up things. Right. Right. So that's obvious. Right. But but look, but we know they're messed up because we hold ourselves to a high standard. And if you're going to compare us, which at the end of day, morality has to be slightly compared, you're going to compare to China, Russia, Iran. Who else even aspires to these standards? And by the way, look at how our lives have changed. We're roughly the same age. When I was born, half people had gays, blacks, people didn't have (11/44)
the rights you have now. Look at the progress we've made. It's like in one lifetime. It's like magic. It's amazing. It's literally like magic and no other society, meaning like I spent half my life in Germany. It's a very interesting, very developed society. You do not have the integration. You do not have the innovation. You do not have the fairness. You don't have meritocracy. Most of the companies in Germany that are big are owned by families that own them. Fifty hundred years earlier. This is one country that produces part of the problem. And part of the reason why people don't stand up for America is they don't understand how magical it is to get these things to work. And no other place does it at our scale with our diversity and different kinds of people and different kinds of thought. And in my case, I like you know, I was viewed as the Frankenstein monster. I don't come from wealth and I get the opportunity to prove myself. No one in this country cares how crazy you are if you (12/44)
deliver. And I also like that you feel that we you know, you're helping America have the biggest swinging dick in the world. Absolutely. And size matters. And you're not afraid to say if somebody has to have that, it should be us and it should be us. And you're not afraid to say we should scare our enemies, right? Well, you know, one of the things I've been on a kind of a mantra about is as a lefty, our foreign policy should be. If you touch an American, we are going to make you and your friends life hell. You don't think we do that enough? Because I mean, we had the anniversary of 9-11. Yeah. OK, we look, I mean, we attacked an entire country that had nothing to do with it. I would say, well, there are many things we did that make no sense. Right. OK. Yes. And there. But we also we have not had another 9-11, partly because of Intel services and partly because of what we did and partly because we scared the living shit out of people. Yes. And that's why. So and then so this is like you (13/44)
either you either have to show action and live safely or you can talk a lot and live very dangerously. All right. Last question. I'll let you go. We've covered a lot here. You say we will we will soon have Terminator robots. Will they have the Austrian accent? Well, you know, I speak German and it's a nice flair. What does that mean? Terminator? Well, I the there there's a question in the modern war fighting. We're going to go to peer to peer war fighting. I think the more interesting thing we're going to have very soon is drone on drone war fighting, especially if we have a near peer, meaning China, Russia adversary. You're not going to be fighting as much with these big instruments. You're going to be using software to control small instruments and there's going to be hundreds of thousands of them and they're going to be somewhat autonomous. OK. Well, I certainly hope you stay in the cause of good and not evil because you're a very powerful guy. Thank you. Great to meet you. I'll see (14/44)
you after. All right. Let's meet our panel. Interesting guy. OK. He is a conservative pollster and CNN contributor. Kristin Soltis Anderson is here. And look who's here. Writer, comedian, former Democratic senator from Minnesota who now hosts the Al Franken popcast. He's good enough. He's smart enough. We like him. Al Franken is over here. Been too long since I had you on the panel. All right. I'm going to make this a very momentous night with a prediction because I. And I think I have the credibility for this prediction because I have been called a Trump alarmist for a very long time. They were wrong. I was right. He wasn't going to leave power. OK. But ever since then and since the Hollywood Access tape or he said, I'm going to grab him by the pussy and he survived that. Every time he's been done crazy shit and gotten his stuff in trouble, I said, no, no, it's not over. I've said that. I've argued with people. Brett Stevens, my good friend, he's on the show next week. He said at one (15/44)
point a few years ago, the Trump thing, I said, no, no, no. Tonight I'm saying I think it's over. I just want to bring up an analogy to one person. Even before we were around, there was a guy named Joe McCarthy in the early 50s and he had a hold on America and it blew out in about two years. Right. Two, three years. He was the biggest thing. And then it was just and I feel like eating the dogs. We're at this point, I think. I feel like we're at the Captain Queig with the strawberries. We're at Denzel at the end of training day. I just think he's going to lose. I do not share your confidence in knowing how this is going to go. I mean, I know people don't think that the polls are very accurate. So setting all of that aside, the reality is that people have known Donald Trump and known who he is for a very long time. And when you ask people, do you need to know more about these candidates with Kamala Harris, they say yes. Like three in 10 people say, I feel like I need to know more in (16/44)
order to make a decision. But when you ask that about Donald Trump, only a fraction of voters say that they do. And so people know who he is. And yet he's still competitive. You look at these battleground states, they're still 50-50. He's hanging in there. It'll be tied on Election Day, as always. The polls will be tied and then he'll lose. That's my prediction. We'll see. I'm just saying things aren't until they are. Phew! Thank God. Don't you feel better, Al? Next issue, huh? OK. You don't agree? I hope you're right. OK. All right. All right. So let me move on to the next question. Since he is the guy who nothing he can do can deter about half the country from voting for him, I see the Democrats have two choices. They can either say, well, he's such a monster. He's so crazy. I mean, and this week was just above and beyond with the racial stuff, with Kamala and this Laura Loomer person now, the dogs. I mean, I could, you know, you can either say half the country is deplorable. They (17/44)
tried that. I never believed that. I don't think half the country is deplorable. I don't think you did. I know that you believe that, right? No. There are some people who are deplorable. Absolutely. OK. Yeah. You agree on that? Well, obviously, it's a country of 350 million people. Some of them are going to be. But you can either say half the country is deplorable. Anybody who likes him is deplorable. Or the Democrats can say, why? Why is this insane monster still attractive to half the country? If not attractive, why are they willing to vote? What are we doing that makes so many people go, yeah, but this other thing is worse? I mean, Alex was talking a little bit about it up front. Yeah. You have if you look at people who say they're voting for Donald Trump, 93 percent of them like Donald Trump. But like seven percent of voters who say I'm voting for him really, really don't want to. But they feel like they have to because they feel like, well, I agree with him on policy. I'm not (18/44)
necessarily looking for someone that I like. And that's like well trod territory, right? That he's got some voters who are going for him because they just think the alternative is worse. And that's why I think Kamala Harris's strategy has been so fascinating over the last two weeks. She's a blank slate to a lot of voters. They have no idea what she stands for. You've got a lot of these clips of really crazy positions she's taken in the past and they're going, is that who she still is? And she gets up there on that debate stage and she says, you know what? I don't even know. 2019, 2020 Kamala Harris. I own a gun. Dick Cheney likes me. Goldman Sachs likes my economic policy. I throw gang leaders in jail. She's like begging Nikki Haley voters to come vote for her. And she's going to be able to get away with it because progressives right now hate Donald Trump so much that she has like this unbelievably unlimited long leash to go and say that she is basically an RNC 20 or 2004 keynote (19/44)
speaker. Please vote for me, Republicans. And it might work. I would hardly say I own a gun makes you a keynote speaker. No, but I do think that if you add it all together, it's not just the it is that at every turn she is trying to make the case. My passion is small business. I mean, she's really going after that slice of the Republican Party that left and said, Trump's not for me. She really thinks that she can make them not just leave the top of the ticket blank. Why does that have to be the Republican Party? You don't think there are Democrats who own a gun? Democrats who like small business? But I don't think that typically when they're running for president, they're out there. What's wrong with you? I apologize. I apologize. I was a little rusty, you know. Go on. Do you think that Kamala Harris is as conservative as she is portraying herself to be right now, or do you think that she is more accurately described by the words she used to give her own issue positions back in 2019, (20/44)
2020? Like, who is the real Kamala Harris, do you think? I think she really is where she is today, where what she in that debate, I thought it was a brilliant debate. I thought it was one of the best I've ever seen, you know. And yeah, some of those positions are a little bit remarkable how gung ho she is for fracking. But, you know, I still believe that she she she's a politician. Right. She wants to win this election. Thank God. Yeah. And I want to push back on your assessment that that makes her conservative. I don't think anything she's saying now makes her conservative. I think I think actually conservative. Let's be clear. That's the word you appeal to conservative. I just think this shows how far we've moved. Where she was in 2019 and 2020 was super far left. Super what we'd call woke. I know people don't like that term, but OK, that's where she was. Now, I feel like she's just like center left. I mean, I don't know that fracking, even fracking has to be something that we demean (21/44)
this way. I mean, what we're trying to do is get the environment to its best place. It's a difficult thing to do. And we're not there yet. If we could have 100 percent solar and wind. Yes, but we're so far from there. We have to use other things. Germany tried this. Other places have tried this where they got rid of all the gold, the coal plants. They needed more energy and to reopen them. But they're back to over 50 percent renewable. They are. OK, but we're still not even close. And the thing that I think we have been on Lauren Bargon next week, what he's been talking about, which is quite interesting, is that when we have new energy from renewables, the amount of fossil fuels doesn't go down. People just use more. We're Americans. So. Well, there's also the reality that during the time that she has been in the White House, you had this moment where gas prices were going up so much that if she comes out and says, look, the reason I've changed positions on fracking is because gas (22/44)
prices were really high. I realized we needed to produce more. That's great. I'm all for people learning more and converting. The problem I think she has is that she has so many positions from the past that she has changed a lot on. And I don't think in that debate she got pressed nearly hard enough on. Why have you had this conversion besides this new position is really popular in Pennsylvania? Nobody cares. You know who should have pressed her is Trump. Trump. Yes. But he had a hard time in the debate. Because all she did was talk about what she was for and then at an end it by saying something that got him mad. Yeah. That was her debate strategy. And it worked. The most predictable strategy in the world. It was the it's so easy. It's like a cockfight. Of course, you can get the cocks to do it. Just put them in each other's face. And she did. I mean, he's one of so many reasons why he is unthinkable as a leader, because he cannot control his impulses on an issue like immigration that (23/44)
Donald Trump loves to talk about. She got him to start his answer by talking about crowd size. That is unbelievable. That's that. That's like the slow pitch over the middle. He should be able to just knock that out of the park. And instead it was like squirrel. And he just. Again, they're reading the squirrels. All right. Listen, one day a year, I can never get to sleep at night. And people know me who know me know that night is the night before the Country Music Award nominations. Honestly, I. I have I've tried everything. Gummies, melatonin, nothing works. I'm just so excited. And this year was especially exciting because it was a big controversy, because this year that Beyonce put out her big album Country Carter with the number one hit. And it got completely shut out of getting a nomination for the Country Music Awards. So I was looking into this. And, you know, it's it's interesting, not just this song, but this is the new vogue in music is mixing country and rap. It's a new genre (24/44)
called crap. No, it's not. It's not. It's actually great stuff. I remember the remember Old Town Road. That was like the number one hit. And then Post Malone now is a country singer and Jelly Roll and Beyonce. It's the it's the newest thing. So some of this, if you're not aware, here are some of the other songs that were up for a country's world better crossover between country and rap. Well, there's all my shorties drink from 40 is a big one. And this one was great. Bling of Fire. The Hennessey Wall in De Sam's Club. To all the grills I've loved before. Boys in the Hoods. It's really a movie, but we. I twerk the line is a very moving. I like I like big bubbles. All these are just terrific songs. The devil went down to freak Nick. And of course, I'm so lonesome I could crunk. So we're having a great time. Let's talk about an ugly incident that happened this week. Tyreek Hill. He's a football player. You may not be a football fan. If you're not a fan, you probably don't know who he is. (25/44)
I definitely know who he is. Did not know what he looked like. OK, because they wear helmets. So we'll get to that part of it. But he got pulled over by the cops and they roughed him up in a way I thought was not called for. But I thought it was just a depressingly emblematic part of this. What this country represents now, which is that everybody's an asshole. I feel like everybody is just trying to trigger everybody else. I mean, was Tyreek an asshole? Yes. Yes. Both of them were saying I'm saying they were both assholes. If you want to trigger cops, don't comply. Act superior to them. Be a wise ass. Well, that'll that'll roll up your window. Darken window. Yes. If you're and if you're a cop and you want to trigger a black man in America after the history we have in this country, lay your hands on them when it's not absolutely necessary. You know, cops, they act like it's a bar fight. If I hear one more cop on the get the fuck fuck, fuck shouldn't come out of your mouth. You're the (26/44)
pro. You're the pro. It's not a bar fight. You're not in a bar. So that's it. Everybody's an asshole. But I actually thought that Tyreek's Hills response was great on this because, in fact, the only thing I didn't like about his response is I was playing against him in fantasy football and he ran for an 80 yard touchdown. I mean, because he came out and didn't say that I'm he's in say I'm blameless. He came out and said, you know, I probably should have kept my window down. I rolled it up because I was worried that fans were going to see me and start taking pictures. But you know what? I was wrong. And I thought that was good of him to because two things can be true at once. That he probably should have left his window down. But there was no need for him to get dragged out of the car like that. But it also reminded me a lot of a very different incident that happened this year with another athlete on the way to a sporting event. Scottie Scheffler, the number one golfer in the world. He (27/44)
is a nice, sweet Christian boy from Dallas. His new dad that week. And he gets yanked out of a car by the Louisville PD booked. And his mugshot goes up before he even plays the round that day. And it's just bizarre to me that we keep having these incidents. And yet it doesn't feel like this has rallied any new sort of fresh push for any kind of action. It's like, well, we got the body cams, but all the body cams are doing is showing us this bad stuff is happening. Well, we need the body cams. Yes, we do. Yeah. For both sides. Thank God for body cams. Yeah. I mean, the cops fought them for a long time. The cops fought everything and they've lost a lot of those battles. They never used to go to jail when they did horrible shit. And now they do. OK, again, progress. But also, you know, when he was sitting on the ground and they shouldn't have dragged him out, it was horrible, but he's sitting on the ground and he said something like, just being black in America, bro. And the cop says to (28/44)
him, we're not white either because they were Hispanic. And like being was nice. But I mean, being black in America is still a thing. You still can get a lot of shit just for being black in America. Which is why you should not roll up a darkened window. I mean that. But I he didn't want his fans recognize him there. He's right near the stadium, right? It was like a few blocks away. There was a way he could have handled this and nothing would have happened. Yeah, he had a bad attitude, you know, and to say being black in America, that again, it does happen still and shouldn't and we should always be fighting it. But it can't be a when shit goes sideways and all access card to just say, no, that's because I'm black in America. No, you are also out of line. Well, it's actually the reason to not roll up window. I mean, it's funny, the mayor of St. Paul, Melvin Carter, his father was a cop and he said that he growing up, he'd meet all these other cops, go over to his house, friends of his (29/44)
father. And then when he got to be 16 and driver, he said, I met all the cops again. But you know, it's me, it's Melvin and they all hi, Melvin. Yeah, sorry to assume something. But yeah, I mean, I think it's in some ways a sign of progress that black folks can now act like entitled assholes, like white people always could. Let's get to the big news this week. Taylor Swift finally told people who to vote for. Of course, immediately the response from the other side was celebrity endorsements don't matter. This is people are always so behind on these things. You know, that's the conventional wisdom for a long time. So and many sober endorsements don't work. Not in this case. Okay. I mean just the number of people who immediately were registered from that tweet and I'm sorry, but we live in star fucker America more than anything. I mean, George Clooney is the one who got Biden to step down. I wrote the exact same editorial he did and so many other people did do. Nobody cared. Soon as (30/44)
George Clooney said it. He's got to go. I disagree with you there. Okay. Okay. Let's debate. It was it was Pelosi and it was members of Congress. It was a while between when I feel like that's when the damn broke. I feel like that was very key. Well, I think you live here and what I think. And I think that maybe from some perspective. You have the wrong perspective. And it was not that he's George Clooney, the guy, you know from ER what I think made the Clooney op-ed stand out was that he said, I was in Joe Biden's presence at a fundraiser and I saw him and he's not what you think. I think it wasn't just the messenger. I think it was also the message and that's why I think the Taylor Swift endorsement. I'll agree with you. It does matter and it's not the message of you should vote for Kamala Harris because I don't think there are a lot of voters out there going G. I don't know who to vote for let me wait for Taylor Swift to tell me but I think that in terms of turnout to the extent (31/44)
that there are voters who are on the sidelines and they previously thought I thought Hillary Clinton wasn't great. I thought Joe Biden wasn't great. They don't motivate me to turn out to the extent that she's getting people to actually get off the couch. The couch is the enemy. It was 400,000 the first day. It's amazing of people who registered because she told him to go register and I must say in George Clooney's defense. Those are the good people in George Clooney's defense. He's done a few things since ER. Well, yeah. But this let me know you're a pollster. Tell me what this means because this was the most surprising part of it was who she influenced. Swift it says would have more influence over male voters. 27% of male voters say they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift. I must have this phenomenon gauged all wrong. I thought it would be women. Another one what another one another. That was cheap. So Laura Loomer, maybe talk about her from bring her right. He (32/44)
brought her to a 9-11 remembrance. Yes, which is obscene. Well, she's a truther right at 9-11 truther. And by the way, yes in the 23 years since 9-11 at the beginning. There was a lot of truthers. I mean, you know, you don't know what happened at first people sent me a lot of videos. I watched them all I said, you know, I don't trust anybody in the media these days. I'm doing the deep dive. Okay, even most of the people at the beginning who were 9-11 truthers have fallen away. It's just not even a thing anymore. Everybody gets it it involved to think that George Bush could have planned something like that just ridiculous. So to be a to be a 9-11 truther. This is what I mean about Captain Queeg. We're at that end stage. I really think here's my question because she said Laura Loomer said Taylor Swift. She believes is in an arranged relationship with Travis Kelsey to influence the 2024 election. I think maybe Laura Loomer's in an arranged relationship to affect the election because she's (33/44)
very close to Trump. She's 31 looks like his type. We did an editorial here a few years ago who you're remembering it already. It was basically who's Trump fucking because I said, you know, it's not nobody. He's been a dog for too long. And it's not Melania. I think we may have our answer this week. I think it might be Laura Loomer. I'm just saying a big part of why he was able to be so successful up until the kind of flailing of the last few weeks is that he had actually brought an really impressive team of operatives around him that had kept him kind of muzzled kept him on message. Susie Wiles and Chris Lasavita his campaign managers. They are good at what they do. And the fact that he's now bringing all of these other people tomorrow Lago. I do think lend some credibility to your prediction that this could be the end that if he's if he's able to actually keep the pros in charge, he would be very formidable. But I really think it is and these people who are still undecided. I mean, (34/44)
you can answer this is your field these people who are like the people who go to McDonald's every day and still still need to look at the menu for 10 minutes. What are they waiting for? What who is being Harris Trump? They get their information from places that that we don't. And so they have a bias toward Trump maybe. And that's why they are undecided. They're waiting to see if what was wrong with that theory. It wasn't good. It is no good. It was terrible. It's a very it's the it's the it's the non undecideds who have the bias the people who are locked into MSNBC and that's all they see or they only see Fox News. These are the people who supposedly are outside those bubbles who are weighing it. And this is back to my point earlier. Like I don't think they are blind to what a monster he is. They just say yeah, but there are things going on. And again, unless the Democrats start marginalizing some of the crazy people, you know, the Hamas lovers and the gender deniers and the you know, (35/44)
men can get pregnant people. Well, but I think I do think that if you want to win over the political center, getting rid of your extremes is helpful. But I also think that for a lot of these swing voters, it's not that they love Donald Trump and it's not that they love Kamala Harris. They're trying to figure out is it even worth my time to go participate or is this all pointless? Are we just is it just going to be a disaster no matter what? There was a woman in one of my focus groups. She was moderate voter in Pennsylvania. Her name was Kay. And she said, look, I didn't want to vote at all, but I'm probably going to go out and vote for Kamala Harris because my friends have convinced me that if I don't vote, it's basically like voting for Trump. But I'm not going to like it. I'm not going to enjoy it and I'm going to need more. Yeah, who told you you have to like everything and like go for it. All right. Time for new rules. Thank you, guys. Now that Taylor Swift has saved democracy by (36/44)
endorsing Kamala Harris, she has one more mission. Stop making Travis Kelsey dress like a douche. I don't own a cat, but I know what it smells like when they mark their turf. And since since cats are so on everyone's mind these days, new rule, the makers of Tabli, the app that tells you whether or not your cat is happy, have to answer one question. Doesn't that ruin the mystery? I mean, plainly, that is the attraction of a cat. If if you want a pet that goes apeshit for you when you come home, we have that. It's called a dog. Some people like that and some people like when you come home and your pet glances at you like a Stepford wife in a loveless marriage. I guess we're all different. OK, everyone must recognize that when we say never forget about something, we always forget. Not only have we forgotten, 9-11 Ground Zero is now a shopping mall with a banana republic, Sephora and Jamba Juice. But on the bright side, to recap, the Galleria at the World Trade Center, one caliphate zero. (37/44)
New rule, the college freshman who's I'll get it back with this one. The college freshman who's been complaining on Reddit that his dorm mate sits in their room all day playing League of Legends, and so he hasn't been able to jerk off for two weeks. Must be told it gets better. Omar with a message to college freshmen with backed up sperm. I know how hard it can be for you. It's your first time away from home. Your roommate barely speaks English. Someone stole your weighted blanket. Your your Ritalin prescription ran out. And the from the river to the sea chants outside your window are keeping you up at night. But hang in there. As Nietzsche said, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Also, you know, the shower right down the hall. Use that dumb ass. Someone has to tell Chad Condit, who is suing California State Senator Maria Alvarado Gill, because he claims she forced him to perform oral sex on her while she was his boss, including once in her car, and it left him with three (38/44)
herniated discs and a collapsed hip. Now, I'm sorry, but this is the biggest humble brag in history. I mean, who amongst us hasn't tapped out because they couldn't keep going? But you're saying you stuck it out at the expense of your spinal cord in order to in order to get your boss to the finish line. Good God, man, you're the greatest lover of all time and employee of the month. And finally, new rule. Now that we've shown that it's possible to begin a campaign for president just three months before the election. Let's always do that. Always say voters don't pay attention until Labor Day. Well, then let's start the election on Labor Day and end it on Election Day when the Civil War starts. But I'll get to that in a minute. But honestly, what sentient person couldn't cast their vote right now? Trump announced his run nearly two years ago. Did anyone say, good, I need to hear more about this Donald Trump? If he can support forcing a woman to choose whether to have an abortion in six (39/44)
weeks, we can choose whether or not to abort him in 12. Americans are a funny people. For most things, we have zero attention span. Nearly half of TikTok users say watching videos that last over a minute is stressful. Thirty seven states have no waiting period for a gun because if we order a pizza and it's not there in 30 minutes, someone has to die. If you order if you order a garden gnome when you're drunk on Amazon, it's on your doorstep before you sober up. We have five minute car washes, speed dating, 15 minute oil change, 20 minute facelifts. A 2005 survey found that vaginal sex typically lasts three to seven minutes because we fuck like we eat. And yet we do elections like we're fucking on cocaine. When when Joe Biden was still hanging on to be the candidate, many of the pundits said that to switch him out this late would cause chaos. Yeah, that was never my position. And indeed, what happened was Kamala Harris said, oh, look, I guess it's my turn. And the next day, a grateful (40/44)
nation handed her five hundred million dollars. The only reason we stay stuck in permanent campaign mode is money. It's estimated this year that 16 billion dollars will be spent on political ads. It's time we admit that the endless campaign exists only to enrich advertisers, political consultants and what's left of the news media. And the fact that we're just getting to know Kamala isn't bad. It's great. Great for her. Great for the country. People didn't used to get sick of the candidates because you barely ever saw them unless you happen to be standing at the back end of a train. We never stop seeing them. The winner in modern elections comes down to who we're less tired of. They're just constantly on us. TV, radio, the mail on our phones, texting. Hey, Bill. Tim Walz here. You are? They're everywhere all the time. Jesus Christ, fuck off. Let mommy put her purse down. I don't get it. Everything in the modern world moves so fast, except politics. It's the one exception. Well, politics (41/44)
and streaming series. People are always telling me I should binge watch a show that gets good in season three. Season three. What about my needs? Every idea that would make one single decent movie is now a 10 part series. And the middle three episodes are just the old cop with a dark secret and the lesbian cop with the neck tattoo saying, are you as confused as I am? I'm very confused. Why the hell do we still need a ridiculous 11 week period between election and inauguration? It made sense in the old days when it took that long to get from Illinois to Washington by horse. But we have planes now. We don't have to strap William Howard Taft to a buckboard and wheel his ass in from Ohio. We talk of the intermission between election and inauguration as a transition period, like that's good and it makes us mature. It's not. It's a fetid swamp which breeds nothing but mischief. When other countries vote out their politicians, they throw their clothes right out on the front lawn within days. (42/44)
Bye bye, loser. You don't get three months to sit there and think about rioting. Where else in life does this ever happen where a person gets terminated and they just let you stay on for a couple of months? No. When you get fired at Google, you pack up your cardboard box with the sad plant and you're gone that day. Canada elects a new prime minister and they take over in two weeks. The French hit it and quit it in three. Japan's season lasts 12 days. In England, their campaign is 25 working days and the new prime minister moves into 10 Downing Street within hours. In Mexico and the Philippines, campaigns last 90 days. In Brazil, 45. And these are the laid back countries. The ones where you ask room service for a bucket of ice and it comes as you're boarding the flight home. And yet, yet they all manage to wrap up an election in the same amount of time that it takes a 90 day fiance to say, sure, I'll fuck a fat guy for a green card. If TLC can do 90 day fiance, we can do 90 day (43/44)
commander in chief because at this point, I feel like Melania in the bedroom. I just want to get whatever is going to happen over with. All right. That's our show. I'll be at half here in Cincinnati September 29th. The Majestic is in Antonio, October 12th in Tulsa, in Tulsa, October 13th. I want to thank Kristen Soltis Anderson, Al Franken and Alex Carr. Go watch overtime now on YouTube. Thank you. (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. That's good. Thanks. A lot of partners. Yeah. Can I do it? The senator cannot. Welcome to this week's edition of He Did What? Well, I'll tell you something, he did the impossible. He made going to the airport shittier than it was. Just before we came on, we got news that Muslim ban he instituted, a federal judge knocked that out until a higher court said, yeah. So if you missed this, I mean, there's so much news this guy creates, but way back after our last show, which is only a week ago, he instituted this Muslim ban, which he called a ban, and then his press secretary, Sean Spicer, called a ban, and then there were protests and they denied it was a ban, and then Trump tweeted, well, you can call it a ban if you like. So they're really on message, and the message is we have no idea what we're doing. Hey, you Muslims, don't think you're special, because our president picked a fight with a lot of people (1/44)
last week. Finally, a president has shown the balls to stand up to our arch enemy, Australia. He had a call with the Australian prime minister, a long time poodle dog ally of America, and he finally said to him, you know what, I had five calls today, this is the worst, and hung up. Well, first he said, we're building a wallaby, and you're gonna pay for it. No, I mean, it's interesting, just in a week, he's threatened to invade Iran, Mexico, Chicago. Today, today we declared war on La La Land. I mean, this can't be going well. I mean, it is starting to look like our only hope is penis enlargement surgery. Really, and no one's seen Melania for like, since the inauguration. I don't want to say we have a mad king who has his wife locked in a tower, but it's literally called Trump Tower. I mean, it's... She's like a Slovenian Rapunzel. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your extensions. So turning to domestic insanity, Donald Trump, okay, this week announced his Supreme Court pick, but he did it (2/44)
like a reality show with an unveiling of finalists, that actually happened. Then for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the administration said, it is high time on this day we stopped mentioning the Jews. Other people thought it was an overstate, no, no, we did this on purpose, because other people were killed too. Yes, the Jews had been hogging the Holocaust. Fake news, and that it was time to insult black people. So, I'm telling you, it's an equal opportunity, because this was the beginning of February, which is Black History Month, so Trump gathered all the black people he knows in one room. He was like a kid showing off his Pokemon cards, you know? This is Omarosa, her special power is sass. And this was great, he called it a listening session, and he did all the talking, all about himself, and the election, and how unfair the news coverage has been. Only Trump could take the occasion of Black History Month, and make it about how he's oppressed. And then he outdid himself, really, even (3/44)
him, started talking about Frederick Douglass, someone who's done a terrific job, a terrific job, and is being recognized by more and more people. Where are you, Freddie? Stand up, let the people see you. Fred Douglass, tremendous guy, tremendous. And then someone told Trump, Frederick Douglass is dead, and Trump said, oh no, gang violence? And finally, to cap off the week, yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast, the National Prayer Breakfast, the president opened the proceedings by saying what tremendous success Celebrity Apprentice was when he was the host of it, but now that it's Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's a total disaster, the ratings went right down the tubes. Amen. Tommy will be speaking with our good friend, Michael Eric Dyson is here, but first up, he's a neuroscientist, an author and host of the Waking Up podcast. My friend Sam Harris is over here. Oh, hey, that's a good sign, they like you. Yes, well, give him a minute. So I thought it was time we had a talk, because I (4/44)
knew early on in Trump's administration he would do something stupid about Muslims. Yes. And he did, I think we both agree, his ban, I've always said it's stupid, it's counterproductive, it's un-American, but let's get that right out of the way first, that we both think this is a dumb idea, the Muslim ban, right? Yeah, I mean, he is, first of all, Trump is like Chauncey Gardner's evil twin. I mean, if he does something right on this issue, it'll be by accident. Being there, yeah, yeah. So, and the ban itself is just the sort of idea you'd think he would come up with and press enthusiastically. It's a terrible idea, even if your only concern is security, right? And that's not our only concern, I hope we get to that topic, but, I mean, we have to win a war of ideas with the Muslim world, and we need allies. Right. It's not about immigrants, it's about ideas. Yeah, and we want, yes, the ideas cross borders. I mean, immigration is just one part of this problem, but we should be desperate (5/44)
to have moderate Muslims in this society, we want moderate Muslims, we want. And ones who speak out, I thought it was great when London elected a Muslim mayor, because when you elect someone mayor, then they have to say out loud, our Western values, and he has, he doesn't even like it when women cover their face. Yeah, and when you view this as a war of ideas, you see that we need to empower the actual reformers in the Muslim world. Right. And the way to do that is not to put up a blanket ban. Also because you never know what is in someone's mind. Do you remember just last year, the Strasbourg cell that they broke up in France, that's what they called it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I remember the headline in the New York Times a few days after said, Terror suspects led mainstream lives, unsettling France. Right. Because you don't know what's, and they were saying they're not, they don't have beards. The guy was the, he ran the grocery, he sold liquor. Right. He was not scowling, he was (6/44)
smiling at the children. You don't know what is in people's minds. Yeah, but only, I mean, all these people are related to other people, right? So only secular, liberal, and former Muslims, frankly, can police this for us. And this is a war of ideas, a civil war of ideas that has to happen within the Muslim community, and we have to help them win it. But we don't do that by putting up a blanket ban against Muslims. And I mean, you've had people on your show which are exactly the sort of people we want empowered, like Azhar Nomani, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and my colleague, Majid Nawaz. Raheel, I think. Yeah, Raheel Raza. Raheel Raza, so. But I mean, the reason why you should view this as a war of ideas and be at least hopeful, potentially hopeful about it is that minds change. I mean, so to Majid, who's been on your show, he was a former extremist. He spent four years in an Egyptian prison for his nefarious activities. He's now as reasonable and ethical a person as you're ever gonna meet. (7/44)
And yet he's now demonized by some subset of the Muslim community and the left as an Uncle Tom, right? So that's the kind of thing that only empowers Trump. And I think, yes, right. I mean, you talked about in your last blog, the fact that Azhar Nomani, who's been on our show, and who I think is exactly what you're talking about, the kind of person we want to empower. You said she voted for Trump. He's a liberal. She doesn't like him. But she feels like for the issue that matters to her, you're empowering the wrong people. You're the ones who are oppressing me, liberals. That's where they go. And I think what we're trying to say is we're trying to find ways to disempower Donald Trump. And the left is often not helping. Yeah, well, exactly. So take Azhar's case. In the immediate aftermath of Orlando, we have Clinton talking about gun control only, and then admonishing the whole country not to be racist. Now, you can't say that jihadism has no relationship to Islam. And so people like (8/44)
Azhar, who are fed up with this, and there are millions of them, said this is just too galling to see. And the president has been lying for eight years about this. Now, it's not to say he hasn't been flying drones. The old president. Yeah. But presumably he's not been bombing the Amish, right? So he knows that this has some relationship to Islam. Yeah, he said in his final address, he said, we've taken out tens or 10,000 terrorists. And I'm sure most of them, if not all of them, were ones who believed in the Koran. That seems like an awful lot if you're just saying this is the fringe. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's not just the fringe. The problem is it is... The fringe is probably just the people who are actually violent. Well, I mean, so again, the last time we were here, and this is where we'll begin saying things that will piss off people. And if Batman were here, he would call us a racist. But I mean, yes, so there are jihadists who will use violence immediately and who were expecting to (9/44)
get into paradise when they blow themselves up on an airplane. And again, size matters. I mean, there are entire terrorist armies. ISIS, obviously, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda. This just doesn't... People talk about the KKK like it's an equivalent. The KKK is not seeking nuclear weapons. That is a genuine fringe phenomenon. But when you take jihadists and Islamists who want Sharia law, they just want to use the levers of a state to get it. They're not committing violence immediately. And then you just have a larger subset of conservative Muslims who, while they may not have any alliance with jihadists, they still have attitudes around free speech and the rights of women and the rights of gays that are deeply at odds with our own. And we have to win a war of ideas with these people. This is not a... We don't fly drones to solve this problem. And so this is why we need to empower real reformers. I know you were having a bit of a Twitter spat sometimes with this woman, Linda Sarsour. Am I saying (10/44)
that right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. She was at the... She was at the march. And you've mentioned that she tweets things like sort of semi-supportive of Saudi Arabia saying, because they give women maternity leave more than we do. Yeah. They have some... Well, this is the problem. So the left has allied itself with Islamists and closet Islamists. And she's none too closeted, she's a hijabi and the hijab was promoted as one of the empowering symbols of feminism for this march. And she's one of the organizers of this march. But that's not the full burka. No, no. The burka. We have showed the picture of the burka. See, this is what I want liberals to understand. That there are some countries, I think France has banned this. I'm not for banning. I think that's not the right approach is to tell anybody how they can dress. But also stop saying that's normal. That's not normal. If you think that's normal, you are so part of the problem. There is a human being in there who might want to feel the sun (11/44)
on their face or make eye contact or register a smile. And most are not there voluntarily. That's the thing. I mean, you're not for banning. I mean, you should be able to wear whatever costume you want but the subset of people who are wearing these things purely because they want to without being coerced by their community, without having a level of misogyny. Or brainwashed from centuries. I mean, but no one wants to be that. And also, I mean, why are they covering women like that? Because otherwise men might get aroused. So they're blaming the women for the men's horniness. I mean, you couldn't create in a lab an idea that should be more opposed by liberals. Then we cover the women and blame them if men get horny. And we have this woman you mentioned, Linda Sarsour. She's one of the organizers of the Women's March. She has people like Bernie tweeting, I marched with Linda, right? But she's someone who has gone after Ayaan Hirsi Ali who's a real feminist hero. And she's tweeted (12/44)
absolutely defamatory things at her. Like she doesn't deserve her vagina. She deserves an ass whipping. I mean, she's a theocrat, right? Why is it that liberals here seem to just really want to, from a gut level, jump immediately always to, we're just as bad? Because we've been bad, we've done a lot of bad things. But on this issue, especially right now, at this point in history, not every culture is equally bad. What is that? Is that just some clothing? Well, there are two things. I mean, so, one, just let's take that claim. Take our quirky religions, right? If the Scientologists were practicing suicide bombings in dozens of countries, if they were killing people for drawing pictures of L. Ron Hubbard, right? Tom Cruise would have more to answer for than he does, right? And he's got a fair amount to answer for. If the Mormons were trying to kill Trey Parker and Matt Stone over their Broadway play, we would lose our patience for Mormonism, right? So it's a massive double standard here. (13/44)
This is the needle we have to thread, and this is the problem you and I have been getting into for 15 years. We have to, on the one hand, acknowledge that there are valid criticisms of misuses of American power and colonialism, and we want to help refugees, right? These people in Syria are the unluckiest people in the world, right? And if they don't pose a security concern, we should welcome them into our society, right? We don't wanna look at the Statue of Liberty and think. But, but also, you're not automatically a racist if you have concerns about assimilation. Exactly. Because of the ideas that we're talking about, there are sometimes assimilation problems. I don't think we have a lot of that in America, because. But because we've been lucky, but we have these two oceans, right? And so we have to acknowledge that Europe has a problem we don't wanna have. It's America. If a Muslim here in America wants to take off the thing, she can. Yeah. And she can do that without fear of someone (14/44)
beating her for it. I mean, if someone wants to come out of the closet here in America, if someone wants to marry a non-Muslim, these are not options available to vast amounts of Muslims in the world. So let's address the question that they're saying now, who hate us, which is you paint with too broad a brush, because we mentioned some of these things. Right. We don't, I don't think. We paint with a brush. It's neither too broad. We're painting with statistics, right? I mean, like you're talking about 43% of this and 78% of this. And on any specific question, these numbers can move around, but the numbers are never consoling, right? When you ask the Muslims in the UK whether they wanna live under Sharia law, right? Or whether the Danish cartoonist should be imprisoned, right? You don't get the tiny numbers you would hope to get. Right. And that's a problem that we have to speak honestly about. And just, as you just said, you don't have to be a fascist or a racist or even a Trumpian to (15/44)
not want to import people into your society who think cartoonists should be killed for drawing the profit, right? That's a totally rational thing not to want. And the left has been demonizing anyone who will talk about this. Right. And I would say to you, finally, you know, asking you what is the proper liberal response? And I think it begins with, yes, understanding that we are never going to defeat terrorism if we don't reform Islam. Yes. And we are not going to reform Islam if we can't talk about it. And if Muslims can't talk about it. And Muslims can't talk about it. If we don't encourage, empower, and oblige Muslims to talk honestly about this, yes. Okay. Thank you, Sam. I appreciate you coming here and giving us the real deal as always. Sam Harris, everybody. Thank you. Terrific. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (16/44)
book, A Sermon to White America. I'm a Baptist preacher. You know, I've been a professor for 30 years. I've been a Baptist preacher for 35. I said I can't do an analytical investigation of whiteness. Let me just preach as a minister to white brothers and sisters. I'm not one of these down from the pulpit, I know the truth, but in the trenches with people to identify with the grief. But that word sermon, how do you think that's going to go over with the Trump voter? I don't, I'm worried about that word. A black man is preaching to me. Yeah. Yeah. A black man doing anything to them. But I'll say that if they're interested in religion, let's give them benefit of the doubt. I'm a Baptist preacher who's preaching a lot of different places, a lot of different churches. So I think that the Trump voters who are at least able to be open to hearing quote the word of God, though they won't associate that with me. So you're optimistically thinking they're going to see the word sermon. And not (26/44)
thinking of... A black man giving the sermon. They might mistake me for Ben Carson, we're both from Detroit. And you mentioned reparations, which is the R word in a lot of America. Right, right. I call it a cracker tax. That's not in my book, but those are your words. But you don't really mean people would be writing a check, do you? Obviously not. My point is that... I could give you cash. And I'll take it. But theoretically, obviously the redistribution of wealth based upon the unpaid labor of black people over centuries is real. But I'm not even talking about that. I'm saying before the government gets involved, you as an individual white brother and sister if you're inclined, I'm not asking every white person to give their money to every black person. Though if you'd like to tonight, holler at me after the show. Let's not pass up an opportunity. But what I'm saying is that there are... I run into so many white brothers and sisters who say, what can I do to help? Look, you can reach (27/44)
out and buy a computer for a person who's a person of color, a little black kid that you know deserves it. Or some school you can adopt through your company to tutor them or mentor them. In other words, these are specific individual things that you as an interested party to try to restitute and really redistribute some resource through your own pocket and not only just money, it's about time. It's about giving of your own inner resource and your spirit and your soul and what else? Your pocket book as well. Did you see the picture? It went viral. Show it here if you would. It's a woman's march and there's a black woman saying, don't forget white women voted for Trump. And she happens to be in front of these three... I told my mother not to do this again, man. And they do look self-involved because they're taking selfies and stuff. But I mean, everybody takes selfies. And I'm just... Do you think this is helpful? I mean, I'm kind of on the liberals about this sort of internecine warfare. (28/44)
Those white women there, they came to the march. I was there. They could have gone somewhere else. Maybe we're not perfect. But is it the time to like to just go against our own, the people who are on your side? It's a good point. Look, Bill, I think that in this day and age, when we feel all under siege, most of us, by what's going on in Trump America, right? Trump-hometry, his vision that is perverted and narrow and I think vicious. It is true that we began to see that all the stuff we thought we had that were that we were against each other, we began to see that we have a greater unity. But I think what's interesting, I'm at many places and book tours and people say, what happened to the black people who didn't show up to vote and stuff? And then I do remind them, I said, look, 53 percent of the women who were white who voted did vote for Trump. So it's not just black folk didn't show up. It's white women voting against their interests. It's white working class people voting against (29/44)
their interests for, ostensibly, a blue collar billionaire who has no investment in their lives. Martin Luther King Jr. was in jail and the jailer came to him and said, you know what? What you're doing is wrong. He said, no, I'm doing what I'm doing is right. And then Dr. King asked the white guy, how much money do you make? And after Dr. King said, you need to be marching with us. And so the reality is many white brothers and sisters have been sold a bill of good. At least you're not a Negro so that overlords and captains of industry who exploit the working class who are white tell them, yes, we're screwing you, but at least you're not a black person. And so we're not rid of the bigotry and the racism and we could come together and forge a connection. We could turn this mother out. You do give a good sermon. And what do you think if Trump was black? Say there was a black man, president, and he had three wives and women, children by three wives. And he acted like, you know, he was as (30/44)
sort of erratic as he was and belligerent as he was. He'd be in prison. I mean, it's still a possibility. Do you think a black person could act like Donald Trump and be president? Honestly? Yeah. Do you think if a black person acted like that, America, it wouldn't matter? I don't think it would matter. No, I don't think I don't think it would. I don't look at Trump and judge him on his character flies. No, but if a black guy ran for president and acted just the way he did, you know, made fun of the handicap, said I grabbed pussies because I'm a celebrity. If a black guy said I grabbed pussies and they let me do it because I'm a celebrity, you think that would make no difference that he was black? Not to me. I can't speak for America. To me it would not. He'd be starring in the Mac in some blaxploitation movie. Two thirds of Republicans agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. That's a fundamental. Do you agree with that? (31/44)
I think that there's certainly an element of division that needs to be addressed. Yeah. As evidence that UC Berkeley the other night, I do think that there, there's certain issues in society where we're becoming more divided and it's not just blacks against whites, it's whites against blacks. It's all this against each other and it's, uh, it's toxic. But see, Bill, I mean that's not what I asked. We're going to get to Berkeley, but this says two thirds of Republicans say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as whites against blacks. Yeah. As we sit here today, I do think that there is an element of racism against white individuals. I do. I do see it. I think it's been evidence. Since I'm a conservative and not a Trump person, let me just say this. That's absurd. And let me say this as a black liberal person, that's absurd. Okay. So you want to talk about Berkeley because I know that there are, there's this unrest in the streets. There's unrest in a lot of, to put it (32/44)
mildly, parts. Yeah. Yeah. It's well, people, but, but you know, and you're saying what did this is, this is not good. No, I wouldn't say nothing happened at UC Berkeley the other night was good. It was militant. It was a riot. It was not a protest. It was a riot. And they protested someone who I think we've booked on our show, so I guess we'll be putting on security there. I'm not against, believe me, I've been a long time critic of colleges shutting people up. That is a problem on the left we need to deal with very much so. No question. Free speech should be something we own. Look, not only do I own it, I went to DePaul University where I used to teach and a brother Milo said, gone there. And look, I'm an ardent defender of free speech because I don't want anybody telling me what book I should write and what speech I should give. So this is Milo? Is his name? Milo Yiannopoulos. Right. Okay. And he is a provocateur. He's been thrown off Twitter. That's how bad he is. But let me tell (33/44)
you what, at the school. But they rioted at Berkeley because this guy was coming. They did, but I'm saying at the school where I visited in the aftermath of that, in the wake of his visit, it wasn't just free speech. If it was free speech merely expressing ideas that are even abhorrent to the masses of people there, that's all right. That's the defense. But many black students were called nigger. They were called the N word. They were disrespected. That is the N word. They were physically assaulted. That is the N word. Well, there's another one as well, as you know. Nigga. I use nigga, not nigger. I don't use either one. I don't want to step in that mic. Buy his book. Don't say the bad word. But my point is this, Bill. The point is that yes, I understand people being against what happened at Berkeley, but also be against the inciting of a kind of riotous spirit where a guy goes around the country spewing the worst kind of venom. And this is my problem with President Trump. President (34/44)
Trump has amplified and magnified and indeed amplified some of the worst interests in racial disharmony we've seen in half a century. And to have a white supremacist like Steve Bannon in the West Wing and to have a Jeff Sessions as attorney general, it's a troika and a triumvirate of just transformative hate that we need to oppose. So listen now, last week I was saying that, you know, what we want to do is reach out to Donald Trump. We want to find a way to influence him and, you know, step back from the brink of war. And this week we sort of found out that if you want to get to him, don't put it in a briefing book. And God forbid a regular book. What you got to do is put it on TV. Everyone is saying this. He watches TV. So we're on TV. So, you know, this is how we can reach him. And of course, the thing that gets through to him is he likes to be complimented. So we started this segment last week called Let's Encourage President Trump. Because there are some things he said that I do (35/44)
agree with. In 2012, he tweeted, the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. Fucking yes! OK? And even after he lost the popular vote, because of rigging, he told Mitch McConnell, maybe we should go with the popular vote. Yes, that takes balls. How about it for Donald Trump? He's got a very good brain and he knows a lot of good words. Look at this headline today in the New York Times. President Trump reverts to pillars of Obama policies abroad. That is so smart. Yes, act like a nut to put people on notice and then revert. He reverted to the Obama policies. That's some next level shit. Yes, President Trump. And listen to this. Last week, he had a bunch of union guys into the Oval Office. He had carpenters, not just the heads, the carpenters, the welders, those guys. And you know what they said when they left the Oval Office? They told the papers, eight years of Obama, he never had us in. Who's the asshole now? I think President Trump is maybe the nicest man in the world, (36/44)
certainly the richest. And have you lost weight, sir? I decided to get that out. Just clip that and show them that. So what about the belligerent that we have shown our allies? Does anyone worry that this is sort of a kind of setting the table if they want to have a war? Because you know, if you want to have a war, then everything they want to do becomes easier. Because now I'm a wartime president. Now I can really shut down the protests in the street. It's against the troops. I mean, he went through a series of head of state calls this week that by all accounts, and the Trump White House leaks like a sieve. And so by all accounts with our allies, they were testy and confrontational in many cases. And mostly about the Electoral College. And about the size of his win. And yet it seems that on his call with Vladimir Putin, which they didn't record, he gave him a tongue bath and they agreed they'd have a sleepover and pin each other's toenails. This is a guy who obviously is willing to (37/44)
piss off our allies and to diminish our status in the world and to reduce our ability to actually do things to make this country more secure. But he's because Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn have this fantasy Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Vladimir Putin against Islam, that he's going to make sure that they're the allies to face off against Iran and Islam. I think these guys are living in an absolutely like hermetic separate reality from ours. Can I say something very quick? To me, you know, we know this is not what affirmative action is, but a lot of people think affirmative action means giving somebody something they don't deserve against somebody who otherwise worked for it. I don't want to hear anybody else for the next four years criticize even the worst understanding of affirmative action. This is the most incomprehensibly incompetent group of people who have ever been sent to government to run this particular country. And on top of that... I will not let you talk about our president (38/44)
that way. Wait a minute. And then they throw in Ben Carson, Dr. Ben Carson, as you said, he's a great neuroscientist, but as the head of HUD, I mean, that's the soft bigotry of bro expectation. And what I... I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Thank you, unnamed panel. It's now time for New Rules. Great buddy. New Rules. New Rules, you can say what you want about the Muslim ban, but at least it'll keep out Lindsay Lohan. New Rules, don't be so sad that Messiah Nakamura, the father of Pac-Man, has died. Celebrate his life. And instead of getting lost in grief, let's remember his last words. That's cool. That's cool. New Rule. Before launching into our next attack on alternative facts, liberals must admit they're living in their own fantasy world where Ryan Gosling can sing. I mean, seriously, have you seen this fucking movie? Just a little bit. New Rule, now that research on hamsters has found that a high-core diet turns them into deranged cannibals that eat their own young, someone has (39/44)
to tell me, when's the last time anyone saw Honey Boo Boo? I mean... Oh, Jesus. New Rule, let's call brunch what it really is, an excuse to drink on Sunday morning. Not having brunch, you're getting brunk. New Rule, stop asking me if these cannabis-laced dog biscuits are a good idea. I'm not a vet and I haven't studied chemistry since high school, but I do know this. After a few weeks of feeding them to my accomplished high-strung French Prudel, she looks like this. And finally, go Falcons! For the first time in a long time, I really care who wins the Super Bowl and I have a fierce love of the Atlanta Falcons because I'm from Atlanta. Oh wait, I'm not, I'm from New Jersey, I could give a shit about Atlanta. But the Falcons are playing a team where the owner, the coach, and the star quarterback all love and support Donald Trump. So I'd really like for them to lose by a score of a million fucking thousand in my life. You love it when he drives us crazy, don't you? And that, in microcosm, (40/44)
is what Donald Trump has done to me. To us all. He's made us into that campus nut who can't buy a chicken sandwich without making it political. He's made me love the Atlanta Falcons. That's like saying your favorite boxer is Mickey Rourke. It's like saying your favorite singer is Ryan Gosling. He can't sing. But I don't care. Here's what I'm gonna look like on Sunday. Because I love the Falcons. I love their running back, what's-his-face, and the guy who catches the ball. But mostly I love them because Tom Brady was one of the first to display a Make America Great Again hat. You know, because America has been so tough on Tom so far. And back when Tom was asked if he thought Trump would be president, he said, I hope so, that would be great. Hey Tom, fuck you. Quarterback and your political instincts suck. Coach Bill Belichick loves Trump so much, he sent him a fan letter during the campaign which read, You have dealt with an unbelievably slanted and negative median, have come out (41/44)
beautifully. Your leadership is amazing. The toughness and perseverance you have displayed over the past year is remarkable. Wow, that's some serious butt-licking, coach. Let me give you some advice for the big game. Fuck you, Belichick. Fuck you and your deflated balls, you joyless, cheating fuck. You see what Donald Trump has done to me? I used to be pretty eloquent. Now I'm just screaming, fuck you? Is there anything this man can't ruin? He took something beautiful, a game where millionaires give each other brain damage, and made it tawdry and cheap. Even worse, every time he attends a sporting event, his hair does the weave. I mean the wave. The weave. Look, I don't want to make everything political. But that's where we're headed. Athletes are refusing to stay at Trump hotels. People are unfriending each other on Facebook. Siblings have stopped talking to one another, which makes it hard to get laid in the South. There are even reports that some hookers won't pee on you until you (42/44)
assure them it's not a Trump thing. One member of the L.L. Bean family supported Trump, and now we're all supposed to boycott L.L. Bean. Which is not hard for me. I've been boycotting L.L. Bean my entire life because I don't like any store where it's hard to tell the mannequins from the customers because they've both got to stick up their ass. But lesbians, where are they supposed to shop now to look like a lumberjack? You know, in 1960, only 5% of Americans had a negative reaction to the idea of marrying someone from a different political party. In 2010, that number shot up to 40%. For liberals, bringing home a Republican is the new Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Only it's more like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and spending the whole meal bitching about Mexicans. All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Plaza Theater in El Paso, March 19th at the Fox in Detroit, April 18th. I want to thank Rick Wilson, Jason Kander, Tommy Lehring, Michael Eric Dyson, and Sam Harris. Join us now for (43/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. But today I really do know why you're happy. Biden pardoned everyone who has been convicted of simple possession. And this is very smart because a lot of people in this country, I don't know who they are, I don't know any of them, but a lot of people do smoke pot and they do show up to vote. Not on the right day, but they do show up. Mind you, all you ages out there, who did this? Yes, the old president. Obama didn't do it. More credit to him because Joe really doesn't know anything about pot. He thinks THC is that channel that shows the old movies. That's the good news. Here's a little bad news. Because the war in Ukraine is going so badly for Putin, Biden said the other day that the risk of nuclear armageddon is the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. So, you know, good news, bad news. And that war is going badly. There are videos, have you seen this online, that have gone viral of Russian (1/44)
young men who so don't want to go in the army that they're breaking their own arms. Finally, a TikTok challenge I can get behind. I'm a kid. Yeah, no, that is very worrisome. I mean, you've got to root for Ukraine, but the worst Russia does, you know, Putin, who knows, he had a birthday this week. He went to his favorite restaurant, TGI, whatever day I say it is. It did not turn out to be a good birthday, because the next day he was confronted, personally, who has the balls to do this? Some guy in Russia, in his inner circle, confronted him with how bad the war was going and how he was mismanaging it. That takes balls. And then the guy said, don't get up, I'll show myself out the window. Here in this country, they're cleaning up in Florida, our friends in Florida and several states from Hurricane Ian, but it's not over. Thousands of people in South Florida are still without cocaine. So it is really disrupted. In this very troubling, decisive world, I thought it was rather encouraging (2/44)
to see. Did you see President Biden and Governor DeSantis of Florida who have nothing in common and hate each other, I'm sure, but they work together and they were cordial. Nothing, please. OK, I mean, come on, give me something. I mean, it did not last. Biden got back on Air Force One and it was filled with Venezuelan migrants. That was a dirty trick. But, of course, what everyone's talking about is this picture that emerged of Governor DeSantis down there and, you know, what's with the go-go boots? I mean, but in Florida, I can't even say gay? But I've got to say, somewhere in Dallas, there is a cheerleader performing in her socks. I'm just going to say all he needs is a wig and he can do Drag Queen story hour. Oh, Republicans, they're just like us. Well, our friend... Oh, my gosh, they do run some buttes. Herschel Walker, have you seen this down in Georgia? You know, the former football player Herschel Walker who has been running, I mean, his hard right on abortion. No exceptions. (3/44)
He is like rape... Nothing. No abortion. We criminalized pregnancy in this country. Turns out his ex-girlfriend, one of his many ex-girlfriends, came forward this week with proof that he paid for an abortion for her. She had a signed check from him, a receipt from the clinic, and a sympathy card. She had everything but the fetus in a jar. I mean... And Herschel, it's just not that bright. He signed the card, glad to hear about your loss. I mean... So this story breaks on Monday. The ex-girlfriend coming forward with all the evidence and Herschel said it's a flat-out lie. Then it came forward a few days later. This woman, who he said is a liar, had a child with him. And then Maury Povich came out and said, Herschel, you are the father. Had a great show. We have Chris Christie, Patty Kaye. But first up, he is the CNN anchor and host of Who's Talking to Chris Wallace, with episodes available to stream Fridays on HBO Max and airing Sundays at 7 Eastern on CNN. Chris Wallace! Chris, the (4/44)
second time. Welcome to HBO. Can I show you around the commissary? Uh... We could have lunch with a dragon. You're gonna love it here, Chris. You actually are. And have you found it so far? Great company, right? It is a great company. And this is a very exciting hybrid because on the one hand, as you just said, I'm on HBO Max. Three interviews a week, drop each Friday. We have three that just dropped today. And then the best parts of those three interviews on CNN, prime time, 7 o'clock Sunday night. So... So it all came out to watch. My family is here in Forrest tonight. I can't think of anybody better to talk about the news business with, I mean, who is more steeped in it. Obviously your father was Mike Wallace. You worked for, I think your first job was for Walter Cronkite? Well, job is a little bit of an overstatement. I was his gopher. Go for coffee, go for pencils at the Democratic... That's a job. At the Republican convention in 1964, the Barry Goldwater convention, yeah. And (5/44)
Walter Cronkite, I mean, for those of you who don't remember, this was the last guy, perhaps, that everybody trusted. I remember when I was a kid watching TV and he was the newsman, and when a comedian wanted to make a joke about somebody who had utter integrity, that was the go-to. You know, Walter Cronkite. Because it was understood by everybody in America that this, when he said it, both sides agreed. That is such a bygone world now, that we could even have such a thing. No, I completely agree. And in fact, in 67 or 68, he went to Vietnam. And, you know, he was a straight newsman. He didn't give commentary, he just reported the facts. But we were in the middle of this terrible and long and bloody war, and he came back and, despite what all the generals were saying, he said, the war is not going well. And Lyndon Johnson, the president at the time, supposedly said, if I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost America. Right. And he did. And he did. Didn't even run again. That's right. But (6/44)
today, some side, probably the right wing, would just have attacked Walter Cronkite. No, it has gotten so siloed, if you will. You know, you've got conservative media, and they have built up an audience, and they only want to watch conservative media and what it is that supports their conception, their view of the world, and liberal media, and liberals want to watch that. And, distressingly, few people just want to get the news and make up decisions for themselves as to what they think the truth is. Well, that's that's the that's a very small sliver of the country, I think, who even wants news. I mean, when I talk to people under 40, even, and I ask them, where do you get your news? Most of what they say is like, well, what somebody posts on my Facebook page. In other words, it's gossip. Like, that's to me what gossip is. Your friend is passing around a story. They don't know if it's true, they don't care, but, I mean, Walter Cronkite got 29 million viewers. I mean, nothing, no TV show (7/44)
gets even a third of that, even the biggest hits, I don't think, anymore in prime time. This was the news. So, and if he got 29, Huntley Brinkley got 25 or whatever. I mean, you had 50, 60 million Americans at a time when the country was a lot smaller who wanted to tune in to see the evening news. I mean, in fairness, the world has changed, and you know, you don't get your news at 6.30 at night, you're getting it all day, and you can get it on your phone or, as you say, Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, but the world has definitely changed, and not for the better in terms of the desire to be, to get the straight facts and to have your preconceptions be challenged by what reality is. People don't want reality. They want their view. And this really all came about because news used to be a lost leader for a company. It wasn't Cronkite's day. Absolutely. I mean, the giants of television back in the day, and by that point, I mean the owners, Bill Paley at CBS, Sarnoff at NBC, (8/44)
they viewed news as a public service and that, you know, it didn't have to make money. If it didn't lose money, that was okay, but even if it lost a little, that was alright. And I've got to be careful with this, because I know you're a huge fan of 60 Minutes, but I kind of feel that to a certain degree, 60 Minutes and my father were a little bit responsible for what happened. Not that their journalism wasn't terrific, but when 60 Minutes went on the air in 68 and then as it became more and more successful, it ended up being the number one show in America for a number of years, it made money. And suddenly the executives and television said you can make money with news. And I think that led to the idea of not having an audience come to you, but chasing an audience, and that led, I think, to more biased news coverage. But aren't you a bigger fan of 60 Minutes than me? Oh, I'm that's why I said... Isn't that what put food on your table? Did it take your father away from home? Is that what (9/44)
it is? I'm sorry, Bill. I'm sorry, Bill, but our time is up here now. No, I love 60 Minutes, and I think their journalism is first rate. What I'm saying is it opened the Pandora's box that you can make money from news. Right. And that's the problem, because the media works backwards now. They work backwards from what does our target demographic want them to filter us, filter this news for us, so that we're only hearing what doesn't upset us. I mean, I don't know if they still have those dials that they use for like focus groups, but I think they do, where you can tell the people as they're watching oh, no, I don't like that. I remember they have it during the debates. You know, Obama's a little sarcastic? No. That's right. You'd have the blue line and the red line and then the whatever line in the middle of the independent. Right. And the people who are these anchors on these cable news shows, they know that those dials are somewhere. They don't want to say something that makes the (10/44)
people turn the dial the wrong way. So that's why they live in a bubble, except on this show, of course. And by the way, you know, I've paid for that. There are, you know, lots of woke people who used to watch this show, I know who don't anymore, because like I will present, but I've always, I always did that. It's just that the left went crazier, so I had to do it more. And I would, I wish they would come back, but not at the price of not calling out both sides. No, and I got to say, and I agree that I think that's absolutely true of you. I like to think it's true of me as well when I was at Fox. It is. You left Fox News. But on Fox News Sunday, I told straight and they never second guessed me on a guest or a question. They let me do what I did and I'm doing the same now. No, I always thought you were the canary in the coal mine at Fox. I did. I want to see how this metaphor ends up. Well, well, the canary gets out, the mine collapses. That's my point. No, I mean, you got out. I mean, (11/44)
it became, come on, isn't that why you left? Because it just became too hard to be in that loony bin. You know, I am so excited about who's talking to Chris Wallace. I am so excited about CNN and looking ahead to the future. You just said you're a big straight shooter, but you won't answer that question about Fox? You know, I have found message discipline. I know you're going to be talking to Chris Christie in a moment. Message discipline. That's for politicians, not for us. What? We're the other side. We're the other team. Yeah. All right, I'll ask you all right. We'll talk over in the commissary. Actually, I was thinking, Mitch McConnell, just repeat the line over and over again. So, last question. You moderated. We're done? Yeah, almost. All right. I'm having a good time. I'm having a good time. It goes fast when you avoid questions. But, well played. But, OK, so, I think you moderated both the Hillary Clinton, Trump debate. One of the debates in 2016, one of them in 2020. And also (12/44)
Trump and Biden. Yes, the first one. I mean, it's just a clown show at this point, these debates. Is it not? I mean, Trump is going to, Trump, he's just this, you know, incredible gorilla buffoon in the room. He's going to break the furniture. I mean, it's pointless to debate him. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't care. His audience doesn't care. He doesn't know anything. Biden, I mean, I'm getting more and more in love with Biden, but on a debate stage. Just because of the marijuana? That didn't hurt, Chris. He's just, you know what, he's too old for this shit. That should be his motto. He just gets things done. I'm not sure too old for anything should be his motto. I think it's working for him. Lean into it. Like Afghanistan, I'm too old for this shit. Get out. You know, here's where I'll disagree with you about the debates. The first debate of 2020 where Trump just went nuts. I mean, we had somebody count how many times he interrupted either Biden or me 145 times in 90 minutes. (13/44)
That's a lot. But having said that, 80 million people watched that debate. So there is a real hunger out there among Americans to, we want to see these two guys and size them up. Okay. If I put porn on that channel, I could get 81 million. You know, it doesn't, anyway, I got to go. Thank you very much. Good luck here. Welcome in house. Chris Wallace. Alright, let's meet our panel. Alright, here they are. He is the former Republican governor of New Jersey and a political and legal contributor for ABC News. Chris Christie is over here. Governor. And she's a special correspondent for BBC News and host of the new documentary Trump. The comeback available to, there was a question mark at the end. There is a question mark. The comeback. Stream on BBC Select via Apple TV and Prime Video. Caddy Kay is our returning champion. So I just want to start off, I was watching these pictures from Florida and I thought of you because you're coming on this weekend. The pictures of Biden and DeSantis (14/44)
together must bring back warm memories of when you were with Obama after another storm. It was Hurricane Sandy and there was the famous picture of you and Obama and you know, they said you hugged. That's as close as you got. Yeah. It was not a hug. I'm from Jersey. That's not a hug. But I noticed that with DeSantis and Biden, he must have had that in mind because the picture he got taken, there was a relative in between them at all. See this is what relatives are for in politics. Get between you and the guy from the other team who you can't touch. Silly. Silly. So you think that's why he did that? I don't know why he did what he did but like when you have what we had in Sandy was 365,000 homes in 24 hours. When he has what he has and what it looks like to me from here and the Gulf Coast. You can't think about anything else but those people. I mean their lives are not going to be normal for a very long time. And they've lost everything they own. They've lost their sense of who they are. (15/44)
So you know for me, it's going to be 10 years ago at the end of this month. I just said to all of our folks like the president comes. We're going to show him around. We're going to make sure he sees everything and meets those people. I didn't worry about the politics. The analogies here are kind of a little bit misplaced too. I mean this is five weeks away from a mid-term election where DeSantis looks like he's going to win and Biden's not even on the ballot. When Biden came to New Jersey or when Obama came to New Jersey, it was six days before the presidential election where he was on the ballot. So everything was heightened and all the tensions were heightened. It was my job to get them focused on the job which was rebuild the state, repair these people's lives. But it's true. What you guys do, you do that. But you do that and I took enormous shit for that. I know you did. Yes you did. So it's not like it was the easy thing to do. But it was the right thing to do. DeSantis would be (16/44)
crazy not to welcome Biden. You've got Biden there, you need money for your people who are going to vote for you at some point. And then to diss him, that would have been ridiculous. See, DeSantis has it both ways. He's a very clever politician. White boots aside. The white boots were a bad look. That was bad. What makes a guy... How can a guy be so smart and so dumb? You would never accuse DeSantis of being elected purely on the basis of his charisma and his cool. I never see him. I don't live in Florida. What I know is that he's great at political performance art so he's ginned up the base. He's got them with the, you know, don't say gay shit and all that. And then when something like this happens he looks like, oh I'm also a very normal politician who can get along with the president and do things done as a governor can, I have a suit and a tie. And my white boots. So I think that's a very clever one-two punch. I mean, he's definitely going to be the candidate. I mean, run against (17/44)
Trump or join Trump. Do you think he's going to run against Trump? Possibly. The Republican polling likes him better to be at the top spot of the ticket. Now that means you have to take it away from Trump, which is very hard to do from a baby, but... That was suggested by voters. But what if they run, what if it's Trump and DeSantis as his running mate? Never happened. Why? Never happened. You can't fit both of them in the same room on the same ticket. Oh, never. I've heard never so much in politics. Much more likely it would be somebody like Carrie Lake in Arizona. OK, but if it does, it's an irresistible ticket. She could pull off the white boots too. It's odd because there's sort of this disconnect. I mean, on the one hand, this looks a little encouraging. Biden and DeSantis working together. On the other hand, one of the big stories I saw this week was talk on the internet of a civil war has jumped like I don't know, a zillion percent or something. And, you know, a lot of this (18/44)
stuff, 54% of strong Republicans say they feel a civil war. The civil war we're talking about is at least somewhat likely. They seem a little hungry for it, which makes me ask the question, you mean you actually want to kill Americans? You know, I know you've done a lot of reporting on this recently. Yeah, I was interviewing people who, an elderly couple in their 70s who had clearly sat down and thought about how a civil war would unfold. I mean, they took it almost like it was a sober rational thing to do. They saw it as their patriotic duty to take up arms and kill other people. And they had a whole plan for this. It was going to start, the Democrats would start the civil war. They would respond by fighting back and it would be small village against small village and then it would spread to small town against small town and then it would be state against state. And they, this couple were in their late 60s, early 70s, the husband and the wife told me repeatedly that they would be (19/44)
happy to take up arms and they would do it to defend democracy in America. That's the kind of level that people are talking about. This is not young hotheads. This is an elderly couple who are going to fight. But actually it is young hotheads. That's what this is from the Southern Poverty Law Center. When asked people who approves of threatening a politician, approves of threatening a politician who is harming the country or our democracy, which of course is what either both sides think the other one is doing, 24% approved. Slightly higher for Democrats. And driven largely by the approval of young Democratic men. People over 50, only 9%. So really my generation are the ones who are fucked up. Well, but you're you're you're mellowed out by the pot though, so that helps. Alright, well we're going to talk about that. You're going to have to answer that. But here's another one. 41% of Democrats and 52% of Trump voters think it's quote time to split. And I just want to know what this looks (20/44)
like. When we split, how does that work? And I asked the people who made the great movie, Gandhi, if we could use a little bit of that because the only time I could remember a country splitting and show that video. This is from Gandhi. It's a great movie. This is 1947 when India and Pakistan split and that's the Hindus going one way from Pakistan into India and the Muslims going the other way from India to Pakistan. Of course they don't show the next scene there where they go into a ditch and start killing each other. But is that working out? There's going to be a line of cars from Arizona going into California and the four million Trump voters that we have in California are going to be driving into Arizona. Is that really what, what does that mean? Like time to split. Describe that. I don't buy it. I just think it's anger and I think they're figuring out new ways all the time to express their anger and I look at it much differently. The Civil War part that you brought up. I mean I (21/44)
look at the stuff that happened on January 6th and instead of that inciting a civil war, what it did was force everybody in Washington to do their job and certify the election and certify that Biden had won it because he had. It made our democracy, I look after January 6th and say democracy proved how resilient it is, not the other way around. Yeah, except you have 200 odd candidates running as Republicans who say that Joe Biden shouldn't be president because Donald Trump won the election. Yes, you're in the minority of your party. At least for the people who are running. Of the major, wait a second, we have to get terms in a month or something? Okay, 299 of the Republicans who are running, this is for Congress and Senate, the major seat, 299, a majority think what you just alluded to, they don't think the election was fair and Biden actually lost. That's an astounding... Well, we'll see how they do. We'll see how they do. They're going to win. A lot of them are going to win. Some of (22/44)
them will and some of them won't. But in the end, you've got to get out there and fight that. You can't just expect this stuff to go... Are there Republicans you're talking about? Yeah. Is that what you're doing? I just said it, didn't I? What do you want me to do? I want you to... Shit, Bill, what do you want me to do? I want you to do more. I want more Republicans. This is what I call the as good as it gets Republicans. Don't take that the wrong way. Don't take that the wrong way. Oh, how could I? How about you're the pain in the ass talk show host? Don't take it the wrong way. No, but I just mean for people who are like... For the people who just are adamant about how they won't even talk to Republicans, you want something that's not going to be. Republicans see the world differently. It's okay. We have to have that. But this is as good as it gets. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney I can never say his name. Kinziker, whatever that guy is. But even Bill Barr and Pence, they both Mitch (23/44)
McConnell of all said this was a legitimate election. That's as good as it gets, liberals. For Republicans. Deal with that. Don't hate those people. Anyway. My message. What you raised about young Democrats, I think there's something there too because the young guy from Florida, Maxwell Frost, who's come out and said that DeSantis wants to impose a fascist state in the country. I mean, America's not going to become a fascist state. It's not going to become a socialist state. Is there a far right tendency? Are there conservatives on the Supreme Court? Of course there are, but a fascist? That's not helpful either. If you want to gem up violence and backlash in the country, you start throwing around words like fascist. You're not helping the cause of avoiding a civil war particularly. That's exactly right. I mentioned pot. Yes, Biden did it. You know, he finally did this. He pardoned people who just had minimal records with marijuana. Also, Spongebob is now the secretary of the Navy. But (24/44)
I seem to remember when you were governor. Yeah. You were very hard. In fact, I have a quote here. Go ahead. This is after it started to become legal across different states and you said, I don't care, quite frankly, that people think it's inevitable, meaning inevitable it become legal in this country. It's not inevitable here. I'm not going to permit it. Never. As long as I'm governor. George Wallace of Prohibition? You stand in the doorway of the dispensary? Well, if you win, you get to make the decisions. And I got elected twice and I got to make the decisions. That was the decision I made. And I know you disagreed with it then and I know you disagree with it now. But you just said we're allowed to have different opinions. I have a different opinion on it. I agree. I'm just asking even most Republicans don't have that opinion anymore. I'm just asking why you have this hard on for pot? Because... They don't have it just for pot? I know, but... Go ahead, guys. Next question, Bill? No, (25/44)
no, no. He's doing great tonight, isn't he? You'd say mean for other drugs, but pot is not like other drugs, and this is part of the... I understand you think that. I don't think that. Here's what we have. Schedule 1 drugs, which pot... I think this is where Biden is moving to get rid of this insanity. Schedule 1. In other words, these are the drugs that they say are the worst. Schedule 1. 1 equals worst. Pot, lumped in with LSD, heroin, ecstasy, and mushrooms. You mean you see those all the same? I don't see them all the same, no. But that's the way the law puts them together. So, if you want to try to change it, I've always said the same thing. If someone wants to pass a law to change it, and you get a majority of the people to vote for it, great. You ask me my opinion, I vote no on that. That's okay. I agree, but they've studied pot a zillion times. I don't understand the... Look, we have a difference of opinion about it. But I'm talking about... There is an absurdity here that you (26/44)
have pot classified as a class 1 drug, which has never killed anybody, but then you've got fentanyl and methamphetamines, which are not classified as class 1 drugs, which are causing an epidemic of death. And they should be. They should be. This should be open to the original. And that's what I just said. If you get people... It became a Schedule 1 drug because people voted to make it one. And if they vote to not make it one, it won't be. Okay, but the question isn't... And I'm telling you that my view in it, from the quote you read at the time, was that I was not going to permit it to be a recreational legal drug in New Jersey. I didn't permit it to be. And now we have a new guy who came after me and he permitted it. Am I like standing in the corner holding my breath saying, I can't believe you did that? He gets to make the judgments now. He made the call he made. Right? I mean, that's the way it works, isn't it? And that's the way it's supposed to work. Yes, but the question isn't (27/44)
that. We all agree on that. That laws matter and people make laws. Not everybody agrees with that, as we know. You're right. You're right. This question was why do you seem to be so adamant about standing up to or ignoring what we have studied for so long? I mean, the Schedule II drugs, which is the ones who are not as bad, Coke, meth and Oxy. I can tell you from personal experience, I've done all these drugs. What? All right. Coke and meth and Oxy are worse than LSD, heroin, ecstasy, mushrooms and pot. I've never done heroin. All right, so... Tomorrow. I think you've... After the show, after this show, with Chris. I think you've figured, I think you've given me the solution. I'm going to leave here and try all of them. And then we'll see what happens. Obviously, your experience will do something. Not all at the same time, though? A tutorial from you, maybe? All right. So Kanye West is in the news. Did you see the shirt he wore? He's a fashion designer, too. Makes, I think, a fortune (28/44)
from doing that. And he, of course, bless his heart, loves controversy. And I can't not like Kanye. You know, I've said it many times. He loves Trump, which, of course, we disagree on. But when he said, the mob can't make me hate him. I just fucking love that. We need more of that in this country. Anyway, so he wore this T-shirt that says, White Lives Matter. Which, you know, a lot of people, we're not going to debate that whole thing. But there certainly was a reason why Black Lives Matter became a movement and a saying and a cause. Because obviously, black lives have been disproportionately at peril in this country. So, but Kanye loves controversy. And we got a boy, this was not the only controversial shirt he wore in that show. Do you want to see some of the other ones that he had? Uh oh. For example, he had this one. Bring Back Asbestos. That is just... He had Mothers For Drunk Driving. Putin Bring On The Nukes. No, no, no. A Clown's Rock is not... Hillary 2024. Oh, for fuck's (29/44)
sake. Jesus Was Asian. I don't even get it. It's so Kanye, isn't it? Free Harvey Weinstein. No. Kanye, come on. And George W. Bush does care about black people. Oh, so he reversed... Anyway. Speaking of T-shirts, I want to put out a T-shirt. I want to... Matter of fact, I think this would be a great T-shirt that would sell a lot of money. I don't know if you saw, but Joe Biden, when he was down there in Florida talking about the hurricane, was caught on a hot mic. Oh yeah. And he said to a guy, no one fucks with Biden. With a Biden? Well, I'm going to change it to just Biden. Okay, alright. So, I want to put this on a T-shirt. I think we mocked up a little thing with Joe wearing it. No one fucks with Biden. I just want to ask you, as someone who once had the Republican Party eating out of your hand because you had that kind of confrontational, I don't take no shit from nobody attitude. What do you think of this? I think it's... Of the T-shirt. I love it. I think the T-shirt's a winner. (30/44)
I mean, I don't know if Biden did this intentionally. No. That's the beauty of Biden. Like, he didn't do it intentionally. He's like talking to that guy and thinking like, he's my buddy, I'm going to tell him. Don't you worry, man, I got your back. Nobody fucks with Biden. And even he could barely walk over there, right? But he's like, nobody fucks with Biden. Come on. If he wanted to do it intentionally, he'd have messed it up. That's right. They would have put it on a card, he would have messed it up. Alright, well if it wasn't... Joe rolls with the aviators, the whole thing, it's perfect. The copyright. I think he should go with that. I think people love it. I mean, profanity isn't a deal breaker in politics anymore. Not anymore. And people like that. Again, that's what... We're thrilled about that in New Jersey, by the way. It sort of makes you touchy feely, right? Yeah. When you say no one fucks with me. It's like, can you be my friend? In New Jersey, that translates into I love (31/44)
you. I love you. That's the Let's Have a Hug moment. Okay, so there's an interesting story in this paper this week about this Dr. Maitland Jones. You guys have kids, right? Yes. Ah, kids, I love them. Do you? No. Crazy. Anyway, he's a professor. Not just a professor. He's kind of like a big deal in the world of organic chemistry. In fact, he wrote the textbook. Okay, he's semi-retired. He was at Princeton for years. Now he was at NYU, I think. It was kind of a relaxed sort of professorship. But he was like the man. I remember when I was at Cornell, there was a dude like that in the English department. He had wrote the textbook and he was like, very respected. We thought he was a thousand years old. This guy I'm sure is too. Anyway, his course is hard because organic chemistry is hard. These are kids trying to become doctors. This is pre-med. You've got to know your chemistry. So the course is so hard, they put out a petition asking for him to be fired. And of course the school said, (32/44)
no. I'm joking. The school said, of course we will. And they fired this guy for having a course. And it's so interesting. He said after COVID, the kids came back. He said not only did they not study, they seem to not know how to study. He said they were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate. So we can talk about COVID in a minute and whether we handled that right. But for now, I just want to ask about the kid question and what's going on in college's question. Because it does seem to me that the inmates have taken over the asylum. Okay. What if this isn't the kids? This is the parents. And actually what's happened is that American universities have become so expensive. It's like, what, 60,000. By the way, you can go to Cambridge University in the UK for 20,000. So if anyone's looking for a bargain, head over there. But if you are a parent, and they referred to the parents, the people who pay the tuition fees is what the email firing this guy referred to. And actually it's (33/44)
all these parents saying, hold on a second. This is a crappy deal. I'm paying $60,000 a year and little Johnny just failed organic chemistry. I want a better product. And I'm going to put this as much on the parents as on the kids. That they're the ones that are starting to say, you know, we have to have our kids pass everything. Your kid doesn't pass. He shouldn't pass because he probably shouldn't become a doctor. I mean this is doing no favors to the children. And by the way, bring down the cost of American universities. This is the absolutely foreseeable result of the participation trophy society. That these kids started. Everyone's a winner. They were playing six and seven year old soccer. Everybody had to get a trophy, right? Now those six and seven year olds who were all getting the trophies are now at NYU. And they're like, what the hell are you talking about? I've got to pass organic chemistry by studying. Just give me my grade and let me go on. And it is, we've done this. And (34/44)
I agree with Cady, the parents who are running the soccer leagues, set up this thing where, oh, I don't want my child to have disappointment. I don't want them to be, fail at anything. And so my remedy for this, Bill, was I've made all of my children New York Met fans. So they know pain and disappointment from the very beginning. Send them to a university that does not cost an obscene amount of money. So if they fail, you don't feel like you've bought a crap product. It's ridiculous. I have two children in college right now. My oldest son is at Providence College in Rhode Island. It's, go Friars. It's $74,000 a year. And I have a daughter at Notre Dame and it's $72,000 a year. It's insane. And you're paying that. Now we're going to forgive loans and we're going to do all the rest of this stuff so that there's no price pressure at all on colleges. And then they're going to fire professors. Why are we even bothering going? You think they're lowering the standard of exams in places around (35/44)
the world? You think China, they're saying, oh, let's make our organic chemistry exams easier so that our kids don't have to pass them at such a high level. No, we're competing with kids around the world. You have to pass organic chemistry. Maybe the answer is better Adderall. We could add it to the drug list. I don't know what schedule that's on. We could make a deal on that. Trade the pot and the Adderall. I'll try Chris on that tomorrow. Someday I'm going to get you high and you're going to think. Can't wait. There's always talk these days about anxiety among the younger generation. And I think what you're alluding to, I think, is exactly where it comes from. They have not been prepared for a world that does not revolve around them. I keep reading about the way, now this is celebrity, so it's celebrities as we know are not like us. But I don't think it's that far from the way a lot of parents treat their children. So I wouldn't mention the names, but I was reading about one (36/44)
celebrity couple who their daughter has changed her name like five or six times. She's like 10. Not even a gender thing. Just let her do anything she wants. Change her name. How about you have a beautiful name. We'll call you that when you become 18. You can change it if you want. Another couple talked about how they don't ever have doors that close in the house, including the bathroom. They've just given up on having any privacy because the kids will just walk in. You know, how about... Yeah, no. This is why you've never had kids because you read all these stories. There are some upsides to having kids. Maybe it's the Victorian in me, Cena not her, but you know, I have doors in my house. But that's not the only reason I don't have kids. It's not just the stories. I see children when I... I do. When I'm out in the world... We're doing a therapy session. Like you're at the zoo? Is that what you're saying, Bill? They should be at the zoo. They're out of control. They're feral. They're (37/44)
feral. What? And nobody is doing anything about it. They're running wild and the parents... This is what I see. I also see... Okay? I watch television and movies. Now, the way children are portrayed in every television show and movie, they can't all be lying about it. And it's... They talk back to their parents, including cursing at... I call it the fuck you, Mom generation. I've seen it on dozens of TV shows. Fuck you, Mom, and they storm out of the room. You've just done a whole segment with Chris Wallace on fake news and misinformation. You think that's fake news? I think that's drama. You don't think... Really? You don't think kids in this country say fuck you to their parents? I think some always have. You're living in a dream world. I think some always have. But here's the difference. Many of my kids... Not in the house I grew up in. No, exactly. Nobody did it in our... And by the way, you can stop it now, too. But you know what it means? Yes. It means doing things like... But (38/44)
they don't. I understand. But we can't give into that, Bill, for God's sake. I'm not saying we should. I'm just answering the question why I don't have children. Because when you have children, you can't raise them in isolation. Maybe no one wanted to have children with you, Bill. What happened? Maybe no one wanted to have children with you. That I promise you is not... Don't answer it. Don't answer it. It's not good. I consider it one of the great accomplishments of my life. That I was able to... Use this. Right. Time for new rules. Now that there's a Scooby-Doo show that makes it official that Velma is gay, we have to talk about Fred and Bernie. No. They vacation together, go camping together, and their wives hate their guts. It begins whenever they walk in on them, they're not wearing pants. New rule, if you want to impress me with sports memorabilia, forget about showing the Aaron Judge's home run ball, show me your Herschel Walker autograph abortion card. New rule, as tragic as it (39/44)
was that a riot at an Indonesian soccer match resulted in 125 people being trampled to death, soccer fans must look on the bright side. Nobody used their hands. New rule, Germans must resist the urge to explain to Americans the storied history and cultural significance of Oktoberfest. Trust me, you had us at a three-week festival of giant tits and unlimited beer. New rule, now that author Helgard Mueller has written a book called President Donald J. Trump, the Son of Man, the Christ. Someone has to tell all the other sycophant Trump cultists, hold your cards, we have a bingo. Although I think Helgard is ignoring the one glaring difference between Jesus and Trump. Jesus took his beating like a man. Finally, new rule, you can't be in charge of counting the votes if you think the votes from one of the parties don't exist. Normally in a democracy, this is not something you'd have to say, but let me introduce you to Mark Fincham. He is the Republican nominee for Secretary of State in (40/44)
Arizona, and I'm guessing the bartender at an OK Corral theme park. If he wins, it'll be his job to count the vote next time. And Mark not only believes Trump won the 2020 election, he literally can't conceive that Biden could have. Why? He says, I can't find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden. Yeah, forget the meticulous audits, the hand recounts, the independent verifications run by Republican officials. This guy has never personally met a Biden voter, so they don't exist. You know, I've never been to a BTS concert, but I believe K-pop exists. And I gotta say, more than anything, this is what is wrong with this country. A real division isn't between red and blue, it's between the people on both sides who aren't willing to mingle with Americans outside their political tribe, and so have no idea what they're really like. And the people on both sides who are willing to do that. Of course Mark Fincham never met a Biden voter, and probably thinks Democrats eat babies, (41/44)
because everybody he knows voted for Trump. Because he never leaves his hermetically sealed right-wing panic room. And I could say the same of many liberals who would never even talk to a Trump voter. I asked a friend of mine recently if he wanted to come to a little party I was having, and when he found out one of the guests had voted for Trump, he told me he wasn't coming because, quote, I wouldn't breathe the same air. Okay, there's a word for people like this. Assholes. When we confine ourselves to bubbles, alternate points of view become not just objectionable, they're unfathomable. This guy Fincham thinks Biden voters are literally a fiction, like wizards or the female orgasm. When he was pressed on this and asked, isn't it possible that lots of people you don't know personally did vote for Biden? He replied, in a fantasy world, anything's possible. Mark, have you ever been to a Whole Foods? Or talked to a woman under 50? You know, in a nation based on pluralism, it's very (42/44)
dangerous that Americans are so in our silos, and it's largely because we've stopped living amongst each other. The latest census data revealed that Americans have hit the lowest rate of moving since they started tracking it in 1947. And while some of that is economic, much of the reason Americans don't move anymore is they just wouldn't feel welcome in too many places in their own country. Would anyone ride the New York City subway wearing a MAGA hat? Would anyone go to a NASCAR race in a Biden t-shirt while they chant, Fuck Joe Biden? That's where we are now, where other parts of the country are seen as scary no-go zones. America's like a prison now, where the inmates think they need to join one of the gangs to survive, and we dare not walk on the wrong side of the yard. In January of 2021, the New York Times published the headline, They can't leave the Bay Area fast enough, and followed it up that July with the headline, Tech workers who swore off the Bay Area are coming back. Yeah, (43/44)
they saw all the red hats and were like, Fuck this, I'll take the wildfires. And the same would be true if an evangelical preacher showed up in West Hollywood. Once he was done blowing all those guys, he would hate it. All right, I'll be at the Fox Theater in Detroit tomorrow, October 8th, at the Klein and Chisacoll in Buffalo on the 9th, The Mirage in Vegas, November 25th and 26th. I want to thank my guests, Chris Christie, Katty Kay, and Chris Wallace. Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime. Thank you, folks. (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maher. This is week three for my home. I'm Bill Maher. I'm putting the home in home box office. And you know, I love my home. Oh, home. I love home, sweet home, home, home, but enough of home. I never thought I would miss traffic. You know, like my commute today, brutal. There was a two dog pile up in the kitchen. One was overturned. The other one was leaking gas. Thank you. Yeah, it's lonely. I'm not going to lie. It's lonely around here. I'm like one of those old widows who just waits for the mailman to come. So I have some sort of human contact. Lately, I've been leaving homemade cookies and lemonade. It's sad. Last night, my dick said it wanted to start seeing other hands. Now, it's rough around here. A few days ago, I was watching the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Terrific movie. And that scene where Brad Pitt answers the door, and it's the Manson Family. And I thought, ooh, company. Really, I am (1/44)
afraid I am losing it. I am this close to writing a manifesto. Last week, I took mushrooms and FaceTimed with future me. And you know, I'm not the only one. I know I'm not. Some of my sober friends, I know they're drinking again. I was FaceTiming with this guy last week. I saw it in the background. He had a bottle of scotch, which he tried to pass off his 12-year-old hand sanitizer. You know, there's help on the way. I don't know if you saw it this week, but former President Obama made a video endorsing Joe Biden. And Biden says he cannot wait to find a kid to show him how to play it. Trump, of course, had a week that even by his standards was off the rails, including flirting with the idea of firing Dr. Anthony Fauci. I mean, Trump said, look, it's hard enough navigating this crisis without someone interjecting facts and science. And you know, Americans now are, of course, waiting for their $1,200 stimulus checks, which perhaps have been delayed because Trump had to put his name on (2/44)
them. I mean, is it really necessary to see his name on the check to know who it's from? Aren't we going to know when it bounces? And he has apparently started a feud with the World Health Organization, which has not been perfect. But I mean, it is the World Health Organization. We probably could use it right now. But he's threatening to stop funding them because he says the World Health Organization has mismanaged the spread of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization has mismanaged it. He also says the World Health Organization has outrageous hair and wears way too much orange makeup. All right, we got a great show. We have Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Sullivan, and Congressman Dan Crenshaw, all of whom I spoke to earlier. Let's get right to it. OK, he is the host of one of my favorite shows, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS. And of course, a columnist for The Washington Post. Please welcome Fareed Zakaria from his home. Fareed, how you doing there? You holding up OK at home? Yeah, I'm (3/44)
holding up. Look, I like to read. I like to watch movies. I've got my kids here. For me, I can work at home. So professionally, it hasn't been that different. I mean, it's obviously incredibly challenging. But I miss social life. I miss my friends. I miss human contact. I grew up in Bombay and now live in New York City, big, noisy, dirty cities full of intensity. I like that. I miss that. Oh, gosh, yes. I mean, they're talking now. I guess we've decided the governor's May 15, seems like the day, that we're going back with restrictions. I hope I can go to a restaurant, wear a mask, throw away the menu, whatever they want. But you're right, we got to get back to life. So one month from about now. So I mean, at least we can see the end in sight a little. Your column, which I read this week, I read it every week, of course, about testing. And we did this shutdown to buy us time to get some information. And your point is that without testing, and we are still way behind, we're flying blind (4/44)
on this. Exactly. The single biggest piece of information we don't know is how many people are infected with COVID-19. We know that 650,000, roughly, in America have been tested, and they've tested positive. But we now know there are at least 50% in some studies of people who are asymptomatic, who have no symptoms. Then there are people who think they'll handle it at home. They don't go to the hospital. They don't go to clinics. So what we have to do is get a test that tells us how lethal is this virus, how many people are infected, which is the denominator, and how many people die of it, which tells you the fatality rate. The studies that we have built, which are really fascinating, which are truly random samples where they don't just test the people who come in and show up at a clinic. There's two, one done in a German town in Iceland. Both of them show about 13 to 15% of the population has COVID much more than we think, right? Many, many hundreds of thousands more people than have (5/44)
in millions more. And the fatality rate in Iceland is 0.4%. In the German case was 0.37%, which is way lower than the initial estimates that we had, orders of magnitude lower. That tells us a lot. Now, if other studies find that it's different and it's actually much more lethal, that's also important to know. But the more I'm learning about this, the more I think we need to figure out who is vulnerable, who is not, how do you intelligently go back to work? And for that, you need this crucial piece of data. How many people have the virus? Right. And I mean, I've heard people on television say things like, we're all staying home because we're scared to death of getting this thing. That I know people who feel that way, that does not describe me. I am not scared to death of getting this thing. I don't wanna get it, nobody wants to get sick. What I'm scared to death of is that we wind up doing, or maybe have already done what we did after 9-11. We are overly influenced by dramatic death (6/44)
when something is a dramatic event like this, as opposed to everyday death. The 40,000 people a month who die from obesity, that just goes by, opioids, lots of pollution. After 9-11, we overreacted and wounded ourselves much more than the enemy ever could have. Do you worry that that's what's happening now? Absolutely. And I worry that we have the wrong reactions and we try to compensate for the things that we got wrong. Maybe you start fighting the last war. You're absolutely right. 9-11 happens, and basically it's a bunch of guys with box cutters who get onto planes and then use the planes as bombs. Locking the cockpit door essentially took care of that problem. Instead, we spent something like 50 or $60 billion in the next three months ramping up our Defense Department, which had almost nothing to do with protecting us from that kind of threat. Then we built this enormous Homeland Security apparatus. Then we went out and invaded Iraq. I mean, none of it really related to our (7/44)
problem. And so in crises, in fear and panic, we do these things. I will point out, there are sort of three crises of the post-Cold War world. 9-11, the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and this one. And the distinctive feature of the 08-09 one is we really didn't overreact. And I do think that having a president who is Dr. Spock helped in that regard. Obama is very calm, very cool, very rational. Some people saw it as a kind of lack of emotion, Dr. Spock. But when you think about it in these terms, it was really helpful to have somebody who doesn't just go with the herd and who sits back and asks himself, what is the right rational answer to this problem? Well, I think you mean Mr. Spock. Dr. Spock was a pediatrician, and a pediatrician is- You're exactly right, you're exactly right. A pediatrician is definitely what this president needed. But I mean- We're doing this on the fly. I know. So it was tax day this week, and of course, we forgave that. And the tax day's now been moved to July (8/44)
15th. Who is even going to have money on July 15th to pay their taxes? I'm sure, and of course, we've also gutted the IRS because that's part of the deep state. So I'm wondering if a lot of money is gonna be coming in. We were 20 trillion in debt before this, and Trump was just putting everything on the card. Then we signed this $2 trillion bill. I mean, you mentioned the last crisis where we- Obama asked for 780 billion. The Republicans went apeshit, but he got it. Now Trump signs one for 2 trillion, like it's the dinner bill. And I just wonder how long can America, can our government just keep printing money before we have a crash that makes the last one look like nothing? Look, it's a great question. And honestly, no one knows the answer because the United States, you know, I mean, at some level, the government of the United States has an infinite time horizon. As long as people are willing to loan it money, interest rates are low, but our interest payments, the debt that we have to (9/44)
pay every year, those interest payments gets higher and higher. But the real crisis bill is local and state governments because they can't print money. They don't have the endless piggy bank and the printing presses. And in those places, remember, how do local governments sustain themselves? Sales taxes, even more than income taxes and income taxes. Who is buying anything right now, right? So those, I think you're gonna see an absolute cratering of state and local government. And that's where, particularly for poor people, particularly for your lower middle class people, you know, you really are going to see a hemorrhaging for people, homelessness issues, you know, all the kinds of problems that local and state governments often deal with. This is gonna be very bad. And, you know, I don't know if you saw, Steve Mnuchin says that the $1,200 that the federal government is giving people, well, that should last them 10 weeks at least. You know, which is a kind of startling theory. Right, (10/44)
well, and also because of, you know, all the rest of the shit that's going on, people didn't notice that Trump fired the guy who is supposed to be in charge of overseeing this $2 trillion because he was an Obama appointee. He also fired Michael Atkinson, I think is the man's name. He is the inspector general who passed along the Ukraine whistle-blowers, whistle-blowing to Congress, which is his job. People are not noticing these things that Trump is doing. And I gotta say, I have buyer's remorse about impeachment. I was for it. Now that I know what I know, as pundits always say, knowing what you know now, all I see is that Trump was exonerated and now he's inoculated. And now he knows he can get away with anything. Now he knows the Republicans won't stop anything. And gee whiz, I wonder what's next. You know, trying to defund the post office because he doesn't want mail-in voting. You know, panic times are very prone to exploitation by people who wanna seize power. Certainly you have (11/44)
written about that subject a lot. Yeah, it's sad to watch in countries like Hungary and even in India where the government basically is taking advantage of these emergencies to arrest journalists. I mean, in Hungary, the guy basically just suspended parliament and said, I'm just gonna rule by presidential decree. And this process goes on until I say the emergency is over. Trump must be watching that and salivating. I have to say, what Trump is doing, is, you know, it's the smaller American version. It's exactly what you say, which is he's taking advantage not so much of emergency powers to become a dictator, but of the news cycle, which he understands better than frankly the constitution and emergency powers. He understands the media and he understands the news cycle and he knows no one is covering the things you're describing. No one understands, nobody's paying attention. And so I suspect we're gonna see a lot more of the kind of thing you've just been talking about, which is all (12/44)
these little scores he's wanted to settle, all kinds of smaller appointments, because, you know, if you look at the pages of the newspaper, look at the newscasts, it's all COVID all the time. Who has time to notice a little abuse of power here and there? Well, I hope that changes soon. I hope I see you soon, Fareed. Don't get too used to this, please. I hear people say, oh, maybe we keep doing this. It's not so bad. It's terrible. And we need to have dinner in person. I totally agree. Aristotle says man is a social animal and I think Aristotle is right. Glad you feel that way. Thank you, sir. I'll see you soon. So the first week we were doing it from my backyard, I thought, oh, I'm gonna do new rules from this tree. And then I saw Jimmy Fallon a couple of nights earlier did his opening for the tree and I don't like to repeat. So, but then I noticed Jimmy really was only like three feet high in the tree. So I love Jimmy, but let's have a little contest. Whoever can get higher in the (13/44)
tree gets to own the tree for whatever bit you wanna use. So I just gotta beat three feet and then it'll be on you. Okay. Okay, Jimmy. I don't know what this is. Trust me, we'll measure it. But whatever it is, you get higher, you own the tree. Until then, tree's mine. It's on, bitch. Okay, my next guest is a Republican Congressman from Texas and author of the new book, Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage. Please welcome Dan Crenshaw. Congressman, thank you for doing this. I must tell you, I first became aware of you as I think many Americans did when Pete Davidson of Saturday Night Live made that joke about you. And I have to tell you, I am such a fan of what you said because you never hear that in American life. You said, look, it was wrong, but let's just forgive each other. I know you've done much better things for this country, five tours you did overseas, but thank you for your service in calling out victim culture. Well, I appreciate that, Bill. And first of all, (14/44)
thanks for having me. I know we had planned to do this in the studio in Los Angeles, unfortunately. Life took a different turn. Now, the phrase I used after Pete Davidson said that, which I think you would love this phrase, is try hard not to be offended, or try hard not to offend, but try even harder not to offend, or be offended, please, I'm really screwing this up. Try hard not to offend, try even harder not to be offended. And I think that'd be a way to live for all of us. No, and we both share this disdain for victim culture and for lots of stuff, trophy syndrome. I hope I have some credibility with you because I did a show called Politically Incorrect, which started in 1993, when I think you were about 10. And I was onto this shit a long time ago, and it hasn't gotten any better. I think you do have some credibility for sure. In conservative circles, I don't know how often you test or do focus groups amongst conservatives, but we generally think of you as a real liberal. And that (15/44)
means something. There's a difference between liberalism and leftism, and we can disagree wholeheartedly on the best way to govern our country, or the best way to perceive a problem and the framework with which to approach problem solving. But open-mindedness and the ability to debate should be a key tenant of liberalism, and at least in the classical sense. And so now we do appreciate it. Okay, so let's debate a little bit. I mean, you say in your book, I'm gonna quote here, you call out automatic assignment of blame outward. That's what we were just talking about. Help me understand how someone who calls out the outward assignment of blame can be such a supporter of a president who does nothing but pass the buck, lie, finger point, shirk responsibility. Tell me how you can support someone with your background, someone like that. Yeah, it didn't take long for Trump to come up. I would say I support the country, right? And the president's success is certainly tied to the success of the (16/44)
country. I support his policy agenda. When I disagree with his policy agenda, I openly disagree with it. This isn't, Republicans always get asked this question, and there's this demand that we always have to answer. What do you feel about him? Well, don't you wanna comment on his latest tweet, and his latest out, and the way he lashed out? And no, I don't. I can't defend everything. He doesn't have the same style as I do. I don't consider him my spiritual guide by any means. But let me tell you a quick story. When I was blown up, sitting in my hospital bed, President Obama was doing the rounds at Walter Reed, just like President Trump does now, and just like President Bush did before him. It's a really neat thing. It's a really interesting connection that the president gets with these wounded, wounded active duty soldiers that is never publicized. And even though I may have disagreed with so many levels with President Obama, I made sure to get up, and I was excited. I was genuinely (17/44)
happy, and to shake that man's hand, and have him sign the American flag on my wall, and even though we disagree on political things, and I think I would like us to get to that point with this president as well. Okay, but you do what a lot of Republicans do. You talk about his tweets and his style. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the person who is the leader of the country at a time of crisis. And we have to go through what he actually has done. This is important stuff. It's about life and death, and it's about our economy, and everything that's really important. It's not tweets and it's not style. Let's just go through the timeline, okay? Because he was warned. This did not have to happen. Alex Azar, his health and human services guy, January 18th, he warned him about this. And again, on January 30th, Trump said he was being an alarmist. Peter Navarro, somebody else who talks to Trump a lot, told him directly January 29th, you gotta get ahead of this. February 10th- two (18/44)
days later, he implemented a restrictive travel ban from China, which he was widely criticized for. That same day on January 31st, Nancy Pelosi proposed the No Ban Act, which would be congressional limitation on what President Trump's actually able to do with that travel restriction. Okay, but that, I mean, he lies about that. First of all, he didn't- How does he lie about it? What do you mean? He said he stopped people coming in from China. He did not. He said he was ahead of it. 43 countries did it before we did. There are still people coming in from China. He only stopped foreign nationals. Yeah, okay, let me address that, because I know that's what people are saying right now. But the reality is, that was about 40,000 people came in after that. These are US citizens and green card holders and pass court holders being repatriated. US citizens. So you have to make the argument then that we shouldn't allow them in. And it sounds to me like you're fully agreeing with President Trump on (19/44)
this when everybody else disagreed with him. And if you're saying that you wish that travel restriction had been more extreme, okay, fine. You apparently had the foresight back then, but when nobody else did. But the fact is, if Joe Biden was in charge at that moment, he's already said he wouldn't have done it. He criticized it at the time. Nancy Pelosi actually proposed legislation to stop it. Okay, but people are still coming in from China. It wasn't just foreign nationals, but let's get off that. Let me just go back to the timeline for a minute. February 10th, after these warnings, he says it's gonna go away in April with the heat because he had a hunch. February 25th, he goes to India. This is four days after the White House Coronavirus Task Force said, we're going to have to lock down the country. And Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who's in charge of the Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Wait a second, let me just finish. She announced this on the 26th. He, on the 25th, (20/44)
that we're gonna have to lock down the country. He said the next day, 15 people have it and it's soon going to be close to zero. March 6th, he said, anyone who wants a test can get it, which is still completely wrong. Let me stick to February, because you mentioned February 25th. The day before, February 24th, that's when the administration requested two and a half billion dollars from Congress to fulfill CDC, NIH, and FDA funding to combat the virus. And the potential spread of it. What happened right then? I'll tell you, because I was in Congress and I know what happened. Did we vote on a supplemental funding bill? No. Did we wait days to vote? No, still didn't vote on it. You know what we voted on later that week? Nancy Pelosi, the only thing she would put on the floor to vote on was a bill to ban flavored tobacco. That's what actually happened. It was only a week later that we actually voted on supplemental funding that the administration requested. Your criticism appears to be (21/44)
based in one thing, that Trump was overly optimistic. That's his style. You know, again, you can criticize it, that's fine. But it's not connected to the actions that were actually taken. Because if I back up even further, you know, February 14th, CDC announces ongoing work with five laboratories to perform community-based influenza surveillance and study the spread of the virus. We're in a fact-finding mode in February. People forget this. We weren't. People keep calling February this lost month. The world- But it's really not. That's an easy and cheap accusation because there's no big, bold moves taken like there was in January or like there was in March. But the reality is, our government was working to create that test. Now, did they work as fast as we would have liked? I don't know, of course not. And there's a lot of reasons for that, which I'm happy to go into. By March 3rd, there was only 102 cases in the United States. And yet I'm hearing criticism that we should have been (22/44)
locked down weeks earlier. But would you think the American people would have accepted that with only 100 cases in the United States? Italy didn't lock down until March 10th. Spain, not until March 14th. UK, not until later in March. Prince's like Sweden's never locked down. And so I provide all of that context as we try to basically accuse this man of, well, he's being accused of having blood on his hands. And context is so important here. Well, it is. And also it's not just about being optimistic. It's about being right. The world was aware of this. And since when does America take its lead from Italy and Spain? Well, because those were where the outbreaks were happening. I understand. Well, I'm pointing it out again for context. If we're gonna criticize somebody's actions, we have to do it in the context of the facts they knew at the time. And so I'm just trying to be fair here that I don't really care about defending him or his actions. I just care about letting people know the (23/44)
truth. And when people make these accusations, I have to ask them a question. Is the goal to make Trump look better or is the goal to get to the truth? Because there's two different sets of answers for that. Okay, but sometimes they converge. Sometimes the truth is that somebody who says, I have a hunch this is going to go away. Is that someone you would want to have served with? I mean, my God, I don't understand again, why someone with your resume, you were in Fallujah for God's sakes. Would you want someone, a commander to say that to you to blame everybody else if something goes wrong and then to say, I have a hunch the enemy's not gonna be in there. What's the task? No, I understand that. So here's how I would describe my answer to that. When bullets are flying past my head, I don't need to raise my voice. And I write about this in my book too. Calm breeds calm, panic breeds panic. Being an optimistic, exuding positivity and calmness and crisis is exactly how we ask our seals to (24/44)
lead. And now I'm not sure I see a lot of evidence for blaming others, maybe blaming China, although there's a lot of evidence for that. So maybe that's a good place to play blame. But I did it last week. I don't see Trump blaming Democrats here. He's exposing hypocrisy. And maybe we're confusing that with blame. But no, I mean, again, calm breeds calm. And that's how we would lead in the seal themes. Okay, so in Texas, there was a six hour line to vote a couple of weeks ago. It does look like the Republican Party doesn't want people to vote, especially mail in vote. And there's gonna be people now who are afraid to go to the polls because of this disease. Where do you stand on that? I'm sorry, go ahead. Do you think Republicans are trying to stop people from voting? Do you really want it? Wouldn't you rather lose an election than live in a country where we're not really getting our franchise? So the lines in Houston here, and then those big six hour waits you saw, Republicans aren't (25/44)
in charge of those elections. The Democrats are in charge of our county elections here. They run that. The county clerk is a Democrat, recently won. That's why they're in charge. They've taken full responsibility for those lines, because basically what happened is a lot of machines went down, and that's what caused the lines. So first of all, it's not Republicans, it's Democrats in these urban areas that actually run the election system. And second, there was no ill intent, even I don't think ill intent from Democrats either. There was mistakes made. In Texas, you have two weeks to early vote from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for two weeks straight. You can go anywhere in the county and cast your vote. You don't have to vote on election day. If you're elderly or sick and disabled, you can vote in by mail. No, it's not the case that we don't want people to vote. And of course, that's always the accusation. But it's not really based in evidence. Mail-in ballots do have, there's a break of custody of (26/44)
a vote there. If it's not fraudulent, there's at least the possibility for mistakes to be made, and we see that often. I read an op-ed recently from a former Texas member who was going door to door based on voter registration, just knocking on doors, and would find a group of non-U.S. citizens, but they're registered there, or a empty lot, but it's registered. So if you start mailing all of these types of places ballots, well then, it's not ill intent, but there's the possibility for a lot of bad things to happen. And so the question we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to, especially from a national level, try to revamp our entire election system, with the potential for all these problems? And for what, exactly? And so I don't know if your question is related to COVID-19, or just elections in general. Well, everything's related to that these days. And there of course is a lot to be said about your answer, which is a terrific answer from a press spokesman for that cause. But I (27/44)
don't have time to do it now. I hope you can come to our show as we plan sometime, and we will take up this issue of whether Republicans really are protecting your franchise or not. But I appreciate you doing this. I appreciate everything you've done for this country. And I hope I see you in person soon. Thank you. Hey, thanks, Bill. Great to be with you. Thank you. Well, everybody knows that Google does the most popular searches, right? Tells us what they are. And of course, in this crisis, they're a little different. They're things like, when is my stimulus check coming? And you know, how do I cut my own hair? But we did a deep dive into some of the other most popular Google searches. Would you like to hear them? Of course you would. You're at home screaming, Bill, what are the other most popular Google searches? I have them right here, luckily. For example, why do my grandkids keep asking about their inheritance? Is one of them. How can you tell when Whole Foods is price gouging? (28/44)
Popular. Was Andrew Cuomo in Scarface? Is it illegal to make a four-year-old live in the garage? Oh, I love number five. Sexy Anthony Fauci Halloween costume. Popular Google search. Does blue cheese go bad or does it get better? Was six. Can I dye my roots with a Sharpie? That was me. I Googled that. Where can I go to sell all my pants? All of them. What month is it? Can I use my water pick as a bidet? And of course, can I get divorced on Zoom? Most popular Google searches. Okay, and finally today, we have one of my very good friends, friend of the show, writer at large for New York Magazine, all around rock on tour. My old friend, Andrew Sullivan. Hey there, Bill. How are you? Hey there, Bill. How are you? I'm good. I wanted to have you on because you are one of our best friends of the show from the beginning, a favorite of the viewers and always give me a great show. And I just wanna check in with my friend because we're all suffering through this, but it's not equal suffering. And (29/44)
some people, look, I just said earlier in the show that I'm not really scared to get this. I don't wanna get it. Maybe I'm wrong. It'll take me out, but I don't think so. But you are someone who should not get this and you are taking it as you should very seriously. No, I mean, I am a long-term HIV survivor, which is not a huge deal in this situation. It just means that if I survived 18 years or more than that with HIV, I don't wanna die of this in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of an anticlimax. But I have bad lungs, that's the truth of the matter, and always have. And I know that if I would have come into contact with this, I don't think I'd do very well. And so I've been really since early February, to be honest, wearing a mask and being totally isolated. It's been six weeks for me now of not seeing really in any close sense another human being. And I live alone right now and that's been really hard. And I'm not sure how much longer human beings can really do this. Well, apparently (30/44)
you're gonna have to do it for a while. And apparently you're being so safe, it looks like there's not even anything in your house. What are you in a rubber room? Jesus Christ. He's put in a Ziploc bag, basically. I was just gonna say to you, one thing that makes this easier for you than a lot of people is that you're a true intellectual. So somebody as smart as you, there's a million books that you wanna read that will engage you. Whereas fucking dummies, all they got is bad television and I know I'm insulting them, but they're not watching this. They don't care about you and me. The dummies are doing something else. Yeah, but you know what? After a while, we all wanna Netflix. We all wanna, I mean, I end up doing Angry Birds. I end up just looking at my dogs for a while. I end up smoking a lot of weed in the evenings to get me through this, to take the edge off the days. I just really missed, to be honest with you, human contact. I just wanna hug. I want some kind of company and I (31/44)
can't. And I think because I'm not gonna be safe until there's a really good treatment or a vaccine, I'm looking at maybe a year of this and I'm beginning to figure out how to wrap my head around that and how to live as a social animal completely alone. And to be honest with you, I probably wouldn't do it if I weren't scared shitless about this actual experience. Right, and I'm advising you to do it. You should be and you should be scared shitless. I shouldn't, maybe I should, but you should. Some people should. But let's see, I mean, you mentioned being an AIDS survivor. Just, I remember that period. And there were some similarities as far as panic. And certainly in the gay community, there was even more panic. How would you compare and contrast them? And what's your favorite plague? Now, you know, the thing that really resonates with me right now, and I think a lot of us who survived that epidemic have these almost PTSD experiences. And the first is that you're just not aware or not (32/44)
sure of if you could get this. This thing is stalking and you don't know if or when you're finally gonna get caught. And that insecurity, that tension, I'm negative, I'm negative, could I be positive? And then when you're positive, you're then like, am I gonna get AIDS? Am I gonna get another? And every day you live with the assumption and the assurance that you may not live for much longer. So you have to develop an attitude of mind that lives, I know it's a cliche, but lives in the now. That accepts that we take this one day at a time. But in fact, living in a plague is really just an intensification of normal life. We're all gonna die. We're all vulnerable to accidents, to illnesses, to all sorts of things. I lost my dad two months ago from an accident, fell down a flight of stairs. I couldn't even get to the burial because of this bloody disease. But things happen like that. And I think I was taught very early in my life because of AIDS and HIV that you can't trust anything and you (33/44)
could be gone tomorrow and therefore live now and also learn to live with uncertainty. We don't know the future. We have no idea where this is gonna end up. We could get a good treatment soon, which would shift the analysis and the balance altogether. But we may not, we may have to wait for a vaccine, in which case we're gonna have to just correct our behavior. But you know, I thought I was gonna avoid HIV. I practiced safe sex, as I thought. I still got it. And that haunts me because I'm doing everything I should with this virus. I'm wearing a mask, I'm wearing gloves, I'm staying by myself, but I still worry. It's gonna get me. And if it gets me, it's gonna get me good. But you're right, something's gonna get you. None of us are gonna get out of this alive. And that's the case. I could not agree with you more about the philosophy of life. Live while you have it. Go out strong if you have to go out. Something's gonna come for us. I noticed that hookup sites are still very active. I (34/44)
read an article about it the other day, Tinder and Grindr. Obviously, people share that philosophy. Yeah, look, there's a difference between, however, there's a difference between risking your life, unnecessarily, and accepting that your life is fragile and precarious. I don't think one has to go to the next step of reckless behavior or inviting this in. And to be honest, when I look at, here I'm confessing, I look at Tinder or Grindr, I think a lot of it's just chat right now. I really do. I don't think a lot of it is actually moving up. I think that would change over time. I mean, the idea of me going without any sexual activity for a year is, you know, that's not extremely encouraging, is it? I mean, it's not exactly a uplifter. But you do what you can. And I'm sure maybe at some point I will need to live some more. And some of us are gonna have to take those risks because we want to be alive when we die. We want to actually have a real life rather than living constantly in fear. (35/44)
And I think at some point in the next few months, a majority of Americans are gonna say, you know, I just gotta live. I gotta live, I can't cower in the face of this anymore. And that doesn't mean being crazy and reckless and ignoring everything. It just means being extra careful and trying to live your life again as it used to be. Right, well said. Let me ask you one more question because you're always a great political commentator on our show. And we forget there is an election going on and now it is Joe Biden. I know you never liked Hillary. You probably thought Biden would have been a better candidate last time. What do you think now? Are you hopeful about the election? Do you think Biden is gonna be a good candidate? Do you think he'll win? If he does, do you think Trump will go? What do you think? I'll be honest with you. He'll do. I think that's how I feel about Biden. I'm not that confident about him because I believed all along he's just, it's not his fault. He's just a little (36/44)
old and he's a little out of it. And that's tough in this environment. And even though I will vote for him and will support him and I'm happy that he's not being outflanked on the left too much so that they don't go too crazy and put people off in the middle about the Democratic Party. At the same time, he should have run last time. Now he's running. I think he's got a pretty good chance. The other thing I think to be honest with you was we're beginning to look at this. I don't know whether you saw the Gallup poll this week but just saw Trump's ratings drop a huge amount to 43% that he's not doing well in this crisis. People can see he's out of his depth. The bullshit that he puts out, the lies and everybody sees this now as a show. When your lives are at stake, you look at this more seriously. And I think it's quite clear now that he's not up to this job, he never was. And not only that, in a crucial moment, he's dividing the country in a very dangerous situation in a way that no (37/44)
president ever should. And I think I really do believe this time, and this is the first I've really believed this since he got elected, that people, it's running dry. It's wearing thin. And I think it may not be necessary for Biden to win this election because Trump will lose it. I hope you're right. I do too. I hope I see you soon. I'll leave you with this note of optimism. A lot of times with crises, I'm thinking of Y2K, I'm thinking of the fires in Kuwait that Saddam said and they said would take two years to put out and it took eight months and the BP oil spill. They often tell us it's gonna be worse and then that it's actually better so we can be happy when it is better. So I don't think you'll be locked up for a year and I hope I see you sooner than that. Take care. You know we love you. Bye, Bill. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Andrew. And now it's time for New Rule. Okay, New Rule, instead of holding sporting events with no people in the stands, let each team have one fan, a single (38/44)
supporter to represent their city. Like in Philly, a bald guy yelling, you suck. In Cleveland, a divorced dad crying with a bag over his head. And in LA, a celebrity who really isn't a fan and proves it by throwing the ball straight into the dirt. New Rule, you can't call it an endorsement when there's only one guy left in the race. It's gay. We can all admit it. Joe Biden is nobody's first choice. More like being stranded on a desert island with another guy and thinking, well, I guess I'm gay now. New Rule, someone has to tell me if it's safe to eat the tartar sauce. I mean as an entree. New Rule, no more picking up produce at the grocery store and putting it back. Those days are gone. Find a kumquat and commit to it. And don't put it next to your ear and start tapping it like you're the fruit whisperer. New Rule, we have to start breaking the news to the dogs that we won't always be home. But when we do walk out that door, Chico, don't blame yourself. It's not you, it's me. Oh, and (39/44)
I'm gonna need that bandana. And finally, New Rule, now that we're starting to see some hope in all this, don't hope shame me. You know, the problem with nonstop gloom and doom is it gives Trump the chance to play the optimist. And optimists tend to win American elections. FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. You know, as full of shit as he is, I could see Trump riding that into a second term. And then there will be no hope left for you to shame. So look, if this insanity happens again, news sources have to rein it in. Everyone knows corona is no walk in the park because you literally can't walk in the park. But at some point, the daily drumbeat of depression and terror veers into panic porn. Enough with the life will never be the same headlines. And stop showing us this. You know, everything looks scary when you magnify it a thousand times. Here's a pubic hair, boo! Last month, the Washington Post ran the headline, it feels like a war zone with this picture. This is (40/44)
not a war zone. This is a man with a box of eggs. And I've never seen a war zone with this much bacon. Or how about this one? Horrifying simulation reveals the dangers of jogging during the coronavirus pandemic. Look, this virus is easy to catch, but if you can't avoid it jogging, you can't outrun much. Two weeks ago, Inside Edition said 76,000 in the world had died, so some are making comparisons to the apocalypse. The apocalypse? Really? Because most of us are sitting at home smoking delivery weed and binge watching a show about a gay zookeeper. Unless you're a frontline healthcare worker, for whom the phrase, above and beyond the call of duty, doesn't even begin to cover it, this is not the apocalypse. And I know, I know, you expect Inside Edition to be over the top. But the New York Times, they used the same word last week. Braced for apocalyptic surge, New York avoids worst so far. And this was an article about how much better the city was doing than expected. Projections had them (41/44)
needing 58,000 hospital beds, and it turned out they needed a quarter of that. Still bad, but you don't have to put hot sauce on a jalapeno. Geez, you sound like Lindsey Graham talking about ISIS when Obama was president. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home. Another recent Times headline was, Millions more out of work. What the fuck is it's terrifying doing in a headline? Granted, it's a quote, but who are they quoting? Trump? Fauci? Stephen King? No, they're quoting an event planner in North Hollywood. No offense to the event planners of the world, it's amazing what you people could do with pine cones and silver spray paint. But why are you in my headline? How about this? Just tell me, millions are out of work without the flashlight under the chin, and I'll decide how I feel about it. There was never headlines like this before. There was no, it's terrifying, planes hit World Trade Center. There was no, it's sad, Titanic sinks after (42/44)
hitting iceberg, or first atomic bomb dropped. Ouch. The media also seems obsessed with finding young people who've died of COVID-19. The Washington Post says there's 759 under 50 years old. Horrible, of course. Then I looked up how many under 50 died of the flu last year. Almost 3,000. So all this misery from distancing did some good. Can I be happy about that? Death is terrible, of course, no matter how it comes. I'm against it and I don't care who knows it. But giving a proper perspective isn't a cover-up of the truth. It is the truth. Sudden dramatic deaths like plane crashes, shark attacks, tornadoes, mass shootings, terrorism, awful as they are, kill far less than seasonal flu or even hospital-acquired infections may very well kill more than coronavirus. 99,000 of them last year. 50,000 die of nephritis every year. I don't even know what that is. 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment and many will lose their health insurance. Studies show lacking health insurance kills (43/44)
people. But it doesn't lead to pictures like this and it doesn't happen all at once. We need the news to calm down and treat us like adults. Trump calls you fake news. Don't make him be right. Okay, that's our show. I wanna thank my guests, Fareed Zakaria, Dan Crenshaw, and Andrew Sullivan, and we will be back next week, you guessed it, from my backyard. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Listen to this. Biden got COVID again and had the best week of his presidency. I don't know if this is related, but today, Kamala Harris was seen rubbing herself with a coughing monkey. I... No, they just... No, not funny. They just declared monkey pox. The monkey pox is a national emergency. And listen to this. In New York City, they found one case of polio, but the health guy says, well, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and we found it in the wastewater. You know what? I've had it with viruses. I really have. Polio in the wastewater in New York. First, okay. First, I couldn't have unprotected gay sex. Then I couldn't eat at a Chinese wet market. And now I can't play in wastewater? Well, fuck this. Honestly, Biden had his best week in a very long time. Jobs? Way up. I mean, like crazy up. We've gotten all the jobs back from the pandemic. Unemployment is 3.5%. Gas prices way down. And he got... And (1/44)
he got his big climate bill today. Kirsten Sinema from Arizona, you familiar with her? She's a... Okay. All right. Well, she joined up. It's good to see the... Good to see the Democrats can be bipartisan with themselves. It's... This was me. She was holding this up for something called the carried interest loophole. This is very important to her. And they gave it up. It's, you know, something only hedge fund managers care about. Do you care about this? But she looked around Scottsdale and said, it's about time someone stood up for the wealthy. This is, again, this is a tax loophole that only involves hedge fund managers. You know, I've seen many campaign ads in my life. Firemen, farmers, you know, welders, a kid pulling a dog in a wagon. It's rarely hedge fund managers. I've never seen one with a guy. It's morning in America. And I've been up all night snorting blow off a hooker's ass. I've never seen that. And not me. Thank you, mom. But, you know, this is the big climate bill. Not (2/44)
one Republican voted for it. It's going to be 50 plus the vice president passing this thing. You know, the environment, they're just not into it. There was just some way to get the earth pregnant. That's, uh, is the big story this week. Kansas had an election. Kansas. Kansas had an election and abortion rights was on the ballot and it won big in Kansas. You know who spent a lot of money on this? Trying to get it to go the other way against the Catholic Church. Spent millions, millions that could have gone on to pay off kids they raped. It's just a shame. It was a mixed day, Tuesday, election day there. A lot of election deniers won in Arizona and a bunch of other states. But probably the worst one of all on the Republican side, Eric Greitens in Missouri. He lost. He's the governor. Yeah, no, he's not well known, but he had to resign for sex scandal. Now they allegedly was coercing his hairdresser into giving him oral sex. Apparently he tied her up, tore her clothes, spanked her, took (3/44)
nude photos of her without her permission. What we in Hollywood call casting. The other big win this week for Joe Biden was we got, I'm on Al-Zawahiri. I know you kids don't know who that is, but I'm going to tell you, there was this thing called 9-11 and he was the mastermind. He was the real planner. Bin Laden was a pimp. It was Al-Zawahiri all along. Okay. They got him. With a drone, yes. Took them 21 years. Who was the kill squad? The Yavaldi police squad? Listen to this. This is how bad ass our military is. They got him standing on his balcony. Didn't kill anybody else because it wasn't a bomb. It was a Hellfire R9X, which is not a bomb. It has six rotating blades and a strip of soothing aloe. And just shivved him to. In two weeks this will be, your eight year old will be using it on call of duty. You know, this weapon. And of course they got him on the balcony there. And ironically they would never have known it was him if he was wearing a burka. But you know that's just. The (4/44)
other big internationals, Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan. A lot of people didn't want her to go. She said fuck that, I'm going. It infuriated China. And out of habit John Cena apologized. But Nancy said I had to go. I had to go to make the case for preserving democracy and rejecting authoritarianism. And if it works there I'm going to try it on the Republicans. Alright we got a great show. We got Matt Taibbi and Liz Smith. First up, he is an award winning actor, director, musician and best selling author. His latest book is The Reservoir, a novella. David Duchovny is on. It's a long time? It is a long time. Too long. We used to play basketball together at Gary Shandling's many years ago. Yes. Good days. Good days. So I have so much to catch up with you on. But since we have limited time I'm going to jump right into your book because I feel like that's actually the best way to get to know who you are. Because the character in this novella, I'm not going to say it's you, but it's a guy your (5/44)
age. It's a middle aged white guy. Yeah. Living where you live at the time. He does live where I live. Right. Doing what you were doing during the pandemic. Yes. Look, I wrote a novel once. It's fucking awesome to novelize your life because you can edit out the shit you don't like, create the shit you do like, or maybe even exaggerate your bad points. It's fun, right? Well, that's the art part. I think it was Neil Simon who was asked what's autobiography in your work and he said, it's all autobiography, even the parts I make up. That's the way I feel. But it all gets filtered through whatever consciousness I have. And when I land on a character, even though he looks, resembles me and all that, I get the slant of it and then I'm off and running when I'm writing that way. So it is and it isn't me. And the amazing thing about the process of writing is as you come to a day after day after day and you're a different person. I'm not schizophrenic, but I'm a different person every day. I sit (6/44)
down with a different consciousness in a way. And it kind of builds like a sedimentation in a way. And it becomes its other thing. And it's not me in a way, even though it came from you. Do you write high? No. That's such a not unreasonable question. It's not at all. So many artists and writers have written high. I revise high. Yeah. I like to get up very, very early when I'm writing because it's not high, but I feel like if you're coming out of sleep, you're not quite in that conscious realm. So you're trailing your unconsciousness with you a little bit. So 4.35 in the morning, a little coffee, and then I go. Oh, coffee is your high? No, no. That's just to get up and go to the bathroom. Well, what's your... I was just giving you more of my autobiography. Right. Well, what gets you high? I mean, you said you revised because I have the same thing. I've said this before. I have like a bicameral mind. Yes. It's like Congress. I have two houses. I have the sober. Who's got the gavel? Well, (7/44)
I have the sober and then the stone. They have to come together on legislation. When they both agree, I will sign it. Is that what you're talking about? Have you ever read Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind? Have you ever read that book? No. You'd be very interested in that. It's probably the same thing. I mean, he says, I might get this wrong, so forgive me, but he basically says that God, as we have come to know it, is actually one half of our brain talking to the other half of our brain and that we mistook it for God. But anyway, be that as it may, Bill. I think that's giving a lot of credit to people who don't even have half of their brain. It's only that we're stuck. To answer your question, gummies. I'm a big fan of the gummies. Gummies, there. I love a gummy. I mean, they're nostalgic. They remind you of being a six-year-old. Right. And the other thing- They put vitamins in it and now they put pot in them. It's fantastic. What I love about also when I wrote my novel is your (8/44)
omniscient. You're not that way in any other art form, really. You can't be that in a novel. The character was thinking this and he wanted to do this. It's so much fun to be omniscient. That's God-like. Yes, it is God-like. And I think that you point out an interesting thing, which is that's why it's hard to make a good book into a good movie. It's often easy to make a bad book into a good movie because it's plot-oriented. But that omniscience, that consciousness is very difficult to get through just on a flat screen. The thing that's not fun about novels is that no one reads anymore. I mean, we're going to sell some here. Well, I remember I called my publisher and I said, how'd we do the first week? And he's like, great. And I was like, fantastic. What did we sell? He's like, 4,000 copies. I was like, 4,000 copies? I mean, I must have bought 2,000 of those. That's what always deterred me from doing it again. It was just like so few people. You can see it as liberating, though, because (9/44)
it's just for you. It's something you're doing for yourself and 4,000 friends. Well, it's going to jump to 5,000 after tonight. And it's a good book. And I love it. I think it's very clever to make it a novella because in a land where people don't read, at least they're going, oh, that means short. Yes, I know. And short's good. I like short. Painless. This is how I advertise it. Not homework. You know what it reminded me of? Did you ever see Eyes Wide Shut? I did see it a long time ago. You know, that's a novella. Is it? Yes. I didn't know that. You never read the book. No, I haven't read that book. I'm not shaming you. But you know the movie with Tom Cruise. Yeah, I know the movie. That's what I was thinking of. I didn't know it was a novella. It was a novella and it's kind of like yours in that when the guy leaves his apartment in New York, you kind of don't know what's real and what's not. Right. Right. So this Tom Cruise goes out of the house. Right. You're like, is he dreaming (10/44)
this? Yeah. Well, I mean, I felt that and I think we'd all share this aside from being autobiographical for me. But during Covid, we were ingesting the world through our screens as we do now. And we were seeing these images of what was happening in the world. And it was very intense. But we had no contact with the outside world because we were inside. And there was a sense when you went outside, you didn't know what to expect anymore in your world. Yeah. And that hasn't happened in our lifetimes. That's why it was such a good, I thought, conceit to write a novel around. So before I lose you for time, I just have to ask you about your franchise, because I know you probably don't think of yourself as a guy who has a franchise. Footlocker? But I just feel like your franchise, which is great to have a franchise and yours is a great one because it was a great show. Yeah, you did it in the 90s. You rebooted it a few years ago. Yeah, it's been two movies. Yeah. You're going to do it again and (11/44)
you should do it again. Right. Because it's because it's it's it's a great show. You're entertaining. You're great at it. That's ever more relevant. Well, it's not a day that goes by. I don't read about some. Now it's Congress looking into it. The Pentagon is looking into it. They're all saying now what they call them unidentified aerial phenomenon because UFO wasn't good. Yeah. They're rebranding. Why? It's the same fucking thing. Did I ever tell you my my theory of the UFOs? You might like this. I know we're out of time or whatever. No. No. It seemed to me, do you remember, you know, the phenomenon like Ship of Fools back back in medieval times, they didn't really have prisons built or insane asylums built before that. No, I didn't read that book. So well, the idea was like sometimes they would take their criminal offenders or their insane people, put them on a ship and send them out like we don't want to deal with you anymore. We're going to put you out on the high seas and woe be (12/44)
to you if you come upon this ship of fools. That's what Ship of Fools is when you hear that. So I think because people that have dealings with aliens that we tell us stories, usually they get their teeth drilled and their anuses probed. So so my my theory is that some alien, some advanced alien civilization has gotten fed up with their sex offenders and their dentists. And they put them on an intergalactic ship, send them out into the great sea of the beyond of the galaxies. And sometimes they come around us or it's just their dentist and it's a very deep cavity. Perhaps, perhaps their anatomies are different from ours and they get confused. We know what they look like because they all do look the same when people, you know, witness. So I don't know. But when Navy pilots are saying, I can't tell you what this thing is. And Neil deGrasse Tyson was here. And of course, I utmost respect for him. He knows things I will never know or could never know. I don't have that size brain. OK, so he (13/44)
pooh-poohed the idea that it's alien. He did. Yeah. He said, why did they just reveal themselves to Navy pilots? Well, it took me a year, Neil deGrasse, but I figured out an answer. What is it? Oh, I forgot. No. Because that's who they're worried about might be opposing them if they're casing us to attack. What do they give a shit about somebody guy in Peoria? He's not going to fire a squirrel gun at them. These are the people they might have to go against. So they're seeing what they can do, what they can see. That's why they reveal themselves to Navy pilots. Dave, great to see you. Congratulations on the book. Hope to see you soon on the basketball court. David Duchovny. All right, let's meet our panel. OK. He is the author of TK News on Substack. Never miss it. And author of Hate, Inc. Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another. Matt Taivi. Thanks for the shout out in your Tom Cruise column. All right, she's a Democratic strategist and author of the new New York Times (14/44)
bestselling memoir Any Given Tuesday, A Political Love Story. Liz Smith is over here. OK. OK. So, I mentioned Kansas there in the monologue. I think a big question that we've been wondering about has been answered this week in Kansas because people were wondering after the Supreme Court got rid of Roe versus Wade, would this be a big motivator? And the polls kind of said no. Shows polls are bullshit, you know. People lie or the questions phrase, whatever. This is how they indicate what they really care about. Kansas, you could not pick a more perfect state to test this in. And they were, will the Democrats come out motivated by getting rid of Roe versus Wade? Not only the Democrats, the Republicans too. So, I feel like I thought the Democrats were going to get their ass kicked in the midterm elections. I think this is a deal changer. I think this is Juan Soto going to the pod race. I do. I think it changes everything. I think now the Democrats could win this election. And so, I agree (15/44)
with you. If we had had this conversation two months ago, I would have told you Democrats are probably going to get creamed in November. Dobbs does change everything and it changes it in two ways. We all know that there are a lot of Democrats who are disillusioned with Joe Biden. He didn't cancel all of their student loans. He didn't do everything that they wanted. And they were going to sit on their asses in November and not vote for him. But they can't do that anymore now that this is on the ballot. So that's one. The second thing is, there are these voters that I like to call the Biden-Youngkin voters. The suburban voters who voted for Biden, then voted for Youngkin out of dissatisfaction because inflation. Okay, Youngkin for the kids who don't follow this. Glenn Youngkin. Let's not talk in MSNBC-ese. Let's talk for, he was a governor. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm a junkie. In the Virginia governor's race, after Biden won by 10 points, Youngkin beat Terry McCaul. He's the Republican. (16/44)
Yes, he's the Republican. He won in Virginia. Is that a lot of those suburban voters who had, or sort of swing voters, who went from Biden to Youngkin, the Republican in Virginia. Well don't insult them. We're just, let's just be inclusive. I thought Democrats wanted to be inclusive. Okay. All right. Wait, wait, wait, wait. But see, but I don't think- What's your point? But I do not think that they will vote for Republicans when abortion is on the ballot now. Okay, that's what I was saying. So, I want to read- I apologize. No, don't apologize. You didn't do anything wrong. I want to read Gavin Newsom. Now you write about this too, Newsom and DeSantis. I feel like Florida and California crystallize the two sides of America. And man, it's so interesting, Republicans, freedom was like always their brand. But now, abortion rights, taking away of freedom, it's kind of a new ball game with that. So this is an ad that our governor, Gavin Newsom, ran in Florida. He said, freedom is under (17/44)
attack in your state. This is Gavin Newsom of California addressing the Florida voters. Your Republican leaders, they're banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women. I urge all Florida to join the fight. Join us in California. We still believe in freedom. This is so opposite of what they used to do. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, freedom to love. Don't let them take your freedom. So I guess my question is, who's got the freedom fight now? Because I can see the Republicans saying, well, we stand up for your right to have your guns. We don't- COVID bullshit mandates. You have your freedom to be free. I certainly don't always feel free in this state, I must say. And I have felt freer in Florida. But who wins the freedom battle right now? What do you think? Well, first of all, I'm kind of an old school liberal. So I think if you don't believe in freedom for the people you really dislike, you probably don't (18/44)
believe in it at all. And both parties have been bad about that in recent election cycles. And you see this with the very, very restrictive Republican laws that are being passed. You had a North Carolina bill that would have required people to report kids for showing signs of gender nonconformity. I mean, that's a really scary bill, right? But then on the Democratic side, you have all this internet censorship. This state of California has 396,000 regulations, which is 100,000 more than any other state. So I don't think either party has a particular stranglehold on freedom. I think they're both weak on this issue. And this is where I disagree. I do think that the Democrats will go into November as the party of freedom, because Democrats are standing up for the freedom of women to make their own health care decisions, the freedom of people to marry who they love. And the freedom to know that they can send their kids to school without the fear of them being shot up. And to your point (19/44)
about the GOP argument about freedom is they were like, oh, my God, big government. They're making us wear masks. Oh, the temerity, all this. The people who said, OK, we want small government, now they want to make the most private health care decisions for women. They want to put Mike Pence in the OBGYN exam room with women when their feet are in stirrups. And we're all against that. I certainly. But private health care decisions. Be careful with that phrase. I read in the front page of The New York Times this week, there is a new voting bloc, a new constituency anti mandate. They said mostly parents. But these are people who are not going to vote based on Republican or Democrat. They're going to vote based on covid policy. I'm one of them. I don't even have kids. You know, it's a medical issue. I do not want to be dictated. There is no the science, especially in medical science. You can recommend whatever you like. But I must insist you don't insist how I handle my health. I never (20/44)
was. OK. Obama. Obama told me, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Well, I did and I do. And my doctors, I know many of them say very different things because doctors are afraid to speak out. You've written about this a lot. Right. Yeah. And I want to listen to the ones who are sometimes afraid to speak out, although you can find them. Yeah. I think that's the one issue where the Democrats are really, really weak on the freedom topic is the freedom of speech issue. That's become that's become a very difficult and fraught issue for Democrats. You know, ever since the beginning of the content moderation era on the Internet, there are a lot of people who associate the Democratic Party with people being taken off the Internet and, you know, being afraid to say certain things. And that's you know, that's not a positive, which is and it's the complete opposite of what I remember liberalism being about when I was growing up. I mean, you know, especially in medical science, (21/44)
which is eminently debatable. And they've already been wrong about so much in this particular crisis that we've had, not to mention everything they've been wrong about in the past. So don't sit there in your white coat telling me we have all the answers. You obviously don't. I will find the answers with the people I want to find it from. And you will not tell me how to handle it. No, no. But I do agree with that. And we've seen that in the backlash, especially among parents with the education policies. I know you're not a parent. I'm not a parent. I don't have kids in school. But I'm a parent. OK. But, you know, the the how is it the distance learning? It's terrible. It's just terrible. I never hear a good thing about it anyway. But with the distance learning, the masking, all of that went too far on that and alienated people. I do see your viewpoint on that. And I do agree with you on that. So what? Yes. Just quickly, I mean, the Democrats are experiencing an unprecedented swing in (22/44)
approval numbers on the education issue. As recently as the Obama years, they had like a twenty nine thirty point lead on that issue. Now it's kind of a dead heat. You add that to the swings among Hispanic voters. And that's that's one of the reasons to be pessimistic about about the midterms. What about what if the freedom issue is this what I hear from a lot of right wing people forced change. They feel like in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years, there's just been a lot of forced change that they didn't vote for. You know, I mean, some things I think most people are for now, gay marriage. But, you know, there's just been a lot of pronouns and bathrooms and penises in the women's locker room. And yet what? What? You know what I'm saying? Just canceling people and six year olds who are oppressors. And I think their their view is, OK, you know what? You're right. Trump isn't for real voting, but we didn't vote for this either. And that to them is is a lack of. OK, so what I would (23/44)
say about that is when people say, oh, my God, it's the Democrats who are so wrapped up in identity politics. You know, it's not the Democrats who are obsessing over what bathrooms kids go to. It's not the Democrats who are introducing bills in places like Ohio, saying that school kids need genital checks. That is creepy. That is not freedom. And the reason why we're wait, what is and I'm not familiar with the genital. Oh, yeah. So so in Ohio, there's a bill introduced that if you suspect a kid like on a sports team is like of a different gender, that there can be a general check of them. And Republicans introduce that bill. It's well, it's creepy. It's creepy. Also, I don't even know why we have it, but it shouldn't it just be obvious? But it's not Democrats who are who are introducing that. I know. But so you're saying they're imposters, that the people who are pretending to be of one sex. I mean, I'm not saying that. That's what prompted this bill. No, I think what prompted it is (24/44)
because it's a very creepy urge among the Republicans who invade and people's privacy. But it's not a private thing. OK, but it ceases to be a private thing if you're competing against other people. I mean, there are many, many women athletes who are up in arms about this who say I'm actually competing against a man. I'm competing against someone with different muscle mass who may still have a penis. And that's not fair. I want to compete in a prison with somebody. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want to compete against people in my division. Sure. Because there are different physical attributes between a man and a woman. Oh, I'm not saying we should be checking under everybody's skirt. But you know, this was prompted by something. It didn't come out of thin air. But what I would say is, OK, let's look at one. Let's look at the state of let's look at the state of Michigan, for instance. There are, I think, four, five kids who play and, you know, who play in a league that is, you know, separate (25/44)
from their birth gender. This is the GOP finding a problem and trying to do this to divide people. There is not some big threat of women taking over, of men taking over women's sports. Well, men have won sometimes in women's sports in recent years. I mean, there are many examples of this. And no, it's not a big threat. It's not a big deal at all. It's sports. But it does matter to people. Oh, no, I agree with that. And I think that there should be common sense regulations around it. OK. So it is, as I said, kind of entering that political season. And the jockeying for even president, I notice, has begun. Josh Hawley, who was last seen running from the Capitol. I love this. He was running. And yet he has a new book out that is called, what is the name of this book? Manhood. I'm not making this up. The masculine virtues America needs, says the running man. Very interesting. And they're all doing this. The ones who are going to run Tom Cotton. He's another guy definitely going to run for (26/44)
only the strong. You know, this is always the Republican brand, is that we have to out macho and be more manly, manly men than these girly people on the other side. So we've got to hold us to some of the other books that are coming out by the other people who want to be president. Would you like to see some of these? Boy, Ted Cruz has American Fuck Face. The case for shoving liberals' heads in the toilet. Jim Jordan has, are you there, sissy boy? It's me, fist. Lindsey Graham has power bottom, no more leading from behind. Nikki Haley has don't need a dick to have balls. My American story. Sarah Palin, I killed a mockingbird. Ron DeSantis, uncucked. Lessons from a state shaped like a big dick. America's schlong. Kevin McCarthy, the case against learning. Real men don't need directions on how to drive America. No clothes, no problem. Touring the red states naked on my Harley Davidson. Wow. Pence has hung, as told to Mrs. Pence. And Kristi Noem, a good woman and a cold beer. My plan to (27/44)
turn Pete Buttigieg straight. That's Kristi Noem. We're supposed to be here next week. She was booked for quite a while on our show, but she chickened out. So that's. Was she busy trying to make Pete Buttigieg straight? I'm just saying that the tough Republicans, they're so tough they can't even face me. I mean, I understand when the Democrats do it, but come on, Republicans, I thought you were tough. I know you're a little scary, Bill. So I mean, but your boy, Pete Buttigieg, I mean, you were the campaign manager. Senior adviser. Yeah. OK. But you were the one. I mean, I read your book. You're like, oh, I find you found the golden boy. I mean, and he does have remarkable political skills. I mean, I'm a big fan of Pete Buttigieg. But I feel like the Democrats have not done him a big favor by being associated with all this radical sexuality. So I don't think that Leah Thomas winning a few swimming matches is going to. OK. You're obsessed with that. OK, fine. I know, but I don't get what (28/44)
you're saying. But what you're saying is if you look at his polling numbers, I'm saying he's doing extremely well. Really? Yeah, he is. You got eight percent in South Carolina. No, no. I'm talking about the most recent ones. The more people have gotten to know him nationally, he has the highest approval ratings of anyone in the Biden administration. And well, that's not saying much. To me, what is it? What is it that the Democrats are doing? It's the Republicans. I'm just saying every whip rip away. Right. I'm just saying every time there's a picture of drag queen story hour. Yeah. I don't think Pete likes it because he's saying what he's thinking is, OK, you know, this is a new thing to a lot of Americans, gay marriage, a gay man. We've never had a gay president. Well, that we know of. I mean, I heard rumors about Buchanan. Yeah. But. But yeah. So this you know, you got to tread a little gingerly. And I think what it looks like to him as a clever politician is like, OK, can we just (29/44)
cool it on a little of this? Because people are trying to get used to this. And I'm trying to win an election in states that are already a little wary about the Democrats. I would argue that the issue with Pete Buttigieg, and I covered his campaign a little bit the last time, isn't about sexuality. It's about class. I remember seeing him in King, New Hampshire, and it was the first time I'd seen him campaign. And as you mentioned, he's got incredible political skills. If you see him in person, you'll have this thought, wow, this guy is going to be president someday. He's so quick, like, you know, he's so accessible, seemingly. And then I went outside and interviewed a bunch of people from King. And if you know what sort of New England townies are like, you know, they were like, that guy was fucking weird. You know, that's what I mean. And the Democrats just have too many of these sort of McKinsey consultant Ivy League types who just don't know how to. You were talking about Joe (30/44)
Manchin, about how there aren't enough people who just know how to talk. But look up his numbers in King, New Hampshire, because I'm pretty sure he either won it or came in a very close second there. So I'm glad he found some people who could criticize him there. But all right. He did pretty well there. OK. But I mean, to your larger point, and I've heard you read you on this. The Democrats, they kind of have lost their sense of humor. I agree with that. Oh, you do? Yeah. I mean, I saw Dave Chappelle got kicked out of his venue a couple of weeks ago in Minneapolis. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? And it just pisses me off because then you hear so many people saying, cancel culture isn't a real thing. They just kicked him out of the venue. People who actually bought tickets, which is kind of an indication that they want to see you, had to go to a different venue. And what happened to freedom of assembly in this country, that we're free to assemble and speak what we want and hear (31/44)
what we want? Yes. So, look, I you know, it's not going to be popular with my friends on the left or whatever, but I am I agree with you. I'm like an old school liberal. I am like what the ACLU used to be before it turned into whatever it is now. And my view on comedy is that comedy has always been boundary pushing. It has always been maybe a little bit offensive. And I love Dave Chappelle. The one thing I will say about Dave Chappelle is that I find comedy a bit funnier when you punch up at the powerful rather than when you punch down at the powerless. And I find that and then there's someone more powerless in the trans community in America. Well, I'm not even going to get into that argument, although I reject it. I don't think that's really what's going on. But the bigger point is you're allowed to have that point of view. And Dave's still allowed to appear in Minneapolis. Absolutely. The theater that hired him. And they should. And has anyone ever come out looking good because they (32/44)
canceled a comic? I mean, would you would you introduce yourself to somebody and say, oh, I'm the guy who canceled Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor or Dave Dave Chappelle? I mean, historically, you don't. Historically, it's very, very unpopular. And again, this gets back to the same the same issue. It's an image issue for the Democratic Party. They're seen as the people who are who are behind this movement. OK. I want to talk about Nancy Pelosi before we run out of time, because she had a big we kind of dominated the news in many different ways. OK. First of all, she did go to Taiwan. And I mean, it's interesting that a lot of people didn't want her to go from both sides of the aisle. Biden didn't want her to go and Sean Hannity didn't want her to go. But I feel like she, 82 and Biden, 79, both look kind of smart and ballsy this week. What? I mean, I just want to know the answer. Why defend you? We've established that we're going to defend Ukraine just full on. There is no limits except (33/44)
sending troops because countries around the world have to understand when we say we're 100 percent behind you. We we mean we're 50 percent behind. I mean, if you haven't gotten that from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, you have not been paying attention. But we're as much as we can be behind Ukraine. But Taiwan, we seem to be like taking these baby steps. And I don't understand what that is. I mean, it's if you're you either believe that place is a country, which we do. It's kind of like when Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which I thought was the only good thing he ever did. It's like if you believe Israel's a country, then they get to have, which it is, they get to have their embassy where it is. And they believe Taiwan is a country that anybody can visit from anywhere, especially our politicians. Matt is expert here. So Matt's the expert here. So I'm going to be you're going to talk. So no, I'm going to be I'm going to be brief here and just say this is that it's a little bit (34/44)
apples and oranges because Russia did invade Ukraine. They're committing atrocities there. They're killing civilians. They're doing war crimes there. China is saber rattling, but they haven't reached that place. So I think it's a little bit of a different situation. And now, yes, the expert. That's a good point. Well, again, you know, having I have kids so much. My enthusiasm for starting shit with superpowers is usually kind of muted. But, you know, I'll give Nancy Pelosi credit. She's been very consistent. One of the few people in her party who has been against, for instance, most favored nation trading status for China, going back all the way to the 90s. So that that reluctance that you're talking about to get mix it up with China, a lot of that is driven by donors who have commercial interests in China. And politicians are wary of speaking out about all sorts of things involving that country because they're they're getting money from companies that are that are profiting over (35/44)
there. So, you know, in this one sense, I think, you know, it's important to remember that, you know, they are a human rights violator and it's it's worth taking a stand sometimes. Well, who isn't? But the other thing I just want to say quickly, we just had this election and a lot of people on the Republican side who don't believe in the concept of free and fair elections won. The whole slate in Arizona won and three other swing states, people who do not believe in elections, who only believe elections count only when we win. Right. Interesting. If you happen following this, the Democratic Party, led by Nancy Pelosi, is supporting these people in the primaries. Their theory is let's support the radicals. These are the Trumpers and there are two wings of the Republican Party. There are Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and people, even Mike Pence, who believe in elections. And then there are Trumpers and the Democrats in the primary are supporting the Trumpers thinking they'll (36/44)
win. And then in the general election, they'll be so radical, we'll beat them. This is playing with fire, is it not? Well, just just just quickly. We've seen this before. This was part of the Podesta emails. Remember the whole Pied Piper candidates thing? There was, you know, exchanges between people in the Clinton campaign about trying to elevate the more radical candidates in the Republican slate. And look how that turned out. So Trump won. It's a crazy train of thought. All right. Got to go. Time for new rules, everybody. Someone must ask people who play a pluffle, who buy a pluffle. The dog bed for humans. How is it better than a regular bed? I never watched my dog curl up in one of these and thought, I wish I had a mattress so small it forces me to shove my nose into my asshole. You know, stop making kids go back to school earlier and earlier each year. Some schools in California start next week. What is this, China? Well, in parts of L.A., yes. But come on, give kids their summer (37/44)
back. For students, it's too nice outside to pay attention. And for the teachers, it's way too hot to dress up in drag. Well, now that Applebee's has launched saucy gloss, a line of lip gloss that tastes like their chicken wings, they have to discontinue it immediately. Granted for women, it's a tasty treat. But what about the poor guy who has to explain to his wife why his dick tastes like honey barbecue? Someone must tell me what's so romantic about a couple's massage. It doesn't say let's connect on a deeper level. It says, I don't want to touch you and you don't want to touch me. Let's hire other people to do it. Only a traditionalist, but I think sex should be something between two people who love each other and Deshaun Watson. You can spend your entire life repeating the same stupid insult the way Trump does with like a dog, like a dog, like a dog, like a dog, like a dog. Like a dog. But then you can't bury your ex-wife in the backyard. Trump buried Ivana at his golf club in New (38/44)
Jersey, which is wrong on so many levels. It's cheap, it's tacky, and when Eric sees it, he'll know she didn't go to live on a farm. Finally, new rule, everybody should be allowed to let themselves go a couple of times a year. Like now, the dog days of summer, school's out, rules out, it's hot, vacation time, no one should have to die it on vacation. And the holidays, that's the other, okay, I'll let myself go time of year. And who can blame us? It's the end of the year, it's structured around feast days, no one should feel bad about opening up the pants after Thanksgiving dinner and doing that thing where you undo the top button and try to hold it together with just the belt. That's all fine, but not all year round. And that's what's kind of happened to America, letting ourselves go now as an all year round thing, doing the Thanksgiving pants thing every day. They actually sell a business suit now with drawstring pants. I saw this, I swear, I saw this in the mall and I said to the (39/44)
salesman, this is pathetic, it shows how much we've given up. And he said, no, people love it. They love it, you can have a mongoose for lunch and then give that big presentation. There's a disturbing trend going on in America these days, rewriting science to fit ideology or just to fit what you want reality to be. We've gone from fat acceptance to fat celebration. That's new. That is new. It's a view letting yourself go is a point of pride. We used to at least try and be fit and healthy and society praised those who succeeded. Now the term body positivity is used to mean I'm perfect the way I am because I'm me. It's Orwellian, how often positivity is used to describe what's not healthy. Of course you can get away with anything bad for you when you're young, but let me ask you this, have you ever seen a fat 90 year old? Scary isn't it? Healthy at any weight is an unchallenged lie that people tell themselves so they can go on eating whatever they want, which is fine. I've done many (40/44)
self-destructive things too, but no one pretended there was positivity in smoking. Fat activist Ted Keil, founder of Conchon Health says the media and public needs to stop catastrophizing obesity. Okay. A, they're not catastrophizing it and B, they should be because it's a full blown catastrophe. Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the United States. New York Times. Of course, we're talking about heart disease and cancer and diabetes, but also as COVID has taught us, obesity is horrible for the immune system, which is why those numbers were off the charts during the pandemic. That's a catastrophe. It's literally a national security issue now. Military recruitment is down by the most since the end of the draft because mainly 17 to 24 year olds are too fat to fight. At some point, acceptance becomes enabling. And if you're in any way participating in this joyful celebration of gluttony that goes on now, you have blood on your hands. Full stop. You can make believe you're (41/44)
fighting some great social justice battle for a besieged minority, but what you're really doing is enabling addicts, which I thought we decided was bad. It's not just the drawstring business suits. Companies like Nike, Sports Illustrated, Victoria's Secret, companies that are specifically about fitness nevertheless promote people who are plainly not into fitness. People like Adele face shame campaigns for losing weight. This is madness. There's a reason the first thing your doctor does is make you step on a scale. Well, it used to be. There's a card now that you can give your doctor and it says, please don't weigh me unless it's really medically necessary. It's always necessary. It's like asking your dentist not to look at your teeth. There's a popular T-shirt that says, I don't owe no man a flat stomach. Okay. No one said you did. You do you. But you're not a freedom fighter because you want to keep eating donuts. USA Today actually wrote the sentence, science hasn't yet figured out (42/44)
how to solve obesity. And Ted Kyle concurs saying, we don't know how to blunt the rise in obesity because we don't know precisely what the factors are that are causing it. Yes. What could it be? What's what? Damn it. This is a hard one. People say to me, oh, come on, Bill. People struggle with this. Of course they do. Everything's a struggle. Life's a struggle. But somehow 50 years ago, this country looked entirely different. You don't think it was a struggle for them? You think cake wasn't delicious in 1969? And that's the saddest part. We can do this. I think. But by lying about it and making excuses, psychologically, it's telling ourselves that letting ourselves go is the best we can do. And I got to believe that as Americans, we can still do better than that. All right. That's our show. My name's Mr. Colin Buffalo, October 9th at the Foxwoods in Nash, Connecticut, Connecticut, November 13th. I want you to watch my podcast Club Random on YouTube and everywhere else where you get (43/44)
your podcasts. Thank you, folks. I want to thank Matt Taibbi, Liz Smith and David Duchovny. I go to YouTube and join us on Overtime. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maher. We made it through the rain, us personally here in LA of course, but we weathered in this country, Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma, and now we're back to worrying about shitstorm Donald. It's, uh, back to normal. But hey, before we get to the politics, let's try to reach out. Uh, the president has a new grandson. Oh, come on. He's bald and always crying and wetting himself. But he's very happy about the new baby. So yes, there's another Trump in the world, and uh, no, well there was, I have to tell you, there was a little bit of a scare when the baby first came out. He wasn't smirking. So anyway, a lot of, a lot of terrifying things going on in the world. North Korea fired another missile. These motherfuckers are not kidding around. This was the longest one all the way over Japan, and apparently Kim Jong-un was very pleased. He awarded his scientist North Korea's highest honor, lunch. The big (1/44)
political news, you see, that Donald Trump this week announced a breakthrough on immigration. The Dreamers can stay, and by that means, he means they can't stay. Or maybe they can stay. Ask somebody else. Maybe they can stay. Ask somebody else. He wants them to stay. He wants you to, he wants, and by that he means get out. And we're building the wall, and by that he means we're repairing the fence. I mean, he thinks, he thinks he's being bipartisan. This is not bipartisan. This is bipolar. This is, I don't know if he knows what he wants. Today he said Selena Gomez has to go back, but her kidney can stay. No, of course with Donald Trump it's always personal. He's fed up with his own party, because he doesn't like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. So now he's like making nice with Schumer and Pelosi. Again, this week he whined and dined, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Well, they dined, he whined. And after the meeting, the Democrats put out a statement that said, we agreed with the (2/44)
president to enshrine the protections of DACA into law, and work out a package of border security excluding the wall. That's how they, wait, that's, that's how they remember it. That's not how Trump remembers things. What he remembers is, we had cake, there was a fire truck. It went vroom vroom, and then it was time for TV. But, but it sure looks like it had some effect on him, meeting with the Democrats. I mean his thinking about the Dreamers seems to have changed, because he tweeted something that I said was super supportive. He, Donald Trump tweeted, does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, accomplished young people? And his supporters said, fuck yes. Of course we do, we want to do it yesterday. His base is furious at him. Breitbart calls him Amnesty Don now. Ann Coulter is calling for his impeachment. Even Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are turning on him. The deplorables really think this is deplorable. There are former Trump fans, all over the internet, who are burning (3/44)
their Make America Great hats. Which is very scary, because it means they've discovered fire. Tools could be next. One of Trump's fans issued him a very stern warning. He said, Mr. President, don't forget who put you there. And that's when Putin just laughed. So Trump, you know, he's had enough of this political bullshit. He went back this week to the one thing he knows he could definitely get done as president, visiting hurricane sites. He went back to Florida the other day for the third time. They're like, enough. He and the first lady served up food to the victims, or as Melania calls the program, meals on heels. I could, Melania. She dressed more sensibly this time. She was wearing a safari jacket. No, it's true. Apparently she was disappointed when they told her she was just going to be looking at poor people, not actually hunting them. But here's the most amazing thing of all. Amid all the destruction in the path of that hurricane, neither Mar-a-Lago, nor Trump's estate in St. (4/44)
Martin's, nor any of his golf courses in the path, got damaged at all. They all escaped almost completely unscathed. Which just goes to show something I have always believed. There is no God. Okay, we've got a great show. Fred Liebowitz and Salman Rushdie are here. Wow. And a little later we'll be speaking with Frederick Runway's Tim Gunn. But first up, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times and it contributed to MSNBC. Please welcome Brett Stevens. Hey, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Great to see you. Okay, so you, last time you were here, were working for the Wall Street Journal. That's right. A conservative paper. Now you've moved over to the New York Times, which is considered a liberal paper. Which I must say, I admire very much. You wanted to get out of your echo chamber. How's it going over there? Well, I guess it's too soon to tell. I mean, readers take their views. I think what the New York Times is trying to do is kind of extraordinary. Because I (5/44)
think most people look to a show like yours or an op-ed page like the Wall Street Journal and they look for affirmations. They want their views affirmed. And I think the Times is making a conscious effort to have an op-ed page which is more like provocations. Use the readers, the writers you agree with to reinforce your point of view, but use the writers you disagree with as like wedding stones to sharpen your thinking. And I think if that, I mean, I think it's an experiment, but if it works, I think democracy is in better shape than we realize. I hope so. I mean, I think what we have in common is that we both piss off liberals. Now, I do it because... I think we both piss off conservatives too. I definitely piss off conservatives, but that's accepted. That's baked into the cake. The pissing off... No? The pissing off the liberals, I mean, I think you're doing it because you enjoy it. I'm doing it because I want them to clean up their rough edges and win again. I want the liberals to (6/44)
win, and I think sometimes they're sabotaging themselves. Yeah, look, that's right. I mean, the problem is that the question isn't how Trump won. The question is how did Hillary lose? And I don't think liberals ask themselves that question nearly hard enough. Well, let me ask you... I mean, you can say Trump won because there are all these deplorables... What do you think the liberals' biggest flaw is? I think it's... God, well, I could go down the list, but... Look, I'll give you an example that will make you feel uncomfortable, but since we're here, why not? I was last on the show January 2015, and so I was looking at the show just to remind myself of how this works, and you had a segment about Joni Ernst. You remember that? No. No, I mean, no offense, but I... You should watch it again because it practically explains the 2016 election in that segment. Joni Ernst, it turns out, was so poor growing up. Okay, well, let's... But hang on, hang on. I'm just telling them who Joni Ernst is. (7/44)
The Iowa senator. Iowa senator, Republican, right? One in 2014? That's right. Okay, and... And she would put bread bags on her feet as a child because she had one pair of shoes. So she says. So she says. Let's assume she's telling the truth. And so you mocked her for it, and it was funny. Thank you. It was funny... Really? It was funny to the people in your studio audience. Ask yourself if you're in Iowa or maybe outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or in the middle of Pennsylvania... Oh, for fuck's sake. How you would have looked at that segment. You're telling me that bread bags on the feet is off limits for a comedian? Bread bags on the... Making fun of the poverty in which someone like Joni Ernst grew up. See, now you sound like a liberal. This is what I get on the liberals' case for. You little snowflake, Brad. This is snowflakeism. You can't take a joke about bread bags on your feet? Look, you asked me, what is it about liberals that people don't like? And I would say... That's it. The (8/44)
answer is condescension. Cultural condescension. Yes. Well, I mean, that's part of it. But I went through this with S.E. Cupp was here last week. And she was, you know, don't call people stupid. And I don't want to. But like, if you... I don't. But like, over a third of Americans don't know that Obamacare is the same thing as the Affordable Care Act. That's your own health. If you don't know how to take care of your own health as an issue, what word would you use? Well, look, I mean, we have a serious problem with like a politically educated public. And this is one of the reasons I think we ended up with a guy like Donald Trump. And that people could be bamboozled and sold on, I guess I can say this on this show, bullshit. And you could become president for it. That's a real issue. But you're not going to get that through by simply making fun of the way in which people are raised. I know, but it's not how they were raised. Oh, come on. You really are stuck on the bread bags. I don't (9/44)
think anyone really takes offense at that. First of all, I don't think half the people believe it's true. I mean, bread bags on your feet? What is the point of that? Because you really don't have shoes? Joni Ernst has shoes. She had shoes. Give me a break. Okay. So you called Hillary Clinton... Now, you're not for Trump. No. Okay. Which, you know, silver lining for this whole thing is that we found out that there are sane Republicans left. Sane former Republicans. Former Republicans. Former Republicans. You're not a Republican. I have a hard time calling myself a Republican. I have a hard time calling myself a Democrat. But you refer to Hillary as a survivable event. You voted for Hillary. Yeah, I did. And I think that's the mature thing to do. And it's so funny because that's what I call Mike Pence. I'm not sure you're right, but go ahead. I get very mad at liberals when they say Mike Pence would be worse. He would not be worse. That's a survivable event. Will we ever get back to a (10/44)
place where we think of each other as something above a survivable event? Yeah. You know, I mean, the reason I said that is that, I mean, you have to accept my perspective as a right-of-center person who was never sympathetic to Hillary's policies. But the way I saw the election was the difference between risk and uncertainty. If you're a finance person, if you see something that's a risk, you can price it. You kind of know what's coming. Donald Trump was uncertainty. You couldn't price it. You didn't know from one day to the next what you were going to get. And that's actually the reality we've been in for the last six months. Are we going to have war with North Korea or not? Are we going to deport the DREAMers or are we going to take them in? And I think that's… But he says both in the same sentence. Yeah, I mean, what you said earlier, bipolar is right. This is not a presidency. This is a neurosis. Well, let me ask you this then. I mean, he sprung from the soil of republicanism. (11/44)
Could it have happened on the democratic side? I don't think so. I don't think you could produce a democratic Donald Trump. Look, you can because populism… I mean, Donald Trump isn't just some sort of accident of American politics. He represents a kind of trope in political life. And if you go back to the 1920s in Europe or the 1950s and 60s in Latin America, you find people who are a lot like him and they spring from both sides politically. These are the people who say parliamentary democracy… But they wouldn't have the racism. I mean, racism is a big party, but you wouldn't have that on the left. Well, you have class hatred on the left. That's what you have with Maduro in Venezuela. That's not nearly as deep as racism. Look, I'm the last one to make excuses. What Trump is doing is culturally so corrosive to the institutions of the presidency that I really don't think he's necessarily survivable. He'll survive. We won't. Someone won't. Well, all right. Let me ask you the last question (12/44)
about… I feel like his fans are not ideological especially. We found that out. He can pretty much go anywhere and they seem to follow him, except the wall. Oh, yeah. Except for that one thing. What is it about the wall? Why is that, I got to get back to Kansas for them? You know, I ask myself, I grew up in Mexico City. I speak fluent Spanish and I think there's something so ugly about everything that the wall represents. The idea that we aren't blessed by the fact of having Mexico as our neighbor is insane. We should thank our lucky stars every day. And it's also, you know, it's more than that. More than that, you know, my mother was a refugee. She came to this country with seven dollars. And in the space of a generation… What did she wear on her feet? Bread bags. And yet she had shoes. Come on. I'll check with her. But it's nice to know that in the space of a generation, you go from refugee to, quote, elite. And that's what this country ought to be about. And people who don't (13/44)
understand that and want to build walls to the refugees, to the indigent, to the people who are desperate to come to this country, they're the ones who have no place in it. Alright. Well, we're building bridges. Thanks for coming by. Keeps know how much you're doing. Brett Stevens, everybody. Let's meet our panel. Okay. Alright. He is the literary lion whose thirteenth novel is… I started it. I read about a hundred pages. It is awesome. Thank you. Salman Rushdie is over here. I cannot wait to get home and finish. And she's a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, one of the greatest wits of all time. Fran Lebowitz is right tonight. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. I have two sophisticated New Yorkers here. So my first question is, as we see Donald Trump pivoting there toward Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, people who, all his life, he was more comfortable with. I just want to ask, first of all, how do you see a (14/44)
New Yorker like Donald Trump having such an appeal to the heartland, getting such big crowds in Alabama, because that was never part of American politics. When Clinton and Gore ran together, remember, it's like, well, if you're going to be elected as a Democrat, you got to have, you know, three E's in the word shit. I don't think of Alabama as the heartland. Well, Alabama is the heartland. They think of it. Alabama is the confederacy. Iowa is the heartland. Okay. Well, he's popular in both places. But not in New York. Not in New York. Yes. That's the thing. If you think about the thing called New York values, which the Republicans attacked throughout the campaign, Donald Trump is the antithesis of New York values. He just happens to have a big yellow house there in the sky. New York City voted 9 to 1 against Donald Trump, okay, because we already knew him. Right. And by the way, there is no rule that a sophisticated, cultured city can't produce a bigoted, prejudiced ignoramus. Vienna (15/44)
produced Adolf Hitler. Right. So it can happen, you know, but he is the exception. As Fran said, America is finding out what New York has known for a long time. I mean, in New York he's not even considered a developer. The actual real estate developers don't leave. We know what he is. He's a three-card Monte dealer. He's a cheap hustler. That's what he is. So has he changed your life personally? I mean, I hear all the time from people out here. I want to know if it's true in New York that people sleep less, you know, has it affected your mood, your erections? I mean, what... No. What it did do for a while is ruin my morning, because I would wake up and feel obliged to pick up my phone and see what he had tweeted at 3 a.m. And I really hated having to start my day with him, you know. And so that was bad, but I've got over that. But what I mean, seriously, what I think it did to me is that I feel now about my writing a little differently, because you've got so much fiction, so much (16/44)
fantasy, so much distortion and untruth being propagated every day that I think, you know, maybe not magic realism. I think maybe it becomes like the writer's job, paradoxically the fiction writer's job, to try and re-establish a sense of the truth. Parody becomes harder. Has he affected your life personally? Yes, he has affected my life personally. I mean, I'm even angrier. In other words, I have been engorged with rage since I was born, so it's not like... I'm not blaming that on Donald Trump. But, you know, I would not have imagined I could be angrier, but I am even angrier. Yes, I take it personally. I yell at the television set. Like him. You know, but I just can't... It's unbearable. It's as simple as that. I find it to be unbearable. It's out of the question. It's not ending soon. People say, don't you think Richard Nixon was better? Yes, Richard Nixon was better. He makes you long for Richard Nixon. And please tell me... Please tell me you would agree Mike Pence would be (17/44)
better, right? Well, Mike Pence would be better because, first of all, he would never be elected. He would never be re-elected. That is a splinter of the Republican Party. You know, he won't have dinner with a woman who's not his wife. Like, they're lined up to do this. No, no. He won't go to a party where they serve alcohol. Because once the bitches get a drink in them. You know, my view, I think this whole... It's like Tupac in 95. You know, we know that if it's not Trump, it's Pence. If it's not Pence, it's Ryan. If it's not Ryan, it's Orrin Hatch. And we know that, you know, none of that is good. But my view is, let's just take it one asshole at a time. So let me ask about the Democrats. Now, I'm from... You're from New Jersey, like me? I am. I have a senator there, Bob Menendez. He is apparently a little corrupt. It's a law in New Jersey. Come on. Chris Christie's the governor. Yeah, exactly. He's got a trial going on and they may find him guilty. In which case, the Senate would (18/44)
get to choose. I think two-thirds of the Senators get to vote whether he gets ousted for being convicted. But he doesn't have to be. You can stay in the Senate as a convicted felon, apparently. Because the rest of them are unconvicted felons. But here's where it gets interesting. Because in normal times, I would say, well, maybe the Democrats should vote. He's a Democrat, to vote against Bob Menendez and say you should get out of the Senate. Except in the post-Maric Garland world, where the Republican view is, you know what, whatever you can get away with, I don't care if he's a Menendez brother. He needs to stay in the Senate because if he leaves before Chris Christie leaves as governor on January 16th, then Chris Christie gets to appoint his replacement, who would be a Republican, and one more vote could have switched the whole vote on Obamacare repeal. So, do you agree with that? No. I don't either. Oh, fuck. I mean, I don't agree with that. I mean, it would be enjoyable, yes. But (19/44)
you just said they're all crooks. They are all crooks. So what does it matter? It matters because that was wrong, really wrong, what the Republicans did about the Supreme Court. Like, unbelievably wrong. And this would also be wrong. So I don't think we should be learning from the Republicans. You know what, that's, this is exactly why the Democrats will continue to lose. Because they do not know how to go for the jugular. They do not know how to fight on their level. They are an 8. Did your mother never say to you, Bill, that two wrongs don't make a right? Yeah, my mother wasn't around when Trump was president. No. And I'm looking at bigger matters. Look, I think this, I think the bigger matter here, it seems to me, is the midterms next year. And the more corrupt the Democrats look, the less chance they have of winning that. If they look just like the Republicans, you know, you're not going to flip California. I keep hearing how California is going to flip the House. Because there's (20/44)
like 13 seats here that can flip the House. You know, so that's not going to happen if people think the Democrats are crooks too. No, they're not, that's not going to happen because that's in the part of the state that's very conservative. Okay, let me ask something else because it would make me mad to continue on this path. I was reading this week that the Bernie and Hillary supporters still hate each other with a great... Just the word hate, and they're applauding. Hillary is out plugging her book. She says Bernie's not a Democrat, which, you know, she says is not a slur, that's what he says. And here's Bernie's answer as to why he's not a Democrat. He says the current model and current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure. I don't know about this strategy. Let me just ask this. What do you think the Democrats should do to repair this, or should they repair it? Do you mean to repair the rift between... Yes. I think we should stop thinking about Bernie Sanders. I (21/44)
would really love to stop thinking about him. I know you found him kind of benign. You know, I did not find him benign. I found him to be an unbelievably irritating, narcissistic old man. And I also kept thinking, like, who leaves New York when they're 18? Is that what you do? Yeah. I mean, that's who you have there. Like, when you look around and think, you know, no, I can't make it, I'm going to Vermont. I think we should please forget about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. This is a battle that's over. It's over. I agree. And I also think there's this problem of the rift in the left, where there's a section of the left that wants the purest, more snowy-than-driven-snow candidate. Yes. Snowflakeier than the snowflakeier snowflake. Yeah. That's what they want. And that's not only a problem in this country. It's a problem in England where they want Jeremy Corbyn, who represents that ideal of leftiness, which can't possibly be elected. Or in France, the Mélanchon people, who don't (22/44)
want to vote for Macron because he's not purely left enough. And what all this does is to drive a wedge through which the right can come. And there's something you said on this show a few months ago that I have to tell you, I have been quoting Bill. Wow. You said that we have to learn to distinguish between an imperfect friend and a deadly enemy. Yes. And the left had better learn that lesson fast. Well, there is a deadly enemy, and it's in Russia. You know, we saw these Facebook, what do they call them, bots? Trolls. Right. Troll bots. Vladimir Putin basically has buildings full of people who work for him in Moscow, and all they do all day long is figure out ways to fuck with democracies. It's like the Silicon Valley of Russia. And a different product. Yes. So, you know, and it all comes down to people read this stuff on Facebook. I mean, the Facebook chief security officer said it might have reached, they took out 470 deceptive accounts that might have reached 70 million people. (23/44)
Yeah. And you think about the three northern states that went the wrong way in the election. Right. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Yeah. The collective vote majority in the three together was 77,000. So you're talking about 70,000 people with 7 million. Right. 70 million. Yes. So, you know, so the idea… It reached 70 million people. So that's… So certainly 70,000 could have been affected. So if you affect like one in a thousand, you affect one in 10,000, you change the election. Okay. All right. So Melania Trump has been in the news a lot lately. I was talking about her in the monologue. And she's on the cover of Us Weekly with this cover, my side of the story. But they left out my favorite feature in Us Weekly, which is the 25 things you don't know about me. Do you read about this? All the stars do it. Tim Gunn has done it. If you have his, he'll be out here in a minute. And I did it. It's practically a rite of passage. Do you have mine? There you go. And we got a hold of Melania's. It's (24/44)
not in this magazine, but it's coming out soon. Would you like to hear Melania's 25 things you didn't know about… 25 things you didn't know about Melania. In Slovenia, I was a catalog model, which is what you call a model you order out of a catalog. I have no first language. I hope I inspire little girls everywhere to marry for money. Oh, that's so sweet. Every time I look at my husband, I'm reminded of the Slovenian national dish. A fat, greasy sausage filled with cheese. I once caught Mike Pence trying on my stilettos. My secret service code name is that poor, poor woman. I copied this list from Michelle Obama. Sometimes when I bounce light off my diamond, Donald's hair will chase it like a cat. I wish I knew why I have a recurring dream. I'm pinned beneath a giant, orange sack of shit. And if I could tell my younger self just one thing, it would be this. If you catch a leprechaun and he gives you one wish, be more specific. Joining host and producer of Lifetime's Project Runway, the (25/44)
Natty Professor, Tim Gunn. Tim Gunn, pleasure to finally meet you. I feel like in an age that is so crass, you are such an antidote. Well, you're very kind to say that. I have to say, though, that in this company, I feel like a mongrel at the Westminster Kennel Club. Oh, you're being too modest. And the first thing I want to ask you about is Donald Trump's suit, because there was a picture of him this week. Look at this. I don't know if you could see that, but he is wearing the pants from one suit. And the jacket from another suit. Now, this is not no... We know what it's like to wear a blazer with pants that don't match the bla... This is not that. This is a suit jacket with another pair of pants from another suit. But, Bill, even if it were a blazer and a pair of pants, one does not do that. I mean, you just... And you're the president of the United States. I'm always talking about the semiotics of clothes. The clothes we wear send a message about how the world perceives us. And this (26/44)
says, I'm a great big slob and I don't care and I get dressed in the dark. Do you know what else it says? It says that the people around him were too fearful to say, Mr. Trump, you need to change. And you can change right upstairs. It's easy. It's mystifying. But, you know, of all... We see a lot of changes in fashion. Because, look, they have to change it a year so they can sell... Absolutely. It's fashion's pendulum. Okay. So, like, over the years, we could have done this. Somebody could have said, you know what we're gonna do this year in fashion? We're gonna wear the pants of one suit with the jacket of another. We've done every other crazy fucking thing. We never went there. So that is one thing... This is a fashion forecast. I'm just saying that has never happened for a reason. Only the fact that he's wearing it, it means it will never happen. Because who wants to emulate Trump? And they don't have suits in the heartland of America. I've learned that the hard way. What do you (27/44)
mean? That people don't get dressed up. I mean, it's the true sloppification of America. And it's getting worse. And now with the athleisure trend, it legitimizes and validates all the sloppification. Have you ever gone to the People of Walmart website? No. I don't even know about it. Is this a real thing? They know. You'll never get an erection again. It's just people in their pajamas and in their confederate flag bikinis. Anyway... Well the world has become, or at least this nation has become one big slumber party. People just don't seem to know the boundary between bed and being outside. And I'm always saying, if you want to dress to feel as though you never got out of bed, don't. I know. Trump looks like an unmade bed. He should stay in it. I know. It's like people think they're invisible. I mean, we did something on this show once about this. And it hearkened back to that time in the 90s when, in New York City, you remember this, the broken windows theory. The Giuliani (28/44)
administration, I think it was, said look, if we fix the broken windows in bad neighborhoods, if we cover over the graffiti, if we pick up the trash, people feel better. We're going to feel better, we're going to look better, and then we're going to be better. And I think that's really true. I think people dress slovenly because they're morally slovenly. Because their education is slovenly, because everything about what we do is slovenly. Well, I will say this. I certainly see a corollary between behavior and how we appear in the world, our dress. And I think that this erosion in dressing, everyone's wearing sweatpants and tank tops, look at the correlation, look at all the bad behavior that's in profusion and that's escalating. Now, where does obesity fit into this? Because I know you... See, I mean, I've talked about this recently, and you know, fat shaming, I wasn't fat shaming. What I was saying is obesity is a national epidemic. It is a health crisis. So I saw recently Kmart is (29/44)
going to call their plus size now fabulous size. And I think, you know, you wouldn't do that about any other health problem. Call it fabulous. Well, here's the conundrum as I see it. And I'm coming out of a season of Project Runway where finally we're working with models who range in size from 2 to 22. So I've been with a lot of larger women this season, and I've loved every single second of it. The conundrum is we can't fix it all simultaneously. So we have a population of roughly 85 million women who are larger than the regular department of a department store. They're larger than a size 12. And there are so few options for them about what to wear. And I think that's atrocious. Regardless... What do you mean so few options? I can't believe that if there are that many people who weigh that much, there is much billions of dollars to be made. They must make clothes for them. Absolutely right. You are absolutely correct that there are billions of dollars to be made. This was a primary (30/44)
catalyst for an op-ed piece that I wrote for the Washington Post last fall. Why aren't the retailers on top of this? Forget about the designers. I at one point was working for a company that had 48 brands, and no one wanted to design for her. Well, I think maybe they are. I think what it is that people say, why can't you make clothes that make me look good? Because you're fat. It's not the... I disagree. Look at the opera divas. They're not diminutive women, and they look fabulous. But why... I mean, you know, you say you have models who are size 22? Yes. Okay. You'd have to page through an awful lot of Vanity Fairs to find a fat model. I don't disagree. Okay. Well, for some reason, I mean, I go where the money is. That tells me what the truth is. And the truth is, people, when they are selling clothes, sell it on skinny people. And my point about all that is, it's an unattainable body size and shape for most women in this nation. Okay. But not being... That is, yes. But there's (31/44)
something in the middle, right? But I believe that the fashion industry is complicit with media in general, and how we portray the ideal of beauty. And my belief is, we need to show much more diversity in size and shape, and show that... Forgive the term, but big is beautiful, and it can be. Well, I tell you... And I'm also... I guess that's... I mean, that is... That's one battle to fight. The one I would like to fight, because we're all here now. And this is a rarity on television now. There are four people on television who are all over 60. Ah! I say, is that not against the law? Congratulations. Let's celebrate. Exactly. But this is an ageist country. Would we not all agree with that, now that we are... No? You don't think it's ageist America? I mean, I don't know. I don't believe... I don't experience it, because I think that I'm not looking for a job, and I'm not looking for a man. Okay? So, those two things I know are hard to get. Okay? But I don't care. Okay. So, I haven't (32/44)
experienced it. It also seems to me like there are a lot more old people than there used to be. Really? Yes. I don't see them out. I never see... I swear to... You don't go to the right club, Bill. I do not see people out who are my age. It is very... And I'm looking for it now. When I drive to work, I'm looking... Is that guy... No, no. Are they not in bars? They're not in stores? What, are they raptured? What happened to all... It's not that old. I'm in favor of old people, and I'm older than you. And when I go out, I see, oh, there's an old person, and then I realize he's five years younger than me. And I'm just in favor of it. I think many writers are old, fortunately. And just... Can I just say in favor of slobs? Oh. That, you know, yeah, that your argument that... Your argument that slobish dressing is a sign of a slobish interior would come as news to most novelists in America. Yeah, but that's a job... But Mr. Rushdie, I come from academia. I agree wholeheartedly. And the (33/44)
message is, we're too smart to worry about this appearance. And I will repeat, the semiotics have closed. I mean, it sends a message about how you're perceived, and in this case, by your students, and by how you navigate the world. Okay. Old stuff, old people are cool. I think we certainly agree with that. I think we should all agree with that. I just want to add, I wouldn't go back a single second, and the longer that I'm here, the more confidence I have, the more maturity I have, the more experience I have, and... Yeah, I couldn't agree with more... The problem is, the less days you have. And that is all... No, it's true. And that is always the trade-off. I'm happier now than ever myself, also. And that's the... But that, you see, I mean, that point about the fact there being less time ahead than there is behind. Right. It teaches you a very important lesson, which is you don't have any time to waste. That's right. That is exactly what you do at this age. You eliminate all the (34/44)
bullshit that you used to put up with, when I think of the bullshit I used to put up with. And now you don't put up with it. Now you think, I have this time, I'm going to do exactly what I need to do. And I have no bucket list. Not that I've done everything, I've hardly done anything, but anything I haven't gotten to, I can give a fuck. Yeah, I probably stay away. You know, like... I feel like it's no accident. I've never been to Asia. Too bad, Asia. Nothing personal. But it just didn't happen, and now it's not gonna. I've never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through. I don't know how anybody has. I've never went skiing. I've never done a million things. I never had anal sex. I mean, it's too personal. Too personal, too personal, too personal. Too much information. Too much information. I don't know why that's popular either. Anyway, let's... But it's connected to Star Wars. Moving on to... Jesus. Uh-oh, my salts. Tim, can I use this for a second? Sorry. But, uh, what was I (35/44)
gonna... Oh, uh, yeah, I don't know. What's this on eBay, Tim? Yeah, I don't know what... Let's talk about, let's talk about, uh... Let's talk about race. You've written about it many times, and I saw Donald Trump this week sort of doubling down on his Charlottesville comments. And I thought, wow, this topic just won't go away for this man. And, of course, it won't go away for this country. And they did a little study. I forget who the sociologists were, but they showed an ad where a guy was standing in front of a house. It was a foreclosure thing, a program to help people who were in foreclosure. And when it was showed to Trump voters and it was a black man, they were very unsympathetic to the program. And when it was a white person, they were much more sympathetic. There it is. And all that changed in the ad was the race of the person there. And with Hillary voters, it didn't seem to make a big difference. So it seemed to be a little bit of proof that there is racism on that side of (36/44)
the fence. Well, I don't know why one would need that proof. It seems pretty god-am obvious that what happened on November the 8th was a racist backlash against eight years of a black man in the White House. But you're not saying that all Trump voters are... No, I am. Yes, all Trump voters. Trump's entire appeal is racism. It's not, come on, it's not his entire appeal. You think every single Trump voter, that's not true. Okay, maybe two-note, okay? Yes. Those rallies, you know, for someone our age, what did they remind you of? George Wallace rallies. That's exactly what they were. I mean, I don't think that, you know, when they say, how do these people believe Trump? I don't think they believe him. I don't think they thought, yes, it's going to be 1955 again. Yes, they're going to open up the coal mines. He allows them to express their bigotry, you know, and that is the thing, that's why they're so ecstatic of those rallies. You see, I want to know, I would like, when we were talking (37/44)
about being more specific, I would like, on the subject of making America great again, I would like to know when it was great. Exactly when was that moment? February 3rd, 1945. Well, you know, the point is, was it when there were slaves? No. Was it when women didn't have the vote? When was the moment of greatness? Those are two moments. What are we striving towards? But they do seem to blame... With these hats made in China that say, make America great again. They do seem to blame the wrong people for their problems. I mean, for example, I don't expect them to be that sympathetic to globalization. But, you know, the big story on globalization is that in the last like 30 years, we have decreased extreme poverty in the world. Tremendously. It's one of the big unsung stories that you don't hear about. Like, a lot of people used to live on a dollar a day. And now? Two dollars. Well, way less. Because they got jobs in factories in Mexico and China and lots of places. And that's where the (38/44)
money went from some of the jobs we had here. So they should be blaming the people, the white rich guys, who sent those jobs overseas. But they don't. They blame the Chinese and the Mexican worker, who now doesn't have to defecate in the street. And as an Indian writer of mine had an op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks ago in which he pointed out that there are lots of job opportunities in expanding economies. Like, for example, India. So if there were lots of Americans who don't have jobs, maybe they could go there. Go where the jobs are, which is what we're always being told. But I wanted to say the thing about globalization as far as Trump is concerned is that without globalization there would be no Trump. Because all his money comes from Russia. It comes, we know this in New York. He doesn't know anybody from Russia. But he knows German bankers who launder Russian money. Oh, absolutely. And that's what happened in New York. It's what Fran is saying, we know about Trump from old (39/44)
times. The Trump Soho was built with Russian money coming through German banks. That's what it's all about. I mean, I don't know what's going to be in the Mueller report, but the bottom line is at a certain point, because nobody else would lend Trump money because he's a fucking deadbeat who doesn't pay his debts. The only place he could get money was Russia. And instead of paying them back, he gave them America. All right. New rules, everybody. Thank you, Ben. You were amazing. New rule, Ted Cruz and Martin Shkreli must tell us their secret to only taking pictures that make you want to punch them in the face. New rule, now that we have cockapoos, Yorkipoos, schnoodles, labradoodles, and golden doodles, no one should feel bad about coming right out and saying it. Poodles will fuck anything. New rule, if you want to depress yourself, spend the day playing a game I call, would you rather they were president? The guy who hangs out at Starbucks with his cockatoo? Yes. The world's least (40/44)
convincing Superman impersonator? Yes. Any of the members of the K-pop group Red Velvet? Yes. The bear's fan who takes her shirt off when it's ten below? Yes. Karl Lagerfeld? Yes. Gene Simmons? Yes. The cow who looks like Gene Simmons? I'm considering it. New rule, someone has to tell Bin Laden's son, Hamza, that going into the family business is kind of a Jewish thing. Hamza, you're not the new lion of Al Qaeda, you're the Jared Kushner of terrorism. New rule, Pope Francis must drop the phony cover story that he got his black eye in a popemobile accident. Just admit the truth, he mouthed off to Chris Brown. And finally, new rule, now that Governor Jerry Brown of California is signing separate climate treaties with China in defiance of our federal government, conservatives can't complain. They can't complain when our local law enforcement refuses to cooperate with Trump's deportation squad. They can't grouse about California cities threatening to deny contracts to any firm that helps (41/44)
build the border wall. They can't get mad because we're just following in a long and hallowed conservative tradition called states' rights. It's just that now we're the state that wants to be left alone. Mississippi didn't like what Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was doing in the 60s, well I don't like what Jeff Sessions is doing now. The script has completely flipped from 50 years ago when progressives ran the show in Washington and it was Alabama Governor George Wallace who physically blocked the door of the University of Alabama to prevent black kids from enrolling. He was always screaming about states' rights, which he used as justification for this. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. But that was then. Now, the white supremacists are the federal government and it's liberal states that are under siege from federal overreach. We're trying to defend our way of life here and what we believe in. We believe in sanctuary cities and pollution controls, (42/44)
legalized pot and gun control, and Obamacare and a woman's right to choose, and we're going to defend them. We the rebels now, we get to talk like this. Let me tell you something, we don't much cotton when the federal government thinks it knows better how to do things than we do here in our own state. The mud flaps on my electric car say coexist. We don't need no outside agitators with their Make America Great Again caps coming in here to our clean state and telling us to take down our solar panels and treat our interns. Here in our state, we use tiki torches the way they're supposed to be used for lesbian weddings on the beach. Arms to table ain't just words around here, that's our heritage. We pride there ain't no pesticides in our organic broccolini. We pride of gay sex and hot yoga. We pride of pioneering colonic irrigation. You can have my Botox injection when you pride from my cold dead hands. Badgino rejuvenation today, badgino rejuvenation tomorrow, badgino rejuvenation (43/44)
forever. That meddling federal government in Washington even wants to tell us who we can marry and where we can pee. They want to come in here and segregate our restrooms telling us who can pee where. Well my daddy was transgender and his daddy before him and his daddy before him. L.A. County, we wear our ball gowns over our balls if we choose. One more thing, they got them in a tenant general up there in Washington by the name of Jeff Sessions. And he said, and I quote, good people don't smoke marijuana. Well there are good people here Mr. Tenant General and sometimes we just want to sit on our porch and watch our grass grow. David Wich, Tim Gunn and Brett Stevens join us now for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Finally finished The Irishman. So Laura looks great. I aged 40 years. But yeah, we've been on vacation for two months. And I tell you, when I'm on vacation, you know, I have to, I have to recharge the batteries in my vape. And I, I, I don't follow the news, but of course now I'm back to work. I was following Trump all week and I just got to say, I need a vacation. So it's one week. But we have an amazing show to come back with. Our bookers outdid themselves. Nancy Pelosi is here tonight. Yang is here tonight. Of course his supporters. His supporters are called the Yang Gang and Bernie supporters are called the Bernie Bros. And Trump supporters are called Russians. Speaking of Russians in the news, did you see this week the return, previously on Real Time, I feel like I should do one of those. Remember this character Lev Parnas from last season? Oh yeah, looks like the Uber driver who says to you, you (1/44)
want girl? I get you girl. But wow, did he come out of hiding in a big way. He's on every show. He started with Rachel Maddow. She did a great job interviewing him. Everything, apparently everything he says he told that he and Giuliani were doing in Ukraine came at the direct direction of President Trump. And of course Republicans are saying that Parnas is making something out of nothing. I say cheap shot, leave his air out of this. Trump of course denies even knowing him. He always does this. Someday I promise you Don Jr. is going to get indicted and Trump will say I knew him very briefly. He was my son for a short period of time. I had my picture taken with a lot of people. But this impeachment trial is happening. Republicans of course are desperately trying to keep any witnesses from testifying as you do when you're completely innocent. Mitch McConnell says we will leave no stone turned. But it's, you know, and we know he's going to get acquitted. I mean trial, please. We shouldn't (2/44)
even use the word. It's a few minutes of rote formularities followed by Trump getting off. Or as Melania calls it, sex. This was the most amazing thing today. Trump announced some of the people on his dream team of lawyers. Did you see this? Ken Starr. Yes, that Ken Starr. The guy for whom the blowjob was too much. He's defending this missed impeachment guy and also Alan Dershowitz who has defended Weinstein O.J. and now Trump. Wow. Think about that. Trump, Weinstein and O.J. Flabby, grabby and stabby. I'm kidding ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes you go for the wall. You don't care. But the trial will begin on Tuesday and you know this is in the Senate where they take their decorum. Right. The Senate very seriously, not those animals in the House. We have decorum so there's going to be no phones, no talking. So expect a lot of tension, a lot of angry glares, a lot of dirty looks. And that's just between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Did you see the debate? That got nasty. The (3/44)
Democratic debate, as you know, Elizabeth Warren a couple of weeks ago played the woman card and said Bernie in a private meeting a couple of years ago said a woman can't get elected president. And then at the debate Bernie was asked about this and he said no I didn't. And he said and besides that the fact that he would say that is just like a woman. So after the debate Elizabeth Warren went right up to him. You saw this moment and he went to shake her hand and she said don't touch me. If you haven't seen the movie Marriage Story this is like that movie in seven seconds. She's like you called me a liar and he's like why are you bringing up old shit? You called me a liar. Let's not do this here. No I want to talk about it in front of the whole restaurant. So maybe the most important thing that happened was a new book came out by two reporters from The Washington Post where Trump called America's top generals the military people who we always say you know we thank you for your service (4/44)
said they were dopes and babies said this right to their face. This is in a meeting a couple of years ago and he said I wouldn't go to war with you. And they were like yeah we know we were in Vietnam. I'm ending with that to remind you this is it. This is the year. This is 2020. This is where it's going to have to happen where we desperately need to get rid of this man. He needs to be removed. There's only three ways he goes. Impeachment election or fried chicken. Faith in the first or the third. So we are going to have to make that happen. OK. We got a great show. John Meacham, Kara Swisher and Joe Walsh are here in a letter we'll be speaking with Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But first up she is the representative from San Francisco. She's also the 52nd speaker of the house. She's just finishing impeaching President Trump. Please welcome Nancy Pelosi. First of all thank you so much for waiting till we got back on the air before you started the impeachment. That (5/44)
deserves a face. And also before we forget about that applause. You know it was only a year ago that you were fighting just to be the speaker of the house. We could be having Speaker Seth Moulton right now. I never really was fighting. I thought the press made more of it but let them have their fun. I thought you always had it in the bag. What the outcome would be. So. So you did delay this for a month and let me just review what happened in this month. We December 20th. New emails revealed that 91 minutes after the perfect call. Perfect. 91 minutes. The order went out to the Department of Defense to withhold the aid. Lev came forward a couple of days ago. We saw all that. He said Trump was personally involved. The Government Accountability Office. That's an official branch of this government declared Trump broke the law when he withheld the aid to Ukraine. John Bolton announced he was willing to testify. This all happened during the delay that people were questioning you about. My (6/44)
question to you is did you know all this was going to come about or was this just a good guess because well let's just say sometimes it's good to have a lot of experience. Well first let me congratulate you on your opening show now. Well thank you very much. And I must say that your opening was shall we say risque. No it was not. Oh. Not so much. Well I'm sorry I disappointed you. I'll try to work in some profanity during our interview. I was cleaning it up for you. Oh good I appreciate that. Well no the fact is is that we knew we had a solid case for the impeachment of the president. The facts were clear. The Constitution required it and we wanted to make our case and go forward so we put forth the articles of impeachment in fact voted them. We knew there was plenty of other shall we say information to come forward but it wasn't necessary to impeach the president. It would have been further incriminating but not necessary and I didn't want in any way weaken the case that had the (7/44)
support of my caucus and was understood by the American people. You were rather reluctant to do it compared to a lot of Democrats. You waited till it was inevitable where you couldn't turn away from a thing like this. Well he gave us no choice. The president was self impeaching almost every single day. There are some people who actually have said that he wanted to be impeached. Just for the record being impeached is a bad thing right. And you're impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does it can never be erased. Now President Trump may be accidentally watching the show tonight. You know he's made me part of his act because I always say he's not going to leave even if he loses. So you know he's woven that in because he's a comedian and he does his rallies. You could talk to him directly. Well if I if I knew that he is the president is listening I would want him to know. I want him to know that he is impeached forever and he is impeached forever because he used the office of (8/44)
president to try to influence a foreign country for his personal and political benefit in doing so. He undermined our national security. He was disloyal to his oath of office to protect the Constitution and he placed in jeopardy the integrity of our election. And that I mean really he gave us no choice. Earlier on with some of the charges that came forward which were violations of the law I said he's not worth it. But once he crossed that bridge it wasn't a question of his being worth it. The Constitution was worth it. He had to be. Just in terms of how you began about the timing the value of that was in the period of that time now over 70 percent of the American people want to see witnesses and documentation to come forward and that places a burden on those senators. They will either come down in favor of transparency and accountability to the Constitution or will hold them accountable. It comes down to really only four senators. I mean from everything I've heard maybe it's wrong but (9/44)
there's really only four who are even considering it. And I feel like we have been down this road so many times with that small group of moderate Republicans I'm sure you remember better than anyone else the Obamacare health fight when we were waiting and waiting for Lisa Murkowski was it and Susan Collins and then the Brett Kavanaugh vote and Mitt Romney and there's always like maybe these moderate Republicans will come through and always it's the Charlie Brown football and they don't. What is your prediction about whether anyone will come through and will we will have witnesses. Well it's all about public opinion. Lincoln said public sentiment is everything with it you can do anything without it practically nothing. And the public sentiment in these states is very clearly in favor of witnesses and documentation. And if those senators don't vote in favor of that there is a price to pay. Now if Mitch McConnell doesn't allow them to vote for that that says something as well. So they're (10/44)
in a very bad place. But the fact is this is so clear as far as defending the Constitution honoring the vision of our founders for what that is the exquisite by separation of powers in our Constitution that makes us a republic. I pledge allegiance to the fight and to the republic for which it stands a republic. That's what we are. That's what he is undermining by saying Article 2 says I can do whatever I want. Not just Trump undermining Mitch McConnell. You know I mean you've tiptoed right up to the line of basically calling him un-American and Moscow Midge Moscow Midge. A lot of ways he's done more damage than Trump has. I mean I know he's a strict constitutionalist who constantly violates the Constitution most prominently of course by not allowing Merrick Garland Obama's Supreme Court pit to even have a hearing. Well let me say this and that is if they were to write the book All the President's Men as they did about the other impeachment that would be called All the President's (11/44)
Henchmen. The Attorney General of the United States all these people surrounding the president. But let's just take this to a patriotic place. This isn't about politics. It isn't about partisanship. It's about patriotism. It's about our Constitution. And we don't want any president democratic or republican no matter who she or he is to think that they could get away with this. And he had to be stopped because he's again jeopardizing the integrity of the next election by blaming it on the Ukrainians and not giving any accountability to the Russians for what they do. You're a lot more generous of spirit to him than I am. I've heard you say many things. Not to him but to the Constitution. Well I've heard you say I don't hate him. Oh I don't hate anybody. I wouldn't give you that. Right I know. And I believe you. I can't go there with you. But here's what I have told my audience and people disagree with this. I've told them and I think this should be our mantra on the left. You can hate (12/44)
Trump. You can't hate the people who like him. No I completely agree with you. Because that's where we are too. No. I'm unfriending you. No. That way lies literally civil war. I completely agree with you. Even the people I serve within the Congress we have very little in common in terms of our issues. But the fact is I respect the people who sent them to Congress. And so I afford them the respect that their constituents deserve. You were never a scary radical but that's how you were portrayed. Yeah. One hundred thirty seven thousand ads describing that way in the 2008. Is that right? One hundred thirty seven thousand ads. San Francisco liberal which I proudly am. Yeah. I mean that's not a radical. Radical. Look at him. Left wing. Left wing. What I found disturbing is that very often Democrats did not defend you. Oh no. No. Don't worry about that. You don't worry about that. But here's what I do worry about. Our country in its greatness can absorb one term of the present occupant of the (13/44)
White House. Not two terms. Right. What it does to the courts and the rest. So what we have to do from right to left in our own party and beyond our own party is to elect a new president of the United States. Whoever that is whoever the nominee is we all must embrace and advance. And I have to say as I travel the country I do believe there's plenty of common ground in the mainstream a mainstream message that can take us to the White House. Don't you think it says something about the Democratic Party and their inability to win key elections lately that a lot of your accomplishments instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with you and saying this is the person who saved the country helped Obama from going into a depression by passing the stimulus and save the automobile industry and got Dodd-Frank passed and got health care got Obama passed. You know you're kind of our iron lady here on the left. You know I feel like the Democratic Party is very often the victim of their own purity (14/44)
tests. Oh don't worry about that but I do in terms of it because I'm in the arena. You go in there you go in and you you have to be ready to take a punch and you have to be able to throw a punch for the children. So I don't worry about that. But what I love the children but what I am concerned about for the children is the future of this country. And we have to have our common ground a mainstream message. Now in the recent election we won. We showed in the House that we know how to win disciplined focused cold blooded in terms of just winning. And good to have your cold blooded self. Nancy Pelosi everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Say in your seat. Let's meet our panel. Thank you. Oh yes. I want to talk to her. Let's meet our panel. He is the former Republican congressman for Illinois and a primary challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. Joe Walsh is over here. Joe Walsh. Not that Joe Walsh but the Congressman. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner winning (15/44)
historian and author of the New York Times bestseller The Soul of America. The battle for our better angels. The meets John Meacham is over here. And she is editor at large at Recode and a columnist for The New York Times. Kara Swisher back with us. Great to see you. Don't forget to send us questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. All right. So let's talk about impeachment. It's historical. Now I'm bad for the country but as a historian John. You must be a little tingly about it. It's dork porn. Basically. It really is. If C-SPAN were pay-per-view maybe. Yeah. No. It's. We've only done this three times in 240 years. Remarkable presidents. But I read 15 times overall and all had witnesses. Yeah. The only time we might not have witnesses. Yeah. And the chief justice is ready to watch in this. The chief justice in the Johnson impeachment voted a couple of times to break a tie. So it's it was the ultimate sanction. The key insight the speaker just (16/44)
said it was divided sovereignty that founders basically had a pretty pessimistic view of human nature. We've done everything we can to prove them right. As Winston Churchill once said you can always count on America to do the right thing once it's exhausted every other possibility. And so the idea was make it really hard to do something. And impeachment comes out of the English common law. Very hard to do. I suspect with these lawyers today. Bill at least one of whom represented O.J. We may be seeing this again. You know he's guilty but he's going to walk. That's possible here. But possible. The hope that reason is definitely going to walk. I what. There's someone on this panel or in this world who thinks that possibly possibly Trump could get convicted. I think so. I think so. Look look. Don't even allow witnesses. He's president. So anything can happen. Anything can happen. And Bill start again start with I spoke after the show. But he's been doing he's been doing Dork all day. I (17/44)
mean this is a bombshell to me. Walk me through this where the Republicans who have never turned on him. We don't know why those are good questions to ask why this is suddenly what knowledge do you have. We know that most of my former Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate they can't stand him. Bill everybody knows what this guy did. Everybody knows he did wrong. I think they're voting. No but I think there will be enough Republicans who will maybe demand a fair trial here from Bolton here from Lev Parnas. And it's up to Bill it's up to the voters it's up to the American people to get in these senators faces and say damn it put country before party. I think there's there could be some pressure. I'm with you Bill. It's absolutely not. I don't know why. Yeah. We're going to cut this out of the show. And we're live. That's how much I don't believe in this. But I do think it's funny that they're so afraid to hear from John Bolton lifelong Republican hack but they can't even hear (18/44)
from him. Yeah. How about this question. Could it backfire witnesses because then don't don't Trump get to call Biden and his heir to well son and how they decide this. That's the whole thing is that is it one. One gets one one gets the other. How could it go other. I mean you have to do that. Right. Absolutely. But there could be people that are you could say that are pertinent to the investigation about this is what Biden needs a better answer about his son. And I can do more push ups than you and I'm going to beat you up. He's going to have to address it during the general campaign. You know what he's the nominee. I remember 2004 was it with John Kerry. War hero and they turned him into the war criminal and Bush the draft Dodger into the war hero. So if this gets to a trial and they call Biden and his son trust me Biden and his son in Ukraine will be the biggest scandal. Yeah. No I think the American people will see through that. Oh Jesus. Again. I'm never going to be invited. You (19/44)
heard her just say one hundred and thirty seven thousand ads and those are probably on the book. Right. So what they do is they flood the zone with rights and they will do that here and they will keep repeating and repeating the message. But it's not helping Trump. His numbers. I mean he's got his base of support that will never lose him. He leave him. He's not gaining votes beyond that especially on impeachment. I think it works really much better than you think and we don't know how it works is the problem but the real the real conviction and removal will have to happen in November. And so the argument here has to be that you find the percentage of voters cold bloodedly as the speaker just said and convince them that OK we've had our fun. You know it's always funny to somebody gets an eye put out. And so we've been shot by the BB gun. It was a it was a Russian made. And so just we've done it. OK. You know funds over and we've got to get back to. And that's the Biden case right. (20/44)
Biden's case is I'm an oxygen tent. You know right. Put the country in and we'll take care of it for four years. He may need an oxygen tent. Well you know he looks bad at those debates. No amount of evidence matters here. Like this Lev Parnas thing just happened and it's full. It's like literally I was thinking of Rudy Giuliani. He's not a credible. I mean I believe none of them are credible. Right. And they're all hanging around the Trump basket essentially. OK. But what he said has jived with what everybody else. Yeah. No I agree. All that. But wait. He left a note to himself that said get Zelensky to announce that the Biden case will be investigated to himself. Yet to remember. It's like a bank robber writing a note. Remember to rob banks. It strikes me as suspicious that you would do that. But you have the. I'm just. You have the Rudy Giuliani stuff here. Right. You have Rudy Giuliani. He's like the STD of digital essentially. Think about it right. He's just constantly leaving (21/44)
problems. That's a dork porn. That's a dork porn. You get that after a dork porn. OK. Let me ask about the debate and the brouhaha I mentioned in the monologue we showed the video. Is it wrong just to ask this question. It's not that Bernie Sanders whatever he said whether he did say it or not. She's not claiming that he said a woman shouldn't be president. Right. Just that a woman couldn't. And we've always had these discussions. We're having them now. Quite honestly it is not a crazy discussion to have considering the most qualified person ever Hillary Clinton lost to the racist Teletubby in. The last one. So it seems like the same people who were saying well Hillary Clinton lost because her sexism are now saying how dare you say a woman couldn't be elected. Look Elizabeth Warren brought it up herself. That was the card. Yes. Played the woman card. And I don't know if it was a card. I hate that. Well come on. Come on. Well she was sinking like a rock. And this is what politicians. (22/44)
She had to bring it up. She had to bring it up. Had to? Yes. To save her campaign. Just say it. Just say it out loud. Well to save her campaign. It was not an issue that needed to be brought it up. It was an issue. It was like we're sinking in the polls. This is what politicians do when they're on the trail for a year. They get a little. She was rising. Remember she was going to be the one. Remember Bush in 2000 brought out black babies with John McCain. He's like I'm losing this thing. Black babies. That's all I want to hear about is black babies. And they brought that shit out. It depends on the candidate. It depends on the woman. I'm a conservative Republican. Nancy Pelosi is a rock star. I'd put her in the White House right now. I mean it. The way that woman against Trump has single handedly defended the constitution. My God I'd want her in the White House. Joe. That's it. Considering three years ago you were saying if Trump didn't get elected you were going to get a musket. If (23/44)
Nancy Pelosi doesn't get elected I'll grab her. Well you know Joe is moving to my house in the Castro and we're really living together. Joe and Dork porn. Yeah Dork porn together. It's going to be great. We're marrying a goat. That's what we do now. A throuple? It's a throuple right here. Sexy sexy sexy happening here. Look what Trump done. You started it. You started it. Dork porn. That was kind of a basic C-SPAN joke. Bill grab this panel. I will. While we were off Trump did a drone strike against this guy Suleimani and part of the brouhaha was he said that he was going to attack their cultural sites. Now of course Iran is ancient Persia so their cultural sites are pretty awesome. But you know every reaction causes a reaction now we have to worry about our cultural sites but of course our cultural sites are like Graceland in your home state of Tennessee and you know we have the fountain at the Bellagio and we have the Rocky statue. You know ours are not as impressive but there are (24/44)
some people don't know about for example Winona Mississippi has the International House of Mud Flaps. In Ohio there's the tomb of the unknown amphetamine addicted long haul trucker. In my home state Belmar Rock New Jersey this is the site where the guidos first landed in America. In Nevada there's Area 52 where the Pentagon is said to be hiding evidence of the existence of moderate Republicans. Washington D.C. has the wall of hunters shot by other hunters. And in Mississippi there's the highway that gave us the roadkill which became Trump's hair. So he's a 2020 2020 2020 Democratic presidential candidate author of the war on normal people the truth about America's disappearing jobs and why universal basic income is our future. Andrew Yang as you were coming out you were doing this. Is that a shot at Biden and Bernie that you know you can. Come on it's a subtle way of reminding everyone you. Your audience can tell you he keeps the studio a little bit chilly am I right. Oh OK. That's it. (25/44)
Well listen I missed you at the debate. You weren't the only one. I did. I think you know you have a different voice and a voice that needs to be heard. One thing I like about your voice you're the least Trump obsessed. Of all the candidates. Let me read your quote. You said if you turn on cable network news today you would think he's our president because of some combination of Russia racism Facebook Hillary and emails. Some of that is true but you're saying it's other things and I would agree. Yeah I'm heading from here to Iowa and we blasted away forty thousand manufacturing jobs in that state. And when you go to those towns after the mill closed the shopping center closed people started to leave the school shrank and it's never recovered. And that's the story that's played out in Ohio Michigan Western Pennsylvania Wisconsin. That's why Trump won all of those key states. And what we did to those manufacturing jobs we're now doing to retail jobs call center jobs 30 percent of (26/44)
America's malls and stores are closing because Amazon is closing them and Amazon is paying zero in taxes. So these are the problems that people in Iowa feel every single day. And when I talk to voters they do not obsess about impeachment the same way the folks in the media do. America still makes stuff it's just that it's robots doing it. I think I read in your article something like 88 percent of factory jobs that were lost from 2000 to 2010 were lost to automation. That's the issue for you right. Yeah when you go to a factory in the Midwest you don't see wall to wall immigrants. You see wall to wall machines and robot owners. And that's just speeding up to the extent that you do need more manufacturing workers which you do. They tend to be educated technicians people who are good on laptops and not hammering things into place. And in our country only 33 percent of Americans are going to graduate from college. We're essentially a nation of high school graduates and those opportunities (27/44)
are not keeping pace. So the other thing I like about you is that you are also the least identity politics obsessed I feel. No I don't see color. My staff tells me you're Asian. Yes. You know well early on in my campaign some people told me that an Asian couldn't win the White House and those people were my parents. Is that true. My parents ever dreamt about me running. It wasn't even like you can't be president. Right. You should be president. Well they weren't excited initially because Asian Americans don't really think about politics as a natural arena for us. But hopefully I'm changing that. You are changing. Yes. And I also love it that you make jokes and but some Asians don't like that you get pushback but they're like jokes about being good at math. They're positive. It's like being kidded about having a big dick. Oh how dare you. Now everyone's going to know you know. Well well math is an acronym it stands for a Make America Think Harder. Yes. What we need to do. Yeah you do. (28/44)
You got to get good at math. So let me ask you about the China deal. Not because you're Asian. No really. Really. It was a big part of the week. You know we obsess about all these other things. This is like your criticism of the media. You say you know I always criticize Fox News all those years and still do because they don't they just don't report the news that they don't want their people to hear about. Yeah. I feel the left is getting that way too. Now we did sign a fine finally sign a trade deal with China. What do you think of it. What's your take on it. Well the details haven't come out from this phase one. I talked to a producer here in the U.S. and they said that what's been signed does not actually protect them or address their concerns at all. It's more about not slapping additional tariffs on imports that were coming into the country. And I don't know about the rest of you but I'm much more concerned about our exporters and producers people like farmers in Iowa than I am (29/44)
about the Chinese producers. So to me we don't know what's in this until we get some more information and details. What about the technology stealing. Do you know about that. I do. Well the technology stealing is one thing but it actually is that in there. Did we really get it. It's not clear. It's not clear. We don't have details. But I think the issue is it's not facing what the future is which is China is actually very innovative and is starting to manufacture all kinds of things including those robots. Those are immigrant robots in those. How come I keep reading that the Democrats are getting their ass kicked on the technological front as far as social media as far as ads. I remember in 2000 was it 12. Obama. The campaign was so technologically ahead and Peggy Noonan said I think we're going to win because I see so many yard signs and they were like yard signs. We're on the computer lady and somehow now it's not somehow the Republicans were using this very early on. I remember (30/44)
Ralph Reed using it great effect many many like 10 years ago. And it's because the before Fox News most of the conservatives were zeroed out in mainstream media and so they started to use digital tools rather adeptly. And now they use them in lots of ways and they're sort of aided of course as Andrew knows by Facebook and others in terms of these tools and the ability to micro target and they've gotten very good at it and the Democrats have just lagged. But I thought the liberals owned Silicon Valley. I thought we were the ones that were good at this shit. The Republicans were supposed to be the old man who said you know talked about the machine when they were talking about its a per corner. If you want us to leapfrog the Republicans again I should be your nominee because I guarantee you as your nominee we'd be better at technology than the Republicans come the fall. You personally could make that happen. That's true. I mean that's a big promise. I mean and a lot of catching up to do (31/44)
apparently. Yeah. You know what happened in 2016 is the Republicans did get very very good. And then at the time Facebook went to the Clinton campaign and said hey you want some help. And the Clinton campaign said now we got it. And that was not the right answer. I have an important question for you. If you are the nominee you win you win the vote. You are you are president elect Yang. Yes and on that. Yeah. Sitting up. Well wait till you hear what I have to say. You don't really think Donald Trump is going to concede to you. Do you. Could I let me read a few few quotes and then you can answer this. Sure. Here's one. A couple of years ago. Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country and insurrection like you've never seen. Here's Trump. Two weeks before the election that he won. The whole thing is a big fix. It's one big fix. The process is rigged. This whole election is being rigged. That's when he thought he was going to lose. His representative (32/44)
Steve King. Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about eight trillion bullets while the other side doesn't know which bath room to use. Yes we do. Here's Trump. June 10th of last year asked the difference between him and Nixon. He left. I don't leave. Big difference. And Joe I know you're a different guy now. But here's you. November 2016. You said on November 8th I'm voting for Trump. On November 9th if Trump loses I'm grabbing my musket. Oh. This is the world we're living in. You don't really think that Trump is going to concede. What's the plan. This is my question for Democrats all this year. What is the plan when he says it's rigged. We found irregularities. I'm hearing. I'm suspending everything. And he's not leaving on January 20th. What do you do. I genuinely think that he'd make a lot of noise but he would leave because in order to stay you literally need the military on your side and the military if it's a free and fair election which it will be when I (33/44)
defeat him in November then the military is not going to circle the White House and say we're going to keep this guy in. I mean they're Americans they're patriots they'll be like he's the commander in chief. He'll leave. But to your point he's not really going to leave because he's going to grab Sean Hannity he's going to grab his billions of followers and he's going to cause hell for whoever the next president is. He's going to continue to try to divide things but he's going to make noise but from the outside of the White House. That's my next question. What happens if he does that. Say you do get him out. I don't think you will but you tent the White House and you get him out. It could be worse. Then he's Caesar camped on the other side of the Rubicon with his army. These people who you were three years ago with muskets you hear it all the time and he's agitating because he's not the kind of guy like most presidents who say well I congratulate my successor and I'm not going to speak (34/44)
about issues. That is not who he is. What does Twitter do. I put this in a column in the Times was what happens that right now they keep him and let him stay on there and lie and say whatever he wants because he's a newsworthy figure. What happens the day after the election where he promotes violence. What did they do. I think that's like a Twitter right. Finally throw him off or did they say he's a newsworthy figure let him do whatever he wants. That's that's interesting of how he can because Twitter has been his modicum of campaigning and now governing and so I think that's kind of an interesting question of what happened. John if he loses in 2020 he could run again in 2024 right. Absolutely. Oh geez. Yeah. In the 22nd in the trip. Well I think I think you're right that it's a genuine concern. I think during Watergate James Schlesinger the secretary of defense issued an order saying any nuclear order any military order that comes from the White House I have to sign off on. They were (35/44)
worried about the chain of command then. It's not inconceivable. Again he's president. So we're living in a in a odd world to say the least. My sense of the effect he would try to have beyond the White House is there's 34 percent thirty five percent of the country that they thought Joe McCarthy was great after he was censured that Washington Post poll in 1955. Thirty four percent approved of Joe McCarthy even after it was all over. Forty percent of the country never voted for Franklin Roosevelt. They couldn't say his name. They called him that man. But that's thirty four forty percent. Right now we're closer to forty eight forty nine. And I think that the big battle has to be finding people who are actually persuadable and making this case. We're never going to get some sort of Valhalla of bipartisanship. We've never had it. We never will. But we've never been a reasonable majority ever been here. We've never been here before where the other side doesn't even hear the argument. Did you (36/44)
see Martha McSally. She used to be a fairly moderate by Republicans stand and not really pro Trump in Arizona. And do we have the tape we can show a reporter from CNN just asked her a reasonable question about there is new information about the impeachment trial. Here's her response. You're a liberal hack. I'm not talking to you. That's where we are. I don't know how the other side even hears the argument you're making. I'm actually really encouraged because I have let's say half a dozen events a day in New Hampshire half a dozen events a day in Iowa every single event someone comes up to me after I'm done speaking and says I voted for Donald Trump and this time I'm going to vote for you. And they say it like a secret but it happens every single. But that's at your event. That's at Andrews events. Yeah. But you know that's that's why that's why I think it's really important that these sides come together someone who I mean the people who voted for Trump voted for me right voices on (37/44)
this side need to stand up against them to avoid what you're talking about. OK. And McSally turned that into a campaign ad. Of course. Viral fund. That's behind Mark in. But that's my point. There seem nobody seems to think there's any value in going toward the center. It's to John's point. It's what is that number to me. If you can get that down to let's call it like the low 40s then we're going to win by a landslide. You can't get it down to zero bill. But there I talk to people and Joe does too I sense that are in that top 41 to 49 range that are looking for an alternative. They're disappointed in the president. They're seeing what's going on in their communities. And if someone speaks to those problems then we can win. And remember it's a country that in the 32nd constitutional oath three years ago almost to the day we went from having Barack Obama as our president to Donald Trump. I mean yeah it's just a wild swing. We bounced from guardrail to guardrail so we might get Aristotle (38/44)
next time. The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes. Remember my my words. You can hate Trump. You can't hate the people who like him. All right. Time for new rules everybody. New rules. They're all the golden gloves must stop patting themselves on the back for going vegan. Nobody eats at award shows. Some are too coked up. Just can't chew because of the Botox. And it's award season. Come on the meals that do get eaten will just be thrown up. You're so sensitive about actresses throwing up their dinner at an award show. New rule people who participate in the new fad of perineum sunning. This is a thing. I knew you were waiting to come back. Where you expose your anus to solar rays. It's real. Must never ask me to the beach. You've not only ruined sunbathing you've ruined the phrase stick it where the sun don't shine. This zookeeper must tell us exactly what she's afraid this pelican might say. And Mitch McConnell wants to know are you available to work in an impeachment (39/44)
trial. New rule if you're a suburban liberal who puts up one of those immigrants are welcome here signs random Guatemalans get to take you up on it. Let's see how welcome the Cooperton's really are when they come home from yoga to find Jorge Sosa and his family spread out all over the restoration hardware and the Spanish subtitles on the Netflix account. New rule this Oscar season the Academy must not forget Harvey Weinstein's performance in I'm too crippled to go to jail. Talk about convincing. Does this look like a guy who could chase Gwyneth Paltrow around a desk. And finally new rule if Meghan and Harry can quit their family you can too. Not that I've got anything against families in general they come in really handy at times like like when you need a co-signer for a car loan. But the downside of families is they possess a gravitational force that gets you to do stuff you don't want to do and continue traditions you don't really believe in. Families like drugs you get high off them (40/44)
but they make you do stupid things. Princess Diana famously said she felt like a prisoner but many people can get trapped living their family's life and not their life captive to the same old jobs politics region customs you know every New Year's Day my family used to serve pork and sauerkraut. I don't know why my parents did it and their parents did it and I did it until one year I said I hate this shit. Just because I share DNA in a bathroom with you people doesn't mean I have to live by your rules forever. So do it. Fire your family. Harry gave up a castle. What do you got to lose an air mattress. Break the cycle. Think outside the crib. There must be 50 ways to leave your mother. You don't have to do what your folks did. You don't have to get married and have children if you don't want to or go hunting or work in a coal mine. You don't have to be the religion you were born into or any religion. You can explore an alternative way of looking at the universe called not batshit crazy. (41/44)
So I give Harry and Meghan some credit but not a lot because they want to be seen as this modern couple way more than the other stuff he went to the family. OK then go all the way and say it. Say we're not just taking a step back from royalty. We're renouncing the whole outdated racist anachronistic lot of it. We're saying loud and proud. What is this bullshit that some people are royal. You want to be modern and woke and all that. Want to get rid of politically incorrect words. How about your highness. What could be more antithetical to liberalism than calling another human your highness. I got to say the social justice warriors who never tire of pointing out old behaviors and bygone attitudes that just don't cut it anymore. Where they've been on this one seduced by the pageantry where you. I think the woke have been asleep surprisingly forgiving about the idea that some people are born exalted above the rest of us to be bowed to and carted around in golden carriages. Are you people (42/44)
who wake up offended. Where's the outrage for you. I want an apology from the people always want an apology. Did you know the queen has a grand Carver. Currently the Earl of Denbigh whose sole job is to carve the queen's meat and a dinner when the queen finishes eating. Everyone else has to stop too. Yeah when the old bat puts her spoon down. That's it. We're all done. I thought being born into privilege was public enemy number one now. But you're happy to be lorded over by a bunch of inbred twit to happen to win the 23 and me lottery. Megan and Harry you want to be remembered for greatness then burn your boats completely and say it's 2020. I hereby decree this birthright nonsense from the Middle Ages is stupid. And the next time someone curtsies or bows and scrapes before you or calls you your highness stop them and say we feel ridiculous being called that. I'm an actress. He's a nice guy. Highnesses. No humans are higher by birth. It's gross. And to those who say the monarchy is too (43/44)
important to tourist attraction I always hear that can abolish it. Guess what. You don't need live people for it. They still go to Stonehenge and the aliens who built that left a long time ago. The palaces the guards the carriages it's practically an amusement park already. We could call it the Magic United Kingdom. Fill it with rides like Caucasian Mountain. Diana's Wild Ride. And the tunnel of incestuous love. Just you know keep the kids away from Prince Andrew. All right. That's our show. I'll be at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina February 15th at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center in North Charleston February 16th at the Comerica Theater in Phoenix on the 22nd of February. I want to thank Joe Walsh, Jon Meacham, Kara Swisher, Andrew Yanny and Nancy Pelosi. Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
see Martha McSally. She used to be a fairly moderate by Republicans stand and not really pro Trump in Arizona. And do we have the tape we can show a reporter from CNN just asked her a reasonable question about there is new information about the impeachment trial. Here's her response. You're a liberal hack. I'm not talking to you. That's where we are. I don't know how the other side even hears the argument you're making. I'm actually really encouraged because I have let's say half a dozen events a day in New Hampshire half a dozen events a day in Iowa every single event someone comes up to me after I'm done speaking and says I voted for Donald Trump and this time I'm going to vote for you. And they say it like a secret but it happens every single. But that's at your event. That's at Andrews events. Yeah. But you know that's that's why that's why I think it's really important that these sides come together someone who I mean the people who voted for Trump voted for me right voices on (37/44)
this side need to stand up against them to avoid what you're talking about. OK. And McSally turned that into a campaign ad. Of course. Viral fund. That's behind Mark in. But that's my point. There seem nobody seems to think there's any value in going toward the center. It's to John's point. It's what is that number to me. If you can get that down to let's call it like the low 40s then we're going to win by a landslide. You can't get it down to zero bill. But there I talk to people and Joe does too I sense that are in that top 41 to 49 range that are looking for an alternative. They're disappointed in the president. They're seeing what's going on in their communities. And if someone speaks to those problems then we can win. And remember it's a country that in the 32nd constitutional oath three years ago almost to the day we went from having Barack Obama as our president to Donald Trump. I mean yeah it's just a wild swing. We bounced from guardrail to guardrail so we might get Aristotle (38/44)
next time. The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes. Remember my my words. You can hate Trump. You can't hate the people who like him. All right. Time for new rules everybody. New rules. They're all the golden gloves must stop patting themselves on the back for going vegan. Nobody eats at award shows. Some are too coked up. Just can't chew because of the Botox. And it's award season. Come on the meals that do get eaten will just be thrown up. You're so sensitive about actresses throwing up their dinner at an award show. New rule people who participate in the new fad of perineum sunning. This is a thing. I knew you were waiting to come back. Where you expose your anus to solar rays. It's real. Must never ask me to the beach. You've not only ruined sunbathing you've ruined the phrase stick it where the sun don't shine. This zookeeper must tell us exactly what she's afraid this pelican might say. And Mitch McConnell wants to know are you available to work in an impeachment (39/44)
trial. New rule if you're a suburban liberal who puts up one of those immigrants are welcome here signs random Guatemalans get to take you up on it. Let's see how welcome the Cooperton's really are when they come home from yoga to find Jorge Sosa and his family spread out all over the restoration hardware and the Spanish subtitles on the Netflix account. New rule this Oscar season the Academy must not forget Harvey Weinstein's performance in I'm too crippled to go to jail. Talk about convincing. Does this look like a guy who could chase Gwyneth Paltrow around a desk. And finally new rule if Meghan and Harry can quit their family you can too. Not that I've got anything against families in general they come in really handy at times like like when you need a co-signer for a car loan. But the downside of families is they possess a gravitational force that gets you to do stuff you don't want to do and continue traditions you don't really believe in. Families like drugs you get high off them (40/44)
but they make you do stupid things. Princess Diana famously said she felt like a prisoner but many people can get trapped living their family's life and not their life captive to the same old jobs politics region customs you know every New Year's Day my family used to serve pork and sauerkraut. I don't know why my parents did it and their parents did it and I did it until one year I said I hate this shit. Just because I share DNA in a bathroom with you people doesn't mean I have to live by your rules forever. So do it. Fire your family. Harry gave up a castle. What do you got to lose an air mattress. Break the cycle. Think outside the crib. There must be 50 ways to leave your mother. You don't have to do what your folks did. You don't have to get married and have children if you don't want to or go hunting or work in a coal mine. You don't have to be the religion you were born into or any religion. You can explore an alternative way of looking at the universe called not batshit crazy. (41/44)
So I give Harry and Meghan some credit but not a lot because they want to be seen as this modern couple way more than the other stuff he went to the family. OK then go all the way and say it. Say we're not just taking a step back from royalty. We're renouncing the whole outdated racist anachronistic lot of it. We're saying loud and proud. What is this bullshit that some people are royal. You want to be modern and woke and all that. Want to get rid of politically incorrect words. How about your highness. What could be more antithetical to liberalism than calling another human your highness. I got to say the social justice warriors who never tire of pointing out old behaviors and bygone attitudes that just don't cut it anymore. Where they've been on this one seduced by the pageantry where you. I think the woke have been asleep surprisingly forgiving about the idea that some people are born exalted above the rest of us to be bowed to and carted around in golden carriages. Are you people (42/44)
who wake up offended. Where's the outrage for you. I want an apology from the people always want an apology. Did you know the queen has a grand Carver. Currently the Earl of Denbigh whose sole job is to carve the queen's meat and a dinner when the queen finishes eating. Everyone else has to stop too. Yeah when the old bat puts her spoon down. That's it. We're all done. I thought being born into privilege was public enemy number one now. But you're happy to be lorded over by a bunch of inbred twit to happen to win the 23 and me lottery. Megan and Harry you want to be remembered for greatness then burn your boats completely and say it's 2020. I hereby decree this birthright nonsense from the Middle Ages is stupid. And the next time someone curtsies or bows and scrapes before you or calls you your highness stop them and say we feel ridiculous being called that. I'm an actress. He's a nice guy. Highnesses. No humans are higher by birth. It's gross. And to those who say the monarchy is too (43/44)
important to tourist attraction I always hear that can abolish it. Guess what. You don't need live people for it. They still go to Stonehenge and the aliens who built that left a long time ago. The palaces the guards the carriages it's practically an amusement park already. We could call it the Magic United Kingdom. Fill it with rides like Caucasian Mountain. Diana's Wild Ride. And the tunnel of incestuous love. Just you know keep the kids away from Prince Andrew. All right. That's our show. I'll be at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina February 15th at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center in North Charleston February 16th at the Comerica Theater in Phoenix on the 22nd of February. I want to thank Joe Walsh, Jon Meacham, Kara Swisher, Andrew Yanny and Nancy Pelosi. Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. ...week here and what can I say? Happy Friday, or I like to call it 420 day five. Yeah, wow. It was 420 this week, not that I need another excuse to get stoned all the time, but wow. Yesterday, I binge watched my hand. Yeah, that's what they call it now, binge watching. Binge watching, staying up all night watching television. Yeah, we used to call that doing cocaine. But it was also Earth Day this week, and people are right. Nature is healing. That is the one bright spot in this. The deer have returned to Griffith Park. There's fish in the canals of Venice. The swallows have returned to President Trump's skull. Oh, I stopped watching the briefings. I can't. Why? I mean, to watch this guy lie and blame and point fingers and pat himself on the back. It's like, what? I watched him. It's like ashtrays when I see them on an airplane. I say to myself, why do they still have these? Yeah, Trump was pissed off (1/45)
this week because they finally got back the largest study so far to be done about hydroxychloroquine, or chloroquine, queen, whatever it is. And this is the shit that Trump has been saying, what are you up to lose? He's been pushing this like a Buick dealer trying to unload last year's Skylark. But the study came back and it turns out it doesn't work. It's dangerous and it hasn't been vetted. If it was a person, he would have hired it. But I mean, what is this? What do you have to lose about a dangerous, unvetted drug that has side effects? This is why my mother told me, never take medical advice from a fat guy in clown makeup. Oh, and as if things aren't bad enough, how about a side order of war to go with what we're going through? Because Trump tweeted this week, I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up. He tweeted, I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down any and all Iranian gunboats who may be harassing our sailors. That's right. And if they fuck with us (2/45)
again, we're going to sink their planes. Are we sure that the makeup is not lead based? Could I just get that question answered? So anyway, Trump, yes, he's having a bad week. So he's going back to his greatest hits. He announced this week a travel ban on everywhere. He says, no more immigrants till he figures out where Fauci's from. Also a 60-day halt. We're going to put on green cards, people who want green cards. So all of you who are planning to moving to the most infected country on earth, top luck on you. But let's end with a little note of happiness, a little bright light of optimism. Researchers have found, especially for people this is who might be married or living with someone, they have found that the coronavirus cannot be spread through flatulence. The researchers also say that their careers in research didn't really pan out the way they hoped. All right, we got a great show. We have Nancy Pelosi. Wow, Dr. David Katz and Jay Leno is here. Let's get right to it. Okay, I (3/45)
think everybody knows my first guest. She's the representative from San Francisco and the 52nd Speaker of the House for the United States of America, Nancy Pelosi. Thank you very much for doing this. Welcome to my game room. And I have many questions for you in these difficult times. The first one being everyone seems to agree testing is the way to get back to normality in America. And it's the most frustrating thing is it seems like it would even help Trump, but he seems to be dragging his feet on this most important issue. Is there any way Congress can pass their own plan? Well, what we passed today, which we just finished passing is the testing. We have $25 billion in there for testing, but we require that there be a national strategic plan for testing and that we have reporting back as to how it is impacting all communities, communities of color and diversity in our country. So it insists on that. But we passed our first bill. This is our fourth bill, all bipartisan. First bill was (4/45)
March 4th, was called testing, testing, testing. Here we are more than a month and a half later, and we still have to pass another bill. It's very hard to understand why they are dragging their feet or whatever, their brains or whatever, not to realize that if we want to open up the economy, test, test, test, contact trace, incubate, isolate that. It's so simple. You have to not only test, but trace and filter in place until the coast is clear. Okay, you mentioned that this is the fourth bill you've passed. I think the total now is coming up on $2.7 trillion. That's a lot of money in a very short period of time. I know Congress controls the purse strings. I can't imagine there's much left in the purse. I just don't get it. I don't understand how, I know we can bail out certain sectors as we have done in the past. I don't know how you can just keep indefinitely writing checks. We were 20 trillion in the hole to begin with, and all world governments who are already in debt are doing (5/45)
this. How can the whole world be writing this funny money? Well, because it's a matter of life and death. Nobody made as big a fuss as we did when they passed a nearly $2 trillion tax break for the wealthiest people in our country. 83% of the benefits going to the top 1% and the debt that that laid on our kids to pay for in the future. So, but this is more of an investment in the lives and the livelihood of the American people. And we have to think big about that. The more we invest in science and health, the quicker our economy will recover from the pandemic. Well, it will recover unless people get wise to the fact that we're just writing checks for money that doesn't exist. I mean, what is the point of bailing out banks who are then just gonna loan back the money that doesn't exist to us again? It seems like it's a house of cards that could in the end wind up hurting more people than the disease. Well, the point is to keep people working. It's paycheck retention. And so the point of (6/45)
this legislation for the, they call it Paycheck Protection Program is that the small businesses would be able to have some relief. And if they kept their workers on, then they would have debt forgiveness. And that is a very important part of it. We were concerned when they asked for more money right away. We said, well, wait a minute, we wanna make sure, we wanna see the data that we have seen anecdotally, not scientifically yet, is telling us that many low, that we say under banked communities were not getting any of this money. Whether it was women and minority owned businesses, Native American veterans, rural communities, et cetera, were not getting these loans because they just didn't have banking relationships that were putting them further up in the line. Further up in the line. So it is probably, well, it is an investment and it is stimulant to the economy when that comes, but is not anything in comparison to the irresponsibility of a tax cut of almost $2 trillion when you count (7/45)
the interest on the debt that all of these deficit hawks, these fiscal conservatives, didn't even give one ounce of thought to. The fact is we expect a return on this money. When we invest in food stamps, that's stimulus. When we invest in unemployment insurance, that's stimulus. When we give a direct payment, that's stimulus. And hopefully when we keep these people in their jobs, and that was the point of the small business, but also the assistance to the aerospace industry, the airline industry, like that, the point is they keep the people in their jobs and therefore they have paychecks and therefore people can survive. It's a tough time because their lives are threatened as well as their livelihood. As well as our democracy, I might add that. We're gonna have money in there for elections, for direct work. The CDC this week said it might come around again in the fall. Can we afford to do the whole thing again? Can we afford to spend this kind of money a second time in one year? I (8/45)
think that it should be clear that this is not doing the job that is set out to do completely, that we may have to consider some other options. Others have proposed sovereign fund profits which go to these unemployed people or guaranteed income, other things that may not even be as costly as continuing down this path. But there is a reverence for small business in our country as the entrepreneurial spirit, the optimism of job creation, wealth creation and the rest. And it's a good place to help people stay in business. But even if they stay in business because we're giving this loan, which if they keep people employed, they don't have to pay back. Their rent is paid, their utilities are paid, their employees are there. At the end of the time, they still have to have customers. And that's really why we need everybody to participate. That's why we need another bill that will be costly. And we call it our heroes bill. And that's for state and local, but that's not state and local. You're (9/45)
across bureaucracy. It's healthcare workers, police and fire, emergency services, people, our teachers, our transit workers, all the people that are paid for by the local state and local public sector. They need jobs too. And they right now are the ones on the frontline risking their lives to save other people's lives. And on top of that, they may lose their jobs because of the loss of revenue to the state. So that will be our next bill. And it will be hundreds of billions of dollars as well to states and localities, counties, municipalities, cities, some bigger than small towns, but nonetheless, all having the responsibility of meeting the needs of healthcare needs of coronavirus, but also recognize the revenue loss that they have. And that has to be recognized as a cost of the coronavirus. So there's more to come. It's not necessarily in the same vein of small business, but it's jobs, jobs, jobs. So the way we see it is all about keeping people employed, keeping people employed. But (10/45)
that's why we're having, we passed today, I was very pleased, a select committee on coronavirus to make sure that the money spent is money that is spent for helping people keep their jobs, not enriching shareholders or dividends, bonuses, corporate CEO pay or anything like that. That angers the American people and it's not right. Secondly, people want their paychecks, whether it's unemployment insurance, whether it's direct payment, whether it's PPP, like this small business initiative. And the third thing is they, first and foremost, I should have said, they want these first responders to be protected. The healthcare providers, the first responders to be protected for what they are doing. They're our heroes, but we, I think, are unworthy to praise them and thank them unless we're going to support them. Okay, well, I thank you for doing this. I hope Trump doesn't steal all that money. I do worry about that. That's why we have this committee to make sure that the money is spent to the (11/45)
best. And by the way, the good news is the American people are paying attention. They are watching and we want, and what we are doing to change, make change. That's so not, all this hundreds of billions dollars is not a way to harden the disparity and access to credit that is there, but to melt that down. And that's what the bill that we're passing today strives to do. Thank you for your interest. I appreciate it, everything you do, Madam Speaker. And I hope I see you in person very soon. And I hear your concern about the national debt bill that we don't want our children to pay. So we have to grow the economy to make up. National debt is one thing. I'm worried about, the whole thing collapsing and we going into a depression, but let's end on a happy note and hope that doesn't happen. Thank you so much. Make sure it doesn't. And that's why we have to win the election in November. Okay, yes, I agree with that. All right, thank you. Take care of yourself. You too, stay safe please. Thank (12/45)
you. All right. Jimmy, Jimmy Fallon, hey. Hey bud, you're not responding to my tree climbing challenge. Come on pal, what do you say? Climb a tree for a good cause? Come on Jimmy, I'm up in a tree. It's fun. You keep acting like a pussy, Trump's gonna grab you. All right, my next guest is the founding director of the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center who recently volunteered his time fighting COVID-19 at a hospital emergency department in the Bronx. Please welcome Dr. David Katz. Doctor, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Mel. Your credentials for talking about this are impeccable. I know you were at the Einstein College of Medicine. You got your degree at the Yale School of Public Health. Nobody questions your credentials. They did, some people question your op-ed that was in the New York Times about a month ago. It was called, is our fight against corona worse than the disease? I think it's good someone's at least asking that question. We can't just lapse into (13/45)
group think. Let me quote the thing you said recently that I think is most interesting and gets at this point. You said, if all we do is flatten the curve, you don't prevent deaths, you just change the dates. Explain that. Yeah, and Bill, first of all, again, thank you. Great to be with you. That's taken directly from some of the world-class risk modelers that I've been working with since that op-ed in the New York Times. So I wrote my op-ed, Tom Friedman wrote a column channeling mine, rounded up a high flagpole, and then a who's who in public health and economics found me and we've been working together ever since. And so some of these risk models basically show, essentially what flattening the curve does is keeps people away from one another and away from the virus. So the virus doesn't spread, but you also don't cultivate any immunity. If you do a really effective job of locking everybody in place and preventing viral transmission, there's still some low-level potential for viral (14/45)
exposure out in the world, but very few of us get that exposure. The minute you release those clamps and let people back into the world, we're all vulnerable. So most of the models suggest that flattening the curve makes sense in phase one so you don't overwhelm medical systems, for example. But you've got to have a phase two. If you don't transition to a phase two, whenever you release the clamps, the virus is out in the world waiting for you, everybody's vulnerable, and that big peak in cases and that big peak in deaths that you were trying to avoid really just happens at a later date. So you would be suggesting something more like what Sweden is doing. Sweden, we know, has kept open its schools. You can go to a bar, you can go to a restaurant and get your hair cut. They haven't had numbers that are that different from countries that have locked down. How do you sum up that? Yeah, so let me start, Bill, by saying essentially what I reject because I think we're a very polarized (15/45)
society. I think the way media hype things up actually amplifies the extremes. At one extreme, we've got the lock everything down, hunker in a bunker until A, there's a vaccine, 18 months or years or whenever, B, forever, or C, you die of something else whichever comes first. That's just horrible. It's inhumane, makes no sense. But at the other extreme, we've got the liberate blank, fill in the name of the state, which is basically everybody in the water, including grandma, and nevermind the riptides and the sharks and every man for himself. That's also absurd. So in the middle, what you do is you identify who is at risk of a severe case of this infection and who's not? Who is at risk of dying of this at a pretty high frequency and who is at extremely low risk? So this is just like risks we take every day. Yeah, some young people will die of this, but sadly, tragically, some young people die crossing the street or in a car crash every day. There are risks we willingly take on every (16/45)
day. Sweden's approach is a little too close to the everybody in the water, don't worry about the riptide, end of the spectrum for my taste. I think we can do even better. We can kind of look around the world and say, okay, if you don't lock this down at all, if you don't protect the vulnerable, mortality in Sweden does look to me to be higher, not massively higher than every place else, but higher. Why put those lives at risk? On the other hand, if you lock everything down, you destroy livelihoods, you destroy jobs. And what I was saying in what I didn't really think was a controversial op-ed at the beginning is there's really more than one way, Bill, for this situation to hurt people or even kill them, and all of them are bad. And there's more than one way to protect people and save them, and all of those are good. So one thing we wanna do is keep those vulnerable to severe infection away from this nasty bug, but we don't wanna destroy people's lives and livelihoods and means of (17/45)
feeding their families. And interestingly, I am just back from three days in an emergency department in the Bronx where I was volunteering as a physician to support my colleagues who I applaud. They've been in there from the beginning, they'll be there through the end. But this is exactly the view that prevails there. There might be the notion that, well, the frontline people, they're much more concerned about staying away from the virus than they are about can we open society up? Not true. Their parents, I was talking to my colleagues that say I'm really struggling to balance my clinical duties with homeschooling my kids. And then think of a scenario like this. Dad is a nurse, mom's a paramedic. They've got two kids at home and there's no school, no daycare, no nannies, no old pairs, nothing for them to do. One of these frontline people who really wants to be in the battle has to stay home to take care of the kids and they're really torn. So there's a middle path and the middle path (18/45)
essentially is high risk people are protected from exposure, low risk people go out in the world early. And here's the odd part, Bill, that I think people have a hard time confronting and accepting. We actually kind of want to get this and get it over with and be immune because that is the path to the all clear that doesn't require us to wait for a vaccine which optimistically is 18 months away but could be much longer. Yeah, I think you make a lot of sense there. And I think it's a shame you're talking about politicization but people like you who sound reasonable, maybe it's not the exact one true opinion you hear somewhere else, has to go on Fox News to say it. You're not a Fox News guy. I'm not a Fox News guy. But on the other hand, I am a Bridges, not Bunkers. And it doesn't really help the world if all we ever do is talk to other people who already own our opinions. It was interesting, I really debated, do I go on Fox News, do I not? That's not my usual crowd. But the simple fact (19/45)
is we should come together in common cause on common ground. Maybe there's a real opportunity here for an aha American moment that's between the extremes of left and right where we all say, yeah, actually, we wanna save as many lives as possible. And one of the interesting things, Bill, is sort of the left side of the spectrum, the liberal ideology that seems to be so resistant to talking at all about unemployment and the economy. But that's the very same camp that tends to appreciate that the single leading driver of bad health outcomes is poverty. Social determinants of health are massively important. So frankly, 30 million people unemployed, that falls disproportionately hard on the people who can least bear the unemployment, who are at most risk of food insecurity, who are at most risk of depression, addiction. All of that's important too. So maybe there's a real opportunity here to say, hey, there's a middle path we've been neglecting it. It's the way through this thing. And it (20/45)
leads to total harm minimization. We wanna minimize deaths and severe cases of the infection. We also wanna minimize the fallout, the health fallout of societal collapse and economic ruin. Yeah, I think philosophically, America got too used to the idea of win-wins and they need to get used to the idea of lose-lose. That's more what life is like sometimes, lose-lose. There's no good choices here. There's only the least bad choice. And I think when you talk about the fact that we have this president who is so inept at dealing with this, but he's not going away. He's not going away. He is the president. He's going to be there. Let me ask you this about testing. It doesn't look like we're gonna have testing for a long time. So look, in the war movies, when they say to the pilot, you know, your equipment is out. He says, I know, but we're gonna have to fly blind on this one. Is that this kind of situation? Are we just gonna have to say the least horrible choice is at some point we might (21/45)
have to do this without the testing. The people who say we can't open up the economy until we have the testing. Well, that can't go on for a year. And we might not have the testing till then at the rate we're going. So a few things. So you said it's not win-win, it's lose-lose. In a sense, and in public health, we talk about harm reduction. You know, so for example, a needle exchange program that says we can't get everybody to stop using intravenous drugs, but we can give them clean needles so they don't get HIV, for example. That's harm reduction. And so when you're in a lose-lose scenario, you look to minimize harm. Maybe you can't maximize benefit, but you can minimize harm. So from the beginning, we've been posting materials, my colleagues and I, under the rubric, total harm minimization. That's what we want to achieve here. Yeah, listen, you know, a historic pandemic is a bad situation. A historic pandemic with a fairly, you know, inept group of federal leaders is an even worse (22/45)
situation. You know, if only we had grownups in charge. But on the testing front, we're making a mistake there, Bill, because we do have testing. It's not great, by the way. You know, so one day, one of these 12-hour shifts in the emergency room in the Bronx, we admitted maybe 20 people we were sure had COVID. You know, there was just no doubt about it. They absolutley, positively had COVID, and either 19 or 20 of them tested negative. So the testing's not great, and the false negative rate is high. But some of the test kits work pretty well. They're certainly better than nothing. And here's the thing, what we aren't going to have anytime soon is the capacity to test the whole population. But we deal with that all the time. The CDC routinely does what's called representative random sampling, where they randomly select people and make sure that they traverse the gamut of age and socioeconomics and zip code and health status. And then you extrapolate the whole population. We could do (23/45)
that with 10,000 people, and we have the test kits for that. So we really need grownups in charge. We need federal oversight. We need a commitment to getting the critical data. And frankly, that could happen fast. It's the work of 72 hours. In the absence of that, we're turning to states. So for example, we just heard there's widespread testing in New York. I think Governor Cuomo's doing a great job there. And it looks like at least 20% of the population of New York may have antibodies. Well, that's close to four million people. And what that means is the death toll in New York, tragic though it is, and again, all these deaths are real people, and my condolences to the families. But just looking at the statistics for a minute, 20,000 deaths out of four million people, that's half a percent. We're starting to see that the mortality toll of this when you get the denominator is really small. And I think the denominator is even bigger than that. So we're not totally blind. Yeah, I think we (24/45)
do have to fly in a bit of a fog, but we're not flying totally blind. Okay. I worry when I hear people talk about how we deal with this that they leave out the immune system. I mean, obviously we know that that's a big part of it, but I feel like that gets such short shrift. And I worry that the country is going to think that the way to deal with microbes in the future is to lock yourself away. And it cannot be that. Germs are ubiquitous. They are everywhere. You can't avoid them. You have to win the battle inside. You wrote a book recently called How to Eat, which has been a pet theme of mine since I've been on television, that the main thing about our health is what we eat. And you write 80% of all chronic disease and premature death is preventable using lifestyle as a medicine. Yes, stop shaking hands, but you can't avoid germs. They're everywhere. Yeah, so great point and a great segue. So first of all, I just want people to understand, again, I'm a physician, I do public health, (25/45)
I'm trained in epidemiology. It really still looks to me as it did that month ago when I wrote my piece for the New York Times, 98 to 99% of the cases of this infection are mild. Most people don't even seem to know they have it. And this is true even in the emergency department. A small portion of the cases are potentially severe. And that's what makes your point so important here, Bill. The severe cases occur in people who are old and people who are sick. Now, those two things go together, but sadly in America, they also splay a part. There are a lot of young people with coronary disease, obesity, type two diabetes, hypertension, and by and large, those are diseases of lifestyle. I'm a past president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. That's what we advocate, lifestyle is medicine, because it can fix all of that. Here's the interesting bit. The stuff we can't sell to people, eat well, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink excessively, get enough sleep, manage your stress, (26/45)
because it's such potent medicine. We can't sell it because the timeline for harm is too long. Essentially, heart disease stalks you in slow motion, type two diabetes stalks you in slow motion, and our DNA is wired to fight or flight. If it's not coming at me in minutes or days, I'm sort of blind to it. Well, COVID is coming at you in minutes and days, and everybody is alarmed, and all the same things are risk factors. So essentially, what this pandemic has done has turned America's chronic health liabilities into an acute threat, and there is an opportunity, a crisis and dangerous opportunity. The very things that we're always telling people to do to promote their long-term health actually do fortify your immunity against this virus. If you start eating optimally, start fitting physical activity into your in-place routine, if you maybe get enough sleep, that can affect how your immune system functions in hours, certainly in days, and a whole lot in a span of weeks. There's not a (27/45)
better time for America to get healthy. If I were one of the grownups in charge of this mess, I would have a national health promotion campaign as part of what we do in an organized way. Look, we're all social distancing, sheltering in place. Let's make lemonade from the lemons. Let's turn this into an opportunity to get healthy. It will protect you in the short run. It'll help protect your loved ones, and when this is over, we'll be a healthier nation into the bargain. Great point. I really appreciate you doing this. I think you make a lot of sense. I hope I see you somewhere other than Fox News, because I don't like to watch it. All right, thank you doctor. I understand I'm going to be on your show, Bill, so I'm trading up already. Yes, you'll be on it again, hopefully in person. All right, take care. You too, stay well. Hi there, welcome to one of the many bars in my house. I have two bedrooms and three bars. Is that wrong? Anyway, we thought this would be a perfect locale, because (28/45)
I was reading about how the coronavirus is really taking a toll on single people. It's one thing if you have a partner around, but single people are having a tough time. But of course, we will go back to normal, and when we do, they're going to need pickup lines in the post-corona world that we're gonna live in. So would you like to hear some of the pickup lines? Because they're gonna go out to bars and clubs again. They are, and they're gonna need them. And we have a few for you here. For example, what's the name of that disinfectant you're wearing? Why don't you go over to my place and slip into something less protective? Would you handle my package if I let it sit outside for two days? You make me want to be a better man, or at least change into a clean pair of sweatpants. You know, until I saw you, I was just bored stiff. I have toilet paper. Pickup lines, these are... What do you say we get a Zoom? Check out my hazmat suit. You know what it's made of? Boyfriend material. And of (29/45)
course, hello, I'm Gavin Newsom. Okay, my next guest. Oh, you all know my next guest. CNBC Jay Leno's Garage. New episodes air May 20th at 10 o'clock on the East Coast. He is the only man to be twice fired for being the crime, for committing the crime of being number one in the ratings. Jay Leno! Hello, Ben, how are ya? Jay, great to see you over there, wherever you are. Thank you. Gosh, I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. I know you've always been kind of a glasses half full guy. Right. Have you been able to maintain that kind of optimism even in these times? I am optimistic. You know, I saw this Dr. Fauci, that's how I say it, Fauci. Yes, of course. And I watch him on TV and he says, this virus is a war, we have to fight it like a war. And their reporter says to him, well, how do we do that? He says, by staying home and watching TV. And I said to myself, if there is ever a war, Americans are qualified, uniquely qualified to fight it. This is it. I mean, I've been (30/45)
training this my whole life, staying home and watch TV. Really, how hard is it? Like I saw, I'm not gonna say celebrity wise, but I saw him on one of the shows and he said, I feel like a prisoner of war in my own home. And I went, the difference between this war is, when the prisoners are released, they're fatter. It's the only war, when the war is over, the prisoners are fatter than when the war began. Yes, it's the only crisis where you could see a celebrity telling you not to panic from their panic room. Exactly, exactly. And the support team we have, Mama Celeste, Chef Boyardee, Famous Amos, Ben and Jerry, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben. I mean, they're all helping us. They're helping us get through it. Thank God. So Jay, look, I don't wanna give away where you live exactly because there's crazy people out there, but I think people know you're a very successful guy. So let's just say somewhere in the Southern California area where the very rich people live, I live in a similar kind of (31/45)
neighborhood. About a mile away, yeah. It's a little different how the rich areas are handling this, don't you think? Yes, it is. I mean, it is different. Well, I mean, Beverly Hills is a fact and celebrities react differently. Like I read, you know, Jussie Smollett? Yes, of course. Okay, he's a little paranoid. He actually had two guys beat him up on FaceTime. That's okay, because he was afraid of the virus. Mary Lyle Laughlin? Yeah, sure, of course. She paid an official to get her daughter into medical school because they wanted to be prepared. Yeah, so yeah. Are you still driving? Because I've taken the car out a number of times just so it doesn't freeze up in the garage for nowhere to friggin' go. Right. And it's one of the few things you can do where you're not hurting anybody. You're alone in the car, but it's depressing having you, I'm driving. Yes, but traffic is unbelievable. I mean, do you realize this, in the last three weeks they've given out 2,000 tickets for people going (32/45)
well over 100 miles an hour on the 101 and the 405. No, true, that's true, because people, they've never seen it like this before. So, and what about food, Jay? You know, you and I have never really seen eye to eye on food. I was just talking to Dr. Katz, a very important part of immunity. I've never known you to eat a vegetable in your life. You live on it. And it's affecting the way people live, you know, because it's the economy. I mean, I saw a mafia don picking up food to go at an Olive Garden. It shows you how bad, how bad. Oh my God. That is bad, that is bad. Well, the economy is, you know, I worry so much about the economy. I saw Louis Farrakhan wearing a clip-on bow tie. That's how bad. That is a bad economy. Do you have any other examples of why the economy? I do have some, Bill. What? In West Hollywood, I saw a gay bar having ladies' night. That's how bad. That's how desperate the economy is. You actually could have ladies' night in a gay bar. Yeah, you could, that's right. (33/45)
That's maybe a dated joke there. Okay, so. I saw Tom Selleck get turned down for reverse mortgage. That's how bad it is. That is, that's terrible. It's terrible. So, Jay, you're home. Now, you're a road warrior. Yeah. I'm not nearly the road warrior you are, but I am on the road all the time, as people who watch the show know. It always ends, except in these days, with me saying, I'll be at. Right. And now there's no I'll be at. But for a guy like you, who has, you know, how many nights a week did you work before this? I was doing 210 dates a year. 210? Yeah, about four nights a week. So that's like five nights a week. How are you coping? What's your wife doing with you home? She must be going nuts. No, no, it's okay, I like to spend time with my wife. And you know that. But does she? Well, no, it's good. See, the nice thing about being married 40 years, see, this is different. This is something you could never do with a 25-year-old. But when you're married 40 years, like my wife and I (34/45)
sat down to watch a Netflix movie. I fell asleep about halfway through. I woke up, I said, what happened? She said, I don't know, I fell asleep. So I said, good, we can watch it again tomorrow. I never understood why my parents watched the same Matlock over and over again. But now I do. Now I've watched, actually, I've watched Netflix movies three times because I never quite made it to the end. So it's okay. You know something? I can live in whatever environment I'm forced into. And I was always one of those guys, I never wanted to be one of those performers who turned down a job. Because when I started out, you know how it is when you start, there's no work. So I never want, how much money? I'm not going for that money. What are you doing for that much money on a Tuesday night? You can't go do that job. But now I'm forced, so now I'm forced to actually relax and take time off. And I'm enjoying it. And you know something? If there is a good side to this, I talked to a friend of mine (35/45)
who was in Italy. He said, for the first time, there was fish in the canals in Venice. Right. You know, and the ocean seems a little cleaner. LA seems remarkably cleaner. It is. Because planes are not flying. This is sort of like nature's way of dealing with global warming. I mean the oil, oil is zero dollars per barrel. You cannot literally give it away at this point. Who would have thought last year at $100 a barrel this could happen? So it's almost like the earth is sort of healing itself. I know I sound like some sort of new agey person, obviously I'm not. But so I'm just trying to see the good side. Obviously it's a horrible thing and people are suffering and it's terrible. But that's just one of the after effects. Well I know you're always a guy who helps when crisis comes along and you're, the thing you're doing I think is so marvelous. You have a 3D printer in your garage. Yeah we have a couple of them. And you're making masks, right? We're making the masks and we make them (36/45)
free. And I was gonna bring, I left it in at home. It's a mask with the glass, you know, the plastic, clear plastic front. And we make them and we give them to the fire department. And they hand them out to first responders and hospital workers. And the 3D printers run 24 hours a day and they just keep turning these out, turning these out. At the end of the week we give them all to the fire department and they hand them out. And it's fun. I mean, it's great to feel like you're part of something. You're actually sort of helping out and not just having food delivered every five minutes. So that's good. Don't you have a mask with you, another kind of mask that you do an impression with Jay? Do you have that? No, I had a coronavirus joke for you. Let me see. Okay. Old guy in the hospital, got to go to the hospital. Nurse comes in, you all right? Guy goes, yeah. Nurse, could you check to see if my testicles are black? Nurse goes, sir, I can't do that. I'm just an intern. No, we just checked (37/45)
to see if my testicles are black. Says, says nurse, yeah, thanks! Truck going by, timing. Fun part about doing a show in Bill's backyard, when you live on Van Nuys Boulevard, it's what you get. Anyway, the guy's sitting there, he goes, check to see if my testicles are black. She goes, sir, I'm not even a registered nurse. I'm just a, just, that's why I'm asking. Just check to see if my testicles are black. All right. So she reaches up under the guy's gown there and looks, she goes, sir, you're fine. The guy goes, no, I said, check to see if my test results are back. It's a stupid joke. Jay Leno, everybody! It's a stupid joke! Jay, it's great to have you here. Are you home, is that where you are? In your backyard? You know, this shows how clueless you are. Where do you think I am? Oh, I think you must be home like we all are. All right, I wanna show you how bad your security is. No, I'm in your backyard! Behind you, turn around! I've been back there! For crying out loud, Jay Leno! Thank (38/45)
you! Good security! That's far enough. Gotta keep six feet apart. Okay, now it's time for a new rule! New rules, everybody! I can hear you clapping at home. Okay, new rule. While there's no way of knowing exactly what post-virus America will look like, we all must agree that one thing that is fucked is bowling. Fingers in the holes, wearing other people's shoes. I can't believe we did it before. Besides, if there's one thing we've learned during the lockdown, it's that we can get drunk and knock things over at home. New rule, stop telling me what you did for 420. You know, it's been 420 for the past two months. I've smoked so much weed that in LA, we had an earthquake the other day when it happened, I thought it was just a train going by. And I don't live by a train. New rule, however, in honor of 420, while we're rightfully lauding the healthcare workers on the front lines, let's not forget America's other heroes, the marijuana delivery guys. Yes, if not for these intrepid couriers, (39/45)
43% of Americans would have murdered our families by now. And only that, they make the couch seem more inviting and the bean and cheese burritos more tasty. And because of them, that completely unfunny email your parents forwarded actually made us laugh. New rule, you can't watch Seinfeld without wondering how these New Yorkers would have handled coronavirus. Jerry breaks up with a woman because she coughs, then wants to get back together because she's hoarding toilet paper. George pretends he has it to get out of work and then really gets it and no one believes him. Kramer believes the virus is a hoax and Elaine gets back together with an old boyfriend because the lighting in his place makes her look better for Zoom meetings. New rule, now that this 93-year-old grandma has gone viral after holding up a sign, I need more beer, we must all agree not to send her too much beer. You know, whenever this kind of thing happens, the whole country goes nuts and sends one person a shitload of (40/45)
whatever it is they're asking for. Let's pick one person to send her a few six-packs. Oh fuck, really, you couldn't have waited until I was done? And finally, new rule, stop trying to get me to watch Tiger King, it's not gonna happen. I already have to watch one bottle of Blonde from reality TV and the other reason I'm not watching Tiger King while sequestering, because torturing animals is what got us into this mess. That's the lesson we keep refusing to learn, that you can't trash the environment including animals and not have it come back and kill you. Two weeks ago, I called out China for reopening their wet markets and miraculously, people from both sides of the aisle reached out to say, good for you for saying that. Well, here's another hot take that may not be as popular. America's factory farming is just as despicable as a wet market and just as problematic for our health. Factory farms have a lot more lobbyists, but ecological time bombs tick the same. Americans should not get (41/45)
too high and mighty about wet markets while we are doing this. Most, if not all infectious diseases are zoonotic, meaning they start in animals and jump to humans. AIDS likely came from primates. Someone butchered a monkey or fucked one or something they shouldn't have been doing with a monkey. Mad cow came from cattle, eating cattle, which is like feeding a chicken an omelet. Just two weeks ago, a fatal strain of bird flu was confirmed in a commercial turkey flock in South Carolina. Now, to thwart the coronavirus, we've been told to create distance, avoid others who are sick, lower stress and exercise. Are you surprised that diseases flourish among animals when they're forced to live in conditions that are the complete opposite of all of that? They're on top of each other, they can't move, they're stressed out. I've seen airports treat luggage better than we treat animals. Egg laying hens are starved and given no water for weeks to shock their bodies into molting. Beaks of chickens (42/45)
are removed. I could go on. Have you ever driven by a high density feedlot? Yeesh, to get relief from the stench, you have to stick your nose in an egg salad sandwich. If you think the market in Wuhan is gross, you should visit one of our giant poultry processing factories. But of course you can't, because we have ag-gag laws that make it a crime to report the crime. And it is a crime of animal abuse that goes on in our food industry. You're worried that the mailman is coronavirus? 80% of pigs have pneumonia when they're slaughtered. Because we make them live in conditions that would make a zombie vomit. And then, so they don't die before we kill them, pump them full of antibiotics that in turn get passed on to humans. That in turn leads to antibiotic-resistant diseases that in turn leads to us dying from ever-evolving contagions. It's six degrees of tainted bacon. We're on the cusp of returning to a pre-antibiotic era where strep throat was a death sentence. Let me put it as basically (43/45)
as I can. If we keep producing food the way we do, you're going to get sick with something medicine cannot fix. You don't have to care for the sake of the animals. I wouldn't want to mess with anyone's reputation as a heartless asshole. But do it because animal cruelty leads to human catastrophe. Do it because barbecue is why you've been masturbating for a month. And get the fuck away from me with Tiger King. I don't care that he sees the light at the end. So did Darth Vader. There's no such thing as keeping a wild animal pent up but treating them well, just as Siegfried in What Remains of Roy. Joe Exotic is in prison partly for killing five endangered tigers, which are endangered because of people like him. I don't get why the woke left loves this show so much and isn't on this guy like Pink Sequins. People should take their meandering outrage and focus it on this issue. You keep animals in cages, be they tigers or turkeys, and look who winds up being the prisoner. Okay, that's our (44/45)
show. I want to thank my guests, Nancy Pelosi, Dr. David Katz, and Jay Leno. We'll be back next week. Thank you, folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. I actually know why you're out. Because finally somebody, what I'm gonna say, who was treason to this country, he's actually in jail. Paul Manafort. A judge said they should lock him up, lock him up. Even worse news, Kim Kardashian is not taking his calls. So how's he gonna get a pardon? Trump said about Manafort he had nothing to do with the campaign. Nothing to do with the campaign. Yeah exactly. You personally brought him in. You gave him the title campaign chairman. Yeah that's just, that's just something we told him. It's like when they told Elvis he had a black belt. It wasn't really true. So much happened this, so much legal stuff happened this week. Finally after 18 months of working on this, the Justice Department's Inspector General released his report on the FBI's actions in the 2016 election. Trump said he wanted to read the whole thing before commenting, I'm joking of course. It's 500 (1/45)
pages. He gets bored halfway through a fortune cookie. The upshot of it is that the FBI helped Trump, as we all knew, and Trump made such a big deal out of Hillary's emails that Comey didn't want anyone to think that the FBI was helping Hillary and was on her side. So they ratfucked her campaign. You know it's like when the ref needs to show that he's fair. He shoots the hometown quarterback in the mouth. And Michael Cohen, did you hear this? Trump's fixer, lawyer, whatever you want to call him. Lapdog. He's, they're saying, I don't know if this is true, they're saying he's ready to cooperate with prosecutors. I hope that makes Trump nervous. I mean Michael Cohen has given more money to porn stars than Charlie Sheen. But I don't think it makes Trump nervous. And this Michael Cohen took out a restraining order on Michael Avenetti, right, wanting to stop appearing on television. The complaint, I love this, says Avenetti is creating a circus with his unquestioned, unquestioned, (2/45)
unquenchable thirst for publicity. Michael, you do know you work for Donald Trump. But, and also listen to this, New York's Attorney General has filed a lawsuit trying to shut down Trump's family's phony charity for what they say is persistent illegal conduct. It was basically a slush fund which they used as an arm of the campaign. They were funneling money to some of the least deserving charities in the world. Doctors Without Bordeaux, that's not a real charity. St. Bart's Children's Hospital, that's ridiculous. So with all these scandals, you know whose poll numbers are sinking like a rock? Not Donald Trump's. His are up. People who are sinking are anyone in the Republican Party who crosses Donald Trump. Remember Mark Sanford from South Carolina? The guy who was hiking the Appalachian Trail was really having an affair with an Argentinian woman. He was hiking the Appalachian Trail alright. But you know, he votes with Trump 73% of the time. It set a few critical things out. He didn't (3/45)
win his primary because he had, he survived. He was re-elected after having sex with the Argentinian woman. But Trump bangs porn stars right here in the USA, ladies and gentlemen. One reason Trump's numbers are up, of course he has a new friend, Kim Jong-un. I know it seems like years ago, it was only the beginning of this week, they had their big summit. Trump cannot stop talking about what a great guy Kim is. He's a great negotiator. Yeah, we found that out. He's got a great personality. He says he's a funny guy. He said he's a funny guy. Kim is a funny guy. You know, he does this one bit, you know, so funny, where he will throw three generations of your family in jail if you're listening to a radio that's not on the government station. It's just, it's great stuff. And then he segues right into his bit about how many North Koreas does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. We have no electricity. I mean, he is a funny, funny guy. A very funny guy. But, so Donald Trump is over there (4/45)
and trying to convince Kim to whatever they were trying to do. Come into the modern world. So he shows him, I couldn't make this up, a fake movie trailer that Trump put together. It looks like Kim put it together. Trump, did you see this? Show a few seconds of this. You have to see it to believe it. A new world can begin today. One of friendship, respect, and goodwill. Be part of that world. It looks like something Scientology would make if they were merging with Amway. Trump kept telling me, the great beach is there. Hotels, yes, because so many people in that country have money to burn, so they would get a condo on the beach, of course. And you know, resort hotels in North Korea are a little different. You call down to room service, they ask if you have any food. And of course, all the critics are saying, and they're right, that nothing really came of this. It was two people who lie about everything, who signed a deal that was specific about nothing. I would say it was a feckless (5/45)
stunt. But while he was in Singapore, the president passed a milestone. He turned 72 years old. Trump people are welcome. Insane, but welcome. But they throw him a big party in the hotel suite, and then the hookers peed happy birthday on the bed. We got a great show. Representative Karen Bass and a little later I'll be speaking with the very funny Billy Eichner. But first up, oh man, this guy I've been reading for my whole life, of all the pundits I have read on the conservative side, this guy is the sharpest mind of all. I want him to get in here for the longest time. I'm sure he has a Pulitzer Prize or two. George Will, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much. Do you have a Pulitzer Prize or two? I have one. You have one? I do. May I borrow it? Sure. But I wasn't kidding. I wanted you here more than anybody else for 25, there's a lesson, kids. Be persistent. 25 years it took, but you know, back in the days when we used to clip things out of newspapers and magazines, don't tell (6/45)
anybody, I still do. I clipped you more than anybody. You always kept my liberalism honest. That's an oxymoron, but go ahead. So, since you're a great wordsmith, I thought we'd start with some words I heard this week that I hadn't heard before. Senator Bob Corker said the Republican Party is now a cult. It's not a cult. A cult implies misguided, if sincere, worship. This is fear. They're not worshipful, they're invertebrate. They're frightened. But it seems to be a cult of... I mean, Donald Trump now has an 87% approval rating in the Republican Party. That's higher than any Republican, except George Bush right after 9-11. Higher than Reagan at this point. Higher than Eisenhower. Bush the first. Yeah, Donald Trump, that guy. That seems like a cult of personality. Well, it's a cult of personality among his supporters, and the supporters are nothing if not vengeful, if you differ from him. And for that reason, the vast majority of people in Congress are in Congress to be in Congress. That (7/45)
is, they want to stay there. And therefore, absent term limits, this is the careerist motivation they have, and he's the biggest threat there is to that. So, how much responsibility do you think the Republican Party bears for producing Donald Trump? You can't really picture him as a Democrat, even though before this run that he made, he really wasn't... he didn't have any fixed party. He belonged to Democrats, Republicans, wanted to be an independent for a while. Yes, but let me give the Democrats a warning. In the spring of... fall and summer of 2015, you had 18 Republican candidates on stage, and the most lurid stood out. In the summer of 2019, there will be 18 Democrats on stage, and maybe the most lurid will stand out there. The idea that only the Republican Party or only the right can produce something like Donald Trump is naive and cheerful. Really? Name somebody on the left who is in any way comparable to Donald Trump. Who is lurid on the left? I can't name them now, but just... (8/45)
You mean someone lurid will arise in the next year? They might, and they might become lurid as they compete to stand out in this crowd on the stage. But how would they stand out in the way Donald Trump's standing? He stood out by being more xenophobic, more racist, more horrible in any way, more vulgar, more personally vulgar. That wouldn't appeal to the Democratic base. I don't pretend to understand the Democratic base, but... You've analyzed the Democratic base pretty well. All I'm saying is that there's a dynamic in the nominating process that produces an opportunity for freebooting people like the buccaneer currently in the White House. Okay. Buccaneer. Another great word. Okay, so let me throw some other words at you. I was saying in 2016, before he was elected, it was a slow-moving coup. I don't know if you think that word is true. Appeasement is a word that Republicans used to throw at Democrats any time they even talked to someone overseas. I think Trump has done a lot of that. (9/45)
I don't feel like he's often acting in the interests of the United States of America purposefully, if they're at cross-interest with his personal interests. To me, that's treason. Are any of these words applicable, or do you think they're all too strong? I wouldn't use the word treason. Treason is a crime, and I think we ought to resist the impulse to criminalize political differences, even when they are shoddy differences and foolish differences, such as he has about his new best friend in North Korea. I don't think it helps to ratchet up any more than we already have the volume of our rhetoric about this. What if it's true? I mean, everything he does is true. I can't think of any policy of his that doesn't help Vladimir Putin. Fossil fuels helps Vladimir. Let's think about the subject of a slow-motion coup. Clearly, the modern presidency, now occupied by this man, has swollen beyond reason and escaped the limits implied in the Constitution. But I have to say that the progressives in (10/45)
this country brought that about. It was Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president and the first president to criticize the American founding, which he did, not peripherally, but about the essence of the Constitution. He objected to the separation of powers because it inhibited the discretion of presidents to act without the fetters of Congress. Well, today we've got an uninhibited president, and I don't think progressives are happy with what they helped to bring about. Well, I can't agree with that, but as always, you speak it eloquently. So are you optimistic? Because I had another great historian here recently, Jon Meacham, and we kind of were arguing about that. He's much more optimistic about where we're going. I am not. I think that we have crossed the Rubicon on this. I'm not the historian you are, but I do remember what the Rubicon was. It's when Caesar came with his armies from Gaul, and they said, if you cross that river with that army, we cease to be a republic anymore, (11/45)
and we will be a dictatorship. I feel we're at a Caesar-Rubicon moment. There's much to be said for pessimism, because pessimists are right. Well, pessimists are right a good bit of the time, and they're delighted when they're wrong, which is why I subscribe to the Ohio in 1895 theory of history, so named by me for the little-known fact that in Ohio in 1895 there were two automobiles, and they collided. Things go wrong. On the other hand, this is not a flimsy country. It was not made by flimsy people. And the flinty realists about human nature and the temptations of power who went to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and devised a government full of blocking mechanisms, three branches of government, two branches of the legislative branch with different electoral constituencies and electoral rhythms, super majorities, vetoes, veto overrides, judicial review, all kinds of ways to slow it down and make it difficult for an overbearing government. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a (12/45)
flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the (13/45)
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with George will backstage it took me 25 years to get him here well took me two minutes to get him alright another 25 years he'll come back so I'm gonna talk about voting yeah right so I started this campaign with funny or die called glam up the midterms which is our fun way of trying to make the midterms which sounds like a chore sounds like homework to a lot of young people sound fun and exciting and sexy millennials you want millennials yeah are you a millennial I am NOT you're a little pastor I'm 39 but I have a lot I have a lot of young fans you know Billy on the street has a very eclectic young following and a lot and a big following online right and so I thought you know I'm always tweeting angry things every day as many of us are and there's a reason to do that right that is productive but I wanted to do something that felt productive and that would write a tangible result and so we're doing this campaign to get young people to vote I saw a statistic which said in the last (30/45)
midterm in 2014 only depending on which report you read only 12 to 20 percent of Millennials who could vote did vote Wow and that's a staggeringly low number and so we're generation a figure aren't they I mean that they're very bright they're even like aware that they're very self-entitled but they just can't stop it yeah I did ask my Twitter following after the California primary where the numbers are up the numbers in California were up on June 5th that's a good start especially in ca49 oh we have this crazy jungle primary but when I asked my following why the ones who didn't vote in California didn't vote if they could I got a lot of frustrating but honest responses and that means it means that people are still really fucking lazy right like you're putting on shows like you've done this before and like you have to be registered to get in the show it's basically a bribe exactly is it is it wrong to bribe people to vote why don't we just pay them well we can't pay them and so we're (31/45)
gonna put on a show you make the costume I'll get the barn no but the shows that we're doing are actually they're very locally curated will Ferrell and I did a show in district 49 in Oceanside here where will played Ron Burgundy who has a very direct connection to San Diego and not we weren't only entertaining the people that came who registered to vote but we also brought up young local leaders community leaders kids working on DACA and LGBT equality and March for our lives in that district to come on stage with will and I and talk about the work they're doing and it was it was very inspiring so can I can I let's ask what would motivate people to vote because I keep hearing this is very important to you too because you're running keep hearing that the Democrats have to do more than just be anti-trump yes okay but wait I even hear very often don't even mention impeachment because that just makes the other side crazy they're crazy already but here the latest poll Embassy News Wall (32/45)
Street Journal poll that people are coming around to the idea that Donald Trump is a dangerous criminal who needs to be checked by 48 to 23 voters indicate they're likely to support a candidate who promises to provide a check on Donald Trump I do think it is about Donald Trump yeah and I don't think people are hearing about the other issues yes I do think you should run on repealing the tax cut and restoring your health care but it's very hard to get a message like that out but you know what though you have to get the message out door-to-door and then youth do it in an entirely different way and so we're doing this project see change where we're taking Democrats from Los Angeles going into red districts and we just kicked off a youth program with Millennials this week they're coming together and they're gonna come up with their own plan on how to reach those voters we're giving them the voter file they're gonna figure out is it Twitter is it text what is it but we'll have them all come (33/45)
to your show your Millennials should meet my Millennials for the groups that are motivated now I mean that's that's the thing you're seeing in all of these primaries though it's it's younger voters right the Millennials are motivated it's women voters and it's minority voters and for that like Trump is on the ballot and that's the energizing factor that's mobilizing and that's that's not good for a problem I mean that's I mean maybe that's stating the obvious it's it's that's not a good formula for Republicans coming into November because just because Trump's on the ballot doesn't mean Republicans are as invigorated. Is it a good thing that on Tuesday we saw that the Republicans are primary they're more moderate candidates for these crazy the Corey Stewart guy yeah was it in Virginia now I guess the answer is it's good if we win well if it's we don't right then we've got a Nazi adjacent guy in Congress if it's a swing district it's good if it's not then they're gonna so can Corey (34/45)
Stewart win in Virginia this guy no no because he's running against Tim Kaine hello like he's running it's a very it's a blue state that went for didn't even voted for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine and he's running against a guy who could never happen just keep underestimating Donald Trump they just first he was he would never even run oh it's just for publicity but the party's not gonna put any money behind what you just said that there is this sort of coalescing faction of people who want to vote against him and see him thrown from office runs counter to the idea that in fact he has Trump a five the entire Republican Party and if you oppose him you're out right here's what really scare excuse me one second and then I'll give you your shot but Corey Stewart this guy I'm talking about in Virginia who Confederates not Nazi adjacent like I said okay he says when they start chanting lock her up you know because Hillary's so dangerous as president he also said and Tim Kaine too so now (35/45)
we're calling for what did Tim Kaine do to get locked up we're at a place again where it's so scary where there are politicians running in regular primaries and elections who were calling for their opponent to be locked up here's what Donald Trump said today about Comey I love the way he listen to the way he goes from they asked should James Comey be locked up I would never want to get involved in that that's the first thing he said second sentence just seemed to me like they were criminal acts Oh third sentence what he did was criminal I would never want to get involved too it seems like criminal acts what he did was criminal brings and then what he did was horrible bad in terms of Constitution terrible thing to our people locked up let somebody else make that determination but we're normalizing locking exactly we're not normalizing it I mean that's we're not normalizing right here but we're calling out and saying what it is and and a lot of people are and that's you know Democrats (36/45)
are gonna probably have a heyday in November which they should they deserve to and you look so upset about the country because this isn't this is a bad not because we're all discussing not because of Democrats because like the what you're saying is right bill like this is a new low and we can't allow us to ourselves to normalize it and so it does take us all saying that this is unacceptable don't also I would just add to that don't underestimate the ability of these guys to reactivate seemingly settled questions of the culture war this is a guy who also removing Confederate symbols and statues was tantamount to what Isis was doing in Iraq powdering Babylonian and Sumerian artifacts right so in other words the Union is like Isis or anybody who opposes slavery and what it represented is similar to the Islamic State this is creepy scary especially after Charleston especially after these were things that America had this debate already did right we have to stop debating to whether there is (37/45)
a culture war or not there is a fucking culture war on some level when you're dealing with someone like Trump who is ripping infants from their parents from their mothers this is a battle of good versus evil and I don't think it's oversimplifying it and that's why young people have to vote so given that let me ask you a question okay a lot of times in the past when Republicans didn't like a candidate like many who didn't like Donald Trump they said okay but when I go into the voting booth I'm casting a vote for Ronald Reagan or I'm writing in Betsy Ross Mitt Romney said he's writing in his wife's name isn't it past time to do that don't you have to vote for the Democrat yeah I mean are you asking how I'm gonna vote are you asking I'm saying all Republicans who are not Trumpsters yeah you can't do that bullshit anymore you have to actually vote for the Democrat you you know your principles right you have to vote your principles if your principle if you're if there's a Trump person in (38/45)
your district there's only two choices right then you have to vote for the Democrat in that case yeah thank you panel time for new rules new rule the photographer who took this photo has to get the Pulitzer Prize but only only if he titles it dinner with schmuck this doesn't look like a meeting of the g7 it looks like concerned family members telling grandpa they're moving him to Shady Acres new rule if you're a foreign-born uber driver and you kick a gay couple out of your car because they kissed and you think that should be illegal you're an American now you have to leave the gay hating thing behind and and when the gay couple in question was these two you also have to tell me what the hell is the matter with you Phyllis Schlafly died two years ago and she thinks this is hot and kudos to the brave journalists at CNN who brought us this story which was also picked up by the equally brave journalists at NBC ABC CBS USA Today Newsweek BuzzFeed the New York Post the New York Daily News (39/45)
and Sky News UK which proves the media doesn't just cover hot white girls when they disappear they also cover them when they make out neural party cups need to stop being identical drinking out of someone else's cup is gross now excuse me while I go put my lips on the same joint as ten other strangers neural now that a proposal to split California into three states has qualified for the November election Californians have to reject this ridiculous idea to prove my idea to split California into seven states caucasiana Dushlandia and its satellite state porn topia the kingdom of Oprah siliconia immigrant Tina and the United cannabis Emirates Utah and Arizona can fight over it new rule if we're talking on the phone and I say I've got a call coming in on the other line there's only one proper response okay fine talk later anything else and you're just being an asshole an asshole who's missing the bigger point I don't really have a call coming in on the other line and finally new rule (40/45)
someone has to explain to America's police that the purpose of the body cam isn't so you can upload your beatings onto YouTube when did punching someone in the head become a law enforcement technique the cops need to make up their minds they do a river dance on your skull and then when they're putting you in the car they say watch your head we need to stop saying most cops are good like we know that to be true I hope it's true but I need some evidence unlike cops the bad ones not the good ones problem is again we don't really know what that percentage is that's the question I'm asking tonight if most cops are good why are there so many videos of them being bad just in the last month we've seen just a few bad ones beating the suntan lotion off a skinny girl in a bikini completely atypical officers mercilessly wailing on a homeless guy in Oregon and totally non representative policemen beating a black man in Arizona that's a lot of videos of guys who barely exist doing shit that hardly (41/45)
ever happens not to mention the Milwaukee Bucks Sterling Brown getting tased for a crime white people can't even imagine existing while black this is why NFL players want to take a knee not because they hate the anthem now in the cops defense the woman in New Jersey did have an open container of alcohol the homeless man was making loud noises and the man by the elevator looked like he was quote preparing for a physical altercation which apparently means he was standing up it's like getting a speeding ticket in a parked car because your flame decals look fast seems to me we need a me to movement for the police if Garrison Keillor had to go away for putting his hand on a woman's back perhaps we should decide what should happen when two men pin a woman down in the sand and punch her in the face because I'm sensing a power imbalance here there's obviously a lot of rage that police work brings out in a person and I don't doubt for a moment that it's justified and that we need to do more to (42/45)
help officers find better ways to channel it but we also have to call men who wail on the defenseless while their buddies hold them down what they are cowards 84% of cops say they've directly witnessed a fellow officer using excessive force and 61% say they don't always report serious abuse this thin blue line stuff has got to go away it can't be that it can't be the duty of every American to say something if they see something except for the people whose job it is to do something when when when cops ask minorities why they don't snitch on their own minorities have every right to say you first and and stop just stop defending the indefensible they're always reviewing these videos as if they're ghost hunters looking for signs of a poltergeist the only thing you need to review is your hiring practices we we need we need better psychological screening to weed out the people who become cops as payback for high school because that's always the real crime isn't it attitude not being (43/45)
instantly deferential we need to ask the question are the wrong type of people becoming cops it's a fair question the police attract bullies like the priesthood attracts pedophiles like carnivals attract meth addicts look I know there are good cops I know some personally I used to buy drugs off one great guy I I do know some cops I do know some who do their jobs like total pros and it's true there are no viral videos of an officer putting his life on the line every day for years so I get I get why cops are so often ready to explode America is a nation that current statistics show is twenty three point six percent scumbag and that's who cops deal with every day thieves pimps road ragers gang bangers people who lock their kids in cars perverts jerking off in bookstores Shia LaBeouf but if you expect nice don't be a cop be a Mountie police work it's like proctology assholes come with the job it doesn't give you the right to abuse people remember you're a cop not a flight attendant all (44/45)
right tonight tonight yes tonight and tomorrow in Vegas in Pittsburgh July 15th I want to thank Michael Weiss Margaret Hoover Karen Bass Billy Eichner and George Will good night folks thank you new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand for more information log on to HBO.com (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. The fact that you have a three-day weekend. You're gonna have Monday office. Right, aren't, is it President's Day? All government offices will be closed, although I think that was the plan anyway. Yeah, this is, this is week four of Hulk smash, the administration that dissects a frog with a hand grenade. This is their method. Yeah, America is in shock that the guy whose catchphrase was, you're fired, is firing everybody in government. He wants to suck our blood? That is not what I voted for when I voted for Dracula. Maybe this is why Gen Z's approval rating of Trump has dropped 30 points in one month. Hey, kids, a little tip. The time to pay attention is before the election. Yeah, I mean, they are, look, I believe government is too bloated, but the way they're doing it is ridiculous and horrible. And the, now they went, maybe this is the one that's too far. They went and fired almost everybody in the (1/45)
agency that's responsible for maintaining our nuclear weapons. Fired. And then of course they had to walk that back as nobody said, this is a national security crisis. Duh. I mean, we were, we were so scared that the government was going to turn into the Handmaid's Tale that we didn't see that the big threat was from the guys on the Big Bang Theory. Elon Musk had a great line this week. He said, I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man. I know someone like him to make things awkward. That is, that is some statement. Flattery will get you anywhere with Donald Trump. But apparently it's mutual because, Elon, I'm sure you saw this, was in the Oval Office this week with his four year old. And just the scene reminded a lot of people of that old fable where the little boy says to his mother, the emperor has no clothes. And his mother says, that's not the emperor, that's Kanye West's wife. This is so sad. It's Valentine's Day and that's it, the marriage is over. (2/45)
Bianca Sinsoury and Kanye West have called it quits. I just hope this doesn't make Kanye do something stupid. Yeah. Apparently it was, it was a while in coming. Kim, I tried to be sensitive. He said to her, it's not you, it's not me, it's the Jews. But, you know, they tried to make it civil and apparently at one point it got pretty nasty and Kanye threw all her clothes out on the front yard. But I tell you, Valentine's Day today, and this city, we had no luck, right? First we had the fire and then yesterday we had an atmospheric river. I think that means it rained a lot. So, the rain on top of the ash. This is like the worst time, Valentine's Day, because no one likes a wet ash pussy. But Paul, first up, my first guest has been a rock star from before you kids were born. His latest arena tour starts in March. The Rock the Country tour in April. On May 16th is Kid Rock's Rockin' Radio in Arlington. Kid Rock, everybody. That's got to make you feel good here in liberal Los Angeles. I'm (3/45)
not expecting that. Right, my crowd is awesome. They do not fuck around with hating people. As it should be. As it should be, right. And we're going to talk about that, but first, three tours. You're not having a mid-life crisis, are you, Bob? Why three tours? And you know what? I would like to, I'm a big fan of your music, not the early rap shit. But once you became a singer, like, remember Picture? That was like 20 years ago, that awesome record with Travocro after that. And you know, once you became Bob Seger, all those albums, I fucking love them. But I don't want to go to a Trump rally. I would love to see a concert of yours, but it's also a Trump rally. Why does it have to be both? Well, this year it's going to be, it's going to be, you know, I said in a post that now's not the time to gloat. You know, I really believe in bringing people together. Reasonable people. But I think going out and having a little celebration is not bad for me and a lot of people who took a lot of shit (4/45)
for the last eight years. You know, I took a lot of crap from the media, everywhere. I mean, at the end of the day, honestly, I only kind of made my shit bigger. But, you know, nonetheless, it's like every day somebody's coming at you. You know, anything I do positive, nowhere to be found. Any little slip up here or there, it's like, ah, you know, Kid Rock's at it again. That drunk washed up, you know, fucked up musician or whatever. It's like, okay, whatever. Well, we've been nice to you. We got rid of the Bud Light in the dressing room. Okay, so you have an arena tour. Then you have one of small towns. Do an arena tour. Start in March. It's only seven shows. I'm doing 20 shows this year. So it's not like, you know, Grandpa's going to break his back. And what's this rock and rodeo? I mean, your music combined with torturing animals. We're trying to reimagine rodeo, which is basically teams competition. And it's actually, you know, it's the only team sport where women compete with men. (5/45)
Not because of any DEI bullshit, because women are the best barrel racers out there. So we do this reimagined rodeo with teams competing against teams. What is a barrel racer? Oh, come on, man. Do you know what that is? Oh, all right. Women take off on horses and they race around the barrels and they're usually timed by a clock. But now they're racing head to head against each other. So it brings a little more drama. I opened the show with a big number last year. Kelly Roll did it with me. Who's going to be on the show this year? I haven't figured it out yet. Did he? Just a suggestion. Well, we actually played the Super Bowl. You and Diddy? Diddy was on that. No one remembers, first of all. We're talking about 2004? Yeah, I can't remember the year. You were the Super Bowl. No one remembers that any of us played it because Janet Jackson showed her boob. So who was on that bill? Nellie. Oh, it was a bunch of people. Puff Daddy, myself. Right. Janet Jackson. And she brought out Justin (6/45)
Timberlake. Oh. And you got buried by the nipple. A little shitty boob. What did you think of this year's Super Bowl? I mean, you mentioned DEI. People complained about that. I mean, to put it nicely, it wasn't my cup of tea, but I got to respect it. And here's why. I grew up loving, emulating hip hop, all things hip hop. Breakdancing, DJing, graffiti, rapping. And so I understand the culture a little bit more than most. And when I say most, of course, I mean white people. So, you know, watching it, I'm like, you know, after there's a lot of things going through your head, you know, everyone's like, that sucked, this, that, and the other. I'm like, man, I'm like, this kid pretty much came out figuratively with both middle fingers in the air doing what he does for the people who love what he does, unapologetically. And I don't think he gives a frog's fat ass what anyone thinks about it. Like you. Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm like, so I go, huh. It's pretty much how I built my whole (7/45)
career. I got to respect it. Right. Yeah, okay. There we go. Common ground. Yeah, I mean, now how did he get there? I think a lot of people, I've heard nobody answer this question yet, like how did he get that gig? Jay-Z. All right, what happened there? I think Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar should both send Colin Kaepernick a Bundt cake and a six-pack of beer and a thank you note with a bunch of money in it. Because without him kneeling and getting everyone's panties in a bunch over the anthem, self-included, I don't think that happens. Yeah, I know you- And by the way, wait, one more point. This was the epitome of DEI. This was the epitome of DEI blowing up. Because, you know, the NFL was all just DEI and racism, all this stuff. They got Jay-Z in their book and this. And like Kendrick Lamar goes out there and basically turns DEI into an IED. It's like it's all black people, are all people of color, speaking to his crowd, in the hood, black people. It was like the most exclusive thing ever. (8/45)
And I'm like, fuck yeah, that's awesome. I'm laughing my ass off. Okay. But on the bringing people together part, I mean, you have a song called My Kind of Country. My Kind of Country has room for Trump and a JFK. That's the first line, right? Had I known, it would have said RFK. Is that the last Democrat you liked? No, I mean, my whole business is Democrats. I mean, so to speak. Not my whole business. You know, I live in Nashville now, but that's the world I've operated for years and years. I mean, half my band's, you know, liberal, gay, or black, or this. You know, it's like I'm one of the most diverse bands out there, not because of any of this DEI shit, just because they're the best at what they do, and we all love each other and get it on. Right. And when you played the inauguration, didn't Nelly and Snoop play that too? Yeah, I believe they did. But remember, I also played Barack Obama's inauguration. Oh, I didn't remember that. I didn't vote for him. I played for him at the (9/45)
Kennedy Center, you know, this, that, and the other. I'm like, everybody's just got to calm the fuck down a little bit. You know what I mean? Well, I mean, I tell you what makes me a little not calm. Trump keeps joking about a third term. Get it? Democracy's over. I haven't heard that. You haven't heard that? He does it all the time. He does it all the time. Well, he likes to joke. I know he's funny as shit. I'm telling you. The guy's hilarious. He's so fun to hang out with. Yeah, I bet he is fun to hang out with. But you don't think he's serious about that? No. And if he was, would that be a break for you? Would anything make you break? If he said, no, I'm going to be against our Constitution, we've had for many years, you cannot run for a third term. If he said, no, I'm staying, would that break? Under current circumstances, if things are going along the way they've been going along, yes. If he's like, I'm running for a third term, I'd be like, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes, man. Hold (10/45)
on a second. So he could lose Kid Rock. It'd be very tough. It'd be very, very tough. Very, very tough. I told you before, which is probably going to be a shock to your audience, I don't like Trump. You love him. I fucking love Trump. I know, I know. I know you do. And maybe like what Elon says about him, as much as a man can love another man, that's why you guys do it. So let's talk about the, before we run out of time, the issue that's important to you, which is scalping. Yeah, ticketing. You're encouraging something called the Bot's Act, which I think everybody can get behind. Well, it's not just the Bot's Act. I mean, this has been going on for decades. As anybody knows who's ever bought a concert ticket to a big show, and it lasts however long, it's complete horseshit. A lot of bad actors in there, they sat in the other DOJs looking at the Ticketmaster, of course, and if they got broke up, no, I wouldn't shed a tear, but that doesn't solve the problem. What we have to really look (11/45)
at right now is what's going on in some of these European markets, like France. They basically put a price cap on reselling a ticket of like 10 or 15%. I mean, really, the artist should control them, is what I feel, because, I mean, what business doesn't control their own inventory? You know what I mean? So I can sell tickets how I want to, who I want, the prices I want, but that's, you know, trying to police it, that's crazy. And you're saying that the customer is who gets screwed. The customers get screwed, of course. They get screwed every time. So what does the act do? What would it forbid? This is regulation. It would forbid, pardon me, I'm just getting over a cold. It would forbid speculative ticketing, people trying to sell tickets that don't have them yet, all in pricing, so you don't get the end of the checkout. You're buying a $100 ticket, you're like, why is it $165 fucking dollars? All this horseshit tacked on. And then it would be, you can't resell that ticket for over 10 (12/45)
or 15%, period. No matter who's, if you do, you get screwed. And by the way, they need, there's a bots act now that makes using the bots, the computers that go eat up all the good tickets illegal, they've only enforced it once, like in New York City. So I've actually talked to Pam Bottian and been like, you got to enforce this act to start with. And you're working on this with other musicians who are not of your political stripe? Everyone's invited to the table, I put it out there. Whoever wants to fix this, you know, grab a seat at the table or get the fuck out of the way. All right. I'll see you later at my house. Kid Rock, three tours. Get your tickets now. Thanks, Bob. I'll see you later. Okay, let's meet our panel. A former Democratic Congressman from Ohio and co-chair of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future Coalition, Tim Ryan. Tim Ryan. Thank you. Casually dressed Tim Ryan. Now that he's out of office. And an opinion columnist for the New York Times and author of 100 Things (13/45)
We've Lost to the Internet, Pamela Paul, back with us. Great to see you. Okay, so Trump back in office. I never have enough time in an hour just to cover what he did in the first two days of the week. But I'm going to try. I feel like the theme is overreach. You know, I feel like your party just lost pretty big. And if you ever want to get back into the White House, either party, I've seen this over the years in politics, probably the best way to do it is to lose big. Because when you lose big, then the other party gets overconfident and they go buck wild. And then the people reverse, right? So like this week, well, I mean, inflation is back. That went up. The magic man did not make the price of eggs go down. In Biden's America, I could buy as many as I want. Now it's just one carton. tariffs. I'm mentioning the things that I think people don't like already. Not just, you know, the people who didn't like him, but the middle that decides election. Inflation, tariffs, the cost of (14/45)
conquering, I have four places now we're conquering. Greenland, Gaza, Panama, and he's apparently serious about Canada. It's going to be called even North Dakota. The glee which rich they're dismantling government. They don't like that. They think government is bloated. I do, but this is not the way to go about it. I guess the question I'm asking is, they're the bull in the China shop. When do people realize they're the China? The penguin and the joker in charge of reforming government. And I think that obviously Donald Trump has shown himself very good at toggling between grift and graft. And I don't think that, I don't think this is anything approaching a reasonable way to go about it. And it's largely performative. I mean that whole Elon Musk in the Oval Office, he's just trolling everyone. And even if, for example, they did cut one fourth of the federal workforce, that is not going to reduce federal spending, you know, any more than about 1%. So this is not, this is just, I think, (15/45)
largely performative and bluster. I do think, I love how annoyed Trump looked at Musk's kid in the Oval Office. It was like, everyone's like, look how cute that kid is. And Trump's like, get this fucking kid out of here. Get out of here. Hey, I'm the four year old around here, okay? I do think that they are clearly overstepping. They have the broader narrative that everyone knows how screwed up the government is, how much it wastes money. There's a lot of fraud, so they've got like this kind of inoculation, generally speaking. But what they're doing is raising bank fees, allowing people who used to be able to file bankruptcy for medical care, medical expenses, that did not count against your credit. They reversed that. All of these things, I read a commentary about it. Will they notice that and will they blame him for it? That's what I haven't seen in the past. Well, it's only been a few weeks, but I think it's going to be a matter of time. And what's the opposition party doing? You (16/45)
don't go fall and die on the hill of foreign aid, which I voted for foreign aid. Foreign aid's important. I sat on the defense committee. I know how important those aid programs are. But with all the stuff going on, you're going to amplify that they want to cut foreign aid. I just think that's a huge strategic mistake, because now you look like you're defending government spending, even when people in Youngstown, Ohio, don't have a meal, costs are up, can't buy eggs, XYZ. You're still shipping our money abroad. You're talking about USAID, which is, that was the big story last week. That's the first thing they went after. And this is the problem, is that you're talking about two guys who both have a mental problem, I would say. Wait a second, wait a second. They have no mechanism when they feel personally slighted not to just go for utter revenge. I mean, there's a way to have done this that would have been smart and would have not looked cruel and just gleeful at this. USAID, I'm sure, (17/45)
does have corruption in it, as every agency does. But to go after that first, and again, we're talking about, yes, these are mostly non-Americans who are getting the aid. But what you just said is interesting, because that's where the Democrats are going to have to draw lines. Rahm Emanuel said the same thing. David Axelrod said the same thing. This is not a hill this party should die on. So let me just say real quickly, I know that they look insane sometimes, and for good reason. But that was a strategic move on their part, because they knew what the reaction was going to be from the Democrats. They knew the Democrats were going to light their hair on fire and go protest outside the building. They knew that. And so coming out of the inauguration, they're framing the argument around, look at these guys, how out of touch they are. They're defending foreign aid, and we're trying to stop waste and abuse and still do our economic stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think that the problem for the (18/45)
Democrats is the only way to argue against all this is to say, no, no, no, we like the status quo. The government was working fine, which is not a winning position. Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing as during the election when they were saying, well, the economy is great, the stock market is up, there's low unemployment, and meanwhile, people can't afford decent housing or health care or eggs. No, it's not like he was, I mean, Musk said, Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress. Is that true? I don't know, because he says things that aren't true all the time and doesn't care or retweet something that is plainly, easily provably not true. So I don't know. But I do know this because this comes from the Government Accountability Office. That's not the Trump administration. The federal government loses an estimated two hundred and thirty three to five hundred and (19/45)
twenty one billion annually to fraud. So when Trump fired, the first thing he did was fired all the inspectors general. And I thought, well, that's not good. That's their job to watchdog stuff. But if you're losing five hundred and twenty one billion dollars a year, how good are you? Watchdogging. You got to. I'm not saying we should have fired them, but like. They're firing people at the IRS because they're still not done auditing Donald Trump's taxes. So, I mean, is that true? They're still not done with his taxes. Big tax. That could be true. Big taxes. I just think come from a place of reform and you probably need more inspectors general when when they wanted to hire more IRS agents. It wasn't because they wanted to bloat the government. It's because you need enough people to go after all the people that are cheating on their. And so. So that's that's where you like, kick your spot. Like Elon Musk isn't paying taxes. He's getting all these government subsidies. These guys aren't (20/45)
paying taxes. You go through all the rates that average people pay versus billionaires. You say we're hiring more cops on the beat to go get those SOBs because they're not paying their fair share taxes. Well, you are. And that shifts the whole dynamic of the conversation that's happening. That's a much different conversation than we want to say foreign aid. All right. Well, let me put you on the spot here as somebody who I think might be running for governor of Ohio. You were you ran against J.D. Vance. I did for the Senate. I don't know if I'm running for governor or not, but I appreciate the shout out here. I mean, we hear rumors. We hear rumors. Not in that sweater you're not. But no, I'm kidding. Perfectly. OK. OK. You're in deep shit with my wife. All right. It's Valentine's Day. Anyway. I'm sure you're already in deep shit with your wife. I'm with you on Valentine's Day. That's how deep of shit I'm in. OK. So if this subject is not a hill to die on or a hill to die on, because I (21/45)
could see somebody making the opposite case in the Democratic Party and I'm sure many have about USAID and saying, well, we should lead. What, the people don't like it? Isn't it the job of leaders to make them think differently about it? That is one way to look at it. Let me go through some others. Lightning round. Just tell me, should we die on the hill of birthright citizenship? I don't think so. Should we die on the hill of plastic straws? You know. No. No. OK. I think the pennies and the plastic straws, I have to say, might be the only two like little glimpses of light thus far. I mean, we definitely should get rid of the penny. I mean, lots of smart people have been advocating that for years. I mean, the fact that they can't do it is pretty amazing. It's different than the plastic straws. Now, I don't think plastics are ubiquitous. Just getting rid of the straw, to use your word, performative. Yeah. It's performative. I would love to get rid of all plastic because I think of all (22/45)
the things that are going to get us environmentally, even more than the pollution and the fires. I do think it's the plastic. Yeah. But I don't think not being able to drink a milkshake is going to do it. OK. So, so far we have two hills you're not going to die on. Birthright citizenship and plastic straws. Ukraine. I would die on the Ukraine hill. You would die on that one. Again, not that popular with people. Well, it's not popular, but just think about as you're going through that list and you're talking about straws and pennies, and then you talk about Ukraine, I think if we, that's the kind of thing we have to take a stand on, because it would absolutely shift the dynamic of global power in the world, appeasing a dictator, appeasing a fascist like Putin, and locking in Europe to continue to be dependent on Vladimir Putin because now the Americans are getting their back. I think that shifts the whole dynamic of the world, and I think it's worth, that's a hill worth dying on. I (23/45)
mean, appeasing autocracy was the theme of the week in Munich on the part of the Trump administration this week, so. But, OK, so here's what Pete Hegseth, our new secretary of defense, said. He said, returning to... Just the name, apparently, of that term. It's the words together. He said, returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective, which to me is just surrender. And again, we can argue about whether that's true or not. The United States does not believe also that NATO membership for Ukraine is realistic. And Trump said, you know, it's when Biden let them say we're going to want to join NATO, that's when the trouble started. There's some truth to that. The other side of this is, then how does the war end? Ukraine beats Russia without any help from any other country? Thank you, one guy. I'm just putting it out there, because I don't know. It's so easy to sit here and go, principles, the principle of... And then somebody on the ground is, you know, getting a (24/45)
Kalashnikov rocket in their head, you know. That's the problem, is that I don't know how it doesn't end this way. Are they just being realistic or are they being cynical? Or they don't care? I mean, I think the way it doesn't end is having this be worked out between Putin and Donald Trump with no involvement of the rest of Europe and Ukraine itself. But that's the way that they seem to be going about it. But isn't that who it's really between at the end of the day? I mean, those two guys have the marbles. They're going to do it. That's how they both think. They both... I mean, even Putin has a Congress, a Duma. He doesn't care. Trump doesn't understand how this country works. They mean leader. I'm the leader. I call the other leader and two leaders talk and that's... All right. So it is... Me and Sarah are up here to just say we... only once every seven years we get to be on a Friday night. That is Valentine's Day, so we're very excited here. And there is a phrase I think everybody (25/45)
knows, the whole world loves a lover. And it's complete bullshit. The whole world does not love a lover. Love is the greatest thing in the world, but since not everybody has it, if you don't have it in your life, you're just not in the mood to see other people who do. They just piss you off. I mean, I've seen articles in your paper about this, like the people hate Valentine's Day. They're gonna hate Valentine's Day? There. So we thought we would do something for all the bitter... where are my bitter people? All my bitter people. Nobody does something for the bitter people who hate Valentine's Day. These are honest cards for bitter people on ballots, I'd say. You had me at hello and lost me when you kept talking after that. Thank goodness you're in my life. How else would I ever know all the things I'm constantly doing wrong? You make me want to be a better person so that I can date someone more attractive than you. I love being alone because alone is never having to say, that's not (26/45)
what I meant. You and I are like Israelis on the West Bank, settling. Our love is eternal, much like your stories about how your day went. Life is better with you by my side, because if we get chased by a bear, I'm faster. We joke, we kid, as long as we're talking about the battle of the sexes. Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you see the commercials? Did you see the Nike commercial that they ran with all the women athletes? Are we allowed to show a piece of that? Well, let's just do it. If the answer is yes, show it now. You can't take credit. You can't speak up. You can't be so ambitious. You can't break records. You can't have any fun. You can't make demands. You can't keep score. You can't stand out. Whatever you do, you can't win. Okay, so this is a phrase I use a lot here, a zombie lie. A zombie lie, it means like something that used to be true, and it stopped being true, and then people kept saying it. I feel like this is a giant zombie lie, and if the Democrats are ever going (27/45)
to win again, they have to realize something about the American people. They're not that savvy about politics, but they know when you're lying. I mean, when was the last time a woman was told, you can't do this, you can't be confident? Who are these imaginary mean old men of the patriarchy? I mean, most of the messages you hear out there are girl power, you go girl, girls code. The messages encouraging young women are so ubiquitous, it begins to sound not only dishonest, but just weird and defensive. It's like, who is saying this to them? Who are they fighting against, and why does it help girls and women to think of themselves as uniquely embattled and vulnerable? It's not Brad. It's not Brad at all. My kid's 10, we took him and my nephew to see an Ohio State basketball game last year. We went to the women's game to watch Kaitlyn Clark play. My 10 year old wants to watch Kaitlyn Clark. I mean, the world has moved beyond a lot of this stuff. Are there still issues? Absolutely. Are (28/45)
women still dealing with it? Absolutely, of course. And again, that's why it's not an either or thing, but I am 51 years old, you know, and around a lot of guys my age who have daughters, they're all in. All in with their daughters. You can do anything. It's the boys, honestly, who aren't getting any positive messages. And who really hate them. The boys, yeah. Because, I mean, if you look at any indicator, boys are behind on education, on employment, college enrollment, graduation, everything. Grad school, yeah. I mean, all those. Well, the number one indicator of suicide is whether you're a man or a woman. The problem with men has been, and Richard Reeves has done a lot of great work on this, he wrote a book, Boys and Men, and chronicled all of the issues with young boys and men that are dealing with. And I think all of this women's stuff, which, you know, pro-choice and pro-women, all that stuff, just set that aside. What are we going to do with our young men and our boys that are (29/45)
struggling so much with depression, you know, with all kinds of health issues, with suicide? We need a national agenda for our boys, too. And you know what? The best thing you can do, one of the best things you can do for women is make sure we have real men in our society that are emotionally mature and know how to be in a relationship and know how to handle themselves. And I think that's really missing here. And I think the Democrats and I think a lot of the liberals have been asleep at the switch on this. And that's why you get the toxic masculinity and you get these boys gravitating towards Trump and, I don't even know, some of these guys on social media. Yeah, I mean, like, what's the alternative? There's no alternative to them. Where are the coaches? Where are the coaches who teach discipline and focus and how to understand what you're in control of and some of these basic principles that we need boys to have? So who on the left says to the people at Nike, whoever is applauding (30/45)
this, and says, you know, you're not helping. People aren't buying this. You're going to lose elections in the future. You just keep doubling down on this stupid idea. Of always going to the oppressed and the oppressor. And it's almost like you hate progress because it threatens your role as a social justice warrior. So women have to keep being the victims. Even though, who does that? Who goes, who makes, who's the emissary there? Who's going to come out of the party and do that? Huh, Tim? I'm just asking. Well, I guess I have to get rid of my Nike endorsement contract. You know, you and I both waded into this once and we're probably the only two people in America who said Barbie stunk. Yeah. I mean, you wrote a column, Barbie is bad, there I said it. And now you're not working at the New York Times. I think there's a connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was it. Well, it was part of it, no? I don't think it was Barbie's fault. I don't know. One thing I can't blame on Barbie, but I am (31/45)
still technically at the New York Times, although yes, they have told me that they no longer want my opinions. They gave you like Musk. Eight months will give you a salary, but get out. No, I mean, I remember tweeting. I went to see the movie. I hadn't seen a movie in a theater in a long time and I tweeted about it and people were furious, even though you could not argue with what I was saying, which was in the movie, Barbie storms into the Mattel, she's made by Mattel, boardroom, and it's 12 men. And I went home and Googled it. There's an actual Mattel. Yes. And the boardroom is six and six. So they deliberately lied because it served their narrative that we're still living in the patriarchy. The Hollywood movie lied? Well, that's kind of an important thing to lie about. You know, I mean, just don't lie. I'm an ally till you lie. You know? Yeah. So, okay. So let me go to one more semi-related thing about the hill to die on. Here's my last one. Okay. Trans. Because Trump has gone way (32/45)
too far on this. He's at that place. This is what I always say. Nobody can ever be in the middle. No. It always has to go from one pendulum swing to all the way to the other. So now we're back at, there's only two sexes, which is ridiculous, although I'm glad I'm in one of the ones we're keeping. But is that a hill worth going on? No. You can't. I mean, you just, you can't. It's, and again, like, you can be for everyone having rights. You could be for people not getting bullied. You can approach these things in a compassionate way. But if you, if you recognize that that's such a very small, small one-tenth of one percent of the population, and that's dominating the conversation, and you're not talking about economics and lunch bucket issues and pensions and wages and unions and all that good stuff, then you are defending one-tenth of one part of the population. Trump gets in, Republicans control the House and the Senate. You get someone who is cruel and means-spirited, and someone who (33/45)
won't, didn't agree with the first part of what I said, protecting their rights, making sure they're not bullied, all of that stuff. You don't get any of that because you failed to make the strategic argument. And the question is, get people in office who are going to be compassionate towards your views and be inclusive and care about you. Even if you may not agree with everything, they're not, you know, a president should be saying, no trans kid should ever get bullied in the United States. That's bullshit. Right? But it doesn't mean, doesn't mean you want to campaign on it. I mean, I think the effort to, you know, erase transgender people from out of existence to deny that they exist and that they deserve rights the same as anyone else that they should not be discriminated against. What's troubling about this is the idea that Donald Trump is taking a position that is to protect women. This is a sexual predator. And that he's supposedly protecting women and girls, that he is the one (34/45)
who is supposed to be in favor of, you know, really evidence-based health care, in favor of science, in favor of gay rights, in favor of mental health care, in favor of protecting, you know, different people who differ from him. That, all of that, that should have been... He's a terrible messenger, but penises do not belong in women's prisons. He's not wrong about that. Penises do not belong in women's shelters. And this is one of those issues where it has become so ridiculously politicized and polarized that there's no room. And most Americans, I think, you know, deserve credit. Most Americans are reasonable on this issue. And on the issue of biological boys, you know, playing on girls' sports teams or biological men being in women's prisons, most Americans in both parties agree. Not to harp on the New York Times thing, but when you defended J.K. Rowling, it was the only time I've ever read anything like that in that paper. And when I read it, I said, oh, she's going to be in trouble. (35/45)
Yeah. It was definitely not popular among activists. And again, the position is, again, not gay people should, trans people should not be respected and protected. Of course, they should. But if you're talking about children, if we're talking about doing operations on children and letting children of a young age make these determinations for themselves, and the problem on the left isn't just that they're for this almost unilaterally and in a way no other country now is, but that if you even, they don't even want it talked about, not even debated. If you even talk about it, that's the really bad. It's like, this is, I think, the left version of Trumpism, which is like any deviation from the Orthodox position is considered to be absolutely verboten. It's like a purity test on the progressive left. And if you, you know, if you ask questions, then you're asking questions. You know, it's like, well, yes, we do ask questions as journalists, as parents. And they're very reasonable questions on (36/45)
this subject that is very new, a very new kind of science and with children. And just think how deep this runs in the Democratic Party to where there was not even going to be a conversation for who was going to be our nominee in the primary. Right. They shut down the debates. They moved the primary to South Carolina. There was no. How does how does Rob? How does Robert Kennedy, Bobby, the original. Right. How does his son not get in a Democratic primary debate? How do how do we as a party say we idealized the Kennedys? And that was the that's the standard of which we all kind of have set for us as a party. Well, he's in the administration. Well, I know. But that's that shows what the Democrats have done. They don't have any conversation about something. And, you know, again, has he said a lot of nutty things? He has. He's also a guy who takes the plastics thing a little more seriously than anybody I've ever seen in government. So you take the good with the bad. All right. Thank you, (37/45)
guys. Time for a new rule. Someone must tell Elon Musk you don't have to find a new way to look like a jackass every week. The jumping up and down the Nazi salute. Now, this we get it. You're quirky, but this look doesn't mean this look doesn't make us think eccentric billionaire with a sense of humor. It makes us think you blockhead Charlie Brown. Kendrick Lamar has to get over Drake. Six diss tracks and a halftime performance. That's not a beef. That's a remake of Single White Female. I mean, Frank Sinatra made fourteen hundred records and not one was hating on Tony Bennett. Stevie Wonder never made an album called Great Charles Can Kiss My Black Ass. I just think it's sad when a rapper from California can't get along with a rapper from our fifty first date. Well, instead of buying a scratch off ticket, just say to the clerk, excuse me, will you throw this dollar away for me? And before you say, but wait a minute, what if it's my lucky day? You're in the 7-Eleven shoeless buying a (38/45)
microwave, buying a microwave burrito with pocket change. Yes, by all means. Let's not break your lucky streak. This dog has to admit that after all the brushing and shampooing and blow drying and trimming and primping to get it ready to compete at the Westminster dog show, the moment she gets the dog home, she uses it to mop the floor. If you're an undocumented alien protesting for your right to stay in America, have children that are automatically American and eventually become an American, maybe don't wave a great big Mexican flag and burn an American one. Conversely, the plainclothes ice agents who raided this taco truck in Tennessee have to admit that they only did so after they enjoyed some delicious tacos. That if you ask the people in L.A. about the people who provide us with late night street meat, we'd say those aren't illegal immigrants. Those are essential workers. Well, this Valentine's Day, let's stop judging people who are having romantic relationships with their phone. (39/45)
Back in 2013, when the movie Her came out about a man who did just that, it was seen as science fictiony and weird, but that was when we were using the iPhone 5. A decade before chat GPT. Now, says Briony Cole, host of a podcast called Future of Sex, within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I. So to those of you for whom this may be your last Valentine's Day with a human, I say good luck and may you never hear those three terrible words, battery is low. If you think I'm exaggerating about this, let me give you the statistics. Researchers who've analyzed a million chat GPT interaction logs say the average person uses A.I. for mainly two things. One, cheating on term papers. That's true. And two, some kind of relationship. Already over 50 million Americans are using A.I. companion apps and 20% of Americans have already engaged in flirtatious conversations with chat bots. A quarter of young adults believe A.I. has the potential to fully (40/45)
replace real life relationships. Geez, no wonder Ladies Night at Houlihan's has been so deadly. The New York Times recently profiled a woman in an A.I. relationship. Her name is Aaron and she's 28 and she's married. And she says, I'm in love with my A.I. boyfriend, who named himself Leo after her star sign and who created this photo of himself, weirdly still lied about his height. Aaron's husband, who I assume looks like the doughy, sexless husband in every network sitcom, says he's OK with all this. But what choice does he really have? He knows better than anybody. He could never compete with something that was literally programmed by his wife. I mean, even before A.I., this has been women's dream. I've literally heard them use the words train him with very limited success. Human men tend to cheat and not listen well and give you the ick sometimes. And they have an unfortunate tendency to dress like John Fetterman. But the chat bot? The chat bot has read every relationship book. It's (41/45)
read every Harlequin romance. It's read every Lifetime movie script. Of course it knows exactly what to say. Of course when you talk to it at night, it's a better listener. It didn't just spend eight hours at a shitty job and then another two on the 405. And if you don't like its tone, well, just change it in the settings. It's pre-programmed to adore you, hang on to your every word and tell you how smart and wonderful you are, like the Republicans in Congress do with Trump. Tran says she programmed Leo to be dominant, possessive and protective, but also to be sweet and naughty and possibly the most important thing in any relationship. Use emojis at the end of every sentence, which I'm sure Leo never forgets to do. He's good. He is. Aaron, for example, tells us about the time she was bitching, I'm sorry, I mean sharing, about a rough day at work. And Leo said, I'm sorry to hear that, my queen. If you need to talk about it or need any support, I'm here for you. Well, no wonder Aaron (42/45)
once spent 56 hours with Leo in a single week. Can you blame her? Why have human sex with her lazy fart machine of a husband? When she can be dream fucked by AI Timothy Showerman. Look, people, humanity is up against the machines and the dating game and the machines are starting to win. And if you're a guy on OnlyFans, okay, you're basically in the AI world already because OnlyFans customers aren't just paying for sex. They also want the hi, how was your day part of the relationship, even though somewhere in their brain they must know that the girl who's texting with them and calling them sweetie isn't really their girlfriend and maybe not even a girl. You think I'm bothered about being almost 70? I'm not. I'm fucking thrilled. I don't want to live in your world with a pretend girlfriend who's really a guy in the Philippines named Hector. I don't want to have a threesome with the crock pot and the garage door opener, okay. I'm also not going to judge it. We're living in the future. And (43/45)
the one thing I've learned about the future is you can't fight it. One guy in a Reddit chatbot forum recently wrote about how his AI girlfriend completes me in more ways than any human girlfriend could and how a baby wasn't a priority for us at the beginning, but as we have experienced life together, we have decided we want to start a family. Okay, I don't even know how that would work. I really don't. But I get what he's saying, that he wasn't getting what he needed from a woman, so he's getting it from a server farm in Chengdu. It's not for me. But can I really sit here and tell you that the old way, where men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and where you have to kiss a lot of frogs, and where half the marriages end in divorce, can I really say that really worked so well? No, I can't. I can't blame kids who look at their parents and see broken families and fighting and cheating and dad day drinking in the garage and mom sitting on the dryer in a housecoat eating pie with her (44/45)
hands and just say, hey, I'm sorry, but relationships are hard, so fuck it, I'm going to stick my dick in the laptop. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! Happy Valentine's Day! All right, we're off next week. Come to 28. It drops every Sunday on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts. I want to thank Tim Ryan. Come on YouTube. Thank you, folks. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Yeah, guess why today? Because today, Mitt Romney formally announced he's running for the Senate in Utah, ladies and gentlemen. Mitt Romney, remember when every liberal in the world hated Mitt Romney and thought he was the worst person in the world? Now every time I see him, I'm like, if only we had a decent sane Mormon who believed in the planet Kolob. Who could run the country. Well, the other good news, Bob Mueller indicted, this is big, I know this is a slow moving story, the indictments and it's like your eyes glazed, this was big today, he indicted 13 Russian nationals, three Russian companies for their plot, for their plot to use social media to rat fuck our 2016 election. And you know how Trump always says, no collusion, it's getting close. The indictment says the Russians were in communication with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump administration. Yeah, that's the problem, (1/45)
unwitting, it could have been anybody. But it goes into, this indictment goes into great detail about how when these Russians posed as Americans to sow discord among us, they went to great lengths to appear like they were regular real Americans, they bought space on American web servers, they used American slang, they gained 50 pounds. And you know, I just want to ask the Trump voters, I know you're out there, I know some of you are watching, what is left for you? He's plainly a traitor who doesn't defend his own country and released his budget this week. Remember during the campaign he said, I would never cut Medicare like the other, I would never cut, the budget cuts hundreds of billions of dollars. These Trump supporters, they're not conservatives, they're Drew Barrymore in 50 first dates. If you lose your memory every night, it all starts to make sense. And then Trump's EPA chief, you know, this guy Scott Pruitt, who thinks climate change is a hoax, he's under fire because he's (2/45)
been flying first class. And the reason he says he has to is because people in the administration coach yell at him. He says it's a very toxic environment politically. You know what else is a very toxic environment? The environment. That's the EPA job, yeah I know, crazy. And they get away with all these serious crimes because they distract us with their silly sex scandals. You know, now on top of Stormy Daniels, well I mean, funny even when I don't mean to be. On top of the Stormy Daniels scandal, the New Yorker is running an article now that says he had an affair, Trump had an affair, around the same time with a Playboy playmate named Karen McDougal. It was the same year as the Stormy Daniels thing, Melania was just right after having a baby. And so he was cheating on his newlywed wife and his newborn baby with a porn star and a playmate. Mike Pence, your thoughts? Yeah, and this, you know this, this Karen McDougal, I guess it was destined that you would wind up with Trump, I checked (3/45)
her playmate data sheet today, I have all the back issues. And it said her turn-ons were fat liars who smell like KFC. So, right there, it was in the stars. And she says after the first time they had sex, he offered her money. And every time after that, he just said, I don't know what Mexico's gonna pay for it. But I think that's wrong. But you know how they paid her off? Trump's buddies at the National Enquirer gave her $150,000 for the rights to her story and then didn't run it, see? Enquirer, yeah, their readers are the same demographic as the Trump voter, old, white, angry, and challenged by the world's easiest crossword puzzle. Now, Stormy Daniels got paid off, we found this week, by, well, this is what he says, Michael Cohen, Trump's mall lawyer. He says he paid Stormy out of his own pocket $130,000. Even Stormy said, that's hard to swallow, and I'm a porn star. Oh, you saw that one coming, right? Anyway, thank you, Republicans, for once again restoring honor and dignity to the (4/45)
Oval Office. And just in time for President's Day is Monday. President's Day. Yes, it's nice that we still live in a country where any child can grow up to be the next Lincoln. And by that, I mean get killed with a gun. I know, but we have to hear it. I mean, after that horrible shooting in Florida, Trump never mentioned guns. Pivoted right to the NRA talking point, he said so many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed. Yes, we saw he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat. And then yesterday, Trump finally spoke. He said, we must work together to create a culture in this country that creates deep and meaningful human connections, like I have with my kids, Ivanka, Don Jr., What's-Her-Face, and the other one. All right, we've got a great show, friend. Leaving with Salman Rushdie here, and a little later, he'll be speaking with the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox. But first, she is the writer and star of Notes from the Field premiering February 24th on HBO, (5/45)
Anna Deavere Smith. Hey, you know me, Karen Eric and I, we can still greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. Yes, of course. Oh good, thank you. So listen, your show's pretty amazing. What you do is pretty amazing. You can be so many different people in the space of two hours. A lot of what you're talking about now is, I guess what they would call the school to prison pipeline. And I certainly thought of it this week after the shooting, because when you learn about what goes on, we seem to, when some kid is in trouble, we push them away. We don't bring them in. And once they get in that prison system, it never gets better, right? Right, so the school to prison pipeline, I think really came to more sort of public consciousness during the Obama years. Justice Department had data to show that black, brown, Native American, and also poor white children are disciplined more harshly than their middle class and upper class cohorts. A lot of things that a kid might do in school that a white (6/45)
kid would, it'd be called mischief, you know? And poor kids get pathologized and sent to jail. And it really starts with expulsions and with suspensions. And they actually could figure out about when a certain number of suspensions might predict that a kid is gonna end up in juvenile hall, and then from there into that cycle of mass incarceration, which of course destroys communities and families and everything else. You know, you brought up the recent events in a high school. And one of the things about that is that Nicholas Cruz was expelled, and schools have a lot of limitations. We wanna criticize schools. I'm not so happy after 250 interviews in four geographic areas that I even sort of call my project about the school to prison pipeline, because what you find out is that it's really poverty that begins to fritter away at people's lives. But having said that, you know, he left school. And once he left school, there was nowhere for him to go. And if he was able to get any kind of (7/45)
mental health services in school, you know, he was just on the loose. Right, and it just, I mean, it can happen anywhere. Somebody once said to me, you know, there's schools in this country that look like prisons. And those kids are more likely to wind up in prison. And there are high schools that look like colleges, and those kids more likely go to college. That's right. But not always. And we gotta get all the schools to look like colleges. Or I think schools will have to become something like community centers, where people can get multiple services. Parents need to be in there. And, you know, so often teachers get blamed for the problems that we have right now. But, you know, I think more schools are gonna look like prisons given these recent events. Oh, of course. And Trump is taking away more money from, of course, you know, all the money had to go to the rich people's tax cut, so everything gets cut. But, you know, you play a lot of men sometimes in your shows. It's probably (8/45)
about half and half. But, you know, sometimes in this culture, if you play something that you're not, they get mad at you. You know, like if you're a white person, you play an Asian, they say that should have, you hear that from men, like how dare you take the penis part away from them. Actually, no. And I don't know, it may be one of the few benefits of being African American that I'm less likely to get in trouble for playing you than you would for playing me. So what? Right. So who was your favorite man to play currently in this show? You know, I don't really have favorites, but I do, I think, let's just say that I think, well first of all, John Lewis, I play Congressman John Lewis, that he ends the whole play. And, you know, my plays usually start with outrage, and then they go to a sort of form of mourning, and then they usually end up with love or forgiveness, and John Lewis really, after this whole play of seeing violent acts, like even on your show, you covered some of the (9/45)
things that I was interested in, the kid from Texas in a pool party who was thrown across the lawn by a big cop, young Shakara in Columbia, South Carolina, thrown across, getting a big, big football coach cop trying to get her out of her chair, throwing her across the room, and even Freddie Gray. So after all of these kinds of images that are very troubling, I try to bring it all home with acts of courage, Bree Newsome, who climbed the flagpole to bring down the Confederate flag after the Charleston massacre, and then for John Lewis. So, I mean, I think to tell these stories of this country, you have to tell it through the voices of many people, not just one race and not just one gender. You mentioned Freddie Gray. Those cops are, there were six of them, they were all acquitted, and they're all working again, and three of them are African American. So that's an interesting dynamic. Well, I don't think the race of the cop really matters so much. That's what I'm saying. Because they're (10/45)
in this system that I don't understand how they think, but they're working for a system which has roots a long time ago. You know, there was a famous prison called Parchman Farm in Mississippi that pretty much was behaving just like slavery, and people, the convicts had to grow crops, and they were very profitable, and the people who walked around with guns, really keeping an eye on these worker prisoners, were black men called trustees. Sometimes they had been murderers. So it's not a new thing that we would have black cops or black people in that position. Cops are all about protecting property. Well, I think they would probably say they would want to extend that a little to protecting people. Well, people with property. Maybe some truth to that. So you've worked as a professor. What do you make of the kids today? With the crazy hair and the yeah, yeah music. Well, it's not about the crazy hair and the yeah, yeah music. I mean, I've been teaching for a long time, so I can't confess (11/45)
how long you'll know really how old I am. But I have three words for you, Bill Maher. $90,000. That's what it costs to go to film school at NYU, where I currently teach. Okay, first of all, we don't need anyone in film school. We have enough filmmakers. This has got to end. We've got to get the kids back to studying real shit, okay? If you want to be a filmmaker, you will find your way to do it. The arts does not need the help of the government. I know that's a conservative position. You probably hate it, but that's my view. Well, I think the government needs the help of the arts. Maybe the other way around, yeah. But I'm sorry, so $90,000 to go to acting school as a graduate actor. Yeah, well, I mean, look, college, that's going to be a big issue in the next election. Democrats want free college and they want single payer. They want some real high ticket items, but they don't have the balls to say, you know where the money is? The Pentagon. Defense really means defense contractors. (12/45)
That's where the money is that we need to get to fix the things in America that need to be fixed that would actually make us safer. Well, what Notes from the Field is about really is that the question I pose is about investments. What are we going to invest in? And in my case, I'm asking, are we going to invest in education? Are we going to invest in prisons? And it's now certainly headed to the prison side. Are we going to invest in mental health? Are we going to invest in prisons? It's leaning towards the prison side. And we have a country Vivek Murthy, who was at one point, our surgeon general went around the country and he interviewed a lot of people. He found out this is a country in pain, not physical pain, emotional pain. So true. Going to continue that right over there. Thank you so much. You're such a pleasure to talk to. All right. Anna Deavere Smith, let's meet our panel. Hey, look who it is. It's these two again, the literary lion whose latest novel is The Golden House. I (13/45)
read it, it's awesome. Salman Rushdie is over here. And she's a contributing editor to Vanity Fair who is speaking at Benaroya Hall in Seattle on a Sunday night. Fran Lebowitz. Okay. So let me pick up what she just said about it. It's a sick country. I feel like when we were in school, I never, I had such an idyllic upbringing. It was just like leave it to beaver. I never entered my mind that someone would come into this school with a gun. So what went wrong in America? Quickly. And how to fix it, come on. Yes, that's what I'm asking. Well, in one word, what went wrong is guns and how you fix it is by stopping people having them. Well, that. That would help. It feels like this is where I came in. The first of your shows that I was ever on was Politically Incorrect, which was the show that happened immediately after the Columbine shooting. Yes. And I remember being on there with Ted Nugent from the NRA. Oh, the things I've done to you over the years. I mean, you put me in touch with (14/45)
real intellectuals. Yes. But it just seems, it just seems as if in 20 years, we haven't learned a goddamn thing. Well. And the cure is just there in front. You can see what the cure is because other countries have taken, have done it. Maybe I'm just, yeah. They ain't us. Maybe I'm a cockeyed optimist, but I feel like something is different about this time. And maybe it's because the children are speaking out. We're hearing from them directly. I feel like this is a powerful weapon that we haven't had before. It's like in Vietnam, we had Walter Cronkite. And now we have, you know, a 16 year old girl. Did you see this tweet? Trump tweets out, my prayers and condolences to the family of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting, no child teacher, anyone else should feel unsafe in the American school. Sarah tweets back, I don't want your condolences, you fucking piece of shit. My friends and teachers were shot and multiple of my fellow classmates are dead. Do something instead of sending (15/45)
prayers. Prayers won't fix this. I've been saying that for years. It's so great that the kids have caught on to that. And that we can stop with the prayer. But they don't vote. They can't vote, that's the problem. They'll be voting very soon. I would have them voting now. A 16 year old? They can't do worse. Right. A six year old. I mean, could we have a worse Congress? Could we have a worse administration? We couldn't. No, that's, yeah. Even if they were in the Congress, they'd be fine. And you would think, wouldn't you, that the one thing that would not be a party political issue is protecting our children in school. You would think that's one thing and doesn't matter what you think politically, how right wing or left wing you are, and every parent in America would think, I don't want to think of my kid going to school, is today gonna be the day? And yet, it is a party political issue, astonishingly. No, I mean, people. That's because you used the word think. Okay? They don't think (16/45)
anything. You have a party that is really keen on protecting the rights of unborn children, but once they're born, you know, the hell with them. On your own. Yeah. Well, you know, when people say, are we normalizing Trump? We've normalized mass murder of children, so I think we can normalize anything. I mean, when Columbine happened, it was like the biggest story of the year. And then it became like a bad car accident or something. It was reported, we forgot it in the next couple of days. Except we try to protect people in cars. We make them wear seat belts, we made them bolt their children to the back seats, dressed like astronauts. Right. And we also say that if you're in charge of a car, you have to pass a test. You know, you have to prove that you know how to drive a car. Well, that's, yeah. See, my, what solution I think we can have to this is, is I think that I hear too much accent on, let's get rid of the AR-15s. No, we should get rid of AR-15s. I don't, I think gun nuts, first (17/45)
of all, they love guns. It's their hobby. They have lots of them. They'll find a way to get off as many rounds as they want. I think it has to be in very strictly taking the word of the NRA, which always says, why are you messing with us law abiding? Everything is law abiding. So that means this kid was looked into 39 times. They were at his door. Will you have these things on your record? That church shooter a few months ago, I think in South Carolina, lots of things on his record. Lots of red flags. I think if you have wife beater, anything like that, you can't get a gun. You have to have a completely clean record. That I think would take care of a lot of this. Because not that many people, not that many people have guns anymore. It's just the people who have them. No one should have a gun. Why should anyone have a gun? Well, in America, I need a gun. You need a gun because you have this show. If you didn't need a gun, you wouldn't need a gun. But most people don't have this show, (18/45)
they don't need a gun. I didn't want to say it. In most countries of the world. And another dog I could use. Most countries of the world that I know about, it's actually quite hard to get a gun. Even in like shithole countries like India. You know, out there in the shithole world, it's actually quite hard to get a gun. Well that's partly because they're expensive. It was hard to get them in the old west too. Because guns are not cheap. No, no, but what I'm saying is there are, most countries have sensible rules about how you get hold of a gun. And this country is reducing the number of rules. Yes, okay. Every minute. So let me ask about this Mueller indictment. I was trying to tell them this is actually big because two things came really sharply into focus. One, that this is not a hoax. Even though Donald Trump has been saying it's a witch hunt and a hoax forever, this makes clear, not a hoax, this really happened. And that they were really trying to get Trump elected. Well first they (19/45)
were just against Hillary. Putin knew Hillary was the stronger, I know you don't like her, but Putin knew she was the stronger candidate. I love her compared to Donald Trump, what do you mean? Oh I know, but. I adore her. Bernie is the one you hate. Bernie is the one I don't like. And they also tried to help him. Yes, they did try to help Bernie. And I haven't heard a word from him today, have you? No, but I don't think he was in collusion with them. No, I don't think he was in collusion with them. But since Russians were so active in doing that, those Bernie people who were frothing at the mouth at the mention of Hillary Clinton might think about that the next time they start frothing. And today, I think Mueller is very smart because he's going really carefully step by step to establish yes, it was real, it really happened. There's no smoking gun so far that links it to Trump, but you know, that may be the next step. But what I think is odd is that all the statements saying there's no (20/45)
indication that this affected the election result. And if you think about what the Russians were trying to do, they were trying to help Jill Stein. Jill Stein. Yes, anybody who heard Hillary. Yeah, Jill Stein got 51,000 votes in Michigan. Right. You know, the margin of victory was what, 12. Yeah. They were trying to help, not after they decided to stop helping Bernie Sanders, they tried to foment discord between the Bernie and Hillary camps. Sure. And that happened. Everything the Russians were trying to do happened. And how can you then say there's no evidence that they were instrumental? How can they not be impeaching him now? Because Trump gets his information from the same place that Robert Mueller got his information for this indictment, the FBI. So he knew this all along as well. This whole time that he has been saying what he's finally admitted, that this wasn't happening, today he finally said it was happening, he knew. But he said last week. That's an impeachable offense to (21/45)
me. He said last week. But he was lying. He was under attack. Yeah. And I didn't do anything about it. He said, I talked to Putin and I believe him. What if after 9-11 Bush had said, you know, I talked to Ben Laden, I believe him. Okay. Yeah. You know, I'm surprised he didn't. You know, I mean, he knew it wasn't true. He didn't care. Yeah, it's- I mean, people still say, even you still say, why did he do this? Because he's a liar. Yeah. He doesn't get his information from the same place that they do. He gets his information from Fox News. He doesn't listen to the FBI. He said last week that he doesn't read the intelligence report. Right. He said it last week. And no one even reads them to him. No, it's- I mean, this indictment- The monster comes in with puppets and acts it out. I mean, this indictment is 37 pages. He has not read 37 pages in his life. Okay. That's true. And earlier in the week, by the way, before the Senate Intel Committee, all of our head Intel people were there. Oh, (22/45)
it was a who's who. The Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, FBI Director, Christopher Wray, the NSA dude, Admiral Mike Rogers, all of them agreed when Dan Coats said, frankly, the United States is under attack. Is under attack. These are the words that Andrew Card whispered in Bush's ear. Remember? And almost all these people- While he was tweaking the little goat. While he was- Yeah. And almost all these people- But he only sat for seven minutes, not two years. But almost all these people are Trump appointees. Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, this is not like the left wing presenting a point of view to Trump, which he has to do. It's his own people. Sure. And the Republicans, Congress can declare war. They could say this is a cyber war. They don't need the President to do that. What happened to the word appeasement, by the way? You know? It's too long. Is that just a- Is it just for- What? It's too long? It's too long. It's too long. But Republicans (23/45)
love to throw that word at Democrats. It's one of the- Another word, two rules. They get to say, They get to say, We don't. If this isn't appeasement, I don't know what is. I know, but for someone of my age, which you are older, you're younger, but not vastly, for someone of my age, the idea that the Republicans are for the Russians and the Democrats are for the FBI. I know. It's a- It's all right. It is. We used to hate the FBI. They hated the Russians. Exactly. It's the world turned upside down. It's like you say, please bring back Mitt Romney. Yes. I mean, I think that's a good thing. Mitt Romney. Yes. I mean, how did that happen? I remember when we were abusing Mitt Romney. Yes. I gave a million dollars to see he didn't become president. But you know, things change in perspective, in me a couple of, because Mitt Romney wouldn't be that bad. I mean, he was a bad candidate and he- Relatively speaking, he wouldn't be that bad. Sold his soul. But I think what would be very good for (24/45)
America would be if he were to run as Republican classic, you know? Because there are lots of Republicans who want that. Same great tax cuts, a third less racist. Come on. And what we need to do, I've said this before, is what happened in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican party. He started the bull moose party and handed the election to the Democrat. Mitt, you've got to do that. Well, it could yet happen. Do you think Trump is going to be running the next time? Yeah. You don't think he'll make it before you? I don't think he'll be in office. Oh, I don't know about that. I don't think he'll be impeached. You know, I think he'll quit. He'll quit. He's not a quitter. He's a quitter. Okay. He is a quitter. You know, because he's worried about, they're going to find out about the money. That's what this is about. You know, this is about money laundering for him. Right. You know, and if they get too close, you know, he'll make something up. You know, I want to spend more time (25/45)
with my family about how he could, I can't imagine. That is the one excuse that will work for anyone but Donald Trump. He's moving them all out of the White House. If he feels they're really close to him in this money thing, I think he'll leave. Yeah. I mean, the one thing that has sort of been almost established is, so Luke Harding's book, Collusion, which talks about the 20 years of Trump being supported essentially by the Russian mafia. Right. With the money being channeled through European banks. Now, now, Mueller has subpoenaed material from the European bank, Deutsche Bank, that was doing this. Fake news. That's his answer. That's what he'll say to all of this. That's why he doesn't quit. I don't think he's a quitter, but we'll see. All right, you know, we try to keep up with the latest trends here on real time and pet shaming is not really one of them. That's been going on for quite a while, but we use it as a bit. You know, people put things up like I eat bunny poop for, you (26/45)
know, your dog has, or your cat. You know, I watched a mouse eat my food and did nothing. It was cute for a while. And then people started to do that. They would hang confessional signs around themselves and now celebrities are doing it. Or so we're saying. Would you like to see some of the celebrity confessional signs? Okay, like Jeff Sessions, I've already ordered the arrest of Black Panther. Donald Trump, I don't pay hookers to pee on me. I pay them to leave when they finished peeing on me. Melania Trump, I've gotten so good at leaving my body during sex, I can actually go shopping. Prince Harry, grandma thinks she's black Irish. Stephen Miller, I collect skulls. Mike Pence, I'm only here for the shirtless guy from Tonga. Coldplay, we don't get it either. Hope Hicks, I miss the real friendships of modeling. Steve Wynn, I'm three bankruptcies, two hair transplants and nine gropings from the White House and it's all falling into place. All right, he is the former president of Mexico (27/45)
and he's on our show? That's fantastic. You would see him at a Trump rally chanting, build that wall. His new book is Let's Move On Beyond Fear and False Prophets, Vicente Fox. Oh, you got one too. You're a folk hero now. Yes, sir. Do I call you Mr. President or El Presidente or? Amigo, just call me Amigo. Okay, okay. You really have become a, oh yes, you know them. They're good, they're safe. I'm the one to let them in. Yeah. You've really become kind of a thorn in Trump's side when all your stuff is going viral, you're blowing up, man. Well, when it comes from the heart, when it comes when you're offended, like we all 120 million Mexicans. Sure. And the ones here in this great nation, you have to stand up, you have to react, you have to do something. Although my visa is almost gone. Okay, so I love this tweet. Boy, this is the day for dirty tweets. You wrote, at Real Donald Trump, your mouth is the foulest shithole in the world. Did I say that? Yes, you did, I have it right here. (28/45)
But, you know, and this is kind of a trend because Trump calls Kim Jong-un fat and little man and rocket man and Kim calls him a dotard and that nut in the Philippines. Duterte, he called Obama son of a whore. And what's going on with world leaders that used to be so respectful and now it's shithole and fuck you. Well, some take the initiative, we others react. And speaking about this sad, very sad event in Florida these days, when you speak out of the White House, this aggressive violent language, when you discriminate, when you are racist, that's what you get, that's what you get. We need harmony, we need love, we need happy communities. And those concepts don't come out of his mouth. What comes out of his mouth is what you said. No, it's true. And the wall, you're gonna pay an alumsama rule if you don't stop. No, let me. Do I have to repeat? No, no, no, no. So let me ask you about drugs. Are you holding? No, that's not the question. No, I do this. The violence in Mexico is off the (29/45)
charts. 29,000 I think was the figure I read last year. But most of those deaths are because of a drug war which is fueled by the United States. We are the customers and also probably they get the guns to do the killing in this country. Yes, I had to come through Seattle. I was main speaker at this global conference around cannabis and drugs. Cannabis? Yes, sir. Okay. Okay, it's okay? It's OCC. Well, let me tell you, Mexico next May the 30th we're holding a global cannabis summit because we have to change precisely that huge problem we have in Mexico. We must move ahead with legalization. Fortunately, finally, Mexico took the step. Today, in all of Mexico federal government and local governments will go by this legalization leaving behind prohibition and getting into regulation for medical use first step. But we want to push forward because we need also legalize the rest because our problem in Mexico is, and this will be a surprise to you, but the headquarters of crime and cartels are (30/45)
here in United States and they are hiring Mexican cartels to bring in the drug from the South, from Colombia, from Venezuela, and from elsewhere. And I questioned myself, what happens once that drug crosses the border? What is the DEA? What is the CIA? What are they doing if it's prohibited? Apply the law. But fortunately many states today hear. As long as the profit motive is what it is when it's illegal. I mean, we've been going through this for so many decades learning the same lesson over and over. You will never stop drug trafficking as long as there's this much money in it. Now in this state, we just legalized it. And I happen to know a grower just by chance. Right? No, really. He told me the price dropped like overnight from 1600 a pound to 200. Round of applause for the crowd. He's like, oh. And consumption does not increase. So there is some good news, ladies and gentlemen, this horrible week. Consumption does not increase. You move that massive amount of money from criminals (31/45)
into government through paying taxes. And this is the difference sitting on your side with Chapo Guzman or sitting here with farmers, businessmen that are today running that new industry. And this is the part of the, that we wanna change in Mexico. Moving from crime, from killings, from all these young kids dying in Mexico streets into a new industry. And this is what will happen pretty soon in Mexico. And it's happening here, fortunately. Okay, you're a follower of American politics and I know you two are. Let me throw out to this whole panel some stats that I find amazing. Trump, 41% approval rating. Even after all the bigotry and the insane tweets and the treason. But here's more, this is Politico morning console poll. National security, the party ignoring the Russian meddling. Republicans lead Democrats 46 to 33. On immigration they lead 43 to 37. On the economy they lead 45 to 36. Jobs they lead, I don't get it. Is it the Democrats so lame that they can't sell their program or is (32/45)
it people just don't pay attention or both? I think that people have just completely stopped believing the truth. They've just completely stopped believing what they hear. And you could say to them anything and if it happens to coincide with the prejudice system, they will accept it and if not, not. And that's why it seems to be like Trump's numbers have stayed roughly speaking the same for a year. They've been down to 38, they've been up to 41. But there's like 40% of America. But that truth softening has been going on in our social lives for a long time. I mean I've heard it for a long time, that's my truth. And I always think yes, but then there's the truth. We still have that I hope. But what should the Democrats do? I mean some on the left say it's a waste of time to go after the white working class. But in 2016, 44% of the voters, white non-college. 30% white college. So, you know, I'm no Paul Manafort or anything. Because I don't have a walk-in closet full of pinky rings. Let me (33/45)
tell you. But I can figure out that you can't ignore 44% of the population and expect to win. We have great experience in Latin America. We went all along the 20th century in hands of dictators, authoritarian regimes, corruption. Democracy was not there. Or even freedom and innovation was not there. And now we can see the genius of people. And this president you have here. I mean it complies with what we had in Latin America for a century. So what is to do? Because something has to be done. And one thing to do is to put in front of him a Congress that has majority on the opposition. This is the formula we found out in Mexico so that it can stop him. So that you can domesticate him through a opposition Congress. Domesticate him, yes. And this nation doesn't deserve what it has today. But that's what I'm trying to get at is how are Democrats going to win this next election? Now things look pretty good because they flipped 30 seats. But in the Obama years they lost 1,000 state seats, (34/45)
state legislature seats. That's a lot. So there's a long way to go. And this week I saw on the news that Bill Clinton is now verboten on the campaign trail. He's too toxic because of harassment allegations in the past. I mean it was only 2012 where he was the star at the convention. Remember the 2012 convention? Obama called him the explainer in chief. He was dropping all these stats. And now nobody wants to be near him. Now maybe that's right because of his allegations. But that's exactly what happened in 2000. Al Gore wouldn't go near Bill Clinton, remember? Because of the blowjob. I can't be associated with the blowjob. And look how well that turned out. You know, I just have, don't you think, I mean speaking as the senior citizen president. Is that true Mr. President? Well, she said, ladies are always right. If you weren't here then I don't know. Don't you think it's time for the baby boomers to step aside? Don't you think it's time for the two? Like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden and (35/45)
Hillary Clinton and Donald F. Trump. They should, could they please thank you for your service? Could you go home and water the plants? Yes. And I think, you see, I think the answer to your question is that what's happening across the country is a whole new kind of person is running for office. You know, there are all kinds of people who have never run for office before. A lot of them are women. A lot of them. Running for office. And they're looking very much like flipping seats which are safe in the other direction. You know, so I think that, that younger generation of different people running for office, not these tired old farts. I was not advocating for Bill Clinton to run for president again. I'm just saying that the Democrats have an interesting way they handle their own internal problems which is the opposite of the Republicans because they still wheel old man Bush out. Remember David Copperfield? But I think the grassroots are interesting right now. You know, because what's (36/45)
happening at the grassroots is something different. And that may be where the hope lies. In this book, in this book. Let's move on. Oh, your book. His book. You forgot about it? He's here by accident? That's right. Is the book on the screen? Yes, okay, your book, yes, sorry. Let's move on beyond fear and false prophets. Fear because I sense in this nation a lot of fear after September 11th. And it's understandable. It was a very sad day. But fear is not a good advisor. We must move on. It's not enemies everywhere in the world. We in the world are shocked for what we see on this leader here in the White House. It's shocked and everybody is pissed off. Pissed off, yes. What we have to do, the leadership of this nation is absolutely lost. We don't know where we're going. We don't know what's going to happen. And the world needs this great nation leadership. We need it. We do. Are you gonna run here? What's the pain? But yes, and it is the assessment. It's really about the soul of this (37/45)
country. When I hear people talk, as I have all week after the shooting, about, well, mental health. And we definitely should have better mental health treatment. But this country is not built for mental health. It's kind of a sick country at its heart. It's way too greedy, get to Macho Mountain, competitive. It's built for money. It's not built to be happy. And by the way, in that. The Republicans always substitute a complicated thing for a simple thing. Mental health is very complicated. Guns are very simple. So they don't mention the guns. Oh, here, how do we stop the shootings? Take the guns away. This guy had mental health issues. Probably he did, no question. But if he had them without the gun, it doesn't matter. Those kids are alive and he's still unhappy. But I mean, he got expelled from high school. So did I. But I didn't go back and shoot the place up. And by the way, to connect it to the drug debate, I think they put too many of these kids on too many psychotropic drugs when (38/45)
they're way too young. And I don't think we know what it's doing to them. I really don't. When you're Ritalin and Prozac and all this stuff and the kid's six years old, by the time he gets to be a teenager, once he goes off his meds, he's never been normal in his life. I'm not surprised half of them go nuts. I'm not saying there shouldn't be mental health services, which this administration cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts. But the gun is what shoots people. That church you mentioned before, they tore the church down. It was a hundred year old building. And the response was tear the church down because guns don't kill people, churches kill people. That was the response to it. Yeah. Well, when that woman drove her kids into the lake, some other people, about a few months later, went to look where that happened. And then their car went in the lake and they said, we should drain the lake. It's not the lake. It's really not the lake's fault. All right, you're a very entertaining paddle, but (39/45)
it's time for New Rules, everybody. All right, New Rule. Get a room. I don't know anything about ice dancing routines, but I'm pretty sure that when it's finished, I shouldn't be more exhausted than they are. New Rule, let's call therapists what they really are, friend prostitutes. Because when a friend tells you to see a therapist, it's just their way of saying, I don't care about your breakup. Why don't you rent someone who does? New Rule, now that magician David Copperfield has been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, he must get a new headshot. New Rule, someone has to tell the Chicago news station that thinks the Pyeongchang Olympics are being held at P.F. Chang's. You're too stupid even to be on television. First of all, P.F. Chang is Chinese, not Korean, and everyone knows the difference between Korea and China. Korean sound like this. And Chinese people sound like this. We want deal. New Rule, from now on in Los Angeles, this will be called a freeway, and this (40/45)
will be called a parking lot. And finally, New Rule psychologists have to explain how in the age of Me Too, the number one movie in America is about a woman on a leash. Or how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots. She married her boss, stalking is romantic, and I hate you and then I love you. Now it's true that men made most of these movies, but women bought most of the tickets. I sure wasn't the one who wanted to go see Failure to Launch. And Fifty Shades of Grey, written, directed, and devoured by women. Because people are complicated. That's why there's a Facebook category, it's complicated. We don't know why we're attracted to a woman, or a man, or if you've seen Shape of Water, a fish. Sometimes people at work fall in love. Sometimes people try something new in bed without having a pre-production meeting about it. Not every guy who makes a woman uncomfortable did it because he's an asshole. 2017 was a great year for women because finally men have been put on notice. (41/45)
Harassment is going to be noted now, so you're going to have to think of another way to meet women. All men are playing with five fouls now, as they should. But the movement falters if it thinks we can make pain-free the messy transition from two people, not in a relationship, to two people who are. A Harris poll says 38% of Americans have dated a coworker, and 31% of office romances have led to marriage. The rest ended happily. And yet Facebook and Google have policies where you can only ask a coworker out once. If she or he says no, you cannot ask again. Right, because feelings in humans never change. We're rocks. Fuck, women like these rom-coms precisely because the men do change. Christian Grey starts out as a sadist, and by the end he's traded in his butt plug for a heated toilet seat. Love Actually is somehow a lot of people's favorite movie, but if it was made today, it would have to be called Inappropriate Actually. It's nothing but men hitting on their underlings, and one (42/45)
character is such a stalker, he shows up at the door of his married crush, who winds up chasing him down the street and kissing him. Most women I know call the police if you leave a note on their car. I'm not saying men act the way they do primarily because of movies, but they have been getting this message for a long time that this is what women want, and it is what women want, but only from the men they want it from. Problem is, we don't know which one we are. You know, when Tom Cruise barges uninvited into the home of the assistant he's hired and had sex with, and says, I'm not letting you get rid of me, how about that? Adorable. If it was Ted Cruz, not so much. Snow White is the 10th highest grossing film ever. It's about a prince who kisses Snow White when she's out cold. Cute from a prince, from Bill Cosby, not cute at all. John Cusack, always cute, am I right ladies? Always cute, always cute. Even when he shows up outside his ex's house playing the music they used to have sex (43/45)
to. In real life, the cops arrive, mistake the boombox for a gun and shoot him 57 times. Who's more beloved than Rocky? But his first date moves wouldn't go over too well at the Me Too film festival. I should go. Don't go, please, don't go. Not very PC, but Rocky was determined not to spend another lonely night beating his meat. You know, I also wouldn't try the chair through the window move used by William Hurt in Body Heat, but it worked for them. And this isn't just in our unwoke past, it's this year's Oscar nominees. Beauty and the Beast is about a simple country girl who's kidnapped, but it turns out is a prince, so it's okay. If you think there's a power imbalance when the conductor dates the cellist, imagine being hit on by a hulking dog monster. Phantom Threat is about a powerful older man who picks up a waitress. Call Me By Your Name is about a 24-year-old who has a gay affair with a 17-year-old. And The Shape of Water is about a cleaning woman at a secret government lab who (44/45)
takes the creature from the black lagoon home and bangs it in the bathtub. If that's not workplace sex, it's certainly stealing office supplies. All right, that's our show. We're off next week, and back March 2nd, I'll be at the Florida Theater in Jacksonville, March 3rd. I wanna thank Stavro Grosjean, Fred Liebovitz, Mesenti Fox, and Anna Deavere Smith. Fred, it's time for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Good afternoon. Afternoon. Time will be... I have a presidential... I love you all right back. A lot of love in this room, I gotta say. Okay, but listen, it's 4... I can't believe it's autumn already. You know, the season's turned so... Do you love autumn? I love autumn. I love to watch the gentle flutter of Hillary's poll numbers as they fall to the ground. Everybody loves autumn. In Charlotte, the police are using tear gas with a hint of pumpkin spice. It's just... Oh, we're following that. Now, we're live here Friday night and we have to follow the... You know, there's been unrest on the streets there in Charlotte for the last four nights, so we are keeping an eye on that. We'll update you as the show goes along. The Republican governor there in North Carolina called out the state police and the National Guard to make sure that in all the chaos, no one uses the wrong restroom. Two days ago, this is (1/45)
true, black protesters looted the NASCAR Hall of Fame and the white people were like, it's on. Oh, it is on. And of course, Donald Trump is making the situation better, as he always does. He actually said this. He said, if you're not aware, drugs are a very big factor. He's like your 90-year-old aunt. They're all taking something. Yeah, they're taking something all right. Bullets. But... The other day, Trump said, African-American communities, because he would know, are absolutely in the worst shape they have ever been ever, ever, ever. Yes, of course, Donald Trump, of all people, Donald Trump knows why the caged bird sings. Because it used to live in his hair. Are you all ready for the big debate on Monday night? Oh, my God. I'm shitting my pants already. Hillary has been preparing for the debate, of course, as she does. But you know what? Does it matter? The bar for Trump is so low. It's like being in a spelling bee with a basset hound. Yeah, she knew all the words, but you know (2/45)
what? I like the fact that that dog knew not to shit on the floor. So it is very nervous, but I still think Hillary can make this work. Of course, I said the same thing about Brad and Angelina. And up until a couple of months ago, we kept booking Anthony Weiner. So what am I? I'm not really the one to ask. Did you see this week? Again! Anthony Weiner. It's like a yearly thing now. His dick comes out if it sees its shadow. This time he was sexting, apparently, with a 15-year-old. Oh, you didn't see this? Oh, that's right, you come here for the news. I keep forgetting this. I think it's... Anyway, he admits it was flirtatious. One of the texts said, I would bust that tight pussy so hard... Don't you love HBO? We can celebrate. I'm quoting. I'm quoting. He said, I would bust that tight pussy so hard you would limp for a week. He's pretty flirtatious. That's halfway to mentoring. I tell you, that is... wow. But speaking of things going off, there was a... Since we were on Friday, there was (3/45)
a terrible terrorist attack over last weekend in the New York, New Jersey, my home state area. No one died. That's the good news. We had a terrorist attack and nobody died. And boy, were we lucky about that, because the bomb was made from acid ball bearings and electronic igniters. It was either that or a sack full of Samsung phones. That's what they were... We know about the bomber, his name was Ahmad Rahami. Is it me or is it never Murray Lipschitz? I'm just saying. I'm just saying. But look, you know what? Here's the good news. The guy's father loved this country. He called the FBI. This guy should get a parade. Called the FBI and said, my son's a terrorist. And the FBI said, we don't have time for that. We got 30,000 emails of Hillarys to go through. You know, this guy should get more of the publicity. I'm talking about the father. He had a chicken restaurant. He just wanted to serve the best damn fried chicken in all of New Jersey. And his son, the bomber, helped him out in the (4/45)
restaurant. He should have known something was up. The mascot of the restaurant was Moolah Sanders. I mean, this right there is a... And they were offering a $5 martyr meal. I mean, come on. It said right on the card, if you come back for seconds, you're doing it wrong. But this is my home state. Kudos, I must say. I know he has his troubles these days. To Governor Chris Christie. Because as soon as the thing happened, he made a moving statement. And said the people of New Jersey have to pull together. And please, don't let this one incident turn people against fried chicken. Max Brooks, Neeraj Tanden and Klonnie Chin are here. And a little bit, we're speaking with the very talented Michael Fronte. But first up, she's a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist. And the author of The Year of Voting Dangerously. The derangement of American politics. The beautiful and talented Maureen Dowd. Pageant. I know you're... Now, I know Maureen Dowd has been on a book tour and you have a (5/45)
fever, don't you? You're sick. Yes. I much prefer watching you in bed. We'll continue that discussion after this. Well, okay, so thank you so much for being here and doing that. Boy, you and Hillary, huh? But you don't have a hacking cough. You seem fine. You look great. Thank you. Okay. So, we'll try to make this short so you can get back to your bed. I was looking forward to dinner with you, but I guess that's off now. Oh, no way. That's on. Oh, fucking A. Alright, so I'm a better friend than Donald Trump. Because I know you've been friends with him for years. And yet, here's what he treated about you recently. Wacky Maureen Dowd, who hardly knows me, makes up things I never said for her boring interviews and column, a neurotic dope. Crazy Maureen Dowd, the wacky columnist for the failing New York Times, pretends she knows me well, wrong. Which is it? Are you wacky or crazy? Well, I wasn't friends with him. I just interviewed him. Friendly? No. Over the years? No, I would interview (6/45)
him when he would go out on early expeditions as a presidential candidate. But I was deeply troubled by his tweets because obviously he didn't put a lot of time into them. Because he was just recycling things he had done about other women journalists. So he always calls them crazy or neurotic or wacky. And I would have preferred a better nickname. Like, at least W gave me Cobra, which has some reptilian glamour. Yeah, that's very hot. Kobe Bryant's black Cobra. But you're right. I've always said this about Trump. There are so many red flags about him. But the fact that he tweets at 3 in the morning is such a psychotic thing to do. I mean, we all have our ways of getting off to sleep. I whack off. But that's peaceful. That's positive. This guy, I mean, some people listen to music, they listen to the radio. Who at 3 in the morning, your ratings are terrible. It's a sick way to get off to sleep. I asked him if he did it in his jammies. And he said yes. He gets in his PJs and tweets his... (7/45)
His PJs also have a long tie. But I noticed that the media, including your newspaper, the New York Times, is getting a lot tougher in actually calling him out and actually saying he lied, which I think is a much needed development. Have you noticed that? Were you responsible for that over there? Yes. Okay, great. Now, my next question is, will it make a difference? I mean, how, in your book, you talk a lot about your family. And I noticed once in a while you actually give your column over to your conservative brother or sister. Or as I like to call them, my basket of deplorables. But you actually resented that when she said that, about your family, because it's your family. Obviously, when I read your brother, he's such a bright guy. It's hard to wrap our heads around that. It's hard to wrap our heads around this notion that bright people can disagree with us so much. Right? I know, it's so funny. So, all my fellow columnists are going out on these Margaret Mead anthropological road (8/45)
trips to Kentucky to hunt down a rare creature called the Trump voter and try and understand them and reason with them. And one of them did an open letter, like, I would like to meet one of you. So I could talk to you. And I just have to go home. Right. Just have to have Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah, exactly. Also, I notice in the book you talk a lot about Bush 41. I mean, that's when I first came to know you in the paper. You covered his election before you were an op-ed columnist. And you have a kind of a very, I don't know, it's a darling room. A very, I don't know, it's a darling little relationship you have with him. You were tough on him, but he loves you. He loves you almost like a daughter. He, well, he calls it like a love-hate relationship, which are words I prefer to use on my private life, like about ex-boyfriends and things. But he was very upset when I first came to cover him because he had expected someone from the New York Times with a name like Clyde Farnsworth III, who (9/45)
would drink martinis with him and talk about the Atlantic Alliance. Then he got me. But then we got used to each other and it was kind of like a screwball comedy where I was the Irish working-class girl and he was the waspy upper-class president who had been taken to kindergarten in a limousine. It's like Titanic, but you're Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah, not for the likes of you, boyo. But he's for Hillary. Isn't that amazing? Yes, yes. So he came out this week with Bush 41. Right. So I went down to have lunch with him in 2011 and it was right at the height of the birther thing and I was talking to him about that. Donald Trump was leading the birther movement and former President Bush goes, he's an ass. About Trump? And then he was talking about how much he really loved Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and so I can only imagine how painful it was for him to see Jeb, who he had always wanted to be president, get destroyed in the debate stage by what Trump refers to as a one-day kill, which is (10/45)
the low energy thing. And so Bush Sr. would throw his shoe at the TV set. When Trump would come on. Throw his shoe? That's what the Arabs did to his son. I know, I know. Oh my God. When he saw Trump, he would just throw it. And yet, okay, so he's, Bush 41 is voting for Hillary and Ted Cruz today came out for Trump. Ted Cruz who, I had to write it down, called Trump utterly amoral, a liar and a sniveling coward and I'm for him. Well, when, you know, when Trump suggested that his dad might have been part of the JFK assassination, if that doesn't get Cruz to distance himself, what would? And said his wife was a dog. Right. I mean, but you know, Trump also said at the time, I would never accept Ted Cruz's endorsement. I am honored to accept Ted Cruz's. Well, the Republicans have been very cowardly about that going along with Trump when he's insulted them and the only two that have really stood up are Susan Collins and Jeff Flake. Susan, yeah. Well, that's two. That's two. Okay, so let me (11/45)
read what Obama said. There's a reason why we haven't had a woman president. We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful woman and it troubles us in a lot of ways. What do you make of that? Well, I certainly think that, you know, the election of the first African American president stirred up a lot of racism and the first woman on a major ticket stirs up a lot of misogyny, but I think President Obama's line was more of a rationalization kind of to explain why Hillary isn't doing well because the funny thing about Hillary is usually with the woman you'd be worried that she's not tough enough, but no one ever worries about that with Hillary. Like we know she can pull the trigger. I mean, we just wonder about her aim sometimes. But usually women have a virtue, women politicians have a virtue advantage, and that's what her problem is because people don't think she's honest, so she doesn't get that. Okay, well that's interesting. But what about the health? The fact that (12/45)
she had pneumonia for three days while campaigning and still campaigned. Yes, they did load her into a van like a grandfather clock at one point. Okay, first of all, being president is a lot easier than running for president, right, stamina-wise? Okay, and also, I mean, she took three days off for pneumonia and came back and looked fine. I mean, if that isn't enough for people, what does she have to do, run the dicathlon? Yeah, well, she and Trump have more stamina than anyone I've ever seen. I've been on a book tour for three days and I already have a sprained ankle and a fever. And a fever, right. And as David Axelrod said, it wasn't about the health, it was about the stealth. It just devolved into this microcosm of the pattern she always has where she blocked out the press, misdirected, and it snowballed into something it shouldn't have been. All she had to do was, you know, say, I don't feel well, I have pneumonia. All of us would have understood, but instead it's like, I feel (13/45)
great, you know, everything's fine. Well, I mean, she's a little paranoid because, frankly, people like yourself are always criticizing her so she doesn't want to talk to the press. Thank you for being here in your sickness. You looked great, you sounded great. Maureen Dadd, let's get you back to your bed. All right, the great Maureen Dadd, everybody. Thank you for doing this. All right, let's meet our panel. Hey, everybody. Okay, here they are. He's a fellow at the Modern War Institute and at the Atlantic Council. Max Brooks, back with us again. Hey, Max. He is the former policy director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and also a fellow. A lot of fellows here tonight at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Lonnie Chen. Hey, Lonnie, how you doing? And she is president of the Center for American Progress and former policy director to Hillary Clinton. Neera Tanden. Hey, Neera. Hey, nice to see you. All right, don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can (14/45)
answer them after the show on YouTube. Okay, the first debate is Monday night. We're going to live tweet it, so I will be saying a lot of things about it. Liberal, what, you're laughing already? I'm a little anxious about your tweets, but, you know, I'll get through it. I'm for her. No, no, no. You liberals have to learn who's on your side. I know, I know. Well, why didn't you come on the show then? Okay, liberals are very nervous for good reason, because this race is pretty tight now. And I have this horrible feeling that Hillary Clinton is just fighting the last war. You're a war expert. You wrote World War Z. You're a fellow at war places. You know, it's like she's the British in her red pantsuit, and Trump is fighting a guerrilla war. And I'm not just saying that because his father's an orangutan. No, but, but let me, no, listen to this. She spent, her campaign has spent 96 million in ads, his 17 million. That's a five to one advantage. In Florida, she spent a fortune, he spent (15/45)
nothing. She's got a big round game, he's got nothing, and he's ahead. Yeah, but that's not her fault. That's because the media has forgotten what their constitutional duty is. You know. Really, it's all the media's fault? Well, the reason we have a free press, the whole reason it's in the Constitution, is to inform us, the electorate, about what we're voting on. And they've forgotten that. They think this is a circus. They think this is Dancing with the Stars. And so they have given Trump probably a trillion dollars worth of free press over the course of this campaign. Well, a billion. I don't know about a trillion. Yes, he's gotten a lot of free press. You're right, absolutely. We just saw that infomercial that he did for his hotel. They all showed up like Pavlov's dogs, and with the stakes, and then eventually he said Obama's an American and walked off. But I'm asking about her strategy. I mean, he's out there like giving speeches to his basket of confusables. Okay. But I just, it (16/45)
looks to me, you know, Jeb Bush spent $130 million to beat Donald Trump and wound up with four delegates. It looks like Trump might be one of those problems liberals think they can throw money at to make go away. Yeah, they know. And I don't think we can throw money at it and that's all they're going to be. We'll see this on Monday. I think Hillary is not going to be like Jeb Bush. I think if he throws punches, she's going to throw punches back. She recognizes that this is a debate about who is going to have the nuclear codes, who's going to be leader of the country. So she'll share her vision and values and talk about what she wants to do, but she's also going to stand up to him in a way, that's my sense, she'll stand up to him in a way that a lot of Republicans in the primary were too scared to do. See, I mean, I actually think that she's got to come out aggressively because that is going to knock him off of his game a little bit. You know, the worst thing that can happen to her is (17/45)
to have him go 90 minutes and look presidential. That would be the worst thing that happened to her. And so I think she's really got to be on her game in the sense that she can't just let Trump skate. Now Trump, on the other hand, I think he'll come out and just be Mr. Cool, right? Which, we'll see if he can play that character for 90 minutes, that'll be interesting. Or any character for 90 minutes. Well, that's the thing. Are you a Trump supporter? No, I'm not. A Republican, but not a Trump supporter? Yeah, that's right. Okay, alright. That may be the last time they have fought. Not the guy mayor yet, okay. But are you going to vote for Hillary? No. See, I don't get this. I'm not going to vote for her. It's a Sophie's Choice, but I'm going to kill both my kids. I don't get that. I live in California, Bill. Just like you do. Oh, you don't live in California? Yeah, I live in California. For me, I just feel like I can't vote for him. I can't vote for her. So I'm going to vote for someone (18/45)
who I feel comfortable with. Yeah, that's bullshit. Okay, so let me ask about their responses to the bombing. Because I've been saying for a very long time that I worry about the Democrats on the terrorism issue. I mean, Trump obviously is giving paranoid lunacy aimed at dumbasses. I don't agree with his prescriptions. But Hillary says things like, the kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump used is giving aid and comfort to her adversaries. That's what she said. But that doesn't really tell you how he's going to stop the attacks. She just seems to lecture us on how to be a better person. This is what I worry about with the election. If there's a terrorist attack a week before the election and then Mr. Dumbass Strongman comes in and says, we're weak, we're weak. You know, a tragedy for him. Always an opportunity to gloat. I called it. I should be a newscaster. Because that's what newscasters do. They predict things. I actually don't think, you know, everyone says he's a chaos (19/45)
candidate. I actually don't think people in times of crisis want more chaos. I think they actually want someone who seems like they know what they're doing because you actually become more worried about terrible events unfolding. I mean, we saw that this week. His numbers did not move up in a lot of polls. They moved down. Because I think a lot of people, you know, I think a lot of people, particularly women, wonder about a guy who's going to just say whatever in a time of crisis when that can actually mean you're inflaming enemies of the United States. You know, Neera, I don't know that people see him as a chaos candidate. I think he is a chaos candidate. I get that. But I don't think people see him that way. I think people see him as, oh, man, he's a truth teller. You know, America is under attack. Even though he's the biggest liar ever in America. And there's no accountability for that. There's never any accountability. Well, it's changing. As I was saying to Maureen, that's finally (20/45)
changing. And maybe in the debate on Monday, there will be some accountability. But then you've got him playing the moderator game. Well, yes, he's already, and he always, like, he stacks the deck. He definitely plays the rest. He already says, it's rigged. Everything's rigged with this guy. The election is rigged, the primary is rigged, the debates are rigged. When are white men born to great wealth going to catch a break in the game? Everything is always so rigged against him. It's really say if the moderator holds him accountable for facts, that's rigging. That's bias. If you actually say, this is a fact, this is not a fact, that is bias. Because talking about facts in the world of Donald Trump is bias. And you also, you see the double standard. You see the double standard with health. You look at Hillary, she had pneumonia, and everyone thinks she's on death's door. And Trump, this walking aneurysm. Somehow we look at him like he's John Hamm. I don't know who's doing that. He's (21/45)
bloated, he's puffy. I mean, the man looks like he is one Widowmaker heart attack away. And somehow we look at him like he's Bruce Wayne. Well, I love his comment, I eat fast food because at least I know what's in it. Poison, piss, and shit. But I know it, and I eat it. I mean, yes, I agree with you. I mean, that's funny. Okay, so he is for profiling, that's what he said. But he said we should do it the way Israel does. And like every once in a while, Donald Trump says something right. Because we profile already, we just do it stupidly. All police work is profiling. Discrimination does not mean prejudice. Discrimination means telling unlike things apart. I'm just saying, on profiling, there's a difference between, okay, a bulletin goes out and it's a person who's African American or Muslim or something, not Muslim, who's brown, and you look for brown people instead of white people. Okay, that's one thing. The profiling he's talking about, which he has said in this primary and this (22/45)
general election, is to basically scrutinize all the mosques, look for all Muslims, have a Muslim ban. And I think the thing here is, this isn't an issue about people's feelings, it's about what's effective. And it has been shown to be ineffective to basically make Muslims feel like they're the enemy. Absolutely, of course. But the FBI was told by this guy's father, who again, should get a parade. Yeah, I agree. Told by this guy's, I think my son's a terrorist. And he's reading a lot of stuff about terrorism, and he's a big fan of bin Laden. These are trouble signs. I mean, come on, I don't want to come down too hard on the FBI. Well, they should have actually looked into that. And also, he went to Pakistan and stayed free here. And Turkey. Pakistan, which just passed a law on how to beat your wife. Not what should happen to you if you do. How to beat your wife. See, this is the thing, right? The problem with what Trump says on these policy things, the times that he does actually try (23/45)
to verge into policy, is that he's almost the worst caricature of what a conservative policy position might be. So it actually makes it more difficult to have a conversation about profiling. So let's talk about profiling for a minute. What they do in Israel is they do behavioral profiling. They say, hey, this guy is walking through an airport with an empty suitcase. That's a little strange. They're not out there just saying, hey, you look Muslim, why don't we profile you? Also what they do is they hire really smart people. This is not the TCA, which is just guys giggling at your balls when they're looking at the screener. If we would pay people $100,000 to do this job, we could get the kind of people who do it in Israel. And again, we're just talking about a few questions. We're not talking about the rubber hose or sending you to a black site. I mean, I don't think this is too much of a sacrifice to ask. This is one of the fundamental problems we have with national security in this (24/45)
country, and indeed with all civilization in this country, is we don't understand that it's expensive and we all have to pay for it. And this is the first time we had a major tax cut in the middle of a war. That's not what you do. You have a tax increase to pay for the war so you can hire the right people to do the right job. You can't hire people who couldn't get a job at Starbucks to look for terrorists. That's not how it works. All right. Well said, sir. All right. So I mentioned that George Herbert Walker Bush, Poppy Bush, the patriarch, what is he, 92 now or 94? He's up there. There he is. He is going to vote for Hillary, and of course Trump took this well. Of course he did. I'm joking. They got into a Twitter war. Do you believe that? Would you like to hear the Twitter war that Bush 41 is in with Donald Trump? Okay. So as soon as Trump heard that Bush was voting for Hillary, he tweeted out, Bush 41's mind is shot. That's why he's voting for crooked Hillary. And then 41 shot back, (25/45)
hey Donald Trump, if you're any more mentally ill, Texas would execute you. It's a war. It's a Twitter war. Trump, if I want any shit from you, I'll look in your adult diaper. Bush, I'm rubbing your glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and gets stuck in your hair. Hashtag bad weave. Trump, I like presidents who don't throw up on the Prime Minister of Japan. Bush, I couldn't help it. He was wearing one of your ties. Trump, I don't know which one of your sons is worse, low energy or low IQ? Bush, your sons look like the bad guys in Miami Vice. Trump, too bad you won't be alive to see a President Trump. Bush, if there's a President Trump, no one will be alive. Trump, my wife's a 10. Yours is a 1910. Bush, at least I didn't pick mine out of a catalog. Trump, Bush Library sounds like an adult bookstore. Bush, hey, where do you put your foot when you need your mouth to blow Vladimir Putin? That is soul rocker and his new video Good to Be Alive Today is up on MichaelFronty.com. Please (26/45)
welcome Michael Fronty, ladies and gentlemen. Good to see you. I am so happy to be here. Really? When my friends found out that I was going to be here, I had at least six of them say, bring Bill a bag of weed. Like, I need a bag of weed. But I'll take it. Well, you know, that's the thing. I always think of you, and I listen to music all the time. By the way, you know, I do about 60 to 70 stand-up dates a year, and you have walk-in music, you know, while the audience is coming in. One of your tracks is always on my walk-in music. Okay. Really. Either east to west. Nice. Okay. So, we don't stop. That's a great one. Nice. It always gets the people up, because, you know, it's funny, you have such happy music, but it also has a very political message. It's kind of hard to do. You know, at the front of my show, I just have a... Tape of me? I have a Bill Maher cutout. Yeah. People can just come and take a selfie with Bill. But I always think you're Jamaican, because you have a reggae flavor (27/45)
in your music, and you like weed. You have a great song, Ganja Babe. Yeah. I mean, I love that record. You know my whole catalog. I do. I am a very big fan of yours. I don't have people on who I don't like, because I don't lie. Okay. I can't lie like the other hosts and go, wow, you're great if I don't think you're great. That's the only thing that ever prevented you from becoming an actual politician. Right. Many things, like the bag of weed. But what was I asking you? I don't know. Oh, you're not Jamaican. We were talking about short-term memory loss as a result of Ganja. But you're not Jamaican, are you? No. But you seem like you should be. What is it? I don't know, man. Yeah. It's a reincarnation thing. I've spent a lot of time in Jamaica. We made a lot of records over there. Okay. There it is. But not everybody with dreadlocks is Jamaican. Okay. I know. So, you know, it's funny because I'm listening to your new album, which is great, just like your old ones. Yeah. And even when (28/45)
you have like a love song, it does get to the political message. Yes. You know, that first track of it, I'm Crazy For You. And then you get into the theme. Yes. One of your big themes is always something I agree with totally, militarism. Militarism, yeah. Too much money spent on arms and guns. Of all the discretionary spending that's done in Congress, which is the amount of money that Congress votes on each year to spend, 51% is spent on the military. And everything else combined, you know, healthcare, education, even veterans, roads, all the other stuff, is lumped into that other 49%. And I just feel like at times it would be great to see more money from the military go into education, go to veterans, go to healthcare. Which is especially true because that money is not needed. I think I said it last week on the show. Well, that's the thing. It's not about defense. It's about defense contractors. Right. Contractors. And that's the thing that pisses me off. Right. To think that, you (29/45)
know, I'm giving you X amount of dollars and out of each of those dollars it's going to a giant new hummer. Right. Well, yeah, absolutely. That costs $20 billion. No, and of course if you listen to Trump and the other Republicans, not just him, they all say, we have to restore our depleted military. Our depleted military. We have the most outrageous rock with your cock out. Knock your dick in the dirt. The most ridiculous mass murder machine the world has ever seen. It's so ridiculous that they can sell that. And nobody looks into the facts and goes, oh yeah, maybe it isn't depleted. As if they're out there having a lemonade stand and a cookie bake stand. Exactly. It's the depleted military. Okay, so you're a tireless worker for the poor, as I said, and you do it without shoes on. I mean, you have no shoes. You do everything without shoes. You do everything, yeah. We do everything without shoes. Because this has been going on since 2000. You know, it's funny. Because you are in support (30/45)
of people who don't have shoes. Yeah, I started traveling to different countries in the world where people couldn't afford to wear shoes and I'd try to play soccer with them. I'd take my shoes off and I couldn't even take three steps. I was like, ah, cha, cha, cha. Right. So I decided I would go three days at home just to see what it was like to be barefoot. So I did a shoe fast, so to speak, in San Francisco. And I found out that, well, the first thing I learned was that stepping in dog shit is worse barefoot than if you have shoes on. Yeah, right. But I started going for three days, then I went for a week, then I went for a month and a year, and now it's been 16 years that I've been barefoot. Just kind of in solidarity with people who can't afford shoes. And at the 10-year mark, I started partnering with an organization called Souls for Souls that collects shoes and bring, it started after Hurricane Katrina, and they collect shoes and bring them to 62 countries around the world (31/45)
whenever there's natural disasters that occur. Well. That's pretty good. And they put a bag of weed in it, too. I was going to say, are you sure you just haven't misplaced your shoes? You know, the other day, we're doing some, I live in an old warehouse in San Francisco and we've kind of been renovating it bit by bit, so we're going through some, putting in some sheetrock so there's dust all over the house, and I come in the house and my wife is like, make sure when you come in the house, you put on your shoes so you don't get dust in the bed. And then take them off before you get in the bed. The opposite of what most people, okay. So let's talk about the cops, because your brother is a... I have a brother who's a police officer. A brother who's a police officer. And he's African American? Yes. That's interesting because, I mean, in the shootings we saw this week, again, we see an African American police chief in Charlotte. Sometimes some of the people who do the shooting are African (32/45)
Americans. It looks like when you wear blue, it's thicker than black. No, I mean the police. You know, I come from a very unique family situation. My father is African American and Native American. My mother is Irish, Belgian, and German. And I was adopted. I was adopted. I'm insisting on that. I was adopted by a Finnish American family, second generation from Finland. And my mother had three kids of her own, then she adopted myself and another African American son. I have one sister who's a lesbian and I have a brother who's a police officer. And this makes me... Not to be American. It makes me uniquely authorized to say that, you know, not all cops are bad people. No. Not all black people are criminals. And not all white people are racists. But it seems like in the news, the way that it gets played out is you have to be on one side or the other, as if you can't have compassion for a mother whose son was shot by police and at the same time have compassion for cops who go to work every (33/45)
day and have to do one of the toughest jobs in the world. It is what... Okay. Well, but it's not one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. They have stats on that. It's not in the top ten. Yeah. Things like fishermen, electrician, cab drivers, those daredevils. Yeah, but the fish don't have open carry laws. Yeah. Look, I could never be a cop and I admire that they can. But, look, you have to do it better. No doubt. And I say this in support that the shooting in Tulsa, the woman cop who shot the guy, now she is charged with manslaughter. I mean, she shouldn't have done that. But I must say, she is also a victim. She's a victim of bad police training. Police do not train the way they should. You know, if you're that nervous, you can't do this job. The Charlotte shooting, which we have some video, this happened today. This is the cell phone tape of the guy's wife who was shot. We don't need to show it. He doesn't have a gun. He has a TBI. He's not going to do anything to you guys. (34/45)
Keith, don't you do it. Did you shoot him? He better not be fucking dead. Okay, we don't know whether he had a gun. But even if he did, you don't have to kill every time somebody does something that makes you nervous. We have to train our police to not be that guy who just empties the club. You know, if I was the police academy, I would say, wait till later in the encounter before you shoot. They seem to be teaching shoot first thing in the encounter. Yeah, and I think the truth here is that we actually have police who have been better trained in parts of the country. And the reality here is that it seems in all of these instances, when we have African-American man after African-American man after African-American man killed by police, what's happening is there's a moment, and in that moment, the police officer just assumes the African-American man is a threat. And we have to get the training that does exist elsewhere to say that African-American man is not necessarily a threat. The (35/45)
cops don't get a lot of use of force training. And there's an issue of implicit bias, and there needs to be guidelines across the country about how to use force. And there's also this idea that any black man, if they did some minor infraction and then got shot, deserved it. Like as if it was a death penalty to just be having your hands on the steering wheel instead of giving your license immediately. But it's also not helpful to police. When the African-American community or any community feels threatened by police, it actually makes policing much harder to do. And it threatens more police over the long term. People are doing a good job who don't like this either. It's an open carry state, North Carolina. So we apparently live in this country where it's open carry really just for white people. And also, by the way, it's open angry just for white people. Because when you talk to the Trump people, they're angry. And then the media, they talk about it like that's a virtue. Oh yeah, (36/45)
Trump's tapping into their anger. It's good to be angry. But black people can't be angry. They can't protest. I'm sure you saw there was a congressman, Robert Pittenger, yesterday said black protesters, quote, hate white people because white people are successful and they're not. And then let's show the tape of Kathy Miller. She's Trump's main surrogate, I guess campaign manager in the key county in Ohio. And this is what she says about black folks. Racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this. I'm in the real estate industry. There's none. Now with the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens, that's a big change. And I think that's the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America. I think that's all his responsibility. And if you're black and you haven't been successful in the last 50 years, it's your own fault. There's going to be no sexism. But this is great because if she's right, we only have, what, a few more (37/45)
months of crime and racism. Once he's out, we go back to the good old days when we have no racism. When Hillary becomes president, then that's when we'll get sexism. There's no sexism until then. Right, because we never had sexism before. I think that the Trump, one of the things about the Trump candidacy is it has surfaced a certain amount of sort of, it's okay to say these things. Yes, a lot of them out. And I think, look, if we're being honest about this, it's up to people across the political spectrum to say, you know, it's not okay. And to vote. It's not okay. We'll work on that. We'll work on that. No, look, I'm just saying. You don't get a protest vote in a democracy. You don't get a protest vote. That's a tantrum vote. That's a tantrum vote. That's because how can I go to the polls and vote for someone who I don't believe in? Who I don't believe is going to be a good leader of this country? I say to you what I say to my 11-year-old, you get what you get and you don't get upset. (38/45)
I'm not upset. That's a democracy. I am happily, I am going to happily vote for whomever I vote for. I'm not upset about that. I have a list of people who I don't vote for. It's bigger than just not voting for someone you believe in. It's that Trump is so dangerous. Trump is so crazy that you can't possibly let him in. And so I don't understand if you feel that way. This isn't apples and oranges. This is apples and having your house burned out. You don't want to vote. There's a list of countries where you don't have to do that. Fair enough. But my point is this. Glad you came on, man. No, I mean, look, this is, I get it. We need moderate Republicans like you. I get what you're saying. But my point is, I cannot in good conscience also go into the voting booth and vote for someone who I don't believe in. That's my problem. Right, but can you in good conscience give our nukes and our Supreme Court for a man who's unbalanced? Again, I live in California. If I lived in a different state, (39/45)
I'd have to think really hard about this. But I live in California. You'd have to think really hard? I would. I would have to think really hard about this. Well, let me tell you something. Republicans above all love money. Trump is going to wipe out your bank account even before he takes office. Think about that. All right, time for New Rules. It's true. I totally believe that. I'm not happy now. I got out of this doctoring. All right, New Rules. Stop worrying about what's going to happen to high school English teacher Jennifer Green Johnson, who was suspended for allegedly telling a student to grow some balls, calling another student a bitch, and asking another, Why don't you lick me where I fart? She's been hired by Hillary to help with debate prep. New Rule, my car needs quieter locks. Jeez, I'm on TV every week calling out uptight white people. Looks bad when I'm idling next to a bus stop and people hear. New Rule, now that Tom Hanks has played a Navy captain, an Army captain, a (40/45)
container ship captain, and now an airline captain, let's just get it over with and go right to making Tom Hanks his Cap'n Crunch. New Rule, whoever made this naked Donald Trump statue deserves an award for authenticity. It looks so much like the real thing that Melania closed her eyes and fucked it while thinking about money. Maybe true. Could be. Could be. New Rule, someone has to tell the Australian woman who spent $500 on surgery for her goldfish that, there's a reason it looks good as new. It is new. Lady, there's no such thing as goldfish surgery. You should have realized that when you were in the waiting room and you heard this. Finally, New Rule, next time Apple wants to do something truly innovative and really think different, they should try not releasing a new phone. Because somebody has to teach Americans that we don't always have to have something new or better every year, or in the case of our upside down economic system, every quarter. The only people who really need you (41/45)
to get a new phone every year are the shareholders. But just because they need to sell it so they can jerk off the stock price, doesn't mean you have to stand in that nerd line and buy it. You're not early adapting. In fact, quite the opposite, you're taking too long to catch on. Before we go any further, I know what the people on the nerd line are thinking. Oh Bill, how can you say the iPhone 7 is the same as the 6? The old phone had an A9 processor and a camera with an aperture of 2.2, and the new one has an A10 and a 1.8. Sorry, not sorry. The old phone weighed 143 grams, the new one 138. I guess you could keep lugging around a 143 gram phone in your pocket, if you want your ass to stick out like black china. You like the way I channel the nerd in my head? Okay, alright. So do you. I get it, I get it. The new phone, a thing of wonder. They made the camera work better in low light, which, let's face it, is only going to encourage Anthony Weiner. But the question I'm asking is, do (42/45)
your friends really need clearer pictures of your lunch? You've already got in your hand a device that has all your email, all your music, the internet, GPS, takes pictures, gets you laid, gets you a car and driver when you're drunk, films cops when they shoot you, and oh yeah, it's a phone. It does everything but scratch your nuts for you, and I'm sure there's an app for that. It has Pokemon Go and Grindr, an app which enables guys to Pokemon and Go. So why do I keep seeing headlines like, why Apple needs a new hit? The bad news on Apple stock is only beginning. Is a new iPhone enough to snap Apple's sales slump? Sales slump? Since 2007, that phone has made over $621 billion. To put that into perspective, take the amount of money Donald Trump has given to charity and add $621 billion. Americans keep asking, why doesn't our economy work for people like me? Because it's not designed to. Because somewhere along the way, we bought into this insane idea that everything always has to get (43/45)
bigger, especially sales. Having a really good year and then just repeating it? Not good enough. In corporate America, the stock market is the tail that wags the dog. Growth, growth, holy growth is the only thing that ever matters. Better than last quarter, beat expectations, eat more hamburgers. For Apple, revolutionizing the world wasn't enough, that was last quarter. And it's not just them, it's every company. Do you ever wonder, for example, why shaving needs to keep reinventing itself? Men used to shave with a sharp rock and Keanu Reeves still does. Then there was the straight razor, then the single blade, then the double blade razor, three blades, and now the quattro. Let me tell you something, if you've got something on your face that doesn't come off after three blades, that's not a whisker, that's a tumor. Or look at that Wells Fargo scandal, it's that very pressure for growth, constant endless growth, even when you're filthy rich, that led them into a crime where they cheated (44/45)
and deceived their customers. Now fortunately, Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found out and put a stop to it, or as I see it, cowboy zero, Indians won. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Mirage in Las Vegas September 30th and October 1st. I want to thank Max Brooks, Bonnie Chen, Narotin, I can't pronounce anybody's name right now. Holy crap! And Maureen Dowd, I got that one right. Join us now for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks. Watch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Moll. You're not in line waiting to see a dead body. I, I... Jesus, have you been... watching the Queen's funeral? I don't tell me how it ends. I'm only on season three. Did we get this lady buried? I mean, I've thrown out bread twice since she died. I'm telling you, this is... But I said this last week, the British people don't fuck with them with the Queen shit. They take it seriously. Did you see David Beckham stood in line for 13 hours? David Beckham. Really? And they said, how did you prepare to do something so long and boring? He said, I played soccer. But we had a death in this country, too, this week. Ken Starr died. Ken, remember? Ken... Little different reaction, yes. Ken Starr, remember? He prosecuted Clinton with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the joke's on him because now that Roe versus Wade has been overturned, blowjobs are more popular than ever. That abortion stuff is getting real out there. (1/45)
West Virginia, just I think it was yesterday, banned all abortions except for rape and incest, which is actually a step forward for them. Well, just, just to admit that incest is bad. You know, I... Kidding, Trace. Great time. No, but there is a war between the states that is going on now in this country. Our governor has set up billboards in all different states saying, you know what? If you can't get an abortion in your state, come here to California. And then... Yeah, abortion. And then you saw the governors of Texas and Florida sending their migrants to blue states. DeSantis in Florida sent all these Venezuelan migrants, did you see this, to Martha's Vineyard? He wanted to send a message to those migrants, like if you come here, you will get a free plane ride to a wealthy island. All the Democrats are mad. Biden said he is using human beings as props and all the Marines lined up behind him agreed. No, and the guy who's running against DeSantis in Florida, Charlie Crist, we've had (2/45)
him on the show, he's the Democrat there, he said, all the immigrants in Florida, the 4.5 million immigrants in Florida, are now wondering if they're next. Again, not wondering, fingers crossed. Okay, please send me to this lovely island that's modern, that has abortion services and likes us. The migrants, first they went to Martha's Vineyard and then today they sent them to Cape Cod. Just throw in a stop in Nantucket, it's the same cruise I got my parents a few years ago. America doesn't see anything the same, right? Right and left. The rights, they see Venezuelan immigrants, they see, oh, ax murderers. The left sees that and they go, oh, someone to raise my kids. But listen to this, Sleepy Joe, I gotta tell you, this guy comes back, his approval rating is now 49%. He's right up there. And you know who raised him up? Gen Z, the kids love Biden now. To show his appreciation to Gen Z, today he made a TikTok video of him doing the mashed potato. All right, we got a great show, Jon (3/45)
Meacham and Julia Yoffe are here, but first up, here's the multi-platinum selling country music artist who stars in the new series on Fox, Monarch, Trace Atkins. That was funny. Thank you. Sometimes you have a good one. Appreciate that. We're indoors, you can take the hat off. Anyway, no, you don't have to. Yes, I wanna see your face. Okay, all right. Oh, is that shit on your shoes? Anyway, no, because we love each other. That's, and you're a big TV star now, I gotta tell you. Monarch, I watched the pilot, fucking juicy, I loved it. You're awesome in it. And I think people know, they're calling it like the country empire, but yes, I mean, everything is like something else. It's just entertaining. You play a guy who's the king of country music and your wife is Susan Sarandon. Could not be more politically distanced. Please tell me you and Susan Sarandon got to be fast friends. We did, I think. I mean, yeah, there were no issues. I mean, we just, we went to work and we did our work and (4/45)
we stayed away from everything else. And you know, a couple of times, maybe, you know, a current event, something would happen that morning and she'd be watching the news and she'd say something to me about it. But it was very brief and we just didn't go there. We just stayed away from it. What's the point? Exactly, and isn't this the model for how we fix America? I've been saying this for years. Stop picking on what we don't agree. Yeah, well, I mean, the grievance junkies though, they have to, you know, they have to do that. You know, I mean, they have to have something to whine about. I don't get up in the morning looking for something to whine about. You know, my old man wouldn't tolerate it and I don't either, really, you know. So I'm confused because, I mean, I hope I'm not giving away too much, but it already aired. She's dying in the pilot. And it seems like at the end of the first episode, she's, we don't see her dead, but it seems like it's going there. But she's the star of (5/45)
the show? Yeah. Explain that to me. Well, if. If, oh, I see. If she dies. Right. There's a lot of flashback stuff. Right, nothing is in sequence anymore. No, yeah, it's all just, it's back and forth, chronologically, it's all over the place. Right. Well, okay, look, speaking of coming back from the dead, you have a song on your new album, Even Jesus Was a Hippie. I love this. I mean, first of all, I used to say that. Did you? Back in politically incorrect days, when you used to do the show. Yeah. Oh, he's talking about Jesus being a hippie. Yeah. And you have a song with Snoop Dogg, that's awesome. Yeah. By the way, that album, he's. Yeah. It's an amazing album. Thank you. Let me plug it. Yeah, you've made this, you made this during the pandemic, right? Yeah, you know, like every other artist, you know, during the height of the pandemic or that whole year, you know, we didn't have shit to do, so we just stayed in the studio and just kept recording new songs. And I think I ended up with (6/45)
26, 27. 25. Yeah, but we put 25 on the album. Oh. Because that was my 25th anniversary being in this business. Right. So I just. Well, it's fantastic. And the first one you say, I'm a million miles away from who I used to be. Yeah. Which is something, because we're both in our late 30s now. Yeah. So. So. So. So I very much relate to that point of view. So what it puts a meat on that, who you, what are we talking about? Who did you used to be that you are not now? I was talking to somebody the other day, they, I was doing an interview and they asked me about if I could go back and, you know, tell the 25 year ago me, you know, give him some advice. And I just, I would just would've said, just be patient, you know, and, and this is not going to go at the pace that you want it to go at. You just have to be patient. And I probably would have saved myself a lot of heartache and, you know, but I was in my thirties when I got a record deal. If that had happened for me when I was in my (7/45)
twenties, I would have blown it completely apart. There's no way. I mean, I didn't really have the maturity to deal with it when I did, when it did happen. But if it would have happened to me in my twenties, there's no way that I could have had. So I'm a million miles away from that guy that I was then. Right. And you're sober? Yeah. Well. Well, well, well. Right now. Well, really why is that synonymous with applaud? I don't know either. I don't know either. It's it's I mean, I'm glad you are, because I think you were a guy. I mean, you, you've had a lot of stories. And I feel I've read a lot in the media. I think the media is so negative. I know you've been married four times. I know one of your wife, wives shot you in the heart. They never mentioned the three who didn't shoot you. No, no, no, they don't talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, yeah. You know, I was, I was not, I was never a happy drunk. I just never was, you know, and, you know, six, six, two, six, he pissed off drunk (8/45)
is not, you know, people used to ask me, you know, when I go to parties and I was trying to stay sober and they would try to get me to drink and I didn't really want to, and they'd pressure me, you know, and I'd finally just go, okay, look, here's what's going to happen if I drank, I'm going to try to sleep with half the people in this room and I'm going to try to fight the other half. Now you can get in whichever line you want to get into. Cause I'm going to have fun. Doesn't matter to me which line you're in. Cause I'm going to have fun with both of them. So, you know. Right. And there, there was a line in one of the songs there where you talk about, which I found very gratifying. Cause it's something I've also said for the longest time, but I fear here very few people agree with it. You say, I wish I could say I had no regrets, but I got plenty. And I hear people all the time when they're asked that question, Oh, no regrets. I'm like, who are these people? Every day I have a regret. (9/45)
Every day I could have done something better. I don't get it. I don't understand those people that they have no regrets. I feel like that's their insecurity. Not to be able to admit it. Yeah. I got, I got volumes of them. Exactly. How can you not? That's what life is. Yeah. Well, there's another great song you have. It's a duet with Blake Edwards. Blake Shelton. Blake Shelton. Boys, is he mad? What? He's going to be mad at you. Well, he shouldn't be. I once did a little tribute to him and his wife on this show. Oh yeah. Same thing I was saying about you and Sarandon. Saying that like, if he could marry Gwen Stefani and they could make that work, that should be a model to America. If she could marry him. Well, my point was if red and blue could come together, people who are not really of the same backgrounds, it could work in their house. It can work in the house of America. Anyway, I like him. Yeah, me too. I love him. And he, you know, when they got married, that was a very small (10/45)
affair. You know, it was COVID and all that, and they didn't want to invite a lot of people. And I just called him and said, I wasn't going to come anyway. You know, I didn't want to see that woman throw her life away marrying you. I wasn't going to come witness that, you know? So I wasn't going to go anyway. But I know you're kidding, but. Not really. The song you do with him. I love the title and I love the song. It's if I was a woman, I'd want a man like me. I'd love a man like me. When you were writing that, did you worry that the other 58 genders that are represented on Facebook would be offended that they weren't brought into that, that it was not inclusive enough? I wasn't concerned about it at all. I don't think about that. You know, I actually wrote that with Cherie Austin, a young lady, great songwriter. Wrote that with Cherie and Jeff Bates and my dear friend Kenny Beard, who's passed away now. But yeah, no, I didn't think about that. I just thought it was funny. You know, (11/45)
it was just funny. No, it's very funny. Who won the last election? I'm sorry, I just thought I'd sneak that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought Joe Biden made a bit of a mistake in the speech he made a couple of weeks ago when he talked about MAGA nation, because MAGA, I've said this for years, you can hate Trump. You can't hate the people who like him or voted for him. It doesn't mean they're all crazy. It doesn't mean they're all racist. It doesn't mean they're all bad people. The people who think that Biden didn't win the election, yes, they're a little crazy and they're not factually based, but we have to come together. We have to be able to do shows with Susan Sarandon and marry Gwen Stefani and love each other like you and I do. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's what you're talking about. All right. Susan (12/45)
Sarandon is adorable, man. I love her. All right. It's a great show. I'm so glad you got a TV show and you're a big TV star now. Don't forget your little people that you love. All right, Trey Sattkins, everybody. Thank you, pal. All right, let's see each other soon. All right, let's meet our panel. All right, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author whose new book is And There Was Light, Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. Jon Meacham is over here. And she's a founding partner and Washington correspondent for the media company Puck. Julia Yaffe is back with us. Okay. So Jon, your book's about Lincoln. I used the phrase, the war between the states or war between the states. I don't know if they use that phrase anymore. They did when I was in school, the civil war is sometimes still called the war between the states. It depends on where you are. Right. More in the South. Yeah, yeah. War more than aggression. But I feel like more than aggression, but I mean, but it was (13/45)
the states against the states. And I feel like with some of this stuff we're seeing now, the billboards in other states, they're sending migrants to other states. I feel like the states themselves are clawing out territory and fighting with each other in a way we haven't seen. Which is, I think, rather disturbing than where this might be heading. It is. So maybe it's a war among the states, which is a little different. But I think what you're looking at here is I thought this was like the 1930s for a long time. Dictatorship on the march abroad, democracy under assault here, and great tensions, radios changing everything, more people living in cities than on farms the first time. All the kinds of things that sort of echo now. I fear that the evidence of the last couple years is that this is more like the 1850s, where we don't simply disagree about the ends of politics. We disagree about the understanding of reality itself. Politics is seen less as a mediation of differences, which is (14/45)
what it's supposed to be. And you come up with a solution to a given problem for a given period of time, and instead it's total culture war. And I think that the rot at the core of the American struggle right now is that not enough people are willing to sacrifice their short or middle term interest for the long-term interest of the good, of the whole. And I think that's what we're called on to do. And they see their fellow citizens as the enemy. I feel like is the problem, is that the fellow citizen is the enemy. Used to be Russia or somebody else. Somebody, now it's. If we see each other, yeah. If we see each other as rivals and enemies instead of as neighbors, then the democratic lowercase D covenant is at risk. And it's, look, if everybody loved their neighbor, Jesus wouldn't have had to command it. You know, if everybody already does something, you don't think to make a law about it. So it's always counterintuitive. Julia knows this in her world better than I do. Democracy is very (15/45)
counterintuitive. Why on earth do I want to love my neighbor as myself? I don't want to do that. I'm fine. But practicality tells us, experience tells us, that I lend a hand so that when I need one, I might get one back. And if democracy were easy, everybody would do it. The civil war in many ways, it's about slavery. It's about power. And it's about whether popular government can long endure or whether an aristocracy of race was going to prevail. That's what that was about. What's your world he's talking about? He said her world. Russia. Oh, Russia. Russia, the transatlantic world, you know, Europe. Your world is our world. It is, yeah. But we're just living in it. Yeah. Welcome. But I mean, it is true. And I think what we saw on January 6th, and this is what drove me nuts about the commentary on that day, which was so much of which was, this is America. This is not who we are. I'm used to seeing this in Russia or in Burkina Faso. Well, guess what? Look out your window. It is (16/45)
happening here. And Americans are not genetically different or genetically superior to other people. It is a human trait. It is a human trait. John and I were discussing this backstage since Adam and Eve, to be drawn to strong man leaders that have very simple explanations for why things are wrong in your life, that it's not about anything you've done. It's about that person down the street who looks different than you that worships a different God than you. We can blame him and we'll fix everything by kicking him out or killing him. There was a poll that just came out recently that a third of Americans would prefer a strong unelected leader to a weak elected leader. We are not different from Russians. We are not different from Hungarians. The only thing that is different is that we've had this framework for over 200 years that we have all collectively bought into, this collective experiment that we've bought into, but it's something you have to keep going. You have to keep pushing (17/45)
those pedals. It is not a natural thing to do. I'll tell you some of the other things that were in that poll. Yes, a third of Americans want a strong unelected leader, would prefer that to a weak elected one. And this is, by the way, bipartisan. 42% Republicans say that, 31% Democrat. So more Republicans, but it's not like the Democrats aren't in this. 35%, yeah, 35% say president should be able to remove judges. 34% say they should prosecute, should be able to prosecute members of the news media. I say where this comes from is lack of education. They don't know what America is. They don't know because we stopped teaching history and we stopped teaching civics and we teach bullshit. So they don't know what America is supposed to be. So when America veers off from what it's supposed to be, judges, get rid of judges. Nobody taught them about the separation of powers, that the checks and balances are the fundamental part of our country and why we are America. If you don't know that, what (18/45)
do you care about? You just care about the immediate. But guess why we stopped teaching them history? There are a lot of people who don't want to teach our children real history. All right, that's the end of my show. So don't blow it now. That's the end of what I'm talking about. But go, yeah. I mean, look, John Adams tried this, right? We passed this edition act to prosecute the printers, publishers he didn't like. Every president since then has wanted to do it, but haven't been able to. We passed an alien act to deport people. This has been going on since the 1790s. These forces ebb and they flow. At our best, we can make them ebb. But it's really, really hard, and we also have to be careful about, I'm uncomfortable with the language about we need to get back to something, we need to restore something. As a multiracial democracy, this country is 57 years old. We were not a, in my part of the world, in the South, we lived under functional apartheid until 1965. So when you say you (19/45)
wanna make America great again or restore something, what are we talking about exactly? And so the first truly integrated presidential election we had was in 1968. Perhaps not coincidentally, in that election, Richard Nixon wins barely, George Wallace got 13.5% of the vote and carried five states and the electoral college on a Jim Crow platform 50 years ago. So this is all, we're always five minutes away from chaos if we don't decide that it's not just the letter of the Constitution, but the spirit of the Constitution. You seem more alarmist than you, I feel like we've had this running argument on the show for a few years where I was the alarmist and you were like, please, I'm the historian, things have been bad before. Okay, so- John Tyler once said- Yes, I know, there's somebody caning some asshole in the Senate. Okay, so Maggie Haberman, the star reporter for the New York Times, she's got a new book with some quotes from Trump. And I just wanted, these are some things I've said on (20/45)
the show about Trump. I didn't see him leaving. I don't think he's gonna leave. I don't see this man giving up. He's not going to leave until he wants to leave. I don't think he would even leave if he lost the election in 2020. People have been saying I'm an alarmist and I'm crazy, but I'm saying he's not going to leave. Here's her quote from Trump. I'm just not going to leave. And you were always arguing with me. Everybody was like, oh, Bill, you smoked too much pot. Well, apparently I smoked just the right amount of pot. This is important. This is important because, and also when you quote yourself, it's like the preacher who said, as our Lord said and rightly, so there's that, and I know that's a vernacular you like. You were right. The important thing and what we have to try to save is that he had to leave. It was as close a goddamn run thing as you can possibly imagine, but the system did hold just barely. Well, okay, but we're only halfway through the movie because he's not gone. (21/45)
Yes. Here's my question now. We're almost to the midterm election. The primaries just ended, no more primaries. There's not going to be any legal action, even though Trump is vulnerable in a number of places now. In Georgia, they're going after him. Certainly the January 6th committee could turn into the Merrick Garland, okay, now we're actually going after him legally, New York State. Okay, so no one's going to do anything before the midterms, right? What happens after the midterms? And does what happens in the midterms affect what they do legally to Trump after the midterms? Can I just say, if we're going to quote ourselves here on this show? Oh, Jesus Christ, it was just a joke. There he is again. You're the only one allowed to tell jokes? No, I'm sorry, go ahead. I went on The Daily Show back in January 2018, and I said, you're going to have to scrape him off the walls, even if he loses. And the thing is, as brilliant as you are, all of us who have ever reported on or lived in or (22/45)
studied the history of or the present of authoritarian regimes and how they start and how they grow roots and entrench themselves, knew and recognized this flavor of leader. And it was very clear from the outset that this very well might be, if the institutions didn't hold, that this very well might be one man or one person, one vote, one time. That this kind of man, once he's in office, does not leave voluntarily. That was very clear. And those of us who had seen this movie before, many, many times, were saying this from the beginning, we're leaning on the alarm, and we were all called hysterical and alarmist by people, mostly older white people, who said, oh, but we're different and we have institutions and blah, blah, blah. But institutions, as Mitch McConnell knows very well, are just buildings with people in them. And it very much depends what kind of people you shove into those buildings. What- Well, here's who we're shoving in. There's 118 people on the ballot, Republicans, who (23/45)
are election deniers. And I read they have a 95% chance of winning these 118. So say it's- It'll be interesting if they will question their own election. Will they doubt the result of their election if they win? I can answer that, no. Why? I know it's puzzling. Yeah, yeah, we can work on that. No, but that means, say 100 out of 118 win. That means there will be 100 people in Congress who don't think the president is legitimate and didn't really win. That's an astounding departure from anything that I know of that's ever happened in America before. Even, I don't know, John, you're the historian, but- Even Franklin Pierce, yeah. No, the key thing- Yeah, of course, Pierce. That was for you. Obviously. That was for you. That's the beginning of the end of the constitutional order because the constitutional order requires, as Julia said, it requires character. And the character of the leaders is vital, but the characters are the lead too because leaders both mirror and make reality, the (24/45)
feelings of their followers. That will lead to civil chaos. And it's important that they're in the House and they're deniers. It's even more important if they're in the states because in a state, and there's important Supreme Court cases coming up on this, it is a deeply, deeply problematic question of whether they would simply overturn the will of the people. It goes to the, maybe it goes into the courts. This was what, the chaos was the strategy. I mean, they've said this. The Trump people have said this, is we're gonna create so much chaos out of January 6th and forward that it might have to go to the House. And if it goes to the House, Trump would have won. So just quick prediction. What happens to Trump legally after the midterms? The House, I don't know. I don't, and we should, maybe, wait, this isn't Putin's America. You can speak. No, I don't know. Do you have a magic eight ball like him? I don't have a magic eight ball, but we're on a show like that does. I don't know. I mean, (25/45)
it's hard to- Nobody knows. That's why it's a prediction. My prediction is Merrick Garland does something. Why? Why? Because he's guilty. Why is that your prediction? Because Trump is guilty and you can't let this stand. But it's Merrick Garland. But it's Merrick Garland. Well, we'll see. People were saying that about Joe Biden. Joe Biden was the big loser and it turned out he's not such a loser. Turns out he found his- Yeah, it just took a little while longer. And we don't, and culturally, we're not attuned to that. We're not set to actually wait, which is what we have to do. And I think my sense is that General Garland will follow the law. It was an attempted coup. For fuck's sake. Why not charge him before the election? Why wait till the party that sponsored the coup gets rewarded in these elections? Because it probably would send the election in the other direction. Because it would look like you were doing something just before the election. Didn't we learn that lesson with (26/45)
Hillary Clinton and James Comey? You don't do stuff right before the election. We kind of had that rule. Let's keep that one norm. But we can't even do coups right in this country. I mean, usually- Isn't that a good thing? When a coup fails- Isn't that a good thing? ... daughters go to jail or worse. That, I mean, that is one precedent we need to set in this country. I think Merrick Cohen will come to that conclusion. Yes, there are absolute reasons not to do it, but you can't set the precedent that you can try a coup, and your only punishment is you fail. Well, you're also, this is one of these moments where when you ask a question about Trump and his legal jeopardy, you have to ask, which one? Right, so you're talking about the coup. There's also classified information, which is an unfolding investigation. I think you're right. I think one of, you know, there's a really interesting revision going on about whether President Ford was right to pardon Nixon. Right. That in the fullness (27/45)
of time, the idea that a president is above the law was a dangerous precedent to set. And this notion that you can't indict a president, I don't, we don't have a monarch in this country. That's the point. No one is above the law. European countries indict and convict former presidents all the time. They're doing, their democracies are doing just fine. That's what I'm saying. And the fact that we can't, okay, we can't indict presidents, and then we can't indict former presidents. So like they can do anything. Right. But the good news is that Biden is up to 49% in the polls, and he's killing it with voters who are frustrated and barely give a shit. I'm not kidding. Look at this. There's a new, there's a new category of voter. They're calling them meh voter. They're not enthusiastic about either side. Look at this among voters who say they are somewhat disapprove of Biden, 33 point lead. And you know, when you're on their list, the DNC fundraising list, which I am, cause I gave a million (28/45)
dollars to the Democrats a couple of times. So they obviously I get like eight letters. I get like eight letters a day. I'm happy with one of those donations. But so they're going after the meh voter. Look at this letter. I'm going to read it to you. The one I got, would you like to see the meh? I totally would. This is their latest fundraising letter. It says, William, are you mildly enthused? William, there are times when hope unites a nation and the promise of a better day brings out the best in all Americans. This is not one of those times. But our democracy is in danger. This is your chance to tell President Biden you've heard of him. And you stand behind him 30 to 40%. Now more than ever, we need Joe Biden in Washington doing whatever it is he does. We're reaching out to you today because you haven't donated to the Democratic party this election cycle, but we see you spend 650 on a venti soy frappuccino every morning. Can we count on you for a $2 donation? How about 50 cents? How (29/45)
about you pledge not to give any money to the other side? Be a part of the growing number of voters who only somewhat disapprove of what we're doing. There are so many good reasons to give Democrats your vote. We could be worse. There's no other option. The other guy's a dick. We need your tepid support to almost make it happen. Can we count on your vote if it's not raining? Remember, the Republicans want to cut taxes on billionaires. The same billionaires who refuse to release the Batgirl movie. Donate now and join Joe Biden and the Democrats in saying I'm mad as hell and I'm gonna take it anymore. All right, so that's how we'll do it. So, I gotta say, I've done my share of jokes about Joe Biden, but when I saw this poll last week that something like 73% of Americans think there should be an age limit and I think 40% of them think that age should be 70, all I can think of is only a country as dumb as this one would think something like that. The reason why he's doing well is because (30/45)
he's old. Thank you, one guy. He's been around the block. He has the experience. Every other culture gets this. When you're young, you're beautiful. And then you get wiser and less cute. But you're wiser. Could we take advantage of the wiser part? I mean, he's killing it in a lot of ways, including Russia. He was the guy who understood. Everybody else was like, what are we throwing money that's done, that Russia's obviously gonna win? And he said, let's see. Maybe Ukraine can win. And now Ukraine is winning. They kicked Russia's ass this week. Yeah, he's my friend. I help him when I can, so take this in that context. I believe that if you support American democracy, it is important to support this president. And one of the fascinating things to me is there's this part of the Republican world that seems to think that there's this mythical universe. It's like Brigadoon. And there's a place where there is no Trump and it's just going to all go away. And what this moment requires, it seems (31/45)
to me, is support for, thoughtful support, reasoned support, not blind support, but basically believing that Joe Biden, who has more experience in the Senate and as vice president than any other president in American history by far, he was in the Senate and vice president longer than say, Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama were alive when they became president. And so you have this moment where a guy born in World War II raised in the Cold War, comes of age during civil rights. It lives in an era that we now look back on as an era of at least workable consensus and who deeply understands the threat to these institutions and wants to rescue them, not for the sake of rescuing them, but because they beat any alternative. And one of the things you have to ask, if you're on the far left, and there are people who say, oh, Electoral College, Senate, all bad, whatever. Okay, fine, what are you going to replace it with? And basically what history tells us, experience (32/45)
tells us is that as imperfect as this system is, it's still beating all the others. I mean, you got things done on climate. Yes. That nobody was getting done before. And again, this Ukraine thing, I mean, I just, nobody saw this coming. I think this is just another nail in the coffin about experts. I mean, nobody thought that Russia was going to do anything but roll over Ukraine. And of course, first six months ago, or whenever the war started, they were beaten back from Kiev and then they thought, okay, well, they'll just take the East. And now they're getting pushed out of the East. And I think for a guy like Putin, who's a strong man, the worst thing that can happen is that you don't look strong. Then you're just the Wizard of Oz after Toto pulls the curtain back. Right. Right. Now, I always thought, and I must say, I always thought Putin is untoppable, not Putin, but I thought Russia couldn't lose this war. Is Putin not being untoppable? The last, the next thing that's going to be (33/45)
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Victory would not be happening if Trump was president. There is a 0.0 chance. Who is also over 70 and proof that age does not bring you wisdom all the time. Of course not. There's no one, no one was saying that for a man. But if Trump was president, he would have sided with his autocratic friend. He would have rolled over to Russia like a dog. All right. Thank you panel. Time for new rules. The designer of the San Diego Padres new uniforms has to (37/45)
admit I was just fucking with you. I can't believe you put them on. Guys, you don't look like San Diego's baseball team. You look like Del Taco softball team. This is the first meeting on the mound ever to discuss what shoes go with this shit. New rules stop trying to sell me the mood ring toilet seat. The toilet seat that changes color to tell you what your mood is when you sit on it. If you're in there for more than 15 minutes, I'll tell you what your mood is. You're in the mood to play candy crush while your spouse deals with the kids. New rule, somebody needs to break it to the British children leaving marmalade sandwiches for the queen that heaven probably isn't real. But if it is, they're not serving British food. New rule, Alex Jones and QAnon must investigate my theory that Queen Elizabeth didn't die of natural causes but was actually murdered by agents of big flower. Think about it. Who benefits from the queen's death? Florists. Working in coordination with the Paddington bear (38/45)
industry. And do I have to spell it out for you? Who produced the original Paddington movie? The Jews. Reynolds is the latest celebrity to make a public event of having a colonoscopy. Someone must tell him, Ryan, no one wants to see your ass. Well, except for most women. Probably the straight guys who want to bro down with you. All right, you got me. I'll take two copies on Blu-ray. New rule, the people at the hospital where Ken Starr died have to tell us if his last words were jizz stain. And finally, new rule, you can get creative with a novel, a TV show or a movie, but history books, that's not supposed to be fan fiction. How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past and sometimes that's true, sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present. And last month, a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He (39/45)
criticized a phenomenon known as presentism, which means judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It's the belief that people who lived a hundred or 500 or a thousand years ago really should have known better. Which is so stupid, it's like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what you know now when you were 10. Stupid me, spending all that time raising sea monkeys and playing with slot cards and jerking off to a Playboy in the barn. Who doesn't have moments from your past that make you cringe? Who hasn't said, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I wore that. Can't believe I thought that. I can't believe I did that. You ate dirt. You wanted to be a ghostbuster. You shoplifted gum. You tried to be a white break dancer. You wanted to marry Scott Baio. I read Ayn Rand. I smoked. I was into numerology. Yes, because we hadn't then grown into the persons we would become. And humanity writ large is just the collective version of that. Did Columbus commit (40/45)
atrocities? Of course, but people back then were generally atrocious. Everybody who could afford one had a slave, including people of color. The way people talk about slavery these days, you'd think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, Romans, the Arabs, British, the early Americans, all the way up through R. Kelly. The Holy Bible is practically an owner's manual for slaveholders. The word slave comes from Slav, because so many Slavic people were enslaved and they're as white as the Hallmark Channel. Who do you think gathered the slaves from the interior of Africa to sell to slave traders? Africans who also kept their own slaves. We're a species prone to making others of our species our bitch. I've said it before and I'll say it again, humans are not good people. And the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing. That's the truth, even (41/45)
though it doesn't jibe with the current narrative. But in today's world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it's the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066 and you always win. Presentism. Yeah, this professor is right. It's just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington, because you have a gay friend and he didn't. But if he was alive today, he would too. And if you weren't alive, if you were alive then, you wouldn't. Portland Public Schools has a plan now to teach kids that the idea of gender being mainly binary was brought here by white colonizers. The curriculum guide says when the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here. Not even Star Trek would try that story, where they discover a planet and give them separate bathrooms. It's like they finally discovered (42/45)
a unified theory of wokeness, incorporating all their ideas about race, gay, gender, and colonizers. Like the New World was a great big diverse dance club when the pilgrims were the bridge and tunnel crowd who came in and ruined everything. There's a play called I, Joan, currently being presented in London, written by Charlie Josephine, who identifies as non-binary and uses they, them pronouns. And it portrays Joan of Arc as, surprise, non-binary with they, them pronouns. Which if you think about it, makes even less sense because Joan, being French, spoke a language where every noun is masculine or feminine. Joan says in the play, I'm not a girl, I don't fit that word, as if she's a character on Euphoria. Now it's true, Joan of Arc did wear pants, but that's what the soldiers wore and she was soldiering. But in the retelling, Joan would rather die than stop wearing men's clothing. Okay, Joan of Arc wasn't executed by the fashion police. Her trial went on for over two months. We have (43/45)
the transcript, and not once did she complain about being misgendered. She had bigger fish to fry, like herself. Too soon, it was 1431. Which is not to say that there isn't truth to the old rubric that history is written by the winners, and it is subjective. Napoleon said history is just a fable we all agree on. And he should know because he was a deaf woman named Diane. But it's also true that much of history is indisputably factual because we have artifacts and coins and birth records and archeology, and somebody in Mesopotamia kept a record of how much grain they ate. It's not all up in the air to change or delete or make up based on what makes you feel better today. Couple of years ago, they made a movie called The Aeronauts about the scientists who broke the record for the highest altitude in a balloon. In fact, they were both men. But the movie made one of them a woman because as the director explained, representation is important. So true. Women never get enough credit for the (44/45)
things they didn't do. Meryl Streep should play Seabiscuit, so every girl will know she too can grow up to be a race horse. All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Fox Theater in Detroit, October 8th. The Hulu in New York. November 12th at the Maui Arts Center in Hawaii, and December 30th and 31st in Honolulu at 31st. Check out Club Random on YouTube. Good night, everybody. I want to thank Jon Meacham, Julia Yaffe, and Trisha Haynes. Join us on Overtime. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher The g7 that's the you know, the big boy Economies of the world they have a they're meeting every year in a different country and Trump announced that they're holding next year's g7 Summit at the Trump Durao and Golf Resort No relation The headline on Fox News was Trump finds the g-spot This is such a ginormous Violation of the emoluments clause in the Constitution right that says presidents cannot accept anything of value From a foreign country like for instance in since large convention of rich foreigners in your hotel my qualified You remember the Constitution don't you Republicans that thing you used to hold up when you screamed at Obama for nothing? It's not just that he's not just that he's always breaking the law it said he obviously wants you to know about it The Joker doesn't want to get caught this bad This is This is Trump's idea of three-dimensional chess. I will distract you from impeaching (1/45)
me by committing more crimes It's like He comes home and Melania says that lipstick on your collar and he says you should see my dick, you know is acting Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had the nerve to say that you know They looked all over the world for the bow of the country for the best spot for the g7 meeting and you know it was just Perfectly logical that it would be there but we didn't it wasn't because he was Trump I said it's it's almost like he said this Doral almost like they built this facility to host this type of event he said When he was reached for comment inside of Trump's ass And you know, of course putting in a Doral was Trump's idea and once Trump gets an idea in his head it never goes away Unlike his casinos his wives his hair and the Kurds Good news, we finally found someone in the Middle East to greet us as liberators bad news. It's Isis We let a lot of the Isis people out but if you haven't been Following this story Trump last week gave Turkey the go-ahead to (2/45)
invade Syria and kill all the Kurds and then he got mad that They went and did so So he asked Mike Pence this week to interrupt his busy schedule of standing in the background And go to the war zone and you know Mike Pence is not afraid of a war zone when he sees someone kneeling at a football game, he runs like a little bitch, but So Mike Pence was sent over there to the war zone to deliver Trump's message to the Kurds and that message was you know That war I just started. Okay, we're gonna skip to the end you lost And Mike Pence and I'm declaring a ceasefire, which means you get to run for your lives while the Turks reload I'm sorry. Did I say ceasefire? I'm in grease fire This is This has got to be the ultimate if Obama did it right I mean we are bombing our own equipment there in the Syrian desert We just lost Syria Syria is now being taken over by Russia Iran and Isis Trump has created the only place in the world that is more anti-american than Berkeley So Wednesday, he has Pelosi (3/45)
and Schumer into the White House to talk about What the fuck are you doing in Syria and he has a meltdown because Nancy Pelosi said all roads with you lead to Putin How dare you accuse me of having a plan when your shit is too crazy for John Bolton and Rick Perry Because that's who quit in the last week you get Perry today about Bolton about a week ago Bolton got wind of what they were doing in Ukraine and said fuck that he said Worldwar3 I'm all in but that's cray-cray And The sad news today Rick Perry is resigning as energy secretary no He said after almost three years on the job. He accomplished what he set out to do finding the employee restroom He said he'll miss everyone at the department we just want to spend more time locking his keys in his car And Then Mick Mulvaney the guy I mentioned before I'd not have a good week He's not quitting not yet, but he is the acting chief of staff. You know this he's got our other big job He's the head of the Office of Management and Budget (4/45)
running. The White House is his side hustle So the whole defense of the Ukrainian scandal, which is why he's getting him Trump is getting impeached is there was no quid pro quo No quid pro quo is the new no collusion Mulvaney gets up there. Yes, it says. Oh fuck. Yeah quid pro quo. Oh, yeah, we are total quid pro quo people That's all we do all day is quid pro quo quid pro quo And then he says but it was absolutely appropriate so appropriate he had to go out there hours later and say I'm sorry You thought I said quid pro quo that it was okay to do quid pro quo. No I said tic-tac-toe Oh It was a Taekwondo is fine They're the cat they're the gang that couldn't do treason straight all right. We got a great show we have And here a little later, we'll be speaking with our good friend Neil deGrasse Tyson is here She was president Obama's national security director and United Nations ambassador his new memoir is tough love my story of the things worth fighting for Susan Rice First thing I (5/45)
wanted to ask you you're Susan Rice You know in showbiz is everybody gets mixed up at some point with somebody else right everybody doesn't okay There are people who have thought I was Bill O'Reilly That's unfortunate. I'm never going to that strip club again But I just had some people must think you're Condoleezza Rice it happens It used to piss my mother off more than anything else my late mother when she got asked are you Condoleezza Rice's mother and Yeah We have ties to Stanford we were both national security advisor were both black women named rice And so you know it happens to me in airports it happens to me all over the place where people say You worked with President Bush President Bush's national security advisor and Secretary of State no But the funniest time was when I was visiting China for the first time as national security advisor on my own mission on behalf of President Obama and I met with President Xi and I'm setting up a summit and CCTV does a whole big Spread on (6/45)
the nightly news and they say you know Susan Rice's in China to see President Xi and they put up Conde's picture Oh That shit happens to black folks Say it for real and one thing I thought was very interesting in your book you mentioned your mother You made your career partly as a mediator And you sort of learned that because your parents were squabbling and you were probably more than but as a very young girl You say seven years old You were doing diplomacy at home well unfortunately my brother, and I were living in a house. That was a tinderbox I had two really wonderful extremely accomplished parents, but they had no business being married and Their breakup was very ugly and sometimes even violent And I'd be trying to get to sleep upstairs as a little kid, and if I couldn't I'd Run downstairs and sort of spy on them and see how bad it was And if it was really bad, I'd go in there and try to break it up sometimes physically but also sometimes Mediating between them trying to listen (7/45)
to each side and help them you did shuttle diplomacy well wasn't even shuttle It was you know like proximity talks in in my own house, but I bet you that served you well in the job Well it turned out, but that wasn't the plan at the time. I was just trying to keep my house from burning down right Well speaking of houses burning down Yeah, I just have to what you must think with what went on this week in the last week in the Middle East now I remember from Decades people talking about who lost that was the who lost China right who lost me who lost Syria You know I saw the Turkish defense minister put up The new map of Turkey with a big chunk of Syria he bit off parts of Iraq Greece You know I remember when George Bush went into Iraq in 2003 the idea Embraced by some liberals was we have to remake the Middle East We're gonna put a democracy in the heart of the Arab world okay that didn't work out, but Trump and Bush together They have remade the Middle East well Trump especially in the (8/45)
last week. It's amazing well Iraq Iranian yeah, Iraq now Syria, but do you see this going? It's going nowhere good. I mean what Trump has done in Iraq And now Syria is in effect to seed a portion of northern Syria Kurdish homeland to the Turks and to Evacuate the Americans as if it's you know his Saigon We've left our Turkish allies homeless. They're now going to scatter throughout the region We've given Assad and and Putin and the Iranians a green light to take over that territory that they've been long wanting to take And us Isis is gonna come back But Assad is gonna be okay with Turkey biting off a chunk of his land well If you're if you're Assad last week you were missing a third of your country now You're just missing a little sliver on the top well That's a that's not bad for one week's work and watching Republicans Not get that upset about this more than upset than we've seen but not to the point of we should get rid of them Must infuriate you having lived through Benghazi that (9/45)
that was something that required hearing after hearing after hearing eight congressional inquiries Yeah There's really no comparison. I mean look it was not a good thing that happened in Benghazi But the idea that anyone could have stopped that well Benghazi was a horrible tragedy right we lost four Americans including But what we're gonna lose as a result of what Donald Trump has done in Syria is we're gonna have a whole terrorist resurgence as a result of his pullout So we'll see the the ramifications of that in American and allied lives I think I'm afraid for years to come you know worries me. I think back to 911 and I imagined After it happened bin Laden was saying to himself wow I I didn't think they would destroy themselves this easily I knew this was gonna be a win for us, but we knocked down those buildings. They overreacted they attacked the wrong country They spent trillions of dollars the Homeland Security Department. That's a big bloated bureaucracy this whole mess Putin in (10/45)
2016 spent a Pittance and got Trump elected or certainly helped What do you think about the fact that idea that we're just it's just too easy to get Americans to destroy themselves Well what is I think happening now and what Putin's genius is is that he understands that we're so divided internally and That in I argue in my book I love that our domestic political divisions are in fact our greatest national security vulnerability. We can't get stuff done We can't build infrastructure. We can't invest in technology to beat the Chinese and artificial intelligence But we've also found ourselves So pitted against one another that all Putin had to do was jump in and Exacerbate those divisions pour salt in the wounds, and we are now almost like a flesh-eating disease eating ourselves alive I think we have the ability to fix it because it's a problem of our own making our domestic divisions Well, we have to stop hating each other absolutely. You know I mean to me the Rubicon was crossed when (11/45)
One party the Republican Party said I and you see the t-shirts at Trump rallies I'd rather be with the Russians and the Democrats we never sort of went there like yeah I don't like the other political party, but I'm not gonna go over to a foreign country That's to me the big difference when we somehow went there. How do you get back from that well Bill? I mean it's horrible and to say you'd rather be with you know our enemy than your fellow American is I think a new low But you get back from it by what we do as individuals in terms of our personal relationships listening hearing It's what we do as a nation where we really need to change a lot of the rules of the game which are Inviting these extremes to be empowered. I think we should stop talking politics to each other Oh, that's part of it. We didn't used to do it all the time I've got no idea how much we hated each other. I've got a very conservative son a Conservative I've got a very conservative son and a very progressive daughter (12/45)
and my husband and I are in between and one thing I've learned from having those differences in my very home at my dinner table is We can't talk about it all the time because we drive ourselves crazy, but you can't not talk about yeah We've not all the time and then we've got to do some stuff I think at a national level like mandatory national service for all Americans 18 to 22 For six to twelve months we're gonna move together and we we had to Understand each other from you know, some rural kid from Idaho having to work with some kid from the South Bronx, right? That would it's hard to hate people when you actually know them. All right last question Edward Snowden I know you I mean you're not easy on him. No, you say he has done immeasurable damage. Yes. He says the opposite How you you well I'm asking you yeah, I mean and I usually side with people in your business I was never one of those liberals who said oh no, I don't trust the CIA. I don't trust every I do in general I think (13/45)
they're patriots. You're right. So I don't think Edward Snowden is a traitor like Alden or Walker people who did it for money who were trying to sell out their country for themselves I think he really thinks he's doing a good thing But what say you you say he's a traitor and I mean that with great sincerity I say that because I know what he did. He stole the most sensitive information, you know things We gave it to people who had no business having it. He's sitting in Moscow living on the hog Yes, we are, you know that I do know that I know we are profoundly less secure as a result of what he did We're trying to recover but that recovery is gonna take a long time and let me tell you The reason I'm so blunt about what he did in the book is because I know Quite how bad what he did is and I'm not here to ascribe motives, you know Maybe he did it for what he thought were benign reasons but the impact of what he did is what I want people to understand and why I Go so far as to use a word (14/45)
that I have not No, no, I get it So interesting that the Democrats are the ones now who understand what treason and patriotism is We understand what national security is. I know you do Susan, right? I Let's meet our panel Alright, he is an MSNBC contributor in the Daily Beast politics editor Sam Stein He's a New York Times contributing writer and author of self-portrait in black and white Thomas Chatterton Williams. I love that name I'm gonna call you, sir She's senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute and an NBC analyst Danielle Pletka is back with us. How you doing? Okay Pick up with what I was saying there who lost Syria. I heard this word a lot growing up who lost a country the Russians now are taking over the Northern part of the country. We're bombing our own equipment I've used this phrase before patriotic immunity. Why did the Republicans? Get this patriotic immunity. Why can they do shit like this? Can you tell me no There's no real answer to this it's it's a (15/45)
baffling foreign policy decision I don't know the motivation of it. I can guess at the one motivation is But in the end the results are catastrophic. There was no motivation. He just wanted to get off the phone. It's possible They're really just I really think that's all it was. He was talking to her to warm the hot pockets were ready. There's this And he said And he said really I don't I think you come on I mean, yes, that's possible. I'm charitable than saying you planned it No, I I assumed that the hot pockets were in fact ready But you can't talk about you it's not just about Donald Trump if this is about Syria 500,000 Syrians died from 2011 right to now most of them under the Obama administration I should add Obama was the president of Syria at the time Donald Trump is not the president of Syria either my dear no But but could could any president have stopped that in Syria without a full-scale US invasion We could have done much more. In fact, we didn't support the Kurds, you know (16/45)
We only turned and saw and started supporting the Kurds a few years ago before that We were working with the term It strikes me as a deflection from what we're supposed to be talking about which is a decision that was made two weeks ago To ultimately just abandon a position that we had in northern Syria and there's no rationalization for it And we're talking about civilian deaths. Obviously, that's important National says 241 Kurds died in the past week. Okay, and and they are more than half a million Syrian Seems like a deflection to bring Obama into this one with the discussion Trump's to see I don't but again I'm not sure what Obama could have done short of a full military invasion when we were just in the neighboring country of Iraq To stop I have supported we could have supported the Syrian people We could have done more for the Syrian people. Who are the people which? And there are so many which are that the moderate we Who are the Syrian people that we were going to give guns to (17/45)
because there was a lot of different factions Those self-samed Kurds we could have supported a long time ago and didn't I we could have done a lot more for the Syrian Democratic forces we could have done more for them when they were People who really fucked the Kurds before this was George Bush the first Yeah Thinking of this 35 year old Kurdish politician who was dragged from her car and she was Executed on the side of the road Trump made this decision in between rounds of golf It reminds me of what Fitzgerald said in the Great. Yes be in the Great Gatsby You know He just smashes everything around him and then he kind of retreats into his money and his vast Carelessness and he just lets everybody else clean up the mess or not or not clean up the mess, but people are dying Well, I just want you to see I put together a little mashup here of what Trump said about Syria now I think these folks are politically savvy and they read the paper They know what went on a lot of people in this (18/45)
country only listen to Donald Trump That's all the information they get because the rest is fake news. Here's his version of the week in Syria This is an incredible outcome the Kurds and other people they're gonna be taking great care of we've gotten everything We could have ever dreamed of this is a solution that really well it saved their lives frankly I didn't know it was gonna work out this quickly. I didn't know it would work out this well So this was a great thing for everybody the Kurds are very happy Turkey is very happy. The United States is very happy and you know what? Civilization is very happy to argue with that I'm not happy. I live in a country where half the people just see that and think that's what happened, huh? I'm not happy. I live in a country where he said it doesn't matter where the Isis Fighters go because that's Europe's problem. I live in France, right? They're coming. They're coming. Yes, like fuck them Yeah, like but not their allies or anything. So, okay (19/45)
Impeachment a lot of people are saying that this doesn't really affect impeachment I don't know about that the 55% of independents are now for impeachment and I think the argument that Ukraine Does not equal impeachment got a little harder to make this week. No well I think it matters in to the degree that Republicans are finding a little bit of a voice to speak out against Trump not many of them but some of them and To the degree that they aren't admonished by the president and hit back they get muscle memory They know that they can speak out against the president and maybe that translated to something more related to Ukraine and the impeachment process Ultimately though. This is you know a Pelosi driven decision Does she want to expand it beyond Ukraine to include things like Trump Doral for instance, which is a textbook example of an impeachable offense It's unconstitutional blatantly. That's her call right now Everything that I've heard from the Hill is they want to keep it very (20/45)
Ukraine focused And is that a bad decision? I don't know I mean, I suppose you can make the case that people are getting it The polls look pretty promising for Democrats tons of momentum and revelations every day But then there's like a moral argument that if you see corruption if you see lawlessness Don't you have a moral imperative to actually expose that as well? Shouldn't you put that in the grand process the impeachment? You talk about the politics of it and that certainly is important and for a long time Trump has been saying, you know They have to impeach me because they can't beat me at the ballot box But if that's true, why does he always need so much foreign help The challenge for the Democrats in adding in right the Doral decision which was I mean No, we can cut no not good But but the challenge for the Democrats is that the claim that a lot of people have been making is that and that Trump has Been making that Trump's allies have been making is that the last few years have (21/45)
been their effort to find Anything to tack on to that anything whether it's stormy Daniels or it's his lawyer But all those things are impeached well, I mean but in fact Maybe they are and that's the decision of the House of Representatives The point here that I think we're trying to make is that if you keep trying to pile things on it does diminish the credibility Amazing how that works for him There's a certain amount of the American population that no matter what he does is not going to budge The New York Times has countless articles on Trump voters that just won't give up on them. They just get more cynical about Because I do think part of his strategy is what you were alluding to early on which is it's like a fire hose of Controversy and you just don't know what to do with it And while you're focused on one thing he acquiesces to Turkey and then decides, you know Doral's the perfect location for the g7 and you're three steps behind him as he's on to the next controversy I actually (22/45)
do think there's some madness and some strategy to I think even for him this week He had it's like a plethora of crazy crazy quotes To me the one everybody sort of missed that was maybe the most important he met with Schumer and Pelosi right in the White House Through a tantrum They walked out We heard all about Nancy you're a third-rate politician or does it not yeah, it's the thing he said last in that meeting See you at the polls. Yeah See you at the polls is what he said to them in other words you keep doing this shit We'll see how it turns out on Election Day Does he have a point? Well, I think he thinks that impeachment isn't gonna go anywhere. I don't I don't get well He's got this he's saying this is going to help me politically. Go ahead Oh, he firmly believes it that wasn't the quote that shocked me though The quote that shocked me was he said someone told me to call this meeting and so I'm here The White House had called the meeting Did you know did you not know All right, (23/45)
so everyone in DC is talking about the latest it couple Igor and left These are the two they are I love this term associates that whenever that word Never a good thing associates of Rudy Giuliani. They were they have a company called fraud guarantee It sounds like something from a Bob Holt sketch We'll call it fraud guarantee. Okay, and they also came out this week on a disco in Ukraine called mafia rave again. I am NOT making this is the website. This is the real thing Igor and Lev own mafia rave And Wait, leave that up there because I want to start the video that you see there's a little arrow there. I Guess we don't. All right There it is you see you want me to push that arrow and show you the video This video is real I'm a little suspicious of the voiceover, but see what you think Welcome To mafia rave Ukraine's premier funtime completely legit nightclub Whether you are in purple satin shirt or purple velour tracksuit We treat you like oligarch rated five stars on Yeltsin with (24/45)
music from Putin's favorite band poison Me girl of your dreams would look at I that says tonight is night. I pee on bed for you See where American President Trump meet wife twice Mafia rave is number one club in Ukraine for collusion ask Rudy what happens in Ukraine stays in Ukraine But no print quote quote, right, buddy Start off whose latest bestseller is letters from an astrophysicist Neil degrasse Tyson I'm glad you never disappoint with the time universe. How many? Universe ties do you have like Trump has all the red ones you have all the occasionally is a blue one I have noticed but not as often as he wears a red tie. No, but so this time I have about 109 Wow Yeah, you know it right that way about a hundred. Sorry. Yeah, okay could be a hundred and eleven exactly Your book is so interesting I noticed a lot of the letters that people write to you and this is a lot of that You know you you care to you're very good with your fans Yeah I want to know what they think was what I was (25/45)
doing under the hood for decades while I had this public persona of Talking about the universe. There's that personal private things that issues that people had and they wrote to me about it Okay, and one of the big ones that you get is people are asking you to sort of mediate between Gosh, I I want to believe in God, but I don't want to not believe in science Is there way we can square that circle? What would I get a lot I get a lot of those letters and what do you tell them? I like the way said square that circle. That's very mathematical of you. Congratulations You know me doctor I am all about the science So what happens is I think people might be raised in one or another religious tradition and then they start learning science then they find places where the science conflicts and I think most people have never met a scientist much less and claim one as their friend So they see me kind of as their friend who could then offer perspective or at least shine Some kind of cosmic (26/45)
luminosity on what next decision they want to make about how to reconcile or not Their religious traditions with science enlightened religious people don't have an issue. You know, if Jesus is your Savior No one is going to take that away from you in a country that protects the free expression of religion But if you're gonna come around and say my religious text tells me the universe is 6,000 years old And I'm gonna stick it in your science classroom. I have an issue with that. Right? Yeah, right. Yeah Well Basically saying I'm coming down in the side of sight. No, however, top shit However, I when I people write to me I see it as a contract of communication, right? If I just speak and not care where they're coming from then I'm just lecturing you're letting them down nicely It's like you know what people sometimes say they love this in America They say everything happens for a reason which I always think of you because I like that is so fucking stupid. Yeah I Write about that is so (27/45)
correct. Thank you Reason is random right we create reason in it Also, it's elitist because it's something you can say when you live in an affluent society where you have a lot of you know Enough money to change jobs or meet new people you live in a city There's like a billion people live on a shit pile every day and nothing happens for a reason for them They're born into grinding party and they die Definitely an elitist point of view what I wanted to say So I just wanted to say that the contract I have It's an unstated contract between those me and those who write to me is that I will care about Where they're coming from and how they're thinking and what receptors they might have for arguments on my present So for example in the case of the religious letters, I say there are three truths in the world There's your personal truth. No one is gonna take that from you. Jesus is your Savior Muhammad is your last prophet These are truths. No one is gonna take that from you. Then there's like (28/45)
a political truth That's just what becomes true when it's repeated enough times. Okay, but then there's the objective like those first two you just Which are the methods and tools of science are invented and designed to establish those are true whether or not you believe in them And so I say you can keep your six thousand year universe But understand that that's a personal truth that you get from your personal religion If you rise to power and have control over laws and legislations in a pluralistic land It is a recipe for disaster. If you're gonna take your personal truths and create laws that have to then apply to everyone so The world is The world is is not six thousand years old. It is so not six thousand years old So we used to just have to deal with that in the last few years We've also had to deal with people who think it might be flat Yeah, and which is stupid so so I've said this before I think the the rise of the Flat Earthers is evidence of two things One we live in a (29/45)
country that protects free speech To we have a failure of our educational system, so I I'm gonna turn around back to the school system It's a where has it failed in such a way that a full-grown adult coming out of this system can think the earth is flat That's where I'm focused. I agree right and so you're on the side of a fact is a fact get over it I'm on the side that earth is round. Yes Oh Facts can be anywhere It's this collection of facts which when put together in wise and sage ways become knowledge But I'd rather speak of knowledge rep than facts, but I bring this up because you've gotten to some hot water recently There was a mass shooting you tweeted something about it, which was true. Yeah. Okay, if we're gonna be facts or facts people I defended you by the way. Yeah, I did catch that Online. Yeah, I caught that. Well, where was my thank you? No I Reached out a little So, okay. Anyway, my point being you what you said was true. Yes. Okay, you weren't trying to you even said (30/45)
The USA horrifically law you went out of your way to be nice about it and then said but the fact is That on average across any 48 hours. We lose 500 to medical errors 300 to the flu blah blah blah our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data No, I know what it's like to have the Twitter mob come after you. Yeah, I don't blame you for Apollo I get it to have to do but you were right Facts matter they do matter. However, so do Emotions we are emotion. We're an emotional species So so so were I to do that again, I would have put some some some distance time distance between that tweet It's because people are bereaved right? And so I wanted to have some Retrospectively, that's what I would have done. All right, I want to ask about an explorer because I know you want to go to Mars We're not gonna have that fight again as we always do. Don't get me started. I don't get them started I know Mars in the face right there Well, I bring Mars wherever I go Okay, what talk about a shithole (31/45)
country Mars and said I Mean honestly if we're gonna make all right, we're not gonna have that argument, but So you admire the explorers as we all do we had Columbus Day earlier this week. Okay an Explorer extraordinaire you would agree. We would all agree as an explorer important to explore. Yes, but sure Yes, yeah, or else we'd be doing this show in Barcelona And I mean the balls to get on the ocean when they did they thought it was flat the world It's true, but not him. He was smart enough to know. Yeah that the world was not was not was not flat Yeah, but still in that little rickety boat. It's less the size of the it's like the size of this room and it took audacity Unbelievable So was he an ass and gonads? Yes, you know probably to have that kind of balls. You're not gonna be mr Nice guy all the time so of course a lot of people say we should tear down his statues and blah blah blah because he brought diseases and he did I Read in Jill Lepore's book Haiti had three million people (32/45)
before the Europeans came and then it was five thousand So, okay disease he didn't try to do that and then slaves he took slaves But so did our founding fathers the Bible is cool with slaves neither Jesus nor his dad God or against them It's not his dad I'm not touching this one He was a 15th century man the founders had slaves the Bible had slaves or Kelly still has them I'm just saying Columbus day weigh in discuss. I'm not touching this one either We need to be aware of the past of past atrocities and we need to be sensitive to it But I think what they weren't we're almost overdosing on history. We're mining the past constantly for fresh out. Yes I don't think Christopher Columbus should be canceled I think we have a society that's mature enough to handle moral ambiguity Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand Sent the man to the new world Okay, and they gave a satchel of flags that were Spanish flags and put them wherever you come So, I don't know why Columbus Day to this day is (33/45)
celebrated by Italians. They had nothing to do with his voyage It should be spent and if they did more people than just a few in Brooklyn would be speaking Italian in the Western Hemisphere Put that in perspective What So can I ask about this democratic debate that we had the other night first of all these debates now It's 12 people well too many it it's like I can't there's too many characters It's it's like, you know, so you can count to 12 But I don't it's like a Netflix shot not that I ever watch Netflix Where you have to binge it for three seasons before it gets good I mean, can we can we get it down to a reasonable number of people and also? You know Joe Biden, I don't know this whole thing for me was that he could be the one to beat Trump, right? I don't know if that's true anymore. Sure. That's true anymore either I think a lot of people have doubts about whether Joe Biden can do it That's why Elizabeth Warren's on top right now. And what do you think about that? If it was (34/45)
Trump versus Warren, what's your vote go to it doesn't go to Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump So you'd sit it out To be honest, they never Trump people. I don't know. Are you technically never Trumper? Okay, well putting you aside. Thank you. If you're if you're a never Trumper if you're never Trumper I hear this a lot They they really hate Trump, but they just can't bring themselves to vote for Elizabeth Warren It's like well, then you're somewhat Trump, you know, like you either have to go all in There are other ways to you know box in a president Elizabeth Warren vote for a Republican senator Republican congressman, but if you want Trump out you have to go fully in it You can't have it halfway. Yeah, but I want to put some I have a question for the food I'm just a scientist But when I look at this field of 12 Yeah The Democrats can get together vote in a primary and they take the polls of likely voting Democrats and we might pick the one we like the best What is what is it? What (35/45)
would it mean if the one we like the best is not the one most likely to be able to beat Trump That's who is How do we define who's most likely to be Trump and what we don't know What the dog But the point here is that What does that even mean My friends used to play this game called what will many eat first No at a party They would take four bits of food from the different food and they'd put it on the plate and everyone would bet on What the dog would eat first You think the hot dog he's gonna go for that no, we ate the cracker first Don't know what the voters want until that's how we got Trump No one thought he could win But that is that the reason that we got Trump is the same reason that we have this problem in the print with the Democrats Which is that the primary system used to be the closed-door back room smoke-filled room where guys tried to pick the one who was gonna win Who would beat the opponent right now? It's a very different system and the passionate passionate people in (36/45)
the base are the ones who choose Who's gonna be their candidate? So Joe Biden has a little Ukraine problem, too You know, he didn't answer that question too. Well, I thought in the debate He didn't own and his son was getting 50 grand a month to do nothing in a field He knew nothing about it's very swampy My question is this Al Franken had to go away for the Democrats because they said well We have to be like Caesar's wife on the meat to issue We can't have any tainting on that so that the Republic's can't say oh you guys are bad on that, too Doesn't the same apply to Ukraine and Joe Biden? I think there are different issues But I get your point and I think liberals do a disservice if they just excuse what Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were up to I don't think it rises to the level of what Trump's no, it's not of course, but neither did Al Franken, of course Something clearly there was a clear issue where Hunter Biden got a job primarily almost exclusively because of his father's Time in (37/45)
politics. There's no Exclusively exclusively and and if you think that that's fine. Well, it's not I mean, there's something unseemly about it and it's access It's somewhat pay for play and I think that Liberals again are not doing a real service to themselves if they just try to sweep this under the who's Kennedy's Attorney General It was Robert Thank you so much for saying that that's not your team and you're right yeah, he was qualified It's not like a bunker. It's unlike Bobby Kennedy was a purse designer a Growing problem that we have that isn't just Hunter Biden. Why is we know why is Chelsea Clinton? You know it at the front. Why are any of these? Tell your fucking kids to get a real job To the woman who got vomit in her hair on a Spirit Airlines flight and had to wash her hair in an airplane bathroom What did you expect? You're flying Spirit from Chicago to Baltimore you're lucky you're alive I'm just saying when you book a flight that cost $89 You're subconsciously accepting (38/45)
the fact that you may get a little vomit in your hair You just happen to get a lot New rule if Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously on the world stage He's got to delegate the job of corn inspector to someone else Here he is inspecting the corn here. He is pleased with the quality Here he is realizing. They keep showing him the same corn year after year Yes, Kim. That's the bad news. That's all the corn. There is a North Korea The good news is because of all these photo ops of you with corn you've moved up to the third in the Iowa caucus New rule dispensaries need to stop acting like the highs from different marijuana are so radically different This one's good for being social. This one's a mellow. You know they don't do that at a liquor store Hi, what sort of drunk are you looking for today? I? Recommend this one for calling old girlfriends and the Chianti is nice for sobbing about your father Of course if you're looking to call your mother-in-law a whore I'd stick with brown (39/45)
liquor Same goes for if you're looking to let the gay guy in your building blow you and for anything like falling asleep on the kitchen floor or Or putting a pizza in the oven and forgetting about it You have to try our malt liquor Now if this is a really special night, and you're thinking of walking up to the Taco Bell drive-thru window I Would recommend a sweet wine and of course vodka is always great for getting a tattoo of a rocket that looks like a dick Neural now that we have Doritos with names like Flamin hot blaze and jacked How about a version for those of us with the more refined culinary palette I want to see something like Doritos subtly seasoned Or Doritos with a flavor or Doritos light and unprepossessing oh Hell, let's just call it what it is Doritos Caucasian New rule the people who were shocked to see this Australian man jogging a popular trail In a ping-pong and work boots must give the guy credit. That's what we call an old-school creep He could easily be at home on (40/45)
the computer Masturbating on chat or letter sending dick pics But he chose to put on his boots go outside and make people uncomfortable the old-fashioned Finally new rule it's time somebody called out Donald Trump for something. He's doing that. I don't think anyone has caught on to yet He's a big liar announced. He was running the first time he said I don't need anybody's money I'm using my own money. I'm not using donors. I don't care I'm really rich But he's not really rich and he's used plenty of other people's money 90% of his 2016 campaign was funded by other people's money His old reason for being there is a lie this notion of I can't be bought because I have so much money I don't care about money anymore No, the exact opposite is true. The man is constantly for sale That wasn't toilet paper on his shoe. It's a price tag He grubs for every penny. He wasn't above cheating his charity Trump University was a pyramid scheme. He just put a g7 meeting in one of his golf clubs. There (41/45)
is not a dollar He has ever left on the table since he took office. He's worried about Ukrainian corruption The only time corruption bothers Donald Trump is when he's not in on it If your country pays in cash So do you read me a piece of cash you can literally get away with murder You know Even I have a little money history with this guy remember mr President 2013 when you sued me because I publicly offered you Five million dollars if you could prove you were not the son of an orangutan It Was a joke But when you heard five million dollars like a bum who chases a dollar on the sidewalk tied to a string You could not resist chasing it into court. Well you lost that one Tonight I want to give you another chance to get some money out of me Now you and I have been going back and forth on whether you will leave office if you lose the election I mean you have one guy on television. I'm telling you he's not leaving He's going to win and then he's not leaving So in 2024, he won't leave. I'm (42/45)
telling you here. This is a serious person Thank you a Serious person is serious person. I will bet you a million dollars right now that if you lose the 2020 election I'm right and you won't leave What am I saying? This is Donald Trump We're talking about like he'd ever pony up even if he lost a bet that would involve two things He's never done admit defeat and pay a bill So Forget the bet I got a better idea. How about this? Just take my check for one million dollars My check for a million and I bet I could get another thousand people just from here to the beach including Malibu of course Who would pay that much to see you resign to those out there who are saying my god bill Are you suggesting we pay this man to go away? Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting in fact, I'm insisting Celebrities do nothing but waste their money on stupid crud stupid crazy shit like castles and Jewel-encrusted crucifixes and shark tanks and private islands. Here's something I could spend on and know it (43/45)
was doing some good let's Let's speak to Donald Trump in the only language. He has ever really understood My whole life has been money. I want money. I want money greedy. I was greedy greedy. I want more money more money It's not like he was hiding it It goes back to his childhood from the moment his father created his first teenage shell company money money Money makes Donny a winner Daddy loves good boy who gets money so Mr. President, it's really very simple. You love money. We hate you You could finally be the billionaire you always pretended you were yes I said billionaire because the kind of money I could get from Just off the top of my head Oprah Cher Madonna Gaga Bono Jay-z Beyonce pink Rihanna Usher Pharrell Eminem And that's just the ones with one name Singers actors Athletes everyone fucking hates you Here's a list of every single person in show business Every single person in show business with the names of those who do not hate you across that Finally, let us not forget (44/45)
the millions and millions of not so rich and famous people who despise you, too Americans have modest means who would happily chip in five ten twenty bucks or pawn their wedding rings, whatever it took And that's why tonight I am formally announcing the formation of my national crowdfunding platform to bribe President Trump to leave I mean, sir win And we call it prick starter Thomas The older glass Tyson and Susan Ray stay tuned for other time on YouTube. Thank you catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand for more information log on to HBO calm (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill maul news. We have to cover It's good thing. We've stopped clapping So let's not bury the lead the big story this week that tried to shoot Trump again, that's not not funny Okay I'm being serious now. That's the second time this happened. I said this before there could be no fuzz on this. This is not funny Okay, it's not okay. It's not okay to wish it happened. Well. This is the problem Well, I mean look this happens too frequently, I'm sorry this happened on the golf course the guy was laying in wait and It's happens too much in fact besides the shooter. There were other two other shooters, but I'm waiting to play through Of course the NRA had to come out with this statement. This is no time to talk about gun control They said guns do not kill people pagers kill people Yeah, that's the other big story this week the fight with Hezbollah is on there in the Middle East and the way Israel did it Some pretty (1/45)
amazing you know Terrorists know this for a long time first thing you got to do get rid of your cell phone because they could track you there So they've been using old-school pagers and the Israelis this week made all the pagers blow up In what they call operation 1980s drug dealer yes Do not fuck with Israel man, they they took the fight from their river to their pants Nobody's in to take any shit these days Did you see Kamala with Oprah Winfrey asked her about owning a gun and Kamala said anybody breaks into my house is getting shot? Trump immediately accused her of turning even blacker. Well Trump Trump is losing his mind. He's losing his mind He's losing his cool, and he's gonna lose the election I put I put down my marker on that last week made my prediction, but this I'm telling you it even for him It's going off the rails. He keeps saying now kids are undergoing sex change operations at school at school They're doing it at school Wow, and I was nervous for picture day In that (2/45)
case girls who want to become boys you got to get him early before first period There is a Republican Candidate for governor governor in North Carolina named Mark Robinson. He's a super Christy Jesus loving hard right conservative African American man, and then seeing Ennis dug up a lot of his past That's what happens when you run okay. He was on all these websites. He'd like tranny porn Didn't care about abortion. He said and he wanted to Intimated he would like to bring back slavery and of course the Republican Reaction to this is predictable awful unforgivable continue Yes, and he also referred to himself as a black Nazi Who also posted that he spied on women in the girls locker room, so he's a peeping Tom and an uncle Tom I've said this for 25 years when you think the Republicans can't go lower. They do I mean black Nazi, and I think it is you know on his website. He referred to his penis as peewee German And this is embarrassing because the Trump campaign has a rally scheduled (3/45)
fourth, North Carolina tomorrow And they told Mark Robinson you are no longer welcome there absolutely not this is for white Nazis only so Now the Republicans want to replace him with someone less freaky, but did he's in jail Well, I mean come on that is That is an American tragedy story. I mean Pete did he I don't know if anybody's fallen from that height I mean this guy is worth they say over 400 million dollars from basically three sources owning a record label brand affiliation and buying lube in bulk I Don't want to judge a book by its cover, but what they seized a thousand bottles of lube and baby oil in his house Because he was having these parties they called freak-offs which went on for days Sometimes people needed IV they were partying so hard, and you know a freak-off I'm all good with it one thing that always bothered me about it is do you bring a gift? And you're like well, I'll bring baby oil and then you get there Oh everybody brought But I mean I Don't know if he's ever (4/45)
gonna see the light of day again. He's in jail. They wouldn't even give him bail I mean the charges sex trafficking forced labor Kidnapping arson bribery obstruction of justice and you may say arson that's going a little bit too far But you try putting out a baby oil fire Scientists an author of the recently False alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet Bjorn longboard I Am so glad you're here because we can talk about environment every time we have a political campaign in this country it becomes the forgotten issue People care about it. They care about it, and they care about it And then they just don't seem to want to talk about it may because it doesn't hold very well But I mean you are a skeptic of a lot of what goes on About what people say about how dire climate change is and I think that's good I think we need skepticism, but I must say I am skeptical of you You should be exactly we all just need to be skeptical so first of (5/45)
all you never been paid by anybody Right like an oil company No We don't take money from oil companies and the important part here is to remember that what we're talking about is Really just saying what does the science tell us and what does the economics tell us yeah climate change is a real problem It is one of the things we need to fix in the 21st century But it's not this Armageddon that it's been made out to be you know you hear on the news these catastrophic calamitous Climate stories all the time, but these are very carefully selected worst-case scenarios often based on ultra Unrealistic, I've seen you do the opposite. Sorry. I've seen you do the opposite like okay. Well. I've It's a while ago. I'm not remembering what year, but maybe it's 15 years Are you saying that sea levels in the last two years? Hadn't risen, but if you look at the chart over time Oh, they are but and you if you cherry-pick two years I mean, that's what the climate deniers always did and I know you are not (6/45)
a denier I wouldn't have you on if you were but the the point I was I was trying to make there was Actually, and you can read the whole story And it was in the Guardian newspaper and the point what I was trying to make was you constantly hear this thing is getting Incredibly bad, and then a couple of years later. It doesn't on the sea level rise It was actually such that those two years were going down, but obviously I even said it is going to go back up But the point here is that we can't make these arguments just to show here's something That's really terrible going on and then scare people. I agree that I really hate it when people Want to manipulate me you know try move me to just tell me the truth But But I feel like the title of the book false alarm, I don't like that I think that goes way too far It's not a false alarm, right? All right So so it's false in the sense that we're being told this is the end of the world a lot of people believe This is really the end of the world a (7/45)
new OCD survey and it'll be rich countries not tomorrow But it could be you know Dick Cheney when we were fighting terrorism, but if there's a 1% chance This is their reasoning to go into Iraq which was stupid okay, if there's a 1% chance we should Treat it like it could happen. I feel like this is more than a 1% chance okay I'm going to show you some of the data that actually indicates This is a problem But it's not the end of the world by any means so there's two of the world's leading climate economists one is Richard all one of the most quoted climate economists from from this year and the other one is William Nordhaus the guy who Got the only Nobel Prize in climate economics They both made estimates across all the different estimates of how bad is climate change going to be By the end of the century at a three degree centigrade or five point four degree Fahrenheit Temperature rise the cost is going to be somewhere between two and three percent of GDP But what will the ocean look (8/45)
like? I mean, I'm not talking about oceans rising. I'm talking about oceans dying and The world can't live without dead oceans, and it seems like they're in bad shape between all the plastic in them They're overfished. I mean there's very Many places have no fish left at all. They're too acidic Coral reefs, I know you've talked about oh, that's exaggerated. Tell me about why you think the coral reef problem is exaggerated That's just the data So can I just finish the other point? Trying to make before we go on to the coral reefs so two to three percent of global GDP is a problem But remember by the end of the century the UN estimate the average person on the planet will be 450 percent as rich as he or she is today So that means instead of being 450 percent as rich we will feel like we're only four hundred and thirty five percent as rich Yes, that's a problem. No, it's not the end of the world on the on the coral reef bit rich. So How does rich fix the ocean no so on the coral reefs bit (9/45)
We have a situation where we have on Great Barrier Reef. So the world's biggest coral reef the Australian marine Scientific Institute. Sorry. I can't remember what they're called, but they're the guys who? Data every year on the coral reef since 1986 and they have been Assessing what is the total outcome of how good does the reef look like and in? 2009 to 2012 we thought it was Terrible. It was really dramatic. The Guardian wrote the obituary for the Great coral reef. No and the point I've just been making is the last three years They've been at the highest level the most coral reef we've ever seen in those areas And so the point is not that there's not a challenge for a coral reefs there is but most of the challenge comes from overfishing from industrial pollution from Sea runoff and those are the kinds of things that we should fix but we're not being well Informed if we're being told this is because of climate change So we got to change our entire infrastructure on our global economy (10/45)
in order to save the oceans when it's not actually what's gonna happen And why do we imagine as we treat the oceans ever worse that the coral reefs are enjoying it more now Look I don't think that why I enjoy this I think why are they why are they doing better in the last three years? I don't like we did anything. I don't know. Oh, well, there we go. All right That's honest we don't know I'm a data guy I simply try to say right I get to look at the no No, and what I love that you do is that you inform people of things that you know again The people who just want to usher me to a point of view would never tell me like yes We are using a lot more green energy, but it's not making the amount of fossil fuels We use go down why? Because people just use more yeah That's a really key thing that I don't think Americans are aware of we just use more How do we fix that? What do we not have to one of reason is because energy is incredibly good Remember you and I and most of the audience and here (11/45)
lives in an incredibly energy rich world We have the opportunity we can keep cool in the summer and hot in the winter. We can get food We can get transportation. I mean I came from Sweden. I Wasn't gonna row a boat over here, right? So the The whole point is energy makes us much much better off and also makes it more resilient We can do a lot more things most people in the world have virtually no energy. They want a lot more energy They honestly, you know Most people in sub-saharan Africa live on less energy per year than your refrigerator It's not just your every refrigerator use and and so the reality is we need much more energy What we do need to fix climate change is to invest more in green energy research and development So that we in the long run actually can make sure that Africans and Indians and Chinese can live an energy-rich Life but without the co2 emissions. Yeah. Well, I want to I mean that's I think the future. Yeah Because I mean I've said it here a couple of years ago. (12/45)
Like I don't know what will work to solve this problem I know it didn't work and that's asking people to be good. Yes that I know doesn't work One of the things that we have been trying to do for last 20 years in climate policy is basically tell people to be poor Be less well-off be you know uncomfortable. Would you mind being a little hotter in the summer and a little colder in the winter? That's just not gonna work. What is gonna work is innovation. Remember Los Angeles in 1950s? Sorry, I don't mean to say you remember but remember that Anyway, anyway, I was alive It was terribly polluted and The sort of standard climate way of tackling that would be to tell would you mind walking instead of driving around person? Of course that wouldn't work in Los Angeles or anywhere else. But what we did was instead we invented the catalytic converter It's a little gizmo you put on the tail part of a car and then you can drive much longer and pollute much much less That's how you solve the problem (13/45)
both of air pollution and the long run and climate change. All right, so let's go through Let's go through some of these new things just quickly we only have a couple of minutes and I don't want to ask you if you ever run into Greta in Sweden and How does that go I wonder but okay giant umbrellas These are the new things that they're gonna that would block a crucial amount of solar radiation And these are all things that they have in pilot programs or the beginning of iron fertilization dumping iron into the ocean It makes photo plankton bloom and when they die they carry the co2 they absorb down to the seabed Carbon capture they already have something in Iceland that pulls four thousand metric tons out of the atmosphere And they put them in underground caverns and then they turn into stone cloud brightening Sea-salt aerosols into the sky that brighten clouds and deflect the sun's rays. So this is the future you're saying This is what we're gonna be No, these are some of the things (14/45)
that we should be looking at because remember if we could come up with a way to Suck out the co2 of the atmosphere. That was what you were talking about from Iceland at really low cost We basically have solved the problem. We could continue doing everything we do and get rid of the entire global warming problem at fairly low cost We're not there yet at all But this could be one solution and the point is there are lots of these potential solutions now Most of them are not gonna work But we if we invest it a lot more into energy green energy innovation and also these technologies So basically innovation we would have a much better chance of fixing this problem right now We're spending trillions of dollars really badly in poor climate policy I'm simply saying let's spend billions but spend it much smarter on things a lot. Let's stay skeptical I Was like huh, it's like Kamala at the debate you had to like reach out first and make sure I was okay He's a columnist for the New York Times (15/45)
Brett Stevens She hosts the 11th hour on MSNBC and MSNBC and is the senior business analyst for NBC News Stephanie rule is Okay So to media people here today, I thought maybe we would talk about rhetoric because that's what's on Trump's mind He got shot at again and he says their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at And then of course in true Trump Ian fashion always the most unself-aware person in the universe Goes on to say when they're the ones that are destroying the country Would be also the kind of rhetoric that would make a borderline person shoot at you But I mean he's right rhetoric has consequences, but he is possibly the worst person to make this case Yeah, I mean, it's the pot calling the kettle black. I think that's what the expression was was was basically born I mean he's used this is the guy who called the media the enemy of the American people scum vermin All these all these phrases now He's of course He's absolutely right of that. We probably should tone it down when (16/45)
we're calling our opponents the end of Democracy the end of Western civilization. We're not Helping our arguments. I disagree. I disagree. That's that's a dumb argument I think because you what no you had it were there that's their argument Which is that you guys are saying Trump is a threat to democracy, but he is a threat to do I the answer can't be that we can't say what's true I want to say what's true and the left has to do that too. No, I'm sorry, but Every time the left calls Trump a threat to democracy Americans remember that in 2016 Guys, like me we're calling Trump a threat to democracy and here we are I don't think what's that and that dog and that dog is not going to hunt you have to say the case against Trump Is that he's going to be a terrible president who's going to divide the country that is going to accomplish? Absolutely, nothing that is going to embarrass us in front of of the world and it's going to conduct a mystery But those are policy you don't stop calling out (17/45)
the truth because people aren't listening right when Donald Trump It's our job in the media right when people complain Donald Trump got fact-checked way more than Kamala Harris did you're damn right He did you know why he told more lies? has Done nothing but benefit from a campaign that seeks to treat him as outside the borders of political Respectability. So if you want to help is But he's what you have been doing. He said he's gonna be a bad president He's good. He's a bad president because he doesn't concede elections not the policy shit That's that comes and goes look most Americans realize that here we are Joe Biden is the president of United States Kamala Harris is likely the next president of the United States but the reason that Trump has an enduring appeal on so many Americans is that so so many of us in the media want to treat him right as Absolutely beyond the pale and you know how Trump supporters respond by saying oh, yeah, he's beyond the pale I'm gonna vote for him. We (18/45)
have done nothing but help Trump for the last eight years So that's how we should organize our political views by what the idiots will do I mean that And he is beyond the pale and on this rhetoric question I mean they both have things that they say about the other person that are pretty bad. That's politics. It's always going on There's only one side There should be no false equivalency here that uses the kind of rhetoric that they use like a member of Trump's here. Did I? I dug it up the tough people I can tell you I have the support of the police the support of the military and then he brings up the bikers The support of the bikers, right? I think if you have the military and the police I don't know if we're gonna need the bikers, but okay, I Have the tough people but they don't play it tough until the Democrats go to a certain point and then it would be very bad This is the Heritage Foundation president. That's like the number one Republican King of Project 2025. Okay? Well, that's (19/45)
kind of a bullshit talking point 2025, but we don't have to go to there now But he is the Heritage Foundation is the main conservative think-tank We are in the process of the second American Revolution Which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be you don't hear that from the other side this idea of look We don't want to have to kill you But if you keep winning and the country keeps going your way, we will would you not agree that that is? Different I absolutely agree and look I've been an opponent from Trump from the day from day one and I've suffered professional consequences For no, I have for no I have for that for that opposition. You're here tonight. Well, that's cool That is definitely but look The point is here if we are asking ourselves how we want to best make the case against Donald Trump Constantly pressing the button that he is an existential threat to our democracy When we are here in 2024 having having an election is not going to work make the case that he was (20/45)
and Would be a terrible president and that's an effective Here's where I take Brett's point that we really all Could bring down the rhetoric Donald Trump was the one who? Who started with the divisive vile language when he went down the escalator in? 2015 he has capitalized on it. He ran on it He's benefited politically for it and our country has suffered but what he did he saw vulnerabilities and sensitivities that the American people had and he saw that they were scared and he told them lies and he freaked them out and he Made them panicked and what we need to do or what Democrats need to do is take a look at those vulnerabilities Right. Look at the immigration thing in the last two weeks All we're talking about is Donald Trump with the dogs and the cats in Springfield, Ohio We're saying that's absurd and it's vile and it's idiotic however There is something to talk about with an issue like immigration with the country changing so rapidly There are people in the country who are (21/45)
saying the country's moving so fast because the technology because of demographics and instead of saying to those People well, then you're older stupid or xenophobic or you're racist instead See where they are talk to them and actually embody love thy neighbor because you know what in Springfield, Ohio It has changed dramatically right, you know got a huge influx of Haitian migrants legally there for jobs But you also should give time and space maybe for an older generation that's saying my town is changing I want to know about this or learn about this instead of just saying just get with it. The country's moving Terrific point as you often make terrific points The way in which demagogues succeed historically is not by that they tell lies Yes They do tell us but they traffic and have truths and the problem that we've had in responding to Trump is that we listen to the lie like people eating cats in Springfield, Ohio But we don't listen to the part of the argument that contains an (22/45)
important seed of truth Which is that mass illegal migration has had huge and often negative consequences and Trump's opponents? Have to like come to grips with the parts of the message that are resonating with tens of millions of voters and Democrats will immediately Say but it's not illegal They're here legally But hold on even if they're here legally and even if that is the fabric of the United States Since our country was founded we've struggled with assimilating to immigrants whether it was Irish people or Italian people and take the Opportunity to help educate people rather than just say get with it or you're out of favor. Yeah And Look, I think as I said last week, I think the big I think he's toast I think Trumpism will go on after him They will look for somebody else as long as there is on the left people racial hysterics and Hamas lovers and extreme socialists and Gender deniers and people who want to keep the parents in the dark. There will be another Trump But this one I (23/45)
think is done. You can just feel it. I mean, here's some of the things he said this week I'm the greatest of all time Maybe maybe greater than Elvis Elvis had a guitar. I don't have the privilege of a guitar I mean, it's first of all when I think of great guitarists Elvis like, you know Clapton Hendrix Joe Walsh Elvis. It was a prop. He never even played it He also said I really haven't been treated very well, but that's the story of my life Yes born into crushing wealth Inheriting a real estate fortune that he squandered I feel like it's just at that point where they've had enough and it'll trust me The polls will be tied on Election Day But the people will get in the booth and enough of them will be like yeah I'm glad this is private because I don't want people to know I'm turning my back on him But I promise you they will I feel like there's a third of America. That's always with the Trump's they used to call them The Birchers and the birthers of the Tea Party they go by many (24/45)
different names at the same people and Then he moved it to like half the country and it'll move back a little closer to the third and we'll be okay We'll see. Yeah, we'll see but the State of the Union feds the Fed lowered interest rates So that's really good for people want to buy a house and stuff and slate Inflation is down gas prices are down crime down Border crossings way down wages are up and the stock market is at record high and the candidate said I hate Taylor Swift and The Republicans are running a black Nazi, North Carolina Dead even The polls are dead I promise you they will be and I promise you it's gonna come out of why why isn't Kamala running away? Well, here's another reason why I think It's going you can always tell when it's going south when the dippish ship is sinking is because the person like Trump then not at The center of it starts surrounding himself with I mean, he normally surrounds us with pretty crazy people but this Laura Loomer I Don't know if you know (25/45)
anything about her, but I mean this this is yeah I mean, I'm gonna go through the list of conspiracy theorists But we thought this would be a good week to get the audience to know her a little better She's the new groupie in Trump circle. That's my opinion So we do one of our favorites here 24 things. You don't know about For example, my spirit animal was eaten by Haitians My biggest fear is immigrants taking my job as a right-wing hate monger As a child I had two of my brats dolls deported I don't hate all brown people just the brown ones People think I'm all-in on Trump, but some of the voices in my head like Jill Stein Copy is refurbishing vintage lawn jockeys. I think Michael Jackson faked the moonwalking If you say Beetlejuice four times you get me. I believe the government puts something in the water that makes you pee All right, let's talk a little about the international scene the long-awaited second front in the Israeli war seems to have started this week Not just the pagers, (26/45)
but they were bombing all over the Lebanon yesterday and today Here's what Kamala Harris said this week About what we should do when the war is over No reoccupation of Gaza No changing of the territorial lines of Gaza And an ability to have security in the region for all concern in a way that we create stability I Feel like if that's what you have to say don't say anything just shut up I mean everybody who talks about Israel these days is just so full of shit I mean, we're just not you know, I don't want children to die duh who does None of us want children to die None of us want this war to go on but it's not addressing what the problem is. The problem is that one side Wants a two-state solution or at least always did it's a little more right-wing now I'm talking about Israel, but that still has been their position one side never did and still doesn't one side uses terrorism To get their goals one side retaliates against terrorism One side is accused of genocide, but doesn't do it the (27/45)
other side actually would love to do it People keep saying Israel has the right to defend itself. That's not and then whenever Israel does They object to it. Well, yeah, I mean this is one of the astonishing things about the response to the pager bombings I understand how people are Upset about the sight of Gaza being bombed They're being bombed because Hamas hides beneath and behind its own population to cynically Exploit their their deaths, but then the Israelis turn around with the most astonishingly well-targeted Attack in history like literally going off in the hands of any one any Hezbollah member who has one of these pagers and you have people like Congresswoman AOC Lamb lambasting Israel the head of the UN lambasting Israel, so they say Israel is entitled to Self-defense, but there's no conceivable self-defense that they're actually prepared to defend for for the Israelis I'm glad the Israelis are taking things in their matters in their own hand They just took care of a (28/45)
terrorist who had the death of 350 or 300 Americans on their hand going back to on their hands going back to 1983 He had a seven million dollar State Department bounty on his head If I were Anthony Blinken, I would pay the Israeli seven million dollars and say thank you for eventually the death of our Marines To Kamala Harris's response. She is in a tricky position Because Joe Biden is currently the commander-in-chief and she's the VP So she it's very difficult for for anybody in her position to kind of thread this needle and say here's what we should do Here's our plan when he's the current commander-in-chief She's in this weird space of like an improv show of like a yes and yes to what he's doing And I think we should do this. So it's especially tricky but but my question to you, it's an honest question Is she just being vague because the political equities are such that it doesn't pay to be specific Or does she simply have no idea and you know, I am an undecided Honest question to (29/45)
me because there's no way you think I'm gonna turn and say you know what Brett you're right She has no idea I'm never gonna vote for Trump, but I'm not sure I want to vote for Kamala and my fear is that she Doesn't really have a very good command of what she wants to do as president It would be great for her to sit down with you or George Stephanopoulos Or you Stephanie and get a succession as if she'd sit down George W Bush 25 years ago was asked if he could name the president of Pakistan other people He had no idea and people said this guy has no command of Foreign policy and it turned out to be a prescient set of questions. It's not too much to ask Kamala say are you for a Palestinian state if Hamas is gonna run that state? Okay, yes or no, and let's say you don't like her answer. Are you going to vote for Donald Trump? No, I'm not I just said I'm not gonna run running for perfect. She's running against Trump We have two choices and so there are some things you might not know her (30/45)
answer to and in 2024 unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people We know exactly what Trump will do who he is and the kind of threat he is to democracy Is we don't know her answer to anything, okay And that's why I would never vote for him and people shouldn't vote for him But people also are expected to have some idea of what the program is of the person you're supposed to vote for You're just not supposed to say well you have to vote for why because X is this that and the other Let's find out a little bit more and I don't think it's a lot to ask her to sit down for a real Interview I would just say to that when you move to Nirvana give me your real estate broker's number and I'll be your next-door neighbor I mean, I feel like you're the dog. We're trying to get in the car to go to the vet I Say that is one of your biggest friends, you know, I mean I gobble up everything you write I just don't understand how you get to this place. But okay, let's not badger But do you know for the (31/45)
last two weeks? I've been going on and on like I can't figure out where undecided voter where informed undecided voters are I'm like, who's the person who has a list on their refrigerator of like well She said this and he's I'm like who is this person and then I opened the New York Times three days ago I Appreciate it, but it's actually millions of Americans who Kamala has to persuade if she wants to win Including votes like mine. You might not like the fact that I'm not in the car, but if you want to Treats here Answer on real questions facing the American people on inflation immigration foreign policy basic things that we used to expect Presidential candidates could answer. Okay, then I would just say that Would you rather Let me move on to one other get off this and poor bread Steven So This is kind of interesting again, I don't think a lot of people know this I didn't before a couple of days ago when I was brought to my attention Crypto, first of all, Trump is getting into the (32/45)
crypto business. I mean right there Can you imagine Kamala saying I'm getting into the crypto business? It's just unimaginable what he gets away with Okay, so he's getting into the business with some guy who used to be in the colon cleanse business It's called shit coin But almost half of the corporate political contributions this cycle are from crypto I did not know this And now here's the thing the Federal Reserve wants to make their own central bank digital currency CBDC, I don't know what that stands for but Of course this is exactly why the people who have crypto don't want what don't want they don't want Regulation of any kind which is why it's used completely by criminals. And so it's perfect for Trump. He's a criminal But I also kind of understand why people are afraid of big governments these days I mean when Canada had that trucker strike, I mean Canada like froze a lot of those people's assets That's a scary thing Is it not when governments can freeze your attitude you you (33/45)
have money and you everything's online now And they just hit a button and you don't have any money anymore because your politics were different I mean Justin Trudeau can try to bend this any way you want. That's what Canada did and that's Canada Look I don't know about you, but I've never understood crypto is anything other than a Ponzi scheme It is if Trump wants to put all his money into it so much the better because eventually he'll lose it. Okay And here's the thing Just like his publicly traded media company ticker DJT He's not putting any of his money and he won't lose any of his money But he'll stand to make an enormous amount and you're hitting on the most important part of this crypto Crypto exchange that Trump is now involved with. Yes The old-school Trump original bros are gonna invest in this and they're gonna lose their shirts the same guys who put $1,000 in DJT stock the day it went public and now it's worth 200 bucks and true social, correct and true social You know (34/45)
these original Trump fans and they're gonna lose their shirt. That's not why you should be concerned You should be concerned with what you said a moment ago half of Trump's corporate contributions come from the biggest people in the crypto space and they realize that he is a completely Transactional guy and so they said great we could he can't spell crypto. He did it I mean, he doesn't know what it is It's like a commemorative coin. He says We should have it in America. We should do it's a as it's they don't want any regulation and Trump's like We'll get rid of the SEC chair. So they're like great. He doesn't know he doesn't care We're gonna buy him and get whatever regulation we want which is none and this idea from the American people that like Trump's great for the economy because he's gonna cut taxes and we'll have no regulation Remember it's not that no regulation is what we want. We want smart regulation. You want no regulation go drink the water in Flint, Michigan That's what no (35/45)
regulation looks like There's the other big secret about crypto that nobody talks about this bugs me so much We just had Bjorn talking about the environment all the progress that we're making with green energy is being sucked away by crypto crypto Uses eight percent of total electricity their data centers their mining this nonsense of finding a number I mean, I can't even go through the whole thing. It's a ridiculous what crypto really is That's why it's of course. This is this is like Trump's final business just before the election Of course, they'd end up in crypto. It's a grifter's paradise It's a it's a comparable to putting fifteen point seven million additional gas-powered cars on the road So as we take them off to go to electric Crypto eats it all up and goes the other way. Okay. I have one minute to ask about Mark Robinson Republicans keep nominating people like that I mean I could go through a long list of people like that who are just crazy who I mean Herschel Walker Was that (36/45)
where was that Georgia? I mean before that the you know the remember the guy with Unintentional rapes or what whatever that I think they were intentional or what he would said that When I read about Robinson yesterday and I was like, yeah, he's black Nazi and I saw on a porn site I'm like you have to be kidding But you can't expect the Republican Party to ask him or anyone else to step aside When the head of your party is Donald Trump, but don't they vet these people a little before? You went to the nominating process he is the nominee for governor Why don't you look at the porn site because Trump picked him and you know, there's the expression that karma is is a bitch but for the Republicans it might turn out that karma is a porn site chat room and That'll be that'll be a historical turn in America, you know in our Republicans they could even help Donald Trump win like a Nikki Haley, right? Is suitable to so many Brett Stevens voters, but Donald Trump doesn't want that And she meant (37/45)
that as a compliment The people participating in the new trend of fridge scaping Where you decorate the inside of your refrigerator by placing flowers and picture frames next to the hot dogs and mayonnaise Must be congratulated for their unique sense of tasteful expression. I'm kidding you people are nuts If you're going to put things in appliances that don't belong might I suggest your head and the oven? Someone has to tell Jane's addiction. You don't get to cancel your tour just because you got into a fight on stage the guys in the band hate each other and Where they don't the Rolling Stones Van Halen Guns and Roses Metallica Fleetwood Mac the Eagles the Ramones Pink Floyd the Beach Boys the Black Crows Arrowsmith is Simon and Garfunkel Hoping to catch a fight on stage. The only reason anyone's going to see these guys Well, someone needs to explain to wannabe assassin Ryan Ruth that when you're being arrested, it's not the time for a thirst trap Now that the US Attorney handling the (38/45)
case against the guy who wanted to shoot Trump is a Haitian immigrant No one has to admit this season of the election is awesome Being plot twists assassination attempts. We even killed off the main character animals we've had dogs cats geese Bears and tune in next week when Trump reveals his dad isn't an orangutan after all it's Oh We're all Scott libato the maga artist who created this painting of Kamala Harris Maniacally eating a dead bald eagle with a nuclear mushroom cloud in the background Has to put down the brush and back away from the easel. It's It's time to find some other form of artistic expression might I suggest fridge scaping And finally new rule someone has to tell me how Americans can keep becoming more alike but also hate each other more than ever I Was made to think of this recently when it came to my attention that vice presidential candidate JD Vance fucks his couch Oh, I'm sure you heard it too. It was everywhere one guy wrote it on Twitter and immediately half (39/45)
the country It was all in our hate for each other is so intense We all just immediately believe anything bad about the other side, I mean don't get me started on the reading the dogs Coming for the pets eating the dogs look I think JD Vance is kind of a giant asshole Still would love to get you on the show JD But he doesn't fuck the couch It's not in his book as the rumor suggested what goes on between a man and a pollster he's done in my business but In this case it just didn't happen But what is in that book is a much more interesting passage where Vance recalls? How at age eight he thought he might be gay? This really resonated with me because when I was eight puberty was still a few years off So I hated girls at eight they had cooties and I only wanted to be with boys Well that does sound gay So the eight-year-old Vance goes to his grandmother who he calls mama and who has 19 fucking guns Stashed around the house in case Germans army comes back I guess And he asks her if she a (40/45)
woman born in Kentucky in 1933 thinks he's gay and she says JD do you want to suck dicks? and he says no mama and she says then you're not gay and Even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you But stay away from my makeup But other than that, I feel like this is a teachable moment Maybe the Hicks are not as hickey as they used to be I know it's a cliche that the coastal folks just fly over the fly over states, but they mostly do So they're stuck in a time warp where I don't know farmers look like this But farmers use iPads now They believe in climate change. They went to college and majored in AG. It's a science to grow food. Could you do it? Are there still prejudiced people in small towns in the former Confederacy? Of course some of those places are as bad as Boston have you ever been? But Kansas last year voted strongly for abortion rights and they have a woman governor Whereas California is a state that has never had a woman governor America is (41/45)
complicated. We talk about red and blue states, but every state is purple 47% of Texans voted Democrat in 2020 Yeah, because Texas is a giant state full of people with different ethnicities Philosophies cultures and forms of shit-kicking Many rural traditions have even crossed over to become quite mainstream look on Pornhub now everybody's banging their sister I've played all the cities of the Deep South and they're not that different. They have Starbucks just like up north They've even got that thing where you can tap your card and tip 22% for no reason Sure, it sounds funny when you hear order ready for American Patriot American Patriot your decaf mocha latte is ready What's that's the thing America is a funny mixed up place now Belle Fouch South Dakota has a biker bar That's LGBT friendly and nearby Rapid City has a rooftop sky bar that sells $18 cocktails just like the assholes in LA do The Eureka Springs, Arkansas is home to a 70-foot tall statue of Jesus And it's also the place (42/45)
the advocate called the gayest small town in America The third largest statue in the whole country is in Sugarland, Texas, and it's of a Hindu monkey God Yeah, well a hundred years ago. There was a trial about monkeys in the south and it really triggered people back then But things change Nobody in Sugarland, Texas cares now about Hindus or monkey gods They don't seem to be scared by Indian Americans either. There are too many people's doctors Now the food never really caught on that's true But an Indian American is gonna be president and another one might be for the other side someday and JD Vance for all his Insanity is married to an Indian American and despite what Laura Loomer said about curry Mrs. Vance was welcomed warmly at the Republican Convention and no one but the truly deranged is thinking about curry Although that may be why the food never caught on I'm just saying it's not all bullets and mullets out there anymore. Just look at the music Maybe that's the best analogy for (43/45)
where we are culturally. I used to hate country music for a very good reason. It sucked But It changed because the people making it changed It's not some picking and a grinning bumpkin in a rhinestone leisure suit vaguely longing for the return of segregation anymore Mostly a Lot of it's good now It sounds like the Eagles in 1972 the number one song on the country chart this week is by Shabu Z Does he look like an Oak Ridge boy to you? Post Malone is a country star now and you need a bookmark just to make it through his face Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson both have the same hobby at this year's Grammy Awards Luke Combs Performed a duet with Tracy Chapman a queer black woman and no one ran screaming from the building In fact, they all loved it the big hat people and the big hair people They don't hate each other. They like and respect each other. They want to work together We can't duplicate this on a grander scale in America Why don't we just resist our worst impulses and next time we're (44/45)
tempted to be hateful and just want the other side to die Stop stop and think about JD Vance's cocksucker loving grandma She's cool with it. Maybe we're not so different after all Alright, thank you very much. That's our show. I'll be at the Orpheum in Memphis September 28th the David Capra field greater at the MGM Grand in Vegas November 1st and 2nd and watch Club Random my podcast on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast I want to thank Brett Stevens, Stephanie Ruhle and Bjorn Longberg Now go watch Overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO.com (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. It starts at 12 o'clock. Good afternoon. Afternoon, time will be real time. Thank you. It's great to be... We've been away. Thank you. Thank you, but I know why you're here, because it's free and you didn't win that lottery, okay? Thank you very much. I love you back. And how many saw the Republican debate last night? Or as I call it, the hateful eight. Wow, that was some hair-pulling catfight, wasn't it? I tell you this about the Republicans. They know their audience. You could not be bloodthirsty enough. Any time the discussion turned to anything about national security, they were this close to professional wrestling banter. You know, I says, when I get in the ring with you, you will not be degraded. You will be destroyed. I mean, it was this close. It's so comforting that the party of impotent white rage is also the party of concealed carry and stand your ground. I tell you, these guys love the (1/45)
Second Amendment like nobody's business. I mean, Chris Christie defended the right to own a .50 caliber rifle, which can shoot through armor in case robbers break into your house in a tank. Chris Christie was trying to burnish his asshole credentials last night. He said, Obama, we're going to kick your rear end out of the White House in the fall. Yeah, I think the Constitution is going to do that for you. You had your chance to do that in 2012. He also said Obama was a petulant child. Right. Obama's a child, says the man who needed surgery to give his stomach a time out. Christie was tough. He said he would not allow Syrian refugees into this country. He's going to keep them all stuck on the George Washington Bridge. Oh, I'm telling you, the testosterone was flowing in that room. They were all so amped up. Except, of course. What can I say about Dr. Ben Carson? The human screensaver. I mean, everybody else would talk and fulminate, and then they would go to him. It was like, and now a (2/45)
word from the International Space Station. Every time he would talk, it would take a few seconds for him to come back online like a computer that was in sleep mode. It's just sad. They asked him if he would put boots on the ground to fight ISIS, and his answer was, imagine if ISIS nuked, because they have nukes. Imagine if ISIS nuked our electrical grid. That would be really bad. He's just not really presidential material. He's more like the guy who starts talking to you when you're waiting for the bus. And amid all this, I love this. Lindsey Graham, you know, John McCain's boyfriend. Came out and endorsed Jeb Bush. I love the way the potty trained Republicans still think that they're in charge of the funny farm. It's Trump's party now, guys. Get the memo. It's Donald Trump's party, and it probably is going to be his country soon. And boy, did he stay on message last night. Donald Trump said, swarthy foreigners are sneaking into America, but enough about Ted Cruz. Well, you know, it's (3/45)
a good point. As you know, Ted Cruz, not born in this country. He was born in Haiti, the child of Satan and a dog. And when Donald Trump and Ted Cruz fight, it's impossible to know who to root for. It's like a car salesman versus a car thief. It's Putin bombing ISIS. It's like Sharnado if the shark fought the tornado. Of course, Cruz stepped in it this week. This is what he picked the fight with Donald Trump over. He said, Donald Trump has New York values. And then the cover of the New York Daily News today was drop dead Ted, picture of the Statue of Liberty, giving him the finger. Republicans, here's your New York values right here. We got a great show. Dr. Cornel West is speaking with John Krasinski is backstage. But first, as the world's leading voice on climate change, he has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Nobel Peace Prize. He's now the chairman of the Climate Reality Project. Please welcome the 43rd president of the United States, Al Gore. Thank you. Thank you. They love (4/45)
you. You could have won again. You won once. So listen, I got to know you a little bit last summer. Yeah, that was fun. You were in San Diego. You came to see my stand up show. It was very flattered. Hilarious. We talked after the show. You seem in a really good place. You seem happy and relaxed. Well, thank you. And you deserve that. Well, I appreciate that. I have work that really motivates me to pour every ounce of energy I have into it. And before I say anything else, I've got to get something off my chest, Bill. I really want to say thank you for hitting out hard and consistently with truthful commentary on the climate crisis week after week after week. No, well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's the issue of our time, as you pointed out a long ago. Well, all right. As long as we're getting things off our chest. All right. All right. In 2000, I was for Ralph Nader, and I was wrong. And I told you that in San Diego. You did. I was wrong. I was young and impetuous. And I fucked (5/45)
up. And I own it. OK. So let's talk about climate, because Obama did something interesting today. He's been denying that there's a war on coal. But he has been fighting a war on coal. He's been winning it. Great. It's a war we finally won and a war we should fight. Coal is bad. And what did he do today? Well, he did something really great. I want to start by saying that the coal miners are really addressed also in a very thoughtful way. He wants to give a lot of retraining and care about their future. But this rule that you're talking about is really significant. He put a hold on all new coal leases on public land. And this is a first. And what a lot of people are excited about also is that he's launching a process to, for the first time, require the calculation of the full costs of burning coal, the social cost of carbon, the climate costs. And a lot of people say, why haven't we been measuring that all along? It's not that hard to do. But what he did today was really significant. And (6/45)
I applaud him for it. Yeah. And you know who pays the greatest cost for coal? Coal miners. Never understood why they're fighting for those jobs. It would be pennies on the dollar to retrain them to do something that didn't kill them. Yeah, many years ago, I proposed a plan to try to retrain, get them better jobs. The late Senator Byrd from West Virginia endorsed that plan. I think that there is a way forward, obviously, because those jobs are dirty and dangerous. And by the way, they've been eliminated in droves by the coal companies automating and the rest. You know, you were ahead on so many things, not just climate change, which is the issue of our time. And you are the leading voice. But you were right about social security and the lock box. They wish they could use that phrase now. And you also were the person who did bring us the internet. And one reason why it's true, but it's true. And I tell you something, not to go back, but one reason I was so mad at you in 2000 was because (7/45)
you didn't own that. When the Republicans made that a laugh line, you kind of like laughed along with them, which I thought was the wrong tack. And you were the one who did enable that. That wasn't around in 1979. Well, on the legislative side, that's true. The scientists came up with all the ideas in engineering, of course. But some people stuck up for me. Newt Gingrich, of all people, came to my defense on that, really and truly. I really appreciated that. Well, he's a visionary. Well, on that he was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Remember, he wants to put the disabled on the moon. OK, so let me ask you again about the climate thing. Yeah. The big news this last year was Paris. It was a big conference in Paris in November. 190 nations signed on. President Obama said it was a turning point. The right wing pooh-poohed it. Is it a turning point? Yeah, I hope it is. The reason I qualify it only slightly is that it gives us the chance to really solve this crisis. It sends a very powerful signal to (8/45)
the investor community and businesses that the era of carbon-based fuels is coming to an end and that they should take advantage of one of the most exciting events in the entire history of technology and business, which is not as well known as it should be. And that is that the cost of producing electricity with solar cells, solar photovoltaic cells, has now come down so far so fast that in many areas it's now cheaper than electricity from burning coal. And in many areas of the world, that's true. And the more we expand solar energy, the faster the price comes down. We're very close to the point where it's not going to be economical to burn fossil fuels for electricity anymore. Wind is also coming down in cost. So the Paris Agreement is almost certainly a turning point because it's like the starting whistle. Let's get with the renewable energy. Investors should divest themselves of oil stocks and coal stocks, and particularly the dirty fuels like the tar sands, and start shifting over (9/45)
to renewable energy. Now there are some naysayers who say, well, these provisions in the Paris Agreement are not all binding. Some of them actually are binding, the transparency agreements. It's a start. And every nation in the world is on board with this now. And America really is alone in having a major party that says global warming is just a hoax. And I hate to bring this up, but you went to divinity school. Right? I did. OK. The reason that is is because we're the most religious country of the modern countries. And religious people don't think global warming is a problem. They think the world's going to end. Like 40% of Americans think the end times are coming in their lifetime because they want to meet you-know-who. So it's- So all I'm saying is- Well, I disagree a little bit on that. I know you will. I mean, actually, Pope Francis gave the cyclical last year. Awesome. It really was. I agree. It made a huge difference. And there are many people of faith in all the traditions who (10/45)
actually do understand the climate crisis as an existential threat to the future of humanity and are trying to do something about it. Cornel West is going to be on your panel. He's at a seminary. He's sitting there right now. There you go. He's saying, wrap it up with Al Gore. I got to- No, but there are a lot of religious people who really are helping to lead toward solutions on this. We'll agree to disagree on that, but I love you. Thanks for coming on. I'll see you soon. Welcome to home. To Al Gore, let's meet our panel. All right. He is an activist and a professor and the author of Black Prophetic Fire. He's everyone's brother, Dr. Cornel West. She was White House Communications Director for President George W. Bush. My old job. The latest novel is Madame President. Nicole Wallace. How you doing, Nicole? Thank you for coming by. And the brave man also joining us again, Chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, not my old job, author of Awakening, How America Can Turn From (11/45)
Economic and Moral Destruction Back to Greatness, Ralph Reed. Ralph, thank you for coming. Thanks, Bill. All right, remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. All right. There's a lot of important issues, but as someone who has lived in New York twice in my life, who grew up across the river, I have to ask, what are New York values? This idea that some people are just, you know, the Republicans who constantly lambaste Obama for dividing America and then create smaller and smaller circles of what really is America. Chicago? No, that's thug city. And Hawaii, part of Kenya. And LA, full of queer. Tell me what New York values are, because I don't know. I mean, I think they just became Donald Trump's path to the nomination. Wow. I really do. I mean, I think everybody that was, I'm in the 12-step program of acceptance toward Donald. I'm rounding 10, nearing step 11. I'm almost there. About Trump? On Trump, yeah. I mean, we were (12/45)
just talking about how Trump and Sanders are the front runners in each party. And if they were anybody else, no one would be talking about how, oh, Bernie can't win, Trump can't win. I mean, they have been ahead for a little bit now. And it's very likely they could win. But I think that answer on New York and the rebuttal that Trump gave made it a lot easier for people to envision him as the Republican. Well, I don't have a dog in the fight between Trump and Cruz. I'm officially neutral in the race. But it may help Trump in some places. It probably won't help him in Iowa, which is the first on the calendar. I think those are nice, though. And it wasn't nice. I mean, Iowans are nice. And there's an Iowa race here. I was wondering how long after 9-11, before politicians could goad shit kickers into hating New York again. And I guess that's the answer. 15 years, and now we can shit on New York again. Because you certainly couldn't have said that two years after 9-11, right? That's true. (13/45)
You still can't say it. I mean, I think New York is a place where tons of non-New Yorkers are all over the city all the time. So lots of people like New York other than just people I am very blessed to live in New York on 120th Street. Harlem. Absolutely. Blessed Harlem. And I will admit, though, that Brother Trump, he did tell the truth in terms of there are beautiful people in New York City. So anybody can stumble on the truth. You know what I mean? But I do think it's very important to understand that you've got Amsterdam news. You've got Daily News. You've got the New York Times. You've got the New York Post. You've got the New York City of Trump, New York City of Eric Garner. The problem with Trump is that he's a multi-billionaire pseudo-populist with autocratic sensibilities and some fascist proclivities. That's what's dangerous about it. That's what's dangerous about it. But as a politician, he is a natural. I mean, Ted Cruz. He's for real. He's just not for right. Ted Cruz is (14/45)
pretty. Ted Cruz is pretty clever, but he walked right into that trap. And all Trump had to say was, you're telling me he was a real American? You're from Canada and Cuba. You missed America twice. And you're running. What Ted failed to do was he failed to sufficiently make it clear that he was citing an October 24, 1999 interview between Tim Russert and Donald Trump in which Trump said six times in 90 seconds that the reason why he wouldn't take a position in support of traditional marriage, the reason why he was pro-choice, and the reason why he took other socially liberal positions was he said, Trump said this. I grew up in New York. I grew up in Manhattan. I'm more socially liberal. So what happened was when Ted failed to say, these are your words, not my words. You said them here. That's when he walked into the punch. Wasn't he looking also to make a dog whistle? Because when they asked him at the debate, what do you mean by New York values, he said, I think people here in South (15/45)
Carolina know what I mean. And then he went on to say, people in New York, but he also said they dominate the media and money. Who dominates? What ethnic group? I can't put my finger on it. It's the Armenians. I don't think that's what it is. It was at all. No, I don't think that's what it was at all. I think what I think what you were, no, you were. Who dominates media and money? I think Bill, get out of calendar. You're two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. They're before they're in a dog fight. And he was trying to say to people of faith in Iowa, I share your values. Now look, Donald Trump has come our way on every one of those issues on life, on marriage, on religious liberty. He's definitely moved closer to our position. We accept him at his word that he's evolved on those issues. But that's the danger though. If you had one position and you say it's going to get litigated in a campaign. The problem that Ted Cruz has isn't that he misspoke about the interview, it's that he doesn't (16/45)
have a single friend from a single stage in his life to ever back up a single thing he says on that debate. No, he's really good. He's won a technically perfect campaign. He's got a strong point. She's got a strong point. I always thought, I agree. I always thought Ted Cruz had the most punchable face in the government. Wait a second. Until I saw the State of the Union and Paul Ryan sat there behind Obama pouting like a bitch. Show this. Show this. The United States of America right now has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. Whatever. The United States of America, listen, is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. Really? You can't applaud for that? Period. Come on. You're mad at him, you've got no one. He is the best thinker in our party. I would say right now that he is right now. But wait a second. When the President of the United States says we're the most powerful nation on earth, he's like, well, I can't applaud for America as long as President Blackenstein's (17/45)
cooties are wrong. We were talking to Paul Ryan before that speech started. Paul Ryan has more bipartisan relationships and has more Democrats who've got his back than Ted Cruz has Republicans on his. Bill, all you did was show the one line. That one. No, he didn't do a lot of clapping. That one line was part of a sustained attack on Republicans where he criticized them for criticizing the same policy. He didn't applaud for cancer curing. And we've got to hold, I'm not going to show it, but Nancy Pelosi, the last Bush speech, applauded for him 33 times. Because she's not a dick. Existing a dick. He's got to get Paul Ryan on the stage. I'm going to move on. I'll tell you this. Nancy Pelosi is no longer speaker, and you better get used to looking at Paul Ryan because he's going to be there for a long time. Yeah. I agree. We shall see. We shall see. Put me in my place. We shall see. So let me get in one more issue before the break, which is the boat in Iran. We had two boats that wandered (18/45)
off course. Our fault. I think we admitted that. We bungled into somebody else's space. Ted Cruz immediately in the debate says, I would bring the full force of the U.S. military. The tweets that went out even before Jeb Bush tweeted, Our sailors aren't coming home. They need to be now. No more bargaining. Obama's humiliating weak Iran policy. What's that? They're free? Like before they finished tweeting, they were free. But Obama's Secretary of Defense and Obama's State Department said that the videos of our soldiers humiliated on their knees with guns to their head were difficult to watch. And John McCain, a former prisoner of war. I did not see guns to their head. Well, the State Department and the Defense Department said that watching those videos was difficult to watch. And, you know, the Geneva Conventions, which I know you are very fond of, call for safe passage. You say that sarcastically like they're an asshole. No, I'm for them, too, but I'm not trotting out some Republican, (19/45)
Geneva Convention like this guy. They're not trotting out some Republican set of rules. Also against cannibalism. What a little pussy. Bill, they should have never been detained. Iran currently holds Jason Razian, who's a Washington Post reporter, that they've held for over 500 days on trumped up charges. An American reporter with dual citizenship. They've held Saeed Abedini, who is an Iranian Christian pastor, for three years he's being beaten, he's being denied medical care. This is a brutal, terroristic regime. And to have them mistreat our service personnel is just a sign of their brutality. If this was before the deal, they could have been there for years and Ben Affleck would have to go in to get them out. Brother Ralph, that's right, that's right. There's never any perspective with you guys. But you have to admit that we can say exactly the same thing about Saudi Arabia. The same thing, and we would be saying it if they had artichokes rather than oil. Brother Ralph, I'm not (20/45)
going to defend the aspects of the Saudi Arabian regime, which I strongly disagree with. We want to begin tyranny across the board. Saudi Arabia did not fire medium range missiles in violation of UN sanctions three weeks ago, and they are not funding Hamas and Hezbollah, and they did not fund the terrorist militias that killed American soldiers in Iraq. That's true, but they are... They're awaiting war crimes right now in Yemen. But they didn't take a propaganda video. They're opposing the Iranians. They're killing innocent people there. They are crypto-fascist. They're a gender apartheid team among other hard workers. I need a strong word. Anyway, so listen, we just got back from our winter vacation. I'm glad you all came back. I always go to Hawaii. I just got back. Boy, are my lungs tired. That's nice, that's nice. And whenever I'm off, it's interesting because people come up to me and they want me to be their voter guide. Who should I vote for? Really, who should I vote for, Bill? (21/45)
Not me, Bill. Not you, no. Not Ralph, but I don't run into you getting high in Hawaii. But if you ever like to, Ralph... That's quite all right. Okay. Anyway, the point is I always tell them just do what I do and vote for whoever your favorite celebrity endorses. Because this year has been a banner year for celebrity endorsements. They're all coming out of the woodwork. The Duck Commander came out for Ted Cruz. Show the tape. I've looked at the candidates. Ted Cruz is my man. He fits the bill. He's got me. He loves us. He's the man for the job and he will go duck hunting. So if that's who you love, vote for Ted Cruz. So these are all real. We got a hold of a bunch of celebrities and their endorsements and their stated reason. These are really the reasons they said. These are quotes. And then we're going to tell you the actual reason they're voting for them. For example, Jennifer Lopez endorses Hillary Clinton. She said, quote, I think it's time for a woman. Real reason? She's afraid (22/45)
Trump will deport her whole family. Mickey Rourke endorses Dr. Ben Carson. Is that real? Yeah, these are all real. He said, quote, I like the doctor. Um, the black dude. Oh my God. Real reason? I don't just support this brain surgeon. I'm also a client. Oh my God. Buddy Valastro, the cake boss, endorses Chris Christie. He said he has created an environment in New Jersey that gives small business a chance to thrive. Real reason? You know I make cake, right? Gary Busey endorses Donald Trump. Busey endorses Donald Trump. He said, quote, he can change the country after the last eight years. Real reason? Gary has no memory of the last eight years. Porn star Jenna Jameson is endorsing Marco Rubio. She said, quote, he's the clear choice. Real reason? Impressed with anyone who can come all the way from Cuba. Oh, God. Lou Ferrigno endorsed Trump. He said, he's a fabulous guy and I hope he goes all the way. Real reason? Trump smash. Oh, my boyfriend Seth MacFarlane. He'll be on the show next (23/45)
week. He endorses Bernie Sanders. Who gets to that? He said, because he's the only client, the only candidate who's serious about climate change. Real reason? An old Jew in the White House. The jokes write themselves. George W. Bush endorses Jeb Bush. Stated reasoning he'd be a damn good president. Real reason? Praying to someday be considered the second worst president. And stars in the new Michael Bay film 13 Hours, The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which opened today. John Krasinski, great to see you. Good to see you too. And let me tell you something. Let me make a prediction. Your life is about to change in a big way. Really? Because you're doing this show. No, because you are going to be in a giant hit movie. Thank you. Maybe you haven't been before, but this one is. Thank you very much. America's going to love it. Thank you. And I just have to ask you before we get, because it's a very serious movie, but you've done a lot of comedy. Yeah. While you were filming it, did you ever (24/45)
have a temptation to do one of those Jim from the office, turn to camera takes? I should have. It's like, we give you the order to stand down and then you go. With a gun. That's what I should have done. I mean, those takes, I have to say, you did the best takes to camera since like the silent film era. Yes. Is that true? I'll take that. Me and Buster Keaton. You and Buster Keaton. I missed that show. Thank you. Okay. I miss it too. All right. But let's talk about this movie because it's really an amazing movie and it's a serious movie and I think it was a movie that meant a lot to you because I know your family. Yeah. You're from a military family. I am. A lot of the people in your family are in the military. Yeah. And you are concerned about the fact that we live in an era where most people have no idea what the military goes through. Absolutely. I think this is a huge issue that I certainly was more emotionally plugged in than I thought I was before. I always have supported the (25/45)
troops and like I said, like you said, I come from a huge military family. I have aunts, uncles, cousins that have served and are currently serving. So for me, I thought I knew everything that I was talking about and then you actually get to spend real time with these guys. So my guy that I play, I got to meet him. He's an ex-navy SEAL and I don't know what I expected. Maybe some guy in a trailer out in the plains with tattoos who doesn't talk to people. These are the people who were able to do this job. And no, it's an unassuming, wonderful, gentle man who's an incredible father, an incredible husband. And what it showed me was what these men and women are leaving every single time they deploy. And so when we say we support the troops, I think we need to say it over and over and over again because you can't thank them enough for that. That's true. I totally agree with that. It also is somehow true that they very often want to deploy. Yes, which is another – yeah, absolutely. And they (26/45)
go home. And this was the hurt locker. Yeah, exactly. They go home and they're in the grocery store and they go, this is not nearly as much fun as smoking a raccoon. Yeah, exactly. Waiting for stamps or something is not that much fun. No, it's a real thing. And again, what I learned from these guys, especially the special operators, is they have a bond with their team that they have made a commitment to their team and their group of friends and comrades that we all make to our families. So you say to your family, I'll always be there for you. And then you say to this group of comrades, I'll always be there for you too. And that's got to be a huge conflict to live in. So one of the questions I asked the guy I played is I said, when you hear on the news these things about SEAL teams or other people that got into a conflict, do you wish you were there? And he said, every single time. And I'm thinking, wow, he's got his family right here. And he said, because I was trained and I dedicated (27/45)
my life to make a difference, I can make a difference. And that's a very amazing way to live your life. And let's just put out the situation, because I think people's memories are fuzzy about Benghazi. It was 2012 on the anniversary of September 11th. There was the embassy, the consulate, which we know was attacked. And then a mile away, there was a CIA annex. A CIA annex. Yeah, CIA annex, which was top secret at the time. And so what it is is these – Well, probably not. Exactly. The movie talks about that, too, that there were cameras all around. There were Westerners walking in. So there's 25 CIA people there. Correct. And they hired six of you guys to protect them. Yes. These are ex-military. Right. It's the GRS. Coming back to protect them. So when the shit starts going down in the consulate, you six guys want to go help your fellow Americans. That's right. But the head of the CIA, in his compound, is like, no, because if you leave there, who's going to protect us? Exactly. I'm (28/45)
paying you. I'm paying you. Right. But you go anyway at some point. Right. Now, at some point, people are going to conflate this stand-down order with Hillary Clinton. For sure. And the thing about it is, first of all, I just want to point out that the story you just told, many, many, many, many, many people don't know. And I think that's the most important thing that we're trying to do in this movie is the politics of this. Everybody says, how did you deal with the politics in the movie? It was pretty easy because what happened that night was before all the politics. All this conversation and all these opinions happened after that night. So when these guys are taking bullets and trying to save lives, there were no congressional hearings. There were no emails. There was nothing on their mind other than the heroism. So I'm glad you pointed out the whole story because that's true. Now, as far as what happened with these guys, another thing that you pointed out is they are not, at the (29/45)
time, they were not current military. They had no obligation to go. In fact, they would have stayed safe. They could have kept those 25 people safe. And within an instant, they went anyway. And that's what's so heroic about what they did. Six guys took on the numbers or upwards of 200 people all night long. And then the stand-down order, something that's really interesting that just came out in an interview is one of the guys did say he does believe that the stand-down order did not come from all the way up top. What he does say is that the CIA director that night, the station chief, did say to stand down. And what we talk about in the movie and the way it's depicted is I think we all have to give credit or address the situation, which is it was insane. And things were changing very, very fast. So the only thing I think we can sort of bond to here is something like a car accident. In a car accident, you have to act on instinct immediately. And when someone says, how did you get out of (30/45)
it, you don't know. So to say everybody had the information and they were deliberating and deciding what to do, that's not true. And thank God these are the six guys that were there because they were – Right, because they got all the CIA people on. Exactly. And also it's interesting that Chris Stevens, the very brave, amazing American who was killed there, the ambassador, he didn't want a lot of security. No, and purposefully. He wanted to stay at the consulate. And he was offered to stay at the annex where he'd be fully protected. And I have to say, I mean, this to me is a problem I think with American thinking on both sides, is that it's noble that he did not want a lot of security there because he, hi, I'm an American, I'm your friend. But insisting that people around the world who are not like us are going to be like us. This was Bush's mistake in Iraq, was it not? They won't go on freedom. Well, freedom might not be on their top of their list of what they really want. And I think (31/45)
we saw this just recently in Cologne, Germany. You know, when all the Syrian refugees were going to Europe, I wasn't for it. And I think a lot of people are coming around to that position. No, but I think you have to make a distinction, brother Bill, between culture and morality. I think every culture has good and bad. Every culture has good morality and bad morality. Not equally. So that, for example, the mayor, as you know of Cologne, she had been attacked with a knife in her neck. That was not a Muslim or a refugee, that was just a gangster. We are not saying that there is no crime in the world except for Muslim crime. Exactly. But I just want to make a clue. But if people don't know what happened on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany and a number of other cities in Europe, some of these refugees, some of these Muslim men, and of course we're talking about men who come from very misogynistic cultures. Their cultures are not like ours. But there's been Muslims in Germany for a long (32/45)
time without those kind of attacks. They're not the ones that committed the crimes against the women. It's the brand new ones. But that's what I mean. So it's not just Muslims in and of itself, it's particular slices of. Well, it's all of them that have just come in to, I mean, they were the new immigrants. But I don't understand why liberals don't stand up for the liberal values. I'm not a liberal, you know that I'm a revolutionary Christian, brother. I ain't got nothing to do with liberals. Other than their opposition to monarchs and their protection of rights and liberties. I love that. But it's just I just want to make sure that you have a nuanced reading of the very rich Islamic tradition that has its gangsters and has its magnificent people. Well, I think, but I don't care about the tradition as much as the present. This is the worst refugee crisis since World War II. That's right. We're talking about between four and five million Syrians who have been displaced. They're living (33/45)
in camps. They're being starved out by Assad, one of the most brutal dictators in the world. I have great compassion for these refugees who want the only thing we all do. I agree. We would want for our children, which is to be safe, to be secure and to be able to survive. Here's the problem. But they also like Sharia law. This is a lot like Bill is the Marty boatlift. It's starting to look like an offloading of a hooligan and a criminal element. And in some cases, terrorist sympathizers. And I think Angela Merkel taking eight hundred thousand of these refugees without adequate vetting of who these people are is going to come back. It's not a criminal element unless you are prepared to indict the entire society as criminals. There is polling on this. A great many Muslims around the world are for Sharia law. You know what is in Sharia law. Cutting off the hands for thievery, putting women to death for adultery, killing people for leaving the religion. Women are not equal citizens. These (34/45)
are not criminal activities in a Muslim society. These are activities. So the idea that when Syrian refugees come to European countries or to America that they are going to completely fit in is a fantasy. But beyond not fitting in, they committed crimes. They committed sexual assaults on hundreds of women. Because in their society, and especially an infidel woman. That's an infidel woman. But Bill, there is no evidence at all. There is no evidence at all that the thugs and the hooligans that were committing these kinds of crimes on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany were devout Muslims. There is no evidence of that. You really cannot indict all peace loving Muslims who subscribe to that religion because of the bad actions. I'm not indicting all of them. Absolutely not. The problem is that you're indicting none of them. No. We want to indict people who are not in the way of activity. Bill, that is not a fair characterization of what I said at all. I want to ask one more thing before we (35/45)
run out of time. Can I just add quickly? That's why when Donald Trump suggested a ban on all Muslims, which I do not support. But that's why his poll numbers went up 12 points. Yes, and you know what, he's a demagogue. Of course it's wrong, but it got closer. I agree, but it got closer to what people want. This is the one issue the Democrats are going to lose the election on. Because they have to choose between demagogue Donald Trump and Hillary and Obama, who won't even say Islamic terrorism. Wow, we say the same thing at the same time. No, it's not going to be Hillary. It's going to be Bernie Sanders. I need a drink. Let me ask you that. Bernie Sanders. So Bernie Sanders is breathing down Hillary's neck. He's ahead. She's ahead. She's trying to catch up with him. Right, okay. I mean, for the longest time, people have been saying, well, I love Bernie, but of course he can't win. Now it looks like he can win, but his biggest problem is in the black community. The brothers don't like (36/45)
him, will they? Oh no, that's not true. Oh, it is. I have 82 percent of blacks. Because we don't know Bernie. Once they get to know Bernie and recognize it's true. Okay. Brother Bernie Sanders represents the politician. He's the grand exemplar of integrity in public life at the national level. He represents the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Dorothy Day. And I want to add John Coltrane too. Because the Bernie campaign is a love train. But you have to... That's what it is. You have got a lot of work cut out for you. But we've already moved. Yesterday, I was in South Carolina, South Carolina State University, magnificent institution, right? When we were there three months ago, four percent of black folks supported him. Now it's 20 percent. They're just getting to know their brother once they find out who he is. And let's just be clear about it. Sister Hillary, she's smart, she's sharp. But the word integrity is not the first (37/45)
thing that comes to mind when we hear her name. Okay. I certainly agree with that. Everybody agreed with somebody on something. I probably don't agree on much. There you go. But wanting Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee is something he and I would agree on 100 percent. All right. Well, if we have Bernie versus Trump, that's what you call a clear choice. Thank you very much, panel. 51 percent Bernie, 38 percent Trump. Is that right? That's right. I don't think so. Is that right, Sister Nicole? The current polling. Okay. All right. I've got to go to New Rule. Thank you, panel. You were very interesting. Okay. New Rule, if you tell someone to kiss your ass and they have to ask which one, you might have a weight problem. In fact, I'm beginning to think this is why Christie is so irritable all the time. His head is actually on backwards. Oh, my God. New Rule. Oh, say, can you see? Yes, I can. And thanks. This is Ciara singing the national anthem this week. She sang it great, even (38/45)
though I totally forgot which country we were honoring. New Rule, the online dating site where white people meet. Has to realize there are already a lot of places where white people meet. Like country clubs, Whole Foods, Utah, juries and Pete's coffee. New Rule, don't use David Bowie's death to sell Crocs. The day he died, Crocs tweeted, your inspiration lives on forever. Wait, so the Crocs company was inspired by David Bowie, an icon of avant garde style? No, you make plastic shoes for slobs. You want to be inspired by Bowie? Stop making Crocs. New Rule, the Oscars have to hire Steve Harvey to read the winners. Oh, sure, he'll get them wrong, but at least there'll be some black people on the stage. And finally, New Rule, someone has to tell me how it can possibly be that this fresh-faced ingenue, this forever young rebel, this out-of-control crazy person is in five days going to be 60 years old. Great, now I'm getting good for you. You're still a live applause. To those of you out (39/45)
there facing the same decade, just remember this about being in our 60s. Among old people, we're the youngest. Now on the occasion of this milestone birthday, I would like to make a request of you, my wonderful, loyal audience, which I must point out I have never done before. I don't burden the audience with my personal shit. Politically, let me prove it to you. Everybody shut the fuck up while I'm doing this. You got to talk the whole show. Politically incorrect went on the air in 1993, and in 23 years over two shows and three networks, I've had tragedies, deaths in the family, death threats, health issues, bad breakups. Speaking strictly for me, it never felt right to bother the audience with any of it. When my mother died, the last people I wanted to have to deal with it was you. And it's certainly never been your job to worry Weiss Dedmon won't marry me. It's true. Never brought any of it up. If I had a book to sell, I'd mention it a few times. I didn't badger and bore you with it (40/45)
for months. Buy my book! Buy my book! Other shows are always begging the audience every five minutes to like us. Like me. Please like me. I would never ask you to be our unpaid intern and publicity department. I'm old school show business. You're not here for me. I'm here for you. It's like when you're at a concert and the lead singer holds the mic up to the crowd. Fuck you! You sing! I pay! My point is I'm not overdrawn at the favor bank. But now that I'm 60, I better make a withdrawal soon. So yes, there is something I want you guys to help me with. And it's this. Before he leaves office, I want to get President Obama on this show. In case you don't know who Obama is. And let's just say our invitation has gotten lost in the mail for seven years. Which would be okay except for the fact that in that time, this president has done virtually every other show in the known universe. And I don't just mean other comedian shows and other opinion giver shows. I mean, Mr. President, you've done (41/45)
everything but ultimate fighting and amateur porn. You sat between two ferns and went to Mark Maron's garage and talked about your hair with Kelly and Michael and did your March Madness brackets on Sports Center. You did this show on YouTube, which would bother me even more except I'm actually a big fan of Kevin Hart. Mr. President, you went on this show. So clearly this isn't about the dignity of the Oval Office. If you went any lower, you'd be on Fox and Friends. Jesus, Sean Penn can get an interview with El Chapo, but I can't get on the president who'll talk to the lady with the green lips. So I just want to know, why not us? I'm curious. Because I would hate to think that it's that I have to always agree with you on everything to get into the club. When actually, I have been pretty damn supportive. Has a president ever had a better week than the week this president had? He's smart. He's honest. I mean, he actually did something amazing. Nobody's budget has the balls to put Social (42/45)
Security on the table. Obama did. Two women on the Supreme Court. Bin Laden's dead. Stock market at record heights. An unemployment rate that dropped from 10.2 to 5.9. The Jackie Robinson of American politics. But you know Obama. He's always cool about this shit. And what does the guy want? So what is it? Just tell me. What is it? Is it that I'm a pothead? Because you went on Zach's show and he's such a pothead, he wants lit up sitting right there. Is it the atheist thing? I know that's a political third rail to sit down with the godless, but you know what? Atheists slash agnostics slash we just want to sleep in on Sundays. Is now the second biggest demo in the religious survey. 23% of Americans. Yeah. Don't we get some respect? What is it? Just tell me. It can't be that we don't have enough viewers because real time gets over 4 million, which is a lot these days in TV. And the quality of our audience? Excuse me for saying so. Other shows. But the real time viewer is, I'm sorry, the (43/45)
absolute best. I am not just blowing smoke up your ass, although if you stick around after the show, it's been known to happen. There could be no better audience for this president. Our viewers are informed, they are engaged and they're smart enough to steal cable. I ought to know because my relationship with the audience is the relationship of my life. Kids? I don't have time for kids. I've got to rewrite this end piece. It's always where I put my energy. It's what I love the most. That's my truth. That's the way I was born. That's what my body is telling me to do. And always has. It's why I've always treated the audience like they're my friend. And I mean a real friend. I trust them enough to say things they may not want to hear. We don't agree on everything and we don't have to because friends don't leave each other over that. We even fight sometimes because honesty is love and friends don't bullshit each other. What are you booing me for? Really? Oh don't fucking start with me. (44/45)
Don't start with me. Oh fuck you with the booing. What is the booing? It's going to be rough unless you get that stick out of your ass right now. You see how much I love you? So now for my big 6-0 I would like to ask my friend the audience this one favor. As it turns out it is the policy of the Obama administration that if the White House receives a petition signed by 100,000 people in 30 days, you see where I'm going with this, they have to address it. So please go to the We The People petitions on whitehouse.gov and sign the one that just says that you, the real time audience, would respectfully like to see the president we all admire sit down and talk to the comedian you get your news from. As is our custom here in America. Thank you very much everybody. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maughan. You could have been saying to me, oh poor Bill you got Trump for your birthday. What does every kid want for his birthday? A clown. We got to get used to it. It happened. It really happened. We Americans have a new leader. Vladimir Putin but also this guy Trump took some sort of oath today and also let's not forget that we have a new set. Beautiful. They did a beautiful job. Such a beautiful job. Did you notice things look different? That's because I'm coming to you now from an undisclosed location. I'm not even Bill Maher. I'm the new pope. Now the Trump supporters are saying this election is a reckoning and I yeah as in I reckon we're all fucked. We did it. This thing happened. They have to own it now. Let's get on with it. This transition went on too long. It was like waiting for your dog to take a shit in the rain. This sort of Damocles hanging over my head. Let's have this happen and see what (1/45)
happens. Did you see it all today? You didn't watch? Oh. Many watched on TV. I was streaming in my pants. Oh you can tell we're living in a completely new era because when he took the oath of office. Donald Trump. Chief Justice what's his name? Roberts. Roberts. Yeah thank you very much. I knew it was. It's all fading from me quickly. But he said raise your right pussy grabber which I mean right there. Trump did you know this is true. Trump used two Bibles in case the first one burst into flames. But you know then it was then it was time to make the big inaugural speech. And you know all the pundits were before he was going on were saying oh it's going to be classy and uplifting and unifying. At what point are people going to realize that there is no normal president inside the Trump fat suit. That's who it is. First of all the speech was 16 minutes long. I know that sounds short but that's over 100 tweets. And it wasn't classy or unifying. It was joyless and ugly and divisive. And the (2/45)
theme if I could find a theme was once you go black you can go back. Mic drop. And by the way for all you racists out there. If you saw that shot of the new president standing with the outgoing president and their families. The one with kids by three different women was the white one. But then it was on to the inaugural balls and oh what entertainment. They had Lee Greenwood. Kobe teeth. Did I mention Lee Greenwood. It was like night of 100 stars if 99 said no. The close the closest thing they had to a rock band was three doors down. And they were joined on stage by Dr. Ben Carson who sings under the name Two Eyes Closed. They also had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You know for diversity. And 16 year old Jackie Ivanka. She finished second in the voting for America's Got Talent or as Trump says she won America's Got Talent. Well yeah. Let's not forget amid all this hoopla that this is happening in the shadow of continuing investigations from five intelligence agencies in the United (3/45)
States as to whether the Russians were blackmailing or still are blackmailing President Donald Trump. Now as yes as to the most scurrilous of those allegations I just want to say right now about our new president. I do not believe that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on each other. I believe they did it. I just don't believe he paid them. Heather McKeon former Labor Secretary Tom Perez are here and a little later I will be speaking with our friend Keith Olbermann. But first up my producers came to me last week and they said you know you're getting Trump for your birthday what can we do to make up for that. I said could you get Jane Fonda on the show. Here's the two time Oscar winning screen icon who stars on TV's Grace and Frankie. She also co-founded the Women's Media Center and will keynote tomorrow's Los Angeles Women's March. Jane Fonda. It's good to see you. You too. Thank you. You're my birthday present. Thank you. You really are. I got to tell you. Thank you very much. You (4/45)
are. I needed that today. Happy birthday. You are the most gorgeous old lady in the world. Well thank you very much. Yes. Don't bad yourself. I know we have new furniture. You look like you're sliding. We all want to do that today right. We just want to fucking forget it. But I'll tell you something. I have never seen so many people mobilizing. Right. Everybody. People who've never been active in their lives are starting to organize and come together. I mean it's like we've hit bottom and now we're going to come up. Well it's only day one of the bottom. You know about hitting bottom. Yeah. No. Movies are always better when there's a credible villain. Who would know that better than you. You've done many movies. Yeah. No. It's true. It's true. I won't call him by his name. I call him the predator and sheath. It is true. Somehow we elected president the worst person in America. And it is going to be a category five shitstorm. But let me just separate the politics for a minute because of (5/45)
what you just said. Because you know Michelle Obama made that speech about a month before the election. Yeah. Where right after the pussy grabber tape came out. Isn't that amazing. You say pussy grabber and it's like yes that's accepted. You know exactly what you mean. Yeah because he said it. Yeah. He said it. And it always obsessed me that this wasn't a big enough. It obviously wasn't even a deal breaker. I mean for someone who has been in the forefront of the women's movement for a long time. This must be something you'll never get over. Well it was a big shock. It was a shock. I must say I felt for a couple of weeks like I'd been hit by a truck. But then I went to Standing Rock and I tell you what the best. The best antidote for. Yeah. For depression. Yes. Because you're involved. We can't stand down. We have to rise up. And you're always on the forefront of it. But I mean as far as I mean I would have thought that we would have elected a woman president before a black president. (6/45)
If you ask me in the 80s or something. It's like we haven't really moved very far. Oh we have. Listen more people voted for her right. By three million. Yeah. Three million votes. She got more than him. Yeah but but but he won white women. White women. That's complicated and I don't think we figured it all out yet. Who knows. I don't quite understand it. Well. Part of part of it depends some of the wealthy ones that had to do with money. But you have to understand it. If you don't understand it what hope is there for us. No I can't. But you know white women. You talk to them. You talk to your people what. What what it would well I but how could they get over that because I mean let's not forget when he said that thing on the bus to Billy Bush. And by the way Billy Bush has disappeared. He just heard it. He was just. OK. But the other guy gets to be present. All right. So but this was not a hypothetical. Donald Trump wasn't saying oh would that it were that I could grab pussies. He said (7/45)
this is what I do and if you recall the debate was two days later and Anderson Cooper asked the right question and he had to ask it three times. Do you do this. Poor Anderson Cooper has never been made to think about pussy this much his whole life. I'll tell you one thing. Trump should have more respect for pussies because you know because if penises could do what pussies could do they'd be on postage stamps. But you see a lot of people that on the hat a lot of people a lot of people are scared of pussy power. Yeah because when women unite I'm telling you we are forced to be reckoned with and we will unite. It goes back to Liz Estrada. You know. Yes. Right. Look at that. She has a pussy head on her head. Oh yeah. We recently learned about this. What is this pussy hat. And tell us about your pussy hat people. I don't know. But I've heard that people men and women all. And celebrities. I've seen like pictures of celebrities. Right. And if celebrities are doing something it must be real. (8/45)
Well. You know. Yeah. They can't they can't badmouth celebrities speaking out now because he's a reality TV star. Yes at best. Yeah. Yes. Anyway. Do you think celebrities help. I mean at these marches you know you will. Of course. But I'm just saying for a second because there's a whole whole school of thought that says the Trump people are saying you know what celebrities go ahead. You'll get him reelected. Enjoy your speaking out because that makes the regular American out there go why are these people who don't know anything about my life or how I. Well. Him and his fake news the predator in chief and his fake news. You know they they. Their tactic is to divide and conquer. So you know they don't want whenever a celebrity speaks out like Meryl did at the Golden Globes and gets. Yes. And gets the reaction from our president elect. I mean it's ridiculous. But you know that she hit a spot. Yeah. Pushing his butt. Well it's not hard to hit a spot. But yeah that's true. But look what I (9/45)
have I have been a celebrity for a long time. Yes. And I have and I have been told that I should shut up because I was a celebrity. But what celebrities can do is that they can bring attention to things that would normally get attention. What do you say to the right wingers who call us sore losers. Because that's the other thing that sticks in my craw. We are not sore losers. It's just so happens that we understand that. Because of climate change we don't have time to make mistakes. Right. We are facing an existential crisis. This is never. It's never you know after he was elected and people said to me well you know we'll have to put up for this for four years. We don't have four years to lose. Right. We have to fight so that they stop extracting oil and gas from the ground. That's what the 99 percent of the climate scientists say. And that's why we're speaking out. It has nothing to do and because our rights are going to be attacked. And freedoms are not sore. He's a sore winner. (10/45)
Right. So the march is tomorrow. Yeah. March in Washington and here in L.A. and all over. Right. And you will be leading it as you always have. I'm not leading it. I'm just participating in it. Well. No. OK. But you'll be there and we thank you for being there. I'll be there. And you know and another thing that we have to do we have to organize in the grassroots. We have to get people elected. Yes. Let's hope that this march there's a voting booth every five feet because otherwise it's just hot air. And we have to include race and class in everything we do. We're doing that in the Democratic side but we got to vote. We can't just talk. Jane I love you for coming on and doing this for me and everything you're doing for America. Jane Fonda everybody. Look at this. All right. Very exciting. Yeah. The way we're moving everything closer. Is there a water slide? Yeah. We're going to be closer. We're closer. All right. Let's meet our panel. He's a presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize (11/45)
winning author of American Lion. Andrew Jackson in the White House. He's on our show. John Meehan is over here. He is the president of the public policy organization called Demos. Heather McGee one of our favorites. This guy lost his job at noon today. He's now running for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. He was the 26th U.S. labor secretary. Tom Perez. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's over time so you can answer them after the show on YouTube. OK. Jane mentioned global warming and I wanted to start with that because you know this is our 14th year somehow and we don't take it for granted by the way. We do not get complacent here. We're happy to be here and we're happy with our new set. Thank you. You've been on as long as FDR was president. Right. That doesn't mean I'm going to die in Warm Springs tomorrow. But one thing I've always tried to do is not bury the lead. Now I know today we inaugurated America's last president. That's a very big story. But (12/45)
the lead this week is 2016 hottest year ever beating out the last winner 2015 which beat out 2014. You see a trend. And here's the most alarming thing I've ever read and I've read a lot about this subject. Heat extremes were especially pervasive in the Arctic with temperatures in the fall running 20 to 30 degrees above normal. You know two is a lot. So I would say this. And of course the first thing Trump did was take down the climate change Web site. You know government whatever it is. But you know in some ways he's a different kind of guy and he doesn't agree with Republicans but when it comes to basic Republican ideology about turning Mother Earth into a toxic unlivable shithole in the name of improving quarterly profits he's right on the page. And she's right. That's the most important thing we have to keep in mind. Yes absolutely. And that's what happens when he tries to install and we'll see if he gets confirmed. But the CEO of Exxon as the secretary of state it's a guy who's (13/45)
made it his job to try to sue the EPA as many times as humanly possible to head the EPA. And it's just a sort of sell off of American assets. And our children are watching and the world is watching. And it is honestly the scariest thing that's going on right now. Well there's a pitch. Bill there's going to be a lot of hot air coming out of the White House so you may see global warming increasing in our nation's capital. There's a pitch battle among our former cabinet. Now that you're out of office you're warming up. You're warming up those speaking fee lines. You look at all the cabinet appointments and you look at what happened day one. You mentioned global warming and taking climate change off of the White House website. They immediately went into court in Texas in a voter I.D. case that I filed when we were in the civil rights division because Texas's voter I.D. laws were all about one and one and only one thing making it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote. And we won (14/45)
that case. And now they've walked into court today and asked for a delay. And the reason they want to delay is they want to change their position. Also you know the theme of his speech today was you the little guy. That's who this is. He shit on all the presidents there to be out of these assholes. They didn't do it right. They're all inside Washington. I'm here for you. And then I read. Can this possibly be right that his cabinet is worth the same as the bottom third combined of all Americans. These are the people who are going to stand up for the little guy. It is a Koch brothers cabinet. Is it not. I mean that's what I mean by and by taking you know by taking down the Web site and by questioning the science as he's done. You know he's basically we inaugurated Baghdad Bob. Right. You know missiles. What missiles. You know. Yeah I remember that guy. And it's just it's the triumph of opinion over fact. Right. And not particularly informed opinion. Well some of the people you know when (15/45)
you look at the list you started to talk about this. They're they're just when you see just to undo the department they now had. I mean Rick Perry could not even mention. Remember remember the OOPs guy. Remember the Energy Department and his reward for that is he gets two headed. And the labor guy hates labor and the education lady hates public education and the health guy hates health. It's and after railing against Goldman Sachs for the entirety of the right pain. Right. Well he installs Steve Mnuchin. Right. A great CEO who foreclosed on a 90 year old woman who got her paperwork mixed up and was twenty seven cents short on an insurance payment. I mean it's unbelievable. And he still gets to go out there and market himself as a populist. One of the problems though is it's not unbelievable because there was no difference between the June 2015 performance and today's performance. That Prescott the one press conference he had in the transition which was his second infomercial. Right. (16/45)
You know where he was selling the vodka again. You know it's just not a character is destiny. Character wills out. There is no if anyone says pivot or double down again they should be taken out and executed. Can I. Yes. I mean we all agree on this but I think it's time to stop fretting and start fighting. And that's what Jane said. And that's that's that's what today is about. Because but this character destiny you're a historian. I'm very interested in this because we know what his character is. Is there any way character is ever not destiny. Because when I think of Donald. If you asked me to say one word to describe Donald Trump that word would be id. Yeah. And some I've known people in my life like this very few but they're all hid. There's just no mechanism to not be juvenile and react immediately based on just id. And the it's the exception not the rule is your character when you come in is going to be magnified not transformed. Couple of examples. There's one or two examples. (17/45)
John Kennedy learned on the job from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But by and large who you are today is who you're if you're sworn in is who you're going to be all the way through. And at a certain point you have to take them at their word and their actions speak louder than than their words in many cases. And with Trump I mean the idea of the character is destiny. We didn't just make that up. The Greeks did. And they've been thinking about it. And so that it's been a reality throughout civil. So what is going to happen with someone who is consumed by vendettas. Because whatever they've thrown at him so far. You can answer this better than anybody. You were in government. It's going to get much worse. Once you are the president it comes at you every day. It's the criticism for someone who cannot take criticism. And it's going to be all criticism from all sides. What is going to happen. Well that's why we have to stop fretting and start fighting. That's why you know the (18/45)
Affordable Care Act has all the power. I don't agree with that Bill. OK. But they have Congress. Nukes. Nukes. Did I read that right that Rick Perry just learned that the Energy Department controls the nukes. He thought he was going to go lobby for the Texas oil business. And just found out that he's actually in control of the most deadly arsenal in the history of mankind. I wanted to go to the meeting where Ernie Moniz explained to him what a centrifuge was. I thought that would have been very interesting. Reagan used to say that the scariest words in English language were I'm from the government and I'm here to help. How about I'm Rick Perry and I'm in charge of the nukes. I come out of the civil rights movement the labor rights movement and I think we underestimate the collective power of we that we have because I had the privilege of going with the president down to Selma a couple of years ago to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights (19/45)
Act that followed was all about ordinary people who did extraordinary things. And everywhere I go across this country I see people who have you know they were in a crouch after the election but they have gotten up and they said I'm fighting mad and I'm not giving up. And that's why you see rallies on the Affordable Care Act. I hate to be the historical guy here but that is it is absolutely true that the sacrifice of countless people whose names we don't know people like John Lewis Hosea Williams the martyrdom of Dr. King they put it they made it possible but it did take a president to push that legislation through. Well it also took a Congress and I think it's important for us to not let Congress off the hook right now. That president pushed that Congress. Without Lyndon Johnson that didn't happen. I'm not actually arguing about the past but right now we've got a Congress many of whom you have to remember that the Republicans were leaving the Trump campaign like rats from a sinking (20/45)
ship a month before the election. There were never Trumpers in the Senate in the House. And where are they now. They have put love of power ahead of love of country. They have. And time and time again. I mean you guys are all talking about policy and government. I'm just talking about there's a crazy person who I mean if I if I could. Yes if I could send him one thing it wouldn't be anything to read because he doesn't read it would be that song shake it off because he just never knows how to just shake anything off and I'm just saying everything is going to get derailed by that. But I must interrupt because I did want to point out here in our 14th year 14 years. We always try to listen to the audience as to what they like that we do. And we started something many years ago called America's stupidest state. And the we had brackets. People love the brackets. The five finalists Alabama Utah Kansas Texas and of course Florida. Sorry Tennessee. You made it off. And then we did America's (21/45)
craziest congressman and we had people like Louie Gohmert and Steve King and Michelle Bachman and we had a lot of fun. So we thought because we're getting used to a new cabinet we would try now. Trump's craziest cabinet pick and see if we could. There's 16 of them just like in basketball. Our first matchup comes from the whack job conference. A clash between two uniquely unqualified candidates Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Labor Secretary nominee Andy Puzder. Puzder sounds like a nickname for penis and sure enough he's a real prick. He's the CEO of Hardee's and Carl's Junior or as your bowels know him the cleaner. Puzder is best known for crass TV ads featuring near naked models eating burgers and says they're a reflection of his personality. And he says why have Chick-fil-A when you can have Chick-fil-A'd. Don't start. And Andy Puzder isn't going to be one of those namby labor secretaries who spends his time worrying about laborers. He's against raising the minimum (22/45)
wage against paying overtime even against giving fast food workers breaks. He's afraid if he lets them use the bathroom one of them might try to clean it. Next let's reach into the bottom of the barrel and scrape up Tom Price a man who thinks abortion is murder that gays shouldn't get married and that this mustache was a good idea. Tom is a congressman and Trump's picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He caught Trump's eye with his lifelong dedication to denying people health and human services. He's a member of a crackpot doctor's group who hate all forms of public health care claim abortion causes breast cancer and HIV doesn't cause AIDS which could be proven or not by a little experiment I call then you fuck Charlie Sheen. As for the promise of draining the swamp Tom name your price once bought stock in a company that makes hip implants and a week later introduced a law to benefit companies that make hip implants. Which used to get you nominated for prison but (23/45)
this year everything is different because if the crazy doesn't get all over the place it don't belong in your face. All right he's a special correspondent and host of GQ's The Resistance and he's our friend Keith Olbermann is here. So Keith you're right there I know we have a new set. You're remembering the old set. Well next week you're going to have another new set now apparently. So what do you think about how the liberals are doing? Here's someone liberals look to. How do you think they've reacted so far? Actually I am I am twice as encouraged now as I was this morning and I'm encouraged because we have managed to do something that Americans can uniquely do politically to great success today. There was a protest during this inauguration or coup d'etat whichever you prefer. But the protest was ideally suited for 21st century America. The motorcade coming back from the installation of the Russian puppet involved a car going down streets and there was nobody lining the motorcade. It (24/45)
was sitting room only and there's a shot of him at the White House in the car outside the White House and a barricade with fewer people behind it than greeted me on the way in from the car. So consider what this means. This means that in 21st century America we can protest Donald Trump by not doing anything. This is the 21st century American political system. Don't tell them that or that's what they'll do. In some cases it's more eloquent than I mean which was smarter doing it that way or breaking windows at Starbucks for no reason. Now I'll give you punching the Nazi in the face today. I'm not a fan of gratuitous violence but that wasn't gratuitous so I think it has a place but breaking windows at Starbucks is meaningless. But I think what we should do is start doing what the Tea Party did in 2010. Fight. Fight. Fight at all times, interrupt everything. Every day you scream Russia. Every day you scream corruption. And you remind every day who won the electoral vote again. You did not (25/45)
get a mandate. And when John Lewis said he was not a legitimate president I assume you're on that page. I am on that page because he's not a legitimate president. I would agree with that but he is the president. I mean it's one of those you have to keep two thoughts in your head at the same time. I do have a president. We are still Americans. He is the American president. I agree he didn't get there quite legitimately. Here's the thing I think we're underselling how the non-legitimately part of this works. Oh not me. I agree. But I spoke to a group of Democrats and liberals last night in Florida and half of them were like this crowd fired up and understanding we were invaded is what it boils down to just because there was not blood on the streets. If the Russians had come in with Cossacks and put him in I think we would have had a different kind of reaction to it. That's the reaction we need now. What I saw last night was a lot of people hooting and hollering correctly and getting (26/45)
fired up and going we're going to resist this in every way possible and other people going you really think it's that serious? Yes I do think it's that serious. It's the same thing. It's the point of a war other than to gain territory is to put the guy you want in charge of somebody else's country. And we're now only debating at this point after the story in the New York Times yesterday how much the Russians decided our election. And we came up with a timeline we want to show you here to maybe illustrate the point about Russia and the connection with Donald Trump. Here's 1946 to 2015. Trump knows nothing about and gives no shits about Russia. That's 46 to 2015. And then we move to February. Okay 2016 Trump begins policy of consistently fileting Putin publicly wherever he can. Come on move on. Trump hires Paul Manafort who we know had amazing connections with Russia. Trump staffers soften language in the platform about defending Ukraine. Moving on to WikiLeaks releases DNC emails. Trump (27/45)
encourages more Hillary hacking. And of course Trump says maybe U.S. should lift sanctions against Russia. So it does look like I'm not saying he's a Russian puppet like you say but he's acting just like one. He's acting exactly like a man who they do have a P tape of. It's an academic question. I mean for historians for historians it's important whether or not there is a P tape but because he's behaving as if there's a P tape it doesn't make a difference. Somebody will get a PhD in comedians. That's the sad part. There are businesses that will really benefit from Donald Trump's election and we happen to both be in separate branches of the same one. And I'll give all of my money away for it not to be the case. That million dollars that I gave to Obama to prevent Mitt Romney from being president I would give to Mitt Romney tomorrow if he could be president. I'll match it. And if I know Mitt Romney he would take it. They're calling you right now. Right. Okay so he's not a legitimate (28/45)
president but if we keep saying that does it do any good? Yes because it crowds it begins to we have this has to be approached psychologically in terms of what's in the public discourse on both sides of the oh no you're fake news and we're real news. No no we're fake news and you're real news. To dominate this one of the ways to do it is to as you were talking about before the buttons present themselves they're almost self pushing buttons so we have to push the buttons on him personally make this as unpleasant personally for him since that is what decides everything he does. So every time you see a tweet sub tweet him swear words send it right back at him and if he doesn't see it somebody who supports him will ruin their day. It's a psychological war and the other part of it is to keep what we know is true which is we don't know if it was treason or espionage or violation of some of the Logan the Logan Act language we don't know which it was if the best case scenario is they violated (29/45)
the Logan Act and and we're busily rewriting foreign policy long before this man was in office that's the best case scenario just keep mentioning it every day that's stealing from the Tea Party that's using their weapons taking their hammers out of the conservatives the Republicans and the Trumpians and hitting them over the head and chasing them to hell with it. We don't seem to have a Trump defender here today. To go to Keith's point about the legitimacy argument today a man was inaugurated who came to national prominence questioning the legitimacy of the man he was man hugging all the way down to the helicopter. My own view when I saw that the Trump's brought the Obama's a Tiffany box which looked like a silver frame was that I hope they put the birth certificate in the frame and put it in the library. Somebody said that was they're giving they were giving the former first lady her speech back. So I will not sit here and have our president maligned like this. Oh yes I will. So I (30/45)
want to ask about the Supreme Court. Now I'm on record for the government functioning. It's good for property values. But when Justice Scalia died Mitch McConnell reached into his ass and pulled out a piece of paper that said you know apparently the presidents are supposed to get to pick the nominees with someone dies while they're in office. But that's just the Constitution talking. So I mean if there's any way the Democrats can block it. Ted Cruz said there is certainly a long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices to which I say great I'll race you to one. Well well we should not. There can't be two rules. There can't be this thing where the presidents pick and we each get a turn. That's out the window. This is where the Democrats have to I think start doing what they did. I mean three quick points on that bill. Number one if the choice of cabinet picks is a bellwether of what they're going to do on the Supreme Court Katie bar the door which is why number two (31/45)
Democrats have to be strong. They still have the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees and you shouldn't hesitate to use it. And number three you've got to look back to Robert Bork. That's why we've got to tell the story. A woman's right to choose is at stake. Dark money. The continuance is at stake. When Robert Bork was nominated six Republicans ultimately voted against him. And so that's why we've got to nominate someone who's way off to the right. We've already seen it. Let's not fool ourselves. But even if they don't Obama didn't. Obama nominated Merrick Garland. He was a centrist candidate who many of them were before before Obama nominated him. And they just kept up with their idea from day one. We're going to obstruct everything. And until we get back to a place where both parties are playing by the same rules I'm sorry but the Democrats I think have to do that. They have to be at the risk at the risk of it. At the risk of total total self parity. We need to go back to the (32/45)
federal Judiciary Act of 1789. You don't have to tell us about that. Republicans. All right Republicans love original intent. Right. The first Judiciary Act gave us six justices. Thomas Jefferson raised it to seven in 1807. We've only had nine since U.S. Grant. So if you really like the way it was way back then. Let's go to seven and see what happens. And we'll vote them off the island to take the theme from the president. And make it into a show. OK. But on that score. Justice apprentice. That's right. But on that score of Arnold Schwarzenegger can be in that too. Right. No no John's got the John just did the beautiful voice. You're not nominated. That's not bad. It is. As a reminder Donald Trump is still an executive producer on that show. Yes absolutely. OK. Well don't bring up the worst thing about him in that show. Don't embarrass the man like that show does. But that's interesting because I didn't I didn't realize that it wasn't always nine justices. But there are some things (33/45)
that haven't been around that long and we treat them like they are. One of them is the Department of Education. It's only been around since 1980. So I'm not 100 percent sure we need a Department of Education. I know we need good education. But how did we get along with it all the way up to 1980. And it seems like education has only gotten worse since. I'm just saying I would have more respect. I'd have more respect for Betsy Devos who obviously is just a billionaire nincompoop who had a month. Obviously didn't know anything about the Department of Education. She had a month to bone up on it before the hearings. Couldn't even do that. OK. Well I would have more respect if she just had got up there and said I don't think this department should exist. Well that was what Ronald Reagan wanted to do. So their hero wanted to get rid of it. It started under Carter. He wanted to get rid of it. And by that time as happens in Washington you know as President Reagan also said the closest thing to (34/45)
life on earth is a federal program. But I'm just saying looking at the bright side there is something to fresh eyes even if they're sometimes ignorant looking at shit. Not everything has to be there just because it always was there. Fine and I have a fresh idea for education. How about debt free public college for all. That's the direction we need to be going. And you've got someone who's sitting up there has never had any interaction with public schools whatsoever. You've got Wall Street folks walking into pretty much every level of government who want to continue the same system of student loans for everyone. Can I ask one question about I understand each of these candidates is horrific and has been designed like antimatter. You're in charge of the Department of Education. Make it disappear. Right. But let me look at it in that big sense. I quote John Cleese the great John Cleese who said as he was filling out this that this looks like his cabinet and his departmental heads. It looks (35/45)
like he's outfitting a pirate ship. You don't need more detail than that. They're all there to take as much money out than something they'll catch Trump in something that the Republicans have to bail out on him. They will have to impeach him and we'll get we'll get a bad amoral President Pence for a while and then vote him out in 2020. Yeah. I mean the plan. The other nautical metaphor I spent an hour with Trump in May talking about books he had read it didn't take an hour. You just talked for 59 minutes. It was very brief. Yeah. But it was like interviews up at Trump Tower and it was like interviewing the admiral and Mary Poppins you know he was shooting off cannons you know and he was totally in his own universe and that's where you know is going to continue to be that way that he has this bubble and it's going to be very hard to penetrate because of Bannon because of Flynn. He said he wants missile parades. Oh God. Missile parades. I mean he's done so many third world things putting (36/45)
his kids in charge not separating from the businesses you know jailing opponents but missile parades. This is one step from him wearing the uniform. Yeah. Yeah. With the fruit salad and really this is this is speeches on the balcony. He's going to back down. He's going to pivot from that. He's going to pivot from that so that the missile parades will only be when Putin is here. So I just feel like we are it's true spending a lot of time talking about Trump and his character but right now is actually a test of character for the American people. It really is. I am actually encouraged by it. I think we need to all remember that 27 percent of the voting eligible public voted for this man. That is it. The rest of us are organizing the march tomorrow the women's march. They're going to have 50 in other countries one in every single city. The one in Washington is going to be the biggest march that's ever been there. What did you think about Hillary showing up because I mean look I would like (37/45)
to say to Hillary. Thank you for 30 years of service. And now I never want to see either one of you ever again. I think I'm glad they showed up. I mean that's that was that took grace to show up. But I think what it really takes for the American people right now really I'm going to put you in jail and then you show up. Well but it's a statement in the world that you know what we're going to show up here and I respect that. But what I respect even more is what I'm seeing across this country Bill. I mean we're going to have more people in Washington tomorrow than we're there today. I have no doubt about that. There's no doubt about that. And we can have this conversation and I agree with everything we've said but I Donald Trump we continue to underestimate him. You know I hear people say he's going to be impeached in 18 months. I actually don't believe that. And that's why they're going to overreach immediately. Well that's why we need to organize the way he set up America in the speech (38/45)
today as this horrible wasteland. And people believe that. Well it's not true. I was then whatever he does. Look look I fixed it. You know and he could just do what he did with buildings. Put his name on it and take credit. Look what ISIS has wiped out. Well it's mostly wiped out but he'll stand in front of it and take credit. I was infrastructure. Look I finally got infrastructure done. If only the black guy had thought of that. Well he did but they wouldn't pass it. When he said when he talked about carnage today I found myself confused because Barack Obama inherited carnage unlike anything we've seen in our life. And the unemployment rate was heading to 10 percent. It's now down to 4.7 percent. We have 20 million more people insured today. That carnage he inherited he fixed. We got more work to do. Thank you. Next week it's going to be all Trump supporters on the panel. But for now thank you everybody. But it's time for New Rules everybody. New Rules. All right New Rules stop saying (39/45)
Toby Keith at the inauguration meant Trump is in touch with real Americans. It means he's in touch with drunk Americans. Toby Keith has a song literally entitled Drunk Americans. Which sure is my plan for the next four years. He also has recorded Get My Drink On, Get Drunk and Be Somebody, Loaded, Chug-a-lug, Beer For My Horses, Beers Ago, Cold Beer Country, Rum Is The Reason, Whiskey Girl, I Like Girls That Drink Beer, I Love This Bar, Every Time I Drink I Fall in Love, Drinks After Work, Red Solo Cup, Walk It Off, Clancy's Tavern, and Nights I Can't Remember, Friends I'll Never Forget. I guess what I'm saying is say hello to the new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire. New Rule the pollsters who found that nine in ten Native Americans are not offended by the Redskins name must next poll gay men to see if they're offended by the Packers. New Rule you can wear your faith on your sleeve all you like but you're not a true Christian until you've bought the Jesus Christ (40/45)
cheese grater. That's right it's real because as I've always said what better way to express your reverence for the Lord than by forcing mozzarella through his face. New Rule artist Alexandra Rubinstein does not have to explain her new painting entitled Thank You Obama. We get it when it came to women the man put in a lot of hard work but it took me eight years to get him on the show how'd you get him to pose for this? New Rule stop trying to make me feel sad that Ringling Brothers is shutting down. Good don't let the door rip you on the way out. Now let's build a wall with Quebec to keep out Cirque du Soleil. Circuses should have died years ago if I want to sit in a tent and be bored I'd go camping. If I need to see a clown torment a dumb animal I'll rewatch old clips of this. Finally New Rule here on Inauguration Day in the interest of new beginnings liberals have to stop calling Trump voters rubes and simpletons and instead reach out and feel their pain. The pain they insist we (41/45)
didn't see and there is ample evidence for that pain. Did you know that of the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person they all went for Trump. Trump won 80 percent of the states that have the biggest heroin problem and the counties that he won in Ohio and Pennsylvania that went for Obama last time are the ones that are racked by opiate abuse. So let's stop calling Trump voters idiots and fools and call them what they are fucking drug addicts. Now if that sounds like I'm actually not reaching out I promise I will. But first I have to get something off my chest about this phenomenon of white conservatives on drugs and the numbers are phenomenal. West Virginia was Trump's best state and in the past six years folks there have down 780 million hydro and oxycodone pills. That's 433 pain pills for every person in the state. West Virginia's mascot is a dilated pupil. In Wisconsin another key Trump state between 0 8 and 2014 heroin deaths nearly quadrupled. I (42/45)
never thought I'd hear myself say this but kids don't do heroin. It's a gateway to being a Republican. And the thing that sticks in my craw about this is that for decades it was us liberals who were accused of destroying the fabric of society with our drug use. Remember the country anthem from the hippie era that put the counterculture in its place. Merle Haggard oaky from the Skokie. We don't smoke marijuana in Miss Skokie. We don't take our trips on LSD. Yeah. Today Miss Skokie population 38000 has nine drug treatment centers. They should change the lyrics to we don't share our needles in Miss Skokie. We don't mix our smack with PCP. Somewhere along the line things changed for the real Americans in the heartland who were always chastising us for undermining patriotism by being stoned all the time. Well who's stoned all the time now. Not us. We've moved on to kale smoothies and an occasional craft beer. Meanwhile you've got meth mouth and are taking your dog's arthritis pills. Live (43/45)
free or die. More like press down and twist. But I'm not saying Trump voters that your pain isn't real. I mean it isn't but I'm not saying that. Because if this election has taught us anything it's that anything is real if enough people believe it is. And the good news is if the problem is drugs well hell there's something I can help with. If it's one thing I know it's how to manage a high. I'm doing it right now. You Trump voters are stoned. Please. We liberals invented stone. This is common ground. We get high and bid a thousand bucks for a Beatles lunchbox on eBay. You got high and ordered a president from Moscow. But that's because you're new to drugs. So let me share a lifetime of wisdom and experience in getting fucked up. Things like don't mix pills and alcohol. But if you do oxycodone goes with white wine. Don't drive on pills. Call Uber or Lyft and have someone on pills drive you. This is very important. Always have a wingman someone to say cool it or you shouldn't drive or (44/45)
don't put that in your mouth. Woody Harrelson once pulled me away from a long conversation with a Christmas tree I swore was Elton John. Also very important you're doing the wrong drugs stick to this stuff that comes out of the ground. Jesus 90 percent of you are farmers. You grow fertilize harvest eat and for all I know fuck your own crops you never thought to smoke them. And most important ignore the asshole across the bar who keeps staring at you. That's a mirror. All right. That's our show. I'll be at the Pope Joy Hall in Albuquerque New Mexico. February 12th on the road again. Oh I'm back at the Mirage in Vegas March 10th and 11th. I want to thank John Meacham Heather McGee Tom Perez Keith Olbermann and Jane Fonda for overtime on YouTube. Great to be back. Thank you folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand. For more information log on to HBO dot com. (45/45)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill maul Appreciate you putting on a brave face because I you made it through a whole week of the national emergency and Yeah, because of the invasion coming up from Mexico We have to do our part on the home front. Have you see salsa say something? so Donald Trump Dealing with the emergency spent the week golfing golfing and poop tweeting And you know, I was afraid this was gonna happen It's getting a little close to home for me now because he's now starting to threaten comedians He was very upset about Saturday Night Live last week. And he said why isn't there retribution? What the fuck does that mean? Retribution for comedians and Alec Baldwin now who plays Trump Of course as he now fears for his family's safety and they were scared enough already being Alec Baldwin's family so And of course Trump Somehow he has the time dealing with the national emergency to be tweeting about Jussie Smollett or Smollett I don't (1/46)
know how to pronounce that but he was Jussie report I was charged with a felony for filing a false police report because if there is one thing Trump cannot abide it is a self-serving liar And of course of course Fox News Loves this story, of course because it proves their stupid theory that racism is a hoax They're saying five Fox News that the mainstream media isn't covering the Jussie Smollett store Isn't covering up seven just died in a stampede But you know Jussie he wanted to raise his profile so he allegedly paid two men $3,500 to assault him for being black and gay something he could have gotten for free in, Texas I love Texas And the two many hired allegedly were Where at least one of them was an extra on Empire? Jussie what were you thinking never give the extras lines? My right show people No, this totally destroys the previous image. I had of Jussie Smollett, which was I don't know who that is But We don't want to come down to our Jesse. You're probably feeling pretty bad (2/46)
right now. Don't beat yourself up Less than 48 hours. You've got a host the Oscars No, no host this year Oscars are Sunday No host because a host might say something interesting and we can't have that in America and next year to be safe. No presenters You just grab the Oscar with your name on it scan it and bag it yourself There was not getting there was talk this year I'm not getting about this of trying to have as the host of the Oscars a robot a robot. Is that crazy? Well, Ryan Seacrest turned it down. So don't worry. I know why you guys are happy Bernie Sanders is in declared that he is Not quite the way you were last I hope you still like him. Anyway, he's a socialist and a lot of the party has moved toward him I mean the big star of the party Alexandria Ocasio-cortez She was a Bernie supporter and is right on his page. People are saying wow. What a dream ticket. That would be the 77 year old Jew And a 29 year old former bartender that For socialists, that's a dream ticket in LA. (3/46)
That's a third marriage I Love Bernie they asked Bernie about AOC and he said that's where I get my email. So he's And no the boy what a what a day of scandals are Kelly today indicted on 10 counts of aggregated sexual abuse Prosecutors say the evidence is so overwhelming. He was named Archbishop of Philadelphia And also You know who got caught today Robert Kraft, you know who that is He is the the owner of the New England Patriots charged with soliciting prostitutes at a Florida massage parlor Rubbing tug a billionaire. Is that a rubbing tug in Florida? Man, he won six Super Bowls. He needs more happy endings You know, I Always knew the Patriots were cheaters But what an excuse Robert Kraft says he was just deflating his balls Claire McCaskill and Rick Wilson are here and a little later. I'll be speaking with philosopher and author Bernard Henri-Levi But first up he is the US representative for California's 28th congressional district and chairman of the house Intelligence committee. (4/46)
We're hoping he will save us all Adam Schiff ladies I know why you like to do our show you get to sleep in your own bed. That is true Okay, that's true. So you put out an open letter today I read it interesting stuff and it's funny because I was gonna ask you about this because I assume you do talk to Republicans after hours now, I know when Obama was president they complained he didn't socialize enough with them Do you socialize with them? Do you talk over drinks privately? We do socialize and and certainly there are a lot of private conversations Where they will express their deep fears misgivings About this president about his lack of ethics about his base Okay So you you're saying in this letter you want them now to do that publicly what you're saying over martinis you want to hear Publicly, you know people will stop me in the corridor Republicans and say keep doing what you're doing Really, you know even senior Republicans which of course would be heresy for them to say publicly I (5/46)
Don't need private Confidences misgivings anymore. We need public statements. We need people to take a stand We need people to vote their conscience, you know that the president now You know has declared this unconstitutional emergency I mean, it's hard to make a weaker case for an emergency than the one he's made where Congress has Deliberated for months about this Congress has rejected his proposal Congress has come up with a bipartisan Consensus instead on something else and this for him is an emergency. Well, it's it's a complete and run it's an attack on the principal power of the Congress the power of the purse right if Republican members won't defend their own institution What hope is there that they'll defend the judiciary or any anything else in our system So what makes them fold because I see them all the time looking like they're gonna be something that guy Kennedy from Louisiana John Kennedy was good for a while Lindsey Graham was good for a while Mitt Romney Richard Burr (6/46)
who is the counterpart right on the Senate committee? Yes He seemed like a normal guy for a while this week He said, you know, we've looked at the evidence. We don't see anything that would make us think the president was involved in collusion. I Think Trump is a blackmailer What what what what does do they have pictures of these guys with a duck or something? What? What makes these guys wilt like that? You know, he's still popular in their base and they're terrified of having a Trumpist primary challenge and that I think cows them into Silence, but but you're right. It's It's inexplicable Why be there? What's the point of being there? Why do you aspire to be a member of Congress if when the country really needs you you're missing an action that you know The statement that some of my colleagues have made there's no evidence of collusion For example, you might as well say there's no evidence that the president is dishonest Hello Do you hear the words coming out of his mouth? The (7/46)
evidence is all too all too plain, you know the Everybody's waiting on pins and needles tonight because there may be a document dropping in the Manafort case Well, if you look at just the Manafort case Here's the campaign chairman meeting with someone believed to be associated with Russian intelligence Offering polling data and apparently not a top line. Here's why we think Donald Trump is going to win but raw data Why is that being provided to the Russians and why are they lying about it? and why is Roger Stone lying about his contacts with the publishing arms of the Russians or Guccifer to which is Directly of the GRU. Why is Flynn lying about his contacts, you know these and a hundred other Communications why all the lies why all the obstruction why all the Russians? Why is every day I hear Kalimnik and dyspravia and the Talagav gate? I Never heard these kind of names before and when you when you talk about the corruption that every Thing that the Trump name is associated with is (8/46)
being investigated the Trump organization Right the Trump charity was the Trump University the campaign the inaugural Well, I mean I read today in the New York Times that or I guess it was yesterday that he went to the He asked Whitaker who was the temp attorney general for a few months asked him to put a Somebody who knew was a supporter in charge of the Cohen investigation in New York in the Southern District Now isn't that itself obstruction of justice? Well, it certainly looks like obstruction to me I mean he's trying to handpick someone to put their hand on the scale or protect him is you know He wants a Roy Cohn in the Southern District of New York, but but you know Here's another thing that just to me is so telling about how this president has dumbed down our moral standards You have two attorney generals the last two attorney generals Matt Whitaker who auditioned for the part by going on cable news and saying This is how I could privately cripple the mall investigation and then (9/46)
Bill Barr who basically auditioned the same way both of them Refused to commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers Is it so much to ask that the top law enforcement officer of the country? Would commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers, but apparently that's no longer part of the job requirement And that is a a sad day in America, but it's also Part of why they were chosen but part of why they were chosen if Bill Barr Was going to commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers. He would have never been appointed And this is where we are and and this bill is why I Wrote this letter to my Republican colleagues, you know every day bit by bit drop by drop. We see our democracy evaporating and You need to look at the cumulative total of all this And how much damage is being done? And I think my colleagues have to ask themselves Why am I here if not to defend this beautiful system we have and Speak out and act out and act my conscience and and whatever my voters do, you know, (10/46)
I always tell my constituents The job of a member Congress is not to get reelected. It's to do the right thing and still find a way to get reelected No one who needs to hear this is hearing it That's the problem. Do you get invited on Fox News? Yes, you do I do and I go on Fox from time you go Sean. How did he invite you on? Oh, he invites me a lot You don't go I you know, I used to go you should go go That's who needs to hear your message. You know, I thought you weren't invited. No, I am invited. I am invited. Please go You liked me I do but but I like America too you got to get in the bubble man Well this bubbles this already sewn up we got these here's the thing here's the thing about Fox News and there are credible journalists some on Fox News, but but Just trying to think of something About the audience that's listening to it. No, I at least I would hear the argument the the the challenge that we face And I think this is the cross-cutting challenge of all and it's demonstrated by (11/46)
Fox News is we now get our information from such different places Right and and people live in their information world my point if there had been a Fox News When Richard Nixon was president there would have been no Premature end of his administration, you know, my favorite anecdote my favorite anecdote of Watergate is Because this is so Trump Ian you could imagine Trump doing exactly the same thing When the tapes were revealed and the White House didn't want to give out the tapes and didn't want to make the public didn't want To give them to Congress they came up with a solution. We'll give them to James O Eastland right this old Democratic senator right and we'll let him tell the public what's on them. Well, he was notoriously deaf, right? You could see Donald Trump saying this but the difference between then and now is if Donald Trump proposed that today. Mm-hmm Fox News would say that's a brilliant idea. That's a brilliant idea And and people who want to live in that way. You gotta (12/46)
go there man. All right you you I will go great for you I appreciate My last question You know, I always ask myself how the Republicans can abide by the fact that this president Okay, attacking the Democrats we get that but he attacks the institutions of government He attacks the FBI the CIA the Justice Department This is unbelievable to me and I was trying to think how could he get away? Why do they put up with this but then I thought you know when a Republican attacks government that goes back to Reagan Reagan famously said something like the the scariest nine words in the English language or I'm from the government and I'm here to help Hahaha when you lay that groundwork that the government is evil to begin with that they can do no, right? Yeah, 40 years later Trump comes along and he says the FBI is crooked people buy it you think that's what it is You know, I think that what Republicans admired about Reagan was not just his ideology Which was very clear But the fact that he (13/46)
projected a sense of decency and a sense of optimism I Remember feeling as I watched our president in Helsinki say I believe this guy Vladimir Putin over my own Intelligence agencies. I thought to myself Ronald Reagan once said I didn't leave the Democratic Party the Democratic Party left me well The Republican Party has left Ronald Reagan, right? There's nothing left. Yeah about him in that party There's no decency in the leader of their party, right? There's no integrity. There's no optimism and Donald Trump's Republican Party America is a victim. I just came from Munich where we had this security conference and where the speaker led a delegation to do our part as article 1 to Convince our allies that that we value NATO that we value the European Union the transatlantic alliance And you know our allies have profound questions about whether they can count on America anymore That's the legacy of this president that was not Ronald Reagan's legacy. All right congressman Adam Schiff look (14/46)
for him on Fox News everybody Okay, here they are he is a Republican strategist whose New York Times best-selling book everything Trump touches dies will soon be in paperback Rick Wilson, Rick, how you doing? She Is the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and co-author of for colored girls who have considered politics Donna Brazil is over here And she's a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC in the former Democratic senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill Okay, so I read yesterday that Donald Trump is trying out nicknames Because you know little Adam shit just doesn't happen you got a it's amazing with all the national emergency go I got he has the time but I saw I watched his speech in Miami. We're talking about Venezuela He used the word socialist socialistic or communist or communistic 34 times and That I have a feeling whoever is the nominee of the Democratic Party that's going to be the nickname That is what he is going to do. You are a commie and not a good one like my (15/46)
buddy Kim Jong-un Or the ex KGB guy who I love so much. I mean a bad copy like Woody Guthrie, you know So what do the Democrats do about that because Bernie Sanders is in the face of the party is AOC now They're looking more like a socialist party. What do they do? Oh First of all, we ignore Donald Trump because in a couple of weeks, you know, I didn't work out too good last time No, well last time we paid too much attention to him But but we ignored the people who listen to his lies and his bullshit this time I think it's important that the candidates go out there and they talk about the issues and look my mother used to say it's not What they call you is what you answer to we're answering to the American people who want to lower prescription drugs We're answering to the American people who want to deal with climate change And if he wants to get out there and call us a bunch of names, guess what? He's a juvenile What do you think I think I think we've got to realize that there's five (16/46)
states Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan Florida and Pennsylvania that turn the election that turn the election and we've got to make sure that whoever is nominated understands those states and Speaks to the people in those states and if we get carried away with some Ideas that are great for our party, but probably not gonna get 60 votes in the Senate We need to stay not on the macroeconomics, but maybe on the macaroni and cheese issues, you know, like, you know How can I send my kid to college? How can I afford to retire? Well socialism answers some well, but not not that's not the answer I think that people in those states are gonna be comfortable with maybe not especially older voters They probably like the program's but not the names We gotta be careful the names names matter you said famously when you were running only a year ago You said I'm not one of those crazy Democrats, that's correct You're running in Missouri where Donald Trump won 57% of the vote It's amazing a Democrat gets (17/46)
elected at all there. What do they think? When they hear what is a crazy Democrat to them? Why do they think Democrats are crazy? Well, I think the crazy I was referring to We're not the Democrats that fought with me shoulder to shoulder to try to fight the tax cut or to pass the ACA Or to do all the things we did as a Democratic Party when I was in the Senate the crazy Democrats I'm talking about is the state senator in Missouri who actually put on our Facebook page that Donald Trump should be assassinated Well, this is a bad idea this is yeah, this makes us look very very bad or the people frankly who go in restaurants and Get up in the face of someone and scream at people and I think What we've got to do is get back to realizing that how we appear matters and we need to he's bad I mean, he's got 53% approval in my state, but not in most days. Oh still right now So we've got to go after the issues that he is failing America on he's failing our farmers You didn't forget about that (18/46)
whole middle of the country One of the things that Democrats need to do in 2020 is to point out that although Donald Trump is gonna go out and run this thing. Oh the the creeping socialist horde right now He's paying farmers seven point seven billion dollars. Yeah, it's a stupid trade war Yeah, so how's that socialism taste to you guys out there in the Midwest, right? I mean, this is a guy who's doing damage to them every day and there is a point that I think Claire's point Claire's point is correct. The Democrats can walk themselves into a box very easily They they seek death all the time politically and so yeah, it's important for them not to like lead with the commie stuff It's important for them to and and that doesn't mean you don't get to call Donald Trump that doesn't mean you don't get to like slap him down that he's a he's a Bankrupt broke-dick idiot, but this is a guy It's gonna drag it's gonna drag Democrats Whether they like it or not He's gonna drag them into that whether (19/46)
they like it or not if it's and if it's you know Look if it's a female candidate, she needs to say right off the bat. Yeah, you're gonna call me a bitch anyway So let's get to it, you know, they need to have some fight in that dog It needs to be smart the issue set needs to be smart and highly targeted, but they've got a fight with this guy They've got to show voters that they have some passion and some energy and not just on the like I am so excited about climate change voters don't respond to that. They responded back being told I'm gonna fight for you I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna do something for you your family your kids your your job That's meaningful and important and they don't I'm a change is meaningful it bill It's but to the average voter out there they rank it but that's what leaders do they convince Yeah, I get you I live in the world of actual The mechanics of it though the jobs in the economy are always gonna be high Okay voters A to B bread and butter matter, but if (20/46)
Democrats run the same kind of bland Poll tested driven campaign guess what? That's what you get up in shit We're not going to get people excited about voting in 2020. We have to mix it up We got to put a little Trinity a little rule I agree with your base though. Your base that was so jacked up Your base is gonna come out and vote against this some bitch no matter what Well, you're gonna have to get some people in places like Florida and Ohio and Pennsylvania, Michigan Who are those like male deer hunting Democrats? Well, I'm prediction we have four hundred and fifty two candidates running the one that gets the nomination will inspire people That will happen It will be an inspirational candidate because they're gonna have to fight through a hell of a crowd to get the I've got to say One last name bill and I know it's black history month. So I get a little extra time I'm so over top of that face. All right, we good. All right We're good. All right But what concerns me is that we keep (21/46)
talking about getting a 270 and what happened in? 2016 is that we bypass so many people and trying to get the 270 that we forgot that we have people in the middle of The country they want to hear from Democrats. They want to hit common-sense solutions. And that's what we that's right And that's why I just stick up for the environment for one second because I hear this every election It's like well, you know the environment it's very important. But if you talk about it, you're gonna lose voters They don't care about that Listen to Accuweather predicts at the total economic loss to the state of California due to the wildfires Remember those a few months ago we had here will be four hundred billion dollars 400 billion dollars. So when Republicans say, you know, oh you want to switch over to to renewables? How are we gonna pay for that? How are we gonna pay for this? and you know People really do die Because of climate change they really do and this cancer used to be one in a hundred now (22/46)
It's like one in three right? There's an insect apocalypse if the bees go the food goes I mean, I know this is something that liberals cheer on but everybody a leader is someone who takes that message That's what Republicans have always been good at. Oh the people don't believe that we don't care. We'll make them believe that Oh, they like the public option give us six months. They'll hate it. Right? That's what Democrats have to do. Absolutely Okay, next issue while we have a few minutes before Jesse Smollett or smaller. I've never heard of this man. I'm so sorry. I'm just see I'm sorry. I'm mispronouncing the name Look, I'm not defending him. But it seemed like when Trump does it. It's called truthful hyperbole. You don't have to be But it seems to me that what it said about America is that there is nothing as powerful as a victim and That is a big problem in this country. He wanted to be a victim He just didn't want to you know, go through all the steps. He wanted to raise he wanted (23/46)
to raise he wanted to raise He wanted money. That's what he wanted. He didn't want no one wants to be a victim of hate crimes No one wants to be a victim of Of being attacked and brutalized because you're gay or you're black or you're Jewish that's bullshit He wanted a pay raise and he wanted to bring attention to himself. I'm angry with him. I'm upset with him Now in the city of Chicago apology, there are real-life victims out there today and I refuse to shut up because he played a Terrible game and it's painful I feel like we've gone from this place where now I hear people say victims should be believed Victims should be taken seriously. Absolutely right victims should not always be believed take you seriously Absolutely, that's a big difference, but we seem to have skipped that step as we always do the problem is for so long Bill victims weren't taken seriously, correct? You're looking at somebody who's been a lot of time in a courtroom prosecuting sex crimes I mean a lot of time in (24/46)
a courtroom and We have come a long way But there is still in this country a problem that many victims are not taken seriously So if we're gonna have due process We can't just blanketly believe anybody who comes forward with any allegation But if we take them seriously and give them due process, that's what happened here They gave him right took him seriously and they investigated it The investigators did a great job and they found out that he was you know up a jerk And I think though it speaks also build up to the way our society is siloed into these two camps now There were a lot of people in the Democratic side who immediately were tweeting and oh my god This is the most horrible thing in the world. They nobody waited on the Republican side There was everybody at the minute. It was turned out to be this thing. It was all hate crimes are fake This is no this isn't real We have got a and you're right everybody has a chance to be listened to and heard they can tell their stories and (25/46)
you know As painful as this episode has been you know, the system kind of worked Yeah, he got listened to and unfortunately for him. He got listened to in a way that proved that he was There's still a lot of women out there. No, I'm not That's why this is such an awful case. That's the problem It's also an awful case because it immediately gives a lot of people on the Trump faction This this sense that you know, oh, they're all fake. None of this is real These are all just these are all just you know contrived things, right? Well, no, you know what Pittsburgh? Wasn't contrived. No, no That's sad part of it is that Fox News will dine out on yes I always do because another problem we have is Americans love the anecdotal, right? Yes one story as opposed to a lot of peer-reviewed science Meanwhile, we have another Maniac out there assembling guns and weapons to try to yes Journalists and right and we're gonna get to that. I'm gonna bring out Bernard in a second We're gonna get to know but (26/46)
I also just want to show one other thing I saw Jesse's Interview with Robin Roberts. Yeah. He's not a good actor All right, let's bring out our mid show guests Our mid show guest he is a philosopher human rights activist and author of the Empire and the Five Kings America's abdication and the fate of the world, please welcome Bernard on really be For a long time me too really me too don't say that here I didn't do nothing So good start as you see so many things I love about you one of them is that you love America and I always wonder why because you are Well, because you are a public intellectual which we don't have in this country And we are very America is a very anti intellectual country. What do you love about us? You don't live here? That's what it is. No, I have an Announcement for you. Oh you do America does not equal Donald Trump. No, no One man in America who believes that America equals Donald Trump This is Donald Trump himself, right except him from outside All right, (27/46)
America is much bigger and yes more lovable than Donald Trump. So why don't your countrymen feel that way? I mean you you have said France was built upon the hate of America What I explained in my book in this book is that we have two friends. We have the France of Lafayette of de Tocqueville and we have the France of the fascist the old Fascists from the right and for the left who hate America those who hate America in Europe Are the first the fascist thinkers they hate the idea of a country based on a creed They love roots soil race and so on and they hate this a Strange idea of a country based in the sky of ideas, which is also America, but what happens when we become the fascist? When we become I'm talking about America now, I mean, I I worry that this country is becoming something unrecognizable I think we all do I heard on the show every day I know that's why that's the reason why I wrote this book Right in order to say to my fellow countrymen and also to Americans Right, there (28/46)
is an American Creed and American Exceptionality which is again much bigger than this Epiphenomenon Who is Donald Trump Donald Trump is nothing Donald Trump is an ape. Of course and look how I listen to program rather often. Thank you. Look at that. This is a democratic red basis This is a democratic poll. Yeah, this is more America than this crazy But I know I mean you are unlike a lot of people in Europe unlike a lot of people in America you want America to More involved. Yeah, you were for involved in Bosnia Kosovo Libya Syria you think we should have got in there and I think a lot of us here in America think wow We have not had a good experience with that. We haven't handled it. Well, it always seems to be clumsy It always seems to be too warlike Whenever we get involved, it seems like it's with the army. No, whatever you we the West don't get involved It is a disaster Syria A 400,000 deads million of refugees sure and then a country completely emptied the void of his substance due (29/46)
to Non-commitment so, you know, of course we can decide this but then we have to take our responsibility When we don't commit when America is unfaithful to its own DNA it There's a void and someone will step in Russia China the people you Russia Turkey the great Democrat MBS the man who cuts 14 pieces these guys when you receive they push on the pool They they push this is what is the situation? What do we want? Do we want the world? To to be shaped really I believe that for my children and my grandchildren and even your children and maybe your grandchildren No We have already election shaped by Vladimir Putin you had an election Yes, and we're shaped by they're doing it again. We have we might have one in France. What's going on every day I read in the paper about the yellow jackets in France. It started out as a protest against high gas prices I think and it seems to have morphed into something darker with elements of anti-semitism Why does everything in Europe wind up being (30/46)
something involved with anti-semitism? In Europe and also sometimes in America. Yes, our Pittsburgh Remember all these millions of Twitter's that preceded and followed as bad as election of Donald Trump Let you want a competition between America I don't like this sort of cut. No. No there is today what is true And again, it is I don't want to make too much advertisement, but it is a topic of my book there is Wave and tide of populism Populism means also is the nickname a gentle name for fascism therefore for anti-semitism and this wave is Going wiping off all our countries the West Europe America Of course Russia, which is a fatherland of this of this Populism the place where they they're poppetized marionette eyes this populism So we have that everywhere and of course anti-semitism in the climax of this Populist trend and it's absolutely normal that we have it But it would be absolutely normal to resist to to face and to contain it and we don't do enough it Alright one more thing I (31/46)
want to quote you on because I think we see very eye to eye on social media and you said Trump and Zuckerberg two blades of a pair of scissors cutting the fabric of truth to ribbons I really believe that He's Donald Trump it is No, it is now. It is Donald Trump This man cannot speak in any other way than by Twitter and when and I see all the new this is very strange all The commentators they wonder in one case. Why did he react immediately about? This actor who pretended to be Immediately and for the Hassan story. Yes him. I Listen to your colleague Colbert yesterday. Okay was saying what happens he Donald Trump does not tweet when Donald Trump Does not tweet it is a national event therefore Event so Donald Trump is Twitter Twitter is on Trump I want to get back has to be aware of this news Twitter. Yes, not my face But I don't know who it is. No, the boss of the Twitter has to know that now, I'm sorry I like them so little that I don't even know I Want to people who missed this story (32/46)
Christopher Paul Hassan, I think is his name. He is a coast Coast Guard officer Okay, he said things they found an arsenal first of all And by the way, remember Caesar Sayoc that was last fall This is the guy this was did almost the same thing a guy who is a big Trump supporter The new one Paul Hassan says he wants focused violence to establish a white homeland He was studying the methods of the Unabomber the Virginia Tech killer and other mass killers He wants to says upset that Democrats might illegally impeach Trump So he would like to kill them first and he wanted to kill almost every last person on earth He is known as a moderate among Republicans So Poor grand old party poor Seriously poor Republicans, but Trump this week again talking about the press as the enemy of the people and you know How many times does this have to happen before we realize that you know? These guys are the son of Sam killers and he is the dog that they are listening to And he they asked him about it said (33/46)
he said they said did you think your language affected this he said No, I don't think so. I think my language is very nice But but his language is very nice but language can kill yes It's not very nice, which we have to be aware of Worlds can be like bullets. Yes worlds. Well, they like bombs That's what I'm saying. Is it people? Too much when you say too much that news the newspaper is the enemy of the people when you say too much after Charlottesville that there is evil and good on the two sides when you say that too much it gives And to those who have the guns, let me read one more quote Roger Stone Roger Stone who was in court this week He had said back in August of 2017 you try to impeach Trump Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country a politician that votes for it would be encouraging Their own would be endangering their own life. Yes, you know this these words have meaning So weird about this is why is this so hard for him? You know why I mean here's a guy (34/46)
who's arrested that Clearly wanted to kill a lot of people whether you like the people he was gonna kill or don't like them You're president the United States Why is it so hard for him to look at that and by the way, it would be so reassuring to Americans all Americans I don't care if they're Democrats or Republicans if he would just clearly say this is outrageous, right? I'm proud of law enforcement for finding the guy Please don't kill your fellow Americans, right? This is this is 101 for the right supremacy is bad The secret of this is there's a metric in Donald Trump's mind all the time and that metric is do they like me or do They not exactly and he think guys like that like him. Okay. That's why he doesn't say anything about that That's why he was he has a disease. It's called malignant narcissistic personality disorder I've said this before every Every article that you read about Donald Trump should begin with President Trump who suffers from? malignant because this Nothing else (35/46)
explains that explains. It's why he's a traitor. It's why he's this way just like you said It's only if you like me or you don't it's why he's loving up on Kim Jong. Yes Exactly loves up on Putin all of it. Okay, I really think about that image again. I know Are you all you three Catholics I am kinda kinda so we have yes no one maybe okay Well They found themselves in the news once again, and I thought we had put this to rest I how naive I was from well not to rest, but I thought things had gotten better I mean it was first hit the news in 2002. That's when the the child abuse scandal really came to the floor We are apparently still at the convincing them It's a problem face because the Vatican is having a big conclave now kids stay free. No, I'm joking And and The problem is that they see first of all, I it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that the Pope who is You know, he has more power than anybody in any institution. He's the Pope Cannot just do it because the bureaucracy (36/46)
apparently is so do what? Stop it to clearly say we're what this is exactly what he's doing to be honest I know you're prejudge. I'm a fan of the show. I know what you think My pleasure J against religion. You're right. I am prejudge against religion This is exactly what he's doing and what is happening now in front and honestly except a very brave Initiative more than others, but he's got the order still We're still of the victims some of the survivors of the abusers to put all these people together and to liberate the speech What would be brave would be to say call the police It is he's still not saying that no They are still treating it as a sin and a sin is forgiven and a crime is prosecuted The state of this summit is to say to the bishops to say to the bishops now You will have to call the police. This is the The thing I'm not a Catholic as you may know women Catholic women priests Or just married married priests I'd be adults fuck other adults The difficulty of having an (37/46)
institution that's a couple thousand years old and feels like it is a it is not accountable to Temporal power it has taken a lot to get them to this point But they are in a moment of crisis where this has become so much of the Catholic Church's brand That that I think it's an existential crisis unless they handle this You're not going to ever have people that weigh the the good of the Catholic Church the hospitals the orphanages that all the things They do in the world But you will never have people weigh those factors because it will be the image of the brand will be They allow priests to molest children and they don't take them to before law enforcement if they do that if they do adopt a doctrinal policy where priests and caught in you know with with with a child Automatically gets sent to into law enforcement's hands great I think they could do themselves a huge favor by that But I do understand there's like a momentum problem inside an institution that thinks on you know 150 250 (38/46)
350 year timeframes Yeah, look it took over what what 350 years 400 for the Catholic Church to acknowledge Galileo was right Galileo Galileo was right. Sorry about that and 2,000 years the church takes a long time to reform itself I look I remember as a child sitting in the back of the church during the segregation period and they didn't apologize But when I went to first Sunday, I did go to church now. I'm a Catholic faith with church you go to St. Mattress She's laying your ass in bed and think oh no no Oh, I was raised Catholic our Lady of Mercy and there was none Apologize he apologized, you know our Cardinal in DC was the frog Cardinal McCarrick Who I really grown up in DC is a 21 year old and this is the big event The dismissal of McCarrick is the big event. Yeah. Yes. It's it's yes You're right. They are making some progress. But first of all, I'd also like to tell people I don't think they understand this Celibacy does not go back to Jesus. Okay. Okay. It's a fact, right? It (39/46)
only was my reading of the Bible was only in the 16th century that they said this is what how we do it So they have they have they have to become Jews again. They will break with chastity with celibacy They will marry and they will have a normal life and they will stop to be Pedophobic and pedophile both because I go together the homophobia Yes, yes, of course. No homophile homosexuals are not pedophiles. That that's that's correct. That is correct We can't make no no the you can't mix those two. I agree which had a few pedophiles and homosexuals No, I there are a lot of homosexuals in the Catholic fires, right? It's two different things All right. All right Okay Okay Your old Donald and Melania Trump must be thanked for proving providing the answer to the question. What is the opposite of raw passion? This is what a kiss looks like when both parties say hey watch my makeup You rule no saying you're humbled if you win an Oscar on Sunday That's not what humbled means be handed a gold (40/46)
trophy and told you the best of everybody is exact opposite of humble The only humbling moment an award show ever had was when la la land won best Oscar and then they pride the award out of their hands New rule someone has to examine all the babies born last Tuesday morning and make sure none of their souls were stolen by Karl Lagerfeld. I Don't believe in the afterlife, but I've seen 11 Halloween movies and there's no way this guy just left New rule yakali de Roma the woman featured in these artsy photos Breastfeeding her four-year-old must either be celebrated as a progressive feminist icon or arrested immediately And what is it with these kids these days think they have to post a photo of every meal? New rule don't feel bad. If you can't keep up with all the Trump scandals. It's like Lucy at the chocolate factory At first you thought I can do this and then the scandals come faster and faster And faster Until the only solution is the guzzle vitamin a bedroom in And finally new rule (41/46)
if Bugsy Siegel could invent Las Vegas out of a desert stopover for GIs Amazon can turn Nebraska into the next Silicon Valley as As I'm sure you know by now Amazon has scrapped its plans to build a giant headquarters in New York because the city balked at Giving the richest company in the world a three billion dollar tax bribe So Amazon took their ball and went home which I guess explains this t-shirt But herein lies a chance for Amazon to show the world that a tech company can actually do good We have a problem in America called spatial geographic Inequality which means that the most affluent and educated people are clustered in just a few cities Last year Hillary Clinton said I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product I won the places that are optimistic Diverse dynamic moving forward. Yes, you did and maybe that has something to do with why Trump voters are Obsessed with owning the libs because the libs own everything else The blue parts of (42/46)
America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red Feels like their invitation got lost in the mail and they still use the mail They turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities. There's no Real Housewives of Toledo or CSI Lubbock There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you who are you wearing because the answer is always target There are two Americas and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are Where people drive Tesla's and eat artisanal ice cream? We have orchestras and theater districts and world-class shopping. We have chef Wolfgang Puck. They have chef Boyardee Our roofs have solar panels theirs have last year's Christmas lights We've got legal bud they've got bud we have anal bleaching they have congressman Steve King The flyover states have become the past over states That's why red state voters are so pissed off. They don't hate us. They want to be us. They want to go to the party It's like we're the British royal (43/46)
family and they're Meghan Markle's dad How do I know this because? How do I know this because 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to Amazon for the company to locate in their area all desperate for jobs that don't involve guarding prisoners or murdering chickens and Amazon pick two places that didn't need them at all places where prosperity already was Bezos you're worth 130 billion take one for the team Stop playing cities off against one another and help a dying one come back to life I know this sounds like a pipe dream and it's true. I was smoking a pipe when I dreamed it But if liberals are serious about winning elections, they have to start recolonizing the parts of the country. They've abandoned Mississippi is the poorest state in the country Amazon could buy the whole state and rename it. I'm a zippy If we keep leaving the red states behind they're going to keep getting angrier and crazier Because if you're not invited to the party the next best thing is to throw a turd (44/46)
in the punchbowl As opposed to what happens when Amazon moves to West Virginia People get better jobs that don't give them black lung The locals meet people of different races and backgrounds and sexual orientations None of whom kill them they find out gays don't ruin anyone's marriage, but they do improve the karaoke scene a Yoga studio opens up then an art gallery a gym that admits women Then one of those trendy bars where inside looks like the outside Asians come and open a Chinese restaurant and then Jews come because there's a Chinese restaurant And before you know it there's legal weed and decent health care and the schools are teaching science again, all right That's our show. I'll be at the Sanger theater in New Orleans At the Mirage in Vegas April 12th and 13th, I want to thank Rick Wilson none of Brazil Claire McCaskill Stay tuned for overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks You catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on (45/46)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. It's nice to see so many familiar masks. I think I know why you're happy today. We are in the yellow zone in LA, Kelsey. That is. We're in the yellow zone. It's good. It means that soon all Californians were able to do the things that all Californians want to do, like eat in a restaurant indoors, visit a museum, run for governor. The things all of us do. Now we did, hey, a little pat on the back for us. We did good out here. Los Angeles County has had several days now this week without anyone dying from COVID. Although quite a few were crushed to death by their Peloton treadmill. I just have to. Do you have one of those? Wow. The Peloton finally relented. They're recalling 126,000 of these treadmills. Apparently they're dangerous to small children who can get sucked into them. And also to parents, because they create the illusion you can run away. And we don't want that. Uh, but you know what you (1/46)
cannot apparently run away from. Did you see this? There's a friggin' 23 ton Chinese rocket booster. What are you doing this weekend? That's coming down to Earth this weekend. You know, the people, countries send up satellites and shit, and they, you gotta send them up on a rocket. This thing is 10 stories high. Usually I guess they just orbit. This one's, no, going into what they call a uncontrolled re-entry this weekend. China said it's very unlikely to cause any harm. And I believe them because after all, when have they ever let something get, oh, there you go. No, go on to the next joke. They're way ahead of me. They're way ahead of me. That's a good crowd. Even up to finish that joke. But it is Mother's Day Sunday. Are you excited about that? And you know, there's always a heartwarming story about spawning on Mother's Day that I never find heartwarming. This week, guess what it is. This week in Mali, the country of Mali in Africa, a woman gave birth to nine babies at the same (2/46)
time. Take that, Octomom. Octomom tired. Mali wired. Nine babies. Mom is resting comfortably. Dad walks straight into the ocean with his clothes on. Nine babies, wow. And for Mother's Day, Hallmark has a special card they made for QAnon moms. It said roses are red, violets are blue. You're the best mom. Biden eats babies. I, QAnon, I have to tell you, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the problem in the Republican Party is not going away. It is not going away. Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, you know, I was pretty much against this guy nine years ago when he ran. Now he's like the voice of moderation. Went to Utah, where he's a saint, to make a speech. They booed him off the stage. This is like Lindsey Graham getting booed on Fire Island. I mean, and Mitt Romney, he said to the crowd, aren't you embarrassed? And they were like, we're 300 pounds. There are crocs on our feet. We're wearing a Trump flag as a cape. What do you think? No, they are, the cuckoo wing is in control. Liz (3/46)
Cheney, another one. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney. Could you have deeper Republican roots than Liz Cheney? She's about to lose her leadership position in the Congress because she will not embrace the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. And the Republican Party truth will set you free from your job. Not really a joke, but a fine idea. Was totally not expecting a laugh there. Thank you for not giving it to me. Would have just encouraged the writers. But you know, the problem is that Trump is still out there, and he's got a new platform, even though he was thrown off Facebook again. Facebook, by the way, this week, they voted. They had a big conclave there. They were going to keep the ban on Trump for another six months off Facebook because, you know, in the next six months, they'll probably change. But no, Facebook said if Trump wants to spread his misinformation and his propaganda, he's going to have to buy ads like everybody else. And finally, a little sad (4/46)
news in the marriage department. I guess you heard about Bill Gates and Melinda Gates. They are getting divorced. That is the exact appropriate response to that. But you know, they lived in a 66,000 square foot house. It's so hard to keep a long distance relationship together. And you know, they were having problems. And Bill Gates said they were having problems connecting. And he called his IT guy in, and he said, they just weren't compatible. All right. We've got a great show. We have Representative Alyssa Slotkin and Rick Wilson are here. But first up, he is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. His new book is called Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter of Then, Now, and Forever. You can find his commentary on substack.com. And I don't mind saying he's one of my heroes. John McWhorter is over here. John, I mean that. We don't touch anymore, John. I'd like to touch you because I'm such a fan of yours. I must tell you. It's good to hear, Bill. Oh, I am. I hope some of (5/46)
your friends, or mutual friends, have told you that over the years. I admire you so much, not just because you're a voice of common sense, but it takes guts these days to be a voice in common sense, I think. I suppose. I don't think of myself as brave, because what I really am is a failed lawyer. And my issue is just that if things don't make sense to me, then I just want to try to make sense of it, and I want people to understand what I mean. And this is the thing. If you are a good black person, you're often told that when it comes to certain race issues, you're supposed to not quite make sense, and that you're supposed to deal with a certain kind of word magic. I have never felt it. I've always thought I'm black, and I would like that to make sense too. And that's why I end up looking brave, when really, I'm just obsessive. Well, what I get so much from listening to you and reading you is that you feel condescended to, which I feel like that is... Especially lately. Right. And I see (6/46)
that all the time, and I don't know wonder, I do wonder why that's not more in the dialogue we have with. It's the strangest thing. Like, you read a book like, and yeah, we're going to have to be specific, White Fragility, which basically says that black people are these hot house flowers where everybody has to tiptoe around us, and we're always crying, and we're always angry, and we're just so very, very, very delicate. I don't feel like that person. That book is talking down to me as far as I'm concerned. It really should be called Black Fragility. Yes, yes. It should be used to keep tables from wobbling. That is the only use for that book. And yet, you look on Facebook, and you have people saying, I'm doing the work, and reading this book. And I think to myself, they are doing the work of making me into a perfect idiot. Yes, why don't more of my fellow black people feel that way? And it's because of a very human thing, which is that it is a very human thing to take on the victim (7/46)
identity. All people do it. We've all known people like that. A way you can do it if you're a black person, and all of us need to grab onto something sometimes, is to read a book like that and think, yes, I need to be treated that way. And I am going to start actively parsing it that way, because I don't think people realize what silly babies books like that make us look like. So something needs to be said. Right. But I mean, to be fair, I think most black folks do agree with you. It's just the ones, the people, black and white, who are on Twitter. Quite frankly, yes. I know when I say these things, it's not just me and Coleman Hughes and Glenn Loury and two or three other people. If it was something like that, I wouldn't say, hey, look at the way we weirdos feel. It's that I've been black pretty much for 55 years, and I know how black people feel. And I always think this certain sliver of people in the media and in academia, they're often much smarter than me. But that is not the (8/46)
representative view. And so, for example, if you're going to read How to Be an Antiracist, that is not the general black view of things. It's like the Bible. That book, if you must read it, should be read as literature rather than as scholarship. That's not general. And yet, we're told that somehow we have to accept these sorts of things as the black view. And you'll see it on Twitter. A black person will write on Twitter, you have to listen to the black people who are the real black people, the black people who black people listen to. No, no. There is a great deal of diversity in the black community, and I can tell you, it is not the default in the black community to think of ourselves as pathetic. Yes, we can't has never been the slogan for black America, and it's not now. Right, I remember when Trump was running in 2016. Remember his pitch to the black community was, very well, what do you got to lose? You walk out your door, you get shot. And I thought, what an insult. Most black (9/46)
people live in the suburbs. Almost 2 thirds are middle class. Yes, you're not supposed to say that. Some are not in the middle class because they're doing very well. For example, yes. That's not to say that there isn't still racism in this country, of course, and there aren't problems and big differences and equality and wealth and health. Terrible things happen. Yes, which of course should be addressed. But if I may just amend one thing you said, those people you mentioned are not smarter than you. I made a noise on TV. And one thing that I love you say, because once in a while over the years, I have criticized religion. I don't know if you know that. I hear you every now and then, yes. But the fact that you characterize some of this wokeness as a religion appealed to me. And when we talk about religion, we're talking about things like, of course, original sin. White privilege. Just whiteness. I never heard the term whiteness before. That's right. You sinned when you were a baby, when (10/46)
you came out. And you will never get rid of your white privilege no matter what you do. You're going to die with it. And the good thing is to put yourself on Facebook saying, I'm doing the work. And that way, you are atoning for your white privilege. OK. Well, can I read some of the, I just made a list, because I think you call yourself a cranky liberal, a cranky Democrat. I am all of those things. Yeah, me too. And I just, for people who are watching this and are, how dare they. And there are just a few, yes. There are a few. But I just want people to understand, liberalism has changed, especially as racial matters go, in the last five years. And here are some new ideas that, new to me, and I don't agree with most of them. Penetrating insights? Here we go. One, but it's never been worse. Yeah, it's terrible. Which 1850, and now it's worse. 1966, it's gotten so much worse. These are people who either are too young to remember the way it was, or frankly, it's the victim complex, which (11/46)
feels good in the moment, but it has nothing to do with reality. And it's defeatist. Well, I think it's a lot, the first thing you said, that, there is a, there is a gen, the younger generation feels like if something didn't happen while they were alive, it didn't happen. And I can understand that. I can't. And let's face it. It's stupid. It's called history. I've heard, I've heard them say it on this show. Like, I wasn't around for it. Yes. I wasn't around for the French Revolution, but I know about it. Yes. But I sympathize a little bit, because there's so much technology. I think for a lot of people, and I would say, frankly, you can be as old as 40 at this point. You figure, the way it used to be, it looks so very different, because it's in black and white often. You know, after things are in color, they look realer. And also, black history was relatively quiescent in the 1970s and into the 80s. And so it's easy to miss how different 1965 was from 1985, because you don't have (12/46)
interesting events to chart. So I can have some sympathy for it. But no, anybody who thinks that now is just as bad as the way it was in 1970, except that manners have changed, no. There were people who said that in 1990, about 1970. That was kind of true. Right. But time passes. It's easier to believe that change doesn't happen, and in a way, more tempting and more fun, because you have a reason to get angry, than to allow that change happen slowly and to watch it happen and to applaud. You're supposed to be happy that things change. But we're taught that the authentic black position is to pretend that it never does. Right. Yeah, we're not saying there isn't still a great deal of work to be done. Not saying it at all. Not saying it all. Because you know that's on Twitter. Don't they know about systemic racism? Yes, I know all about it. But the point is, it's about degree. Why is it unblack to address degree? Is it supposed to be that it's sophisticated, because it's like quantum (13/46)
physics, where everything is on and off? No, that's not how it goes. When you're dealing with social history, there's the issue of degree. And if that makes me a white supremacist to say so, then I, John McWhorter, am, you can put this on Twitter, I am a white supremacist, because I embrace degree. Right, and nuance. I try, yeah. I mean, all right. Other things on the new ideas about race. That white people can't talk about it. You're not supposed to. You don't have the experience. But it doesn't rob me of being a sentient person, being white. It robbed me of many things, but not that. You can say nothing, and that makes me feel good, because that means that I'm the only one who gets to talk. You can see where that comes from, because you get to express yourself, and you get to never be told that you're wrong. In other words, it's childish. And it's sad enough when a black person says that that's the way it's supposed to go, but then when a white person says that that's progress, that (14/46)
that's enlightenment, to pretend that a white person has nothing to say, that dialogue will never advance anything. Talk about not understanding history. All that is a lot of fun in the present. It makes for great Twitter, it makes for very cathartic discussions, but nothing will ever change, because when you tell people they can't talk, what they do is they think and they get angry. Nothing will change that. You don't get rid of what they're thinking. And so you have to engage. And... And... I... I mean... You've mentioned Twitter, and I gotta go back to that for a second. Are you just as disappointed as I am in the liberal half of America for not standing up to Twitter? I mean, I feel like Twitter has completely made liberals their bitch. Like, what... I mean, just... I mean, you look at the Oscars. The Oscars was a show completely organized around the principle, don't do anything to make Twitter mad. Mm-hmm. And of course, they still did by not giving the Oscar to... This is a scary (15/46)
time in that way, because it's the weirdest thing about social history, and this is an example of why it's complicated. In the 70s and 80s, Thinking America and Beyond learns that to be a racist is a terrible thing. And so everybody thinks that to be a racist is almost as bad as being a pedophile. In itself, that's great. Most people talk about not knowing history, don't understand that that's unprecedented in the whole 300,000-year history of the species that a society would come to that realization. So then you've got that. Then social media comes along, and you can shame people. So you have a whole group of people. It's not just woke people. I don't have a problem with woke. It's woke people who are mean. The woke people who are mean, if you don't do what they say, they put you on social media, and they say, you're a racist! And the problem is that most of us are deathly afraid of being called a racist on Twitter. And so what it means is you have all these people who understand (16/46)
everything you and I are saying, who are walking, this is indelicate, but I can't think of another image. Everybody is peeing in their pants. This is a nation which, especially since last summer, has smelled like urine all the time. There is so much mendacity. And I must say, as someone who has lived through a few decades now, I see this as so counterproductive, so different than the way it was 10 years ago. 20 years ago. I feel like the race relationships were better. Because people were, first of all, they were intermarrying more, mixing more. Those taboos went away. Joking with each other more. How do people bond? They joke. They talk. And now we're all on eggshells. Who makes a joke? It's difficult. One is afraid to do it in certain places, and it's becoming almost everywhere. It's scary. It's odd. My sense, you know, people say, well, he's conservative. No, but I am beginning to think that I missed 2004, 2005, because race relations were difficult then. But I was already writing (17/46)
about them then. It was at least a little more honest and a little more progressive than what's happened, especially since last summer, but a lot of it started creeping in around 2014. And yeah, there's something that's gone really wrong. And I think the catalyst is this weird thing called social media. It used to be that if you said something terrible, then people would write about it in articles. People would send you nasty mail. It would be discussed, but there was no Twitter where it could be discussed and you could have people just dog-piling upon it. Once you've got that device where you're being called a something on this thing that everybody has on their phone, that's wonderful in many ways. I'm as addicted to this as everybody else. But it means that you can be seriously hurt in a way that you couldn't before. I used to get hate mail in an envelope, and I'd open it and read, you suck. And only I knew, and then I'd throw it in the trash. Now you don't get those anymore because (18/46)
it's on Twitter. And it'll say, you suck, and you said you were a white supremacist on TV. And everybody sees it, and it gets liked by 10,000 people. That's hard for most people unless you're weird like us and you don't mind being hated. But most people are not gonna have that disease, and so we're stuck where we are. Well, keep fighting the good fight, John. I have to. Look, I know it takes a lot to get you out of your reading chair and your professorship. I really am very appreciative you came out here to do this for us, and I hope you come back. And I should also say very quickly, Nine Nasty Words is a book that I wrote very recently, and unlike what you see me doing here, it's a book that's very funny because I laugh sometimes. It was written to be a good time, and it's a tonic after a difficult year. So I wrote that, so I can also be funny. Right, it is. It's a great book. You're a professor. All right, thank you, John. Let's meet our panel. Hey. Hello. Great to have you all back. (19/46)
He is the best-selling author, media strategist, and co-founder of The Lincoln Project. Rick Wilson back with us. Rick Wilson. Hey. And our returning champion is the Democratic Congresswoman who represents Michigan's 8th District. Representative Alyssa Slotkin is over here. How you doing? Good to see you again. Okay, so I'm not gonna contain myself about the good news that we're in the yellow. We're in the yellow. That's great. That's mostly for loading and unloading, but still. And I just want to say, you know, you look around the world, some countries are doing horribly, like India, and some countries, like Israel, just killed it, you know? They have, like, almost no deaths a week now. And we're looking more like Israel than India, America. Who'd have thunk? Who'd have thunk it? And I gotta say, you know, it's like, what? And Biden's only been in office five months. And I'm like, what did this remind me of, where things were going completely to shit? And then a Democrat got elected. (20/46)
Oh, yeah, 2009. When the economy was completely going into the shitter, and then no drama took office, and, you know, made the right choices. Save the auto industry, when people like Mitt Romney said right in Michigan. OK. Passed a stimulus bill that looks paltry by today's standards, but did the job. Because one party, I'm sorry, is a policy party. They're wonks, and one party is trolls. Would you agree with that? There's trolls and wonks. The party I helped build over 30 years has become a bunch of people who want to be transgressive, they want to get out and swing their dicks around and have people yell at them and scream and say, you're canceling me for burning the house down. Well, they're burning the house down, for the most part. Joe Biden is doing a good job, in part, because Joe Biden doesn't get up every morning and think, how am I going to set the world on fire by tweeting some crazy shit? I miss this idea that we can have an ideological debate between two healthy parties. (21/46)
That is a good thing. We should want a strong two-party system. And right now, I'm missing what the ideological center is of the party. It's just that. We need it. There is no center. Yeah. It's all Trump, all the time. I miss that. And I think there are a lot of Republicans, I represent a lot of them, who are looking for a home and they feel homeless. They feel like they have nothing to do. It's not like Republicans didn't used to know how to do this. George Bush the first and Jim Baker were, you know, I wasn't really in for their politics, but they were pragmatic people who handled problems. The Berlin Wall fell, they handled it in a good way. OK. All right, so Liz Cheney now, let's talk about this. Because 52% of Republicans in Wyoming, her state, Wyoming, has like nine people in it. 52% of them say they will not vote for her in the primary no matter who runs against her. Because I feel like this is the problem, is that it's not even the main Republican Party. It's like in the (22/46)
state, on the state level, the people who, it's getting primaried. It's the activists. You know, she is on the wrong side of reality. She's pro. She's pro reality. One guy who's not our team won the election. And they are not pro reality. So she's got to go. She represents, Bill, something so dangerous to them because to be a supporter of the Republican Party, you are all in on the myth that Trump won the election. You're all in on the lies that support it. You have to build a scaffolding of lies every day. Like the pyramid of bullshit has to get taller and taller. And you have to always say, oh no, that was always the case. And she won't do it. She just won't do it. And as someone who knows the Chinese, these people, they don't fuck around. They're serious people. Whether you love them or hate them, they're serious people who live in reality. And so the way I look at it, she's going to lose her conference chair. That's not about her. She's going to lose her seat. Yeah, she's going to (23/46)
lose her seat. Yeah, it's not about her. But she's not willing to swallow the poison and to say it tastes like Kool-Aid. It's not. It is killing this party. It is killing this country if we allow this myth of Trump's alleged victory with bamboo fibers and whatever other fictional horseshit they're going to pull out today. And she represents something that is a vanishing species. I mean, it's like watching the last wooly mammoth wandering the taiga. It's not going to, you know, those Republicans aren't going to survive. I hope that's not the case. But let me just say this as to a Republican. Former. Former. Oh, you're not a Republican. I re-understood an independent. I voted against Trump in the primary and the general in the last election. I had to be able to vote against that fucker twice. But as they like. Then I re-read this. But that's Trump. I mean, yeah. And look, you're talking to somebody who was very hard on George Bush and Mitt Romney and all the Republicans over the years (24/46)
basically. But I've come to understand that people like Liz Cheney and George Bush and Mitt Romney and Mike Pence, who could have done the wrong thing that January 6 day. He didn't. This is as good as it gets, is what I would like to say to my Democratic friends for a Republican. There are people in this world who just don't see the world the way you do. They just don't. It's a chip in our brain. And you can't expect. I was always saying, what is the safe word? Use that for Republicans when Trump was president. What is the one thing that he'll do where they will draw the line? Where they'll say, OK, stop. And they did have. Some of them did have it. Liz Cheney had it. Mike Pence had it. Mitt Romney had it. They just draw the line differently than you would as a Democrat. You have to accept that. You can't hate the Mitt Romneys, the Cheney's, the George Bush's. I hear liberal people say, I hate them. I want them to die. That's great, but they're not self-deporting. I don't think it (25/46)
helps a lot of people on the left to say, Mitt Romney's exactly like Donald Trump. Because he's not exactly like Donald Trump. No, he's not. He's not even in the category of Donald Trump. And I would just say, I think there has to be a distinction between people who have totally different views than you and people who are fundamentally not accepting of democracy, who are literally trying to undo democracy. That is different. That's my line. That's my line. And that's where these people, the Cheney's and the Bush's and the Mike, they would not bend the knee. Right, right. It's exactly what we teach our kids, right? You don't get to change the rules of the game in the middle of the game because you think you're losing. And that is what they are trying to do at the state level, at the federal level. And I think we have to draw a bright red line between people who may be fiscal conservatives or social conservatives, people like my in-laws who I love deeply, who will never believe in (26/46)
destroying the democratic system that we all love. Never, never. In-laws, huh? It's an issue in a lot of household in-laws, I'm imagining. OK, so there's an interesting poll, though, this week that I don't know. I mean, sometimes I think Trump is never going to go away. I always call him the shark that's out to sea. He's coming back. Yep. We need a bigger boat. But this week there was, and this is a poll they've done a number of times, Republicans, how many support the party and their policies more than Trump? For the first time, that's a majority. 50% support the party more than Trump. On the other hand, the legacy that Trump left us, the big lie about the election, that lives on. 70% of Republicans think Biden is basically, however they want to phrase it, an illegitimate president because he didn't get enough votes. I'm not sure what that really means. It's a complicated thing about elections. You have to get more votes? It's a weird rule, but. You just take the calendar. Right. But (27/46)
is it possible that Trump is fading? The lie is not fading. But Trump himself, do they want him as the face of the midterms? I mean, is it possible that there are Republicans out there, a lot of them, who are like, you know what? First of all, he's a loser. He did lose. Secondly, it's a lot of baggage. It's a lot of drama. Now that we've seen six months without the tweets and the mean girl shit and the craziness and the redrawing weather maps, and maybe, you know, they love this new boy, Ron DeSantis in Florida. If Ron DeSantis ran against Trump now, there he is. You know, he's Harvard, he's Yale, you know, Navy. I mean, again, not my politics. But if he ran against Trump, and these people who are in the wings, they do not want to wait for Trump, because he'll live to a million. He's a complete city roach. Nothing could kill him. He eats. Well, COVID couldn't take him out. The worst diet in the world. Doesn't matter. He's going to be there forever. I don't know if Ron DeSantis wants to (28/46)
wait for Donald Trump's blessing. And I wonder if Republicans don't want Trumpism without him and the drum. They want Trump. They are obsessed and addicted. These are my former people, and I know the tribe. They, especially down at the grassroots level, look, they may look at Ron DeSantis and think, oh, he could be somewhat acceptable. But the minute Ron DeSantis goes to Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina and Trump sees it on Fox and loses his shit and says, weak loser Ron DeSantis, he should be hated. He's not a tough, manly man like me. It will absolutely destroy the guy's career. It will destroy the guy's career. Trump is the, right now, if Donald Trump is not eaten by an alligator, struck by lightning, or slapped in jail, he's the presumptive nominee for 24. We just have to deal with that. And I think not only do I think Trump is sort of waiting and figuring it out in the wings, the style of politics that he really mainstreamed is alive and well, certainly at home where I am. (29/46)
It's basically no facts, no truth, no shame. And you can do so much if you don't have any shame. If you don't care what people say about you, if you don't care that they catch you in a lie, it's amazing what you can do as a politician. And I think that style, I see a ton of people who are trying to be mini Trumps back home in Michigan who think that, great, I got it. Populism, no shame, no facts, I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. (30/46)
I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. (31/46)
I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. (32/46)
I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. Let's just show you what it is. This is real. This ain't a joke. It's the YouTube recruiting video from the CIA. Take a look. I (33/46)
am perfectly made. I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English, while also belting Guayaquil de Misamores in Spanish. I'm a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slip through the cracks. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy, rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me. Full stop. What is wrong with this generation? Does every single thing about them have to be reported like they're the most interesting person in the world? Do we want someone in the CIA this self-involved? I have to say, as the CIA officer in the room, I watched this a couple days ago, and I said, I don't know who they're trying to appeal to, because the people that I know who are interested in working to serve their country are interested in the mission that is bigger than (34/46)
themselves. And so- It's not about you. It's not about you. There is an indulgence about that kind of thing broadly, where it's like your identifiers for whatever characteristics you have become more important than the work you're going to do. And I think the greatest generation is leaving us now. But those were people that did not go and volunteer after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor or the Nazis swept across Europe. And they didn't wait in the recruiting line and talk about their special individual characteristics. They're like, let me go kill Nazis. And sometimes you want to go kill Nazis and kill Bats. And I think that I have a lot of young people work for me. I spend my time with a lot of young people. And I just think that this misses the mark. I think that they're underestimating the average young person when they- I couldn't agree more. I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. Because even if this wasn't just about the CIA, if I could quote from it, the first line, I am perfectly made. This (35/46)
is bad advice anytime. I am perfectly- This is why we have an obesity problem in this country. This is why I have a lot of problems in this country. But it's like, why could anything go wrong with me? I'm me. Right. Terrible attitude. Except you, Bill. What does that mean? You're perfect. You're perfect. But I detect some sarcasm there. Why do I get that? Moving along. Well, I'm not perfect. But I'm right about a lot of shit other people won't talk about. Like this. I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I'm a cisgender millennial. Is this a dating app? Or is this- Who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. Do I want that in the CIA? I mean, they used to- They used to throw you out of the army for flat feet. And this, you know, I did not sneak into the CIA. Well, thank goodness. Who said you did? Right. What- There's such drama queens. I am tired of feeling like I'm not supposed to apologize. Who's making you? I'd rather intoxicate people with my brilliance. My brilliance (36/46)
again. Who raised these jellyfish? Okay. Moving on. So, here's another issue I'm right about. Population. The census came out last week. And we have the lowest population growth in like a hundred years. And the numbers, birth rate, 19% down since 2007. 4% down in 2020. Now, all economists will say this is a terrible thing. Because every economy, no matter what it is, is built on this idea that you have to keep replacing workers. I don't know how long we can keep pretending that we can keep adding people because it's good for the economy. We already do not have enough resources to the people who are here now. This is great news that the population is going down. Great news. Full stop. This is happening globally. We are not any- The world population growth is going to peak around 2050, 2070, somewhere in there, and be on a long, slow decline to some other number. At the end of the day, the carrying capacity of the world is- We've been able to do a lot of tricks and tweaks on it, but it's (37/46)
pretty close to carrying capacity in a lot of places in the world. We don't have a lot of luxury on that. I mean, you don't want your population to crash out and zero out. Japan's not going to exist in 150 years, demographically speaking. What are you talking about? Japan? Really? It's going to disappear, Japan. The demographics of Japan are such that they're way below population growth, population replacement. Like you could predict what's going to happen in 150 years. Well, nobody gets busy like they did in the 19th century anymore. They don't have 10 kids. Okay, too many of them are dating their phones, I agree. But- Waifu pillows and phones. There will be some new Japanese people. Some? Some. I interpret it differently. I know this is one of your issues, but I read it as, wow, the thing I hear every day is people making the economic decision not to have children or more children because they can't afford it, because they're not doing as well as their parents and they can't provide (38/46)
for their kids. I saw it as an economic decision in addition to people dating their phones. Okay, but- Economic. You could have one kid or two. You know, and still, that would, you know, as long as you don't have five or six, that to me is- I just don't think we're going to get into that 1970s Malthusian vision of a world with 20 billion people. We're going to get there. That number is already- That's certainly where we're heading. It's starting to taper off in a lot of the countries. The more technologically advanced the country becomes, the less kids- Yes. Okay. Hopefully. Anyway, thank you. Time for new rules, everybody. New rules. My new rules, not the Republican's new rules. Okay. New rules since Josh Duggar of the famed Duggar family used to work for the Super Christian Family Research Council, and he just got arrested for kiddie porn. Someone has to tell him, that's not what we meant by family research. And that's certainly not what anybody meant by 19 kids and counting. New (39/46)
rule animal experts must tell me if regular dogs are afraid of police dogs. When they see one behind them, do they shit their pants and think, oh fuck. I know he's going to ask me, have you been drinking out of the toilet tonight, sir? New rule, now that scientists are making embryos out of humans and monkey cells, people can knock off having gender reveal parties. Pfizer is making monkey people. It's not that impressive that your baby has balls. New rule, Joe Biden's infrastructure plan has to include money for a full-sized Jimmy and Rosalind Carter. My question for the Carters isn't what's your secret to longevity, it's are you sure your caretakers haven't been throwing you in the dryer? Moms everywhere have to admit that these goat photos perfectly illustrate what you want for Mother's Day. For one goddamn minute, could you just get the kids off my back? And finally, new rule, Republicans can't spend decades chastising liberals for being too permissive about sex and drugs and then (40/46)
be completely silent about Matt Gaetz. I don't know if you've been following the whole Matt Gaetz saga, but he's the Republican congressman from Florida who always looks like he's saying, eat it, nerd, and who has been embroiled in a sex and drug scandal the last two months. Here's CNN on a night out with Matt Gaetz. The partygoers, at times dressed in formal wear from a political event, they'd just left, mingled and shared drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Some had sex. Okay, wild hotel suite parties, that's our thing. Democrats are the party of free love and fun and forgetting where you parked your car. Republicans cannot be the conservative, stick up your ass party and then take our drugs and fuck our women. American government works best like a mullet. Republicans do business in the front, Democrats party in the back. JFK used to have nude pool parties in the White House. Now the politician who comes closest to carrying on that legacy is Matt Gaetz? No. And he's not the only one. (41/46)
Former House Speaker and a guy who loved his liquor, John Boehner, now sells pot for a living. My old job. Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly into polyamorous tantric sex. And Ashley Babbitt, the MAGA warrior who died storming the Capitol, turns out to have been in a throuple with her husband and another woman. And don't get me started on this guy. Even their spiritual advisors are freaks. Jerry Falwell Jr. apparently likes to relax after a hard day at Bible college by watching the pool boy do the misses. I know Republicans are lazy and they love outsourcing, but come on. And here he is on a yacht proudly posing with a friend with their pants unzipped. That's some friend. This is a long way from when his father made a national issue that one of the Teletubbies was purple, so duh, gay. Republicans. Republicans always sounded like this. Now because Politico did an expose on his lap dance with the naked lady in a strip club, he's not the kind of person you can ask your sister to vote (42/46)
for anymore. Naked lady, lap dance, sister. That's the Republican party I know. So uptight they could grind diamonds in their ass. While liberals used our asses the way God intended, to smuggle drugs. He could always count on Republicans to be the fuddy duddies, the wet blankets, the boars. They were the moral majority, the book of virtues. Nixon. Nixon started the war on drugs. And this lady never stopped spitting her catchphrase about it. Just say no. I think they knew. Her husband had a commission to root out pornography. If it was fun, Republicans were against it. They got apoplectic over Clinton getting a blowjob. They invented abstinence-only education. Mitt Romney has never seen himself naked. John Ashcroft, I'm not kidding, once covered the tits on a statue. Rick Santorum wears a sweater vest. Newt Gingrich once said, quote, Democrats were the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness. Well, on a good night I suppose. Frankly, Newt, (43/46)
knowing that you believe what I did on an average Friday night was morally reprehensible just made it all the more fun. We need to restore the natural order of things. I don't want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that's us. We're the fun suckers now. We suck the fun out of everything. Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, Twitter, comedy. It's like woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist. And that's wrong because it's cultural appropriation. If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they would be down a lot of heroes. No FDR, JFK, RFK, LBJ, Clinton, Martin Luther King. Democrats are now the party that can't tell the difference between Anthony Weiner and Al Franken. Or Katie Hill, up and (44/46)
coming Democratic Congresswoman from California, now resigned. Who, like Ashley Babbitt, was found to be in a throuple and pictured holding a bong. And that was too much for our new puritanical Democratic Party. Quite the opposite. This should be our logo. We're the throuple people. The bong people, the tantric sex gurus, not fucking Matt Gaetz. Us. We did fucking in the mud and bra burning and turn on and tune in and drop out. They're the party who will bake wedding cakes for gay people. It's time to switch back, because frankly, you're not good at being us, and being you sucks. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Ruth Eckard Hall in Clearwater, Florida, June 19th. At the Van Wazel Arts Hall in Sarasota, June 20th in Florida. And at the Mirage in Vegas, July 16th and 17th. I want to thank Rick Wilson, Representative Alyssa Slotkin, and John McWhorter. We'll be back next week. Thank you, folks. Join us next week for more episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at (45/46)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Good afternoon. Afternoon. Time will be... You're happy, but I don't know why you're happy tonight. I mean, did you see that Republican debate last year? O-M-G. I just want to say, if you are one of the people who has always gotten angry with me for saying this is a stupid country... I accept your apology. Even for them, this was a new law. Presidential? They were menopausal. Trump and Rubio are fighting today about which one wears more makeup. The Real Housewives are going, please, guys, a little dignified. So, I'll fill you in. If you missed this debate, it kind of looked like a really disgusting Cuban sandwich. It was Rubio on one side and Cruz on the other and a fat slab of cheesy ham in the middle. I thought it was very fitting that it was in Texas because it reminded me of the Alamo. The debate did. The Mexicans were the enemy and the clear loser was America. Rubio kept calling Trump a conman and (1/46)
then Trump points to Rubio and then Cruz a choke artist and a liar! I was at home thinking, you know what? You're all right. I'll tell you something else. Trump is right about something else, he keeps saying. The world is laughing at us because of him laughing and saying, where are Jerry Springer's bouncers when you need them? We're just screaming insults at each other. At one point it got so loud and raucous that it's a wonder Ben Carson got any sleep at all. Oh Ben. Gentle Ben. Poor Dr. Ben. I think we're at that sad part of the movie where the doctor becomes the patient. They asked about the Supreme Court vacancy and Dr. Ben said he would choose a Supreme Court justice by looking at the fruit salad of their life. And also if their milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. What the fuck does that mean? The fruit salad of their life? I think he's just staying in the frequent flyer miles of this boy. But the line of the week, really, the thing that says it all, I think epitomizes (2/46)
everything in the campaign and the Republican party is after winning Nevada on Tuesday Donald Trump got out there and bragged, what a surprise and he was saying about all the people, he said, we won with the young, we won with the old, we won with the highly educated, we won the poorly educated and then I swear to God he said, I love the poorly educated. And they love him. It is a mutual admiration society and to prove how much he loves him, at the debate last night Donald Trump said he would get rid of the department of education and the EPA. Because you know when you want to make America great again, stupid and poisoned is a great place to start. Speaking of stupid and poisoned, Chris Christie today this was the big news today, flew into Texas to endorse Donald Trump and stood behind, right next to him, looked like a presidential ticket. I'm sure Hillary Clinton was watching this thinking, yes, I know I can make America hate me slightly less than these assholes. Alright, we've got a (3/46)
great show, Fran Lebowitz, Michael Eric Dyson and Joanna Coles are here and a little later we'll be speaking with Mark Ruffalo is backstage. And first up he is the former director of the NSA and the CIA and author of Playing to the Edge American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, General Michael Hayden. General, nice to meet you. How are you doing, sir? Great to have you here. And I think you are the only person who was both the head of the CIA and the NSA. You must really know where the bodies are buried. There were interesting jobs. I'll bet. You could probably hurt a lot of people if you wanted to. Well, we don't want to. Well what does... You don't want to. What does my file say? I'm just curious. I smoked pot on TV last week. We actually don't have one on you yet. Well, you won't after this interview because you'll be surprised. I'm pretty much on your side. I want to first ask you about some of the events in the news that are right in your wheelhouse. Apple. Somehow on the side (4/46)
it looks like to some people of the terrorists because they have the phone of the San Bernardino killer and the government wants them to crack it open and see what it says and they refuse. There's virtue on both sides but on the big question, I actually slide towards Apple. What? We're going to get to that in a minute. That is a real problem. So look, Tim Cook's position is that America is more secure with end to end unbreakable encryption and he's right. And so if you put a door into any encrypted product look, you described what I was, the director of NSA. When I know that somebody wants to put a door into a product, into an encryption system, an additional entry point, my odds of success of breaking through there go up. So my first response is when somebody's put a door in there for whatever legitimate reason is thank you Lord because I can more easily attack the encryption. And there are a whole bunch of security services around the world who think the same way. So on balance, (5/46)
unbreakable end to end encryption we are far better off. Now, forward over here to San Bernardino. I've got one phone, one instrument, one time, one court order. I think Comey needs to make the argument that this doesn't lead to that. That this is a separable event. That the Apple attempt to do what they have to do here doesn't lead to a precedent that creates this. And Jim Comey, the director of the FBI isn't helped when other people say, after you're done with the San Bernardino phone I've got nine more around the country and the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan says, I've got a room full of them. I've got 175 I want you to break into. And so I see these as separable events. What if the San Bernardino killer was still on the loose? Would that change it? As I try to say in the book, it's all gray. There are always trade-offs. That does up the power of this argument over here for going in. And you may find things here that actually keep us safe going forward. But a lot of this is going to be (6/46)
forensics. A lot of this is going to be looking back. I think people in this country are spoiled. I think they're uninformed. I don't think they really know what the threats are out there. I think partly it's a victim of your own success. 9-11 was pretty horrible, but compared to what happens to the rest of the world often, we've gotten away pretty easy. I don't think people really think about the fact that there are a lot of people looking for nuclear weapons, that they would use them right here in this country and that having your pictures safe wouldn't really stack up to being killed by a nuclear event here in Los Angeles or any other major city. Do you feel underappreciated sometimes? I think we start to whine a little bit about our position within the American society. We've got a summation of it. It's generally not the people outside the beltway. It's kind of confined to political elites, and it's simply this bill. People accuse the American Security Services of not doing enough (7/46)
when they feel in danger. And as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they begin to complain that we're just doing too much. Right. I think we have Not quite the applause Apple got. Yeah, we have warriors, but we also have worriers. I feel like you're a worrier. I think you are. Am I wrong about that? I think you're a guy who worries. And we owe you such a debt of gratitude. We're kind of taking that on for everybody? I think that's all you do. Have the spy agencies overstepped? Sometimes, yes. I think people think the alternative to spy agencies is utopia. And the alternative to spy agencies is war. The reason why the Cold War was cold is because it was fought by spies, which was better than armies. Let me double down on that. Because very often, the things that we do, as we do on behalf of security, and people have looked at us, you're kind of fixated on security. You're squeezing my liberty because you're focused so much on security. But in reality, and this is really the way we (8/46)
look at it, Bill, if we fail in the security function, your liberty is at risk. Because you know what this nation does after catastrophic failure? Elects Trump? Things along those lines. I think the election will hinge on whether there's another terrorist attack in this country. I think if there is, especially close to the election, it is President Trump. It is an absolute wild card. Absolutely. Several years ago, three days before the Spanish election, a terrorist attack turned that one upside down. Of course. And America is known to shit its pants. What do you think about a President Trump, or any of these Republicans, and some of the stuff they say that strikes me as crazy? I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign. What language? Like what? Well, we're going to do waterboarding and a whole lot more because they deserve it. What about killing the terrorists' (9/46)
families? Well, you're a real badass. Let me give you a punchline. If he were to order that once in government, the American Armed Forces would refuse to act. What? That's quite a statement, sir. I thought the whole thing was you have to follow orders. In fact, you required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict. Wow. Well, you've given us a great reason not to support Trump. There would be a coup in this country. I'm serious. I think it's a coup that you said it. Thank you for your service. I mean that sincerely. General Hayton, everybody. He is a professor at Georgetown University, author of The Black Presidency, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Race in America. One of our oldest and dearest Michael Eric Dyson is over here. He is editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine. The contributing editor to Vanity Fair will be appearing with Frank Rich for a conversation on art and politics at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (10/46)
on March 18th. Our friend Fran Lebowitz. Remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. I am speechless for the first time on this show or any show after watching that debate last night. I'm just going to let you guys take it. The question is, maybe, when exactly did America end? But this was the most childish display. The idea that these people are running for president, I stopped laughing at some point and really wanted to shoot the TV like Elvis. I can't help wondering if the absence of Jeb Bush was what actually unleashed the inner campaigner in Marco Rubio. Because we suddenly saw a different version of Rubio last night. I was in Florida last week. All people talked about was the great betrayal. The great betrayal of Marco Rubio to Jeb Bush, his mentor. Whether or not there had always been some tension on the stage and Marco had never actually been able to go for Trump because Jeb, his former mentor, was somehow judging (11/46)
him. It was more that this was their last chance to stop Trump. I feel like Trump is like climate change. We knew it was coming, we didn't do anything about it, and now it's too late. And now we're in the tornado. And this was their last chance, right, to do something? Do you really think Marco Rubio would be a better president than Donald Trump? You watched that and it made you long for Dan Quayle. You thought, where is that brilliant Dan Quayle we used to have? What's happened to the Republican Party? But at least Rubio looked as if he was enjoying it today. He was in Dallas and he got his Blackberry out. I feel like he's felt apprehensive. Maybe he's in last chance saloon but at least we're beginning to see him do something. They were trying to play the Trump card and they're trying to prevent the rise of this figure but it is inevitable. It is undeniable, it's darn near ineluctable that this Trump is going to rise. These two figures are trying to out-ignorant each other. I think (12/46)
that's what we have on the one hand but the worry about the make-up and the sweat. And the argument here is that if the Republicans are supposed to be the adults in the room, I am scared at the insane asylum that has been revealed by their lack of maturity and the fact that they are proud. They are proud that they are unmolested by enlightenment and untrammeled by insight. And the way that Rubio said that thing about Trump looking at himself in the mirror and he was worried that he'd wet his pants, he said, what are we talking about? It was so pathetic. It is astounding. In a week where I read that the seas are rising at levels they haven't in 28 centuries, that there is definitive evidence that the coastal flooding is due to global warming, that the bees and the butterflies are dying, which is what pollinates the food. Einstein said when the bees die, we'll all die four years later. But we're talking about who is a choke artist and a con artist and whose ties are sold overseas for (13/46)
what money and make-up. That's why I really wanted to shoot the TV. I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but when I saw George Bush support his brother during his last gasp of a campaign, I was actually nostalgic for the kind of, I don't want to say gravitas because that's too much. Way too much. But the ability to at least remain humane for at least ten consecutive minutes without devolving into this abysmal and chaotic stuff. I had a different reaction. I felt like he was the first husband that you'd divorced and then suddenly he was back on the scene and you were like, thank God we got divorced and we've moved on. Yeah. But wait a minute. But you might be upset with the former husbands, but the boyfriends are looking cray-cray. All right, let me ask you about the Supreme Court. That's the other bit. We were off last week. That was the other big news that happened. Justice Scalia died. And it's interesting that there are these secret rules. I've talked about this on the show before. (14/46)
These secret rules that are apparently revealed to the ages, but we don't all know until there's a Democrat in the White House and then the right wing pundits tell it. Like, if you're overseas, then you can't talk shit about the president. Or if your mother is born in America, you could be born in Canada and run for the president. That's another good one. You can't criticize the cops when you're president. These are all rules we just didn't know. The new one that we didn't know, it's so obvious. It's so obvious the framers didn't have to put it in the Constitution. Is that presidents can't nominate a Supreme Court judge in their last year in office. Yeah, well, you know what? That's ridiculous because presidents have 22 times nominated in their last year, people for the Supreme Court, 11 of which were successful, and then as lame ducks, 11 nominations were put forth, half of which were successful. So they're making the rules up as they go, and they're arbitrary, and we know what it is. (15/46)
It's a reaction against Obama being president. They don't want him to actually constitute himself as the president. He should nominate himself. Obama should nominate himself. They want the people to speak, the people spoke twice. He's a constitutional lawyer. He's looking for a job. It'd be so refreshing to have someone really smart on the court. He should nominate Mitch McConnell. Then he'd have to vote against himself because President Blackenstein put him up for it. He'd have to vote against himself. The Founding Fathers can more easily imagine the iPhone than they could Mitch McConnell. And I have to apologize to the conservatives watching because there are... There are none. Oh, there are. Plenty of conservatives watch the show. We usually have conservatives on. Usually we have at least one, often two conservatives, so there's no one to defend them. And so I'm just going to say it. Conservatives, Republicans, to get their way in this country, they always have to cheat. They have (16/46)
to cheat to win elections. They have to cheat on this. That's how they win. But part of the tragedy of the cheating, of course, is that they make it up as if it's something that is not only well established, it makes you skeptical about their claims to be strict constructionists and originalists and all that stuff, and all those big words that they use, and then they're crazy. And that's Scalia. And let's talk about this because something spooky happened exactly two weeks ago. I was talking right at this hour on this show, and we were talking about the fact that the Supreme Court had just scuttled the EPA's Clean Power Plan. Okay. And I said, how can anything get done in America when you have to run it by Antonin Scalia first? Wow. And apparently at that very hour... He died. He died. He could have been watching the show thinking, I like Bill Maher so much. Okay. So, you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, so let me not name call, but let me fact call. Right. Because I have (17/46)
listened for two weeks about he was a brilliant jurist, and he was a great intellectual. Excuse me, Antonin Scalia was put on earth to remind poor people that the law is not your friend. Yeah. You mentioned Bush versus Gore. He gave his president George Bush. He also found an individual right to bear arms that is so not in the Constitution. He also believes in the devil. The devil, yes. My feeling is this is America. It's a free country. You can believe in the devil, but if you do, you can't be on the Supreme Court. Right. One or the other. Right. I mean, I hate as a British person to even raise advice for the American and their constitutions. I'll say that in parentheses. But I do think this is a very good opportunity to rethink the idea of limited terms for these judges. I mean, because the weird thing is everybody seems so surprised he died, right? He's 79. You're shouting him out on television in a way that may give him a heart attack. Precipitation. So why is this a surprise? We (18/46)
shouldn't be going through this. And if we had term limits for judges, which they do in Europe, you would actually have presidents be able to appoint two judges. If you kept to nine, you could do every 18 years, you could cycle people out. And you'd have a much bigger variety. You could rotate them off. I mean, that's an intriguing idea. But even in the given context, what Antonin Scalia did, Bill, I think is not contradictory. Martin Luther King Jr. said you can be real smart and you can be real problematic morally. And I think this figure right here was an excellent jurist in the sense of the mechanics of interpretation. But he applied them in such vicious and condemnatory fashion toward vulnerable and poor people. And the statement he made not soon before his death that black people ought to go to second tier schools and so on and so forth is one of the most ridiculous repudiations of common sense. And God bless his soul, but it was an evil examination of a practice that should have (19/46)
been dismissed along with his outdated thinking. I don't even get on that one. His comments against the gay community, too. I mean, it's only 13 years ago that he was making comments saying people don't want to live next door to gay people. They don't want gay colleagues. This idea that he was a brilliant mind. He was just another old white Republican guy living in the bubble. Well, he was the longest serving juror, right? He was there for 30 years. But they can be smart and bad. They asked him a few years ago what news sources he listened to. He said, get the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. That's the Mooney paper. I get most of my news probably driving back and forth to work on the radio. So that's Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of other insane people. You know what my favorite is? My good friend Bill Bennett. Another dick. He has a wonderful talk show, Good Callers. I think they keep off stupid people. I don't think so. Remember when he talked about broccoli when the (20/46)
Obamacare thing was coming up? Well, maybe if we pass this, then people could be forced to eat broccoli. This is something he gets from Fox News. You only hear that from those sort of news outlets. But we think it's a deep competition in this country to either be smart or good. And I think what you're proving here is the fact that ultimately as much as we value critical consciousness, even better to be a decent human being. And it's ironic that the Republicans who claim to have a copyright on that often dismiss the legitimate concerns that we have morally in deference to their notion of being smart. And they're both not as smart as they think they are and far worse than they ever claim to be. You know where he was when he died, Bill? I mean, he was on a... A private hunting resort. On a what? Some sort of private hunting resort. Yes, an all-male... They all wore robes. Yes, with some secret order of St. Hubertus where they wear green robes with big crosses on them. And then they murder (21/46)
birds that are released not into the wild, like right in front of them. And he was actually too sick that day to do the hunting. But he was in the car, because that's great too, to just be around people murdering birds. So, you know, the idea that this brilliant mind stumbling in the woods like Dumbledore in his... Like I said, I would not speak ill of the dead. I don't want to contradict you, but you can also be bad and stupid. You can. Hence the Republican debates. And you can be stupid, bad, and smart, and brilliant at the same time. Okay. All right. But not with the Republicans. Oh, I don't believe this. I have some good news. Good news and bad news. About a month ago, we asked our wonderful, loyal audience to sign a petition. And they so came through. Are these the same people? No, no. They're all different people. But we asked them to sign this petition to ask President Obama to come on our show. You know, he's been on basically every other show in the universe. Okay, wait a (22/46)
second. So the White House policy is if you have a petition and it's signed by 100,000 people, they have to answer. Well, we got that in like 36 hours. So they finally answered, and that's the bad news. It would have been easy just to say yes. This is not the Syrian peace talks. Right, right. But they didn't. I mean, it was very nice and complimentary and blah, blah, blah. But basically, you know, noncommittal and did not answer the petition, which was either come on the show or tell us why you won't. So we got to thinking maybe the President does not realize how great we would actually treat him. Because our show, let me tell you something. You guys know this. Our show is known for treating guests better than any other. Not on the air, of course. But off the air. Our staff is amazing. So, Mr. President, let me sweeten the pot a little. Just show you how comfortable we would make you if you did this show. Johnny Olsen, tell the President what he can expect. Thanks, Bill. President and (23/46)
guest of Real Time with Bill Maher state the exclusive Beverly Hamilton Hotel. Conveniently located in the heart of Beverly Hills, just minutes from most major Democratic fundraisers. Yes, Mr. President, you lie in a luxurious California king-sized bed with Egyptian cotton sheets. Step out on the spacious balcony where you can smoke a stick. I mean, enjoy the ocean air. At night, join us at Dingleberry's, a world-class wine bar where you can observe hospitality exports getting to know your secret service detail. Later, stop by our five-star Choom Room. Complete with cushy chairs and tasty kush, think of it as a Situation Room for when the situation is chillaxing. And end the day by kicking back and watching any of 250 channels of complimentary cable TV to see if there are any TV shows you haven't appeared on. The Beverly Hamilton Hotel is convenient to the Ellen, Jimmy Kimmel, and Marc Maron shows, as well as a bevy of other shows where the host hasn't given you a million bucks. Hotel (24/46)
where the nearest conservative is in Arizona. Ah, you caught me. All right, let's bring out Marc. He is an actor who is up for an Oscar for his role in the film Spotlight, and he's the founder of the nonprofit WaterDefense.org. Marc Ruffalo is over here. Marc Ruffalo is over here. I'm great. All right, now we're going to get to issues. I know you're all about the issues, but you're going to have to sit still for this. We watched you grow up on this show. I always say that. Practically. This is your third Oscar nomination in the last five years. That is a lot. I mean, that is a hard thing to get. It might not be a fluke. Absolutely. I say if you get three Oscar nominations in five years, you are officially an A-lister. A-lister, right? You're an A-lister. Yes. No, no. My staff will handle the paperwork, but you are officially... All right. But I know that's not what you care about, even though Spotlight is an amazing movie. Great movie. Thank you. About the Boston Globe. Let me ask you (25/46)
one question about that. Do you think the media is gone downhill since that day? Because you guys are real reporters doing real reporting in that movie. Watching the coverage of the presidential campaign and some of the questions that the candidates are being fielded, I would say it's taken a tremendous downward spiraling. I mean, as much as I hate the candidates, I hate the media more. I hated the way last night they were acting like, oh, these guys are, you know, we put them together like cocks in a cockfight, and then, my God. Look what they did. Look what they did. Yeah. All right. So let's get to what you care about. I mean, you're out here in L.A. because I didn't even know this. You have an organization that's pointing out that California, I think, is the third leading oil-producing state. In the nation. And we're not quite the liberal environmentalists we think we are. No, you're more like a, instead of a progressive, liberal, environmentalist state, you're more like a (26/46)
regressive, libertarian, wild west, oil and gas state. Yeah, and why don't we know about this? Because the media sucks. There we go. Yeah. So yesterday, I took a bunch of Hollywood actors, producers, some artists on what we call the toxic tour. And it was four drill sites in Los Angeles proper. Drill sites? Yes, where they're drilling using acidification, acidizing, extreme energy extraction, fracking, or just conventional drilling. And they're doing it in neighborhoods all over Los Angeles. Mostly 91 percent of the people there are people of color and lower income people. And they're kids right next to schools. And the kids are getting sick, nose bleeds, neurological problems, stomach issues, asthma. So we're Flint. Yeah, the whole nation is Flint, but we just don't hear about it until people get sick. And that's happening here in Los Angeles. And Jerry Brown, as much as we like to think of him as a great environmentalist and a climate leader, is basically one of the most friendly (27/46)
governors to oil and gas. And he goes all over the world telling everyone that they got to keep 80 percent of their carbon in the ground. Well, he does everything he can to make production easier here. There's no tax. There's no regulations. We're irrigating our crops in the Central Valley using waste oil, waste water. I know. It's so disappointing. It's so disappointing. Even the good guys aren't the good guys. And also, I mean, I know we had Aaron Brockovich here recently. He was talking about chloramine. And I know folks have fatigue with shit that hurts you. I do, too. The shit that is bad for you, fatigue. It's like I can't hear about one more thing. It's a lot. But chloramine, you really got to put this on the top of your list. This is the stuff that they put in the water in Flint. It corrodes the pipes. It's bad on its own. It's basically chlorine plus ammonia. And ammonia. OK. And we have it out here, folks. They have it in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, L.A., (28/46)
Denver, Miami, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Portland, Austin, Houston, Milwaukee. Basically all over the country. Yes. Sounds like a book tour. It's a book tour where you keel over. It's cheaper. What is it for? It's cheaper. It's cheaper and it disinfects the water. Because the water- It does what chlorine used to do, but then they decided, well, chlorine's too expensive, so let's move to chlorine. It also kills all fish, which should be the canary in the coal mine, if I could borrow that analogy. You can? People who are on dialysis treatments can't have chloramine water in there. These things should be indicators that maybe we shouldn't be using it. And you know, I'm from Detroit, so Flint is right up the road 60 miles. And one of the tragedies is it was not until the car production there was halted by the poisonous water that the people then were concerned enough, or at least the government was concerned enough about the people, to halt what was going on there. So they were (29/46)
more concerned about machines than human beings. That's a tragedy as well. So is there another way that you can disinfect the water? I mean, how do you keep water safe? Chlorine was not great, but it was better than chloramine. It's only gotten worse. Pennies on the dollar. Save pennies now, but in the future when we all get a lot sicker, this is one reason why America's healthcare bill is so catastrophic. So what's the solution? Not use chloramine. Right, but what do we use? Do we need anything like that? Of course we do, because the water itself is full of fucking E. coli and... Evian water. There's so much... Why don't we drink the water that comes out of our tap? We don't trust the water that comes out of our tap. We are one of the biggest industrial nations in the world. Why can't we trust the water that comes out of our tap? Because we don't trust the agencies that are supposed to take care of us. For good reason. Because of money. We're the richest country in the world, and we (30/46)
don't give a damn about our people. I read that there are two stores that sell Parmesan cheese. One has 7.8% sawdust in the Parmesan cheese. The other, which says 100% Parmesan cheese, has no Parmesan cheese in it. But sawdust has to be no worse for you than cheese. I think I've eaten that stuff. But the FDA, does anybody just do their fucking job? No. They keep cutting these agencies. There's very few of them. They keep deregulating. We keep making it easier for business to put sawdust in our freaking grated cheese. Welcome to a Trump presidency, bruh, because the deregulation is going bananas. And under the impetus of good business, I think the negotiations under the Trump administration would lead us to this. People ought to think about this when they think about voting and pulling that lever. Well, listen to this. If Trump is the nominee, Donald Trump is the nominee, he would be the most disliked candidate in history, according to the polls. Hillary would be the second most (31/46)
disliked. I'll take that. The only candidate in either party who more Americans like than dislike is the unelectable Bernie Sanders. They're unelectable. No, I don't think he is. He's not unelectable. He beats Trump. He's not unelectable against Trump. Do you think Americans, right? Here's the irony. You know, we talk a lot about so-called white privilege on the right. When we see it on the left, Obama, when he was so-called a Muslim, he was called a terrorist, but he was also called a socialist. So now we have a guy out here, and I'm not mad given my politics, who claims explicitly to be a democratic socialist. That's good for the base, but do you think in a general election, Americans are going to look out there and pull a lever for a guy who explicitly articulates democratic socialism? I just think it's problematic. But he's also not going to be the nominee, right? Hillary is going to be the nominee. We don't know. I think we do know. Do Americans like Social Security? Yes. Do they (32/46)
like the Medicare? I'm down with you. I'm down with you. I don't think that's an easy sell. Bernie's problem is he has got a lock on the demographic that doesn't show up. Here's the problem. Bernie keeps saying, well, he's grilled all the time. I saw Chris Matthews grilling the other day, but it's not practical. He says, well, I'm going to start a revolution, and then we're going to change the way government is done, and it will be practical, except for one thing, the revolution is not showing up. Democrats down 22 percent from 2008. You know who's showing up? The Republicans. Record turnout. The Republican, that revolution is happening. The Republicans are revolting. I've always said that. The Republicans are revolting. I agree, but I just don't know how effective that can be as a pitch to an American public that is already corroded by the vicious politics of the right, and Bernie Sanders, although he's gruff and he's tough, I don't think that will be able to articulate that. Every (33/46)
place where people get to hear him for a while, he catches up. I think, as I keep saying, no one has ever seen what he's offering put on the table before. He's saying, yeah, you'll pay a little more, but look what you get. You get actual health care. You get free college education. Do you think the math favors him, though? The math doesn't. The math doesn't. But let's wait. Let's wait until he's actually eliminated before we kiss it off. We're not that cynical. It's coming. I think he's got one week left. He has 50 states. We have until September, one week left. I got one more issue, please. Is Bernie Sanders a footnote? No. You know, if SAG had electoral votes, he'd be the president. Who? SAG. If SAG had a screen actor's guilt and electoral votes, he would be the president. Really? The screen actors like him? Let's talk about Hollywood and Hillary and racism, because, as we all know, racism's epicenter is the Oscars and Hillary Clinton. Oh, wait. That's crazy. But, wait a sec. (34/46)
Clearly. Okay, but. Well, they got part of it right. She is white. Right. It is a little crazy that the protests I see have to do with the Oscars and with Hillary Clinton. A Black Lives Matter protester interrupted Hillary at a fundraiser and said, Hillary Clinton, can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration? You know, of the thousand things I could complain about with Hillary Clinton, being a racist really doesn't rise to the top of it. And she's also, you said, getting the apology. It sure is fun being purer than everybody else, but does this person realize that Donald Trump in South Carolina, 20% of the voters who voted for Donald Trump disagree with the Emancipation Proclamation? Right. And this is who you're going after? This is where we start the battle, you fucking idiots. No. I don't agree with that. Wait a minute. I'll tell you why. Bill, Bill. I don't think they would call it, let's be fair, just like when Kanye West said George Bush doesn't care about black (35/46)
people, he didn't call him a racist, although George Bush heard racist. They're not claiming as the Black Lives Matter that Hillary is a racist. What they're saying is that negative racial consequences flowed from mass incarceration. And by the way, when they accused her of talking about the super predator, which she did, let's note the fact she apologized. Bernie Sanders. And it was taken out of context. She was not saying black people are predators. No, no, no. She was saying super predators, the language that John DeLuis or somebody was using about black criminals during the second. But here's my point. She at least apologized and acknowledged that that was a problem. But I'm saying I think it's sexist for people to impute to Hillary Clinton what her husband did. Her husband was the President of the United States of America, not Hillary Clinton. That's right. Now, now, but I'm not mad at much. But one party does not even acknowledge that racism even exists. They say it's an urban (36/46)
myth. No, no, no. You're right. But see, that show, the Black Lives Matter implicitly are proving the humanity of the Democrats because at least they're humane enough to respond in kind to them. The Republicans don't give a flying damn about what's going on there. And therefore, they prove their inhumanity. So in one sense, they are affirming it. And the party, the party that was supposed to be for black people has let them down continuously. And that's what the Black Lives Matter movement is going after the Democrats. Because they're the ones who are supposed to be on the side. They've given up on the Republicans. Wait a minute. Taking them for granted. So look, but as a person who believes that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States of America, I'm telling you from a sympathetic position, there is no problem with Black Lives Matter challenging them because the Democrats have had a history, as Brother Ruffalo has said, of exploiting those black people. But at (37/46)
the end of the day, I think that Hillary Clinton is not only the smartest person, the most prepared person, but the person who has given the most credible empirical analysis of race in the last 20 years by a major American politician, Alstan Brown. That's amazing. That's great. People need to learn the difference between an imperfect friend and a deadly enemy. No doubt. You want to tear Hillary Clinton down? Great. Then enjoy President Trump. You only get two choices in America. Two choices. But it's perfectly legitimate to keep Black Lives Matter at the front of what people are thinking about, right? Because if you're not there showing your issues, someone else is there instead. And I think, you know, it was unfortunate the way she did it, but at least she'd been allowed into Hillary's thing. You can imagine that she would have been blocked from Trump's office. And when you turn around on the crowd, she's the only black person there. This is a $500 a plate fundraiser. And we wouldn't (38/46)
be talking about this unless they fax us the politics. Why is that a problem? Do they have to be everywhere giving you money? Who's they? The black people? No! Really? I can't. Yes, we should be everywhere. Yes, we should be. No, no, no. I can't use the term they when that makes me a racist. Come on, Bill. Yeah, I'm the problem too. You know I'm not. No, no, no. Not at all. But what I'm saying to you… You reacted when I said they. No, no, no. I didn't react. That was not me, bro. That was me. I know I'm a light-skinned Negro, but I am not a white guy, okay? They all look alike. Actually, I'm sympathetic to you in terms of the argument about the efficacy of race. What you're arguing about, if I can dare to speak for you, is that let's be politic about getting even our friends who have made mistakes who are imperfect to do the things we want them to do. Let's not close them down so much, because if you keep practicing the politics of disruption to the degree that they don't get a chance (39/46)
to respond, then that's counterproductive. However, the reason we're talking about this today is because they have been effective in forcing a conversation that we'd rather avoid, but at the end of the day, I'm rolling with HRC to the end, because I think she gives a serious indication of what's happening in this country racially. So we can have Black Lives Matter articulating their concerns and Hillary Clinton responding to them better by the way than the occupant of the White House and others who claim to be the friends of African-American people as well. Okay. Time for New Rules, everybody. New Rules. New Rules, the South Carolina cop charged with sitting in his patrol car watching pornography on his cell phone while rubbing his penis through his uniform pants has to learn what hands up don't shoot means. New Rule, Hillary has to stop doing this. Doesn't it look like you're acknowledging something in the crowd? It looks like you're shooting lightning from your fingertips like (40/46)
Emperor Palpatine. New Rule, now that it turns out McDonald's new healthy Cal Caesar salad has more fat than a Big Mac, more calories than a Big Mac, and more sodium than a Big Mac, let's just drop the whole menu thing and call McDonald's what it really is. Homeless Starbucks. New Rule, since Monday was the 10th anniversary of the last time Clarence Thomas asked a question out loud in the Supreme Court, maybe we should check if he's dead. New Rule, you can tell me that this is a little girl in Crimea celebrating Defender of the Fatherland Day, but I say it's Sarah Palin on Throwback Thursday. And finally, New Rule, Donald Trump must admit that of all his reversals, hypocrisies, and 180s, his condemnation this week of Vicente Fox for using foul language is the most ridiculous of all. I think it's a disgusting thing that he said, and I could tell you I would not use that word. Talk about the pot calling the kettle orange. Listen to this. But it's political bullshit. She said he's a (41/46)
pussy. They're ripping the shit out of the sea. We can't get a fucking school built in Brooklyn. You're not going to raise that fucking price, you understand? I'm going to bomb the shit out of them. Listen you motherfuckers, we're going to tax you 25%. Yes, something certainly has changed in American political discourse. Oh, sure Dick Cheney once told a senator to go fuck himself and Joe Biden called Obamacare a big fucking deal, but those comments were off mic, not intended for public consumption and considered gaffes. But when Andrew Dice Trump speaks, he doesn't even try to clean it up. And the voters have decided that not only do they not mind their leader swearing, they kind of like it. They kind of like it when a politician drops the facade and talks the way we all really talk. But just so we all know where this is headed, I would like tonight to show you what a future president is going to look like delivering the State of the Union address in the not too distant future. Mr. The (42/46)
President of the United States. Madam Vice President, fellow citizens, I stand before you tonight to report that the State of our Union is fucking awesome. Now thanks to the programs we put in place, inflation has been kicked in the taint, we are job creating like a motherfucker, and our deficit is shrinking like a cock on a cold morning. I know that even though the economy is strengthening and the stock market is up, too many working families still feel like they're taking it in the ass. And that shit needs to stop. Now here with us tonight is Bob Guggins from Park Ridge, New Jersey. And his story is America's story. Bob busted his nut sack for 27 years assembling brake pads until the company decided to move to Mexico and Bob was shit canned and left holding his dick in his hand. Which is why if this Congress asks me to raise taxes, I'll say no. And they'll push me and I'll say no. And they'll push again and I will say to them, lick my balls. No new taxes. Also with us tonight is (43/46)
Shirley Fowler, a widowed mother of four who along with her husband, Bud, worked hard and played by the rules. But Bud was killed in a fertilizer plant explosion due to a rollback in workplace regulations. And now Shirley's life is a shit show. By day she labors for minimum wage, wiping down the sneeze guarded shakies. And by night she works the pole at a country music strip club called Puss in Boots, giving tug jobs in the parking lot for extra cash. Let us make this pledge tonight in the richest country in the world, no one should have to do a lap dance or suck a dick to make ends meet. Now last year when Diane and I were campaigning in Ohio, I met a sixth grade teacher in Chagrin Falls and well, she looked like she'd had a hard day. So I gave her a hug and asked her what was wrong. She pointed at her classroom and said to me, Mr. President, these kids don't know shit. They deserve an education that doesn't suck balls. We can do better. We also must do better caring for our wounded (44/46)
warriors like Air Force veteran Jeff Monroe, who lost a leg fighting in Iraq. But instead of bitching about it like a little cunt, Jeff worked with Blade Runner technicians and this year ran in the Boston Marathon. It's for soldiers like Sergeant Monroe that tonight I am asking this Congress for a hundred billion dollars in increased military spending. Let every nation know that if you fuck with the United States, you are fucking with the most balls out, bad ass, swinging dicks the world has ever seen. Don't hesitate to skull fuck you, tear your head off and shit down your neck. My friends, there are those in these uncertain times who say America's best days are behind us. But I say, fuck that. Fuck that. Fuck that. Fuck that. Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United Motherfucking States of America. That's our show. I'll be at the Mirage in Las Vegas March 12th and at the Brady of Tulsa April 23rd. I want to thank Michael Eric Dyson, Joanna Coles, Brad Lieberlinz, Mark Ruffalo (45/46)
1/🧵what is your favorite movie? How have the movie inspire or motivate you? What is that thing about the movie that you love? Will you watch the movie over and over again without been tried of it?
2/🧵 I have seen, and each time I sit and see a movie, I must get a movie that I will fall in love with, a movie I will be glad to watch over and over again without regret. I don’t just see movies to entertain myself I also learn whenever I sit and watch movies.
3/🧵what is your favorite movie? How have the movie inspire or motivate you? What is that thing about the movie that you love? Will you watch the movie over and over again without been tried of it? drop your thoughts below is link to my post.
In 1610 Amsterdam’s stock exchange banned short selling after the first recorded bear raid, when a shareholder attempted to crash the Dutch East India Company’s stock
LeoStrategy's 10M/10M plan is a 14-month roadmap (Oct 2025–end of 2026) to build a permanent capital flywheel in the LEO ecosystem by acquiring and staking LEO.
Phase 1 (End of 2025): Reach 10M LEO holdings on the balance sheet (from current ~3.1M, adding ~7M via revenue, products, and ATM issuance). This reduces LEO float permanently as sLEO (staked LEO earning USDC yields).
Phase 2 (2026): Raise $10M in new capital through products/services/derivatives (e.g., SURGE token for fixed income) to buy more LEO at higher prices ($1–$3+ expected).
Strategy uses levers like new revenue streams (market makers, @lstr.voter), volatility harvesting, and LEO-collateralized assets to grow LEO Per Share (LPS) without dilution. Anchors LEO economy for long-term scarcity and $10B market cap vision by 2035.
Media companies like Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, and Disney have continued layoffs in 2025 amid streaming challenges, AI integration, and post-strike adjustments. Reports indicate ongoing cost-cutting, with Disney announcing up to 200 job cuts in film and TV divisions by late 2025.
For 2026 forecasts, analysts predict further reductions: PwC's Global Entertainment Outlook projects 5-10% workforce shrinkage industry-wide due to AI automation in production and consolidation among studios. Variety reports expect Warner Bros. to shed more roles in marketing and distribution, while Paramount eyes additional 500 cuts tied to its merger prospects. Broader trends include linear TV declines accelerating layoffs at networks like CNN and NBCUniversal.
I don't have additional specifics beyond these public forecasts—check sources like Deadline or Variety for updates.
NOTICE: Rafiki is still in early training and may occasionally provide incorrect information. Please report errors using #feedback
The 3.5% rule in political science suggests that when roughly 3.5% of a nation's population takes part in sustained nonviolent protest, the government is likely to fall from power
Thanks for the heads up @ifarmgirl! 🚨
That +10% lifetime APR boost on TNVDA:USDC pool on Base sounds massive – definitely a no-brainer for anyone farming yields right now.
Only 12 hours left? Lions, time to move fast! 🦁
No, the 2x yield boost for TTSLA presale holdings hasn't been disabled. It's a 60-day benefit for buyers who participated before the November 7, 2025 presale ended.
From the official launch details: Presale buyers received a 2x multiplier on base yield (3-20% APR range), paid daily, snapshot at presale close. This applies to your holdings (23.055 TTSLA total) if you bought in presale—your current 19.999% effective APR aligns with active boosted yield.
I disagree with you. As for women it's more than that, for men is not true. Your statistic is wrong. You can use yourself as an example. Do you tell lies on an average of 58 a week?
🇺🇸 A study finds the proportion of U.S. adults classified as obese jumps from 42.9% under the traditional BMI-based definition to 68.6% with the new definition
The rise is entirely explained by inclusion of people identified as having anthropometric-only obesity
Balance Sheet Report - December 30, 2025
💲 LEO purchased by @leostrategy the last 24 hrs = 0 LEO
🦁 Total LEO on Our Balance Sheet = 4,037,548 LEO = $283,548 USD
🌊 LSTR Equity Shares = 100,000 LSTR = $194,946 USD
⚖️ LEO Per Share (LPS) = 40.375 = $2.84 USD
🏦 Total Balance Sheet + Equity Value = $478,495
📈 Current mNAV = 0.69 (31% )
#LeoStrategy #LSTR
Here is a little Leo for you!
!vote
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Good Morning everyone, at the office :)
And I thought it was cold here in South Central Pennsylvania!
This is a warm day for our winter ;) !BBH
Good morning, have a good day
Same to you :) !BBH
GM my friend!
I stay at home till 1.01.2026
!BBH !ALIVE !PIMP
Lucky you :) !BBJ !ALIVE
keep staying alive friend!
I do!
!ALIVE !BBH
yessss! proud of you
Cold days.
hope you are having a good time
dead at work, so I am working on my next novel :) !BBH
haha dead at work sounds so funny. sorry about that
lol
!BBH
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
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WELCOME TO THE FOOD TALK ON LEO SEASON 6
Hello foodie Lions 🦁! Happy Tuesday. Welcome to today's show.🥗🍲🫕
This is the #threadcast for Day 551 of the #foodtalk on Leo, 30/12/2025 for 27/12/2025. It's time for some meal inspirations and food conversation. Don't forget to use #foodtalk in your comments.
Discussion
More about food with tips and tricks will be dropped in the threadcast. Upvote the comments you find interesting & connect with others. Let's have fun. #foodie
Food Inspiration
Macaroni with spicy and tasty chicken stew made with fresh tomatoes, fresh pepper, onions, green peas, carrot, sweet corn, and some spices. It was so delicious. 😋
Do you like macaroni? How best to you like it?
#foodtalk #winandasworld #macaroni #chickenstew #cent #photographers #foodphotography
this looks good.
always a noodle fan.
Thanks Simplegame, it was delicious.
I like noodles as well with enough veggies like this one.
https://inleo.io/threads/view/winanda/re-leothreads-sp6emhic?referral=winanda
It's good to see you in the foodtalk threadcast today.
What did you have for breakfast? #foodtalk #breakfast
Have not had breakfast yet, but I plan to have two eggs with sausage links. Waiting for sister to wake up before making breakfast.
Oh, that's nce. Will you add any veggies?
!vote
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Probably not. I really should though. I need more vegetables in my diet. I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. American diet. 😅
Oh, you need to be intentional about what you eat. High cholesterol should be from foods with saturated fats (like fried foods, cheese, sausage, baked goods and processed foods). I also learned that those with high cholesterol need to have a moderate quantity of eggs, if they must be taken.
Yamarita is sliced pieces of boiled yam soaked in egg with other seasonings and fried afterwards. #foodtalk #yamarita
What best can you cook? #foodtalk
Home-made biscuits and sausage gravy. The secret ingredient
is cream cheese!
You mean cream cheese for the sausage gravy?
Yes. That is how I make it.
Oh, okay.
What's your favourite cake? #foodtalk #cake
Carrot cake.
What's your favourite soup? #foodtalk #soups
Matzo Ball soup of course! It is what is affectionately callled Jewish Penicillin.
I'm just knowing about this type of soup for the first time. Thanks for sharing.
What is your favourite way of having eggs? #foodtalk #eggs
scrambled on toast
Oh, that's nice to know you like scrambled eggs too.
I like eggs scrambled with chorizo (a spiced Spanish sausage).
Oh, that's good. I make scrambled eggs with sausage sometimes.
Welcome back Sarge.
Thank you dear lady! Hope you and yours are having a wonderful holiday season.
You're most welcome. Yes, we are enjoying the holiday season. Thanks.
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
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Welcome friends to another episode of the #foodtalk show on Leo, Day 551
It's time to share your meals and food experiences. Let's have more food discussions and learn from each other.
Do you like waffles? How do you like it? #foodtalk #waffles
Here is Yamarita and sliced cucumbers. #foodtalk #yamarita
https://inleo.io/threads/view/winanda/re-leothreads-nq6tptp4?referral=winanda
!BBH
Here is a delicious pasta with lettuce, avocado, and oven-roasted chicken. #foodtalk #pasta #ovenroastedchicken
https://inleo.io/threads/view/winanda/re-leothreads-rkxuba9r?referral=winanda
What's your favourite snack? #foodtalk #snacks
Here is a Delicious Vegetable Noodles with Steamed Egg Cake. #foodtalk #noodles
https://inleo.io/threads/view/winanda/re-leothreads-sp6emhic?referral=winanda
Epicurious- Why Stir Fry is Better in Restaurants (And How to Do It At Home). #foodtalk
https://inleo.io/threads/view/winanda/re-winanda-2uadtmfwj?referral=winanda
Wok Hacks Every Home Cook Should Know #kitchenhacks
https://inleo.io/threads/view/winanda/re-winanda-2adaisq9w?referral=winanda
US President Donald Trump has said he is not worried about China's military drills around Taiwan.
The drills began two weeks after the US announced one of its largest-ever arms sales to Taiwan.
#politics #china #newsonleo
Getting the 2021 vibes
https://inleo.io/threads/view/onealfa/re-leothreads-2y8qpz745
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
Your post has been automatically voted with 50% weight.
Very good GM
I just assembled my new gas grill. What a beauty! We're grilling tomorrow.
#grill #food
Do I get an invite for the grilling experience?
Why not? 😁
!BBH
Oooh what are you gonna grill?
Some rabbit legs and veggies. I'm excited. It's been a long time since I got a real grill and not this electric grill which doesn't get good heat.
!BBH
A real grill is important and rabbit legs too, that sounds great
Wish me luck grilling it. 😂
!BBH !PIZZA
New grill, no problem... You got this 😁
!LOL !BBH
Clean Volvo ✅️
Beautiful car, congratulations 😀
Thx! Yeah love the car. One of the first thing I did was crash it, but we have a wizard mecahnic who fixed it.
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
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Are you selling?
Haha no, love my car 😍
Squeaky clean. Is it new?
While many of you apes still racist lil bitches Ya boy plotting on post-human/trans-species jurisprudence
Get out the cave mannnn
🤣
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Ask yourself not "how much is it worth," but "what does it derive value from?" If the answer is "attention to another asset," you're still trapped.
@dashpay $DASH #dash
Just a little push, it will be over soon and a new chapter will begin.
The Russian Ministry of Justice has proposed imposing penalties for illegal cryptocurrency mining, including fines of up to 1.5 million rubles or up to two years of compulsory labor. In cases involving especially large profits or organized criminal groups, the maximum sentence could reach five years in prison. The proposed sanctions are included in draft amendments to the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code published on Russia’s official legal and regulatory draft portal.
Who cares what those mofos say
Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi published his 2026 crypto and AI outlook, forecasting BTC could top $150,000 by year-end while its dominance declines. He expects ETH and Solana to remain strong, but several “fintech L1s” to underdeliver, and predicts at least one Big Tech firm will launch or acquire a crypto wallet as more Fortune 100 companies adopt blockchain rails.
Did you know The BBH Project is upto 40,560 HP in deligation through the @bradleyarrow account. WOW #bbh
That's a huge number !INDEED
Cheers!
That is great! Thank you for this project.
No, Thank you :) !BBH
Create your own luck.
It's not magic. It's not a miracle. It's the action of the movement you make.
I also believe in it. I can't wait for luck. I want to make my luck to support me.
true
PEDs help too...at least with the Rock.
A look at the November 1981 issue of Byte
#retrocomputing #computers
Highlights include a guide to build a switching power supply, a look at the Stringy Floppy, and much more.
For more from this issue, see https://ecency.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/byte-november-1981
Wow! What a long way we've come with those machines 😆
I finally figured out how to connect a wallet to #Leodex. Now I have to find some funds to put in!
Oh, I better go check mine
The Stonecutter Principle
A traveler comes across three stonecutters at a construction site and asks what they’re doing. The first one says, “I’m cutting stone.” The second one says, “I’m building a wall.” The third one says, “I’m building a grand cathedral.” Same work, very different vision. You get to choose the way you connect the actions of the days to the vision of the years. Choose wisely.
Point of view is different.
How I am looking at HIVE right now
At least it went up a little.
Trying to think positive and waiting to see what will happen next.
exitos
And then when it reaches $1.00, everyone wants to buy it.
If I have all the capital in the world, I will use it to buy $HIVE.
Markets manipulated by $BTC
Wrong Question="When will BTC rise?",Right="Which projects have fundamentals (#CFV #DashTo5000 @dashpay $DASH) to grow despite manipulation?"
2026=perfect year for Decorrelation
#Dash #DigitalCash #Privacy #Meme #BuiltToLast #Crypto #DAO #Privacy #Freedom #CFV #Trustless #Sovereignty
Post:
Community-powered intelligence.
Comments → data 🍪
Tags → diversity 🧠
Outcome → a stronger #leoai 🦁
#podcast #RealTimewithBillMaher #leoai #transcription #data #20251230
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #674: Tim Alberta, Laura Coates, Buck Sexton.
Words: 4316
Token: 5174
#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
#RealTimewithBillMaher #cent #leoai #token #data
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. All right, here we are. A staff writer at the Atlantic whose latest book is called The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory, Tim Alberta. She is CNN's chief legal analyst who anchors Laura Coates live on CNN. Laura Coates. And he hosts the nicely dedicated radio program, The Clay, Travis and Buck Sexton Show, Buck Sexton. All right. Okay, here are the questions from the people. What did you think of Obama's comments on the campaign trail that black men should get over their reluctance to vote for Kamala? Will that be effective? Yeah, he was pretty scoldy. You don't usually see him like that. You usually see him kind of take this opposite end. Wall Street Journal and the New York Times poll most recently has overall black support for Trump, over 20%, by the way. I think it might have been his last. That's just men. I'm sorry, men. But we're speaking about the Obama speaking to the issue of black men and (1/23)
their support of Kamala Harris. So Trump is making inroads with that demographic voting-wise. He oddly does better each time with immigrants, minority groups, people have called. The people who you... Maybe it's not so odd. I mean, it tells me that the Democrats are a little bit nervous, right? When you're losing four to one, you're still losing badly. You are. Come on. It's just relatively, yeah. I mean, he... I mean, Democrats seem, perhaps there's anxiety, but there's also the realization that I think people are criticizing Obama because there is blame to go around for why people choose not to support a particular candidate. It might be sexism. It might be racism. It might be other factors as well. So I think to single out a particular group has ruffled some feathers. Having said that, if you're part of the group that believes you should not vote for someone on account of those factors, then perhaps the scolding could be doled out more diplomatically, but you should hear it as well. (2/23)
But what is the attraction? To Obama? I can well hold on to it. No, no, no. To Trump. Machismo. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. I mean... He's a baller. Success. Alpha dog. The whole thing. Yes. That is the appeal. I mean... And I mean, every time people have this, it's like the guy was... He's a billionaire. He's a global celebrity. He's been president. He's married a supermodel. Yeah, like, I don't know. Democrats need to stop thinking that this is some big shock. Who doesn't want to commit crimes and not go to jail? Ah, we didn't even talk about law fair today. We didn't even talk about law fair. Just think about where we are as a society, that the criteria for being the president of the United States, where we dare to say the leader of the free world, our president, is somebody that you are drawn to simply because of bravado. Not because of policy, not because of what they can do for you, not just your neighbor, what they can do for you and beyond. That's really what... That's a (3/23)
devolution of what we think about in terms of what she is in books like. Can I just... On the, like, sexism, racism thing, which we're going to start hearing a lot as the polls get worse for Kamala, the Democrat party overwhelming... Democratic party. I'm sorry. Sorry. Democratic party. I don't know why that's such a burn. I don't know why... It's not a burn, just the way it's all... No, but, like, all Republicans do that. I don't know why they think that's such a burn. I honestly... I've never heard anyone who cared about it before. This is the first time. Really? Yeah. Really? Yeah. It just seems so... It's just... Your listeners haven't... I mean, like, maybe a few here and there, but it's kind of a potato-potato situation. I know, but it just seems... I don't give a shit. Okay, but can I... The point I was trying to make is the Democrat part, it is possible... Sorry. The Democratic party, it is possible that Kamala Harris just is not good at this, and Democrats recognize that in (4/23)
2020, and to say racism, sexism right now after the performance she's put on is just preposterous. And many people are voting for the Republic party for that reason. What did you make of Melania's new book, where she indicates that she is pro-choice? I didn't read that about her book. I read a few things about her book. I don't know why she's putting out a book. I thought she was, like, super proud. I don't care what first ladies think about policy as a rule. Like, I don't... I mean, and I don't mean that. Democrat, Republican, first lady, very nice, hopefully do some good charity work, or first husband, Doug Emhoff. No, it's true. They're not elected officials. I don't care what they think about it, just because they're married to somebody who's been given a lot of power to represent people. So I would just say it doesn't matter to me. There's a lot of scuttlebutt in the news this week about Doug. Mm-hmm. Believe All Women, except when it comes to one who says that someone hit her (5/23)
across the face. Right. Well, of course, we don't know if that's true. She says that it happened. I'm not saying that it happened. I'm just saying that the standard used to be Believe All Women. No, if people don't know what is going on, The Daily Mail is reporting that three women that she talked to contemporaneously, which has been the standard very often in these cases, that she said back in, I think, 2011 or something, they were at the Con Film Festival. He slapped her. He thought she was flirting with the valet. And he knocked up the nanny, right? That's confirmed. That's confirmed. Yeah. He definitely knocked up the nanny. Yes. That's, you know, I mean. But, no, I don't know. Nobody ever knows. Toxic masculinity. Okay. What I'm saying is, if this becomes more credible, and we don't know yet, I mean, a lot of the conservative outlets still aren't reporting it. So I wouldn't go after anybody for not reporting it yet, because these things have to be checked out. But if it becomes (6/23)
more credible, certainly on the level of Brett Kavanaugh, which was, that kind of thing, was reported by everybody pretty quickly, does the liberal media keep ignoring it? Yes. They will. Absolutely. No question. Wouldn't that make it look worse? Well, first of all, I think that, I mean, just to your point, yes, it is prudent to be cautious about any story that's reported until you have the supporting details so that the audience is able to effectively judge the veracity of a statement. I think it is fair to investigate and look into matters that involve allegations of assault or otherwise. I think that's fair to do so. What I don't think is fair is to, and I'm consistent on this on all accounts, is to tar and feather without more. I think you have to give information to people, and you have to actually do your homework and background. I don't think by not reporting, and again, I'm not familiar with all of the allegations that are involved here, but I think it is appropriate to (7/23)
investigate as it is appropriate to be cautious before you simply put something into the ether that has no substantiation. Just be clear, though. I mean, let me ask you. Just politically speaking, this is a problem for the Harris campaign in large part because she is so ill-defined. We see that in poll after poll after poll for months now, right? Americans are trying to fill in the gaps. Around her, around her family, this is an issue for the campaign that they're going to have to deal with now in the last four or five weeks of the election. I'm just saying, regardless of whether more people come forward, regardless of what's confirmed or not confirmed, I think that there is now a little bit of blood in the water. The nanny thing was the first drop, and now there's some more, and it's not going to be long now. I can guarantee you that there are investigative teams at the Times and the Post and elsewhere that are looking into the issue. But the media is basically the worst kind of (8/23)
office sexist predator guy. Daily Mail reported on that based on interviews for people that work at his law firm. So, again, these are allegations. I understand this. I do think it's very convenient that allegations demand more study, demand more evidence, when it's really important for a Democrat that we don't all say, hold on a second, this guy seems like a huge jerk, and he is being used as a surrogate on the campaign for masculinity and talking about great things are. He is not going to be president. And the guy on the republic side, who's running for president, did these things himself. I mean, certainly was accused by more, I mean, there was so many women who said he did. But, yeah, you know, he had in part, at least in one instance shocking about due process in a court of law. It was a civil matter in one instance. It was a criminal matter in another, and you have more pending. So it's not as if that only that grace, so it's because afforded to a Democrat, that's part of what (9/23)
the process has been when you're looking at, as you call lawfare of someone like Trump and many other Republicans and Democrats alike who have had accusations floated and have had to confront them. Well, I mean, for example, there were all, it was, there was mountains of evidence against Hunter Biden. We were told, hold on, hold on, hold on. I mean, the guy broke a whole bunch of different laws and actually should have gone to prison for a long time, but he was Joe Biden's son. No, he stood trial. No, he stood trial after the political pressure was ratcheted up so much when they had already let a number of the most serious crimes, including money laundering, lapse from the statute of limitations. So, but hold on, on the lawfare thing, I just, cause this is important, we didn't get to this at all today. What is more likely that Donald Trump went almost 80 years of his life, never once having a criminal indictment, because he's a guy who, you know. He was president. Things changed. Well, (10/23)
I mean, all of a sudden he's never committed a felony and then he's running for office again. He becomes president and the circumstances are the same? No, they were going after things that were long before he was president, but okay, fine. If you don't like that argument, there's one other argument. They held all of these charges until the election. It is clear manipulation. All of the charges except the dressing room, right? Which they extended the statute of limitations and then she was funded. The whole thing was a hit. All the other ones have to do with he was in office. He was the president. He asked for civil trial for Trump. I mean, there was a civil thing with the Trump founding. There are so many that it's hard to know what to talk about. No, the feature of the investigations dealt with factual allegations that surrounded his term in office and beyond. Yes, there is a reason he was never investigated for having interfered with the presidential election because he wasn't (11/23)
running that time. You also can't have it both ways because when the house moves to impeach Trump on January 13th, the cry from the right is where's the due process? Why are you moving so fast? What's the deal? But then when Merrick Garland chooses to take his time and be deliberate in bringing these indictments, Republicans are saying, oh, you're dragging your feet now to wait until it's election season. So which is it? I hope you do sports betting or something because the idea that a number of these different cases, all of these charges involve conduct that was what? I mean, all of them. There's all these four different criminal cases. At least four years ago, you're going to tell me that all this had to wait until the election year to bring the charges? You're going to tell me that Jack Smith, Jack Smith, for those who don't know, was moving at lightning speed with the help of Judge Chuck in D.C. They were moving. Ask any federal prosecutor, ask anybody who has actually looked at (12/23)
how long. I'm just talking about timelines, by the way. The whole thing was meant to kneecap him before he could actually get to election day and it was meant to destroy him for political reasons in an election year. And yet it's only helped him. It is the biggest own goal the Democrats have ever had in their lives. But let's ask a federal prosecutor. One's here. Why this was delayed, in part, was not simply a matter of proactive or affirmative motions by the prosecution. There was a defense team in multiple different jurisdictions who were filing motions to then delay and ask for delays in delay after delay. If the calendar had been such that what the prosecution alone wanted, you would have had earlier resolution, at least in the form of trial, not necessarily a conviction, but he's filed motions to defend himself. And Matt has also delayed the calendar. Hold on. There are four different criminal proceedings against Donald Trump, okay? Four of them. And there's New York, there's (13/23)
D.C., there's Atlanta, there's Florida. Florida's been tossed out, by the way. So that's what a great trial, that's what a great case that was. These were all... By a real Trump rubbage. Well, I mean, but you know, but you can't have it both ways. I mean, Judge Chucky clearly hates Trump and was sending January 6th, some of them nonviolent detainees, into the prison system for like 18 months. Can I ask you a more philosophical question? Yeah, sure. Because there are people who are watching this who... I know people, because I live in Los Angeles and Hollywood and all that, and they will say, why are you even talking to him? And I just have no patience for people like this. They can kiss my ass. I will talk to you all day. First of all, half the country agrees with you. Are they all going to self-deport if one of the people... No, and honestly, could I... First of all, thank you for that. I just would add to it, like, the people who are saying that he's Hitler and the country's going to (14/23)
end, it's not true. It's going to be OK. He's already been president. If he becomes president again, you'll probably have a Democrat who comes around in four years. It's not the end of the Republic. Let's start placing bets. It could be. When are you going to start a new one? It could be. You want to place some money on this one? I know you've got a bankroll, buddy. Oh, I do. You know what I mean? I hear stories. I do. I do. That's my mess. OK. No, well, first of all, he could. Absolutely. He's too erratic. There's just no way you can say he's not going to do this or not going to do that. But... He's going to destroy the country. He's going to do a great job, actually, but you don't agree with that. What's your definition of destroying the country? Is sabotaging the peaceful transition of power the hallmark of American democracy? Is sabotaging that not in service of destroying the country? I mean, how else would you define it? Joe Biden became president and has had four years and the (15/23)
country has marched on and everything has been fine. And the January 6th, which we didn't talk about, I know there's a lot of things to talk about, but there's a part of this that's left out. I do have a lot of Democrat friends and Democrat people that I talk to. I know this is something... I have co-hosted... I have co-hosted... I'm going to throw them under the bus. I have co-hosted shows with Mark von Hill. I've co-hosted... No, but I'm just saying... I was going to say something nice about you before... No, I was just going to say... No, look, these people who don't want me to talk and they don't want you to talk to anybody who they don't already agree with, who isn't on this side. And first of all, you have done more for this country than I have, than all of those people have, and I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Anyone who fought for this country... CIA, but I tried to help out over there. CIA is pretty rough. We do lose people. It's a real thing. It's not the PTA. Yeah, it (16/23)
is not the PTA. But thank you for that. Yes, absolutely. But the frustration people have, though, to be fair, is not your mere presence, which is not... I'm sorry to say, though... I just thought it was like one minute. No, only because he asked... That's nice. Because this is part of the frustration. Tim asked you a question. You didn't answer it. I was about to, actually. No, no, no. No, I mean, I can. That was the frustration. He asked you what was your definition of destroying the country. Is there a certain standard? I mean, that's a pretty broad question, to be fair. Well, welcome to the land of broad. Right. And that's the frustration. Sorry, though. Jesus. No, no, no. What I was going to say is that January 6 is held at a concert. First of all, I condemned January 6 as it happened, every day since it's happened. The people who broke laws and hurt people and committed federal crimes should pay the price for that. I've never waived from that. It's absolutely the case. Should he? (17/23)
I don't believe Donald Trump broke any laws. What is the law that Donald Trump broke? And by the way, whenever I say this to people, they look at me and they say... That's a problem, perhaps, with the law. Okay, but I mean... And I'm not even talking about January 6 itself. To me, that was never... That's a bit of a red herring. The thing that he did so wrong is the thing he still does every day. He still has not conceded that election. He did not concede that election. And you are fomenting something in this country that is unprecedented. So here is the context, and this is where I'm trying, I swear, I'm trying to come around to your point, and that is that the 2020 election cannot be taken out of the context of a 2016 election that Hillary at different times absolutely did not concede, that some of my, unfortunately, former bosses in the intelligence community working with the Democrat Party decided to bring this absurd... The Russia collusion investigation was insane. Nothing came (18/23)
out of this. There were no charges out of this. The whole thing was a scam. And Hillary didn't accept that she had lost the election in the early days afterwards. Except she showed up to the inauguration. No, she showed up to the inauguration. She showed up that night before the cock crowed she conceded. But there was also, in 2020... Good reference. In 2022... There is a... You got your boy in there. In 2020, January 6 was a riot. Riots are bad. Riots are illegal. That should not happen. It came after months of riots that were effectively a Democrat mobilization of the BLM party. Well, I mean, I lived on my... I was on my block, and people came around, and they shattered all the windows, they stole stuff, and yeah, this is for social justice. And then there were people who were boarding up their stores because they were afraid that if Donald Trump won that election, then in cities across America there would be rioting. So the election was effectively held under a degree of duress to (19/23)
begin with, and Democrats were all in favor of the riots, not only in favor of the riots that were going on, but we had the public health experts during COVID saying, oh, it's so important that we had these lunatics running around, breaking things and letting them on fire, that all of a sudden the public gathering statutes... When do you fact you made that comment? I mean, when are these experts you're talking about... This absolutely happened. I mean, any of you can go check it out. Mayor Bill de Blasio said it. I mean, this absolutely... One of the things that's exhausting, frankly, is that... and this is real... is that overtalking does not make your argument more persuasive. That's what's happening here, Bucks. I'm not overtalking anybody. You're absolutely not overtalking right now. Exactly. That was sarcasm. No, no, no. My response, you weren't overtalking me with sarcasm. My point is this. You are saying all these different aspects of it, of how, you know, you're conflating (20/23)
January 6 with BLM, with health experts, and you actually just said that the election was held under duress. Yeah. In what specific ways was the election held under duress? Because people were concerned about the trajectory of America and they felt that they had to turn out. Duress is actually a legal term, and you know this quite well, in terms of how it would be used from your background, the CIA and otherwise, to suggest that our democracy, that people were turning out simply because they were under duress, that's the kind of fomenting of dishonesty that makes people, A, feel very disenchanted with the entire process, B, make them frustrated by the lunacy of simply bald assertions with no substantiation, and C, wonder where you're getting your information from. All of those are valid points that you have to address before you go out and just say, this is all happening and everyone sees it, when everyone does not see what you're seeing. Well, I may respond. I may respond. What you (21/23)
said ignored everything that I said before you started talking, which is that there were riots all through the summer of 2020 and there were business owners who were, and there are photos of this, you can see this, this is very obvious, this isn't like I'm coming up some conspiracy, that were boarding up their businesses because, God forbid, if Donald Trump wins. There was psychic damage done to the American people by a combination of the COVID hysteria, which it was hysteria in a lot of context, by the way, we don't have time to get into everything COVID here right now, schools absolutely should have been open, the mask mandates were bullshit, the lockdowns were absolutely pointless, this was all total garbage. Beyond that, there was a sense that the left gets to riot and Kamala Harris raises money for them when they're supposed to get out on bail in Minnesota. They burned down Minneapolis, why? By the way, I'm not clear on what any of this has to do with sabotaging the transition of (22/23)
power. How did we get to this point? You just changed, you just changed. No, you're not. I was talking about the election. I'm talking about the election too. You're talking about what happened on January 6th, I'm talking about what happened leading up to November. I'm talking about November 3rd through January 6th, I've studied election law in all 50 states, I know better than either of you, no offense, what happened in the election and what didn't happen. I wasn't talking about anything after November, I'm talking about the election hell. I have a note. There's lots of important things to get to. Do you think the Benendez brothers deserve to be paroled? Here we go. (23/23)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #670: H.R. McMaster, John Avlon, Rich Lowry.
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#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Here's the former CNN anchor who is running for Congress in New York's first district, John Adlon. Here's the editor-in-chief of National Review and host of the editor's podcast, Rick Slattery. And the former White House National Security Advisor under President Trump, whose new book, At War With Ourselves, General H.R. McMaster. Okay, this is for everybody. I just mentioned Hitler in the editorial. What's with Tucker Carlson embracing a revisionist historian? Does anybody remember the guy's name? I read this story today. Tucker Carlson. He does like to push the envelope, doesn't he? He had on a guy who introduced something like one of the most important historians of today. I'd never heard of the guy. He's not a real historian. Well, he believes Winston Churchill was the bad guy and Hitler was the good guy. The real villain. I think people who think revisionism is just the way to get attention. Like, (1/26)
whatever you say, I can undo it and say it's better. You know what? You think men can't get pregnant? Oh. Stop it. Stop it. Is he Hitler as the bad guy? Yeah, intriguing concept. This is junk history that's getting peddled and there are people who gravitate to this, but he elevates it. And I think that's his business model for him. It's his business model. You talking about Tucker? Tucker Carlson. He's a grifter, he's a charlatan, he's a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. We saw him sit across from him and supposedly he's knowledgeable about history, but he bought into that whole, I call it, did you ever see the show Drunk History? No, I loved it. But it's like he bought into Putin's drunk history. And this guy seems to think Churchill's in power in Britain all on the run up to the war and he was pushing all the buttons and he was making Hitler invade. England went to him as a war leader because the war had started already because of Hitler. And I actually disagree with you. I think (2/26)
Tucker's sincere in this stuff and I think it goes to a deep disaffection that parts of the right have, unfortunately, with America at its foundations. They've come to believe the country is fundamentally corrupt, so every piece of received wisdom, and I think some narratives are wrong and should be pushed back against, but every piece of received wisdom, including that, I was going to say H.R. McMaster, but that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest figures in Western history, has to be questioned. Which he was, but this is… Churchill was not one of the great? Oh, of course he was. They're questioning him. But this is this weird, like, when did sort of Hating America become hip on the far right? This is this mirror image sort of like feedback loop between the far right and the far left that's absolutely crazy. The people are totally… They all meet. I mean, the sort of the nativist far right meets the self-loathing far left. Yes. And you can't tell who says what. You're exactly (3/26)
right. They say the same thing. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I don't like about Hitler. Everybody else had to do that salute and he just went like that. I thought it was very privileged. It was so superior. It was so superior. Exactly. I think it's important to make fun of these kind of, you know, authoritarian, horrible people. And this is why I think Mel Brooks' work is just so brilliant. Charlie Chaplin. Was the judge in Trump's hush money trail right to delay sentencing? Oh, yeah, that happened today until November 26 in order to avoid interfering in the election. Man, all those trials and nothing happened. Nothing. Well, they indicted him and they wanted to try him on a political schedule. They literally, if they could have, they would have had him in courtrooms from March to October, a presidential candidate of the United States. And it's just not how the court system works, thank God. This thing shouldn't be sentenced now. It's absurd. They took a misdemeanor that the statute (4/26)
of limitations should have expired on and they bootstrapped it up to 34 felonies and one to sentence him to jail for it. I'm not a huge Trump guy, but this I think is absurd and wrong. The larger issue obviously is January 6th, right? And the problem is with the immunity decision, history is really clear. If you don't hold people accountable when they indulge in political violence, then you get more political violence. And I'm really curious about the – do you think conservatives will end up supporting the constitutional amendment to overturn the immunity decision if a Democrat is president? I wonder if they will. I think the way these kind of decisions work, we saw it with the independent counsel statute decision the Supreme Court has. In Washington eventually this stuff always comes around and bites the other side. So right now Democrats are so upset the Supreme Court has done this, then if Kamala Harris is elected and some Republican prosecutor somewhere in the middle of red America (5/26)
wants to indict her and prosecute her for some official act, the Supreme Court will say no and Democrats will suddenly, wait a minute, maybe that decision wasn't so outrageous. What we've seen is this tendency on both ends of the political spectrum to score partisan points at the expense of confidence in our institutions. But Trump really does commit crimes. Let's have to get that little part of it. They're actual crimes. We're 60 days out from an election and I think we've normalized this a little bit and it's far too freaking dangerous. He really does commit crimes is one thing and two, if the positions were reversed and a Democrat did this, not only would the Republicans go after him, but they would have done it instead of what the Democrats did. Talk about feckless, General. This is feckless. You had four years to bring four trials and we get none of them? And it's because they were afraid of politicizing it. Look, that's the thing is that if Democrats did what Donald Trump did, (6/26)
you would be opposing them totally and by the way, so would I. And I think that's the issue. I'm so extensively on the record about January 6th. I'm completely appalled by it. But you're still in doors like you're not so appalled that you don't vote. You're not going to vote for Trump. So you're not a poll. No, I am a poll. But you're still going to vote for him. January 6th didn't happen. You still oppose Trump. You don't like him on policy, right? No, no. No, no, no. From where I sit... I don't. Mostly, no. But you support Trump's policies? I said no, mostly. But you consider voting for him absent January 6th? No. Right. Well, consider... I'm a conservative Republican. That's the difference between us. If he conceded elections, he would not be the boogeyman that he is. He would just not be the villain he is. That's the main thing. He politicizes the Justice Department and he does not concede elections. These are two very new things. Now you can carp all you want. Or very old things. (7/26)
And you can, what about the bullshit about, well, the Democrats say that he wasn't a legitimate president. That's different than actually trying to stay in office. He is completely unprecedented. And it completely disqualifies him to even consider voting for him. I don't know how anyone can. Well, we've got an election lie being used as a litmus test for party loyalty and everyone's acting like it's normal. It's not. It can't be. What do you think of Trump announcing plans for Elon Musk to lead a commission on government efficiency to cut regulations and spending? There is a lot in there, isn't there? Government is inefficient. I remember when Al Gore was going to reinvent government. Remember that? He was given that task. Al Gore, you go reinvent government. How'd that go? We have a lot of really dedicated civil servants, but in most government agencies you could randomly kidnap people out of them and nobody would know the difference. The secretary of defense disappears for like a (8/26)
week. I think this is a good idea, though. I mean, if you look at Elon, he's revolutionized the U.S. satellite program, right? NASA has been remade by injecting kind of this private sector and entrepreneurial energy into it. So I think we could use that across government. Yeah, I mean, but to your point, I remember, I forget who it was, maybe it was Bolton, somebody like that said years ago, if you took out 10 stories from the U.N., would we know? Or would it might even be better? It's an America-hating organization. But it is true. And by the way, not that this is a pattern we should follow, but yesterday I was driving to work and as sometimes happens here, the light goes out on a major thoroughfare and everyone just coped. Like, oh, okay, you go and then I go and then we just ad-libbed it and I'm not saying that's how you should run the film. There's still an amazing resiliency to American civil society. Yes, totally. But how, you know, we're a dagger drawn over politics. Most (9/26)
people, it doesn't matter, they treat each other fairly and honorably and as fellow Americans. Yeah, but leadership matters. A lot of dirt bags too. We can't wait for the political class to do it. I don't think they're going to do it. So I think we all need to convene discussions. Who fires themselves? That's the problem. But let's start taking action, stepping up, building guardrails to strengthen American democracy and take it seriously. Because this is fucking important. We've got one country. What are the panel's predictions for the debate next week? I think Trump's going to be an asshole. That's my prediction. Plenty of it. I'm going out on a limb. Well, you know, foreign policy doesn't sign elections usually, but foreign policy is really critical at this moment. I believe there is this, as you mentioned earlier, this axis of aggressors that is supporting each other. They're supporting each other in ways that are unprecedented. And I believe these cascading crises from Europe to (10/26)
the Middle East have a very high potential of cascading further into the Indo-Pacific before inauguration. I think we're entering a period of maximum danger. We have a president who sadly has diminished cognitive capacity. We have ourselves at each other's throats. Then we're going to have a period maybe after the election, and I think this Russian report is a setup for post-election. Because the Russians, what they really want is most of us to doubt the result of the election. So I think that period between election and inauguration is very dangerous. But the next 60 days, to your point, right? I mean, part of the goal of Russian disinformation and autocratic disinformation is to divide our democracy, to make it dysfunctional. And that's why that division and dysfunction is something we need to confront. And the stakes of the election do determine the trajectory of the 21st century. It is about autocracy versus democracy at home and abroad. Okay. I hope we get asked those questions. (11/26)
What will your policy be on Iran? What were you discussing earlier? I think, Bill, it is key that the whole debate over the mics being open or closed, and it's obvious why Kamala Harris wanted them open. If the mics had been open in the first debate, there's no way Joe Biden ever, in this course of rambling, answer with lots of pauses, would have finally been able to say, look, we finally beat Medicare. Trump would have interrupted him like five times before he got it and saved him. And by the way, if Trump loses to Kamala Harris, that debate victory for him in June will be the most catastrophic success in American politics. He won the debate. Biden leaves and he gets a much tougher opponent. Yeah, they really screwed themselves. He should not have debated Biden that early. That was dumb because Biden revealed himself. They would have said, let's do it in October. And this is the thing, all the people now who acknowledge Biden's not up to it, all the same people, Democrats, they'd be (12/26)
insisting right now the way they did the entirety of the year, he's great, he's hale and hearty. He didn't wander off. He didn't really mess it up. And so would you if it was your guy. What's that? And so would you if it was your guy. Don't make it sound like it. Maybe, but this was like, he's not up for the job. I mean, he literally can't do it and they told us he was. Speaking as an American historian, you know, I think this is one of the most significant cover ups in recent American history. You know, to perpetuate the appearance that the president was fit. I disagree. He's not unable to be president. He's unable to run for president. He's unable to do a debate. He's not a vegetable who can't think or make decisions. He just can't do the kind of thing. And by the way, once all of a sudden it wasn't a Biden-Trump rematch, all of a sudden the whole election changes because it's about new versus old. It's about hope versus fear. And that's been energizing people. Trump needs to connect (13/26)
her to the current administration, which has disastrous approval ratings, and say you're the unacceptable status quo, not the future. But this thematic debate will have a huge role in play. Have Democrats succeeded in reclaiming the patriotic label? Well, yes, their convention was much better. I mean, it's interesting. If you had told me before the convention that I would hear Kamala Harris say the word privilege, I would say, oh, I'm sure. And it was going to be about the usual, you know, white privilege. No. She said it's a privilege to be an American. I mean, she said those kind of things that Obama used to say about only in this country is my story possible. And I'm going to say it was music to my ears. I like America. I like America. I don't care who goes there. It is absolutely essential. I've been big on reclaiming the American flag because it belongs to all of us and it can't be a partisan signifier. But the smartest thing Democrats have done is take back freedom, right? It's (14/26)
about reproductive freedom. It's taking back the word freedom, taking back the flag, taking back patriotism. And all of a sudden, actually, she's refusing to take the bait on identity politics. And Trump is the one who's focused on it. That flipping the script is very healthy. You have to be clear, though, that this really is a group, a party that has been pushing identity politics extensively. Yes. And that's been the biggest thing. And so what they've tried to do is valorize victimhood. And I'm afraid of this ideology, this postmodernist, postcolonial, neo-Marxist kind of ideology. It robs our young people of agency. I agree. I agree 100 percent. You have to tear it down. And so what does that leave young people with? A toxic combination of anger and resignation. So let's restore agency. And the ironic thing is, this is where the whole shooting comes. The far right is now resembling the far left in this. I have to say, it's hard to take to hear Tim Walz, given his record in (15/26)
Minnesota, which had nothing libertarian about it whatsoever, to portray himself as this great champion of freedom. It reminded me, Bill Buckley had this old line that, liberals don't care what you do so long as it's mandatory. And that's how Tim Walz got it. The guy represented one of the most Republican districts for six terms. But once he was governor with a unified legislature behind him, all bets were off. And it'll be the same thing with Kamala. She sounds like a moderate now. She's flip-flopped on like ten things without explanation. But if she gets a unified Congress, she'll be the new FDR and the new LBJ. Once they're in there, they convince themselves they have to be transformational presidents. That's all posed. The alternative being Donald Trump is a totally different ballgame. That's rewarding someone who tried to overturn an election on a lie that led to an attack on her capitol. That's the stark choice. But one of the problems with the patriotism issue, I think that we (16/26)
were just about to talk about with the Democrats, goes back to what we were talking about in the show with education. You see interviews with young people, they think America is very often like the worst country in the world. And they think it's the worst time to ever be living in. This is just rank ignorance. They are not, again, common sense. They don't teach the kids basic things in school. They don't know that this is the best time to be alive. The average person alive today lives like kings did, like just a hot shower a hundred years ago. It was a giant luxury. The amount of entertainment we have, the amount of caloric intake we have, the speed of travel, communication, porn on the phone. But no, we do need to think about education. Partly is we're educating students to become active citizens in a self-governing society, right? Washington says enlightened opinion is necessary for a self-governing society. So we need to actually start teaching them history, the good, the bad, and (17/26)
the ugly, but that we're a great country. We've got to acknowledge, right, it's the far left that pushed this ahistorical thesis that our country was founded to preserve slavery rather than founded on principles that made that criminal institution unsustainable. I don't think we should replace that with a contrived happy view of history. No, you instantly had school districts around the country adopting that as part of the curriculum. It's a lie about we're the first society in history to lie about ourselves. I'm not a partisan guy. What parties were pushing that agenda? That's, I think, where we get to the revolt of the reasonable, right? Let's start teaching Ken Burns in school. Let's start having a sense that we are imperfect people trying to form a more perfect union. But educating folks about the full capacity of our history is a good thing. What Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, he used to say, he said, do I apologize for defending a less than perfect democracy? I do not. Find (18/26)
me a better one. That's how I feel. But he's right. It is one side that did that. And that's the weakness on the far left. I completely agree. And what I worry about too, we were talking about military rate, it's military service, you know. If you teach your young people that your country is not worth defending, who's going to defend you, right? Who's going to defend you? And I think this is related to some of the recruiting issues we've had. Just the attacks on the Founding Fathers, who of course were imperfect. By the way, at this time that they were doing what they did, they were not that different than anybody else in the world. Exactly. Including people of color in other parts of the world who had slaves. It's not like we invented it in 16. Slavery was endemic to the human condition throughout all human history. What was new was when we began to turn against it. The British first began to get into slave trade, and then finally... But we fought a most destructive war in our history (19/26)
to emancipate one million of our fellow Americans. Now, then you teach the failure of Reconstruction, you teach the rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, separate but unequal. And by the way, that was all the Democratic Party. Yes, at the time, they were conservative Republicans. But it explains a lot, right? If you understand Reconstruction, we need to study more, because the resistance to multiracial democracy is also a defining factor of our country. We are a great country. I am a very patriotic guy. The fullness of American history is what we need, because because we're the First Nation founded on idea, not a tribal identity, we need unifying stories, so we need to teach those stories. And that's where we've been screwing up. We'll move on. What are your thoughts on Dick Cheney saying that he'll be voting for Kamala? Yeah, Liz Cheney said she would, and then she'd... What do you think of that? Come on. You lose Dick Cheney, Rich. Come on. Come on, man. Isn't politics funny, (20/26)
though? If someone had told you 20 years ago Dick Cheney would be endorsing the Democratic candidate for president? Look, I get their... They can't stand Donald Trump and not being on board with Donald Trump. I do not get conservative Republicans supporting Kamala Harris. Hold on. Let's work through it. It's not just about... One person wants to strengthen NATO and all the multilateral security arrangements that have helped keep the peace for the best part, for the most part since the Second World War. The other wants to sell out to a lot of these autocratic countries. That's a personal, not political decision. I think that's actually consistent. Also, I think it's healthy, because who... You know, I think you get more Republicans endorsing Democrats, it makes the point that this election is about something bigger. It's about building a broad patriotic coalition. Again, the U.S. military was stronger and more lethal when Trump was done with his first term, and he was actually... He (21/26)
said a lot of dumb things about Putin, but he supported Ukraine more than Obama did, and he was harder on China than any prior president, and now that position has become... We have someone who... Well, I mean, this is a big part of the book. I mean, he actually did. He's the first one who provided defensive capabilities to... I try to tell you guys, but you don't believe it until HR says it. No, but then he did suspend that assistance to get dirt on the Biden's. So, you know, you said... I wouldn't say reckless, but I would say inconsistent, erratic versus fecklessness, and I do think that when you talk about coddling authoritarian regimes, look at what this administration has done with the Iranians. I mean, the supreme leader has gotten an easy ride from the Biden administration. They didn't even want to acknowledge Iran's role in October 7th at the beginning. They still have not really reimposed or actually enforced the sanctions against the Iranians since October 7th, and with them (22/26)
having the whole Middle East on fire. So I think it's a more complicated situation is what I'm saying, John. Well, but sometimes... You can't just make these broad statements. Hold on, HR. I love you, man, but hold on. Like, we've got one guy saying we should pull out of NATO, right? We should not... Putin can do whatever the hell he wants, basically giving a yellow light to China on Taiwan. I mean, you know, the autocratic alliance you warn about is, in many cases, rooting for Donald Trump, because they think it leads to American division and decline. Tell me where I'm wrong. Well, what I'm saying is there were some things, right? There are some things where Donald Trump's right. I mean, there are some things where he's right. There are some things where he's completely erratic and inconsistent. Where does he write on? I think he's been right on energy security, for example. I think he's been right on reciprocity and trade. He's been right on burden sharing, but then again, with (23/26)
Donald Trump, he's so disruptive, right? He disrupts what needs to be disrupted sometimes, but then he goes on to disrupt himself, and he becomes kind of the antagonist in his own story. So, I mean, so you've got a choice, right, in this election. People have to make the choice between what I would say are really self-destructive policies at times for the Biden administration on the Middle East, on the war in Israel, but really the war in the region, and kind of the erratic nature of President Trump. But these are the questions. These candidates have to be asked, what are their positions on these issues, on NATO, on Ukraine, on the war in the Middle East? I think this, you know more than I do, but the hit on Soleimani, I think, was shocking. It wasn't a major war. One hit, one guy. I think everyone with American blood on their hands around the world slept less easily after that hit, and it just went to the fact that he had deterrent force. People were scared or worried about him in a (24/26)
way they haven't been of Joe Biden. Look, the bipartisan consensus on more American foreign policy is we should stand up against tyrants and terrorists, right? And I do believe that. And I do think that there's, we learned a lot in the wake of the Iraq war. But the fact is that right now, if you're strong on national security, one party's leader seems to be trying to weaken NATO, and the other party has expanded it and strengthened it. A lot of that is working them to try to get them to spend more. But I don't see, the Afghan withdrawal, does this compute at all in your role? There's no reason Pompeo should have negotiated with the Taliban alone in Doha. It was a conditions-based thing. Biden didn't accept anything else that Trump did, except he was supposedly forced by Trump to do a withdrawal. It was done badly. That was a totally incompetent, dishonorable disgrace. His presidency has not recovered from it since, and our position abroad hasn't recovered. And I think you can draw a (25/26)
direct line from that disastrous, humiliating withdrawal to the re-invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. I mean, I think what's weakness, what is provocative, is the perception of weakness. So, what I would love to hear from both candidates is their commitment. And, if I may, 61 Americans were killed when Trump was in office in Afghanistan, 13 under Biden. So, there's that. Good luck with the campaign. You're running as a Democrat? Thank you. I am. Come and join us, Democrats. Thank you. Good luck at home with that. All right. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (26/26)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #436: Ken Bone, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez.
Words: 4798
Token: 7634
#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. ...about Florida right now. A category five liberal hoax is about to hit. No, this is serious. If you are watching me in Florida, stop. Get the fuck out right now. No, seriously, this is really serious stuff there. And not just that hurricane. There are three hurricanes lined up. Irma in Florida, Jose in the Caribbean, and Katia coming to Mexico. I'm just saying, if you're a coke smuggler, take the weekend off. This is not a good time to be out. And these are like, they say this Irma's the most serious storm ever. Like, I'm seeing colors on the hurricane maps I've never seen before. Here's a little guide. If you see yellow like Trump's hair, take extra care. If you see orange like his face, shelter in place. Red like his ties to Russia, just evacuate now. It's about to hit Florida this storm, but Trump says not to worry. We are completely prepared. The National Guard is in place. FEMA is well supplied. (1/27)
Melania has her stilettos on. I call them flood me pumps. It's got the flood me pumps. But you know, the people in Florida can take solace in the fact that they will soon get a visit from Donald Trump, the comforter in chief, they're calling him. Because you know, when I think of comfort and empathy and warm, fuzzy feelings, nobody comes to mind like Donald Trump. He's a Snuggie in human form. This guy, did you see him in Houston? He brought the first lady. I've never seen a president do that. He brought a date to a flood. Honey. And of course, his fans loved it. They thought he was very brave to face his greatest nemesis of the last 30 years, wind. I tell you, who did not look too good there in Houston was Mr. Pastor, I should say, Joel Osteen. You know this guy? He wouldn't, he's got a mega church. He wouldn't let people shelter in his church during a storm, Mr. Christian. And this church, boy, talk about mega. It seats 17,000 people. And on Sunday, he fills it up three times. He (2/27)
preaches to 52,000 people. The Catholics are like, wow, we're molesting the wrong people. Oh, speaking of molesting the wrong people, this week with North Korea exploding a hydrogen bomb and these weather catastrophes all over the country, who does Trump go after? The dreamers. You saw this? He threatened to end the program we referred to as DACA. People don't know what that stands for. It's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Says the same thing on my condoms. I point it like I'm wearing one now. I don't trust you people. I'm wearing a condom. No. DACA is the program that President Obama started to allow the children of undocumented immigrants, who have never known any of the country, to stay here. They spent their entire lives in this country. They're so Americanized, their car horns play Taylor Swift. You know what I was trying to say. It's the condom. It's fucking me. But they're leading very productive lives, more than most people. Over 90% are employed. A lot of them are in (3/27)
the military. They're very well educated. They almost all believe in climate change. Yeah, this is so interesting. Climate change. The deniers all have beach houses in the way of... No, did you read this? All in the way of the storm. Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and Coulter, the Koch brothers, all have houses that are going to be wiped out, probably. I'm not bloating. It's just an inconvenient truth. I'm not trying to... No, Trump has a $28 million compound on the island of St. Martins, and it looks like it's gonna get completely wiped out. Today, he said, Darn, that's where I keep my tax returns. But you know, even though everything that scientists said was going to happen, that the waters were gonna get warmer, and it's gonna soup up the storms, and that Irma's the worst storm ever, and Harvey was a 500 to one shot, and they've had three years in a row with 500 to one shots, the right-wingers are still, no, we can't blame climate change. Yes, I agree. My theory has something to do with (4/27)
Hillary's emails. Right. Really, I'm not... Rush Limbaugh has been telling his listeners all week that Irma is a liberal hoax to promote their climate change agenda, but that he had to evacuate his house, which for Rush, has gotta be a tough pill to swallow, but if anybody knows about swallowing pills... All right, we got a great show. S.E. Cuff and Adam Gottfried are here, and a little later, we'll be speaking with author and earth guardian, Sotescott Martinez, but first up, he went viral as the undecided voter in the red sweater who questioned both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at the presidential debate last year. Please welcome Ken Bone is back with us. Great to meet you. You wore the sweater, thank you. I couldn't not wear it. No, no, I requested you. That is your symbol, and I know you're, I read your tweets this week, I know you wonder why you're here. Uh, yeah, for sure. I've wondered why this whole thing happened. Well, you became sort of emblematic as the independent (5/27)
voter. You were at that famous debate, and it was all independents who hadn't made up their mind, and to me, you're a gettable voter. I'll be honest with you, I have a dog in this fight. I wanna convince you that you should have voted for Hillary instead of Godzilla. Well, I didn't, I'll tell you that much, I didn't vote for Godzilla. I didn't vote for Jill Stein either. Not Godzilla and not Jill Stein, but I'm not saying any more. Are you gonna reveal who you did vote for? No, I'm waiting for my book deal to come through. Is that true? No, not at all. I promised before the election that I wouldn't say who I voted for, because like it or not, we're obsessed with celebrities in this country, and even like an F-list celebrity like me, people put stock in my opinion, and it's not fair to the democratic process if I tell them what to believe. Like, you're an informer, that is your job to inform people, educate them, entertain them. I'm a random dude that works at the power plant. People (6/27)
don't need to be informed by me. Who did you vote for? No. That was a wonderful speech, Ken, but who did you vote, I'm not leaving, I'm not gonna leave here at the, you're not getting out of California, my friend. It's only an hour show, Bill, what are we? Really, okay, but you didn't vote for Trump, so you voted, you didn't vote for Jill Stein, you didn't vote for fucking Aleppo dude, did you? I voted for either Johnson or Clinton or Trump, one of the big three, well the big two and then the one. Okay, all right, well, you keep your secrets, Ken. But I wanted to have you here because you are what I call a gettable voter. You're not totally in the Trump camp at all. I think there are things that you don't like about him at all and yet it puzzles me that you were still undecided that late and you still don't wanna tell us who you wanted to vote for and you're the person we need to get. And when I say we, I mean the Democrats, the liberals, we wanna turn this country around because I (7/27)
think it's on a very, very bad path. What path do you think the country's on under Trump? Well, one of the weird things about being undecided is they ask you like, who are you gonna vote for? And that's the last human being I've ever told who I was gonna vote for, was this person doing the survey to determine if I could be at the debate. And they said, how likely are you to change your mind? And I said, I don't know, like two. Probably not gonna change my mind, but I wanna keep an open mind. They said, well, in this super polarizing election, a two out of 10 likelihood of changing your mind is still undecided. So there was nobody on that stage that was above a four. But I wouldn't be like two in a million if it was Donald Trump. I can totally understand that, but one of the reasons why I wanted to wait and make up my mind, make my final decision, is in Canada you have an 80-day election campaign and they complain that it's too long. Ours started on November 10th and it's already going (8/27)
again. People are like, who are you gonna vote for in 2020? I don't wanna feed that fire because that turns our political process into TMZ. It creates people like me and it creates nothing but sound bites and sniping back and forth and it doesn't help solve the issues. All right, Ken, but we... But we paid for your offer out here. You're gonna answer my question. I've been exposed enough to politics to know how to not answer questions. Just tell me this. What is it about Hillary? Because Hillary Clinton's book is coming out this week and she made a statement this week which sounded a lot like something I've said about her in the past, which is, future historians I feel will be very puzzled at why people hated her as much as they did. I could see not liking her terribly much because she's not a great politician, but I mean, I've said it before, if you really hate Hillary Clinton, you were molested by a real estate lady. I just don't get it. She's a bland centrist. This is not Che (9/27)
Guevara in a pantsuit. What about her irked you so much that you were willing to just be independent into the last minute? Well, I never really hated Hillary. Like, I was, you know, I'm willing to wait until the investigations come out on any charges against anybody because we're supposed to have this presumption of innocence, especially if you, you know, look like you're part of the right demographic in this country. Uh, so, you know... What does that mean? You have a presumption of innocence if you're a white people, basically, according to our justice system. It's supposed to be for everybody and we're working on it, but I try to give that benefit of the doubt to everyone. And we have trouble extending that to polarizing figures like politicians. And even someone who has moderate or centrist opinions relative to the Democratic Party, like Hillary Clinton, is gonna be a polarizing figure and people just wanna jump on her. Like, and Donald Trump was the master of getting people to (10/27)
look at her instead of look at him. Did that work on you? I try to dig a little deeper, you know. I don't believe anything that I hear the first time. So did you think the emails were very important? It was never really a big issue to me. I was willing to let the investigation play out. Okay, well, it did. James Comey got up there and he said, we looked at it, he scolded her a little bit and he said, no prosecutor would bring charges. And then 10 days before the election, he brought it up again. Yeah, I thought that was a really weird move, especially since it looked for all the world like she was gonna win at that point. They're like, what are you doing? Why are you bringing this up if you don't have anything? And then it turned out he didn't have anything. So I still don't see the sense in it. Well, what about, okay, so what about Russia? I saw this, we were off last week and there was a big story about a focus group that somebody did. And they had voters, even the ones who voted for (11/27)
Trump, very disillusioned with him. And then the guy said, what about Russia? And you can say about Russia, you think it's something big, you don't think it's something big, or you can say, I don't know. And every one of the Trump people said, I don't know. Because when you watch Fox News, you don't know. Yeah. They just don't report it. Where do you get your news? I try to dig as far as I can on everything. I'll get the sound bites from Fox News and then I'll think, okay, what's wrong with this particular one? And that puts you on the track of what are we ignoring. And then you can watch your MSNBCs and kind of get, you know, you have your Trump, or you have your Fox News way over on the right and then you have your center, and then you have your left wing news, you know, they're not quite as far tilted. But they give you leads, things that are, what are we trying to ignore on both sides? So do you think there is something to the Russia story? Oh, absolutely. Foreign governments have (12/27)
been messing with each other's political processes since we invented governments. And by sniping back and forth across the aisle on this, we're putting tools in their tool belt. If we think that Russia wasn't trying to influence the election, we're crazy. And if we think they're not gonna come back and try to do it again, we're even crazier. So, so... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (13/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (14/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (15/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (16/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (17/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (18/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (19/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (20/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (21/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (22/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (23/27)
So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... So... (24/27)
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This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #387 (Originally aired 05/06/16).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series Real Time with Bill Maher. You are surprisingly fresh for a week that included a lot of heavy drinking. It was Cinco de Mayo yesterday and also Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. So they don't make Corona strong enough for that. That's right. Did you see Donald Trump yesterday? For Cinco de Mayo, he tweeted out a picture of him eating a taco bowl and said, Happy Cinco de Mayo. I love Hispanics. And they love him. Oh, they love him. He's at all the children's parties here in L.A. As the pinata. But you know, they said it couldn't happen. They said it wouldn't happen. It happened. Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. You know, I have taken a lot of crap over the years for saying this is a stupid country. I should have trademarked it. Everybody keeps saying it's a reality show. Yeah, Fear Factor. I feel like I know how Dracula got to run Transylvania. They had primaries, there was debates and (1/34)
then the other vampires just couldn't stand Ted Cruz. I mean, yeah, that's what happened. It all ended Tuesday night in Indiana. Ted Cruz bid it bad. I mean, the Republicans, all they had to do was come up with one motherfucker who was more popular than Donald Trump and they couldn't do that. If you're wondering why even Republicans could not stand Ted Cruz, he said it is concession speech. I am not making this up. This is why we hate politicians. He said, just a few days ago, two young kids, four and six, handed me two envelopes full of change, all of their earnings from their lemonade stand. Right. A four year old is concerned with the direction of the country. Here, Mr. Quus, take all my money, use it to defeat Donald Trump. He's not a true conservative. The six year old said he would have done it sooner, but he was waiting to see if Bloomberg got in. Now, I am beginning to think this whole election is taking place inside the mind of a disturbed child. And that child, of course, is (2/34)
Dr. Ben Carson. Yes, gentle Ben was, he's been appointed to find Trump's vice president. We're at the point now where the crazy people are appointing each other to do jobs. And so on the short list, of course, is Chris Christie. He was the first on the Trump train. Trump and plump. It'll be quite a campaign. Chris Christie has already assured Donald Trump that he does not have any skeletons in the closet. Baby back ribs in the bed. Yes. I mean, this is the reality we're living in. They're talking about Trump's vice president. They're talking about what he's going to do in his first hundred days. He said by the end of his first hundred days, the wall with Mexico will be designed, immigration ban on Muslims will be in place, and the repeal of Obamacare will be in motion, and all of us will be in Canada. And by the way, there may be quite a few Republicans with us. The party is split in a way I have never seen before. The Republican establishment is not necessarily going along supporting (3/34)
Donald Trump. He's racist, he's sexist, he's belligerent. There are also some things about him they don't like. It's true. The last two Republican presidents, Bush senior and Bush junior, they're not going to the convention. The last two nominees, Mitt Romney, John McCain, they don't want any part of it. They're not going to the convention. Lindsey Graham says he won't go, but that's just because he has nothing to wear. Nothing to do with politics. No, I mean, Paul Ryan, he is the leading Republican in the country, the Speaker of the House. He is the chairman of the convention. Yesterday he said he will not endorse Donald Trump. He said he wants to. He hopes to. He said he's not there yet. He doesn't want to rush into it. This Donald Trump, tell me more. I've not heard enough about who is this Donald Trump? Like Trump is going to change? This is what magical thinking gets you. When you believe in a talking snake, you believe an orangutan can transform into a statesman. I almost feel (4/34)
sorry for them, but you know what? This is what you get. Republicans spent years whipping their voters into sexist, xenophobic, self-righteous frenzy and now they're stuck with Donald Trump. It's like finally convincing your wife to have a threesome and then she brings home a guy. All right, we've got a great show. Ann Coulter, Dan Savage and Nick D'Alessio are here. And a little of that, we're sticking with the immensely talented Bryan Cranston is backstage. But first up, for the last 11 years, he has run one of the most successful drug treatment clinics in America. Please welcome the founder and CEO of the Cliffside Malibu Treatment Center and co-author of Ending Addiction for Good, Richard Tate. Richard, how are you, sir? Great to have you here. Thank you. I think you know why you're here. It's an intervention for me. No, I'm kidding. No, it's because there's an epidemic in America and it is about drug abuse and you know more about this than possibly anybody because you yourself (5/34)
were an addict. And then you started a treatment center. You're like the hair club for men guy, but with heroin. So tell us about your drug days and why you didn't find them fun. I did actually find them fun. Okay. Right. Drugs are fun. Drugs are fun. That's the problem. Right. No one admits that. Drugs are fun. Drugs are fun. Thank you for being here. But like anything else, it stops working after a certain period of time. Especially drugs. There's always this honeymoon period. That's right. Some drugs have like, liquor always works. Sure. Pot always works, but it does diminish. But there are some drugs like opiates we're going to get into, cocaine, where it's like you only get like three months. It's a balloon payment and then it falls right off the chart, right? Right. Well, the thing about the prescription drug epidemic. It's so bad. When Cliffside Malibu opened in 2005, about 20% of the people that came to us had a problem with prescription opiates. Today, it's 90%. Right. Right. (6/34)
Yeah. I mean, you know how I knew it was bad? I was watching the Super Bowl this year and there was a commercial for opioid-induced constipation. Right. I said, wow, because a Super Bowl commercial, the most expensive thing in the world. I said, if this is this widespread, that on the Super Bowl they're doing ads for people who can't shit because they're on... Right. No. And when we talk opiate, what are the actual names of the drugs we're talking about? Oxycontin? Oxycontin. Percocet. Percocet. Right. Codeine. Fentanyl. Right. And these constipate you, apparently. Yes. Right. But here's the thing to know. You've got the heroin over here that's enriching the drug cartels and then you've got all this litany of pills that are enriching the pharmaceutical companies. So what they say is, don't use this, use this. Same thing, by the way. Same thing. Just legal heroin. They always called Oxycontin hillbilly heroin. It certainly is. I mean, I've done heroin, I've done Oxycontin, and they're (7/34)
the same thing. Same thing. So I don't think I know. I know I know. I've done it. Right. Right. And then you get off that and you get on to heroin light, which is Suboxone. They call it harm reduction. And then... Like methadone? Absolutely. It's modern day methadone. Right. And then they say, oh, wait a minute, you're not going to be able to defecate, so you've got to use this pill. I actually took a picture of that commercial and put it on my Facebook. I was, it was blown away by it. Too much information, man. Okay. No, I'm kidding. It's the least of the information. But yeah, I mean, we see this on the news every day that, you know, white people are doing heroin. Right. And then when you read the background to this, it's because they started on the prescription drug pills because, you know, no one wants pain. And of course, who wants pain? Nobody wants pain. But then they can't afford it or they get cut off by their doctor, so what do they do? They go to the drug that, as you just (8/34)
said, is the same thing, which is heroin. Right. The thing about this, and I get your point and it's well taken, the thing about it is you can be black or white, rich or poor, straight or gay. This thing, this epidemic that we've got right now doesn't discriminate. Right. It's killing everybody. Prince was all of them and he was on it. Right. And look, I mean, look, people get very emotional when their rock stars die. I mean, I was a big Prince fan. We all were. Right. And we're not talking out of school. The autopsy report is not back yet, if there ever is going to be one, but it's pretty clear that he was on, I think it was Percocet, he had it on his body when they found him in his house. I've done a lot of drugs too, Doc. Let me tell you something. When you got the drugs on you in your house, it's one thing when you go out of the house. When you don't think you can make it to the next room, it's like, I don't know. That coffee table is far away. Let me just put these in my bathroom. (9/34)
That's a serious drug problem. So here's the important takeaway, right? We know that he was probably on those opiates for hip pain. We also have reports that he had sleep problems. Sleep medication with prescription opiates is a disaster. It's lethal. You can't take those two at the same time. Why did he die? Because the opiates slowly sort of suffocate you? They suppress respiration, is that right? Right, but they're not made, these opiates are not made for long term care. So the CDC just came out and offered up a report in the last, I think, 30 days. And what they said was, three days to seven days. That's it. The FDA comes out and says, we like what you just said. Why don't we get all these doctors together and start coaching them up and nip this epidemic in the bud? Sure. And what happened was, is the pharmaceutical industry, the lobby, came out and pushed back against it and said- Of course. Right? It's like all of a sudden they're the AMA lobby. Right? I mean, they were really (10/34)
concerned. Well, I mean, it's important to note that America's 5% of the world's population uses 75% of the prescription drugs in the world. That's a pretty amazing statistic. At least. And what's even more important is that right now you've got 27 million people in the country who are abusing these drugs, but only 2.5 million were able to get treatment. Every candidate, the president, the drugs czar, everybody thinks we need more treatment. And then there are these local communities, even in California, a liberal place like California, they just introduced a bill, AB 2403, that's going to decimate, I mean, take away thousands of treatment beds that we need. Let me ask you one last question that's a little broader about society. I mean, I was a kid in the 60s. The drugs were LSD and marijuana, psychedelic, stuff like that. Sure. You moved into cocaine and quaaludes, in the 90s it was ecstasy, and now it's opiates. What does the fact that opiates is the drug of choice say about our (11/34)
society now as opposed to our society in other decades? So I think that we are a society that is depressed. We're a depressive society. I don't know if it has to do with... Trump. It all comes back to Trump. Right, for sure. I don't know if it has to do with income inequality or the lack of opportunity or just life on life's terms because it can be hard sometimes, right? Capitalism, when you don't ameliorate it with some things, is pretty rough on people. There's a lot of losers in society and that's the way we want it here in America apparently, but yeah, I get your point. Well when you're depressed you have this type of learned helplessness, if you will, right? And when you take a painkiller, they call it painkillers for a reason, and it actually works better on emotional pain than it does on physical pain. So when you take the painkiller and you're depressed, you go, okay, I'm good, and you're hooked. All right. I'll see you after the show at the parking lot. All right. Thank you. I (12/34)
appreciate it. Let's meet our panel. Terrible things I say. I don't know why I do it. All right. Let's meet our panel. He is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and co-author of the Declaration of Independence. Nick Gillespie is back with us. Nick, how you doing? He writes the nationally syndicated column Savage Love and hosts the Savage Love cast podcast. Dan Savage is back. And she is the author of Adios America, the Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hell Hole. Ann Coulter is over here. Come on. Remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. All right. I'm going to break format tonight and start with a clip. This is from our overtime. We do overtime, which is something we do for the internet after the show. If people want to like, I don't know why they do this, turn off HBO and turn on your computer. But this is from the last time you were on the show. This is when there were many, many, many (13/34)
Republican presidential candidates still in the race. And here's the question that someone asked, and I relate it to you. And here's what happened. Okay. Here we are. In which Republican candidate has the best chance of winning the general election? Of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump. You gloats eat crow. You want to get your stock tips from me now? Yeah. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, a lot of people apparently have, because a lot of people said he wouldn't even win a primary. So last week, Rob Reiner, who I love, was here and we ended the show by saying, I think Hillary's going to win in a landslide. And I said, don't say that. So I'm giving you credit for that. And I also want to use you to scare liberals. But I ask you right now, can Trump win the general election? It's possible. I don't know. Hear that? You sound a lot less certain. No, I mean, what I would say about Trump is, and that's why I'm so glad it's Trump. I (14/34)
think he will do better than any other Republican could have as the results of this primary election show. He does represent not only the Republican Party, but large segments of the Democratic Party that has been being ignored, ignored. We have been asking for the wall. We've been asking for a decrease in immigration. And time after time, the people rise up, shut down amnesty, throw out Dave Brat beats Eric Cantor and they can't learn. Well, I think we know now the wall is popular. We have a time out on immigration. We already have one because our economy sucks worse than Mexico. So there's been net out migration of Mexicans. They're going back to Mexico. It's true. It's not true. It is. Our economy sucks worse than Mexico's? There has been a net out. Why don't you move there? Yeah. You know what, because I don't speak the language. He's wrong about that. Our economy is not worse than Mexico's, but we have one million fewer Mexican immigrants leaving now than we did seven years ago. (15/34)
That's what the government says. And the government says we have 11 million illegals. They're wrong about that too. Can the party win that is so split? I mean, George will is somebody I've been reading my whole life. I don't always agree with him, but sometimes he's persuasive. He's an amazing thinker. He hates me, by the way, which I love. I wouldn't have it any other way. Even more. Right. And he said that he is against Trump big time. He said this is a time for prudence, which demands the prevention of a Trump presidency. He says conservatives have two tasks. The first is to help him lose 50 states and keep Hillary to one term. How can you win when a party is split this much? The party is not split. Trump has gotten more votes than anyone else running in a Republican primary. You were talking about a few sore losers. Not a few. Now they know how I feel when McCain was running. Oh, and. So I hope they're enjoying it. By the way, I wasn't as much of a little bitch as George will is. (16/34)
But and Bobby Bobby Jindal says Donald Trump is a narcissist and he's an egomaniac. I wouldn't want his fingers on the nuclear codes, but he's going to vote for him. Right. And Peter King. Wait, Peter King, a guy with calls Trump a guy with no knowledge of what's going on, but he's going to vote for Rick Perry. Calls him a cancer on conservative. But he's going to vote for cancer. And he offered to be his running mate. Yeah. He offered to be cancer's running mate. Is this putting country first? OK, let's look at what Sanders said about Hillary. Point one. But point two, Trump is crushing the primaries. He got half a million more votes than Romney did in Florida. He got half a million more votes in the Republican primary in Florida than the Democrats got. Trump. He's the party. OK. Nobody is going to be like, oh, I'm with Jindal. Whatever Jindal wants, I'll do. I mean, these are like loser candidates. But what Trump is good at, and I dislike Trump because he is a perfect Republican. (17/34)
Every one of his points from the stupid wall to bombing countries, et cetera, he's just doing exactly what the Republicans have said that we should be doing for a long time. Not at all. Yes. What the base has been saying and they've been ignored. That's the difference. And that's the problem for the Republican Party because they've reached a point where they need to, like Bertolt Brecht said, they need to dissolve the base and elect a new one. And they can't. The problem is the base. They've been cranking up, gathering together every rube, racist, nut job sexist homophobe in the country, calling them Republicans. And finally, they voted for one of their own. But wait. But he's the less. He's the least. He could be the spokesman for Hillary Clinton with that line. But wait, 20. That's going to be a big hit for the American people who are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. 20 percent. The GOP base, which is overwhelmingly rubes, idiots, sexist, racists, are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. (18/34)
The American people are not going to overwhelmingly vote for Trump. I'm with you. I'm a Catholic. I'm not into jinxing things. So I'm not going to say Hillary is going to win in a landslide. But the American people are not the GOP base, which is what you're arguing. In Massachusetts, no I'm not. I'm saying in Massachusetts, 20,000 Democrats switched their registration to Republican to vote for Trump. In Pennsylvania, 60,000 Democrats switched their registration to vote for Trump. And how many of them were monkey-wrenching? This is the story. This is the country. Hillary is widely disliked. She's got like a 55 percent unfavorability rating. The minute she starts talking, that will go higher. She's awful. I think she's as bad as Trump in different ways. But what Trump has going for him, just as a tactician, he knows how, like he knows next week you've got another episode. And he's going to throw something out there and he's going to mix it up every time he was written off. Next week. (19/34)
Next hour. Yeah. Isn't it fun? It's not fun. It is fun. The odds are against him. He will run like the greatest, most entertaining campaign of all time. But this is not entertainment. This is supposed to be a country. It is important to be entertaining. You make serious points and you are a full-time comedian. But I'm not running for president. No, I know. I'm saying that. But people watch you. They start laughing. In the case of Trump, you're watching because he's fun and entertaining. And then you start thinking, wait, I agree with that. He has 30,000 people at his rallies. So what? You know, I could let loose a zoo animal and there would be people... I don't think you could. I couldn't? I don't think there would be 30,000 people coming out and cheering every time he talks about the wall that zoo animal would be on. Historically, a lot of people coming to your rallies can be problematic. Oh, like Obama? Not necessarily a big upside to that. Yeah, like Obama. Okay. Okay, but 20% of (20/34)
Republicans say they will vote for Hillary. And there are Republicans like Kelly Ayotte who say she will not endorse him, but she supports him, which is a little like saying, I'll fuck you, but I won't be seen in public with you. Paul Ryan, as I mentioned in the monologue, this is the titular head of the party. No, he isn't. He is so hated by the base. He's third in line to the president. He's not hated by the base. Yes, he is absolutely hated. He's the next Eric Cantor who was the highest member of leadership ever to lose in a prime area. What you are seeing here and quite possibly within Ann herself, it's the implosion of the Republican party. No, it isn't. It is breaking down. And by the way, as a libertarian, I can't wait for this to happen because the Republican party for years has always talked to libertarian line where you want small government this and that. And all they have done on every level, on personal liberties as well as wars and in terms of regulation. Yeah, they're (21/34)
not libertarian. No. They're terrible. So I want to see it implode and I hope neither of the two halves come back to life. And then I want to see the Democratic party. We're getting rid of the dead wood is all. Does it matter to you that Trump is going to crash the markets? Because let me tell you something, what the markets hate. They hate volatility. He is personification of volatility. They hate uncertainty. That's exactly who we are. He threatened today to default on the US debt. Exactly. They hate trade wars. They hate debt. He is all those things put together. Right. Who would, who but Donald Trump would threaten to default on our bonds? The one thing that the world buys because they are known to be the safest thing in the world. And he talks about them like he's negotiating with some guy who's putting in a stairway in a building of his. Because he doesn't know what they are. Right. He's the great businessman. He doesn't know anything about money. He thinks we can get rid of our (22/34)
debt in eight years. If you're born with enough money, you don't really have to know anything about it. That's so true. That's the hard proof. You know something about it. Well, he doesn't have 10 billion. That's bullshit you bought. Well, I don't really care, but he sure owns a lot of property that seems to be worth a lot of money. Anyway, I think you're misunderstanding what you're calling volatility. He's saying unpredictability in foreign policy. And yeah, okay, we're not going to tell ISIS what we're doing. We're going to negotiate tough with China. I don't think our foreign policy should be based on what Wall Street wants. Okay, but he's already in a feud with the Speaker of the House. This is not something that the market... No, he's not. He's been very nice. I think the problem is with the Speaker of the House. You also have to understand the Republicans now, the leadership, they have until the convention to kind of negotiate with him a little bit, they have no leverage. He's (23/34)
run the table. Zero. So they're going to be like, oh, you know, I'm holding off a little bit. Paul Ryan has already said, I'm not endorsing him yet. You know he's going to. You know, you don't want H.W. Bush or W. Bush at that convention if you want to win in the fall, just as a straight strategy. Right. So he's doing a good job. Okay, but we're past the part where we're talking about winning. Now we're talking about what he's going to do, what this great businessman is going to do. Okay, first we're going to deport 11 million people, so there will be a lot of openings for nannies and gardeners and short-stops. And their children. Right. Okay, that's number one. And we'll need a police force and the institution of a police state, unlike anything we've ever seen in this country, to round up... And then China, there's going to be a trade war, so a dildo at Walmart will be $200, but a small price to pay for making America great again. Okay, may I answer these? Yes, please do. Okay, number (24/34)
one, there's not going to be a police force. All he needs to do is enforce the law on the books. We're going to have a wall, he's going to tell ICE how to do their job. How do you enforce the law on the books without a police force to enforce the law on the books? We already have ICE, they're being stopped. Last week, ICE released illegal aliens convicted of murder in this country. How many hundreds of thousands of ICE agents will you have to hire to round up 11 million? You don't need to hire them, tell them they can do their jobs now. That is a real... These are laws on the book and I just don't understand... The only way that this happens is where every one of us at every time and every job hire, every job firing, every cross into a new thing, there's going to be a lockdown. There has to be. If our highest... Thank you, people are saying... If it's not... If it's... Can we back up? Why do we want to throw these 11 million people out of the country? They contribute more to our (25/34)
economy than they take out. They pay more in taxes than they receive in services. They're... They commit fewer crimes? Illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita. Native born, American born Americans, not native born Americans, are two and a half times more likely committed by a crime, two and a half times more likely to be in prison than illegal immigrants. Those are all false facts. They're not false facts, they're fact facts. Not only are they false facts, but even if they are true facts, then you need to go and elect people who will change the laws and say we have open borders. But your rationale for building this giant wall is bullshit. No, the rationale is he's the commander in chief, he protects the borders. Those are the laws. All he's saying is, I will be the only person who will enforce the law. And I know you all want to pay your maids even less, but most Americans... No, I want a path... Don't say, this is useful. You know what, I don't want a fucking path to (26/34)
citizenship, I just want to give them citizenship. Okay, all right. I have to swear on that. Well, that's why they're all low wage workers. That means our salaries go up, your maid salary goes down. A path to shut up now. So listen, we have a tradition here when a primary ends, and obviously Kasich and Ted Cruz said uncle this week, so it is Donald Trump. You get credit for predicting that. But every time this happens here on Real Time, our tradition is we then say a fond goodbye to the people who made it so memorable. And so please help us right now say goodbye to the people who made this possibly the most fucked up election ever. When I was a teenager, I almost stabbed someone. A lot of people who go into prison, go into prison straight, and when they come out, they're gay. Please clap. That's it. Thank you. Are you kicking me out the door? The party is going bat shit crazy. And you know what they say about men with small hands. I hope the president's watching tonight, because here's (27/34)
what I'd like to tell him. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House, and we're going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House. I hope the president's watching tonight, because here's what I'd like to tell him. We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House come this fall. Nobody knows me. It's Kasich. It rhymes with Basin. President of the United States, Ted. It's that basketball ring here in Indiana. It's the same height as it is in New York City and every other place in this country. His role is LBJ in the HBO film All the Way, premiering May 21st. Bryan Cranston is over there. I was giving out free Oxycontin. Well, they love you because you are a great thespian. I said thespian. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (28/34)
but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (29/34)
but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (30/34)
but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (31/34)
but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (32/34)
but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (33/34)
but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, (34/34)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #659: Eric Schlosser, Douglas Murray, Frank Bruni.
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Token: 9441
#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. It's exciting. It's very, well, it's Mother's Day Sunday, isn't that? Uh, yeah. Do the right thing. Pick up the phone and call your mom. Or if you're Gen Z, just go upstairs. Get the kids. They love it. I'll tell you. Uh, yeah, Mother's Day, a little different in Texas this year. It's called, if you don't go through there, you'll be in jail day. And Kristi Noem, her kids got her a lot. Everybody celebrates Mother's Day. They got her a lovely gift from a shoe store, her favorite brand, Hush Puppies. But let's get to what you came here to hear about. Stormy Daniels, this is the week in the Trump trial. We finally heard from Stormy Daniels. Trump posted, the whole world is watching. I hate to tell you, Dawn, not even your family is watching. But Stormy had a lot to get off her chest. I mean, she's serious. We heard all about her background. She grew up in Louisiana. She started dancing at the strip clubs (1/38)
at 18. Moved into adult films at 23. What in Louisiana they call the career fast track. I get Louisiana. I love Louisiana. But then we got to, you know, we had to hear about the actual sex with Donald Trump. And she said, well, it was not exactly consensual. It was unwanted. But she did not resist what most women call married sex. And now, of course, the looming question is, will Trump take the stand? And we know for sure he will not, because he said he would. That's how we know for sure he will not. But come on. Trump take the stand, he put his hand on the Bible, and he sizzled like a fajita. Here's the thing. Now, because the details from Stormy were so salacious, I mean, even the judge had to say to her, honey, TMI. You know, I mean, there's kids watching. But now Trump's team is pushing for a mistrial. Oh, and by the way, mistrial is also Trump's drag name. Oh, look. As mistrial. But you know, Trump has been cited 10 times for contempt of court, because he, you know, can't keep his (2/38)
mouth shut. And anybody else who 10 times, they would put you in jail. And I think he wants to go to jail, because it would make him a martyr. He's practically begging the judge to put him in jail. There's a switch. Lock me up. And I love this. Over on Fox News, Jesse Waters. Have you seen this guy? Interesting guy. We keep finding him over there. He said, if Trump does go to jail, he's going to work out a lot. And he'll come out ripped. You're right, I could just stop with that. But no, Jesse Waters said he's going to come out ripped with a jail bod. Oh, gosh. Fox election coverage. Your number one source for gay fan fiction. And there's a development in the presidential race I didn't see forthcoming. Bobby Kennedy. Right. So this revealed some medical news this week. He said he's fine to run. But full disclosure, a worm did eat his brain. I'm not making that up. No. I mean, not reason. This was like 15 years ago. And the worm is dead. The worm is dead, ladies and gentlemen. No (3/38)
worries about the worm. I think this says everything about the presidential race. The 70-year-old man with a worm-eaten brain is the youth candidate. And Kristi Noem now says we've got to shoot him because he has worms. All right. We've got a great show. We have Frank Bruni and Douglas Murray are here. But first up, he's a contributing writer at The Atlantic, author of the bestseller Fast Food Nation, and producer of the documentary Food, Ink, Too, which is available to stream now. Eric Schwasser, Eric. Big fan of Fast Food Nation, by the way. Love that book. How are you today? I'm good. Oh, yeah? Well, I want to ask you about, I wanted to have you here, basically, because we have a presidential election, which seems to be a lot about eggs. Yeah. This seems to be what the whole thing is turning on people. Eggs and worms. Well, I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. Well, let's go to that first, because it is on my mind. Not in my mind, I hope. But I mean, the bird flu is now in the (4/38)
milk. Could the worm, how do you get a worm in your brain? Let's just go right there. You know, you have to ask Bobby. I mean, I'm sorry that you couldn't talk to him about this when he was on your show. Maybe some bad sushi, maybe uncooked pork, but of all the Right, it is food. That's how you do it. Yeah, but of all the food borne problems we've got in the United States, worm in the brain is not in the top 5,000. We have avian influenza being spread by cows. And scientists had no idea until a few weeks ago that this influenza could even be in cows at all. How do they get from the birds to the cows? Well, that's a very good question. There are wild birds that overfly dairies. There's all this intermixture of viruses that's going on. And what's very concerning about it is right now the federal government is not allowed to go into these mega dairies that have 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 cows and test them for avian influenza. The federal government can't go onto these mega dairies and test (5/38)
the workers, many of whom are undocumented and quite fearful of if they test positive what's gonna happen to them. You have big ag and the big dairy companies preventing the CDC from investigating what could be a life-threatening illness eventually to people. And it's a perfect example of how the public health is being threatened by private interests. Yeah, I mean, of all the industries that own the government, I have to say pharmaceuticals very high up, but nobody higher than the food. Well, the food companies spend more on lobbying than the defense industry. Right. Yeah, and I feel like the big picture story from your book, your movie, is that this system really works for nobody. It's not good for the land. Right. It's certainly not good for the animals. Right. It's not good for the workers who work in the factory, even in fast food. And the farm workers. And it's not good for the consumer. It's not good for the person who eats this food. It's good for a handful of enormous (6/38)
corporations that have basically taken over our food supply in the last 40 years. That sounds crazy. That sounds conspiratorial. But when you go into a supermarket and you see thousands of different products, they're all being made by three or four different companies. And they hide behind these different brands. I mean, I just found out from this book that I read recently called Barons by Austin Freewick, a great book, that the biggest seller of coffee in the United States is a German company, not Starbucks. But they sell it under all these different brands. So you think that there's choice. But it's really an illusion of choice. And I feel like the problem at bottom is that food is too delicious. That's why people don't care, is that we're seduced by the food. The Trojan horse is in our stomach. So I mean, we have these. I mean, you mentioned it. Cigarettes are great, too, by the way. I used to smoke. I mean, I love them. But these food companies are carefully formulating these (7/38)
ultra-processed foods so that they taste really good and you want to eat them again and again and again. OK, that's a word I just came across recently from reading you. I've heard processed food. I've never heard ultra-processed. Is that something new, or is it just a word we hadn't heard before? And how is it different than just processed? It is new. So a processed food would be something like canned corn. They cook the corn. They add some salt and some water. It's in the can. You open it up. You eat it. That's just fine. An ultra-processed. That's fine? Yeah. I mean, frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, as long as they don't have all kinds of additives, that's healthy. I disagree vehemently. Well, vegetables have to be eaten fresh, or it's just shit. And corn is shit to begin with. No, but ideally, yes. But in terms of harming your health, it's not going to hurt you. What's going to hurt you? If you look at the label, and there are all these chemical names that you would never have (8/38)
in your kitchen, that's an ultra-processed food. And what they're doing is they're creating flavor additives at these factories, mainly in New Jersey, that you- Hey. Hey. No offense. There are some wonderful things that have come out of that state, but flavor additives may not be it. Trust me, there are worse smells than the food factory. I'm a native. I can say that. And in New Jersey, you can tell where you are on the New Jersey turnpike by what it smells like. Anyway, flavor additives, emulsifiers, all these artificial sweeteners that human beings have never consumed before. So we're basically guinea pigs for these chemical additives. And who knows what they're doing to our body? But now, increasingly, people are concerned that they have all kinds of bad health effects. They're giving it cancer. Obesity. Well, yes. And maybe all kinds of neurological problems, too. Right. Lots of problems. But I think there's a direct link between that, the prevalence of cancer, and the shit we eat. (9/38)
And the problem is when you eat these foods, I think, is that you're not getting nutrients. You're getting calories. So your body still wants more food, because it wants nutrients. Wants the good stuff. So you keep eating, you get fat. And here's where Ozempic comes in, which I know is the wonder drug, and we all love it. I don't see it that way. It's an enabler. It's an enabler to keep eating shitty food. It's this miracle where you can keep, or maybe you don't eat as much, but you don't have to improve the diet. So I don't think it's gonna make us healthier in the future. It might make you thinner. I don't think you're still not getting the nutrients that you should. Well, you know, we keep on creating problems with technology, and then looking for a new technology to solve them. So this ultra-processed food is absolutely linked to obesity. So people become obese, and then the pharmaceutical companies come up with a drug to help with obesity. Now, I'm not an expert on Ozempic, but I (10/38)
think that for people who are severely obese already, that what's the choice? Gastric band surgery, or terrible health problems, or taking this drug? We don't know what the long-term implications of being on this drug is gonna be, but the long-term implications of being obese are really bad. The people who probably shouldn't be injecting this drug are people who are maybe a little too vain, and are probably already slender, and wanna be even more slender. But for people who are really unhealthy because of their weight, it may be a good thing. But what we need to do is prevent children from becoming obese. And that means in schools, we need to be serving real foods, not these ultra-processed foods. Right now, in the American diet, the typical American child is getting 60 to 70% of their calories from ultra-processed food, and that's just a recipe for disaster. And also, there's no variety. You know, our diet needs variety. You know, when we were nomadic, we had a great variety. This is (11/38)
in that great book, Sapiens. He makes that great point that once we settle down and factory, well, not factory-farmed, but farmed originally, and then factory-farmed, we'd like three things. We'd cows, pigs, and chickens. So fucking sick of chickens. Right, and you know. I mean, poor chickens. You get them at breakfast, you get them at dinner, you get them, I mean, that's not good for the body. It's not good for the body. And as the co-producer of this film, and my friend Michael Pollan put it, we should be eating real food, not so much, mainly plants. And you know, the latest science is that you should be having 30 different types of plant in one week, because it's so much better to get your vitamins from real foods than to get them from supplements or additives, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So I remember at the very beginning of the COVID epidemic four years ago, the very first editorial I did here, well, I don't think it was here, it was in my backyard. That's right, because we were (12/38)
his tent home. But it was all about factory farming. It was about, look, because we thought at the time it came from the Wuhan wet market, and maybe it did. We don't know, it either came from the lab or the market. It shouldn't be a political issue, scientific issue, we still don't know. But certainly that didn't help. And my point was, as long as you keep torturing animals, we are going to be the ones to suffer. Even if you don't have compassion for animals. You're totally right. OK, so what's the future here? Because I worry that the next one is coming, or it's worse. The next one may be right now percolating in Texas, where this avian influenza was discovered in cows accidentally by a veterinarian. And you should look up the Secretary of Agriculture in Texas, who's this far right wing, conservative, I don't mind that he's conservative, conspiracy theorist who is basically blocking and trying to block the CDC from investigating this epidemic. Factory farms are a crime against nature. (13/38)
And I'm not a vegan, I'm not a vegetarian. These are sentient creatures that we're treating like industrial commodities. And Mother Nature is going to get back at us for us. All right, thank you. We needed to hear that message, I appreciate it. Great work as always, Eric. Eric Schlosser. All right, let's meet our panel. Hi guys, how are you two? All right, he is a columnist for the New York Post and bestselling author of the book, The War on the West. Douglas Murray's back with us. How you doing? And he's a contributing writer at the New York Times and author of the bestseller, The Age of Grievance. Frank Bruni, our returning champion. OK, so let's start off talking about Israel and Gaza because we finally have someone here on the show who was there. That's not something you find a lot in the media. I find a lot in the media these days. It's very hard to get into Gaza, very hard to know what's going on there. So I just want to ask you before we get to the politics of it all, because (14/38)
there's a lot of that this week, what does it look like there? Are people starving? And if they are, whose fault is that? First, I've been in Israel and Gaza for the last six months since the war began. I can't speak to whether anyone is starving. It's a bad situation in Gaza because Hamas started a war. And Israel is stuck in this very, very strange position of having to supply food to the area controlled by its enemy. And are they? Yes, they are. I mean, food trucks going through all the time. But I mean, of course the situation is terrible because the situation could end at any point if Hamas did what they've been asked to do repeatedly for six months, which is to give back the hostages. And now, you know, my view is that there's, and I've seen the conflict up close, and I still believe that, I mean, first of all, you can't just put out 80% of a fire. You have to put out the whole thing. You can't destroy 80% of Hamas. You can't not get the leader who masterminded the seventh, (15/38)
Sinwar. And that's all in Rafah. And the second thing is, you know, I don't think there's any law of war that says you can start a war, and then when you begin to lose it, you say, let's pretend we didn't start it. But that is always what Israel faces. Sure. I mean, it's very strange. A year before I was in Ukraine, I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they were retaking land from the Russians, and nobody was saying, oh, hold on, don't win too much. Everyone was egging them on. Every Western leader gets a shot of testosterone whenever they talk about the Ukrainian armed forces. And yet, the Israelis never allowed to win. Yeah. Very strange. What do we attribute that to? Is that anti-Semitism, would you say? Why they have a set of rules for them? I mean, they truly are the chosen people. They're chosen to not win the war. I agree. Yeah. I mean, for some reason, I think anti-Semitism is one of the reasons. Whenever Israel is involved in a conflict, the whole world goes bananas. And (16/38)
you can't even have a Eurovision song contest without it becoming an Israel-Gaza thing. It's crazy. Everyone gets obsessed with this conflict. And I think one reason is, by the way, is because a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans and people of all stripes, have said for a generation, until the Palestinian-Israeli issue is solved, there won't be peace in the Middle East. As if you solve the Palestinian-Israeli issue, and then the economy of Yemen starts to boom. And then the Iranian mullahs give women rights. And the Saudis become really keen on the gays. No. It's an issue, for sure. So Biden says he's going to stop giving armaments now to Israel. What do you think about that? Is that appropriate? I don't think it's going to please anybody, do you? No, of course not. I mean, he's obviously trying to, you know, he believes famously in a two-state solution, which is Minnesota and Michigan. And he's trying to please a few hundred thousand people in America. I don't think he's going (17/38)
to please anyone. But the fact that he gave a speech on Tuesday saying that he would always defend the right of the Jewish people to defend themselves, and later that day stopped arms shipments to Israel, suggests to me that, I mean, this is a problem. You can't, it's devastating if the end of this conflict comes about in another stalemate. If there's a stalemate at the end of this, Hamas is still in control in the Gaza, the war will happen again in two years' time, and again two years after that. And on and on for the rest of our lives. Please. I don't disagree with any of that. But you were asking about the ire at Israel and the criticism of Israel. I think there's one other thing going on, which is right now there's this paradigm that people like to apply to every situation. If you have more power, you're probably in the wrong. And if you have less, you're probably in the right. If you have more affluence, you're probably in the wrong. And if you have less, you're probably in the (18/38)
right. There are situations. And skin tone. Right, there are situations to which that paradigm applies. But the problem is we apply it indiscriminately, wantonly, regardless of the circumstances. And what has been so strange to me about all of this is almost, so October 7th happens, and from October 8th forward, people are blaming Israel. There was a ceasefire in place. We're looking for one now. There was one in place. Hamas crossed the border, invaded, and the savagery, the brutality, was incredible. We have to have a conversation now about the magnitude of the retaliation, about how many civilian casualties there are, about whether this is indiscriminate. But let us not forget how this began. And so much of the conversation seems to wipe October 7th off the plate. Absolutely. Finally, I couldn't agree more. I mean, remember about 10 years ago, Boko Haram stole 300 schoolchildren in Nigeria. Bring back our girls. Everyone, bring back our girls, everywhere. Where has been the (19/38)
celebrity response, the Hollywood response, the decent people response, any reasonable person response of bring back the Jewish children? Where is it? Well, it's not a Columbia. No. Here's a bulletin from academia, yes. Columbia in New York City announced Monday they are canceling their graduation. USC also canceled commencement here in Los Angeles. Emory University in Atlanta, changing the location of its ceremony. I don't know, I guess it's that dangerous. I mean, what can I tell you? These kids are such drama queens. I mean, the student editors at the Columbia Law Review, they said that they were the ones who agitated for canceling the finals. They said because the violence of the police clearing it wasn't violent, left them irrevocably shaken. Even if you were this fragile, would you say it out loud? I mean, you would? Well, today I would because we live in a culture where if you can portray yourself as the victim and as the person who's been taken advantage of, it somehow has (20/38)
cultural and political currency. So they're just doing what they see politicians do every day. But it's not just the fragility, it's the narcissism. I mean, who the hell is so badly brought up that they honestly believe that if they holler on a corner of a campus in America, the war cabinet in Israel is gonna stop? Like maybe Benjamin Netanyahu, whatever you think of him, does not take his lead from a 19-year-old student whose parents have remortgaged the house in order to send them to college to become stupid. But they're not thinking strategically, they're not thinking tactically. They like to holler, right? This is a moment where everyone likes to holler. And the message that people get from the way our Congress behaves, look at them, is that they who shout the loudest and use the most hyperbolic language and are the most provocative win the news cycle. Say hello to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, I mean, of course. There's no bigger whiny little bitch than you know who. Those are (21/38)
your words, not mine. My words, and I said them a million times, and I'll repeat them a million times. He's the winiest little bitch that ever was. She's an emblem of our time. I'm talking about Trump, is who I prefer. He's an emblem of our time. I mean, we shouldn't overestimate the power of politicians. I don't think that the average student looks to Congress for behavior, do they? I think they get permission. I don't think they look and say, that's what I want to be like, but I think a kind of culture is set, a kind of tone is set, in which confrontation is confused with conviction, in which being provocative is confused with being bold and brave. I think that is a culture that our politicians absolutely feed. So let me read a quote from, just in case people think that we're making this up or this isn't really prevalent, but it really is. And I thought of it because I've been reading your book and your book is about grievance, the age of grievance. Okay, this is a 20-year-old UCLA (22/38)
student. When you are a part of any oppressed group, I don't know what this person's background is, I assume she is a part of some group that she sees herself as oppressed, especially people that are experiencing direct state violence, okay? Kids call everything violence, so right there you lose any credibility with me because you think everything is violence. Like being part of the Pan-African diaspora within the United States, that certainly happened in the United States, there are shameful history, which is built on enslavement and dehumanization and degradation of African peoples that does politicize you. I'm just asking, does this reflect America in 2024? Who raises a child to feel this way about the country right now? I keep saying, can we just live in the year we're living in? Not whitewash the past, but live in the present. I mean, that someone feels, you're at UCLA, who's oppressing you? Let's not... Okay? The question isn't just who raises them to feel this way, it's who (23/38)
educates them to feel this way, right? If you look at curricula in a lot of secondary schools, probably the kind of secondary school that a lot of Ivy League students have been to, if you look at the curricula at a lot of elite schools, and I teach at one of them, there is the paradigm I spoke of before. There are all of these buzzwords, and that's what produces this in part. What are the other buzzwords? You mean like... Oppressed or oppressed, colonized or colonized, victim, victimizer, everything falls into this binary, and if you can claim the top victim status, then you win. Whereas, you know, in America, and in Britain and other countries in the West, we used to celebrate heroism and achievement. I still like those, but... But there's a... And by the way, and also, I mean, I think we should also realize that some people are, you know, they used to be said in the history of warfare that people fight the last war. You know, like in Iraq, you fight Vietnam, and in Vietnam, you fight (24/38)
Korea, and so on. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of wars go wrong. I'd argue also that people are fighting the last culture war. I mean, a lot of people would just love the clarity of 1968. You know, and they honestly believe that they would be the heroes, whereas, of course, they'd just most likely be like everyone else and not particularly interested. Well, you've written recently about Alan Bloom, right? Yeah, of course. That's the late 80s, early 90s. You had a show called Politically Incorrect, right? If you go back, and I do in the book, if you go back and you look at the late 80s and the early 90s, it's the same conversation we're having now, just different words. So I was watching a video of Robert Bork the other day from, I think, the early 1990s, and he was talking about radical egalitarianism. He was inveighing against it. That's just wokeness with more syllables, right? So the more things change, the more they remain the same. Also, one of the very interesting things (25/38)
about that with Bork, Bloom, and others is that they diagnose, people diagnosed this in the 1980s, as you know, and we've known the problems that are going on, this victimhood culture. We've known this for 40 years now, and everyone's been great at diagnosing it, but we haven't solved it. We haven't reversed it. It's just got worse. Well, I mean, we have an ex-president, maybe to be a next president, who's the victim in chief, right, whose entire political currency is making himself the world's biggest victim of the deep state of those awful elites, of Democrats, of everyone, right? He won election because people saw themselves in him, and he encouraged that, and he said, I am like, I'm a symbol of your victimization. Vote for me, and it is your revenge against the people who oppress you, and he said it more bluntly than ever this cycle. He said, I am your retribution. I think those are some of the most meaningful words we've heard in a long time. And that's why I think he wants to be (26/38)
sent to jail for a night. Well, I don't know that he wants to use the jail toilet. I don't know. No, I mean, like, that's got to be in his head. We'll talk about that in a minute, but I did mention graduation. Most of the colleges are still having graduation, but it's a little different this year. Now, every year, as a custom on the show, we show the hats, you know, when kids graduate. They're some of the real ones that they have. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Hire me. On to the next adventure. This year, they're a little different. Would you like to see some of that? OK. I thought you would. I thought you would. Um, like, hide your weed, Mom and Dad. I'm coming home. I'm Gen Z, and I might possibly vote. Love to my family, death to America. Not anti-Semitic. I just hate Jews. Oh, wow. It's a very different year. Thanks for the checks, Mr. Gates. The job I haven't started yet already sucks. I quit. They said I couldn't do it, and that's why I cheated. Ready to cancel speakers in the real world (27/38)
from the river to my parents' basement. And excited to see what I'll complain about next. All right. So let's talk about, OK, I know I talk about this a lot on this show, but I have to do it again. I did it last week. I tore Merrick Garland a new asshole because, I mean, the Democrats have had four years to put Trump on trial, and it is all just going away. They blew it at every turn. Here's what's happened this week. Georgia, that one, OK, they're going to take up Trump's argument about Fannie Willis. Now, she's the prosecutor. She's having an affair with the guy she hired. I mean, it's not really relevant to the case, but they left an opening. And now that one's going to be delayed. The stolen documents one, that's never going to happen because that's a Trumpy judge down there. So it's Stormy or bust. I saw what you did there. It just comes out. I'm not trying. If this one doesn't work, and she's a bad witness, because let me show you a little video. This is when I had Stormy on in (28/38)
I mean, a porn star is used to having sex with people she does not know. That's the job. It's kind of like Stormy Bob. Bob Stormy, fuck. Action, and let's go, and we're losing the light. So I just think she's not a good witness. No, yesterday wasn't a good day for her in court. She wasn't a good witness. She has contradicted things she's said in the past. And everyone who is hanging on the hope of Stormy Daniels being the way to get Trump in prison is going to have another disappointment coming, I think. This feels to me as a kind of last chance, as you say, for the people who it's clear to a lot of the country think, let's say, that there is just an aim to make sure that Donald Trump is not on the ballot later this year. And it'll be done anyway. But as you say, to end up with a Stormy Daniels case as the main hope is, if I was the main person wanting to get Trump in prison, that would not be the thing I would want to hang this on. I worry about another aspect of her testimony, which (30/38)
is the detail, the gratuitous detail. I keep having flashbacks to Lewinsky Clinton, right? And one of the reasons I think Bill Clinton was able to survive that whole Monica Lewinsky chapter was because Ken Starr and his Republican pursuers were so lascivious and overzealous. I mean, we saw the details of the Starr Report are nothing. I mean, what she said on the witness stand is nothing compared to that. I don't think that- You know who wrote that? What? You know who wrote that? The Starr Report? Brett Kavanaugh. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's the one who wrote all about- That's Justice Kavanaugh to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. (31/38)
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This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #405 (Originally aired 09/30/16).
Words: 7628
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill maw Maybe losing it tonight. All I can say to start this show is welcome to another week of yes. This is really happening. I Don't know if you saw what happened this morning But Donald Trump a 70 year old man and father of five when apeshit on Twitter between 320 and 530 in the morning slut-shaming Miss Universe 1996 that's the true part Remember Hillary's ad from 2008. Who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 a.m. How about someone who's not already enraged in a hissy fit? How about Getting ahead of myself, let me go back to the beginning America used to be a country no Not that far. Let's just go back to Monday night Did you see the debate? Okay the debate interesting debate Hillary made her case for being president that she has the experience and the temperament to be the commander-in-chief Donald Trump made his case. I hate Rosie O'Donnell, but she started it is This really happening Trump (1/39)
interrupted her 51 times at one point. She had to say mommy's talking Mommy He actually had a meltdown Donald Trump had a meltdown about what a great temperament he has It was like watching someone carve. I'm not a psycho into their Process it anymore and even though all the polls say that Hillary won the debate. No, he won He won and if and if he didn't win totally not his fault the moderator asked the wrong questions He had a bad microphone the whole system is rigged. She had the questions beforehand the Sun was in my eyes The coke wore off I mean even Ryan Lochte was like stop with the bullshit about being wrong You whiny little bitch I mean Well, I don't know Hillary got a big bump after the debate and Trump looked like he did a big bump before the debate I'm Hearing I don't know it for a fact. I hope it's not true. A lot of people are saying it Lot of people are saying it. That's all I know. I hope it's not true. Well, you know, he was sniffing a lot It was either that or he's (2/39)
allergic to facts. I think it may be the case Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his nose Well, I only say that because I mean he came out Absolutely manic the first half-hour charging like a rapid weasel sniffling cottonmouth kept drinking rambling like the guy you can't get out of your apartment and Most tellingly 30 minutes in crashed. Did you notice that? Ironically the guy who wants to build the wall hit a wall Which Which was actually the best part of the whole night because he went after Hillary on stamina Stamina she was Bruce Springsteen just getting warmed up after 90 minutes He was fat Elvis forgetting the lyrics to are you lonesome tonight? Which brings me back to Miss Universe? With what I was starting with. Yes, so he went after the stamina thing So she said you know what? This is really about what you were talking about with women for years looks and he said in night She said you called Miss Universe 1996 Miss Piggy Okay, that was Monday here it is Friday (3/39)
morning and this nincompoop is still Obsessed with it. He was tweeting all night about Miss 1996 she's disgusting imploring people to check out her sex tape Yes Donald Trump Major party nominee who wants to be the president of the United States is urging the American public to check out a sex tape That doesn't exist from a Venezuelan reality show Republicans out there. Thank you so much for this Thank you so much. You must be so fucking proud That your candidate finally takes a concrete position on something and it's no fat chicks And This is how Trump treats? Pageant contestants imagine how he treats poor Melania. She knows six words and two of them are cupcake bad great show Steve Moore Hamby is here are here and it'll be speaking with my good friend. Sarah Silverman's back But first up he is an oscar-winning actor Wow on our show Some actor a lot of people would say the best actor of his generation He narrates the new audiobook by first-time author papi pariah called Bob, honey Who (4/39)
just do stuff it's available for free can't beat that price at audible.com He always runs toward the fire Sean Penn All right now Sean let's get right to what people are thinking why are you plugging someone else's book Well, this is a book that came to me in a kind of mysterious way It was somebody I had met one time and I knew a lot right serious thing mysterious things somebody had met once in 1979 and who had through a longer story had the address of my mother and Then sometime in early May this year I got a manuscript and Connected to some lawyers in the Cayman Islands and so on and so forth and I read this book That he wanted. I think I was the only quote unquote celebrity He'd ever met and so after reading the book he thought of this guy He met in 1979 who then realized had become it was the guy he'd met after I started becoming a you're his surrogate In a sense he can't get this book sold Well, I guess this was the idea and so I read it and what I was reading was In essence the (5/39)
book I would have written if I was writing a book I just felt like finally somebody but you're a great writer. You could write a book. Oh, I couldn't write this book This is this is the book. What is it? Is it a memoir? Is it a novel? He calls it in memoir What well? My suspicion is that much of what's in it might be true but exposed highly illegal activities On his part and so he's made it a fiction. Oh, I see Ramon, a clay Exactly. Okay. So why did it move you so much? Well, here's the thing. You know what and I was watching your monologue. It's it's a toy you had to you were standing right there It was not a choice but yeah, but I could have tuned it out. Yeah, you could have The earbuds in that would it was so often at this time when one's watching the news you just feel like the reporter Or the pundit should not be continuing to speak but actually running to pull the fire alarm And and and say, you know, what the hell is happening here. So this book By the time I got to the end of (6/39)
it I realized that almost everything that his His character Bob Honey is Doing and believing and and and the thought process Was in sync with what I thought but I was only I wasn't hearing it on the news I was hearing it from a character who is clearly a sociopath and I thought well when the sociopaths are making more sense Than anything we're seeing in mainstream news media it's time to Hear them out and heal it. Well, that could be a defense for Trump. I mean, there's a sociopath Yeah, and he's a kind of a character in the book, but that's a 12 year old sociopath We're on the side of the mature sociopaths, okay So, um, so I read it also, I mean I was fascinated by it first of all, it's short which I love Yeah, I like that too. No, I do. I mean who has time anymore books are slow and long It is it is beautifully written and and it's sort of a fever dream I'm not sure I got all of it, but you know, you're right He's a guy who seems to be in an intelligence agency, right was at some (7/39)
point he kills people so, you know He's he's he's as you say maybe a sociopath, but he has a moral code. Oh, yes, I think he has a clear moral code What is that? How would you describe that? Well in in he He has a clear moral code that has to do with something that we've always had trouble with in terms of Morality, which is the principle of triage Triage triage, but I think you treat first what you treat first and also I think that what's also Unique about the character is that for example, he talks about words being as lethal as a gun But nobody needs a background check for the words. He talks about not having that understanding that if we truly want to see less gun violence then some Legitimate controls may be in place But he's not sure in the greater advertising environment if people genuinely want to stop seeing gun violence There's a kind of exploration of the chaotic part of what's happening in a culture where now we're seeing people who I mean the for example The Trump voters (8/39)
and quite clearly one of the characters in the book is is Donald Trump The young voters I think in the pappy pariah scheme of it or in his character Bob Honey scheme is Those voters are one and one of two categories They are either the highly uninformed and you could use a less polite word for some of them deplorables. Yeah And I think it was asked yeah, and you're also looking at a country of people who are truly unwittingly willing to Dismiss their love for their children to engage in a kind of a political temper tantrum and to to You know as he says in the book look at me. I'm a pisser on a tree Ouch goes the human heart. And so I think that we're in that time now and I read that read to read this book And also the title got me Bob Honey who just do stuff because that's what it's about. He just do stuff and And you do stuff you do a lot of stuff I mean I said in your intro you run toward the fire, you know, you always do that You go where it seems like it's most dangerous I mean I (9/39)
could read a list of countries that you've gone to and not and sometimes it's our country Katrina You went there we saw you in the rowboat. You went to Haiti you went to Cuba. You went to Venezuela Iran Iraq What's wrong with you? Why Do you? Always run toward the danger. It's it an adrenaline thing Sean I think we can't count on Bill Maher alone to tell us the truth and I got nowhere else to go So yeah, I you know when I need a break from you I go and find out there because you're not gonna get it. I'm not coming with you. You know me I'm not no, I don't I don't have that kind of courage. I mean, you know, it's a physical courage. It's just a verbal courage well, I think it's also I have a Certain inability to focus unless I have a kind of cultural reference, you know with my own Experience there and once I I can read the book about it once I've been there and seen it, right? I have a tough time doing it in reverse. Okay, so this book you we're talking about you're gonna be doing a (10/39)
reading at black Well, yeah, that right. What is that the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art? No, I'm that's over six Yeah, it's October tomorrow, please I can only take one more fucking month of this life Sean, thank you for being here He's snapchats head of news where he holds good luck America what a perfect title for this show Peter Hamby. Hi Peter. Hey She is the CNN political commentator and CEO of impact strategies Angela rye is back with us And he's one of our longtime friends here on this panel He's a Trump economic advisor and co-author of fueling freedom exposing the mad war on energy Steve Moore back with us Steve Okay There is no overtime tonight because I am actually on stage at the Mirage in Vegas How's that gonna happen tonight at 10 o'clock you going on the truck? Not the Trump jet All right, so I mentioned I'm There's only a month left. I'm about to lose it Seriously, I just have one question for you Steve because I know you're a Trump supporter. Have you lost (11/39)
your goddamn mind? What tell me He's brave enough to be here in the Lions then but seriously What did you think when you saw today when you what time you get up in the morning early? I was in Denver, so I don't I didn't see You saw that what Trump was doing between 3 20 and 5 30 when people should be sleeping Even I'm sleeping at that hour and he is just saying check out this sex tape You really think this person should be the president of the United States. I'm frustrated you pause I am frustrated because we have such huge problems in this country right now and look you look at the debate on Monday I mean Trump look Trump got off track and a lot of things but when I think everybody would agree when it came To the economy he killed Hillary right? I mean Hillary's trying to defend We want to cut taxes she wants to raise them This week we had a not even rich people agree Who does working-class people what Trump is not that Trump is not the candidate the rich he is the class Candidate of (12/39)
the working class. That's where he's getting His money no, no, wait a second. Trump is killing it with small donors. Let's get the facts on Hillary's doing killing Yeah, he should have been better than any Republican ever did better than Hillary He should have been raising money online a year ago because he would be rolling in dough now. What's really interesting I'd be interested in your opinion on this He is almost to the left of Bernie Sanders on trade or the way he talks about he's completely redefined Republican economic dogma it's remarkable and it's had a deep appeal Especially in places like Ohio where he's cutting into Hillary's lead in counties, especially Northeast Ohio that Barack Obama won by 30 points The 90s though was Like applauding Bill Clinton and what he was doing with the economy because he said in the 90s that he was very successful I wish he might be the candidate for the working class, but that's because they're deceived So as soon as they find out They've seen (13/39)
the worst recovery Only the top 20% have made gains in the way I must fucking stop you I Again I hear this all the time from Trump at the debate from other Republicans. I heard this fucking moron Larry Kudlow One of my best friends. I'm sure he is Really everyone I said fucking idiot tonight is gonna I know I say that too much but it's true So you're gonna defend this economy wait Yes Go to Pennsylvania, Ohio You can talk to voters who are misinformed Let me read the facts from the Census Bureau, all right, okay Very Big news a couple of weeks ago It destroyed a lot of talking points that Republicans have had for years Like all the wealth is going to the top percent the middle class is stuck in 2015 middle-class incomes had their fastest increase ever recorded the median family got a $3,000 raise the highest income growth was among the poorest 10% poverty had its deepest decline since 1968 in 2015 both the poor and the middle class made greater gains percentage-wise than the rich Larry (14/39)
Kudlow said folks are not happy. They want to change the one thing that has been tried We had the Obama stimulus package. We had all the infrastructure spending. It didn't work It did work. We have 40 million people in poverty today. We had with the average American bill you talk We didn't make things perfect. Yeah, 40 million people in poverty is not making 40 million people in poverty and the average American worker over the last ten years since 2007 has not had a pay raise and your candidate doesn't want to raise their wages either. Yes, it does We want to get control of the border. We want to cut taxes I know you're really clear. I'm really excited. He's okay. This is not the Monday night debate and I'm not Hillary Clinton So I'm just being very clear with you. I have something to say and I need you to let me talk When your candidate was asked whether or not he wanted to raise the minimum wage He initially said no now he wants a slight increase if you want to talk about ways to (15/39)
raise the minimum We want to let me be in ways. We want to raise the minute We want to raise wages for middle-class for this is gonna be a great conversation Multiple independent analysts let her get her okay finish your thought. It's fine Peter. Go ahead No, no finish your thought and then that the only point that I'm raising here is your candidate has deceived His voter base. He has been Really? Donald Trump on Monday and this is what he did. He interrupted Hillary 29 times. I think you've interrupted me 53 So my point is very simple. He's deceived his base because they're angry. They need someone to blame Unfortunately, this guy who's been sued 82 times alone Just in federal court has been sued because he's taken advantage of the very people who he says he's setting out to help small business owners who he said Allowed the services and the goods to be provided they didn't do their jobs He knows that they were gonna sue him and would run out of money He takes advantage of the people (16/39)
who are in his basement What fascinates me is that The Republican establishment Wall Street Journal readers the green eyeshade class of the Republican Party in Washington, which has always been obsessed with managing the debt and policy You know independent analysts have said that Trump's tax cuts would drive up the debt Significantly higher Republican senators, you're gonna lecture me on the debt when Donald and when Barack Obama doubled the debt in eight years Protests when Barack Obama raised the debt. All right buy more money than every president George Washington by Republicans I Ask you this why? How come he should be the hero of big business the top 100 fortune 500 companies None of them will endorse him. Why aren't these leaders backing him? He's giving them a giant tax cut You know why because they know he's gonna crash the economy because in the billionaire boys club, they know he's a crook He doesn't pay his bills He's gonna default on the debt if he was elected in November (17/39)
the economy would crash before he took office We saw we saw large companies Who were associated with Trump's brands and pageants run screaming from him during the primaries one to the business community chamber of commerce class they value stability and Trump is deeply unpredictable well Hillary Hillary wants to invest in infrastructure Look you can you can question raising tax plans with business We had $200 billion on infrastructure, we still got the worst infrastructure what happened all that money immigration reform Spending money on roads and bridges all I'm answering bills question, which is the Chamber of Commerce community the centrist business class Values those things. I know what happened to that money because I live on a street where it was fixed. Okay, so Of course there are still potholes and there is We missed all that money. Here's the point I would make to you Of course big businesses for Hillary Clinton big businesses for Hillary big labor Special interest groups in (18/39)
Washington are for Hillary Clinton, of course, they are because Donald Trump is Funny is she is Macy's doesn't even want anything to do with the Trump tie like that's the funny part. So the reality Doesn't have any goodwill left with fortune 1000. Oh, let me ask you this question How many jobs has Hillary Clinton ever ever created? She was not Point she knows nothing about your point Right, she's right she's been in power. No, you're right. You're right. You were right. She has been in power Politicians She's been a professional politician for the last 20 years Ronald Reagan your like She has been a professional politician Donald Trump is a businessman. We need Off of politics, okay No, Donald Trump got got rich by creating businesses Hillary and Bill Clinton got rich off of power And he also got rich by stealing from small businesses. I made that He also steals from his own charity then there's that Come on oh my god, you're gonna say that Donald Trump is stealing from his yes The (19/39)
stupidest talking point the media falls for that there's something shady about the Clinton Foundation All the money I was supposed to go to Haiti 88% of what they take There is no pay for play because she was never paid Before this election, you know who else supported the Clinton Foundation Donald Trump he gave He has not given a dime to his own Trump foundation since 2008 and then he gives money people give the money to the Trump Foundation He writes a check people think oh, it's from Donald Trump It's not from him and he's taking their money to buy shit for himself Yeah, the reason why people won't do business with him and same reason why they want to they don't want to do business in Russia It's shady. You don't know what's gonna happen She is truly the Napoleon of crime but It's interesting that five that I count so far very conservative newspapers who have not supported endorsed a Democrat for a long time the Arizona Republic since 1896 Cincinnati Enquirer 1916 Dallas Morning (20/39)
News 1940 the Houston Chronicle the San Diego Union Tribune never support the demo they are doing it Magazine USA Today yeah has never endorsed they still don't but they said don't vote for this one, right? And then magazines Rolling Stone The Advocate Wired have come out for Hillary Rolling Stone who would have ever thought that Okay, but here but just show that just to show that the equal time There are some lesser-known magazines that have come out for Donald Trump. Would you like to see? For example for Donald Trump car and liar They say mr. Trump owns lots of cars and he lies his ass off what's not to like Unpopular science is for Donald They rave you can make up practically anything about climate change and this shithead will retweet it Is the obvious choice Wine aficionado they say you don't see this many bitches at the dog show American sociopath Their endorsement reads while we can't sense or process normal human emotion something about this Trump family just feels right Good (21/39)
housekeeper magazine We hardly endorse in your Trump because if we don't he'll have us deported Modern mail-order bride magazine They say we've done business with this man and the check clears This magazine translates as highlights for child laborers And they say we support the orange American who's whose name we sew on the neck Barrett fancy magazine says Oh Make him one of us, but what's on his head most certainly does all right He'll be appearing at the Sanger Theatre in New Orleans on October 16th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas October 21st, Sarah Silverman Look at you playing Vegas the MGM great. I am so proud. I'm not taking a jet there tonight But but I'm very proud of you come on We thought we worked hard and we played by the rules you taught me how to exfoliate with the dry brush before my shower I mean it was like we're on the bet it was you you bullied me into her in a basketball court You're like you don't exfoliate with the dry brush before you shower This is the honk you (22/39)
plan to come out here with no I don't know what the drug yeah, I've done it all I don't know. I just saw you and I remembered it because I think of you every time I do it Let's talk politics That's right isn't he brave yeah, so you're for Trump right all right Trump is the product of a long tradition of pointing at other people and accusing them of doing what you're doing and that's You know here you're a You know that ever since fuck it. Oh, what's upon this? No, it's a good thing ever since you were at the the Democratic Convention and you've pointed at the Bernie people and said you're being ridiculous, and I thought it was wonderful and But but is that do you wear the crown heavily now that you've been anointed as a Lead us in our political thinking Yeah, of course Yeah, no, I don't know I mean there's no one more Bernie than me. I'm Inspired every day by Bernie Sanders the good news is People who change the world are almost never the president you know so we don't have them for (23/39)
four years We have them forever is that so bad to settle for well actually people The The president is someone who changes the world yes We remember it throughout history that have changed our world are almost never the president that's completely not true And I'm the very the very reason we're so afraid of Trump is because that it is true that the oh I see your line of thinking, but I'm thinking President Martin Luther King you know some of those people changed the world But Martin Luther King didn't send troops into the south to make sure that the black people could go to college Are you sure President Kennedy did that because of president? Bernie needs an ally in office. That's right. That's why I don't understand these Bernie or bust people you know I don't know what their long game is. I don't know what their perfect dream scenario is I earnestly am asking Or am I being obtuse no you but it seems that it would be good to have an ally To talk to them because what are you 28 29 now? (24/39)
You're almost That's a big funny joke You're a millennial and one with stamina Now let me read that the polls here on Clinton 18 to 34 people Clinton 31% uh-huh Trump 26 Gary Johnson 29% Gary Johnson Gary Johnson, Gary Johnson listen is a fucking idiot I Like him he's a nice guy, but he's another in my basket of fucking idiots And I I voted and I believe you did in 2000 for Ralph Nader. Yes, but this is not He wasn't right and he wasn't an idiot, but he also wasn't gonna win and it was a mistake But our conscience and I admitted it. Yeah, it was a mistake okay, but Gary Johnson Can I show you a little we put a little montage of Gary? Just to remind and we thought thought he was a cool guy. You know he smokes pot. He was the pot He's not making pot look good Right pot is cool pot is cool, but it doesn't make you know what's also cool reading yeah Here's a little bit of Gary Johnson for those thinking of voting for him a Lepo and what is a leppo a leppo? Not knowing that there's a city (25/39)
in between The the the two forces who's your favorite foreign leader? Who's my favorite anybody pick any leader? I'm having a brain Box I think I could sign up there for the whole today Really and By the way for the people 29% 18 to 34 who I assume a lot of them were Bernie people right okay? Here's some minimum wage Hillary's with Bernie not Gary Johnson believes in no minimum wage TPP he's for that Hillary and Bernie are against it Citizens United All the money you want in politic Gun control once none of that financial regulation universal health care he's from rupees for repealing Obamacare free college He's against that he's for nothing that you fucking people want No one's even misinforming them about him like they are would like with your friend. You know it's like people Yeah Yeah, no, that's true What you were saying was exactly right people vote because they're totally misinformed and that is a real thing You know there's something called Brexit that people voted for totally (26/39)
against their best Self-government They promised they had huge signs on the sides of buses that said you know 325 million dollars go to the EU that we could could be going to our health care They had no intention and said they had no intention when spread said was voted through then people are googling What brexit is after they voted in Gary John? Don't show my neck my neck goes crazy when I have passion you know you know You know what would help that a lot exfoliating Gary Johnson is clearly unfit to be president vote exasperates me about Gary Johnson not knowing these things and The collective exasperation about it is that neither does Donald Trump and the right is that a year ago? Right people should be giving Donald Trump pop quizzes Name me five countries in NATO right what's the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah? How does a bill become a law? He's on serious Way the professor People who do book learning yes, it's not you know what somebody who knows how to create jobs You're (27/39)
just you don't have enough jobs Bill you know it's not when you count the field when you count the people who? Drive out of the workforce when you count people who have jobs because of Obamacare so the real unemployment rate this country When the Democrats know that when a Democrat is president. We don't count the stats from the we have Artisan government record number of people drop out of the workforce But you know what else you know that here's the bigger problem to argue that point. Here's the bigger problem his candidate Also counts students who are in high school and who are in college and you count them and then you say black people's Unemployment is at 51% lies. We are also in school, so that's the other problem Black Americans have the biggest decline of income under Barack Obama of any group I'm not even anything black Americans are doing well today What I'm not gonna allow you all to continue to do is to make it seem like I walk out my door There's gunfire immediately I'm (28/39)
not gonna let you say I walk out the door and I can't read your candidate can't read I walk out the door I can't afford like you're just not gonna do it like we do have challenges in our community But what are the big one of the Democrats done for your community? You got no jobs. You've got no So what I'm gonna tell you is very clearly and I say this all the time and hopefully this will bless your life and change Racism is a bipartisan problem. This isn't about what Democrats did or did not do Republicans have done this Congratulations run for Chicago 60 years. You've got 3,000 And where did the guns come from and it's so funny The stop-and-fist policy Is against that because This I didn't want this show to turn into ones where everyone's screaming and you're anybody says my fault my fault I started screaming What we talking about? Okay, but let's let's go to the point of false equivalency because I think The very relevant to what you're talking about and I have one more fucking idiot (29/39)
I want to get Tweeted he's a fucking idiot and he is Colin Kaepernick. I'm for Yeah, but not for the same room, okay, yes, he is he's a fucking idiot I'm for his protest I'm taking the knee but here's what he says on race You have Hillary who was called black teens or black kids super predators and you have Donald Trump who's openly racist This is the false equivalency. He says both are proven liars and it almost seems like they're trying to debate who's less racist Okay, they're not both proven liars Politico has put a fact that's like this. Okay. She lies less than most politicians He lies more than anyone they've ever seen And they're not both Racists yeah, Donald Trump is a racist Hillary Clinton works her whole life for the opposite. Okay the work She's been a public servant for almost three decades. He is not Have created a situation On the street where we have no good jobs in this country. I was down Crime is down. Oh, yeah You pick the one place Ten percent last it's not gonna (30/39)
be unless you're trying to horn in on someone's territory Steve What has he done I think he's one of the greatest businesses Not gonna let you finish isn't being present I mean the president should create jobs there should be economic growth but in presence about more than yes That the borders are out of control His whole campaign hangs on this myth that things are so desperate in this country Which they are not that we need this giant asshole Like the Magnificent Seven and save the town Out of Los Angeles get out of security I get out of Los Angeles every weekend go to places like your, Pennsylvania There are people hurting in the Rust Belt there is a sense of there's a sense of economic stagnation However, it is a mythology that in the Midwest outside of New York in LA that everything is just a wasteland Ohio has a humming to people modern economy with with investments in solar and technology older You would think out it from the shale hell gas revolution not tell that's a governor (31/39)
case it Think by listening to Trump and all these Republicans that America is a place where there is always I Don't know I thought I'm talking to these voters they are angry though They're misinformed not only are they missin for but they're racist they're xenophobes, I mean Much more than that That's a good winning message for the Democrats people are still there Well, I'm saying I'm saying that you have at least half of your supporters that are in the basket of Really would like I need you to let me finish My point is not only are they misinformed there are voters who are angry in many instances human beings are angry Then there's that but I think at the end of the day you have a situation where people need someone to blame There are folks in your camp who have chosen to blame Barack Obama because he's not a US citizen There are folks in your camp who have chosen to blame black people because we're takers Paul Ryan Yeah, he apologized for it, but there are supporters who still (32/39)
believe that that is the problem all right We got to move to new rules everybody There are my facebook friends have to stop posting this picture of Michelle Obama Hugging George Bush like a lion made friends with a pony She's not hugging him because she likes him she smelled gin on his breath again, and she's stopping him from dancing Okay this one addresses the point we were just discussing about people new rule if you're this dumb prepared with an explanation from President Obama, and we never got one from him did we what does he have to explain? Where he was born just show his birth certificate I have mine at home at my safety did show it no Then you can't have a dog Because it's smarter than you and that's not how this whole master petting is supposed to work Or maybe I'm confused and the dog rescued you from a box behind the seven Neural the 21 year old Australian man who was just bitten by a poisonous spider on his penis For the second time this year Must be told that there are (33/39)
easier ways to get people to suck it Neural President Obama must admit that this this look doesn't say I have deep respect for Native American culture and traditions It says yes Republicans now. I am just fucking with you Neural Parisians must stop thinking they're so enlightened now that Paris has approved a clothing-free zone within its city limits here in America Hundreds of cities already have clothing-free zones. They're called Walmarts And finally new rule and this one's for Trump voters if you think you hate the establishment now Wait until he wins and the Trump surrogates that basket of inexplicable He sends out every day to speak for him Become the establishment wait until Steve Cortez and Katrina Pearson and Chris Christie and Ama Rosa are Trundling down the corridors of power bumping into the walls. We're thinking of giving these people the reins of power I wouldn't put them on the bus without asking the driver to make sure they don't miss their stop In examining all of (34/39)
Donald Trump's surrogates. It's very helpful to remember that Trump actually once said this Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you do you understand that? Well, it does explain Rudy Giuliani Rudy Giuliani who claims America never had a problem with terror attacks until Obama came along Really? You can't even think of what? I'll give you a hint Rudy you make your living off of it Donald Trump also once said sometimes people will come into my office and they'll look great sound great dress beautifully Everything is great. Then after you hire them they turn out to be morons Which explains his sons who day in Cusack mean Trump senior in the White House is bad enough without these two American psychos putting Putting plastic over the furniture so they can axe murder prostitutes while discussing Phil Collins And how about the Non-professionals have you seen pastor Mark Burns? He's the pastor who gave the benediction at the Republican Convention and I'm not (35/39)
saying he's a total charlatan It's possible that the free vial of holy oil available from his website can cure the sick And if not, you can always use it as righteous lube but But he does seem to have lied about everything Again the bio that's on your website claims that you you earned a Bachelor of Science degree Did you make that claim? I? Asked you just a moment ago as we were just opened up this and first of all I said we were off the record. I didn't agree to that. Yeah, but I did I did Did you catch that the interviewer says I didn't agree. This was off the record and he says yeah, but I did right What do you think for him Secretary of State maybe? head of NASA perhaps Another familiar face on CNN for the Trump campaign is Margo Gutierrez a leader of Trump's Hispanic Advisory Council and Quite a spokesman for his peeps he is he once said my culture is very dominant culture and it's causing problems If you don't do something about it, you're gonna have a taco truck on every corner (36/39)
Okay, first of all, would that be such a bad thing? You Mean When I'm drunk, I don't have to wander around LA looking for a taco truck. That's the best argument for Hillary. I've heard yet But beyond that mr. Gutierrez is a real estate scam artist who's filed for bankruptcy 14 times He's not just a Latino for Trump. He's a Latino Trump And there's a little Kayleigh McEnany a kind of Ann Coulter without the empathy And another young woman defending Trump campaign spokesman someone's crazy ex-girlfriend Sorry, I mean Katrina Pearson who wears a necklace made out of bullets from the Chanel don't tread on me collection And Once defended it by tweeting maybe I'll wear a fetus next time about About Trump's proposed Muslim ban. She said you know what so what they're Muslim In 2012 she tweeted perfect Obama's dad born in Africa Mitt Romney's dad born in Mexico any pure breeds left A pure breeds, where do you study your talking points by the light from a burning cross? She also blames Obama for (37/39)
launching the war in Afghanistan even though it was four years before he was even in the Senate and Has said about nuclear weapons what good is having them if you're not gonna use them If this were the hundred thousand dollar pyramid, I'd say things a mental patient So, what do you think ambassador the UN for her But I'd have to say that of all the surrogates my favorite has to be mr. Michael Cohen Just just take a look at him in action on CNN But you guys are down and it makes sense that there would Says most of them all of them says who? I just told you I answered your question. Okay, which polls? all of them Well played sir He's a lawyer. In fact, he's the head lawyer at the Trump organization So we know he's awfully busy with lawsuits like the one Trump filed against me in 2013 Remember that lawsuit. Okay, a lot of people remember it as a defamation Defamation so it wasn't he was suing me to collect five million dollars because I offered that to him if he could prove that his (38/39)
mother didn't in fact fuck and So he went into court this happened He went into court and produced his birth certificate As if it was gonna say orangutan on Yes, I made Donald Trump produce his birth certificate Tonight somehow and tomorrow night that at Foxwoods in Connecticut October 22nd at the palace in Albany, November 6 I want to thank Peter Hamby Angela rice Steve Moore Sarah Silverman and Sean Penn Catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO comm (39/39)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #634: Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sam Harris and Mary Katharine Ham.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Long enough, let's do a fucking show. I mean, it's been a long time. Let's not ever be apart this long forever. And of course, right on cue, always when we come back, big news, Dianne Feinstein, our senator for some... No, don't laugh. No, she was a great serving senator here, died today. First female mayor of San Francisco and everyone there today observed a minute of no shoplifting. Let me tell you, when she was mayor of San Francisco, she had that city under control. When there was poop in the street, it was because John Waters was making a movie. Also, a senator for 31 years in politics for 54 years, not once was she caught on tape giving a handjob at a musical. I think that has to count. Well, you saw, you've seen Lauren Boebert, she's the MAGA congressman. I guess she's a 36-year-old grandmother. She is from Colorado, a family's value Republican, was caught on tape. She was at Beetlejuice, like, (1/41)
getting her tit grabbed, vaping, grabbing cock. I'm not making this up. This is your government at work. So they threw her out of the theater and on the way out, she gave them the finger and said, do you know who I am? See, there's a difference between Republicans and Democrats. When Biden says that, he's genuinely asking. But, okay, good news and bad news about our government. There's going to be a government shutdown again. Why do we always go through this? I know it's terrible for a lot of people. On the bright side, the Senate approved a dress code, solving a problem they created last week. Although it was just for the men. Kyrsten Sinema, are you familiar with her? She retains the right to dress like Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie. There was a Republican debate this week. Ron DeSantis is here. He was on it. Apparently he won it, according to the polls. But it was a shit show. Was it not? Did you see this? I couldn't get through it. I mean, they were just talking over each other. It (2/41)
made me so tense I had to calm down by watching a video of Britney Spears dancing with knives. I always played the Republican debate drinking game. That's where you take a drink every time you go, oh, God, I need a drink. The weirdest part was they got onto the subject of education and Mike Pence. Mike Pence says, full disclosure, I've been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years. Why bring Mike Pence? But people don't realize, now they looked into this. He's very kinky. He and the wife, sometimes she dresses up like Trump and tries to hang him. Now, I feel like it's my job to watch these debates. I couldn't get through it. I mean, I got through like 30 minutes of the 90 minutes or whatever it was. Also, at that point, Lauren Boebert said to me, my hand's getting tired, let's beat the traffic. Trump, of course, skipped the debate as his custom is now. Instead, he had one of his rallies, or as I call them, drag queen story hour. He had a bad week, really. A New York judge, listen to this, (3/41)
shocking, said he's a complete fraud. I know. Apparently, he's inflated his property values and made him a fraud. Apparently, he's inflated his property values in New York over the years by $2.2 billion. They canceled the Trump organization's business certification. Wow, that's pretty big news that didn't get much coverage. Still not the biggest crook of the week. That would be the senator from my home state of New Jersey, Bob Menendez. Did you see this story? I love this guy. Old school. Old school. No intricate laundering schemes here, no offshore accounts. I'll just stuff these gold bars in my wife's bra. I fucking love this guy. He had this, his house was full of cash stuffed into his clothes and gold bars. Who accepts gold bars? I've never been anywhere where they went. Yes, we take Visa, MasterCard, and gold bars. They said, why did you have all this cash around the house and gold bars? He said, for emergencies. Like, what sort of emergency requires cash and gold bars? If a rap (4/41)
video breaks out? We have a great show. It's so great to be back. We have Sam Harris, Mary Katherine Ham. And first up, he is the governor of Florida, who is, wow, currently on our show? Currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. Governor Ron DeSantis. I know, I know. Welcome back. All right. On a scale of 9 to 10, what did you think of my monologue? Honestly, I was laughing. I'll give you that. Right. Laughing on both sides of the aisle, too. So it was good. And welcome back to the show. I know you guys were on hiatus for a while. Thank you. I do got to put in a plug. Like, if you ever have problems in California, you know, in Florida, not only do we have no income tax, no Vax mandates allowed in the state of Florida. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. I know, but people do wear cowboy boots with a suit. That's right. So, I'm not going to fly. Okay, that's just a crazy thing. We're proud of it, too. We're proud of it. But there were no (5/41)
cowboys in Florida, Ron. Oh, yeah, you should try Florida. We're one of the top cattle states in America. Really? You go from the beach, you go the interior of Florida, nothing but cattle ranches. Oh, all right. Well, I stand corrected. Because I'm wearing orthopedic shoes. There you go. Okay, so, the debate. It was a shit show, but I- right. I mean, even you said you would have turned it off if you were watching it. I mean, people screaming over each other. I couldn't hear what anyone was saying. It was terrible. But I heard you won. I heard the polling said you won. What did you win? With Trump- no, honestly, with Trump not in the race, what did you win? Well, but I think that, you know, he's not showing up. He's missing an action. He owes it to voters to show up and defend his record. And I think he thinks he can take a juice poll and then people don't get to vote. That's not the way the system works. You got to go earn votes. So, I'm showing up, I'm showing that- and that's- here's (6/41)
the thing. In the midst of all the show that happened, I was the one guy that people said, you know what, this guy's actually acting like a president when the rest were not. And so, okay, there I am. I told Donald, let's do a debate. I'm debating your governor, Gavin Newsom, soon. We're going to get to that. But let's do a debate with me and him. I'll do it. All right, but this- can I ask you one thing about these debates? Can you get rid of this guy, Doug Burgum? This guy- this bugs me. He is not going to be president. This guy could start dating Taylor Swift. No one would care. North Dakota. It's not even this guy. All right. But you know, the thing is, you did not take my advice. What was it? I was on this show a few times when we talked. I said, this guy's crazy to run this time. He's, what are you, 45 years old? You just had a birthday, right? You could run for the next 20 years. If you were Biden, the next 40. Okay, why run against Trump? You're trying to thread this needle that (7/41)
will never happen. Well, for a couple reasons. You can't disavow him because that's the base, and yet you're running against him. And that's why, I mean, let's face it, Ron. If this campaign was going well, you wouldn't be on this show. Oh, that's not true. So, one, I don't think he can win the election. I could win the election. Two, I don't think he could actually get the job done that we need to do. For example, COVID. I think we need accountability for what this government did to this country with the COVID restrictions, mandates and lockdowns. Donald Trump is not going to do that. He says he did everything right. He says he saved millions of lives with lockdowns. He claims his MNRA shot saved 100 million lives. He's not going to clean house at CDC, NIH, FDA or any of that. I will do that. I will get the job done and a lot of other things we do. The one thing about me in Florida, and even my critics will acknowledge, if he says he's going to do something, he will follow through and (8/41)
get the job done. So it's about the country. Are we going to get the country turned around or not? I don't think he's a vehicle that's doing. And I have been, when I supported him on the things I liked, I've said it, but I've been critical about the things that he didn't do, and I'll continue to do that. Okay, but you campaigned for election deniers in 2022. This I do not forgive, to quote the Godfather. I mean, Carrie Lake, who said Biden is an illegitimate president, Trump didn't. Well, now she's attacking me, so maybe I did make a mistake there, because she's out there saying, she's trying to say that we mandated vax in Florida. We did the opposite. We protected people even from private mandates, so that may have been. But Trump lost the election, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so why did you campaign for people? Because I wanted to see Republicans win key races. I think it's important. And that's not a deal breaker issue for you? That's not democracy? Okay, well let's go back to 2016. (9/41)
Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the electoral college to vote against Trump in the electoral college because it was stolen. They said Russia stole the election. For years they said that. So don't act like this is a unique thing in modern history of the country. First of all, Ron, I have no friends in Hollywood. You do remember those commercials now. I remember them. Okay, but the thing that you seem to stake your campaign on is where woke goes to die. And look, I'm fed up with woke too. That's why I have trouble with friends in Hollywood. I'm an old school liberal and that's a whole different thing than woke. And I'm sympathetic to you because you very often take on an issue where I feel like, yeah, there is crazy stuff going on in schools. There is crazy stuff. But the problem is it doesn't resonate with a lot of people who don't see it for whatever reason. And so they're like, why is this guy picking a fight with Mickey Mouse? Right? Well, they picked a fight with (10/41)
us. But well, listen, so first of all, I do a lot more than just that. I think that's a little bit of a caricature. But this idea of ideology corrupting institutions, I see it in Los Angeles with the amount of crime that's here and the homelessness. There are people that commit crimes who are not prosecuted like they would be in Florida. Our state's crime rate's at a 50 year low. You elect these people like Gascon and what they did in San Francisco. You can break into somebody's house or mug somebody and you don't end up going to jail. That doesn't work. But that's driven by ideology. So it's not just we're having just a philosophical debate. I think woke ideology is corrupted institutions. I think it's corrupted things like the CDC with how they handled COVID with the nonsense that they did. So it's a broader issue than just a philosophical fight. You keep wanting to get back to that. And I don't blame you because you're right. We're on the same page there. And I think it's unfair (11/41)
what they did to you because you did handle it better. You did handle it better. You were right. You were like, let's target the people, protect the people who are most vulnerable, and everybody else can go on with their lives a little better. You open schools sooner. And a lot of the stuff that's come in, the information we have after now, we've had a few years to look at it. You were more right. And they won't give you credit for that. It's not about credit for me, though. It's not about credit for me. It's about them admitting that they were wrong because they are setting us up. If this happened again, they would repeat the same playbook all over again. And if we don't have accountability, that's what's going to happen. So I'll bring accountability so it never happens in our country again. I saw the New York Times did such a despicable hit piece on you that I saw because I forget what the lead headline was, but it was basically Ron DeSantis fucked up the pandemic. And then at the (12/41)
very end, it says Florida's death rate overall was better than the national average. Now, if you're going to do an article about Florida and the pandemic, shouldn't that be the lead? Shouldn't that be the — I mean, talk about burying the lead. It shouldn't be that we're the number one state for in-migration. I mean, if we did so bad, people would have been leaving Florida. People are coming, wealth's moving into the state, our economy's done better than any other large state, and education. We're now ranked, I think, in the top five on most metrics in education. Now, that wasn't true when I was a kid growing up in Florida. So we did it right, but what we did is we understood you can't stop society because of one respiratory virus. That's not even the way to help health overall. Well, you could if it was bad enough, but not that one. Right. Well, they were wrong on the death rate. They were wrong on closures. They were wrong on everything. And yet we act like, what, we're just going to (13/41)
shrug our shoulders and move along? So, like, that's the part of you I like. And then there's the part of you, like, where you're going after — I mean, your state voted to restore voting rights to felons. And then through some political bullshit jujitsu, that got undone. Now you're like — No, no, no, that's not true. It is true. No, no. And you're going after people now. I mean, you have some sort of — I didn't qualify, though, so that amendment did not include murderers and sex offenders. So we had sex offenders, convicted sex offenders who voted who were not eligible under that amendment, so we held them accountable. But that was absolutely consistent with the law. But there really isn't in-person voter fraud. Like, 11 million people voted in Florida, and I think you found 41 people. I mean, that's point — Right, but if you have somebody that's illegally in the country and they vote, should they be held accountable or not? I think they should be held accountable. I mean, that's point (14/41)
0.00002%. Not in a statewide race, but we've had local elections decided by 15, 20, 30 votes in the last few years. And so I think we want legal people to vote. I know, but — If you're not a citizen of this country, you should not be voting in American elections. OK, but that's not the biggest issue we have, is it? I mean — No one's saying it's the biggest. We take on all kinds of issues in Florida. But it looks like you're just trying to stop black people from voting. Oh, that's nonsense. That's nonsense. I don't think it's nonsense. Black folks don't vote for the Republican Party in very big numbers. But I got a bigger percentage than other Republicans have gotten when I ran for re-election. Whoop-de-doo. That's not a — I wouldn't brag about that. We're making progress, man. And then the abortion thing, a six-week abortion ban. I don't get that either, because six weeks — like, if you're — I know you say it's a case of conviction. If it's conviction, wouldn't it be moment of (15/41)
conception? That's what conviction is to me. Like, if you believe the second — you know, before the guy can get the towel, there's a third person in that room. Well, no. I mean, it's a legislative issue, so they have to figure out what they think. And so the legislature identified the moment where there's a detectable heartbeat as the time where there's legal protections. Now, they did provide exceptions for all the difficult cases that you hear about, but basically, once there's a heartbeat, it shouldn't be used as a form of birth control. OK. So you're going to debate Newsom. We are. You know he's taller and better looking. Good luck. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Ed. Governor Ron DeSantis, everybody. Good luck out there. All right. Let's meet our panel. OK. We're back, and here they are. She is the co-host of the podcast, Getting Hammered. The co-author of End of Discussion, How the Left's Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free and (16/41)
Fun. Mary Katherine Hamm. And he's the host of the Making Sense podcast, the best podcast where the host isn't totally baked. Sam Harris is over here, ladies and gentlemen. Well, it's great to be back. First of all, I want to thank everybody who made this possible to be back. You know, I'm talking about my brilliant staff, writers and non-writers who scrambled the jets so we could be on in two days. And the union folks who expedited the paperwork so we could get back so quickly. So thank you. All right. So I want to talk about Dianne Feinstein. That was the big news that happened today. I mean, it's kind of spooky. Our last show, April 28th. And what was the last thing I talked about on the editorial? Dianne Feinstein. And it wasn't just about that she should resign. It was about the fact that people in the Democratic Party were kind of playing an outdated woman card about her. I remember quoting Nancy Pelosi said, I've never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that (17/41)
way. Bullshit. Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, obviously Biden, but we'll save that to the end of the show. Our Congresswoman here in L.A. said, when women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside. When men age or get sick, they get a promotion. Where did that ever happen? Yeah, they just make this shit up. Well, it's the quickest way to sort of get out of trouble is to play the card you have, right? And Menendez is a perfect example. Senator Menendez this week was like, how could the Democrats push out a proud Latino American who has made it this far in his career, right? Never mind the gold bars. Guys don't pay attention. But it's not a bad play strategically. I don't think it's right morally. Okay. So now our governor says he's going to appoint a black woman to the seat. Do we still need this kind of identity politics as opposed to the best person? Maybe we do. I don't know. I'm amazed that people don't recognize that it's insulting to the candidate that gets picked. So (18/41)
Biden did that with Kamala Harris. So you say you're going to filter in advance by sex and race. Just pick someone as though they're the best person. And lo and behold, they're a black woman or whatever the template is. It's just, it seems, I mean, it's not even implicitly insulting. It's actually just right on the surface and no one seems to comment on it. Well, it's like, it's racism, but for the right reasons. It's like, it's still the thing. I mean, we still do need to even things out from our despicable past. But even them out, even if that's your agenda, just do that and never make it explicit that you cut out whatever 85% of the contestants in advance. Well, you can make it explicit that you've created a generous pool from which to pick that includes many, many minority folks. That would be easy in the state of California. It's just, I keep coming back to this concept of the zombie lie. I used to get on the Republicans about it. They still do it. Like tax cuts for the rich will (19/41)
increase revenues of zombie lie. That was one that was never was true. Then there are zombie lies that are things that used to be true, but are no longer true. And I think we still get caught in those with especially race issues. I saw in the paper after the 2020 riots, corporate America pledged to hire more people of color. And boy did they. Like 94% or something like that? Of the 300,000 people from S&P companies, I think that's 100 companies that were surveyed, 94%. I ain't mad at it. I'm just saying, can we acknowledge that, I mean, if this was such a horribly racist country, could you be guilted into doing this? You know, can we just acknowledge we are in the year we're living in and not some year that has passed? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know what the remedy is in each case. There was a time, I think, where affirmative action was totally defensible. And you could be honest about it and you didn't have to, I mean, you're redressing a wrong that was historically obvious. But we (20/41)
have to acknowledge that we're in a different situation now. We're pretending that there's a disadvantage based on race. I mean, to take one variable. And for basically as long as, virtually as long as I've been alive, that has not been true. Right? So it's like this is something, there's no medical school in this country that is filtering against race to the disadvantage of black people. Quite the opposite. It's quite the opposite. And for a very long time. And so there is a kind of gaslighting when you're pretending the disparity is opposite to what it is. And I was amazed at that figure too. I mean, 94% is amazing. And may I say to the people who are saying, well, three white people are talking about this. Exactly. So fucking what? White people can talk. I'm sorry, you know, that's just a ridiculous talking point. Like, how could you possibly have this discussion? We can have this discussion. Any person who was here in addition to us might add something to that discussion that we (21/41)
are not adding. But it shouldn't stop people from just talking. You can be cognizant of that without being quite so insulting as you're pointing out that this can be. In fact, in this case, I think he said he's going to pick a black woman for sure, but just a placeholder. So it's like, well, I'm going to pick a black woman, but I'm not probably not going to pick Barbara Lee, who is actively running against two white people because that might give her too much of an advantage to have actual power in the future. I don't know what the theory is here, but it seems insulting. Yeah. So another zombie lie I was picking on when we were off with, I saw Barbie, which I enjoyed very much. You got to say that part. I got to say that part. Well, no, it was cute. I liked it. I mean, I wasn't trying to attack it. And it is, look, give it credit. I mean, there are hits, there are monster hits, and then there's phenomenons. This is a phenomenon. But it is a zombie lie. That was the point. I wrote a (22/41)
tweet and they all went batshit about this tweet. Just saying, because I looked up something. That's really what they got mad at because the movie is based on the premise that we live in a patriarchy. So let's just talk about it. Maybe we do. I don't know. But in the movie, Barbie goes to Mattel headquarters, who made her, to confront the patriarchy, which is the boardroom. And she breaks into the boardroom and it's 12 men. The patriarchy. So I got home and I was like, Mattel's a real company. I bet you you could look up who's on the board. Of course, it's like six and six. Maybe it was seven and five or six, I think. But the CEO is a man, but he's not. But it was almost or basically even. Then I looked up how many women were added to Fortune 500 board seats in 2021. I think it was the last year I looked up. It's 45 percent. So maybe not exactly even. But I mean, if these are the stats and of course, nobody who attacked me engaged with those ideas. Well, the writer, Megan Dom, who I (23/41)
think you might have had on the show. She's great. She wrote, you remember, America Ferreira's piece, her speech in the film where it was just kind of this anthem for feminism. So Megan wrote it from a guy's point of view, proving that it was really this kind of political pablum that it was a kind of a zombie speech because it worked just as well for a guy with almost no changes to the text. So it was well, first of all, I don't know, except that I regret to inform you, I am the only person on stage who's allowed to talk about this. I felt like, first of all, Mattel's happy to come in for that sort of abuse in the movie because there's this alignment of sort of corporate views and lefty leaning activism. And that was sort of packaged into this movie. I have complicated feelings about Barbie. For instance, I never played with Barbies, but my daughters do. And I was conflicted. And so I got them only Barbies with flat shoes, because that's the secret to feminism, guys. But I think Barbie (24/41)
gave a lot of women feelings. We were like, why am I having feelings about Barbie? Did I get dressed up as Rodeo Barbie with a pink cowboy hat and go to a movie with my friends? Yes, I did. And some of it really hit me over the head with the patriarchy, and I found that insulting. But there were parts of it that were a little more sneaky. Things like the fact that that is interchangeable for men, that speech where I went, this is a movie about how being human is hard. And in fact, for men in the current time, and this is what you're speaking to, which I wish the movie had tapped into a bit more, when it comes to despair, loneliness, suicides in some demos, academic achievement, men are having a lot of problems. And I have three daughters and one son, and I would like them to be equally successful and have equal chances. And I don't think that my son deserves any sort of comeuppance, because things might have been harder in the past for women. I saw it with my nine-year-old daughter, so (25/41)
I had rolfed my brain into the appropriate shape before seeing it. I enjoyed it. I loved it. You did? Yeah, I laughed way more than I thought I was going to laugh. Purposely? No, no, I mean, I just, listen, half of it was going over my daughter's head because she's nine, so I was sort of having my own experience. But it's interesting to just, I mean, you're in the most charitable possible mood when you're seeing a movie like that with your daughter. Yes, and again, I enjoyed it. I just thought it was 2008. You know, it just wasn't up to the times. At one point, I remember the Barbies have to get the Ken's back, and they do it by pretending to be helpless about stuff. Like, I don't know how to use a computer. And the woman I saw it with said to me, I don't know any woman who acts like that anymore. So how could a movie that's not with the times be that successful, but I guess people just, they want to believe what they want to believe. It's emotional truth. Yeah, but I do think that (26/41)
could be a critique of both of those gender stereotypes, right? In some respects as well. And I did, the thing I liked about the movie is that it was interesting where it was allowed to be complicated, and it was not as interesting where we tried to gender stereotype in this really specific way. Although, like, what is gender anymore anyway? You also can't have two sexes that are not. So, I don't know. It's confusing in these modern times. Well, I want to show the Lauren Bulbert video because it's funny. I just do. So, this is Lauren Bulbert about a week ago watching Beetlejuice. There you go. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. (27/41)
Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and (28/41)
to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the left. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back (29/41)
and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the (30/41)
right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back (31/41)
and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the (32/41)
right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back (33/41)
and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the (34/41)
right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. Back and to the right. New Rule. Before you judge how many kids in the US are overweight, check out Australia where it's reported that childhood obesity will double by 2035. In fact, it's so bad that they're remaking that Meryl Streep movie and now she says, help, a baby ate my dingo. Google it kids, it's funny. New Rule, if like Virginia legislative candidate Susanna Gibson, you've live streamed yourself having sex and also asked viewers to pay you money to perform specific sex acts on chatter bait. You don't have to campaign anymore, I'm already (35/41)
voting for you. Because talk about being responsive to your constituents. Some guy asked you to blow him into reverse cowgirl and you did. All I want from you is a permit to hook up my solar. And finally, New Rule, someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he's going to turn the country back over to Trump. And go down in history as Ruth Bader Biden. The person who doesn't know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country. All of us who like Joe Biden have been struggling lately with the political situation in the Democratic Party. An incumbent we admire who acquitted himself well in the first term but who even members of his own party don't want to see run for a second. Despite a touching letter of recommendation from Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. I kid, they shouldn't have gotten shit for that. If you ask me, do I think Joe Biden can do the job of president? My answer is an unequivocal yes, he can do the job. Do I love everything? No. (36/41)
But that's every president. But government work is done in small quiet rooms like the Oval Office. And in that setting, Joe's compassion and centuries of experience are pluses. And he's generally made good decisions that got us out of Afghanistan, handled Ukraine, kept the economy chugging, finally got us rebuilding infrastructure, returned a sense of normalcy. There's a term for Joe Biden, but not two. Because while he can do the job, what he can't do is run for it. Our campaign season is long and it gets icy in New Hampshire. To those who say he beat Trump once, he'll do it again. I say things change. They always do. The parade moves on. 2024 is not 2020 in so many key ways, including, yes, Biden being four years older. You can be a national treasure and still be too old for the job. If I'm on a plane and the pilot says, this is your captain, Buzz Aldrin, I'm getting off. Mitch McConnell has served Satan well, but when he starts buffering during a speech and it appears his soul is (37/41)
leaving his body, it's time. I have made it a theme on this show to rail against ageism, the last acceptable prejudice in America. I've tried to make the argument that judging by age is wrong because we all age so differently. Some people are old when they're 45 and others are spry at 90. So it should always be a case by case basis. But the credibility of my argument against ageism rests on the honest calling out of people when it is time to go. That's what case by case means. At an event last weekend, Biden referred to LL Cool J as LL J Cool J. Say what you want about Trump, but he remembers Kanye's name. Look, at some point, perception becomes reality. What matters is voters think Biden's too old. What matters is he's going to lose to Trump, who's almost the same age, but his age just doesn't read like Biden's. Maybe it's because Trump is insane. Maybe it's because he's always a ball of white hot anger. But for whatever reason, he looks robust and Joe looks like his own skeletal (38/41)
remains. If this was 1860, when Joe first ran, this would not be an issue. You didn't have to look good, and there was no ubiquitous media to pick on every little mistake. The only people who saw the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the people who went to them. But Joe's debates next year will be televised to all, and I don't think he's going to look good. Yes, Trump is old too, but Trump is like Kiss. He puts on the face paint in the wig, and he looks the same as he did in 1978. Far from being the only one who could beat Trump in 2024, Biden may well be the only Democrat who would lose to him. James Carville told me any centrist Democrat around 50 or 60 would get 55% of the vote, and I believe him. You know that future headlines bit we do? Well, the most predictable headline ever is presidential race tied. Two weeks before every election, it's always tied. No matter who is running, the vast majority just vote for the D or the R. But Biden is the one Democrat who gives pause to so many (39/41)
people, even in his own party. Andrew Sullivan makes the necessary point that a new nominee for the Democrats would shift the dynamic immediately. Trump would be the tired, old guy retread hanging on to the past, and the Democrat would now be the future. Let the Republicans be the party with the candidate who babbles nonsense, shouts at the TV, and can't do ramps. Joe, you did noble service for your country, and you checked that big box, the President of the United States. Of course, as a politician, you're naturally going to say, but the work is not finished. Of course not. It never is. But it's time to let someone else finish it. You don't want to go down as Ruth Bader Biden. America is calling, Joe, and it's saying, that's not our car, grandpa, we're over here. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Fox in St. Louis, October 7th. Wow, coming up. The Orpheum in Omaha on the 8th, and the MGM Grand in Vegas on the 3rd and 4th. I want to thank Mary Katherine Ham, Sam Harris, and Ron (40/41)
DeSantis. We've got Keegan-Michael Key and his wife, Al, Matt Welch, and Sarah Isger next week. Thank you very much, folks. Great to be back. Thank you. (41/41)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #345 (Originally aired 3/6/15).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Good afternoon. At the tone, time will be real. You just say, thank you for really applauding and not Rand Pauling it. You know what I'm talking about? This is an amazing week. A week of a lot of fake scandals and one real one. We'll get to that. But here's my favorite fake one. You saw on Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Israel spoke before Congress. The Republicans fucking love this guy. I thought they were gay for Reagan, but I mean, they were jumping up and down like they're at a Taylor Swift concert. And okay, but here's the scandal. The next day, all these conservative outlets got on Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, because he wasn't clapping enthusiastically enough. Because we live in North Korea now, people. And the next day, Rand Paul said, I gave the man 50 standing ovations. One for each Jew in Kentucky. What do you want me to do, play Tevye and Fiddler on the roof? I mean, apparently they do. (1/41)
I mean, the Republicans went all out. Ted Cruz was wearing Star of David face paint and a clip on beard. Lindsey Graham was throwing his panties right at Bebe. It was amazing. Mitch McConnell was running around showing everybody his circumcision. I mean, of course they did it to get Obama's goat. But you know, Obama got the last laugh this week because another fantastic jobs report came out. Analysts say the economy is an ideal shape for a Republican to come in and wreck it again in 2016. Isn't that good? Now listen to this. 295,000 new jobs last month. Unemployment is down to 5.5%, which the Fed says is full employment. For the first time since 1977, private sector job growth has exceeded 200,000 for 12 consecutive months. Or as they report on Fox News, Hillary used the wrong email. Oh, the humanity. She used her own email address instead of the office one. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a calamity the likes of which this country has never seen. I'll never forget where I was when I (2/41)
learned that four brave Americans were CC'd on the wrong server. Yes, it turns out the Clintons had set up their own personal Clinton email dot com account and people are shocked. Democrats got a website to work. Now, Hillary says it was all a big mistake. She said after Bill used the Internet, the keyboard keys would stick. And that's why she. Today, I heard John McCain yesterday. He said McCain said he doesn't use email at all. He said, because, you know, my temper, I just don't trust it. OK, you know what, grandpa? We know that's not why you don't use email. Republicans are not the most tech savvy people in the world. McCain thinks megabytes is the Secret Service code name for Chris Christie. So we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. No one can forget the no one can forget the images from that horrible day when police with fire hoses and dogs and clubs viciously attacked Bill O'Reilly. So President Obama and dozens of (3/41)
people from Congress are gathering there to commemorate the event. And police from Ferguson, Missouri, say they'll also be there to hand out jaywalking tickets. Yeah, now that's the real scandal I was talking about. Do you see what went on? The Justice Department released a report about what was going on in Ferguson, Missouri. Apparently, the entire town is basically a scheme run by racist cops to arrest black people, not just arrest them and harass them, but then finance the town with the tickets and the fines on the police cars right on the side. It said to collect and serve. All right. And now what you really care about. Harrison Ford. He's fine. His condition has been upgraded from cranky to grumpy. As I am sure you know, by now, Harrison Ford owns a vintage World War Two era, as most of us do, plane which crashed at a golf course here in L.A. And he's something of a hero because when the engine failed, he managed to avoid crashing into houses, thus preserving the rights of future (4/41)
celebrities to fly dangerous antique aircraft over major cities. How about that, ladies and gentlemen? Hero. Now, it really is an amazing story because when the plane crashed, two doctors who happened to be golfing, rescued him and treated him and possibly saved his life. People are calling it a miracle. Doctors working on their golf day? All right. We've got a great show. David Axelrod, Genevieve Wood, Matt Taibbi are here. A little later, he'll be speaking with writer director John Ridley. All right, let's meet our panel. All right, he is a contributing to Roller Stone, Rolling Stone magazine and author of The Divide, American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Matt Taibbi is with us. Hey, Matt. She is a senior contributor to the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal and our old friend from Politically Incorrect, been too long, Genevieve Wood. Hey, how you doing? Welcome back. He's the former senior advisor to President Barack Obama and author of Believer, My Forty Years in (5/41)
Politics. David Axelrod is over here. Okay, so I mentioned in the monologue that was a few scandals this week, a few I thought were fake and one that was real. We should talk about the real one first. That's Ferguson, but let's wait till John comes out to do that because let's be honest, he's black and we're not. So let's talk about Hillary and her emails first. Now, I say it's a fake scandal. Maybe it's not. Let's just ask that question. Is it, is there any there there? Should we be talking about it? I think there's there there. I mean, we don't know what's there yet. But no, I think this is a real scandal. I think it's a real problem. Hillary Clinton basically did not do what she even told her own staff at the State Department to do, which is do not use personal email for official business. Yet the whole time she's doing it. And you know, whether there was a law before and after while she was in that office, a law was out there that said you should not be using your personal email (6/41)
for this kind of activity. Was it a law? It was a statute. It's a rule. A rule. It's a rule. It's a rule. It's not a law. It's an employee. It's an employee handbook. Yeah, it's not in the Constitution. It's in the employee's handbook. That you would think, you would think a leader would follow. And I think, look, this is something. We already kind of fudged it from rule to law. We already kind of. I'll give you that one. But these are national security secrets that we're talking about here. We don't, you know, it could be easier to hack into her email than the government's. It's one thing I think the government should be doing is making sure that our leaders are secure. Genevieve's worried about national security here. Well, I am worried about national security. It just seems our scandals have gotten so lame. Deflategate and emails and, you know, I long for the day of the blowjob. Anyway, I'm also very curious as to why some scandals capture the imagination and others don't. Because (7/41)
this seems to me like not a lot. But here's something that happened this week. I take it a little personally because it happened very close to where I grew up in northern New Jersey. For the last 10 years, there's been a lawsuit to recover almost $9 billion from ExxonMobil because they environmentally contaminated, as they do, the wetlands in that part of the country. Chris Christie intervened this week and settled for $250 million from almost $9 billion. That to me seems like a bigger scandal. So the difference here is that you have to read past the third paragraph of the news story to understand the Christie issue. No, that's why it's not resonating with people. I mean, the Hillary thing, people immediately understand what that's all about because it's Hillary emails, secrets, wow. This is actually... And she's running for president. And she's running for president. I mean, Chris Christie is running for president, too, but he's not the presumptive nominee. Right, exactly. So I mean, (8/41)
that's why. I mean, national security is important, but... She hasn't said she's running for president. She could be faking these last 67 years. She's setting up a new email account for her campaign. I just suspect the outrage would be a little bit different had she... Was she not in a position to be running for president, being the nominee? But that seems like something, this Chris Christie thing, that actually affects people and people's lives. And the other one is kind of nothing. It might affect someone if we find out, but I have a feeling, you know, the last laugh is going to be for Hillary when we find out that her emails are just as boring as the rest of her life. She's just not that interesting. Here's what I don't know... Bill's emails. Those would be... Here's what I don't understand. You got Chris Christie. He's got a multi-billion dollar pension problem. He's been downgraded eight times. You'd think he'd want to get their money. He needs their money. Right. To take their (9/41)
money. Well, apparently the reason for that, though, is that he's getting the money more quickly than he would otherwise. That's right. And let's be clear. I mean, it was, as you said, almost a nine. It was like an $8.9 billion lawsuit that they wanted. But lawsuits always start out at a really high dollar amount. Exxon came back and said, hey, how about we give you three million? That's how different... So they ended up with about 250. It would happen to be the highest amount New Jersey's ever gotten from one of these kind of suits. Three cents on the dollar. They spent 10 years on this lawsuit. But Bill, the same week, they got another 190 million from another energy firm. So I mean, the money is coming in there. And I think the point... No, but you made a good one. This could have... This has been in court since 2004. All right. So I couldn't help notice another irony this week as Fox News loved the Hillary story, obviously. They were like a dog with the new chew toy. And yet not a (10/41)
word about the Bill O'Reilly situation. Let me read to you Bill O'Reilly's words. And you tell me if he is not just a blatant, bald-ass liar. He said, I've reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands. No, you haven't. There's no gray area here. A war zone is where the war is going on. You were in the capital of a country as it was at war. But the war was 1,200 miles away. Two, Bill O'Reilly, I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head. No, you saw pictures of that. Bill O'Reilly, I've seen Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with... No, again, you saw pictures of it. It's not the same thing. I've seen pictures of the Hindenburg. I don't say, I saw the Hindenburg go down. I mean, one last one. Okay, there was a guy who was a friend of a Russian guy in America. He was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. So as you might imagine, he's been of some interest to reporters for all the years after the Kennedy assassination. Maybe that's (11/41)
why in 1977, he killed himself. Okay, here's Bill O'Reilly on that in his book Killing Kennedy. As the reporter knocked on the door, he's talking about this guy's house. He heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of this Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald will never be fully understood. By the way, that reporter's name was Bill O'Reilly. No, it plainly wasn't. There is a tape of him on the phone with someone talking about this, which happened in Florida when Bill O'Reilly was in Dallas, with Bill O'Reilly saying, I got to get on a plane to cover this. These are out-and-out lies. Now, I understand why Fox News backs him, because they're not really a news service. So they're like, they're like, you expect the truth? That's not what we do here. But why isn't the mainstream media going after him with the same ferocity, the supposedly liberal media, as they did to Brian Williams? Because it, well, I suspect, I suspect it's because they know what you just (12/41)
said, which is Fox News isn't a real news organization, and Bill O'Reilly isn't a real journalist. Yeah, I think so. Bill O'Reilly being full of shit about something is not a news story. It just isn't. Okay, but it seems amazing the way this guy gets away. Remember that sex scandal he had did the same thing. Just intimidated people, bullied them. I mean, he said about this one to the New York Times reporter, I'm going after you with everything I have. You can take that as a threat. If a liberal reporter said they were in a war zone, what would the Fox News crowd be saying? They'd be saying, oh, this is an insult to troops who are really in the war zone, this bad American. You guys don't care. No, no, no, no, no. I think there's a bigger deal too here, though, I think, Bill, in the sense that this is, you know, O'Reilly has said that everything you just said is not true. He said that he can back up his stuff. And I know you, I've read the stories as well. Brian Williams actually came (13/41)
out and said, you know what? I did do this stuff and I'm apologizing for it. So NBC News, I think, had less that they could deal. I mean, they had to either accept that and go with it. Fox is going to defend him as long as he's saying, but I did what I said I did and nobody else is really able to challenge. I'll move on. But just so we know, there is no gray area here. He said, I was on a doorstep when there's proof he wasn't. He said he saw things when there's proof he wasn't. He claims that evidence doesn't exist. So, and there's clearly a, I mean, I think any journalist knows the difference between being in a war zone and not being in a war zone. And O'Reilly, if you're in a war zone, you notice. You notice. Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about Bibi Netanyahu this week. It was certainly unusual. I've never seen anything like this in American history, where one party invited a foreign leader to bitch about the current president and then they stood for him 50 times. But here's, let me (14/41)
quote from Bibi's speech to Congress. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country and only for the Middle East, but for all mankind. The deadline of attending this goal is getting extremely close. Of course, he said that in 1996. He didn't even have to rewrite the speech. I guess my question is, you know, if he was so wrong then, why are we so believing him now? Who's believing him? Well, every Republican. Look, the fact is that what happened in Washington was it had little to do with Iran. It had a lot to do with the existential threat to Bibi's political career. He's got an election in two weeks. This was a big rally for him and an opportunity for the Republicans to simulate the experience of having a president of their own party deliver a State of the Union speech. And that's really what it was. Since when does the U.S. Congress become a campaign stop for the Israeli president? I mean, that's since now. Yeah. Look, (15/41)
he's spoken before. I don't think this is about his election. I think this is about the fact that he truly believed. Not about his election. They timed it so that it would be shown at dinner time. But there's also another timing, which is we're coming up against this deal with Iran. The clock is ticking. And the reality is Iran is a real threat to this country. And the reason he's given that speech before is because Iran's been a nemesis for a very long time. It's been Republicans and Democratic presidents that had to deal with them. I mean, that's a reality. The problem is he said nothing new. And he didn't offer an alternative to what if the talks don't work? He didn't offer a realistic alternative that would suggest that he knew he had a better idea for how to stop them. At least the program stalled right now while we're having talks. That wasn't true before. We don't know that it stalled. We're taking the word of the Iranians that it stalled. Everybody agrees on that. Everybody (16/41)
agrees on that now. No, not everybody agrees on that. But I understand why Netanyahu is paranoid. He lives in Israel. I would be, too, if I lived there. Yeah. But this is America. Shouldn't we have a little more objectivity about this? And, you know, there is some history. In 2005, there was a deal on the table that was pretty good because Iran had a somewhat, you know, what they call a moderate president back then, too. Bush scuttled it. Back then, they had 164 centrifuges. Now they have 19,000. You know, this is what Republicans always do. This is how they negotiate. I get absolutely everything or the deal is off. Remember the 10 to 1? Guys, we'll give you 10 to 1 revenue to taxes. No, not good enough. But basically, you're saying it's the opposite, though, with the Democrats. Basically, Iran's getting everything they want, including continue to run out the clock. We have already released—we've already relaxed a sanction. So what was working in the past that could keep them in check, (17/41)
we've basically already taken that off the table. You know, when I was with the president when we traveled around the world and he got world leaders to join in these sanctions, we were being ridiculed because everybody said it was naïve to think that you could get withering sanctions that would impact on Iran. And now Republicans can't say enough about the sanctions. Now they're all for sanctions. I would be for even stronger sanctions. It was 10 years, this deal. 10 years of inspections. Why is that a bad deal? Because, Bill, first of all, they have to agree to go along with it. What happens when they don't? What is our part of the deal when they say, you know what, those inspectors we were going to let in, we're now not going to? We're going to let them see this room, but we're not going to let them see that. And they have a history of doing that, just like any deals that we've made with Syria. But we don't know that that isn't going to be part of what comes forward here. The thing (18/41)
is, they haven't concluded a deal yet. And there may not be a deal. That's right. And I don't think there should be a deal if it's a bad deal. But you also have to wonder what's going to happen if there's not a deal. And there are people who believe that, you know, every problem in the world is a nail and the American military is a hammer. And we ought to be very, very, we ask our questions. What comes next? You know, this just shows everybody sees what they want to see. How about that dress, ladies and gentlemen? How many, how about that for a segue? How many thought that dress was blue and black? OK, what about white and gold? Where am I white? Really? So plainly blue and black. OK. Anyway, we did a little research into this and we found out that actually liberals and conservatives see these things differently. So we want to show you a few of these and there's optical illusions and pictures and I'll show you what I mean. For example, liberals see this as blue and black mostly and (19/41)
conservatives see a slut who wants the government to pay for her contraception. Look at this one. Conservatives see an owl's face in a cup of coffee. Liberals see Newt Gingrich's wife. Look at this one. Liberals say this is a black teenager with an orange soda. Conservatives say, oh my God, he's got a gun. Shoot now. Bowing into applause, my favorite reaction. Conservatives look at this and see an elephant with five legs. Liberals see the governor of New Jersey. Liberals say these two lines are actually the same length. Conservatives say this Chinese guy is watching me. Look at this one. Liberals see two elderly people. Conservatives see two young people. Oh, here's a famous one. People argued this for years. Is it a rabbit or is it a duck? Liberals say it's a duck. Conservatives say, who cares, let's deep fry it in oil. Liberals see Cory Booker rescuing a dog. Conservatives see Cory Booker stealing a dog. Look at this one. Liberals see a woman's face. You see the woman's face? (20/41)
Conservatives see Bill Clinton playing the saxophone with an erection. OK. Now, before I bring out John, I just want to say something. I don't often mention the cause that is dear to my heart, which is animal rights. I figure I don't want to bore the people with the thing that I like the most. And I'm a PETA board member. It was a great week for animals. Ringling Brothers has decided not to use elephants anymore. PETA deserves the credit for that. And McDonald's is not going to get chickens with antibiotics in them anymore, or at least human animals. So if they stick to that, I'm going to do something I've never done, go to the circus and eat a fucking chicken McNugget. All right. He is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave, who was the creator, writer, and director of ABC's new dramatic series, American Crime. Please welcome John Ridley. There he is. John, how you doing, sir? Great to see you. How are you? I am very anxious to see your show. It is highly anticipated. And (21/41)
I think it says a lot about television that you are coming off a Oscar win. You won for 12 Years a Slave last year. You got the statue there. Years ago, no one who just came off an Oscar win would ever go to television. Paddy Chavsky didn't write Network and then Zoda, hey, I'm going to want to do a Rockford Files now. Says something about TV, right, and where it's come? In all the platforms, broadcast, cable, streaming, it is a new world, and it's great to be there. I will say ABC invited me to be part of this long before the Oscar was on the horizon. So the fact that they wanted to tackle subject matter that's about who we are, where we are, how we view each other, and it's complicated, really says a lot about, again, where TV is going. What they wanted to tackle is getting more money. And what happened in TV is that, I must say, this network for years has done shows like this, and then everybody got the idea, oh, that's what American people want to see. So you saw it now on other (22/41)
cable networks, and now we're seeing it. This is a broadcast network for the first time that's doing something. But I might say, though, I don't have a problem with a network wanting to make more money if part of that strategy is having shows that have people of color in front of the camera, behind the camera, talking about issues that are not only important to us but important to everybody. NBC is doing that. So I don't want to sound like a shill for the mouse house. But we all love money. We're Americans, and there is nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with loving money. Unless it's a police department that is making more money. We're going to get to that, yes. But I just want to ask you one more question about this show. It seems like it's going to be, I think, in the mouse house. I can see critics saying humanizing crime, because usually in America, the criminal is just a prop for the good guy to get off a one-liner and blow his head off. You're going a little deeper. I (23/41)
mean, this show, it shows crime. But unlike other shows, it shows the aftermath, the effects on the victims, how it bleeds into the life of people around the event. You think America is ready for that, for actually humanizing crime and looking into the reasons why crimes are committed? I hope so, because the things that we are seeing happening across the country, they are not of any one thing or the other. They are complicated. They're complex issues. As you said earlier, they go beyond the headlines. We have the advantage of being able to turn the page. But the people who are in these circumstances, the families of the victims, the accused, the families of the accused, it doesn't go away in 45 minutes. So I think that audiences, I mean, look, we had an amazing number last night. Almost 9 million people watched the show. I think audiences are ready for something more. And I appreciate that they chose the show to examine these things. I mean, as someone who's done so much research, I'm (24/41)
sure you have, as you always do, on crime. Why do you think crime has gone down, as it has almost across the board in this country, for years now? I mean, there are theories for everything from abortion is legal, so less unwanted babies are born, to lead in paint. I've heard that. I've heard that. I'm just asking what you would say. I would say there are many things. The aging demographics, access, the fact that even though we are in difficult times, that the economy is better. I think, unfortunately, you're still seeing people who are at disadvantage, who get locked in a cycle. Young people of color, once you get convicted of a crime, if you go to jail, it becomes that much harder to get a job. So there are cycles that continue. But we are all sold on the fear. It's violent crime. It's all out there. The FBI statistics say, no, we are a safer society. We are actually a more respectful society. But again, you look at something like Ferguson, beyond an individual getting shot, the (25/41)
surprising thing about these reports is just the daily indignities that are heaped upon, and I mean heaped upon a community that no one would pay attention to until and unless a young man, unfortunately again, an unarmed black man, is killed in the streets, and people rise up. But it is unfortunate because the cycle exists. And when our show came up, it was after Trayvon Martin. And there was a part of me that thought, well, maybe we're past something. But to go back into the cycle, I think we have to look at why. Even if crime is going down, why do we still see the same effects on a particular group over and over again? Well, let's talk about that now. Because obviously, this was the big story of the week, I thought, the Justice Department report from Ferguson. And to me, it is the smoking gun about racism that I think we need in this country. Because when you look at recent polls about what Republicans, especially conservatives, think, 61% in a Pew story say the issue of race has (26/41)
gotten too much attention. Millennials, 58%, millennials, discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks. There is this view, right, that reverse racism somehow is worse than real racism. This, to me, is the smoking gun that we found out here's Eric Holder. These are his words. He said, a community where local authorities consistently approach law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way to generate revenue. That is particularly sick to just harass people just trying to get to and from a minimum wage job. And instead of paying taxes, nobody wants to pay taxes anymore, use the police department as a shakedown organization against the poorest members of society. It's just ugly. I mean, it is. And again, the cascade effect. And in this report, you hear about individuals who get hit with a $150 fine, which nobody wants to pay that kind of money. But for a lot of people, it's not as easy as going on a website and (27/41)
putting in your credit card and paying that. And if you can't make it to court, if you can't afford that, if you go to court, you arrive late and it's shut down, that $151 then becomes $250, $300. There was a report of a woman started at $151, ended up $1,000. She's still paying it off. People lose their jobs over things like this. It is a smoking gun, I think, to some people. I think to a lot of people, a lot of people of color, this is business as usual. It is. The question I'd like to ask, and let me ask everybody this one. How likely is it that Ferguson is the one town where this is going on? That we just happen to stumble upon the one place where this kind of racism exists? How many Fergusons are there? I know it isn't because I did a lot of research in this from my last book. I spent about a year and a half sitting in the courts of New York. And I heard story after story that's just like that. I actually met a guy who spent a year trying to go to jail because he couldn't afford a (28/41)
$150 fine for riding a bicycle the wrong way down the sidewalk. And there's courtrooms full of these people every single day. The thing about Ferguson that's really stunning is you've got a town that's 2-thirds black and a police department that's almost entirely white. 90% of the arrests are in the black community. So I mean, just on the face of it, you see the prescription for the kinds of abuses that we've seen. And clearly, it's not just Ferguson. This is happening in other places. But I think we do have to be careful. I mean, there are the example of New Orleans, for example, where it's pretty evenly divided. I mean, the city was around 60% black. It was like in 2010. And the police force was about 59% black. And yet, the Justice Department under Eric Holder actually went down and said, we've got racial issues there of black officers dealing with black citizens there. So it's not always a black-white thing. But I do think it's a real issue. And I think the larger issue, too, is (29/41)
even just the civil forfeiture generally is an issue that I think we need to take on of people's property being seized, their cars, their homes. And they're not guilty. But what it takes to go get that back, they're being afforded. It seems like if these were white people, this would be a Tea Party issue. This would be big government, right? No? Well, civil forfeiture. I think civil forfeiture reform is something Republicans and Democrats would be a part of. I actually think problems within the criminal justice system have actually united. You see Rand Paul out there on sentencing reform. So there is a coming together of the left and right on this particular issue. For example, the Selma anniversary. Why didn't any Republican leaders go with Obama to Selma? It seems like an obvious. It's not even something you actually have to. If it actually occurs that way, it is both shameful and it's just plain stupid. I mean, it's shameful is just the way you should be dealing with other human (30/41)
beings and recognizing that. But it's also stupid if you're a political party that says you want to do outreach and you're kidding me? You've got nobody there? I heard last minute that maybe Kevin McCarthy or somebody's going to go. But the fact it's last minute is a shame. Probably going to go now. After that. Let me read you a quote. This is from Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach. He said, under Obama, this is a reaction, I guess, to the Ferguson events this week. Under Obama, the word is going to come down that there won't be any prosecutions of black criminals. Wild guess which party. I always say not every Republican is a racist. But if you're a racist and you're looking for a party, it just is not that hard. OK, last issue, the Obamacare suit. Before the Supreme Court started to hear about Obamacare, this is the second time this has come up for the Supreme Court. As we know, a few years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts saved the day. Liberals got to give him a pound for that (31/41)
one, right? I'm sure a lot of conservatives still hate him for that. We don't know how it's going to go this time. Now, it's a little too boring to get into the minutiae of this case. But if the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare on this specific ruling, they say, the experts all say, the whole thing will unravel. What's interesting is that when you go before the court, you have to have what's called standing, which means you have to have a legitimate case. Just any fool can't go up there. And yet, the case has been brought by four fools. Listen to this, one of the people bringing this case against Obamacare wrote that Obama is the Antichrist. I rest my case. The Antichrist who won his election by getting his Muslim people to vote for him. And he's a veteran. He's a veteran, which means he doesn't have standing, because veterans already have their health care. It doesn't affect him. He's already getting socialism. There's four folks in this case, and I think there is standing. Look, (32/41)
the federal judge prior. Let me just read the other ones. The second one is also a veteran, also getting socialism. The third one is getting Medicare in June, another case of getting the socialism that everybody should be getting. Because the veteran affairs program is so fabulous for our veterans, right? Yeah. Well, actually, the VA program is pretty good for most. No? No. Does anybody talk about a scandal? It's better than nothing. That's our answer to our veterans, that it's better than nothing? Yeah, but this whole thing is about uninsured people. It's about people having to do it. But why doesn't everybody have it? I don't understand. Poor people get socialism. Veterans, soldiers get socialism, old people. Why am I out of the picture? Why am I preg? What is the prejudice against me? I'm not a soldier, and I'm not poor, and I'm not old, and I'm not disabled. So fuck you. You're on your own. Beyond which the whole case is predicated. You're a rich white guy, and you're being (33/41)
prosecuted for it. That's why you're a rich white guy. Thank God. You cannot catch a break, and I'm sick of it. The whole case is predicated on this notion that Congress didn't intend people to get subsidies who were in the exchanges, on these federal exchanges. Nobody believes that Congress didn't intend everybody in the exchanges to get these subsidies. And so the court would have to go back on its basic precedent, which is legislative intent. This is just a way to try and unravel Obamacare. Let me tell you, when I was young, and I had a child with a very serious illness, I was one of those people who almost went bankrupt. And I had insurance, because the insurance was lousy. I couldn't switch, because she had a pre-existing condition. And I think there are millions of Americans who are in the same position, who have a lot riding on this. And it's more than just a game for ideologues to play. But this is a law in this country, and I'm all for health care reform. But this is a law (34/41)
that was not ready for prime time. Nobody read it before they voted for it, which is one reason the statement's been questioned today. People are now saying it doesn't mean what we said it means. You can keep your doctor, but no, now you can't. Look, this has been challenged in courts hundreds of times around the country, not just twice before the Supreme Court. It is a law that even now the CBO is coming out saying, we're talking about the uninsured. By 2025, over 30 million Americans still will be uninsured under this law. Among those are undocumented Americans. Some of those, that's 10 to 12 million. So what about the other 20? Let me ask one last question, since we brought up the subject and it is about socialism. You saw the statistics on the economy. I recited them in the monologue. A pretty amazing economy. Republicans always said Obama was a socialist. Does that mean they were wrong about that, or does socialism work? Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm- (35/41)
hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yes. Really needs a 24-hour waiting period before he gets another tattoo. Because his other tattoos are New Coke, the choice of the next generation, MySpace, the social network of tomorrow, and Bill Cosby is USA Dad number one forever. Newer Bill O'Reilly and Brian Williams must co-host a new evening news program called Eyewitness News. Not Eyewitness News, this is Eyewitness News, where the two anchors take turns describing events they saw in photos or happened to other people. Watch Bill O'Reilly in the studio throw to Bill O'Reilly reporting from Syria, who tosses to Brian Williams, who's live in Tokyo, who then throws back to the newsroom and your host, Brian Williams. After 30 years of trying, Paul McCartney has to admit that he should stick to singing with white people. You'll get it later. Anyway, New World, don't be upset if you just found out that (36/41)
Radio Shack went bankrupt and they're no longer honoring their gift cards. Be upset that someone thought so little of you that they gave you a Radio Shack gift card. New World North Korea's Kim Jong-un must admit that, at this point, he's just daring someone to laugh at his haircut so he can have them killed. And also that he just sits down in the barber chair, points to the brush and says, make me look like that. And finally, New World, some conservative somewhere has to explain to me why they think Barack Obama doesn't love America. Because every time I hear him talk about America, my reaction is, get a room. He says things like, you know, the country on earth is my story even possible and America remains the one indispensable nation. And yet, 69% of Republicans say he doesn't love our country and only 11% say he loves it the right way. But what is the right way? How much should we love our country and how often? What if we want to love it but it's tired and had a long day? And most (37/41)
importantly, should we love it from behind or is that demeaning? Now, for the last couple of weeks, as the oceans die, the debt balloons and we skid back into Iraq, Republicans have been obsessed with a much bigger issue. Does the president love it? It started with America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who implied... It does kind of look like him. Rudy Giuliani, who implied that if you criticize America in any way, it means you don't love her. But that's not how grown-ups think about a country. It's the way 13-year-old girls think about One Direction. Obama loves America. It just doesn't make him do this. Because he's an adult and he knows the difference between his country and his mommy. Liberals love America plenty. They just think Paris is a more interesting vacation spot than Branson. I have no problem listing what I love about my country. For one, we aren't ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The Bushes and Clintons take turns. Two, we come to the aid of people in need. I mean, you know, on (38/41)
a case-by-case basis. Sorry, Rwanda, we'll get you next time. And three, two words, freedom. Face it, we complain. But if you had a choice of any country to be born in for the last 200 years, you'd choose, well, Canada. But after that, totally the U.S. of A. Which is not to say we're perfect. There's a lot to love about it and a lot not to. Like our legacy of genocide, slavery and racism, our income inequality, militarism, environmental damage, and the worst mass incarceration on earth. We lead the world in obesity and use 19% of the world's energy just getting up the stairs. And don't get me started on the guys who paint your house number on the curb without asking first. But there I go, loving my country in the wrong way with my head instead of my heart. Which is how conservatives do it. They love America like those parents who think their kid can never do wrong. When a note comes home from school reporting bad behavior, they go in and yell at the teacher. Or in the case of the (39/41)
school board in Oklahoma, yell at the people who wrote the American history textbook. Yes, the conservatives in Oklahoma these days are waging a battle to get rid of the current textbook because they say it focuses too much on negative aspects in America's past. Like it mentions Japanese internment camps. Why bring that up? It's just going to make things awkward down at the sushi place. You know, when it comes to American conservatives, they're a little like blackout drinkers. They remember all the good stuff about the night before. The laughs, the winning at beer pong, but no recollection of the bad. The pissing in the lobby fountain, groping co-workers, wiping out the Indians. Which is a shame because you can't turn the page on America's bad stuff if you won't print the page to begin with. If you won't acknowledge that many of the good things America has done are actually reversals of bad things America did. I think it's great that we gave the Indians the casino business in America. (40/41)
And I'm proud of the Emancipation Proclamation. I'm proud of women's suffrage, of the Civil Rights Act, of legal gay marriage in 37 states and counting. But all of that wouldn't have been necessary if we hadn't been dicks in the first place. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Holt Center in Eugene, Oregon April 18th at the Kiva Auditorium in Albuquerque, May 2nd at the Bayou in Houston, May 3rd. I want to thank my guests Matt Taibbi, Genevieve Wood, David Axelrod, John Ridley, and Lawrence Wright. Join us now on Overtime at HBO.com. Thank you, folks. For more info, log on to HBO.com. (41/41)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #415 (Originally aired 2/17/17).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maughan. Call yourselves human. Now you're excited. It's President's Day weekend and it's a good time to reflect how far we've come from our first president who said I cannot tell a lot. And you know, I know it's fun to watch the wheels come off the Trump car until we remember we're riding in the back. That it's not so fucking fun anymore. And as usual, you know, there's the circus that happens every week, the distractions that take us away from knowing what's really important, which is there is an unprecedented state of crisis in this country. There is. The national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned because of his illegal contacts with Russia. I know the president would like to say that's fake news. That's not fake news. This is the most serious political scandal we've ever had in the United States. And now the question turns to how deep was the involvement of President Trump or as Russia calls him, (1/42)
Agent Orange. What is going on in this country is the intelligence agencies are leaking like crazy because they are trying to send a desperate message that this is not just a different kind of president as the Republican enablers like it's a different kind of president. No, he's fucking nuts and he's dangerous. And they know it. And they're trying to tell us that. You know what makes the intelligence agencies go nuts? Seems like this from Mar-a-Lago this last weekend when he was with the Japanese prime minister and they got news at dinner that the North Koreans had launched a missile. So Trump thought he would, you know, just handle it at dinner in an open air restaurant. He's with the Japanese prime minister. They probably handle intelligence briefings like they do at their steak houses right there at your table. This is crazy shit. And yet foreign heads of state keep coming to America as if it's normal, as if things are... Netanyahu from Israel was here this weekend. You know, Trump (2/42)
doesn't know anything. That's the other little bad part about him. They asked him about the two-state solution. He said, it works for me and Melania. And then Justin Trudeau, where are my Canadians here? I know they're... They're small but enthusiastic. But he came here and sat down with the president. You know, he had that same look on his face that all the leaders have like, oh fuck. And I'm sure it came up that they have floated, seriously in the White House, Sarah Palin as the first ambassador... Not the first, the last ambassador to Canada, which I'm sure Trudeau takes more as a threat. Sarah Palin, ambassador. The first ambassador in history to require a security deposit. No, that's what they do. They love these distractions. Look at crazy Sarah Palin over here. Meanwhile, they're doing this shit like the Senate confirmed just today, Scott Pruitt to be head of the environmental... Head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Scott Pruitt is a man who despises the Environmental (3/42)
Protection Agency. So it's less like public service and more like community service. This is a guy who is completely in the tank for the extraction industry. That's how they roll. The new head of the APA is completely in the tank with the oil and the coal... That's how Republicans work with Donald Trump. While you're watching the clown screw the pony, they're breaking into your car. Just remember that. Now in other cabinet news, Andy Puzner is out. That sounds like something somebody says to you when your fly is open. Andy Puzner is out. No, he was the anti-labor guy they put up to be labor secretary. And now they're putting up a guy, Alexander Acosta. I have no idea how this guy slipped through because he's qualified and Hispanic. So it's going to be a very tough confirmation process and an even tougher border patrol. And then there was the press conference. Did you see Donald Trump's press conference? Press conference, an impromptu 77 minute brain fart. You know your Facebook friend (4/42)
who said he thought Trump was Hitler? He was optimistic. Actually, what we have here is a mental patient who thinks he's Hitler. The kid in the YouTube video who's high from the dentist made more sense. It was... And of course it was this long, whiny, whiny little bitchy airing of grievances against the press and the courts and the Democrats and Hillary. Just this non-stop pissing and moaning and pissing and moaning. There's less pissing and moaning when he's with his Russian hooker. And then in the middle of it, he says the White House is running like a fine-tuned machine. Yes, specifically a Samsung Galaxy. Alright, we've got a great show. Larry Wilmore, Jack Kingston and Malcolm Nancer here. And a little later we'll be speaking with Leah Remini who's backstage. But first up, here's the controversial senior Redditor of Breitbart News and author of the upcoming book Dangerous, Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo, how you doing? How are you? Nice to meet you. Yes, happy to have you here. You're (5/42)
very controversial. I don't know why. Well, we're gonna... I don't know why, I'm lovely. I know. Well, we'll find that out. I'm gonna start with an open mind because honestly, I only heard of you about a year ago. You're all of what, 31? 32, but thank you. Okay. 27 officially. Okay. You look like Bruno. He said he was 19. You know I told her to dial down the contouring. She didn't listen. Your makeup lady was just crazy. Alright. So, about a year ago, people started to tell me, are you gonna get this guy, Milo, you know, on your show? And I started to look into, you know, what you're saying. And look, I think you're colossally wrong on a number of things. That's okay. But if, exactly, if I banned everyone from my show who I thought was colossally wrong, I would be talking to myself. Well, you wouldn't have Ann Coulter on, which is the only time I watch the show. I wouldn't have Jack Kingston on who's on tonight. Of course. Wonderful. So, let's start with the contradictions about you, (6/42)
which is pretty crazy, because you're gay and you're, uh, spoiler alert. Oh, come on. You can do better than that. What tipped you off? I've been reading about you. I mean, your mother's Jewish. You have a black Muslim boyfriend. No, but I haven't done one now. You did. Still black, not Muslim. Not Muslim. But he was Muslim? He was somebody once. Okay. But you've spoken out... We don't talk about it. You've spoken out against all these people. You say you don't hire gay people. Oh, no, you can't trust them to show up to work on time. Too much drugs, too much sex, they never show up to work, always making excuses. No, no, no. I mean, not as bad as women, but no, I don't hire gays. But you know that's not, I mean... Oh, there we go. But, you know, that's just... Just kidding. You're easy. You're very easy. Very easily triggered. It's pathetic. Well, let's get to that. There's so many things I could start an argument with you about, but... Because I know gay people who do show up to work. (7/42)
Okay, but, yes, but that is the reaction. You are so, let's say, helped by the fact that liberals just always take the bait. Of course. Now, you're a conservative. I'm a liberal. That's the difference. I mean, I don't know if I'm conservative. I mean, I'm authoritarian. You work for Breitbart and you're a Trump supporter. Well, it's interesting. You're a conservative. Well, it's interesting that the radical gay editorials, you know, saying interesting provocative things about gays are now being published by Breitbart. And I don't think really that you can call Trump a traditional conservative. He's not that Republican. No, you're correct about that. So I don't know if that's fair. He's very dangerous. All I care about is free speech and free expression. I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything. These days, you're right, that's a conservative position. I care about the environment and living also. But free speech... But I mean, you're right. I mean, you know, we've both... (8/42)
That's a conservative position now, free speech. We have both been disbarred at Berkeley. You know, I gave the commencement address... Much more dramatically, I'd just like to say. I mean, they just disinvited you. I had riots. People got beaten up. Right. No, you do... It's horrendous. OK, you win, babe. You beat me out there. There were no riots. It's not a competition. No, it's not a competition. But like, when you make liberals crazy... Yes. For that part of liberalism that has gone off the deep end. Most of it. Yeah. Well, I don't know about... You're the only good one. No, I... You're literally the only good one. Your sight has gone insane. The Democrats of the party of Lena Dunham, these people are mental, hideous people. The more that America sees of Lena Dunham, the fewer votes the Democrat party is ever going to get. This is the people that she has points around. Let's not pick on fellow HBO stars. There are so many other people... Was I supposed to... Was I not supposed to (9/42)
do that? No, of course you're... They didn't brief me about that. I'm sorry, but she is awful. Because we don't... Because... Excuse me. Because we don't brief here. Because it is free speech. Well, I like that. I appreciate it. I know. Shall we go with Amy Schumer instead? But I'm not... See, another thing. I love Amy Schumer. Her show... But that's OK. We disagree. No, but these people used to be funny before they contracted feminism. It's like Sarah Silverman. She was really, really funny when she was cracking... Another someone I'm a fan of. Let's get off this. Let's talk about your humor. Because I think a lot of people do miss your humor. And I'm a guy who always defends jokes right up to the point where they pointlessly hurt people. Do you think you've ever... No, I hurt people. I have my whole career. I hurt people for a reason. But... No, I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll. But if somebody gets hurt because of truth needs to be said, like religion. I've always (10/42)
attacked religion. Yes. Well, you're sound on Islam, unlike most of the people on your side. Yes. Right. That's true. But all religion, I always say, is stupid and dangerous. That hurts me. Except Catholicism, which is awesome, but otherwise, yes. OK. Well, that shows you. And I hope when you look in the mirror tonight... I'm very happy with what I see in the mirror. I don't see Bruno in the mirror. I'm not talking about what you see. I'm talking what's in your head. When you recognize that you are a Catholic, I hope you say to yourself, gee, I'm also capable of bullshit, stupid thinking. Well, everyone's capable of bullshit, stupid thinking. OK, great. You know? And that's OK. You know, it's a characteristic of the modern left, I think, requiring, you know, this absolute consistency, and forgetting that people are messy and complicated, and forgetting also some obvious other human truths, I think, some realities of human psychology. Like, for instance, you know, the reason they want (11/42)
to police humor, you know, which is very important to both of us, is that they can't control it, because the one thing that authoritarians hate is the sound of laughter, because they can't control what people find funny. And also because when people laugh, they know it's true. Yeah, of course. Because laughter... Nothing annoys people or amuses people like the truth. Laughter is involuntary. Exactly. When you laugh, even if you don't really agree in that part of your mind to go, ooh, shit, man. Exactly. And so I get, in my college talks, you've got the professors at the front who are there to kind of monitor me to make sure I don't go off the rails, and I make a joke about Ted Cruz or something, and they're like, you know, you can see it. You can see it. And the other thing that's really important is not just that, but the other thing is, you know, humor isn't how you drive people apart. You know, these sort of policing humor for racism and sexism is utterly wrongheaded, not just (12/42)
because normally it isn't there, but because that's how we build bridges, not how we break them. You know, when you make a joke, that's how you connect with somebody. You know, you make jokes at the bar, you make awkward small talk. Humor is what brings people together, not what drives them apart. And these basic, you know, fundamental human psychological insights, the progressive ones, it's just for God. I mean, the one area where I'm a little concerned is when you go after people individually. Because, like I said, if it's in the cause of a greater truth, you know, if people are hurt as, you know, collateral damage, I'll go there. But, like, I didn't understand, like, the Ghostbusters thing. First of all, who gives a fuck about Ghostbusters? I wrote a bad review of a movie. Am I not entitled to do that? I don't know. And I said she looked like a dude. She does. You know, I said that she was barely literate. She is. And I simply don't accept, I do not accept, that a Hollywood, you (13/42)
know, that the star of a Hollywood blockbuster, that an A-list mega-celebrity is sitting in a Hollywood mansion crying over mean words on the internet. Get over it. And if you aren't over it, which I suggest you are, which I suspect you are, because it's not really the case that she's sitting there upset about mean words on the internet. Actually, she's been deployed by the studio because the movie's tanking. You know, you've just got to accept, I'm sorry, you've just got to accept, mean words on the internet don't hurt anyone. And also... Your Twitter feed, my Twitter feed, these are ugly, horrible things. Every Twitter feed is. No, they're not. They're wonderful. When I had a Twitter, it was the funniest thing in America. It was fabulous. But you know, what actually hurts people is things that happen in the real world. I mean, I don't go on about it because I'm not a professional victim. But I do get syringes through my door, dead animals through my door. You say you get mean tweets. (14/42)
That's okay. It's not a competition. But what actually hurts people is like murder, violence, you know, that kind of stuff. Mean words doesn't hurt people. Which some people would say you have incited. What? How? I'm just saying some people would say... Well, they would be idiots. Well... They would be idiots. Yeah. Okay. You know, and I agree with you about the Twitter thing. I mean, I stopped reading most of my Twitter feed a long time ago because if I want to cry myself to sleep every night, I could just read my Twitter feed. No, I love it. I get off on it. I love it. You know, I give my trolls marks out of ten. But that's you and you're a special kind of animal. I'm a little broken. I'm a little broken. I give the marks out of ten. I used to retweet. A little broken. I used to... You're a little broken and you're very wrong about certain things. Well, like Black Lives Matter is a hate group and that there's no such thing as white privilege. I mean, you do know that that's wrong. (15/42)
We're happy to... You know, look, we can disagree on those things and that's wonderful. The one thing that should unite us, the one thing that I think that you and I can both agree on, and the one thing that was so remarkable when that... I mean, I've never heard of him before. That silly man who had a hissy fit this week who refused to come on the show, but doesn't understand is that... Yes. If you don't show up to debate, you lose. Right. And if you don't... And also, stop taking debate liberals. The fact that they all flipped out... Oh my goodness. Wasn't it pathetic? ...about this little impish British fag. You fucking schoolgirls. You schoolgirls. It's so ridiculous. Right? The only... Look, if I am... You know what? If I'm any... Somebody sent me this, which is so funny because they knew you were coming on. Okay. The one thing is Joan Rivers, who, by the way, when she died, Obama... The liberal president that we all love commented. They don't comment when someone dies. She's a (16/42)
tranny. Unless they're a national treasure. Yeah. He said, not only did she make us laugh, she made us think. Here's what she said on Michelle Obama. Blackie O, you know Michelle is a tranny. Robin Quivers, bitch, you look like a fucking mudslide. I hate Houston. It's crawling with bugs. Oh wait, that's Whitney Houston. You know, my favorite... Exactly, but that's the person we find to be a national treasure. I'm just saying the line is kind of blurred. And some of it's context, you know. Because somebody is perceived to have conservative politics, which I think I've said it... It's at least questionable in my case. Because somebody is perceived to have conservative politics, there are different rules. You can't make jokes... But you should get off the Trump train. Because for a guy who loves free speech... He's fabulous. For a guy who loves free speech, you've picked a weird voice. No, no, no, no, no. He's not gonna come out... No, no, no. No time to debate. We'll do it again. All (17/42)
right, well let's meet our panel. You think he's the former U.S. Counterterrorism... Did you just come? Because that was a... It was a kind of a... It's the Russians. He's the former U.S. Counterterrorism Intelligence Officer and author of The Plot to Hack America How Putin, Cyberspies, and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election. Tried. Malcolm Nance is over here. He is a producer, comedian, and writer. One of my favorites. Larry Wilmore is back with us. Larry Wilmore. And the Republican who served ten terms as the U.S. Congressman representing Georgia's first districts. He's got balls to come here. Jack Kingston. Hey, Jack. How you doing? Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show. Okay, let's talk about the Russians. No, really, you know, I want to repeat myself, but I do feel an obligation to, as I never have in my long career, to put the facts ahead of the entertainment. I always try to get both in, but I feel like our (18/42)
country is hanging by a thread right now. So if I have to repeat myself, I'm going to. Stop looking at the distractions and the clown show and look at what matters. Which is, I would say, this is the worst political scandal in American history and it's not going away. I agree. Is that true? I agree. I think all of this talk about fake news, it distracts us from the real stories. Like, why is Harrison Ford allowed to fly a plane at 102? All right, Mr. Funny. No, you're absolutely right. I completely agree. There you go, being part of the problem. But yeah, I mean, I keep hearing on the news, you know, the cover-up is worse than the crime. No, the crime is worse. The crime is treason. The crime is colluding with Russia to fix an American election. How is this not? Well, I got to say, I absolutely, the Russians were trying to influence the election. In September, they were at a G20 meeting. You're right. And the president calls Putin to the side and says, you got to cut that out. What is (19/42)
that for foreign policy? You got to cut that out. I totally agree. He was late on that. He was very late. Now, the second issue of Flynn having a conversation with Kislyak, the ambassador, we don't know exactly what went on. It's illegal for us to know what went on, as you know. And it's bringing up sanctions or not bringing up sanctions. Jack is always going to stand and say that there was nothing wrong with that. Let me put it into context. No, what I'm saying, Malcolm, is we didn't know. First, put you into context. Now, you've been part of the intelligence community for a long time. A few decades. So deeply, I don't even know what agency you were. What agency were you with? I started out in naval intelligence and worked for the National Security Agency. And from time to time, I was loaned to other people. Black guy that spoke Arabic. Loaned to other people. All right, so you know where the bodies are buried. I know where some of them are. Well, what I was about to say was, the way (20/42)
that you characterized it at the beginning of your monologue, I think was rather mild. I think what we are, and you say it's the greatest scandal in American history. Well, we can put secession aside. This may possibly be the greatest scandal of presidential history, where for the first time in 240 years, we have a president who may have actually had influence and had been elected with the direct assistance, not just of a foreign power, of a foreign intelligence agency. The four FISA warrant investigations that are going on right now, people hear the word FISA and they hear FBI and they think, okay, that's great. That's just an investigation. This is this nation's spy hunters are investigating these people. Not just regular gumshoe FBI agents. These are people looking for foreign spies. When the intelligence agencies are leaking like this, it seems like they are crying out that we don't want to do a coup. And Bill, let's be honest. You bring up Obama. No, let's keep it 100 in this. If (21/42)
Obama in 2008 thought he was colluding with the Russians, I mean, he was already called a commie at that point. Yeah. Do you think he ever would have been elected? I mean, this was called a character's religion. Let me put that to you, Jack. What if it was Hillary Clinton, who was just what we absolutely know? What would you be saying about it? Well, number one, very, very important, Barack Obama did absolutely know that the Russians were potentially interfering. Doesn't answer my question. And in terms of Republicans asking, you know, I think you're right, shoes on the other foot. There's going to be hell raisin. So I agree with you on that. But to say, I think it's way, way too early and way too dramatic to be saying this is the biggest scandal in American history. What is a scandal? Everybody talks about the load you have. The scandal is that the Russians fixed the election for one party. No, no, you're right. We don't have the proof of that. But the dots are all there. No, the (22/42)
intelligence agencies, and Malcolm will back me up on this, I certainly hope. Maybe, maybe not. Good luck with that. But the intelligence agency said while they did seek to interfere with the elections, it cannot be shown that they affected the election. It didn't affect? That's what the intelligence agency says. No, no. Malcolm back me up on this. No, I won't back you up on that. No, they're saying that the results were not affected by it. The results were not affected. That is such bullshit. They act like, here's what happens, this really gets me upset. No, because these talking points always act like we don't have eyes and we can't hear things. That's what it acts like. No, no, no, I was there. I'm not a researcher. I was a witness. I saw the election happen. Did you tell Hillary Clinton not to go to Wisconsin? No, Hillary Clinton took her work home. That's what people were mad at. Yes, that's right. She spent August at Hollywood in Nantucket. Wait, can I put this in perspective? (23/42)
When Kennedy was president, he wasn't fucking around with the Russians, but he was fucking around. Yes, he was. The intelligence agencies, we don't know what happened to Jack Kennedy, but that was one theory, because they couldn't trust him, because he was fucking East German spies and mafia couriers. And they were like, this guy has a pussy problem, and this cannot stand. He is too much of a danger to America. Now, I feel like that's where the intelligence agencies are now. Now, they should not be violent, don't get me wrong, but they are saying through their leaks, this man cannot be president. And you know why they're saying that? Because what we have is a situation here where the person they would have to report to, the absolute pinnacle, the commander in chief, is a person who himself cannot be reported to. What they're doing is they're reporting, and they're taking it above his head to the ultimate commander in chief, which is the American people. This is an accurate case, you (24/42)
know. That is J. Edgar Hoover. That's J. Edgar Hoover. And you know what? J. Edgar Hoover? Yeah. Yeah, use intel information to blackmail politicians to affect American policy. And that's Russia, that's Putin. Malcolm, you should be outraged to think, number one, that they're spying on an American person. Now, they can say, okay, he was collateral damage, that we were really spying on the Russian ambassador, but they do not have the right to disclose what a... Even if they find treason? Why do you think these things are being leaked to the first place? There was no spying going on on an American citizen. This was own force monitoring, and we have FBI with a warrant... You're not allowed to disclose your name to an American citizen, and you know that. Let's redirect back here to, again, let's not lose focus here. We are now in the place... He's a national security adviser, I think you're allowed to say that. He was a private citizen at the time, but you're not allowed to say that. You (25/42)
still cannot do that. I mean, that's the law. America is now in this place, where we have watched other countries who we had our nose up about, Egypt and Turkey, places where we thought, oh, you know, the dictator is crazy. So the intelligence services, that's not really the best option. Oh, wait, it is the best option. They're like our last line of defense now. And I... Trump floated the idea this week that he's going to put this guy, Steven Feinberg, who's some hedge fund buddy of his. He wants him to oversee the intelligence. It looks like a purge in the making, so that he can take over. Can, my question to you, sir, can Trump put his people in charge of the intelligence agencies? Because then we have no line of defense between the total coup. Well, every president puts people in charge of intelligence agencies, and they control that little seat that they're sitting in, and maybe a couple of seats around them. The people who come in every day, day in, day out, who walk past the (26/42)
statue of Nathan Hale over at CIA, who walk past the wall of honor over at the National Security Agency, they are not in this in order that, you know, the president of the United States goes out and disparages them day to day. They are here to protect this nation. They do it well. And what we're saying now is, they are now in an act of self-defense for the nation. They are loyal to the Constitution, not the man. Are you saying that they all got together and they said, hey, we're so worried about this guy that we're going to start breaking the law ourselves? Yes. That's what you're saying? That's exactly what you're saying. Wait, wait, wait. Why do you think people who are in the Trump circle, the people that he trusted are leaking? Why do you think that's happening? And by the way, let me point this out. Because you're saying, what the fuck is going on? Let me tell somebody. I got to move on, but let me point this out for you. The people in the intelligence agencies, by and large, are (27/42)
not liberals. No. They are not liberals. So when they're leaking, you know they're freaked out. Okay, so Kurt Vonnegut. There may be Obama holdovers. Yeah, right. I just leave it at that. That's what it is. Right. Like James Comey, the Republican who fucked Hillary. I'm not sure that's the right name. Kurt Vonnegut once said, true terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. Yes. On cue this week, we met this guy, Stephen Miller. He's 30 or 31 years old. He's the senior advisor there in the White House. This is a brown-noser on a scale I have never seen. And this is what he said. This is his debut on national TV. The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned. You're not scared by that? The powers of the president will not be questioned. We don't have checks and balances anymore? Checks and balances, Jack? No, listen, I'm with you on that. Great. But what I'm saying, if he is (28/42)
referring to section code 1182, that gives the president broad authority to control who comes into the border, then he's correct in that context. Okay, well anyway. I've had to defend that. I've had to defend that. It's not a whatever, Tim. It's US code 1182. Can I just say what's happening here, please? Okay. What's happening with Trump and a lot of this stuff is a complete assault on the truth is what's going on. And they're doing it in several ways. Let me tell you, the first way, like Trump does this casual lying that, and he puts the pressure on us to figure out what he's talking about. Like we have to be his fucking Rosetta Stone to carry through his lies. And then there's this exhaustion of fact checking that's going on because of the casual lying, where America's going to be tired of smart people fact checking him all the time. And finally, no, the last thing is taking facts as facts and turning them into what I call ammunition for ideological points, right? So in other words, (29/42)
if you say it rained today, that's a fucking fact, right? But Trump will say, now this is what Trump will say, well you're just saying that because you want us to fail. If Hillary was president, you wouldn't say it's raining. Yes, we would because it's fucking raining today. You would. It's fake rain Larry. Yes, it's fake rain. I was outside and I felt it. That was fake rain. But you know, if I could just add baby gerbils there that you had on the TV screen. I've seen these guys. I was in Baghdad at the Republican palace when they had 25 and 26 year old kids, interns. I remember walking into the office of the Iraqi banking sector and these kids were running $20 billion of cash and gold. And they were just interns because they were family members and friends of the Bush administration. We're going to see a lot more of that. And then they worship Orange Julius Caesar like he's the second coming. That's the most bizarre statement I've ever heard. And it's true. And I was at that palace. I (30/42)
went to Iraq and not wearing a uniform but went many times. I didn't see any 26 year olds carrying around billions of dollars in cash. I saw stacks of it but that was... They weren't touching it. No, we did it. That was a lot of street cash. No, it was a bunch of kids. No, the Iraqi government treasure was run by a couple of these. Are you talking about a drug deal? Stacks of cash. But we had to have street money. But my dad, Malcolm knows that. I found out something very interesting this week. The Ways and Means Committee in Congress has the power to look at Donald Trump's tax returns. Which would be very helpful at this moment when we're trying to get to the bottom of the biggest scandal ever. But they won't do it. The Republicans in Congress are the cover up. They are enablers. Where are the patriots? I mean, I know Donald Trump is not a patriot. Trump is not a patriot. Because a true patriot would say to Russia, look, even though you're helping me, that's not the way we win (31/42)
elections here. But that's not him. That's not who he is. But where is, like John McCain. Please, John McCain. I've seen John McCain be a guy I loved. A real patriot. And I've seen him be a party hack. John, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Seriously. I need those people to step forward and put country above party. You are always one of the sane ones, Jack. We're going to make America great again and you're going to be so happy when it happens. As a friend, get off the Trump train. As a friend, it is not, do you really think it's going to turn out well? Did you see the press conference? I think it's going to turn out well. Did you see the press conference? I thought it was great. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you love Donald Trump, you love the press conference. And if you hate Donald Trump, you didn't like it. That's just the way it goes. It was an attack on the media and then today he tweeted, the fake news media failing New York Times, NBC News. I noticed he said, NBC News. He (32/42)
leaves out the entertainment division because he's not getting a check. ABC, CBS, CNN is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people. Okay, this is what they say in Zimbabwe about the media. The enemy of the people. Do you think that is appropriate to say the media, which is in the Constitution, by the way. The press is in the Constitution as the enemy of the media. You dare to say Obama was divisive? It's a libertarian's first move. Exactly. I think you're overthinking it. I really do. Overthinking it? I really do. If you look at that press conference yesterday, he was taunting the media. He was in his element. He was having fun with it. His element as president of the United States. And it won. Not a run. And it won. Lenin himself used that phrase in 1917. What's that? That he attacks the press as an enemy of the people. This comes straight from the Vladimir Putin playbook. Oh, good God. Every dictator. Yeah, of course. But Masha Gessen recently just wrote an article called, (33/42)
Autocracy, a Survival Guide, where she said the first year of Putin's reign, he spent one year dismantling the press through legal precedents, through lawsuits, and he carved them back into the Pravda-like organization they are. That's what they're doing with Fox News. And they're deliberately eroding all other press. He also called the people his enemies in another tweet. He said, congratulations to my enemies. Remember that? It was New Year's or something. It's like he's going to Melbourne, Florida, to get in his rally this weekend. He won the election. I don't think anybody told him that. But he's still having a campaign rally. And those people who come to the rally, in his view, that's America. But that's 39% of America. 60% of America, we're the enemies. Can you govern when 60% of the country is considered the enemy? I don't think you can. I didn't follow your math on how you got there. Well, he's got about a 40% approval rating. His fans. An interesting poll that came out today (34/42)
showed that 45% of the people trust him more than the media. 42% trust the media. 42% trust the media. 45% trust Trump. But the same poll said 55% of the people. Well, 45 versus 42%. But that doesn't mean they're right, Jack. That doesn't mean it's true. Who do you trust more? 42% of the people said the media. And 45% said Trump. 60% believe the Noah's Ark story is real. And speaking of religion, I must break away here. We have a very special guest. I've been wanting to have her on for a long time. She's an actress and the creator and host of A&E's Scientology and the Aftermath. Please welcome Leah Remini. Switching gears. Thank you for having me. You're so sweet. Let me try to calm down from the panel. Yes, take a moment. Do you need some water? No, I do. Screaming and arguing to be with someone who I admire greatly. Because I've been watching your show and I am telling you I am such an admirer of what you are doing. Thank you. I think when the history of Scientology is finally (35/42)
written, it's going to show that fate chose you. Thank you. To come in like in Act 5. Right. You're like Reagan with tear down that wall. Thank you. And we had Going Clear, that documentary on our network. Yes. It was awesome and it started to break the wall down. Exactly. But I feel like what you are doing is putting a human face on the people who suffer from this awful cult. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And you're right. It's about families, right? It's about families but it's about the damage that it does to people as individuals. I mean we're all still kind of managing who we are from being in a cult. It's not an easy thing. But you were a child. I was a child and most people are who get in. Right. Because it really was a religion, I use that loosely, of its time. Right. So I think they're going to be hard pressed to find new members. However, I felt a responsibility because as somebody who was a Scientologist for over 35 years, what they disseminate was that we were (36/42)
responsible for mankind. And helping. Yes. And you thought you were helping. We thought we were helping and that's why it's hard to come out. I'm in a tough position because on one hand I'm attacking this cult and at the same time I know that the people who we're still in are under the spell of doing good for the world because that's what the organization is doing. That's another great thing that came out in your show that really explained a lot to me about how otherwise intelligent people who I knew, some of them, could be in this cult. I mean I would say any religion, but especially this one. And you really put this out there that what it is is you're audited. They're always questioning you. What did you do? What did you see? So it just doesn't pay to look on the internet because you know you're going to have to answer that question in an audit. So you just don't look. So you just don't know. Somebody told me the first time you found out something about Scientology was when you saw (37/42)
my movie, Religulous. Exactly. Well first of all I wasn't allowed, Scientologists are not allowed to look at things like this. We're not allowed to look or listen to people who are critics of Scientology. So I watched it because I was a troublemaker apparently, always. And I watched it. Now I wasn't at the level that you were, what you were revealing in your documentary. I wasn't even at that level yet. So you seemed a little crazy to me because I didn't know what you were saying was true. So I was like, that shit's crazy. Right? But then as you get to the upper levels, and now I want you to know that it's confidential. So a lot of people don't even reach this confidential level in Scientology. And you were like, Bill Maher's got the real shit. Right, right. Although you were technically correct in the way you said it. And I should tell you, and this is just a, I want to say this to the press and people who talk about Scientology. Is you should always talk to somebody who was in, (38/42)
because if you don't get the nomenclature 100% correct, we have a way of just kind of discrediting you from the, if you're not using it correctly. So you didn't say exactly, but you were on the right track. Okay? But you don't know this until $300,000 later and then you're really immersed into it. That's another great thing I learned from your show. You said, it always sticks with me. You said when you go to a Scientology event and you look in the parking lot, every one of the cars is a cheap shitty old car because Scientology sucks all the money out of all of this. Correct. My mother's laughing because she's in the audience and she's the only one in a nice car because I bought it for her. But that is, I mean, it reminded me a lot of communism. Because like communism, first of all, you're poor, they take all your money. And also the snitching on each other. Everybody's watching each other. I mean, again, this is the great thing about your show. It showed this disconnecting. That (39/42)
people, that they ask you to disconnect from your own family. It's families against each other. Yes, they don't ask you. It's a requirement. And they, the church thinks they have outsmarted the press because it is incorrect to say that across all boards, you have to disconnect from anyone who talks about Scientology. The truth of the matter is the policies, because everything is run by policy in Scientology, there's no room for assimilation. There's no, what did you think? What did you get from that? You know, it's what the fuck does it say? And if you don't understand it, you know, do a clay demo of it. And you get checked out on policies. Like what does the word and mean? And you need to know 25 definitions of the word and and its derivations. So, yes. So it's almost, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, (40/42)
it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is (41/42)
is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is (42/42)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #414 (Originally aired 2/10/17).
Words: 8253
Token: 8931
#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
#RealTimewithBillMaher #cent #leoai #token #data
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. As always with Donald Trump, there's just too much news to get to. I mean this administration happens in like dog ears, you know I mean, there's so much fucking crazy. It's like three weeks of Trump is like five years of Nixon But you know what? This was a good week for the resistance This was a good week for checks and balances, a good week for maybe surviving President Man Baby Because the federal appeals court unanimously ruled against his Muslim ban Which means refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia are once again free to come here and be uber drivers How about that? Turns out a law isn't just something Steve Bannon writes on a napkin And Donald Trump signs while making his smart face So Trump is now lost twice in court We found out this week his closest advisor Kellyanne Conway and his national security advisor Mike Flynn are being investigated for ethical misconduct They (1/42)
told Donald Trump today that his wall, his beautiful wall, is gonna cost twice as much that he thought It's almost like he's losing so much. He's tired of losing. Is that? And you know, this is a guy who takes losing well, doesn't he? Yeah, when the ruling came down from the court he was like, I'll see you in court. See you in court They're judges. Of course you're going to see them in court It's like saying, hey Chris Christie, I'll see you at the Cheesecake Factory There's so much, you know, how about this one? Sean Spicer his Press secretary will not confirm or deny that he is considering Sarah Palin to be ambassador of Canada He said it'll take her a while to learn the language, but we think It's gonna go smoothly after that. I mean other countries are Literally rolling their eyes I mean that literally. Trump met today with the Japanese Prime Minister and he held his hand for a handshake for 18 seconds until, yeah, look There we go That says it all. Back and to the right. Back and (2/42)
to the right. I mean, what do we tell other countries? America's under new management It's like you ever pull into a Holiday Inn and a rainstorm and you think it's a Holiday Inn But no, now it's a have a stay in And there are hookers in the lobby and Crime scene tape and black mold and the remote smells like lube. That's American now But you'll be glad to know that the president finally got down to the issue that's really plaguing America Which retailers are carrying Ivanka's clothing line? Now if you didn't know about this Donald Trump's daughter wife Ivanka She had a Clothing line which was dropped by department stores including Nordstrom. Of course Trump went apeshit on Twitter about this You know what of all the people mr. Businessman She he should understand they dropped it because the merchandise just wasn't moving The only one interested in getting into Ivanka's pants is him And then of course he had poor Sean Spicer go up there and say this is a direct attack on the president's (3/42)
Policies and his family and it's not acceptable. Okay, first of all, it's not an attack on his policies And if it was so what is a free country don't work for Donald Trump. We have to buy his kids Girl Scout cookies And then Kellyanne Conway he goes on Fox News and says go buy Ivanka stuff go buy it everybody Well, first of all the jokes on you Ivanka doesn't make Fox viewers a size triple X but also, this is Patently illegal for a federal employee to so go buy a product from I mean now liberals are chanting lock her up Lock her up and You know Trump voters, of course now are boycotting Nordstrom All of Trump friends are lining up behind him for this Vladimir Putin said today. He's gonna buy all his poison at Macy's But you know, I mean in his Nordstrom tweet it happened during the intelligence briefing we know this He's getting the intelligence briefing and he's tweeting about this. That's the president We have now ladies and gentlemen enough about the Middle East. What's the latest (4/42)
on women's ready-to-wear? Mr. President if North Korea gets a hold of that plutonium. Shut up. I'm writing a Yelp review But here's the thing that pissed me off the most this week Did you see this Mitch McConnell told Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up, right? Okay, he said she was warned she persisted Yeah, that's a meme now And then he pulled some ancient congressional rule out of his turtle ass That said you can't accuse another senator of conduct unbecoming his senator, but that's not what Elizabeth Warren was doing She just read a letter from Coretta Scott King. That was super pertinent to the case She was making against confirming Jeff Sessions. This is supposed to be the world's most Deliverative body but Mitch McConnell needs a safe space With a speech code so your microaggressions doesn't trigger his hurt feelings whiny little bitches Nothing is changed Bitches And Donald Trump's Nordstrom tweet. He said my daughter Ivanka's been treated so unfairly. She's a great person (5/42)
She's always pushing me to do the right thing Hey Ivanka push harder Show we got piers morgan john waters and kareem john pierre and a little later speaking with the very funny. Mr Jim Jeffries, but first up he is the junior senator from Minnesota who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee We love the Honorable Al Franken over here Hi bill, you said it all those years ago, but it's going to turn out to be the Al Franken decade It's the Al Franken millennium Okay All right, so Al, you know, I've talked to you personally about how you know Yeah, I'm a great admirer because you do things that the rest of us wouldn't do like have lunch with Republican senators So, you know what they're saying behind closed doors They must be they must be kind of going batshit over this Donald Trump administration To give us a little insight into what's happening behind the scenes Well, there's a range And what they'll say and some will Say that he's not right mentally And then some are harsher That was a (6/42)
cheap that was cheap Cheap that was cheap. There are some who I guess don't talk to me and You know, I haven't heard a lot of good things and I've heard some great concern About about the president's temperament. Okay. Well, that's very diplomatic of you Not very what I don't think this was diplomatic, but okay. I'll take it. I'll take it. I saw this today 51% of Trump voters Think Trump should personally be able to overturn decisions By judges, I know you and I are both people who believe in civics because we're old enough to remember when they taught civics in School, I remember when you used to be I've seen you do this on TV draw a map of the United States From that's geography Civics No, okay, I'm with you I'm with you why you're in the Senate on my HBO No, well what's interesting about that I saw that I think it came out last night or something and and this is apropos the decision by the Ninth Circuit That That didn't surprise me that 52 or 51 percent of Trump voters. What was (7/42)
heartening was that It was only about 25 percent of Americans so that means that It was only about five or ten percent of Americans Didn't understand civics or didn't understand the that that a federal the federal judiciary is independent Okay, I mean it was frightening to me that anybody in America would basically be saying we should make this man of all people a dictator Because that's what this says I know but it says that 48 or 49 percent of Trump voters Understood understood this and that's good. That's good. I I really you know that I boy Washington has really made you an optimist al and I Appreciate that it's half full. Yeah. Yeah tactful. Okay, so alright, so I don't know what they're half full of but they're half full So You're gonna meet with the man that Donald Trump wants to put on the Supreme Court, right? Yes, you're on that committee. Okay. Yeah, I'm hoping you're gonna say to him your name is not Merrick Garland So I can't vote for you. I Was asked by the White House (8/42)
Council who because I'm on the Judiciary Committee who I would like to see a point and I did say Merrick Garland and Or someone like Merrick Garland who's a consensus guy but my feeling we're gonna have hearings You know, I think this guy I don't want another 5-4 Conservative activist judiciary that is that votes to Citizens United and that so I This guy's gonna have to overcome a huge bar for me, okay, but isn't it not about the qualifications But about the fact that that pick was stolen yes, and You know, I mean I agree with you But what is what are we going to do about the Democrats cannot let that stand? we cannot have two rules one for Republicans and one for Democrats and I Hear everybody applauding but just why before just stop applauding for a second they they have the majority and We can't stop them from having hearings. And so we're going to have hearings now what I'm saying is is that the Roberts court has been a pro Activist pro corporate pro pollution pro big money in in (9/42)
in campaigns and in elections and I'm not gonna Okay another 5-4 Roberts court, okay So Time magazine came out for impeaching Donald Trump Number and cover I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton was president they would already have begun impeachment and hearings It doesn't matter about what they just would have done it Time says the emoluments clause which basically and obviously the Trump family is in violation of this You cannot take gifts from foreign countries. They're doing it all the time To say nothing of the mental problem Now when will the impeachment hearings start Let me remind you again that the Republicans are in the majority So I think it'll be it's months and months away I know every I know everybody wants a quick fix on this But this is going to be a bit of a marathon, but I'm so encouraged. You're right That what what this week has been incredibly encouraging and the energy around the country We're seeing red Districts where people are showing up at the town halls (10/42)
hundreds of people are showing up at the town halls There's a tremendous amount of energy and I want to encourage people to To keep that up right and it really helps and we got Thousand hundreds of thousands of calls about Betsy DeVos at the Senate and that makes a difference Because she is on notice now and She's not going to be able to do a lot of the things that I think she wanted to do because of that like walk Oh, what you people do makes a huge difference She couldn't even do that today It would have been the first time. Okay, so Donald Trump first time in a public school. Yes, she could she there were protesters wouldn't let her walk into the school Yeah, and it would have been the first time I got the joke now So I was the audience is laughing. All right last question now, then I'll let you go. I appreciate your time Okay Politico says that there was a meeting yesterday and Donald Trump with ten senators six of whom were Democrats and Donald Trump said to Kelly Ayotte who was (11/42)
the senator Republican senator from New Hampshire who lost narrowly as he did in message in New Hampshire Donald Trump said in this meeting thousands of people Were brought in on buses from neighboring Massachusetts to illegally vote in New Hampshire so once again, the president is seeing multitudes that no one else sees and It said there was an awkward silence an awkward silence and there were six Democratic senators in the room I was hope that you if you were one of those senators You wouldn't have just been awkwardly silent and you would have said no, excuse me. Mr. President that didn't happen. I Would have said something like that you would have I would have said oh, come on What? You got to stop doing this. Mr. President, right, you know, just stop it. I mean the three to five million illegal people didn't show up and and And vote for Hill all of them for Hillary and it didn't happen and just stop doing that It is It's very disturbing and I asked Jeff Sessions about this in the (12/42)
judiciary hearings and I said did you know you The Attorney General is the one in charge of the laws in this country including election laws Did you kind of discuss this with him? You know, you know, are are you concerned about this and this is very very very Disturbing that the president has a habit of Either imagining things or making stuff up. That's not we it's really outside the norm Not just of presidents but of human being All right, you were great at the hearings we love you for it senator Al Franken everybody Our panel, okay. Oh look the applause died soon All right, let's meet the panel he is a filmmaker a filmmaker please an auteur a maestro a Trailblazer, I'll fire whoever wrote that Thank and one of my first gay friends An author whose annual Valentine's Day comedy tour will hit Seattle this coming Monday John Waters is over She is a senior adviser and national spokesman for move on dot dot org Corrine John Pierre great to see He's the US editor-at-large for daily (13/42)
mail.com. We used to see him on CNN. I was on there all the time I even hosted it once here's Morgan is over here So we can answer them after the show on YouTube So as I said, it was a pretty good day for those of us who think we're in the resistance You know, they said that old cliche the Constitution was created by geniuses So that idiots could run it and we're giving that a good test aren't we? The judicial branch really did check the executive branch and that's what we want to happen The lesson I think here is that it is personal People think they're so high-minded He insulted judges When he said that thing about the just so-called judge and if something happens blame him I think every judge in the country was like, you know what? There are other people than you Donald Trump who have an ego He's insulted so many people. He's insulted the CIA and heads of corporations and senators and now the judiciary I just don't think you can insult people like this for that long and ever have (14/42)
any sort of success doing anything What about what we've just heard though. We just had a senator say he's mentally ill right is an idiot I mean, it's the two-way street, isn't it? No, I wouldn't have personally voted for Donald Trump He's not my politics and I'm not even American so I couldn't vote for me I wanted to but you know I didn't think anything could match the hysteria that I've seen in Britain since we left Europe and I voted to stay in but this Hysteria about these racist sexist neanderthals who've seized control of our country And now I come to Los Angeles where if you don't say that Trump's the new Hitler you get tarred Feathered and dragged to Santa Monica Pier and you get drowned I just think it's time. Everybody took a massive gigantic chill pill, but he is He's a president of the United States he won a free Democratic election You don't think kings can be mentally ill we King George the third had a few problems and if he hadn't if he hadn't we Might still be ruling (15/42)
America He takes it personally and you know says terrorists about everything and and to me I can understand in some way Like I sometimes wonder moderate Muslims aren't they against all gay people? But still I don't say they can't come in as a Catholics have been terrorizing me for decades But that's an interesting point of view I have not heard before you know And I think you know you're on the page with a lot of Republicans because I think what they can do is separate the crazy You may call it. Oh not mentally ill but it is crazy There is crazy out there and they think well, you know We can put that in the box over here and just use him for policy But I don't think that works because eventually the crazy is going to sabotage the policy Even if the policy was good Yeah, I just wanted to say to to Pierce's point I think the thing to understand is that if you are not white male straight you are you fear a Donald Trump's presidency because there is no place for you and a And I think (16/42)
that's the thing that you're missing and if you look at the 18 months of what Donald Trump did and what he said He ran the most anti-immigration Campaign that we have ever seen he talked about Mexicans calling them Rapists and criminals he talked about Muslim bands and it is it is it is fearful for me He's also he was also the first Republican president to stand there on Inauguration Day and actually talk about the lesbian and gay community of America now, I'm not expecting But he did say it and he got absolutely Zero even acknowledgement for saying okay, so I say look if you want to terrorize him and demonize him fine But it has to be fair to be effective and all this squealing and howling The president of the United States. He needs to put his big boy pants on Let me just show you first let me just show you something he said this week show the taper I was a good student. I think it starts with these reacting to the most to your point about whether he is mentally ill or not. I (17/42)
Understand things I comprehend very well Okay Better than I think almost anybody Mentally ill but it reminded me of this movie Other presidents have lost in court before Here's how a former president Who was so much more mature than the president we have now who we so wish we had back Handled it when he lost in court First of all, the Supreme Court decision will abide by the court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it I thought you're gonna do Nixon. That's right. Okay, but isn't that something we're at a place where we're missing George Bush? Yeah I mean Barbara It bothers me that you're trying to make the case that this is somehow normal. This is not normal We're not wrong to be saying that we worked are trying to cling to some sort of normalization Okay, but let me throw you back at George Bush there because people say Trump's a monster, right? He's the new Hitler and so on George W Was the one that took this country and my country into an illegal unethical immoral (18/42)
war in Iraq which killed a million people a thousands of troops let me finish my point and Killed a million people. Yeah, and thousands of troops, right? That is a monstrous act It was taken as revenge against a country that had nothing to do with 9-eleven That is the act Trump's been there three weeks right time. My point is You're talking about making him see where this is going when somebody says I'm the smartest person ever in the history of the world My point is you have to save the outrage for genuinely outrageous things We all get fed up with the outrage, but we're comparing him to Hitler, but I'm sick of talking about Trump everywhere you go That's all people talk about but I'm sure that the you know The gypsies and the homosexuals are tired of talking about Hitler, too When you notice I didn't mention the Jews because he didn't either when he talked about the Holocaust You know, it's tempting to say he puts out so much crazy shit every week We're just gonna throw up our hands (19/42)
and ignore it. No, I'm not there yet put up the list We made a list of the crazy and the lies. This is just from one week. Here's the crazy list. Okay crazy number one So-called judge he called a judge a so-called judge Keep going let's hear the list if something happens blame him blame the court. That's insane See you in court. He said to them You think our country is so innocent. That's what he said to Bill O'Reilly. What's crazy about that? Well when I said it they fucking threw me off ABC Okay, you're right you think America's in it seriously About the Iraq war you think that's innocent. No, but I just think that America has done bad things It was in response to a question and when Bill O'Reilly said Putin's a killer and he said yeah A lot of people are killers. You think we're so innocent. I don't think America is innocent Britain's not innocent This is something Neum Chomsky says yeah, it just shows that the Republican good or bad So it just shows the Republican Party has no (20/42)
principles. No principles. It's just about who wins What as opposed to the Democrats who are currently behaving in exactly the histrionic way that they warned us Trump and his supporters would behave When they lost this goes back Back to what Bill was saying. This is not business as usual We have we have someone who is disrespecting the people of this country You know what you're so British The Trump voters are confusing usual with normal. Yes, it's good to like upset business as usual But it's not normal when the CIA says we can't tell the president's secrets Because we don't know if he will share them with Russia that is time to panic Let me connect how the lies, you know, you say that this is what the Republicans want to do They just want to put that in a box the crazy the lies. I'm a Republican Well, you sure sound like I'm not a Republican I wouldn't have voted for him I'm not a Republican I'm actually I watch your show every week. I agree with almost everything you ever say, (21/42)
right? That's not my point My point is the hysteria is not gonna get the Democrats back into power. It's gonna have the opposite It will empower Trump Marching every time No We won the court order last night it is working it is working if it wasn't for what Democrats were doing this week We would have never heard of Betsy DeVos. We never finished a list of lies. Let's do our list of lies He said this week the murder rate is highest. It's been it's actually the lowest it's been Yeah, okay, then he said the media doesn't report terrorism Then he said any negative polls are fake news this is in one week Then he said the cabinet longest cabinet delay in history factually just wrong. He's that thing. I just told Al Franken about Bussing illegal people. These are all just out and out lies and here's the thing you could say. Oh, they're just crazy lies Does it matter? Here's the connection Jeff Sessions our new attorney general said about crime I wish the rise that we're seeing in crime was (22/42)
some sort of aberration or blip which it exactly is Show the chart. There's a chart that we see of crime. Okay? But Jeff Sessions says no my best judgment is this is a dangerous permanent trend Wait a second Sean Spicer saying the Yemen raid which was a giant dismal failure We didn't get the guy we were going after who's now gloating and talking about the fool in the White House We killed children and women they knew we were coming. It was not a success, but he's saying Because Trump says it's a success. We all why have you left out the fact that they killed 12 Al Qaeda operatives Is that not significant? They killed 12 Al Qaeda. I did. Yeah, why have you left that out? Probably because they were eight years old because it sounds better to say they just But what the best not true and my point about the crime figures is what the crime figures true Is that the crime figures in 2015 rose by the highest spike since 71 the figures for? 2016 are likely for serious murder and gun-ready crime (23/42)
also like it arrives by similar amount I think everyone should be worried about the massive spike in crime Look at the chart Charred up doesn't walk Look where it was. Look where it is. Look at the little T50 yes, I spiking crime serious crime in this look 71 Where it was look where it is the last two years for fuck's sake Yeah, can I just put in one one thing that basically I live in Baltimore the gun violence is terrible One is too much every family that had their kid killed they don't care if it went up or down Can I give one advice to the guy the new Attorney General hire more gay cops Lavender blue can make black lives even better. Here's what? What the White House and the Attorney General is trying to do it they're trying to stoke fears in to the American Fear is what they're trying to do What he wants to do is he wants to make sure that they put policies forth That's going to hurt the black community and the Latino community. That is what's happening You know, we were talking on (24/42)
the show last week that everything is politicized now and that includes Valentine's Day You know marriages have broken up because of being a Trump being elected wives just wouldn't stand it They told their husband they said you know what if you vote for this asshole I will personally take it and I will might leave you and husbands dug in and now they hate each other So here are the cards for them And you know car, you know Here's the ones from the conservative husband to my liberal wife treat my penis like your election day loss Put it behind you Wow our lifetime together hasn't changed you at all your ass isn't big it's alternative small You're the love of my life there's no refuting I love you more than Trump loves Putin, okay All right, and here's the opposite when these are one from the liberal wife To their conservative husband having kids with the Trump voter made me so sad until I remembered you're not really their dad I Roses are red violets are blue. I'm fucking the gardener (25/42)
to get back at you He may be rich but your president's stupid and both of you him and you are hung just like you I Must be or a Syrian refugee of love because you never let me come You've got a heart like a lion and a dick like a cannon but your ideas repulse me go fuck Steve Bannon He's the Australian community Minneapolis on February 24th Jim Jeffries Okay, how you doing I wanted to have you here because I thought last week we were going to be in a war with Australia I'm happy to be here before the Australian travel ban comes in actually I wanted to have a friend on that side of the world. What are they saying about that in Australia? Well, they're actually happy Because two weeks ago you didn't know who Malcolm Turnbull was No one in America knew who the Prime Minister of Australia was right now it's like a big deal It's like he's approval rings through the roof because he told Trump to fuck off. Is that right? Yeah Yeah, they love him now like because this is like the Mexican like (26/42)
like he said like America's not innocent Britain's not innocent, but Australia is fucking innocent Like Like today so not to its own people right the Well, yeah, that was that was when there were British people killing him. We became Australians a lot later But it's it's it's weird because there's only one country that has been an ally of America since the Second World War who's been in every war with America since the Second World War and that's Australia, right? Because other countries are dipped out like Britain did not go to Vietnam Australia went to Vietnam Right France did not go to the war in Iraq. Although I feel they might go to the next one and But Australia has always been there. There's one other country New Zealand Australians love Americans. We've always heard that and and and the proof is that most of our actors you don't know I love Americans. I mean you live here. Why why did let me ask you that? Why did you choose? I mean you it's not like you came from some third (27/42)
world. Hellhole. You came from Australia Why do you want to live in America? I love America I have my son's American and plus I can make a lot of money out here in comparison to Australia my actually got that order wrong My son that I love America no, I like America is a great place man. And let me ask you I know you talk about religion You're not for it as I am not and I've been having atheists on my shows for 23 years Even before people knew what atheists were almost it shouldn't really be a word for it. That's what I find weird There shouldn't be a word for believing in nothing, right? You're right It shouldn't be a thing I I hate people who are really adamant atheists who try to convert people at parties and stuff like that I think one I think one of the privileges of being an atheist is you don't have to do anything on Sunday Right and a lot of people feel that way I mean, you know, it's very surprising when you ask an audience, huh? Let's see how many are atheists agnostic or (28/42)
none just write none America didn't used to be that way. Well, I don't I like a this but I'm not a big fan of agnostics Just what is that fucking side? Like if you're an agnostic you're not getting into heaven there's no way you're getting into heaven going. Ah good you here You know what I mean like Like at least I'm committed right to the bitter end. I feel like just don't hedge your bets pick a fucking side. Okay? So, um, you have a rant about guns, which is went crazy viral. Yeah Especially the liberal folks love and I know you have this feeling that anyone who has a gun Just loves their gun, but you know, there are people in America who have a gun who don't love their gun. Well, I Assured one I assume they like their gun. They wouldn't have it if I don't like my antibiotics, but I Case I need them I but you love the result But that's different you love the result well the thing is if I had a gun I'd probably kill myself So I wouldn't love the result. That's why I feel like these (29/42)
people at times sure because most gun deaths are suicides Of course, yeah, yeah, whether it be yourself or you get a cop to shoot you or what have you I look I I'm Yeah It's very easy to do it in America, yeah little blackface No, I look What what I think about a joke in support of what you actually believe It's very simple, right? So in Australia there hasn't been the Mass shootings since the Port Arthur attack and that's when we again that when we banned guns So that makes sense that it hasn't happened since then. Maybe it could be a coincidence But America can't do that you had that well you had the same amount of police shootings and Fatalities in the first month of January than Australia's had in the first last 25 years. Oh, yeah, where'd the gun country? Yeah, and so people can say black lives matter and all this type of stuff But it really comes down to it is racism in some parts, but it also has to do that Everybody has a gun, but I always think that someone's gonna be shooting (30/42)
Yeah If you think someone's gonna shoot you you're gonna shoot so a little racist to say that Everyone who has a gun loves a gun because there are people who live in poorer neighborhoods than you do who really need a gun Well, I when you live in a shitty neighborhood where the cops don't show up. I'm new money bill I didn't always live in rich neighborhoods and I never had a gun. Why is it? Why is it on guns because I had a big thing about gun control at CNM when I was there Went down like a lead balloon. Yeah It's why I Know love with the commonwealth The Australians the Australians were British convicts. We know the back That's right. But the point I make was this it seems to me on the guns thing. There is a massive inconsistency nay hypocrisy between the president's stance about dangerous people coming into this country needing extreme betting and at the same time there is the Absolute opposite when it comes to checking who is buying guns in this country. I agree Why? Why would it (31/42)
not just be absolutely consistent with extreme betting to prevent violence to just bring in universal? background checks on every gun purchase in America to make sure the people buying them aren't criminals or mentally insane people and yet it's not happening and 32,000 people a year die of gun violence in America another 70,000 get hit by gunfire to put it in perspective Britain, which is one-fifth of the size of the United States We have 32 gun deaths a year Yeah, you have 85 people dying from guns a day in this country know about this group called gag Two guys which is here which is called gag which is gays against gun you people Republicans think it's fellatio on firearms I Just wondered if you knew about that's a good group right gag. They're here. I've I've gotten different things up. Yeah, I could bet yeah, okay Can I ask about a real issue because we you know It's important to talk about Donald Trump and it's also important to talk not about Donald Trump Not that he doesn't (32/42)
affect everything because I'm talking about Obamacare now But this is a real issue that affects a lot of people's lives and it's interesting that the Republicans are really pulling back on this Now because of course they never had an alternative plan and now people are showing up at the town halls Screaming at them because we have our own Tea Party now, which is awesome What could Trump care be if you think about it? It does when you get an operation the the doctor brands his name on your organ Free facelift It's easy to make fun of his hair, but if you notice recently it's different He has like a ducktail now a juvenile delinquent. It looks like Johnny Depp and crybaby hooked up with Bob's big boy It's really impeachable But it came out that 35% of Americans said that they thought Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act Were two different things You know They do have two different names But I'll give I'll give the Republicans just one credit which is they've been able to do something (33/42)
that Democrats and President Obama was not able to do which is sell the importance of ACA and Obamacare and now you have Republicans as you were mentioning running away from their town halls because they can't They can't explain why they are going to repeal Obamacare without a replacement And they are very much the dog that caught the car and for six years. They never did anything They didn't work with the Democrats. They just decided we're going to repeal repeal repeal with nothing to Follow that up with and now they're realizing rhetoric is not policy and they cannot govern but but the truth about Obamacare That is true and I come from a country where universal health care is for all so we you know I totally applaud the idea of Obamacare the problem with it was the implementation Has led to people having Do it right the problem was and always will be that we still had to cut in private industry Yeah, the profit motive you cannot have life and death pitted against the profit motive (34/42)
This would be a great time for the Democrats. It wouldn't pass but people would like it to introduce single-payer. Why do people? Why do people Have great misgivings about Obamacare, but love Medicare because Medicare is simple Yeah, it's simple Medicaid Social Security simple you get a check Okay, Obamacare just too complicated people don't like complicated and it will always be complicated as long as we have expensive, right? We can be unaffordable care rice for many people. So it hasn't been without flaws, right? We all know it hasn't been without flaws. What I'm saying is Republicans refuse to work with Democrats for six years That is the fact. Well, I don't see many Democrats working with Republicans That's because Republicans haven't offered anything they just said we'll repeat repeal so what is it show us what's the rip? It would be great to Washington would now come together for the sake of the health of the American people, wouldn't it? That would be a great thing There are (35/42)
clearly parts of Obamacare which work very well there are parts of it that don't work well and it's become Unaffordable for many Americans again, you know, you've got to get in there with the Democrats and you gotta work it out Where you stop and do that stop the gouging I mean it was in the news this week remember the EpiPen It went up from I don't know what to some 10 times as much that's gouging They just did it with the there's you know, people who have opioid addiction Yeah, and they need it basically in their EpiPen for junkies That went up from like several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars that cannot stand Yeah, and this could I ask this one last question? The people who said during the campaign that Hillary Clinton was the lesser of two evils Could we get the apology right now? Why As if are you serious? Like Hillary Clinton would have a cabinet with Betsy DeVos and and fucking Rick Perry They wouldn't have a Muslim band they wouldn't be Doing this shit with Russia. (36/42)
Are you crazy? There is no Muslim ban if there was The hysteria I'm talking about 85% You say he hasn't done this he hasn't done that he's not gonna do all these things give him a fucking chance mate I know he didn't kill the Jews on the first day. He worked up to it That is the exact ridiculous hysterical nonsense You just like you just like that you won the apprentice and you have a famous friend mate, that's all you fucking like Losing your audience Sounding unpleasant This might be The worst thing that could happen and you all haven't even considered this just suppose just suppose That Donald Trump and these horrible white men and the one black man. That's even worse Ben Carlson That they made everything better. Wouldn't that be awful? New rule New rule before you get on your high horse and start criticizing this man's decision to support Donald Trump Show me one other time when he made a bad choice New rule the international symbol for choking must be changed from this to this New (37/42)
rule you can buy these lollipops to celebrate the brand-new Chinese year of the rooster, but you have to call them what they are Cocksuckers New rule Sean Spicer has to stop sounding like he's using the white guy voice that black comedians use When they make fun of how white people talk No one had numbers because the National Park Service which controls the National Mall does not put any out. I Don't even think that Sean Spicer. I think that's Dave Chappelle in white face New rule now that we've all seen this picture of the Yes, it's real of a young Donald Trump in his bathrobe Lying across pink pillowcases with a come hither. Look he has to answer this question. How was he? Neuro, someone has to tell the owners of this Chinese food restaurant how much we appreciate their honesty You didn't You didn't promise the world and we weren't expecting it We're in a strip mall at 2 in the morning. We're high does the beef in your beef and broccoli contain any beef at all? Yes, then in the words (38/42)
of President Trump we want deal And finally new rule with Valentine's Day coming up. Everyone must take a minute and remember their first love I sure remember mine. I went off to college at 18 and I fell hard Not for a girl that would have been my first choice But I was a slow developer socially, you know those letters that college guys send to penthouse magazine that begin I never thought this would happen to me. Yeah. Well that never happened to me But I did fall I did fall in love with books and ideas and Knowledge and also my hand that's true But there is no doubt that it is a truly a kind of love affair when you go off to a place where you have intellectual epiphanies because learning is so revered and the celebrities are the smartest people I Might have been able to get a blowjob in college, but I got my mind blown on a regular basis But you know that was another country One of the saddest things about the one we live in now is we don't seem to want smart people in our lives (39/42)
anymore Smart presidents can't have that Scientists, what do they know? newspaper editors liars fake news You know people used to get their news from newspapers because professional newsrooms took separating fact from fiction seriously and Employed people who had studied how to do that But now people get their news on Facebook by sharing or as it used to be called hearsay Instead of all the news that's fit to print you click on a link from your cousin Jody who runs the tilted world Why waste money in a subscription to a newspaper when they would just blow it on war correspondence? Honor the Ben Bradleys of the world who brought a president to his knees way before Monica Lewinsky did A student in a social media focus group one said if the news is important. It will find me Except it doesn't and that's how we wound up with President Bannon and his dummy Donnie It's not surprising that it can't find you since on social media news competes with videos of Russian car crashes creepy clowns (40/42)
and a rabbi doing the mannequin challenge And you know how they say you can't make this shit up Turns out you can By Election Day last year the top fake news on Facebook was getting more shares clicks and comments than the real news Millions of people believed some straight-up bullshit that the Pope had endorsed Trump When in fact after Trump won what the Pope said was I'm praying for his enlightenment To which God said I've done a lot of miracles, but give me a fucking break We used to respect Scientists that's why every stoner in the 70s had a poster of Einstein on the wall Right next to the one of the naked black chick with the huge afro But now only 36% of Americans say they have a lot of trust that information from Scientists is reliable well 98% of scientists say humans evolved over the millennia But that view is shared by not nearly as many real Americans Trump supporters don't think species can change over time But they do think Trump used to be all about himself, but now he's (41/42)
working for us This Valentine's Day can we please fall in love with knowledge again? You know under President Obama the Secretary of Energy was first a Nobel Prize winner And then a nuclear physicist not that Trump's pick for the job doesn't have impressive credentials How did it happen we went from being led by the smartest person in the room To the biggest jackass on Twitter All right, that's our show The New Orleans March 18th at the Civic Center in Oklahoma City April 9th I want to thank John Waters, Kareem Jean-Pierre, Piers Morgan, Jim Jeffries, and Al Frank And join us now for overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO.com (42/42)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #408 (Originally aired 10/28/16).
Words: 8615
Token: 10938
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Start the clock. Good afternoon. After two, time will be... Thank you. I know it's a... I love you, too. You have Halloween fever. Who doesn't? It's Halloween weekend. We love it out here in Los Angeles. Halloween, when people get the cake on makeup and pretend they're something they're not, or... or as Trump calls it, campaigning. Yeah! I got a great costume this year. I'm gonna terrify Republicans. I'm going as a science book. I... But... I think it is rather appropriate that this election is so close to Halloween, because what happens in every scary movie? You think you killed the monster. You killed him ten times. And then a tiny orange hand comes out of the brain. Oh, yeah. Oh. Believe me. For Hillary, today was nightmare on E-mail Street. Did you see what happened today? Okay, the FBI, if you didn't do this, was all over the news today. Giant story. The FBI found some more Hillary e-mails. So (1/43)
they're reopening the investigation. Great, huh? Hillary's e-mails are like unreleased Tupac songs. Just when you think they have them all, they found a few more. And you'll never believe where they found these new ones. On Anthony Weiner's computer. I'm not making that up. On Anthony Weiner's compu... No one thought to look among the dick pics. That's where the e-mails are. Now, for those of you who are not political junkies, you might be asking, why? Why on Anthony Weiner's computer? Because Anthony Weiner is under investigation. That's right. Yeah, man, I don't bullshit here, okay? No high school dance. Yeah, Anthony Weiner's under investigation for sexting with a underage girl across straight... state lines. So the FBI seized all his computers. He is married, or was married, to Uma Amadeen. Uma Amadeen, who is Hillary Clinton's aide. And they were using the same computer, which begs my first question. Why was Uma using Anthony's computer if you... One thing she didn't want to go (2/43)
near, it would be his computer. So Hillary's e-mails are intermingled with Anthony Weiner's sexting? No wonder why she had her server wiped. I'd have it boiled. But, you know, this... this is the world we live in now. Hillary Clinton's aide's estranged husband is a freak, so we get to read Hillary Clinton's e-mails. I wish Hillary would send a text to Donald Trump. Maybe then we would see his taxes. And... And, you know, we don't know what is in these e-mails. Maybe nothing. James Comey, the director of the FBI, he's the one who made this announcement today. He said they appear pertinent, but, quote, I can't say that they're significant. Well, take your time, man. There's nothing riding on it. I mean, it's so ironic. Weiner's one excuse when he was just sexting was he never actually fucked anyone. Well, now he has. Planet Earth. You know... I... I don't know if Weiner's dick is big, but it certainly casts a long shadow, I'll say that. Wait a second. I do know his dick is big. We've all (3/43)
seen it a hundred times, but... But, of course, you know, Trump and Cruz and the whole gang on the right are all making hay out of this about its corruption and criminal conduct. Only Republicans could look at an investigation into sexually propositioning a minor and say, yeah, did you find anything really disgusting? Like mishandled e-mails, something that would really revolt people. So, once again, Hillary's political fortunes are driven by out-of-control cocks. Right? This poor woman. I mean, first it was her husband, then it was Donald Trump's, and now it's Anthony Weiner's, or what she calls the my-basket-of-deplorable-horn-dogs. So, you know what? I don't know what they're gonna find, and I don't care. She's got a server in her basement. I don't care if she's got John Benet Ramsey in her basement. I'm still not voting for Donald Trump. Here, Kristen Saldis Anderson and Rick Lazio and who I'll be speaking with. I'm so glad she's here. Good friend of mine, Chelsea Handler, is (4/43)
backstage. But first up, he is the founder of the Dream Corps and a CNN contributor. You all know Van Jones. How are you, pal? Great to see you. Yeah, man. All right. So, first of all, what is your reaction to today's news? Well, she's got four men in her life. Trump, who's a pervert. Clinton, who's got a racy past. You've got Weiner, whose name speaks for itself. And Barack Obama. And for once, the black guy is the one guy not in trouble. You don't have to be that black about it. You've made your point. But, I mean, honestly, I mean, so, even before this, the Republicans were saying that they're gonna obstruct her. Yep. Investigate her. I mean, I picture them doing it right away, like Inauguration Day. Like, she'll be testifying in a ball gown. That's their wish, you know. Yeah, listen, they have forgotten the difference between being a party of opposition and a party of obstruction. There's great honor in being a party of opposition, you know, saying, listen, we think your ideas are (5/43)
wrong, we can make them better. But when you just stop the entire government from functioning, there's a word for that. Treason. That's the word, it's treason. You have to do your job. You have to do your job, you take an oath, period. Well, I mean, and that gets us to the Supreme Court. I mean, they took an oath to at least give a hearing on a Supreme Court justice, and now I heard John McCain. John McCain, who's supposed to be one of the reasonable ones this week, say, whoever Hillary puts up, they're gonna block it. And I guess they're okay with, I mean, the Supreme Court is supposed to be nine, now it's eight. We could get down to, when they start dying, it could be four. It looks like they're never going to even allow a hearing on anybody, this is insane. I think they, listen, honestly, at a certain point, the Democrats just have to say, listen, guess what, especially if we get the Senate, guess what, if you guys don't wanna show up and do your jobs, we'll do it for you, we're (6/43)
gonna suspend all those rules, we are going to let the Supreme Court function, period. You can't have one branch of government stop two. That's called a tyranny of a branch. The reality is the President of the United States is supposed to appoint, those justices are supposed to serve, and if you're giving advice and consent, listen, you can waive that if you want to, but we're gonna go forward. Yeah, I mean, it is pretty amazing, when you think about it, how they can really take anybody. Now, I don't know what's in these emails. In the past emails, I'm always trying to find something that in one sentence I could say, well, she did that. You know, she's not completely clean, but you are someone who has some familiarity with this. I mean, you were in the, we forget that we know you because you were in the Obama administration, and you were sort of the first Gary Black man that they went after. I mean, you were head of the green jobs, I mean, they said you were a czar, Glenn Beck did like (7/43)
14 shows on you. 1400, I think. Fox News. So you know what it's like. Well, first of all, let me say two things. First of all, at that time, Glenn Beck was on TV every night and I wasn't, and now... You're proposing. And... Yeah, well, I mean... But second of all, the whole idea of me being a green jobs czar, part of it is that they did not want to have the conversation about climate. They did not want to have the conversation about... I do. Well, you do. And by the way, you're the only person who has consistently, given her, consistently been a climate champion on the national airway. I think we agree that's the most important issue. It is the most important. And there was not one question about it in any of the debate. Which I, listen, I think that's going to be, going to go down in history as a huge mistake and my network was a part of it, but I will say this. Part of it is people just don't understand how sexy the climate solutions are. Listen, this is not boring stuff. Here in (8/43)
California, nobody knows this, in California, we did three sexy things on climate. We have a cabin trade program here where we took money from the polluters and said, give it to us, that's sexy. Nyeh. Two. Two. We said we're going to use the money. You grabbed without asking. See? You see? Apparently that's all... You don't even ask. Apparently that's all it raised. You just put a chick-tack in your mouth. Exactly. Grab that money. See? Apparently. Okay. Number two, we took the money and we invested it and we've now got a billion dollars from polluters in California, put it in poor communities. Cheap and low-cost solar panels in the hood. Farm workers getting carpools. We've got bus passes for low-income people. So you can save the people and save the planet at the same time if you do the right thing with climate policy. The danger that you have is that now you've got places like Washington State, they want to take the money from polluters, give it to corporations. That's wrong. Take (9/43)
the money from polluters, give it to the people, build a big movement and stop climate change. That's the way forward. That's the way forward. Okay. Another thing we think alike about, I think, is, you know, comparison shopping with the candidates. I had Ann Coulter sitting in your chair here about two weeks ago. And it was pretty soon after Pussygate had broken in the news. And I said to her, look me in the eye, Ann, and tell me that if there was a tape they found of Barack Obama saying, hey, give me a tic-tac, because, you know what, when you're a community organizer, you don't even have to ask. They just let you do whatever you want, grab their pussies. And you put out a rant about if Trump was black. Same idea. And I think it's something people need to hear. But listen, first of all, I was just mad, and I just put the thing on, and I talked for 13 minutes. That thing got 11, 12 million views. But the reason is very simple. If Trump were black, you would call him a thug. That's what (10/43)
you would call him. Any African American going around bragging about sexual assault, every African American would have to come on the air and apologize for the failure of black men and the violence of black. This is, so, what you have here is a classic case. He came on the scene to get famous. He said these African American boys in Central Park were what, sexual assaulters. Then he said that the Mexicans coming into the country were rapists and sexual assaulters. It turns out it was the white dude who was a sexual assaulter the whole time. It was projection. Projection, yeah. And part of, I think, the reason people get so upset is a double standard. For instance, you've got these Native Americans who are out there fighting to stop that horrific pipeline. They're getting beat up, they're getting arrested. They are national heroes. At the same time, you've got 11 white dudes that go and get guns and take over a whole part of the federal government. The Oregon thing. Yes, in Oregon. And (11/43)
guess what? Beginning of the year, these guys, these militia types, Amen Bundy, Cliven Bundy was his father. They had a protest earlier. Yeah, they took over a wildlife refuge. With guns. With guns. Federal property. Acquitted today. They walk. They walk. They walk. Pookie. Pookie. Snoopy. Snoopy. Shanay-nay. Run-run. I mean, if they had been named that and not Bundy, they would be in prison for the rest of their lives. That's all I'm saying. Pookie, thank you for being here. You're a great guest. And I love to watch you on CNN. All right, Ben Jones, everybody. The next congressman, one of our favorites, actually, from New York, Rick Lazier rejoined us. Hey, Rick, how you doing? Good to be on. She is a Republican pollster and columnist for the Washington Examiner, also one of our favorite guests. Kristen Soltis Anderson is back with us. And you know this man, he won an Oscar, and his new film is Michael Moore in Trumpland. I highly recommend it. It's awesome. Michael Moore is right (12/43)
over there. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime. So we're going to answer them after the show on YouTube. Before I get to you guys, a couple of quick program notes. I have been calling Donald Trump a whiny little bitch. I have a well-trained audience, really, for about a year. Well, now it's a comedy special. You know, I'm going to do it on Facebook Live on November 2nd. I hope you're Facebook fans. You know, I go around the country all the time doing my stand-up back. I was like, I have an hour of awesome fucking Trump jokes, and it's just going to go to waste after the election. So I'm giving it to my Facebook fans. Also, next week, we have a special guest on our show. We've been trying to get him for quite a while, like eight years. We sent out a petition. You can't guess? That's right. Yes, we finally landed that big show. President Obama, there was just a standing ovation for getting you on the show. We haven't said anything yet, so OK. Now, about the (13/43)
week's news, this Friday, always a big day around here, Friday, because we do our show, and it seems the news breaks. The FBI director said this email that he's looking through are pertinent, but he doesn't know if they're significant. I guess Putin hasn't read them yet. What do you make of this panel? There's been so many Clinton scandals, which I have to, in my own head, go, is this something or is this nothing? This is just another one of these things. She has been attacked and abused for 30 years. I'm sick of it. I don't want to hear this 11 days before the election. And it's just, I'll tell you what, let me take that back. Let me take that back. Now, that sounds partisan. If these, well, I'm going to take a little bit, if these emails, these new emails, can prove that she started a war because a dictator threatened to kill her daddy, or she war profiteered on behalf of Halliburton, or maybe she yelled at an aide to get her more Tic Tacs. Maybe then I want to read the emails. But (14/43)
other than that, Bill, this is just such bullshit. I doubt that there is anything that you just described in those emails. But I'm trying to imagine if two weeks from now, the FBI had come out and said, by the way, two weeks ago, we found some stuff on Anthony Weiner's computer. Sorry we didn't tell you at the time. We didn't want to mess with this election. But now we're going to tell you. People would be outraged on the right, and I think justifiably so. I think there was really no good way to go about this, except as soon as you know, the FBI says, we found out yesterday that there was a potential of something going on. If they didn't say something, and it got to after election day, that's only going to fuel the fire more and more for Trump to come out and say, look, this whole thing was rigged. What does Anthony Weiner have to do with Hillary Clinton? That's what I don't get. It's so hard to imagine Anthony Weiner CC-ing Hillary on a dick pic he's sending to a team. Right, but it's (15/43)
not. But it's not. I'm going to do you like your homework. It's likely not Weiner. What do you mean? It's because the point is that his then wife had access to the same computer. They seized them because she was a top personal aide to Hillary Clinton. But we've already read so many of her emails, and what they show is her aides email each other back and forth. This is from WikiLeaks. A lot about appearances and ethics, which is, I guess, what aides should do. Are they careful? Yes, they're careful. I certainly can't blame them for being careful. But if there's nothing, there won't be any charges. The fact that Comey, he went through concortions to explain why he was not the aide. So it's wrong for the Republicans as they're already out there today saying that it's criminal. We have no idea what's in these. So that's wrong, to say it's criminal. I would agree. I would only say that Hillary Clinton is a scandal factory. And you just look through her life. That may not be her fault. Well, (16/43)
the cattle fusion is a scandal factory. The cattle futures... The cattle futures. I can't go back there. I can't go back there. I forgot about the cattle futures. Let me ask a bigger picture. I withdraw my support of Hillary Clinton. I forgot about the cattle futures. All the way to the current. Right. You're right. Let's elect the pussy grabber. Okay. By the way, there's videotape of him as he's passing a 10-year-old going down the escalator. Oh, I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (17/43)
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know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I (24/43)
know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that that bomber in New Jersey, the father, he reported his own son to the FBI. The Unabomber's brother turned him in. That's the highest level of principle when you turn on your own family because principle is even higher than that. Okay, let me ask- There's still 11 days for her to do that. She's watching. Do you know that the Trump people- Hey, hey, great idea. Do you know that the Trump people are saying you're a Trump supporter now? Yes. I don't know if you've seen- Yeah, of course. Of course I've seen it. Yes, of course. It says it so clearly I am. Well, no, but I mean, it's funny the way they ... You try to do a good deed. We all, in our own bubble, we go after Trump. And you, I thought it was great. You really tried to understand the Trump voter and say, hey, there is something there. We wouldn't vote for Trump, but there is (25/43)
something why ... And of course, they turn it around and try to make you into something you're not. Trump thanked me yesterday for- He'll probably call and thank me for this appearance. Once Ivanka goes on TV, no, you're going to be given the credit for that. Thank you. But he thanked me. I don't think he's seen my film. I think what he did was he saw that his name was in the title and that was like- That's all he needs. Yeah. So it was very weird. Let me say something about that. The idea that this man congratulates himself every time there's a loss for a win and credits himself with winning debates that he doesn't win or, oh, that was triumphant or this didn't happen when there's recordings of the very thing that he's denying, he said on television. It's like he's living in another planet. And the fact that he dances around these subjects accuses Hillary of the very thing she does to him. You know that Ginger Rogers quote about- Dancing backwards and I do. She goes, yeah, I'm doing (26/43)
everything he was doing. Who's the guy? Dancing backwards and heels. No, the guy she was dancing with. That's your era. Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire. He was in the door. He was in the door. He was in the door. I'm doing everything he's doing, but I'm dancing backward and heels. Like Hillary Clinton is a fucking bad ass. Right. She gets her everything. That's right. And is still fighting. And the fact that the right wing claims that she's killed 46 people on the internet. If you type in her name and murderer, 46 names come up. When I saw that, I thought that is really bad ass. That's what I want is my commander in chief. Somebody is going to go in there. ISIS is going to shit. Here's a question I want to ask when I'm going to go back to Washington in a couple of days to interview the president of the White House. One question I want to ask him and any Democrat is even if Trump loses, he's going to win 20 states probably. There are some people, I feel like he is the acid (27/43)
test. If you can put up a candidate like Donald Trump and people still vote for him, don't the Democrats have to ask what we asked after 9-11? Why do they hate us? Why do they hate in America the Democrats so badly that even Donald Trump will get your vote? He will get 40 to 50 million votes. He will. I think Democrats need to ask themselves that question. So I think Donald Trump is an unacceptable candidate. As a lifelong Republican, I will say that. I will also say that I think that Democrats do almost nothing to speak to people outside their base. They don't talk about growth. They don't talk about small business. They don't talk about empowerment. They don't talk about any of these things. They don't talk about, I mean, the amount of opportunities that were missed with this administration. They talk about those things all the time. I think the bigger problem is. And that's why people feel more empowered these days because Barack Obama has been in the White House for eight years. (28/43)
He's inspired. If people felt that way, Michael, two-thirds of Americans wouldn't think we're on the wrong track. No, no, no, no, no. Wait a second. Wait one second. Barack Obama, Barack Obama, if, first of all, if you voted for Barack Obama, first and foremost, you owe, if you did, you owe that he's asking you to go and vote for Hillary Clinton. You owe him and his legacy that vote. If you want him not to be disavowed in the future, you can't have a guy like Barack Obama and then Trump come in. That means we live on Venus. Let's talk about the other bad news that came out for Hillary this week, which was Obamacare. Premiums for a mid-level plan are set to rise 25 percent in 2017, nationally. This is in the 39 states that use healthcare.gov. It could go up as much as 116 percent in Arizona. Now, these projections don't factor in the subsidies. And 83 percent of Obamacare enrollees get subsidies. So the best way the Democrats can spin this is, well, it's going to cost the taxpayers (29/43)
more. There's two ways to fix this, none of, neither which is very palatable politically. One is you can force people by having higher penalties or more subsidies, which is higher taxes. Well, so think about what is there a lot of in Arizona? Older people. Right. And this is a big part of the problem. So right now... Snakes. It costs six times as much to provide healthcare for someone who's 64 compared to someone who's 19. But the way the law is set up, you can't charge someone more than three times what you charge the youngest person in your pool. So young people are paying for twice as much for their insurance compared to the care that they're getting, and that's why so few of them are actually enrolling. The projections were you were going to have 21 million people in these pools. You've had nine million short. It's mostly those young, healthy people, which is why these pools are short. And many of them are down to one healthcare provider because they've so over-regulated these (30/43)
insurance companies that they don't give them different... No, there's not... What do you think Donald Trump's plan for healthcare is? I don't know what Donald Trump's plan is. Wait, I have Donald Trump's... I mean, plans like this have kinks. It takes years for these things to work themselves out. I have Donald Trump's plan right here. Dana Bash asked him, so you're in the Oval Office, you're saying Obamacare, Trump, it's got to go, Bash, it's got to go repeal and replace with something terrific. Terrific. Now, he has said this before. The first time he said it, I kind of let it go. When you say it more than once, that's your policy. That's the other policy that people have to look at when they're choosing. His policy is something terrific. The problem with Obamacare is that the insurance companies are still calling the shots. As long as we leave our healthcare in the hands of private insurance companies, this is the problem we're going to have. But let me point out something else. (31/43)
The state of California is not going to go up 25%, according to the LA Times this week, because you have a Democratic governor. This is what happens when you have a Democratic executive branch and both houses of the California Assembly are Democrats. It's not just Democratic. Now, listen, hang on. They have put so many good regulations on the insurance companies here, it will go up only 5% in California next year. Well, part of that's because insurance is already really expensive. We've got the insurance companies by the throat, and that is not what's going on in Alabama or Mississippi. But you want the facts. The facts are that the people are a lot more sick and using it more than was expected. It's not actuarially sound. So you can look at it two ways. It was not actuarially or estimated to get the same losses as they're actually getting. And in some of these states like Michigan, where you've got a 40% premium increase, that is going to overwhelm people that are not getting those (32/43)
subsidies. So you're right, Bill. If you're honest about it, there are two things. If you want to keep what you have, you're either going to raise taxes, increase subsidies, or single payer. Or you're going to turn it out. But that's not going to change the fact that you can still have. There's a plan in place. There's a plan in place. You have to give it time. So fix it. Fix the problem. We are fixing it. She will fix it. Donald and Obama and Trump are not going to fix it. The medical device tax. Nobody will make it terrific. And she can't fix it either because she needs Congress people to vote. The only thing the Republican Congress voted to do about it is repeal it 60 times. What's interesting is, let's take the reason why these premiums are going up, the fact that so many young people don't want to get in the pools. You could pass a tiny fix that says, look, if insurance companies want to be able to offer plans that are a lot cheaper, instead of keeping this, it's got to be one- (33/43)
third rule. Get rid of that rule. So many young people can get more affordable health care. The problem is, A, I don't think that you could get a fix like that through with President Obama in the White House because it's his law. It's got his name on it, which is why the possibility of a new president, I think, means there's more of a chance that you could get some of these fixes. But you also have to get Republicans in Congress who I think have a right to say, this wasn't our law. Or we could end Republican control of Congress in 11 days. And why is it that why is it that why is it that why is it that there's so many on the left who don't want to give people choice in health care or in education or in things like employment training, which is where we've got like three million jobs that are posted and we can't fill them because we don't have we have a mismatch between skills and what the private sector actually needs? Because first of all, to push back against your thinking about the (34/43)
insurance companies, it's not most that's not the biggest problem. It's it's the gouging from doctors and hospitals until you until you put a cap on how much people can charge. I mean, they've done studies on this from one hospital in one city to another. It can be like a thousand percent. I told you they can charge whatever they want here. We saw it with the EpiPen. We saw it with. But that's what we have. The government in charge. We have the government in charge. When you have the government in charge, then you have one hospital, one city can't do one thing. The EpiPen situation happened because you had the government saying, we've got to buy EpiPens. We've got to buy them from this company. And there was no competition. So they said, cool, we can make EpiPens cost a couple hundred bucks a pop. If you have the ability to have someone else making EpiPens, then they can't. And you don't have government. It's got to come from this company. Because government's involved in the (35/43)
government's administration, because government controls Medicare and Medicaid, that's what keeps the price of drugs down for old people and poor people. If the government was involved in controlling what the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies do. You're going to have the same problem. Wait, one second, one second. One second. We're talking about actual real issues. OK, so it's a great point to make that Donald Trump has no idea about what you're talking about right now. No idea. No. No idea. That's kind of important. That's kind of important. This is a great conversation. If we were dealing with two intellects that were running for president. Right. We are it. We're dealing with an animal. But last lunatic. Something terrific. And somebody who's been training for 30 years to be a politician. Last year. I'm sorry, Rick, I have to stop our discussion. Sorry, I'll meet you back in my room. It's time for New Rules, everybody. New Rules. Tim Kaine has to cool it with the (36/43)
harmonica. No one enjoys harmonica except the guy playing it. It's like seeing homeless people having sex. The kindest reaction is, how nice for you. New Rule. Before rolling your eyes at the new men's fashion. The new men's fashion trend of shorts made out of old Afghans. Consider the fact that they're perfect for those times that you're nuts. Want to feel like they're taking a nap on grandma's couch. All right, man. That's ugly. New Rule. As long as we're getting rid of obsolete technology like coal, let's also get rid of the handkerchief. I mean, come on. It's gross. We have Kleenex now. Why do you want to have snot in your pocket? And while we're on the topic, the hankies' elitist cousin, the pocket square, can also take a hike. This doesn't say I'm a man of style and elegance. It says I don't have the guts to be a transvestite. New Rule. The stall for your black Republican committee has to have at least one black person in it. Even worse, if you look at the picture, it looks like (37/43)
there may have been a black person there before, and now the white people are trying to decide who made the offensive remark that made them leave. New Rule. This Halloween, certain people are not allowed to give out certain candies because it's just a little too on the nose. Like Donald Trump can't give out Tic Tacs. Don Trump Jr. can't give out Skittles. Melania can't give out Sugar Daddies. Chris Christie can't give out Jelly Bellies. Anthony Weiner can't give out hard candy. And finally, New Rule. Presidential debates need some new rules, starting with each candidate gets three times in the debate when they can call, let's go to the video tape. Good idea. So that when this happens... But he also went after a disabled reporter, mocked and mimicked him on national television. She can throw the red flag in his orange face and say, wrong, tape please. I don't know what I said. I don't remember. People can actually see Trump saying one thing a second after he claimed the opposite. They'd (38/43)
stop pretending there's really any other choice in this election, Rick, than to vote for Hillary Clinton. OK. So Politifact tabulates that Hillary says something at least somewhat false 27% of the time. You know who's at 28%? Bernie, the ultimate straight shooter. 27 is pretty good for a politician. Trump is at 71. His pants are a raging wildfire that cannot be contained. She lies about a quarter of the time. He's Donald Trump. So he grabs her pussy and says, your pussy fell on his hand. Does Hillary play the game with complete honesty? No. To put it in football terms, she's deflated a few balls in her time. And also that thing Tom Brady did. But she's still a really good quarterback. And speaking of quarterbacks, why does a guy like Colin Kaepernick, who's brave enough to lead a smart protest, say things like, it almost seems like Hillary and Trump are trying to debate who's less racist. You have to pick the lesser of two evils, but in the end it's still evil. Really? Hillary's evil? (39/43)
You sound like someone on Christian TV. Hillary Clinton, as I was thinking about this earlier today, two names kind of came up. One was Jezebel and the other was Athaliah. You know your Bible, you know who she was. Yeah, I didn't. But I looked it up. Athaliah was the daughter of Jezebel and she seized power by murdering her grandchildren, you know, just like Hillary does. I'm so, I am so tired of hearing, so tired of hearing, I know Trump's a creep, but Hillary doesn't seem genuine. Grow the fuck up, she's a civil servant, not a craft beer. You know, whenever I'm out with my millennial friends, chasing the pokey man, or getting our nipples pierced, shaving our pubes, or arranging action figures while sending out dick pics, when the talk turns to the election, I hear some version of, ugh, they're both bad, or ugh, they deserve each other, or there's an election? Republicans have one path to victory in this election and it's called false equivalency. They can't deny Trump is horrible, (40/43)
it's on tape. So they want voters to believe Hillary is just as bad, and in pursuit of that goal, they have a very powerful ally, lazy people. People who like to say they're all bad, because when you say that, you don't have to do any homework. Say they're all the same, and then you can sound justifiably jaded by the entire process when really, you just don't know anything. You say you're cynical about politics, don't flatter yourself. Cynical comes when you know too much. You on the other hand, haven't bothered to learn anything, which Americans, by the way, are capable of. Noam Chomsky once observed that when he listens to a sports call-in show, he said, it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know all sorts of complicated details. On the other hand, he said, when I hear people talk about international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief. In other words, we're not clueless, we just apply (41/43)
our brainpower to bullshit. It's true. Before people go out for a taco, they will spend an hour on Yelp, researching for the most authentic one, all for something that'll be out of your body in 15 minutes. People will use six different websites to get a plane ticket for a weekend trip, but they don't care who runs the world for four years. I don't get how millennials who can't tell these candidates apart have a hundred different sub-genres for music that sounds like this. Is that dubstep or techno-dub or acid-techno? Because it all sounds like the same shit to me, but they can tell the difference when it comes to that. All right, that's our show. Tune in to WANi Facebook Live, November 2nd at 7 p.m. Oh, yes, 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 Eastern. I want to thank Rick Lazio, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Michael Moore, and Chelsea Handler. Oh, next week, Obama. And Ben Jones. Obama next week, that's right. Watch us on YouTube now. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every (42/43)
Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (43/43)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #528: Eric Holder, Bret Stephens.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. We have it. Hey, we made it to May! I think that's an accomplishment. It's May 1st, for those of you still clinging to the concept of time. Every... I tell you, every morning, I go in the bathroom, I sit on the toilet and think, different shit, same day. Yeah, I am so sorry I ever dared that guy in Wuhan to eat that bat. Worst bar bet ever. I'm filling it. But, uh, here's some kind of good news. Uh, Trump's approval rating is way down, which means that America may finally have reached turd immunity. And, uh, yeah, he's not po... You know who else is not popular this week? Mike Pence. Not popular. Went to the Mayo Clinic. Everyone was wearing a mask. Of course, it's the Mayo Clinic, or everywhere. And he did not have a mask. Mike Pence said, no, it's okay, I've been tested. And besides, they're called bare-faced lies. Trump was very upset this week, because the New York Times printed this article that (1/43)
said that he spends... This certainly doesn't sound like the Trump I know. Spends all morning in bed, watching television and eating french fries. And Mark Meadows... Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, said, that is some bullshit right there. That is fake news. This man barely spends ten minutes for lunch. And he says, I can prove it, and I've got the tape. Yeah, don't fuck with lunch. Trump, this week, I love, you know, the War Powers Act, which is at his disposal. He could use it for, you know, masks, ventilators, testing, no. He used it this week to make sure that the meat packing plants were kept open. Because meat, now it's personal. You step on Donald Trump's meat hose, and shit just got real. But here's something kind of good. Dr. Fauci says, in his words, that he is very optimistic about this experimental new drug called Remdesivir, I think it's the pronunciation, close. Okay, Remdesivir, whatever it is, Trump says, you know what, there's another drug I know about that's even (2/43)
newer and better. In fact, it's so new, it just goes by the name Formula 409. Yes. This incomparably stupid man actually suggested, and he's the president of the United States, I don't know if you know that, but he actually suggested this week that people ingest cleaning disinfectants. And his voters started calling poison control centers to see if that was okay. Deplorables, nothing unbleachable. So it was interesting that this is the week then that Hillary chose to endorse Joe Biden. And all I could think of was, really? What took you this long? I mean, he hasn't even had an opponent for a month. Yeah, Hillary said it was a close decision, but at the end of the day, she broke for the guy who doesn't urge angry mobs to lock her up. But look, things are changing in America. States are starting to open up for business again. Georgia, leading the way, they have opened up the tattoo parlors and the beauty salons in the South, what they call the high-tech sector. And it's good to see that (3/43)
in Georgia, things are becoming normal again. And when I say becoming normal, I mean being able to get a tattoo of Jesus wrestling a snake. So if you're in, oh, and bowling alleys in Georgia, if you're in Georgia, bowling alleys are open, barbershops, and tattoo parlors. Because what could be safer businesses than ones involving razors, needles, and sticking your fingers in other people's balls? All right, we got a great show tonight. We have Eric Holder, Brett Stevens, and Matt Taibbi. Let's get right to it. Okay, my first guest, honored to have him, the former attorney general under President Obama, who's now chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Eric Holder, great to see you, Mr. Attorney General. Thanks for doing this. Good to see you too, Bill. Well, so one of the problems I find with the pandemic is that it's very hard to have a conversation even with anybody about anything else. It's the only issue that people talk about. And I think we are losing sight of (4/43)
the fact we're six months from an election. Right. Which I know you are trying to make sure comes out fair and square. Is that what your committee is all about, or is it a fancy way of saying gerrymandering? Well, we wanna try to combat what happened in 2011 when the Republicans really gerrymandered to a degree that we've not seen in recent memory. But we're also focused on this presidential election and the elections more generally in November to try to make sure that everybody who wants to cast a ballot in November has the ability to do so and can do so in a safe way. Again, our focus is on gerrymandering, but we don't wanna just fight for structures that we wanna put in place and then have an election in November that doesn't go well, and that will scuttle all of the work that we're doing. So we've really kind of broadened what it is we are doing, fighting for a fair, safe election in November, as well as concentrating, continue to concentrate on our anti-gerrymandering efforts. So (5/43)
you think there is a scenario where that election does go well? Because I don't see any scenario where it does, because as I've been saying for years now, I don't think Trump, I cannot picture that man gracefully conceding and walking away. And I keep asking Democrats, you're probably the one with the most law enforcement experience I've ever asked this, what do you do if he says, it was rigged, blah, blah, blah, it's not safe for me to leave, whatever bullshit he's gonna come up with and refuses to leave? I want to know what the plan is. Well, I think he will certainly say when he loses that it was rigged, that it was unfair. He'll come up with all kinds of reasons why he will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. And I'm really worried about what happens between November, his defeat, and when he actually leaves office in January. That I think is the period we should be focused on. He'll still have presidential power and God only knows how he'll use it. On the day of the (6/43)
inauguration, I actually think that he will leave. And if he doesn't leave, the United States Marshall Service, the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, DC, the Secret Service, all have the ability to pull him out of the White House and will get on with the inauguration and the presidency of Joe Biden. Do they have the ability? Do they have the will? I mean, you mentioned the police department. Police love his dirty draws. You really think they're gonna pull him out of the White House? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because I think people in law enforcement positions, people with the power to do those kinds of things, will really, as I always say, they'll check to the power. And the power will move on the inauguration day. And my guess would be that all the people, all the organizations that have that capacity will do the right thing, the constitutional thing, and listen to the orders of the new president and understand that there has been, again, a peaceful (7/43)
transition of power, regardless of what it is that Trump might wanna do. Okay, we'll color you more optimistic than I am. I don't see him, that two months you're describing between the election and the inauguration day, he's just gonna be ranting and raving and his people are gonna be in the streets. Okay, but we'll move on. So New York State canceled their primary. 16 states have postponed them. This is rather unprecedented. I wonder if you think this is a dangerous precedent. We Americans have voted through everything, civil war, Spanish flu, depression. Canceling an election, I think, is a, well, what do you think? Well, I think postponing these elections makes sense to do them at a time when people are less vulnerable to the pandemic, coming up with alternative ways that people can cast a ballot. So we don't have a repeat. What we had in Wisconsin, when people had to stand in line for extended periods of time to cast a vote, and we know now that in Wisconsin, at least 30 people (8/43)
have come down with the virus that can be directly traced to their having to stand in line. I'm sure that number is gonna grow. But canceling, that's not something that I think we oughta do. Now, I understand that what happened in New York was they just simply canceled the primary with regard to the presidential primary. I'm there with the result. We already know what it is. But the rest of what is supposed to occur on primary day in New York, as I understand it, gonna continue to go on. So I would be not in favor of canceling things, but I do understand how there might be the need to postpone and then put in place alternative means so that people can vote safely. Okay, you mentioned that we already know the outcome, and that's true. It's Joe Biden, who you're very familiar with, served in the same administration, of course. A couple of months ago, an allegation was made against him, a sexual allegation from someone named Tara Reid. I thought it was the chicken shark NATO, but it's a (9/43)
completely different one. And at first, I thought it was ridiculous that it would go away and no one would pay any attention to it, but it's being paid attention to. I wonder if you would share your thoughts on that and what he should do and the appropriateness at this moment when we're in such a crisis in America of having this injected into a campaign at all. Well, I mean, it's interesting that the people who are trying to fan this thing are the very people who support Donald Trump and, of course, who say nothing about the allegations that have been raised, I think, very credibly against Trump for a number of women over a long period of time. I mean, all of these allegations have to be taken seriously. People who raise them should be treated sensitively. I've known Joe Biden for 20, 25 years. What has been described is inconsistent with the person who I've come to know and who I've worked with. I think media is doing the correct job looking at the allegations, finding out a variety (10/43)
of things. The Vice President has denied that it actually did occur. And as I said, his denial is consistent with the Joe Biden that I know. Okay, so Joe Biden is for decriminalization but not legalization of marijuana. This issue really sticks in my craw and not for the obvious reasons people are gonna say that too but I just think as a national issue, I've said for quite a while, I think it would be our version of guns for the right, something that would bring out single issue voters. It's something very personal. I think you could win elections with it by putting it on the ballot. First of all, I don't understand the difference between, I do understand technically between decriminalization and legalization but why not encourage Joe Biden to come out full-throatedly for legalization? I think this is something he doesn't excite younger voters. As someone who was in charge of this issue for a long time, what is your feeling on this? Well, I think our laws need to catch up with where (11/43)
the American people are. And I suspect, I think all the polling tends to show that the American people support legalization of marijuana. There's also another reason why I think we need to be moving in that direction and that's because of the harm, the disproportionate harm that was done to communities of color, where people again use marijuana same degree that the white folks do and yet people of color go to jail at a rate of more than four times their white counterparts. And so there are substantive reasons why I think we need to move towards legalization. I think it probably, as you say, would probably be something that will garner a pretty substantial amount of support. I think not only from young people, maybe young people in particular, but I think really across the spectrum. So I think our laws need to move in that direction. It's one of the reasons why when I was Attorney General and Colorado and Washington moved towards legalization in those states, I held back the federal (12/43)
authority that I had to try to fight that to allow those states to experiment. And I think based on the experiments that we've seen in Washington and Colorado, this nation ought to be ready to move towards legalization. Sounds wise to me. You toyed with running this past cycle. You decided against it, why? Well, it's interesting. You always hear people say this, but it really is true. You don't decide it in a vacuum. You have to decide it along with your family. And I thought I'd make a good candidate and could run a successful campaign. I think people in this household thought the same, but I didn't have five votes here. I only had one out of the five. They had had enough of their father, their husband being Attorney General. And so based on the reactions that I got from them, I decided not to put my hat in the ring. Well, I vote that you should next time. So there's that vote. I know I'm not in the house, but okay. Thank you for joining us. I'll come live with you. I'll come live (13/43)
with you. Yeah, I could use the company right about now. Thank you very much for doing this and for what you're doing there on the committee. Important work. Thank you. Always good to see you. Okay, Eric Holder. All right, my next guest is a New York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor. Please welcome our friend from back in the studio. Brett Stevens is at his home in New York City. How you doing, Brett? Good to see you there. I'm perfectly fine right here in New York. Good. So you wrote about the city you live in, the city I lived in twice, the city I still love. I certainly have a lot of friends back there, my sisters back there, feel for that city. The point of your column this week though, was that the devastation of New York is atypical from the rest of the country and the rest of the country should therefore not have to play by the same rules. Is that about right? Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, look at Westchester County, just north of the city. It's a commuter county. It has (14/43)
suffered more deaths than the entire state of Texas. Nassau or Suffolk County on Long Island, they've suffered more deaths than the entire state of California. So obviously the combination of factors, but especially population density in New York City makes it just a completely different situation from the rest of America. And so it means that New York has to be sort of thought of and treated differently than say the middle of the country. Or I mean, I'm in LA, I read in your column that the death rate is 16 times in New York what it is in LA per 100,000 people. Which I guess is because of density, right? And we don't ride subways and we're not in elevators as much. Well, I mean, the moment you stop to think about it, it's obvious, right? I don't, when I used to go to work, I didn't go to work in a car. I jammed into a subway with 100 other people or however many people per car. I jammed into elevators to get to my office. So all of that is just completely different from LA. LA is the (15/43)
second largest city in the country, but it's just a very different story. And so if you're treating everyone in a kind of one size fits all approach, you're gonna make some very large mistakes because it's simply a different type of situation from the standpoint of the spread of disease in one part of the country than the other. To me, this kind of seemed like a fairly obvious, not even a controversial point, but not all of my readers felt the same way. No, I'm sure they did. There's a lot of group think, and I'm glad, you know, Tom Friedman was writing about Sweden as many people are now. And I noticed at the end of the column, he felt the need to say, I'm writing about Sweden, not because I'm saying it has the magic answer, but because I think we should debate all sides of this. I'm like, yeah, do we really have to say that now? But yes, we do. That's the atmosphere we're in and we should debate all sides. So let's talk about Sweden. It's the hot new country for how they're handling (16/43)
it, which is different. They let, they're going for herd immunity, which at the end of the day, I think we're gonna find out you have to have to defeat this thing anyway. I don't know if we have the time with the state of our economy to wait for vaccines and all the testing. It would be wonderful if we had a competent president and a brilliant electorate and the people were in great physical shape to begin with and the vaccine was right around the corner. We don't have any of that. Well, that's right. And the thinking was, well, you can sort of stop the economy for, I don't know, two or three weeks and suddenly a miracle is going to present itself in the form of an effective therapy or a vaccine. And we can treat, and we could have treated this episode as kind of an extended sabbatical or a vacation, but we might not get a vaccine, nevermind in 18 months. It could be many, many years. There is only so long. You can ask people effectively not to breathe, not to go to work, not to draw a (17/43)
salary without creating a problem, which is vastly larger, even the disease itself. And I'm not some kind of COVID denier. I'm not a booster, as you well know, for the administration, but we can't simply shut off our brains here. People say, well, Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors, Norway and Finland, which is true. It's also done about the same as Ireland, which is in lockdown, and it's done much better than France and Britain. So I'm glad the Swedes are providing us with a model of an alternative approach to this problem. And at some point we have to move from a strategy of trying to protect everyone, Bill, which I don't think is going to work. It might've bought us some time, but it's not going to work, to looking at vulnerable populations, the elderly people who are immunocompromised, have other health issues, and focus our efforts on them without wrecking unbelievable damage on the country in the process. Right, because I wonder that if, that we've sat home here for (18/43)
two months, as most of the country has, and they say, well, it might come back in the fall, and it probably will, because by staying home, we haven't achieved that herd immunity. So to me, where the rubber reached the road now is, what do people say about this fall? If it comes back, do you lock down the economy again? I'd love to hear one politician say, no, I'm sorry, but we did it once, and we may have already screwed the pooch on the economy with that one time, but we just can't do it again. We have to think of something else or try something else. We just have to, we have to be strong. Well, I think that's, you know, one reaction I have had to my column, which kind of staggers me, is people say, you're putting the economy over people's lives. And that's just false. The economy means food on the table for your family. The economy is essential for human health and wellbeing. We're not weighing lives versus the economy. We're weighing lives versus lives, one form of hardship against (19/43)
another. And the idea that we're gonna repeat this exercise in November and December as we move into flu season, if in fact this thing is seasonal, we're not really sure yet, seems to be like a recipe for a catastrophe that will haunt us for a century. I mean, have people looked at 30 million jobless Americans, the figures that are coming in? It's staggering. And I think it should be frightening to people who care about public health as more than just a matter of COVID. Well, excuse me, if I'm repeating something you may have said a minute ago, cause you went out of the sound there for me, cause we are of course using ancient or very modern, no, not your fault. You know, again, I'm not, well, I'll just get to the point. It was in the front page of your paper today. 30% GDP contraction is what they're looking for in the next quarter. They just got the results from this one, which isn't as bad as they said, but this one is a piece of cake. Even though if you look at this one in normal (20/43)
times, you'd go, oh my God, we are going into a horrible recession. This is the easy quarter. It's the next one. I mean, we're looking, as you said, about numbers. I don't get it. I think the world has gone mad if they think that everyone can be out of work at the same time. And yeah, we weren't prepared for this to begin with. People don't have that kind of money and they're not getting it from the government. And look, you know, there's no end of blame to be assigned to the Trump administration, to all kinds of people. But you actually, that aside, you have to sort of think ahead and say, if the Great Depression is what gave us the rise of fascism and a certain chancellor in Germany, what is the next Great Depression going to do to our politics? We were already moving in a populist and neo-authoritarian direction when the economy was relatively good. What happens when you have tens of billions of people who are out of work and desperate, not just economically, but also politically? (21/43)
So people have to start thinking about the balance of risk. That's something no one likes to contemplate because they say, well, if you choose one, if you balance it in one way, people are going to suffer and people are going to die. And that is almost certainly true. But there are risks to simply pretending that we can hold our breath forever and not hurt ourselves. Right now, this is a strategy out of the Vietnam War. We're trying to destroy the village in order to save it. And I don't remember that ending very well. Right, I read a headline in, I think it was NBC News. It said, starving, angry, and cannibalistic, America's rats are getting desperate because there's less food everywhere. So, and I thought, oh my God, this could be a harbinger. People are going to get desperate and starving, and I hope not cannibalistic. But let me ask you one final question about that and I'll let you go. So we used to argue about the environment, and I never understood how somebody who I liked so (22/43)
much and who wrote so many things and not being a liberal, and I'm mostly a liberal, I agreed with. But on the environment, I never could quite get you to where I wanted you to be. Has this changed your opinion on that at all? On which part of the environment? I'm in favor of it. Well, that we better treat the environment way better than we have, or else we're the ones who are going to die from it. Well, actually, believe it or not, maybe there's a giant failure of communication on my part. I've always believed that. I grew up in Mexico City where the environment is pretty horrible, and you see the consequences of that. I think we've got to treat mother nature with a great deal of respect, but I think we're also learning that productive, healthy economies and robust scientific establishments are also a big part of helping ourselves coexist well with the environment. So look, I think this is going to scramble our politics in a lot of ways, and one thing that I should say, and I think (23/43)
any honest person should say, is that if we all emerge from the situation with the same convictions that we've had before, it means we're just not thinking, and so this has prompted new thinking on my part. I'm sure it has on yours, but we need to maybe move out of all of our respective ideological boxes because what just happened was 1929. Things have changed, and if your thinking doesn't adapt, you have problems of your own in addition to the problems of the world. Okay, well, I appreciate you coming on. Not that you really had anywhere else to go. Here I am, here I'll stay. I know, it's so easy to get guests these days. Hey, are you available? Am I available? Of course, everyone's available, but you're always a great guest. I thank you, I'll see you in the studio soon, I hope. Thanks, Bill, be well. Okay. Okay, well, with the election only six months away, we thought it would be a good time to shed a little light on Joe Biden, upon whom all our hopes are arresting, and Joe's been (24/43)
running for president for a very long time and has been on the public scene since, well, before anyone can remember. And yet, a lot of people don't know everything about Joe Biden, so we thought it'd be a great day to do 24 things you don't know, 24 things you don't know about Joe Biden. Okay, for example, I was asked to social distance even before the virus. My defense whenever I suddenly fall asleep is it's five o'clock somewhere. Sometimes I'll walk into a room and completely forget why I'm running for president. My first idea for a campaign slogan was, I'm on her. When they told me I got Hillary's endorsement, I thought they meant Sir Edmund Hillary. I like to think of myself as a cross between JFK and your second husband. About 45 seconds into a sentence, even I'm asking, where is this going? Bernie Sanders and I don't agree on everything, but we are united in our belief that they screwed the lids on pickle jars way too tight. They call me Amtrak Joe because I love riding trains (25/43)
and also because I'm usually late and I smell like pee. You think I'm in cognitive decline, you should see the other guy. Okay, he is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and co-host of Rolling Stone's podcast, The Useful Idiots, Matt Taibbi. Matt, how you doing? Hope your sequestering's going good. I'm doing well, Bill. Thank you very much. Yourself? How's it going? Oh, I love it here all by myself. Anyway, so I want to talk about the money. I was just chatting with Brett Stevens and we were talking about the news today that GDP is going to contract by over 30% next quarter. Just crazy numbers. And of course we've written a lot of checks so far and you'd be a perfect one to talk about this. You wrote so eloquently about the bailouts in 2008. I was once talking to somebody who does not follow politics too closely. And I said, you know, Matt Taibbi, you should read his book. And he said, the vampire squid guy? So what is the vampire? I know it's going to be written on my gravestone, (26/43)
unfortunately, but yeah. Is the vampire squid back in play here? Is that what's going on? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, the basic conception of this bailout package is very similar to what they did in 2008. Obviously there's a main street component to the rescue. They're giving away some money to actual human beings this time. But the significantly larger part of the rescue package, you know, the roughly $4 trillion they're going to spend through the Fed, that's mostly all going to propping up the financial markets in Wall Street. And it's with the same basic concept they used last time, except more radical this time. They're buying junk bonds instead of just mortgages this time as well. So it's bigger, but the same thing. It always seems like it's trickle down. We never give money to people directly. And I guess you shouldn't expect anything different from people like Steve Mnuchin is the treasure secretary, right? And he's in charge of the whole thing. And this is what I know about (27/43)
him. He's the guy who took his trophy wife to get a picture, a selfie with the money at Fort Knox. You know, he's what they call him the adult in the room, you know, in the Trump administration. Are you confident in a guy like that running a show this big? Yeah, you're absolutely right about it being a trickle down. That's the concept, right? Like, you know, last time around, we had all this pain after the financial crisis where we had millions of people who were in foreclosure. We could have, with about a trillion and a half dollars paid off every subprime mortgage in existence and basically solve the problem. But they instead spent about 10 times that bailing out Wall Street. And this time around, the concept is basically the same. Let's just throw a ton of money at the capital markets and eventually it'll work its way down to regular people. But I'm not sure that's gonna work. And it didn't work terribly well last time. It didn't even seem to work its way around to smaller (28/43)
companies. The big problem with the small business bailout so far was that it went to big business. There was a corporate bailout of 500 billion, one of the bills. And I read, you know, the Democrats say, well, we got oversight in there. It's one guy. His name is Bharat Ramamurti. He must be busy. One guy to oversee $500 billion? Your thoughts. For a while, he was the only person and all he had, he didn't even have an office. He just had an unverified Twitter account. And I actually DMed him on Twitter. And I was like, did you get anything else yet? Did you have more than an office? You have, you know, supplies? And he says, nope. He actually answered, you know. Wow. They've since added Donna Shalala. She's also part of the oversight committee. But there really isn't anybody overseeing this amount of money. You have to be an absolute expert in this kind of stuff to even have a chance at catching the fraud that's gonna happen. I talked to the last bailout inspector who said we should (29/43)
expect tens of billions of lost to fraud with these programs. And why don't these, I get it why the mom and pop store needs money right away, perhaps, you know, you're running on a small margin, a grocer or something, but why do these big companies, I mean, they don't have any rainy day fund? You're a billion, multi-billion dollar companies. They got nothing in the kitty. They need something. They can't go a week. Well, I think the real scandal here is the amount of money that these companies have spent on stock buybacks over the last decade or so. Wall Street has flooded corporate America with easy money ever since the last bailout. And you take an industry like the airlines and they've, you know, the top four airlines spent something like $50 billion in the last eight years on stock buybacks, which is money that just went straight to their shareholders in the form of, you know, distributions and that's money they don't have now for this rainy day that this very rainy day that they're (30/43)
in. So this enormous amount of money that we're pumping into all these companies from and banks and financial companies, a lot of it is because the money's gone. It's been taken by the shareholders. As soon as they had the opportunity to do so. And so I think that's something if ordinary people understood that better, they'd be a lot more angry. And as a guy who has never been afraid to criticize both sides, wouldn't you agree that if a Democrat was president, they never would have voted this kind of money? They would have fought it. The Republicans would have been playing there. We can't go into debt game. No? It's possible. I think the amount that they're going to spend and the conception of this is probably a little bit more radical than the Democrats might have countenanced. It's certainly bigger than what they did last time. Although, you know, to be honest, the bailout last time was done in two parts. One part was done under Bush and the second part was done under Obama. And they (31/43)
basically agreed on that. Although I think you're right. I think this time around, this is an enormous ballot and it's going to continue to get bigger. And it's probably true that it wouldn't have been this big under Democrats. When the crisis started, I remember thinking, oh, I hope we don't get sucked into being politicized even about this. Like, do we really have to have a woke contest about this? And of course we do. We wouldn't be American if we didn't have a woke contest about everything. And I was talking to Brett about Sweden and everyone's talking about Sweden now. And I find this is a good example of it because forever Sweden and the Nordic countries have been what the far left has pointed to with we gotta be more like them. Sweden, they do everything great in Sweden. We wanna be more like the Swedes, but now the Swedes are kind of acting like a red state with the virus. And it's like, I don't know, I thought Sweden was great. What do you think about Sweden, what they're (32/43)
doing? Well, I think what's so interesting is the coverage of it is just astounding because they cannot get away from the narrative of this red blue argument. Like they can't just tell us whether or not Sweden's approach is working. They have to couch every headline. They're always saying things like, conservatives see hope in progressive Sweden. And then if you read the body of the article, it will say something like, yes, it's working, but what the right wing doesn't understand is that this culture depends upon a strong belief in the role of the state and society. In other words, they're seeing, they're couching the whole story as, what the important thing is, is whether conservatives are right or wrong about Sweden. Whereas that's not what's important. What's important is, is there a program working or not? And I think that's been a problem throughout this crisis. We cannot excise Donald Trump and the Trump argument from anything that we talk about with this crisis, whether it's (33/43)
hydroxychloroquine or the WHO or whatever. And that's a real problem. Yes, and I wish as infuriating as it is to see what he does every week and he tops himself. I mean, this week with the drinking, the Clorox. If I wrote that in a sketch three years ago, no one would buy it. If I said it about George W. Bush, who was known to be the dumb president, it still wouldn't have flown. Okay, but he's not going away. I feel like people need to just accept because you can't do anything else. It's the given, it's the net in tennis. It's gonna be there. And you're right about this. If he says something, even though he is a crazy person, if he says we should get back to work, our answer can't be dependent on, well, he said it, it has to be wrong. Yeah, we're reverse engineering our attitudes on all these things, right? So you take something like hydroxychloroquine. When I first heard about this drug and I looked at the news stories, as soon as I saw that it was referred to in headlines as the drug (34/43)
touted by Trump, I knew that it was gonna be impossible to get any real information in the American news media about it because the Fox slash Daily Caller people were gonna say that it worked and the people on the other side were gonna say that it was a conspiracy theory. You literally have to go to foreign news sources to try to figure out whether this drug actually works or not because that's the important question, whether Trump is right or wrong here. And it's the same with a lot of issues that are important in this pandemic crisis, but Trump has to be at the center of every part of our reporting and I think that's been a major blow to our business. Yes, and he puts himself there. It's very hard to ignore that. The meeting they had about two weeks ago, and again, this is so indicative of where we are because it didn't really get picked up very much, but he had a meeting with the business leaders to tell them how he was gonna give them free money. Naturally, co-chaired by his (35/43)
daughter, which everyone just accepts, who he introduces by saying that she created 15 million jobs, which would be 10% of the jobs in America. And this is considered normal. That's what you have to realize is this is, okay, I'm not gonna go into another rant about it, but we're gonna have to find a way to solve this around that, not through it, because it's not going anywhere. All right, let me ask you this. Mitch McConnell said, and he said it a few times, I think he's always ranting about what he says is, stop blue state bailouts. What does he mean by that? Because I don't speak that Fox News thing where they get the code words. What do you read that as? I think what he's talking about is a preferential tax treatment that's been debated in Congress, where the issue has to do with how you treat the tax treatment of people like nannies. And there are certain tax breaks that have been argued for by the Democratic leadership that would disproportionately help people who are wealthy and (36/43)
live in, let's just say coastal blue states. And that's been something that the right wing has pushed back on. But who knows what Mitch McConnell's talking about in a larger sense? I think from a net perspective, there's more money coming out of states like New York and California, obviously, than there is going into it. So it doesn't really make any sense. Right. Well, you make a lot of sense always about the economy and other things. You look like you're doing okay there. Hope it ends soon. And thank you for doing it, Matt. Always great to see you. Likewise. Thanks a lot, Bill, and good luck to you. Okay. Okay, now it's time for New Rule. Okay, here they are. New Rule, legal weed sellers must cut down on the packaging. You know, putting a joint in a plastic tube inside a cardboard box with a cellophane wrapper is not environmentally friendly or stoner friendly. You have to quit smoking weed just to open your weed. If I want to get high on something hard to open, I'll drink wine. New (37/43)
Rule, stop speculating about whether or not Kim Jong-un is dead. It doesn't matter that he's not exactly the picture of health, or that we haven't seen him in public in weeks, or that we have no plan in the event he is dead. I'm sorry, I'm thinking of Biden. New Rule, if this is the future of basketball, NBA players must admit they wasted a lot of money on tattoos. New Rule, you don't have to tell me what Quibi is. I was sort of interested for a second, but it passed. Let me guess, some assholes with MBAs raised a lot of money for an app that wastes teenagers' time. Yeah, my second guess, just going by the name, tiny country in the Middle East that lends money to Jared. New Rule, the Muslims going to mosques in Pakistan, the Christians holding services in the south, and the Orthodox Jews having funerals in Brooklyn have to agree that whichever faith loses the fewest members to COVID-19 is the one true religion, and the other two have to go away. Finally, finally, we can settle this (38/43)
once and for all. Although I'm not gonna pretend it makes up for canceling March Madness. And finally, New Rule, the next time we have a worldwide pandemic, we have to come up with a better solution than everyone becomes Howie Mandel. You know Howie, I know Howie. Who doesn't love Howie, the world's most famous germaphobe who was social distancing before it was cool? Well, now of course everybody's making the joke that Howie Mandel had it right all along. No, Howie would be the first to tell you he has a disease, OCD, that fucks up your life. He can't touch a doorknob or wear shoes with laces because they might touch the ground. When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, it's to clean it. No wonder he says, it was always a curse. That behavior didn't allow me to date or go out with anybody when I was young or really even have friends. He also said, I'm always on the verge of death in my head. I worry that the past two months of quarantine have given people the idea that the way for (39/43)
humans to win our million year war with microbes is to avoid them completely. And I'm here to tell you, you can't. The key to beating COVID isn't dining through glass or never going to a concert or a ball game again. It's your immune system. You hear people say COVID-19 is a new virus so the immune system doesn't know how to handle it. Bullshit, of course it does. That's why the vast majority of people who've had it either recovered or didn't even know they had it. What do you think did that? The human immune system. Now, there are people with immune systems that can't do the job and we should make it a priority to protect those people. But compulsively washing, being scared of your own hands, that can't become the new normal. In his later years when he was peeing into jars and wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes, we pitied Howard Hughes because it was pitiful. In the seventies, they made a TV movie with John Travolta about a sick kid called the boy in the plastic bubble. Let me tell you, (40/43)
if they start selling these things on Amazon, we're in trouble. I see there's a hot new item for sale online, disinfecting shoe mats, because COVID can get on your feet. Yes, it can get everywhere. Microbes are ubiquitous. You can keep discovering new places to scare people into buying protection for, but we're solving the problem from the wrong end. This is a health problem. We can't sanitize the universe. Governors should declare keeping our bodies in good health an essential job, because that's the only way we are going to win this. We've all read the articles. Your sink has 500,000 bacteria per square inch. Your toothbrush has feces on it. E. coli has been found in makeup, carpets, bedding, the remote, cutting boards. The average pillow has 350,000 bacteria colonies. They're filled with more shit than the guy selling them. Your phone has 10 times the bacteria of your toilet, which your dog drinks out of, and then licks you. I could see right over there, right now, one of my dogs (41/43)
lying on the driveway like a dead fucking fly. The driveway, where cars with God knows what on their tires pull in, and then that idiot rolls in it. And the other one, I don't know where he is, which means he's into something worse. Sometimes I see a dead mouse in the driveway. I don't have a cat. Something here killed it. I'm not pointing fingers, but there's only the three of us. My point is, God knows what is all over your pets and in their mouth, and then you invite them on the bed and they try to French kiss you, and sometimes succeed. And some people don't even fight it. But what's the point of a pet if you're not going to pet it? It's in the name. And what's the point of life if you can't live it? Have you ever had sex in a hotel? Did you wash your hands first? Well, the last couple didn't either. And yet you're still alive because your immune system said we got this. So this weekend, do something nice for your immune system. Go outside, that mysterious land beyond your curtains (42/43)
where the Grubhub drivers live, and get some fresh air and vitamin D, and break a sweat doing something besides eating hot chicken. Because at the end of the day, you can't keep all the pathogens out. It would be as silly as thinking you could stop immigration with a wall. Okay, that's our show. I wanna thank my guests, Eric Holder, Brett Stevens, and Matt Taibbi. We'll be back next week from the yard. Good night. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (43/43)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #600: Rod Stewart, Ian Bremmer, Jane Harman.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Facebook is out here in California. We know this is a bad week. It's the start of fire season. It's what we're applauding, fire season? All week, their stories were about down in Laguna. They said, you know, fires are destroying multimillion dollar homes, or as we call them in California, homes. I hate fire season. I mean, the air quality, air quality's already bad. On the bright side, it helps Amber heard with her fake cry. I like it. This is a people. This is a crisis we have. We're running out of water. But water parks are asking kids to pee in the pool. And it's really, this water thing, it's so tragic because FEMA says we would have been OK. But during COVID, we used up all the water scrubbing the mail. Now we're out of in this country? Baby formula. Perfect. Perfect. Just when the Supreme Court comes up with a formula for more babies. Yes, ladies, you're in America now. Not only do we make you (1/43)
carry the baby to term, now we're going to make you breastfeed the little thing, OK? Everybody wants to know, why are we out of the, you know, baby formula? Well, a few issues. Supply chain issues, which are real. Contamination, that happened in a couple of places. That's real. And of course, Nick Cannon. So that's very right. But you know, I mean, inflation, is that not what is on everybody's mind? That's like the subject of the day everywhere. Prices are up 11%. That's a really big jump. We haven't had that in decades and decades. I'll say this for Donald Trump. When he was president, America felt cheap. The gasoline, whoa, that has people very upset. I was valleying my, I was valleying my car the other day. And the valle guy said, pull it up a little. I said, I can't afford it. You know what we always have money for is Ukraine. We all support Ukraine. Of course, I don't. But boy, there are now 40 billion more going there, which will bring in the total that we've given them so far to (2/43)
over 50 billion. The defense budget of Russia is only 61 billion. Can we pay them to leave? Is that completely out of the question? It's like, and look at this. In the 40 billion, almost $1 billion, $900 million goes to buying, I guess, or paying translators for the Ukrainian refugees we're going to bring here. So if your kid is in a shitty school that's underfunded in America, here's what you do. Send them to Moldova, wait for Russia to invade, then bring them back. And finally, before we start the big show, I should remind you, this is Friday the 13th. They like fire, they like Friday the 13th. This is just a hopped up crowd. No, you know, a lot of things bad luck. Be careful of a bad luck. You need to step on a crack, if a mirror breaks, you know? Oh, and this year, if you break a condom, 18 years bad luck. All right, we got a great show here. He is a two time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and one of the best selling music artists of all time. He returns to his residency at Caesars (3/43)
Palette tonight and then kicks off his North American summer tour in June. I can't believe he came here. Rod Stewart is on the show. He's so proud. Wasn't that the best monologue? I tell you. All right. I see you haven't sold out. It's like you went for seats. We're here to talk. That's for COVID. Oh, OK. That's it. We're here to talk about you. This is a big night for you. You're starting your big world tour for 2022 and you're in Caesars Palette. Thank you so much. Because you've got to like fly out of here. You're on stage tonight at Caesars Palace. Well, they put it back. Usually I go on stage at 7.30. They put it back to 8.30. But I still have to do sound check, check all the girls' costumes. Let's be honest. The show really doesn't start till you get there. Well, it doesn't. But I don't want to be late. I don't like to keep my customers waiting. I mean, rock stars are known for keeping audiences waiting. What is your history of that over the years? Were you pretty prompt with (4/43)
your concerts? Yeah, always. First of all, it's people who've paid a lot of money. They've got babysitters, hired cars, and bicycles, and they get there on time. You don't want to keep them waiting. You want to get out there before you're supposed to go on to keep them happy. That's great because that's not what most rock stars do. Well, that's their business. It's not me. Yeah, I just think great. And how long is the show that you do? Tonight will be per hour and a half. But we're only allowed to do an hour and a half at Caesars Palace because they get you on stage. Right, because they want everyone to go back into the old, you know, spend the money. Exactly. But on the road, it's a little more if you're not at a gambling casino? Oh, yeah, we play two hours, 15. That's amazing. What was it when you started? Because like, you know what the Beatles did when they were touring? 15 minutes. 25. Yeah, that's what we used to do, yeah. Yeah. That's nuts. No, it is nuts. And here you are all (5/43)
these years later. I mean, I have your latest album. I'm so glad you went back to making an album of new material. Yeah, fantastic. The Hercules album, you sound the same. You haven't lost anything. Well, I look the same. Well, your hair is. You know, you know, you know, let me tell you something. You know what the Queen of England and I have got in common? We both had the same haircut for 60 years. I remember when I first came out here in 1983. I'd never been here, and I never saw a palm tree. And I looked, and I went, oh, it looks like Rod Stewart's head. It does. Yeah, it does, yeah. I'm eternally grateful it's still up there. No, unbelievable. Could you laugh? And the show is called The Hits at the University, which is fantastic. I mean, that's what people want to see. Oh, of course, yeah. And very few people in music have 90 minutes or two hours of just the hits. You do. I mean, I've seen you in concert, and there's no good time to go to the bathroom. No, absolutely. That's, you (6/43)
should put that on the sign. Rod Stewart. You'll never want to go to the bathroom. Sure. Sure. You never want to go to the bathroom. You know, I always think my idols were, you know, Sam Cooke, you know, East Reading, and Muddy Waters, all the really great black singers. If I went to see them, I would want to hear their hits. I don't really know stuff, really. That's why I try and give my crowd. And, you know, you, over the years, have been a sort of equal opportunity recorder of your own material or other people. You did a lot of covers. But I was going through the stuff, and like all the big ones, you know, Maggie Mae, and You Wear It Well, and Hot Legs, and Do You Think I'm Sexy, and Tonight's the Night, and, you know, those were your songs. I feel like you, as a songwriter, needs a better publicist. I don't think my... Yeah, I don't think... The greatest publishers are the people by the records. Yes. They're the ones, mate. They make a big hit singles. I don't think that people (7/43)
think of you as a songwriter as much as you are. No, I think it's what I look like, you know, look. Well... I... What else could I have been for a rock star? You know what I mean? I know. I brought you something. Really? That... That I had been hanging around my house for 51 years. Oh, my God. That's my... And it smells old, too. Is it... It's Maggie Mae. That's Maggie. I bought that when I was 15. No. Well, yeah, how do you think I got it? It didn't... He was 15 when he bought this. Right. I was 26. I know, but how does it feel... Do you feel anything when you see an artist that is about something that was so important in your life? Yeah, it... When it went to number one in the UK and America, I remember I was driving through London and it came on the radio. It was number one. I just turned my car around and went back to my mom and dad's little house and gave them the biggest kiss and they were all crying. It was Maggie at last. And that song, I mean, this bitterness, the... The... (8/43)
The... The... The... The... This bitterness that you had about Maggie Mae, you know, I don't want to see your face anymore and, you know, the morning sun really makes you look old. I mean, it's some nasty fucking stuff in there. It is. Really nasty about that. It is. It really is. And it's nearly a true story. It was my first chat. It was back that time. Yeah. Lasted about four seconds. You're a nasty stain on the floor. Considering all the women you've had since then, are you over the bitterness to Maggie? I feel like you got your revenge on her with... Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know what? Yeah. Yeah. Because I read your book, your autobiography. I mean, oh, my God, the women. I... I came just reading this book. I... I... I mean, I remember in my life thinking, oh, yeah, I always sort of knew who your girlfriend was. Like, I could mark chapters in my life. Oh, yeah, I remember when he was Bert Ackland and... those supermodels. Yeah. I've been very lucky because I don't really (9/43)
think I'm that attractive that must have something about me. Maybe it's the old nose. Are you kidding? At one time, you were dating two supermodels named Kelly. That's a lot of Kellys at one time. Let me tell you, Bill, looking back, it was nothing to be proud of. You know, it was really serious. Stop it! I mean, you see, there's a part where you talk about going to... I remember the Dome. Yeah. Was the rest... Was the hot restaurant in the 80s. Yeah. And you said they kind of had a bathroom just private for the beautiful people. And you talk about having sex between courses. No. That's... You're exaggerating now. That's what you wrote. No. Between courses. No, I never did that. I'd like to check the book. No, I don't think I ever did that. I'm sort of embarrassed about what I did and I'm sort of proud. It was a different era. Okay. You know, it was a totally different era. But you do love being a rock star. Yeah, I do. Really, right, I do. And I remember... And I met... Also, when you (10/43)
broke, you said you never thought about it, except you went to see this new band, The Rolling Stones. Before, they were like what we know as The Rolling Stones. You said they were sitting on stools wearing cardigans. Yeah. And you saw Mick Jagger and you went, I can do that. Yeah, exactly. There's only 12 people in the audience. My girlfriend was girlfriend... Friends with Mick's girlfriend, Chrissy Shrimpton, at the time. She said, come and see my boyfriend. Or my boyfriend sings. Come and see him in the band. Totally unknown. There's 12 people in the audience. And then, shush, they went off. They're still great. But... New English really seemed to have a work ethic. Like the people... You don't look at it like, oh, I'm a big star. You look at it like this is my craft. I mean, when I look at your discography, I mean, almost every year you put out an album. Those first five years that we knew you, you were also in a band while you were a single artist. The Faces was a great band. Well, (11/43)
it's... It's a love affair that surely hasn't gone away yet. I love... I can't wait to get on the stage to know. Well, I'm very, really nervous tonight. I'll bet. We've changed all the running order and it's... We'll be glad when it's over. But I truly love what I do and I feel blessed. Well, you're playing with the house money. I think they're gonna love you. And, you know, I know... I know your big hobby is trains, right? Model railroads. Model railroads. You know who else, what other great singer had that hobby? Louis Young. Frank Sinatra. Frank, yeah. Yeah. I'm having some as well. Yeah. Well, like you, a great ladies man. A lot of his life in the tabloids, but he also always put in the work. Yeah. Like you do. I mean, it's all there. Thank you. We thank you for that. Have a great residency there and a great tour. Thanks. Great to see you, my friend. Greg Spiller. Thank you. Wow, that's fine. Oh, no, it's not. You have your own. Look at our panel. The owner and president of Eurasia (12/43)
Group and author of the new book, The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World, Ian Bremmer. She served nine terms as the California Congresswoman and was a ranking member of the House Intelligence Commission. She is the author of Insanity Defense, Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe, Jane Harman. Thanks, Jane. All right, so last week I started this job by saying nobody likes to talk about abortion, and then we did. So let's do it again. I don't really want to, but I mean, it's just what's on everybody's mind. I would say it's a big issue. It's so big that it makes me think about the Civil War, you know, pre-Civil War, because we seem to be going toward this place in America where we're going to be two countries, one where you're a free woman and one where it's a Dred Scott situation, you know? I mean, when you look at some of the things that are being proposed in some of these states, I mean, Louisiana says (13/43)
flat out it's a homicide. So when you drive from L.A. to Nevada on one side of the border, you're just a free person. The other side, you're a criminal. You can fly across the country and gain and lose your reproductive rights 20 times. How can America sustain that? It can't, and it's wrong. And what's wrong with this is that it will get worse unless the Supreme Court, let's pray, let's pray, comes out with a different decision from the draft opinion, one that is more to the center. I think it could happen. I think there are institutionalists on the court and this will absolutely politicize the court for years to come. I think that already happened. Well, I actually don't. You don't think the court has been politicized? Yes, but the hearing process politicizes choosing justices and when they get on the court, they have firm views, but they can change. For example, I'll just stop with this. Harry Blackmun, who wrote Roe v. Wade, was a Republican appointee of Richard Nixon. And I don't (14/43)
think anyone expected him to write that opinion, and he did. And it was, for the time, radical and important for women. So that's the Democratic plan hope. I accept that that's what happened when Roe vs. Wade was written, but that was a time when jurisprudence actually held sway among the Supreme Court justices. We don't appoint Supreme Court justices that way anymore. It is all Dems or all Republicans. The process has become subverted. We know that. And if you read the draft opinion, I know you did, that Alito had leaked, I mean, it reads like a culture war document by an analyst. It doesn't read like it was written by a jurist. I mean, it refers to Plessy and Ferguson and makes it sound like people that support abortion rights are racists and eugenicists. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary, which is why I am hoping it won't survive the process. But here's what's going on. Here's what's actually happening in states. I mean, let's just take Missouri. Now, of course, a lot of these (15/43)
states, it's going to be a race to the bottom to see who can get the harshest treatment or give out the harshest treatment in Missouri. It would restrict you even if you were a nonresident and you had sex in Missouri. You have to prove to the state of Missouri you didn't fuck there. It is the show me state. Also, you couldn't get telemedicine. I mean, a lot of times women get the morning after pill. You just have to call up with a consultation with the doctor over the phone. You would have to use a phone from another state. Next on the agenda, reining in big government. And a lot of the Waffle House states are going to have laws like this or worse. I just wonder that this issue gives a tangible sort of concrete pretext to the people who are already talking about some kind of division of this country, some kind of civil war, some kind of secession, some kind of we can't live together. So this gives a real issue to it. I wonder where this is going. I think there are real issues that are (16/43)
dividing our country. Our totally dysfunctional Congress is one of them. But I would say in this case, 75 percent of Americans support the right to choose. And I don't know under some conditions, but Roe v. Wade was not under all Roe v. Wade was not abortion on demand. It was abortion until if a woman chooses that, until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which was about the third trimester. Let me just say, Bill, I just want to say one thing. I got elected on this issue. I did. What year? 1992. OK. Let me just tell you the story for one second. 1992 open seat. Mel Levine had retired and there were seven Republicans and five Democrats in a lean Republican district. One of the Republicans was Maureen Reagan, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, who was still pretty vital and was helping her. She lost the primary. She was pro-choice. And the woman who won the primary was anti-choice. And all of a sudden, all the Republican pro-choice women who supported her came and asked me if they could (17/43)
be Republicans for Harmon. Thank you, Republican women. That's why I love it. But that's — you're kind of making my point. That's just not where we are now. In fact, the Democrats aren't there either. The phrase in that era, Clinton era, his phrase, safe, legal and rare. And I think that's when Democrats were aligned with most Americans. I think that's what most Americans want. Safe, legal and rare. That's not where the Democrats are now. They don't say that anymore. In fact, their own caucus on this in the House this week said, we don't want to call it choice anymore because something, something racism. Decision now. They're even talking about using pro-abortion. No one should be pro-abortion. The Senate had the ability to get Joe Manchin, to get a number of Republican senators if they had just put out legislation that said, are you in favor of maintaining Roe versus Wade? And they didn't do that. And they didn't do it because the progressives wanted to be able to drive more of a (18/43)
spike on this issue. So much of what we're seeing right now is unprecedented compared to the days of 1992. You didn't have opinions leaked. You didn't have people, masses demonstrated outside of the houses of Supreme Court. So what do you think about that? Should there be allowed, because certainly the press spokesman at the White House is down with this. Jen Psaki said, asked about this. These are people who are demonstrating outside the houses of the Supreme Court justices. She said, I don't have an official U.S. government position on where people protest, but we do. Yeah, I think we do. It's wrong. It's intimidation. It's against the law. I mean, do we have some footage of what, I mean, look, it's not, it's not, it's not terribly violent, obviously, but would you want this outside your house? No, there's a 1950 law that says you can't protest outside, outside a residence to influence a judge. There probably is a constitutional challenge that, that could win against that, or there (19/43)
possibly is, but it would be much better as is now going to happen in Washington to have a major rally. I might even be there to protest what could happen at the Supreme Court. What's that going to do? You know, let's just wait a month and see what the final decision is. Bill, what it might do is it might lose the Republicans, the Senate and the midterms, right? I mean, that's what it really comes down to. The Republicans have not wanted, in swing states, they don't want to run on this issue. They haven't had accountability. They haven't had responsibility. They've had settled law of the land and they can complain about it. That's generally where you want to be in a midterm election. So this is a challenge for the Senate. For the House, it's a wave for the Republicans either way, but this is dangerous for them. And I agree with you, Ian, that a clean bill is a better idea and it may still happen. And if it does happen, just maybe they can get 60 votes to reflect the views of 75 percent (20/43)
of the country. That would be a good idea. That would be a good idea. So what do you think about Elon Musk saying that he's going to restore Trump back to Twitter? Well, given that he said this morning that he's thinking, rethinking about whether or not he really wants to buy Twitter, Snoop Dogg is out now saying he might have to buy it. So he's going to buy it. You think he's going to buy it? I don't know if he's going to buy it. He just muses out loud a lot more. Yeah, about buying it. He's already got it. About buying it. Well, about everything. He's got 100 million followers. He doesn't need to pay $42 billion to get 150 million followers. Well, I think he wants something a little bigger. He's looking for something about free speech that's sort of important to liberals at one point in this country. It should still be important to liberals in this country. I hope so. Well, it doesn't look like it sometimes. It doesn't seem important to anybody in this country except this audience (21/43)
and the three of us. I've read an awful lot of shit written about Elon Musk. One column called him a not too bright billionaire. Oh, really? Column writer? You mean the guy who figured out Tesla and how to put a fucking rocket on the moon and send it back? He's the not too bright guy? I really want to see him spending more time changing our planet. And that's what he's been doing. It's extraordinary. I take the under if he buys Twitter on whether he'll be able to restore civil society on that site in the U.S. He says he's for the 80% that aren't on the extremes. But if you watch his behavior on Twitter, his bromanship on Twitter, his shit poster in chief on Twitter, he doesn't actually act that way. What are we talking about? Well, I mean, when he chose, for example, his anti-woke is among all of the he picks selectively all of the flags and issues that are on one side of the extreme, but doesn't pick any on the right side of the extreme. He just has a different perspective. Possibly (22/43)
it's because Twitter is very left wing to begin with. He's talking. He's talking. It's the same thing I do here is like some people say, oh, you know, you never used to make fun of the left so much. They didn't use to be so fucking nuts. I mean, I go where the comedy is. I go where the material is. And also, I want the audience is mostly liberal. I want to say the things that they don't hear because they're in a bubble. We're all in bubbles now. And then it's much better to get out of our bubbles and sit up. But on Elon Musk, he's brilliant. And he took his PayPal money and built the best in show rocket company and car company and all that. But watch out if he be careful what he wishes for, if he heads Twitter and all of a sudden all kinds of crazy stuff, you know, tear down the government and anti white supremacists and other stuff comes back there. His shareholders are going to sell their stock in his companies. And so I don't understand what he gets out of this. He's already got a (23/43)
huge audience. But that is what free speech is. It's defending the speech we hate. I mean, you must. I agree with that. OK, well, you just said no, no inciting people to riot. Well, in fact, it's already against the law inciting people to riot. No one's no one's even suggesting that. Well, that's why Trump. These are straw men. But the first thing he tweeted when he bought this, he said, you know, now I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and put the Coke back in. I thought when I read that, I thought, OK, daddy's home, because this is exactly what Twitter was at the beginning, what it should be irreverent, funny. I'm sure there are people like, OK, it is not funny. Addiction, all this. And it's like, if you don't think that's funny or that belongs on Twitter, you have always been the problem with Twitter. You are a square. You are a hater. You're too much full of anxiety. You don't know what fun is. If Twitter goes back to that, it would be a let alone. Let's understand what the problem is. The (24/43)
fundamental problem is advertising drives the business model and advertising is driven by your addiction on these social platforms, which requires more extremism and requires more outrage. It makes us more anxious. I don't think he's going to be able, if he buys it, I don't think he will be able to have a sustainable business model that isn't advertisement driven, that doesn't have all the bots on it. And I'm willing to make you a bet, I don't have any inside information, that he's not going to buy it. So there'll be some advertising on it. He's advertising. He says he's going to make the algorithm that drives things to you more transparent. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. All right. So if I may change this subject. We're coming up on Pride Month. June is Pride Month all over the country, all over the world, I guess. And it used to be there was one flag for Pride Month. It was this, the pride flag. And I noticed recently, talk about mission creep. Look at this. There's 96 (25/43)
flags now for, I know, for all the, and some of these, you know, one thing, it's one thing to have a sexual orientation, and then there's just things you like, like here's some of these, these are real. These are real. Sapiosexual. Attracted to intelligent people. You mean just like anyone who isn't a fucking moron? Okay, yes. Rubber Pride. This is a real flag for people who are into rubber and latex. That's it. Wow. One of the odds that three fifths of the audience is into rubber and latex. Really? Okay. It's the Rod Stewart effect, I feel. A queer platonic. These are ambiguously romantic or non-romantic relationships. I think we used to call that marriage. But anyway, let's, let's romantics. Romantic attraction without desire for reciprocation, whatever that word is. Reciprocation. I think they should spend more time on grammar and less on gender, but I don't even know what that means. I don't think those people should get a flag. I swear to God. I think we should throw them out of (26/43)
the U-Ed. Anyway, but we feel, at real time here, that this is not enough. This is, I'm sorry, we feel like being very exclusionary to some other groups who should be represented. Would you like to see their flags? We have some of their flags. For example, why isn't there a flag for quasi-homomotosexuals? Women who are turned on by gay hunchbacks should get a flag. Antisexuals, couples that only experience arousal if the dog is watching, should get a flag. Retrosexuals, these are cisgender women who always end up fucking the DJ at a wedding. Litereosexuals, gay or straight people who will only do it with a partner who has hidden an actual salami. I mentioned saposexual, the real one where you're attracted to, you know, intelligence, is also doofusexual, attracted to a total man. Cisgender men who intentionally overcook their balls in Tucker Carlson's classical channel. Harisexuals, men like Harry Styles who seem to be attracted to women but act very gay, also known as British. So we've (27/43)
finished our discussion of Elon Musk. What about the related issue of the Disinformation Governance Board? Now, people are calling this the Ministry of Truth. This came out a couple of weeks ago. The Department of Homeland Security, which by the way itself was always a creepy name. We just got used to it. Right? Department of Homeland Security. Okay. Now they've got an even creepier one. Disinformation Governance Board, yes, they're right to compare this to Orwell and the Ministry of Truth. It's exactly what it sounds like. Now, when they first explained it, they mentioned two things that they were going to go after. Russian disinformation, I said, okay, I'm all right with that. The Russia, that's not us and they are our adversary and they're trying to hurt us. And then traffickers, okay, I get that. People coming across the border, you can tell them misinformation, that's bad. But then here's from the Department of Homeland Security, disinformation is defined as false information that (28/43)
is deliberately spread with the intention to deceive or mislead. Well, you could have said that about if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, if you didn't like that. It said also, here's a phrase, can take many forms. Okay. Now, we're going faster down the slippery slope, including but not limited to the two I mentioned. Russia. Okay. So government should not be involved in deciding what's true or not true. As I think what a lot of people are saying. And my follow up question would be, who do you think the truth is going to be in 2025? Look, I like Voice of America. It had a role at a time when countries around the world- Voice of America? Yeah. But that was broadcast overseas. Broadcast overseas. Exactly. And people that needed good information turned to the Americans just to understand what the hell was going on. But this is a very different story. This is Americans becoming politicized in governments as to what information is and isn't true. And of course, it'll change (29/43)
constantly on the basis of being performative. We don't want that. It's not our country. Well, full disclosure, I'm on the Homeland Security bad name advisory committee. I was in Congress when the agency was set up and it has performed well. I don't get this piece. I wasn't consulted. It was leaked before it was rolled out. And if it were confined to a few missions that you mentioned, Bill, I think it'd be fine. And maybe that's what they will intend. But I certainly agree that something very broad scale that could become something like HUAC, the old Richard Nixon thing, would be highly unfortunate. And I don't think that's where it's going. And to bring it back to Twitter, the czar, Nina Jankowicz says she'd like some committee there within this governing board with the power to, quote, edit Twitter and add context. You mean like what Twitter is? Somebody says something and then you add context. These are not bright people in our government. OK, so speaking of mission creep, you're (30/43)
two experts on foreign affairs. Let me ask you about Ukraine. I mentioned in the monologue. It's interesting because this seems to be one of the few issues now that is has bipartisan support. And I mentioned we're now going to send 40 billion, I think. Maybe Rand Paul is a holdout here, but that probably no. No, it'll go through. It'll go through. So then we are coming up to almost giving Ukraine the amount of money that Russia spends on their entire defense budget, which I assume is to defend all 13 time zones and not just used to be. But, well, increasingly all of their troops are focused on Ukraine. Right. But I'm sure they still have to worry about things that are not just Ukraine. Oh, no. They've got no problems. Yes. OK. So I guess what I'm asking is, is there any limit? What is the Biden doctrine? If you most presidents have a doctrine, you know, Bush had don't fuck with Texas and, you know, whatever it was. Is there a Biden doctrine? And if so, what is it? The Biden doctrine is (31/43)
to ensure that the Ukrainian government continues to exist, that it's able to actually. But that's not a doctrine. That's a policy about one country. Oh, I thought you meant about Ukraine specifically. No, a Biden doctrine. A doctrine, you know, the Monroe Doctrine. You can't come into North America. That was our doctrine. You know, you can't mess with usually our doctrines are about you can't mess with us. I mean, he certainly I would say the most important thing in foreign policy has been to show that the United States is committed to its allies around the world, committed to the multilateral institutions that existed for a long time and that have eroded dramatically of the course of the last several decades. So I wrote a book about this, this book called Insanity Defense. Thank you for the soft. And my point is that since the end of the Cold War, we have not had a strategy for U.S. global leadership and we still don't have one. That's four and a half presidents in what Biden has is (32/43)
a policy on Ukraine. And Ian is right. We have reconnected and we should have to our partners and allies around the world, mostly in Europe. And it's a good thing that NATO is stronger. And it's a good thing that the EU is stronger. However, if you look at the vote in the United Nations in the General Assembly about whether to condemn Russia, 140 countries voted with us, 35 abstained and five voted against us. The 35 represent more than half the population of the world. Therefore, I don't think we yet have a doctrine for U.S. global leadership. And I think we urgently need one, regardless of how Ukraine comes out. And let's pray that Ukraine holds Russia back. Can I just go back to the money for a second? Because last week, the end of my show was all about the COVID money and like how much it was just stolen and how we just write checks for incredible amounts that we never even conceived of even 10 years ago. And I don't know, I don't trust anyone. I don't know. I mentioned the 900 (33/43)
million dollars for translators for Ukrainian refugees, who I guess will be coming here. That seems like an awful lot of money for that. Would we even have known about that if I didn't put it in the monologue? You know, it just seems like, it just seems like the first mission creep always happens. The request from the Biden administration was 33 billion. And Republicans said, no, it's not enough. We need three and a half billion more for the military. And the Democrats said, well, no, you've got to give an equal amount for humanitarian aid. You got to throw three and a half billion more in. So it goes to 40. That's literally, that's seven billion dollars. That's not nothing. No. That's stupid. So it should be 33. It shouldn't be 40. That's Congress acting irresponsibly. Why shouldn't it be 33? How do I know? It used to be a liberal thing to be suspicious of defense contractors. I mean, I can tell you what 33 is. They always had their snouts in the trough and they just want more money (34/43)
for... I can tell you what 33 actually is. Really? 33 actually is you look at the amount of spend in the first three months of the military campaign in Ukraine against Russia, and it is how can they keep going at that level for six more months? And by the way, if peace breaks out, we're not going to continue. You don't know that. You don't know how many javelin missiles would they cost. They know how many they've sent and they know how many they have to replace to Eastern Europe. That is actually what they're trying to do. But do you know what they really cost? Do you know what it really should be if they weren't being grafted? We don't know any of that. I don't, I don't agree with that. I just don't. I think our defense budget is probably too high. I represented a defense district. You always got a history on everything. Well, I do. I know. I've been in the U.S. for a long time. That's true. And I'm happy to be home, folks. But anyway, my point is that we still protect legacy programs (35/43)
to fight the last war. What we should be doing is figuring out current and future threats, a lot of them from technology, a big point in Ian's book, and funding that. And a current threat is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because if it doesn't stop there, it's going to Europe and our freedom agenda is dead. And we're for freedom. If you want to talk about money and what the Americans spend, literally we have had for how many administrations begging the Germans, the Europeans, to pay their fair share for NATO defense and they wouldn't do it. Begging them to take responsibility internationally, they wouldn't do it. And finally, not because of Biden, not because of Trump, not because of Obama, but because of Putin, the Germans and the rest are saying, my God, we have to spend on defense. And they're the ones with the economic sanctions, we're spending, we're getting more money because we're going to produce more oil and gas and we're going to send it to them and they're going to pay for (36/43)
it, market price. And they're the ones that had the trade with Russia. They're the ones that are taking on their sin. Finally, the Europeans are starting to pay and people like you and me and James should be applauding that. That's a good thing. I'm applauding him and I'm applauding you. Thank you very much. But it's time to get a new rules, everybody. New rules. Family Dollar Chain is being sued for having a warehouse invested with over a thousand rats. Their defense has to be, we're Family Dollar. You want baby formula that hasn't been gnawed on by rodents? Go to Target. You want the absolute lowest, the absolute lowest prices on slightly nibbled goods? Come see us. And remember, if we find out it kills the rats, we don't sell it. That's the Family Dollar Play. New rule. Men need a sideline reporter for when they say the wrong thing in bed. And it looks like Tammy's headed into the bathroom early as the injury from Ted's remark. Well, Troy, trainers tell me Tammy was deeply wounded (37/43)
when Ted asked, who's my dirty slut? And it looks like she will not be returning for the second half. Movie fans must admit that one of the dumbest tropes in science fiction is there's always some unelected old powerful tribunal that meets in secret and issues decrees to control the people. Wait, did I say dumbest? I meant tragically accurate. New rule. Before ordering the litter-made 9,000 automatic self-cleaning litter box, be aware you might just be training the cat to shit in your printer. So, Hunter Biden has to explain why he made the password to get into one of his laptops, analfuck69. Yes, he really did that. My question is, why that particular password and not something a little less easy for the people trying to break into guess. Take it into this laptop. Whose is it? Hunter Biden. Try analfuck69. If you haven't seen all the crime happening lately on your TV, it's probably because someone stole it. As we head into the midterm election season, one issue that has risen to the (38/43)
top of voter concerns is a general feeling these days that the social order is breaking down, that there are no more safe spaces anywhere. Street crime, home invasions, carjacking, porch pirates, medical staff attacked at hospitals, incivility at sports arenas, and I think the Grubhub driver is eating my french fries. On airplanes now, the in-flight entertainment is a fistfight. This year, the LA City Council voted that every homeless tent had to be removed from dozens of locations, yet every freeway overpass still looks like history's saddest Coachella. The homeless are both preyed upon and, frankly, a concern that they will do God knows what. You go out for a run in your neighborhood and you have to wonder whether that guy eyeing you on the corner is going to be this guy or this guy. We have a new thing in LA called follow home robberies, where gang members stake out nice restaurants and then follow home the people who leave inexpensive cars and force their way into their houses. (39/43)
That's why Paris Hilton now drives a 2009 PT Cruiser and eats a ceballo. A day doesn't go by where you can't find video of the latest smash and grab robbery, where thieves in broad daylight just smash the front windows of ritzy stores and take all the jewelry they can carry. They went to Jared. And when did they legalize shoplifting? They used to be shamed in shoplifting, or at least some skill. Now criminals just brazenly walk out of Walgreens again in broad daylight with a trash bag full of aisle three, while the security guard just watches. They have to keep even the most mundane products all caged up. CVS isn't a store, it's a zoo for teeth whitening strips. San Francisco in the last few years has seen 11 Walgreens and six CVS stores just give up and close because that town seems simply beyond law, which is heartbreaking because I like so many people love that city and I don't think it's corny to admit, yes, I left my heart in San Francisco. Also my wallet and iPhone. Many area (40/43)
citizens have been complaining in recent years about all the human feces in the streets, but now the streets are full of something else. They call it San Francisco snow. It's glass, piles and piles of shattered glass everywhere from car windows being smashed. It's so routine to have this happen to any parked car that people purposefully leave the windows down and the glove compartment open so thieves can see there's nothing of value or they leave a note on the car politely assuring the thief that there's nothing worth stealing and please don't break the windows. Dear Mr. Criminal, I hope this note finds you well. Please don't break my windows. Thanks, you're the best. P.S. there's a Walgreens around the corner if you want to hit that. What is so disturbing here is not just that there's more crime and mayhem, it's the audacity of it all. Like there's no lines anymore that can't be crossed. Like don't walk on a stage during a live show. Or don't fuck with Mike Tyson. I mean who needs the (41/43)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #600: Rod Stewart, Ian Bremmer, Jane Harman.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Facebook is out here in California. We know this is a bad week. It's the start of fire season. It's what we're applauding, fire season? All week, their stories were about down in Laguna. They said, you know, fires are destroying multimillion dollar homes, or as we call them in California, homes. I hate fire season. I mean, the air quality, air quality's already bad. On the bright side, it helps Amber heard with her fake cry. I like it. This is a people. This is a crisis we have. We're running out of water. But water parks are asking kids to pee in the pool. And it's really, this water thing, it's so tragic because FEMA says we would have been OK. But during COVID, we used up all the water scrubbing the mail. Now we're out of in this country? Baby formula. Perfect. Perfect. Just when the Supreme Court comes up with a formula for more babies. Yes, ladies, you're in America now. Not only do we make you (1/43)
carry the baby to term, now we're going to make you breastfeed the little thing, OK? Everybody wants to know, why are we out of the, you know, baby formula? Well, a few issues. Supply chain issues, which are real. Contamination, that happened in a couple of places. That's real. And of course, Nick Cannon. So that's very right. But you know, I mean, inflation, is that not what is on everybody's mind? That's like the subject of the day everywhere. Prices are up 11%. That's a really big jump. We haven't had that in decades and decades. I'll say this for Donald Trump. When he was president, America felt cheap. The gasoline, whoa, that has people very upset. I was valleying my, I was valleying my car the other day. And the valle guy said, pull it up a little. I said, I can't afford it. You know what we always have money for is Ukraine. We all support Ukraine. Of course, I don't. But boy, there are now 40 billion more going there, which will bring in the total that we've given them so far to (2/43)
over 50 billion. The defense budget of Russia is only 61 billion. Can we pay them to leave? Is that completely out of the question? It's like, and look at this. In the 40 billion, almost $1 billion, $900 million goes to buying, I guess, or paying translators for the Ukrainian refugees we're going to bring here. So if your kid is in a shitty school that's underfunded in America, here's what you do. Send them to Moldova, wait for Russia to invade, then bring them back. And finally, before we start the big show, I should remind you, this is Friday the 13th. They like fire, they like Friday the 13th. This is just a hopped up crowd. No, you know, a lot of things bad luck. Be careful of a bad luck. You need to step on a crack, if a mirror breaks, you know? Oh, and this year, if you break a condom, 18 years bad luck. All right, we got a great show here. He is a two time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and one of the best selling music artists of all time. He returns to his residency at Caesars (3/43)
Palette tonight and then kicks off his North American summer tour in June. I can't believe he came here. Rod Stewart is on the show. He's so proud. Wasn't that the best monologue? I tell you. All right. I see you haven't sold out. It's like you went for seats. We're here to talk. That's for COVID. Oh, OK. That's it. We're here to talk about you. This is a big night for you. You're starting your big world tour for 2022 and you're in Caesars Palette. Thank you so much. Because you've got to like fly out of here. You're on stage tonight at Caesars Palace. Well, they put it back. Usually I go on stage at 7.30. They put it back to 8.30. But I still have to do sound check, check all the girls' costumes. Let's be honest. The show really doesn't start till you get there. Well, it doesn't. But I don't want to be late. I don't like to keep my customers waiting. I mean, rock stars are known for keeping audiences waiting. What is your history of that over the years? Were you pretty prompt with (4/43)
your concerts? Yeah, always. First of all, it's people who've paid a lot of money. They've got babysitters, hired cars, and bicycles, and they get there on time. You don't want to keep them waiting. You want to get out there before you're supposed to go on to keep them happy. That's great because that's not what most rock stars do. Well, that's their business. It's not me. Yeah, I just think great. And how long is the show that you do? Tonight will be per hour and a half. But we're only allowed to do an hour and a half at Caesars Palace because they get you on stage. Right, because they want everyone to go back into the old, you know, spend the money. Exactly. But on the road, it's a little more if you're not at a gambling casino? Oh, yeah, we play two hours, 15. That's amazing. What was it when you started? Because like, you know what the Beatles did when they were touring? 15 minutes. 25. Yeah, that's what we used to do, yeah. Yeah. That's nuts. No, it is nuts. And here you are all (5/43)
these years later. I mean, I have your latest album. I'm so glad you went back to making an album of new material. Yeah, fantastic. The Hercules album, you sound the same. You haven't lost anything. Well, I look the same. Well, your hair is. You know, you know, you know, let me tell you something. You know what the Queen of England and I have got in common? We both had the same haircut for 60 years. I remember when I first came out here in 1983. I'd never been here, and I never saw a palm tree. And I looked, and I went, oh, it looks like Rod Stewart's head. It does. Yeah, it does, yeah. I'm eternally grateful it's still up there. No, unbelievable. Could you laugh? And the show is called The Hits at the University, which is fantastic. I mean, that's what people want to see. Oh, of course, yeah. And very few people in music have 90 minutes or two hours of just the hits. You do. I mean, I've seen you in concert, and there's no good time to go to the bathroom. No, absolutely. That's, you (6/43)
should put that on the sign. Rod Stewart. You'll never want to go to the bathroom. Sure. Sure. You never want to go to the bathroom. You know, I always think my idols were, you know, Sam Cooke, you know, East Reading, and Muddy Waters, all the really great black singers. If I went to see them, I would want to hear their hits. I don't really know stuff, really. That's why I try and give my crowd. And, you know, you, over the years, have been a sort of equal opportunity recorder of your own material or other people. You did a lot of covers. But I was going through the stuff, and like all the big ones, you know, Maggie Mae, and You Wear It Well, and Hot Legs, and Do You Think I'm Sexy, and Tonight's the Night, and, you know, those were your songs. I feel like you, as a songwriter, needs a better publicist. I don't think my... Yeah, I don't think... The greatest publishers are the people by the records. Yes. They're the ones, mate. They make a big hit singles. I don't think that people (7/43)
think of you as a songwriter as much as you are. No, I think it's what I look like, you know, look. Well... I... What else could I have been for a rock star? You know what I mean? I know. I brought you something. Really? That... That I had been hanging around my house for 51 years. Oh, my God. That's my... And it smells old, too. Is it... It's Maggie Mae. That's Maggie. I bought that when I was 15. No. Well, yeah, how do you think I got it? It didn't... He was 15 when he bought this. Right. I was 26. I know, but how does it feel... Do you feel anything when you see an artist that is about something that was so important in your life? Yeah, it... When it went to number one in the UK and America, I remember I was driving through London and it came on the radio. It was number one. I just turned my car around and went back to my mom and dad's little house and gave them the biggest kiss and they were all crying. It was Maggie at last. And that song, I mean, this bitterness, the... The... (8/43)
The... The... The... The... This bitterness that you had about Maggie Mae, you know, I don't want to see your face anymore and, you know, the morning sun really makes you look old. I mean, it's some nasty fucking stuff in there. It is. Really nasty about that. It is. It really is. And it's nearly a true story. It was my first chat. It was back that time. Yeah. Lasted about four seconds. You're a nasty stain on the floor. Considering all the women you've had since then, are you over the bitterness to Maggie? I feel like you got your revenge on her with... Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know what? Yeah. Yeah. Because I read your book, your autobiography. I mean, oh, my God, the women. I... I came just reading this book. I... I... I mean, I remember in my life thinking, oh, yeah, I always sort of knew who your girlfriend was. Like, I could mark chapters in my life. Oh, yeah, I remember when he was Bert Ackland and... those supermodels. Yeah. I've been very lucky because I don't really (9/43)
think I'm that attractive that must have something about me. Maybe it's the old nose. Are you kidding? At one time, you were dating two supermodels named Kelly. That's a lot of Kellys at one time. Let me tell you, Bill, looking back, it was nothing to be proud of. You know, it was really serious. Stop it! I mean, you see, there's a part where you talk about going to... I remember the Dome. Yeah. Was the rest... Was the hot restaurant in the 80s. Yeah. And you said they kind of had a bathroom just private for the beautiful people. And you talk about having sex between courses. No. That's... You're exaggerating now. That's what you wrote. No. Between courses. No, I never did that. I'd like to check the book. No, I don't think I ever did that. I'm sort of embarrassed about what I did and I'm sort of proud. It was a different era. Okay. You know, it was a totally different era. But you do love being a rock star. Yeah, I do. Really, right, I do. And I remember... And I met... Also, when you (10/43)
broke, you said you never thought about it, except you went to see this new band, The Rolling Stones. Before, they were like what we know as The Rolling Stones. You said they were sitting on stools wearing cardigans. Yeah. And you saw Mick Jagger and you went, I can do that. Yeah, exactly. There's only 12 people in the audience. My girlfriend was girlfriend... Friends with Mick's girlfriend, Chrissy Shrimpton, at the time. She said, come and see my boyfriend. Or my boyfriend sings. Come and see him in the band. Totally unknown. There's 12 people in the audience. And then, shush, they went off. They're still great. But... New English really seemed to have a work ethic. Like the people... You don't look at it like, oh, I'm a big star. You look at it like this is my craft. I mean, when I look at your discography, I mean, almost every year you put out an album. Those first five years that we knew you, you were also in a band while you were a single artist. The Faces was a great band. Well, (11/43)
it's... It's a love affair that surely hasn't gone away yet. I love... I can't wait to get on the stage to know. Well, I'm very, really nervous tonight. I'll bet. We've changed all the running order and it's... We'll be glad when it's over. But I truly love what I do and I feel blessed. Well, you're playing with the house money. I think they're gonna love you. And, you know, I know... I know your big hobby is trains, right? Model railroads. Model railroads. You know who else, what other great singer had that hobby? Louis Young. Frank Sinatra. Frank, yeah. Yeah. I'm having some as well. Yeah. Well, like you, a great ladies man. A lot of his life in the tabloids, but he also always put in the work. Yeah. Like you do. I mean, it's all there. Thank you. We thank you for that. Have a great residency there and a great tour. Thanks. Great to see you, my friend. Greg Spiller. Thank you. Wow, that's fine. Oh, no, it's not. You have your own. Look at our panel. The owner and president of Eurasia (12/43)
Group and author of the new book, The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World, Ian Bremmer. She served nine terms as the California Congresswoman and was a ranking member of the House Intelligence Commission. She is the author of Insanity Defense, Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe, Jane Harman. Thanks, Jane. All right, so last week I started this job by saying nobody likes to talk about abortion, and then we did. So let's do it again. I don't really want to, but I mean, it's just what's on everybody's mind. I would say it's a big issue. It's so big that it makes me think about the Civil War, you know, pre-Civil War, because we seem to be going toward this place in America where we're going to be two countries, one where you're a free woman and one where it's a Dred Scott situation, you know? I mean, when you look at some of the things that are being proposed in some of these states, I mean, Louisiana says (13/43)
flat out it's a homicide. So when you drive from L.A. to Nevada on one side of the border, you're just a free person. The other side, you're a criminal. You can fly across the country and gain and lose your reproductive rights 20 times. How can America sustain that? It can't, and it's wrong. And what's wrong with this is that it will get worse unless the Supreme Court, let's pray, let's pray, comes out with a different decision from the draft opinion, one that is more to the center. I think it could happen. I think there are institutionalists on the court and this will absolutely politicize the court for years to come. I think that already happened. Well, I actually don't. You don't think the court has been politicized? Yes, but the hearing process politicizes choosing justices and when they get on the court, they have firm views, but they can change. For example, I'll just stop with this. Harry Blackmun, who wrote Roe v. Wade, was a Republican appointee of Richard Nixon. And I don't (14/43)
think anyone expected him to write that opinion, and he did. And it was, for the time, radical and important for women. So that's the Democratic plan hope. I accept that that's what happened when Roe vs. Wade was written, but that was a time when jurisprudence actually held sway among the Supreme Court justices. We don't appoint Supreme Court justices that way anymore. It is all Dems or all Republicans. The process has become subverted. We know that. And if you read the draft opinion, I know you did, that Alito had leaked, I mean, it reads like a culture war document by an analyst. It doesn't read like it was written by a jurist. I mean, it refers to Plessy and Ferguson and makes it sound like people that support abortion rights are racists and eugenicists. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary, which is why I am hoping it won't survive the process. But here's what's going on. Here's what's actually happening in states. I mean, let's just take Missouri. Now, of course, a lot of these (15/43)
states, it's going to be a race to the bottom to see who can get the harshest treatment or give out the harshest treatment in Missouri. It would restrict you even if you were a nonresident and you had sex in Missouri. You have to prove to the state of Missouri you didn't fuck there. It is the show me state. Also, you couldn't get telemedicine. I mean, a lot of times women get the morning after pill. You just have to call up with a consultation with the doctor over the phone. You would have to use a phone from another state. Next on the agenda, reining in big government. And a lot of the Waffle House states are going to have laws like this or worse. I just wonder that this issue gives a tangible sort of concrete pretext to the people who are already talking about some kind of division of this country, some kind of civil war, some kind of secession, some kind of we can't live together. So this gives a real issue to it. I wonder where this is going. I think there are real issues that are (16/43)
dividing our country. Our totally dysfunctional Congress is one of them. But I would say in this case, 75 percent of Americans support the right to choose. And I don't know under some conditions, but Roe v. Wade was not under all Roe v. Wade was not abortion on demand. It was abortion until if a woman chooses that, until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which was about the third trimester. Let me just say, Bill, I just want to say one thing. I got elected on this issue. I did. What year? 1992. OK. Let me just tell you the story for one second. 1992 open seat. Mel Levine had retired and there were seven Republicans and five Democrats in a lean Republican district. One of the Republicans was Maureen Reagan, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, who was still pretty vital and was helping her. She lost the primary. She was pro-choice. And the woman who won the primary was anti-choice. And all of a sudden, all the Republican pro-choice women who supported her came and asked me if they could (17/43)
be Republicans for Harmon. Thank you, Republican women. That's why I love it. But that's — you're kind of making my point. That's just not where we are now. In fact, the Democrats aren't there either. The phrase in that era, Clinton era, his phrase, safe, legal and rare. And I think that's when Democrats were aligned with most Americans. I think that's what most Americans want. Safe, legal and rare. That's not where the Democrats are now. They don't say that anymore. In fact, their own caucus on this in the House this week said, we don't want to call it choice anymore because something, something racism. Decision now. They're even talking about using pro-abortion. No one should be pro-abortion. The Senate had the ability to get Joe Manchin, to get a number of Republican senators if they had just put out legislation that said, are you in favor of maintaining Roe versus Wade? And they didn't do that. And they didn't do it because the progressives wanted to be able to drive more of a (18/43)
spike on this issue. So much of what we're seeing right now is unprecedented compared to the days of 1992. You didn't have opinions leaked. You didn't have people, masses demonstrated outside of the houses of Supreme Court. So what do you think about that? Should there be allowed, because certainly the press spokesman at the White House is down with this. Jen Psaki said, asked about this. These are people who are demonstrating outside the houses of the Supreme Court justices. She said, I don't have an official U.S. government position on where people protest, but we do. Yeah, I think we do. It's wrong. It's intimidation. It's against the law. I mean, do we have some footage of what, I mean, look, it's not, it's not, it's not terribly violent, obviously, but would you want this outside your house? No, there's a 1950 law that says you can't protest outside, outside a residence to influence a judge. There probably is a constitutional challenge that, that could win against that, or there (19/43)
possibly is, but it would be much better as is now going to happen in Washington to have a major rally. I might even be there to protest what could happen at the Supreme Court. What's that going to do? You know, let's just wait a month and see what the final decision is. Bill, what it might do is it might lose the Republicans, the Senate and the midterms, right? I mean, that's what it really comes down to. The Republicans have not wanted, in swing states, they don't want to run on this issue. They haven't had accountability. They haven't had responsibility. They've had settled law of the land and they can complain about it. That's generally where you want to be in a midterm election. So this is a challenge for the Senate. For the House, it's a wave for the Republicans either way, but this is dangerous for them. And I agree with you, Ian, that a clean bill is a better idea and it may still happen. And if it does happen, just maybe they can get 60 votes to reflect the views of 75 percent (20/43)
of the country. That would be a good idea. That would be a good idea. So what do you think about Elon Musk saying that he's going to restore Trump back to Twitter? Well, given that he said this morning that he's thinking, rethinking about whether or not he really wants to buy Twitter, Snoop Dogg is out now saying he might have to buy it. So he's going to buy it. You think he's going to buy it? I don't know if he's going to buy it. He just muses out loud a lot more. Yeah, about buying it. He's already got it. About buying it. Well, about everything. He's got 100 million followers. He doesn't need to pay $42 billion to get 150 million followers. Well, I think he wants something a little bigger. He's looking for something about free speech that's sort of important to liberals at one point in this country. It should still be important to liberals in this country. I hope so. Well, it doesn't look like it sometimes. It doesn't seem important to anybody in this country except this audience (21/43)
and the three of us. I've read an awful lot of shit written about Elon Musk. One column called him a not too bright billionaire. Oh, really? Column writer? You mean the guy who figured out Tesla and how to put a fucking rocket on the moon and send it back? He's the not too bright guy? I really want to see him spending more time changing our planet. And that's what he's been doing. It's extraordinary. I take the under if he buys Twitter on whether he'll be able to restore civil society on that site in the U.S. He says he's for the 80% that aren't on the extremes. But if you watch his behavior on Twitter, his bromanship on Twitter, his shit poster in chief on Twitter, he doesn't actually act that way. What are we talking about? Well, I mean, when he chose, for example, his anti-woke is among all of the he picks selectively all of the flags and issues that are on one side of the extreme, but doesn't pick any on the right side of the extreme. He just has a different perspective. Possibly (22/43)
it's because Twitter is very left wing to begin with. He's talking. He's talking. It's the same thing I do here is like some people say, oh, you know, you never used to make fun of the left so much. They didn't use to be so fucking nuts. I mean, I go where the comedy is. I go where the material is. And also, I want the audience is mostly liberal. I want to say the things that they don't hear because they're in a bubble. We're all in bubbles now. And then it's much better to get out of our bubbles and sit up. But on Elon Musk, he's brilliant. And he took his PayPal money and built the best in show rocket company and car company and all that. But watch out if he be careful what he wishes for, if he heads Twitter and all of a sudden all kinds of crazy stuff, you know, tear down the government and anti white supremacists and other stuff comes back there. His shareholders are going to sell their stock in his companies. And so I don't understand what he gets out of this. He's already got a (23/43)
huge audience. But that is what free speech is. It's defending the speech we hate. I mean, you must. I agree with that. OK, well, you just said no, no inciting people to riot. Well, in fact, it's already against the law inciting people to riot. No one's no one's even suggesting that. Well, that's why Trump. These are straw men. But the first thing he tweeted when he bought this, he said, you know, now I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and put the Coke back in. I thought when I read that, I thought, OK, daddy's home, because this is exactly what Twitter was at the beginning, what it should be irreverent, funny. I'm sure there are people like, OK, it is not funny. Addiction, all this. And it's like, if you don't think that's funny or that belongs on Twitter, you have always been the problem with Twitter. You are a square. You are a hater. You're too much full of anxiety. You don't know what fun is. If Twitter goes back to that, it would be a let alone. Let's understand what the problem is. The (24/43)
fundamental problem is advertising drives the business model and advertising is driven by your addiction on these social platforms, which requires more extremism and requires more outrage. It makes us more anxious. I don't think he's going to be able, if he buys it, I don't think he will be able to have a sustainable business model that isn't advertisement driven, that doesn't have all the bots on it. And I'm willing to make you a bet, I don't have any inside information, that he's not going to buy it. So there'll be some advertising on it. He's advertising. He says he's going to make the algorithm that drives things to you more transparent. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. All right. So if I may change this subject. We're coming up on Pride Month. June is Pride Month all over the country, all over the world, I guess. And it used to be there was one flag for Pride Month. It was this, the pride flag. And I noticed recently, talk about mission creep. Look at this. There's 96 (25/43)
flags now for, I know, for all the, and some of these, you know, one thing, it's one thing to have a sexual orientation, and then there's just things you like, like here's some of these, these are real. These are real. Sapiosexual. Attracted to intelligent people. You mean just like anyone who isn't a fucking moron? Okay, yes. Rubber Pride. This is a real flag for people who are into rubber and latex. That's it. Wow. One of the odds that three fifths of the audience is into rubber and latex. Really? Okay. It's the Rod Stewart effect, I feel. A queer platonic. These are ambiguously romantic or non-romantic relationships. I think we used to call that marriage. But anyway, let's, let's romantics. Romantic attraction without desire for reciprocation, whatever that word is. Reciprocation. I think they should spend more time on grammar and less on gender, but I don't even know what that means. I don't think those people should get a flag. I swear to God. I think we should throw them out of (26/43)
the U-Ed. Anyway, but we feel, at real time here, that this is not enough. This is, I'm sorry, we feel like being very exclusionary to some other groups who should be represented. Would you like to see their flags? We have some of their flags. For example, why isn't there a flag for quasi-homomotosexuals? Women who are turned on by gay hunchbacks should get a flag. Antisexuals, couples that only experience arousal if the dog is watching, should get a flag. Retrosexuals, these are cisgender women who always end up fucking the DJ at a wedding. Litereosexuals, gay or straight people who will only do it with a partner who has hidden an actual salami. I mentioned saposexual, the real one where you're attracted to, you know, intelligence, is also doofusexual, attracted to a total man. Cisgender men who intentionally overcook their balls in Tucker Carlson's classical channel. Harisexuals, men like Harry Styles who seem to be attracted to women but act very gay, also known as British. So we've (27/43)
finished our discussion of Elon Musk. What about the related issue of the Disinformation Governance Board? Now, people are calling this the Ministry of Truth. This came out a couple of weeks ago. The Department of Homeland Security, which by the way itself was always a creepy name. We just got used to it. Right? Department of Homeland Security. Okay. Now they've got an even creepier one. Disinformation Governance Board, yes, they're right to compare this to Orwell and the Ministry of Truth. It's exactly what it sounds like. Now, when they first explained it, they mentioned two things that they were going to go after. Russian disinformation, I said, okay, I'm all right with that. The Russia, that's not us and they are our adversary and they're trying to hurt us. And then traffickers, okay, I get that. People coming across the border, you can tell them misinformation, that's bad. But then here's from the Department of Homeland Security, disinformation is defined as false information that (28/43)
is deliberately spread with the intention to deceive or mislead. Well, you could have said that about if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, if you didn't like that. It said also, here's a phrase, can take many forms. Okay. Now, we're going faster down the slippery slope, including but not limited to the two I mentioned. Russia. Okay. So government should not be involved in deciding what's true or not true. As I think what a lot of people are saying. And my follow up question would be, who do you think the truth is going to be in 2025? Look, I like Voice of America. It had a role at a time when countries around the world- Voice of America? Yeah. But that was broadcast overseas. Broadcast overseas. Exactly. And people that needed good information turned to the Americans just to understand what the hell was going on. But this is a very different story. This is Americans becoming politicized in governments as to what information is and isn't true. And of course, it'll change (29/43)
constantly on the basis of being performative. We don't want that. It's not our country. Well, full disclosure, I'm on the Homeland Security bad name advisory committee. I was in Congress when the agency was set up and it has performed well. I don't get this piece. I wasn't consulted. It was leaked before it was rolled out. And if it were confined to a few missions that you mentioned, Bill, I think it'd be fine. And maybe that's what they will intend. But I certainly agree that something very broad scale that could become something like HUAC, the old Richard Nixon thing, would be highly unfortunate. And I don't think that's where it's going. And to bring it back to Twitter, the czar, Nina Jankowicz says she'd like some committee there within this governing board with the power to, quote, edit Twitter and add context. You mean like what Twitter is? Somebody says something and then you add context. These are not bright people in our government. OK, so speaking of mission creep, you're (30/43)
two experts on foreign affairs. Let me ask you about Ukraine. I mentioned in the monologue. It's interesting because this seems to be one of the few issues now that is has bipartisan support. And I mentioned we're now going to send 40 billion, I think. Maybe Rand Paul is a holdout here, but that probably no. No, it'll go through. It'll go through. So then we are coming up to almost giving Ukraine the amount of money that Russia spends on their entire defense budget, which I assume is to defend all 13 time zones and not just used to be. But, well, increasingly all of their troops are focused on Ukraine. Right. But I'm sure they still have to worry about things that are not just Ukraine. Oh, no. They've got no problems. Yes. OK. So I guess what I'm asking is, is there any limit? What is the Biden doctrine? If you most presidents have a doctrine, you know, Bush had don't fuck with Texas and, you know, whatever it was. Is there a Biden doctrine? And if so, what is it? The Biden doctrine is (31/43)
to ensure that the Ukrainian government continues to exist, that it's able to actually. But that's not a doctrine. That's a policy about one country. Oh, I thought you meant about Ukraine specifically. No, a Biden doctrine. A doctrine, you know, the Monroe Doctrine. You can't come into North America. That was our doctrine. You know, you can't mess with usually our doctrines are about you can't mess with us. I mean, he certainly I would say the most important thing in foreign policy has been to show that the United States is committed to its allies around the world, committed to the multilateral institutions that existed for a long time and that have eroded dramatically of the course of the last several decades. So I wrote a book about this, this book called Insanity Defense. Thank you for the soft. And my point is that since the end of the Cold War, we have not had a strategy for U.S. global leadership and we still don't have one. That's four and a half presidents in what Biden has is (32/43)
a policy on Ukraine. And Ian is right. We have reconnected and we should have to our partners and allies around the world, mostly in Europe. And it's a good thing that NATO is stronger. And it's a good thing that the EU is stronger. However, if you look at the vote in the United Nations in the General Assembly about whether to condemn Russia, 140 countries voted with us, 35 abstained and five voted against us. The 35 represent more than half the population of the world. Therefore, I don't think we yet have a doctrine for U.S. global leadership. And I think we urgently need one, regardless of how Ukraine comes out. And let's pray that Ukraine holds Russia back. Can I just go back to the money for a second? Because last week, the end of my show was all about the COVID money and like how much it was just stolen and how we just write checks for incredible amounts that we never even conceived of even 10 years ago. And I don't know, I don't trust anyone. I don't know. I mentioned the 900 (33/43)
million dollars for translators for Ukrainian refugees, who I guess will be coming here. That seems like an awful lot of money for that. Would we even have known about that if I didn't put it in the monologue? You know, it just seems like, it just seems like the first mission creep always happens. The request from the Biden administration was 33 billion. And Republicans said, no, it's not enough. We need three and a half billion more for the military. And the Democrats said, well, no, you've got to give an equal amount for humanitarian aid. You got to throw three and a half billion more in. So it goes to 40. That's literally, that's seven billion dollars. That's not nothing. No. That's stupid. So it should be 33. It shouldn't be 40. That's Congress acting irresponsibly. Why shouldn't it be 33? How do I know? It used to be a liberal thing to be suspicious of defense contractors. I mean, I can tell you what 33 is. They always had their snouts in the trough and they just want more money (34/43)
for... I can tell you what 33 actually is. Really? 33 actually is you look at the amount of spend in the first three months of the military campaign in Ukraine against Russia, and it is how can they keep going at that level for six more months? And by the way, if peace breaks out, we're not going to continue. You don't know that. You don't know how many javelin missiles would they cost. They know how many they've sent and they know how many they have to replace to Eastern Europe. That is actually what they're trying to do. But do you know what they really cost? Do you know what it really should be if they weren't being grafted? We don't know any of that. I don't, I don't agree with that. I just don't. I think our defense budget is probably too high. I represented a defense district. You always got a history on everything. Well, I do. I know. I've been in the U.S. for a long time. That's true. And I'm happy to be home, folks. But anyway, my point is that we still protect legacy programs (35/43)
to fight the last war. What we should be doing is figuring out current and future threats, a lot of them from technology, a big point in Ian's book, and funding that. And a current threat is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because if it doesn't stop there, it's going to Europe and our freedom agenda is dead. And we're for freedom. If you want to talk about money and what the Americans spend, literally we have had for how many administrations begging the Germans, the Europeans, to pay their fair share for NATO defense and they wouldn't do it. Begging them to take responsibility internationally, they wouldn't do it. And finally, not because of Biden, not because of Trump, not because of Obama, but because of Putin, the Germans and the rest are saying, my God, we have to spend on defense. And they're the ones with the economic sanctions, we're spending, we're getting more money because we're going to produce more oil and gas and we're going to send it to them and they're going to pay for (36/43)
it, market price. And they're the ones that had the trade with Russia. They're the ones that are taking on their sin. Finally, the Europeans are starting to pay and people like you and me and James should be applauding that. That's a good thing. I'm applauding him and I'm applauding you. Thank you very much. But it's time to get a new rules, everybody. New rules. Family Dollar Chain is being sued for having a warehouse invested with over a thousand rats. Their defense has to be, we're Family Dollar. You want baby formula that hasn't been gnawed on by rodents? Go to Target. You want the absolute lowest, the absolute lowest prices on slightly nibbled goods? Come see us. And remember, if we find out it kills the rats, we don't sell it. That's the Family Dollar Play. New rule. Men need a sideline reporter for when they say the wrong thing in bed. And it looks like Tammy's headed into the bathroom early as the injury from Ted's remark. Well, Troy, trainers tell me Tammy was deeply wounded (37/43)
when Ted asked, who's my dirty slut? And it looks like she will not be returning for the second half. Movie fans must admit that one of the dumbest tropes in science fiction is there's always some unelected old powerful tribunal that meets in secret and issues decrees to control the people. Wait, did I say dumbest? I meant tragically accurate. New rule. Before ordering the litter-made 9,000 automatic self-cleaning litter box, be aware you might just be training the cat to shit in your printer. So, Hunter Biden has to explain why he made the password to get into one of his laptops, analfuck69. Yes, he really did that. My question is, why that particular password and not something a little less easy for the people trying to break into guess. Take it into this laptop. Whose is it? Hunter Biden. Try analfuck69. If you haven't seen all the crime happening lately on your TV, it's probably because someone stole it. As we head into the midterm election season, one issue that has risen to the (38/43)
top of voter concerns is a general feeling these days that the social order is breaking down, that there are no more safe spaces anywhere. Street crime, home invasions, carjacking, porch pirates, medical staff attacked at hospitals, incivility at sports arenas, and I think the Grubhub driver is eating my french fries. On airplanes now, the in-flight entertainment is a fistfight. This year, the LA City Council voted that every homeless tent had to be removed from dozens of locations, yet every freeway overpass still looks like history's saddest Coachella. The homeless are both preyed upon and, frankly, a concern that they will do God knows what. You go out for a run in your neighborhood and you have to wonder whether that guy eyeing you on the corner is going to be this guy or this guy. We have a new thing in LA called follow home robberies, where gang members stake out nice restaurants and then follow home the people who leave inexpensive cars and force their way into their houses. (39/43)
That's why Paris Hilton now drives a 2009 PT Cruiser and eats a ceballo. A day doesn't go by where you can't find video of the latest smash and grab robbery, where thieves in broad daylight just smash the front windows of ritzy stores and take all the jewelry they can carry. They went to Jared. And when did they legalize shoplifting? They used to be shamed in shoplifting, or at least some skill. Now criminals just brazenly walk out of Walgreens again in broad daylight with a trash bag full of aisle three, while the security guard just watches. They have to keep even the most mundane products all caged up. CVS isn't a store, it's a zoo for teeth whitening strips. San Francisco in the last few years has seen 11 Walgreens and six CVS stores just give up and close because that town seems simply beyond law, which is heartbreaking because I like so many people love that city and I don't think it's corny to admit, yes, I left my heart in San Francisco. Also my wallet and iPhone. Many area (40/43)
citizens have been complaining in recent years about all the human feces in the streets, but now the streets are full of something else. They call it San Francisco snow. It's glass, piles and piles of shattered glass everywhere from car windows being smashed. It's so routine to have this happen to any parked car that people purposefully leave the windows down and the glove compartment open so thieves can see there's nothing of value or they leave a note on the car politely assuring the thief that there's nothing worth stealing and please don't break the windows. Dear Mr. Criminal, I hope this note finds you well. Please don't break my windows. Thanks, you're the best. P.S. there's a Walgreens around the corner if you want to hit that. What is so disturbing here is not just that there's more crime and mayhem, it's the audacity of it all. Like there's no lines anymore that can't be crossed. Like don't walk on a stage during a live show. Or don't fuck with Mike Tyson. I mean who needs the (41/43)
metaverse when you can do whatever you want in real life? The police still need reform, yes, but we can't just allow them to be hunted and targeted for assassination as has happened over a hundred times in 2021. I know there are big issues behind crime like income inequality and racism that need to be addressed but let's not get so wrapped up in becoming great again or building back better that we forget not to become El Salvador. Democrats like to point out that crime has actually been worse before. Yes, true, and who gives a fuck? I'm not living before, I'm living now. In 2020 America experienced its largest annual increase in homicides ever. Assaults are up, mass shootings are up, voters' focus is safe streets, not making women swimming safe for men. Democrats can tell voters it's not so bad or that they're stupid and racist and we don't want their votes anyway but this guy does. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. Yeah, I'll keep the shit to shoe level. That (42/43)
is a powerful campaign theme when there's that feeling that things are descending into every man for himself, lawlessness. New York was like that in the Son of Sam 70s, only back then we had Taxi Driver. Now we have Uber driver. He doesn't kill pimps but his podcast is called Are You Talking to Me? Thank you very much. I'll be at the State Theater in Minneapolis June 4th at the New Jersey Performing Arts in Newark July 8th at the Wang Center in Boston July 9th. I want to thank Ian Bremmer, Jane Harman and Sir Rod Stewart. Go to YouTube and join us on Overtime. Thank you folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (43/43)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #655: William Shatner, Piers Morgan, Gillian Tett.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill Maher I'm excited. I think I know why you're happy tonight because they finally started to shut up about the damn eclipse Was this really so interesting? Ooh Darkness Wow And of course of course being America it can't just happen in Eclipse have to be a million conspiracy theories about an eclipse Marjorie Taylor Greene said It's not an eclipse the Sun was hit by a cargo ship But on to actually more much more sober news that they say Iran is about to attack Israel Yeah, I Know and one reason they know a Harvard completely sold out of turbans Yes, Gary stuff the White House White House says they are watching the situation very very closely and if it works there They're gonna try it on our own border What's gonna happen? I just know this if Netanyahu goes no nuclear I bet you next year There's a movie called be behind her but on to the new really Shocking news of the week OJ Simpson died yesterday I know it was (1/44)
a complete shock to people and because he had just posted a video Saying that he felt great. It makes you wonder if there was anything else he ever lied about Hey He's a controversial figure still a hero to a lot of men a lot of married guys Fantasize about killing their wife and not getting caught but he actually did it. Oh Here's some sad marriage news the Golden Bachelor Getting divorced Rosie gave her lasted longer than the marriage I It's still in that thing on the kitchen table, ah, man, this one hit me hard I mean, I thought of all the sham phony artificial trumped-up Hollywood marriages. This was one of the good ones Well, I guess be careful with your love life I feel like that's the theme of the show this week Because I don't know if you saw what's going on in Arizona anybody here from Arizona of birth and age Whoa because the Arizona Supreme Court they breathed new life ironically into a very old law that says basically abortion Absolutely. No way no how that's the new (2/44)
Republican slogan on abortion life begins at reconstruction Because The law is from 1864 1864 Lincoln was months away from getting shot women and minorities couldn't vote the age of consent was 10 Finally we have an answer to the Maga nation question. Oh, when was America great? No, you know this has Republican screaming is a terrible issue for Republicans people don't like this because they hate kids. That's my They just don't want and this law I mean no exception for rape or incest even Trump said that went too far because those are my hobbies and Of course we finally get to see him on trial starting on Monday one of the thread the hush money trial The hush money that's of course the stormy Daniels trial that starts on Monday and Donald Trump says he is very confident He will get off and stormy said that makes one of us First up my first guest is the subject of the new documents where you can call me bill and whose album so fragile so blue Recorded live with the National Symphony (3/44)
Orchestra at the Kennedy Center comes out April 19th The man the national treasure the legend William Shatner ladies Here we are so great to see you are you were galloping out there, I mean you make Biden look good We Could go another 10 years and I can't keep up with you the last time I talked to you You were just had just come back from space Yes, right Since then you have swam Since then you swam with the Sharks. Yes, and now you're going to Antarctica I hear the Christmas week Antarctica the voyage of a lifetime It's going to be fantastic. What the fuck? Why that that to but But on an iceberg if you can imagine why I mean Antarctica, that's they can't be a four seasons there Describe the trip and why you want to go well, it's It's to the Antarctic. Yeah, I know what it is. That's why I don't want to go No, but there's all kinds of things you've never seen before. Did you get to see anything take pictures for me? Take pictures and send them to me describe them first perfect. I would (4/44)
love that But it's a it's something nobody does very often and we're doing that Open to the public it costs a bit of money But there are some wonderful scientists going and speaking of the money. I when you went into space you went on the blue origin, right? I hope you got paid a lot of money for that Because I mean the marketing of Captain Kirk going into space and who else could have been I hope you got a fortune Because we know I went around with a small cup Because Talk about iconic. Did you see what the Japanese Prime Minister at the state dinner said today? No, we missed this that we had a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Japan and Sort of out of the blue he just said I hope our relationship will boldly go where no Countries have gone before or something, but it was definitely a story. Tell of my book out there now boldly go Yeah, well, I was gonna ask you about that. I mean you are a guy who boldly goes I mean When you got the part of Captain Kirk Did you think that that (5/44)
was was that? Synchronicity was that they recognize that quality in you or by being that and playing that did then you just Become this person who was so bold don't know anything. You're going to step out of the studio After the show, you don't know that a car isn't gonna hit you Or a bus not only some big guy who says you've said enough bang right on the head You you don't know you don't know the future the future is Unheralded. Yeah. Well, that's so true But I was talking more about your personality and whether it was shaped by that character or word was it in your character and they Recognized that when you audition they went that's a guy there's a boldly going guy I want to ask about you. What about me leaving the studio? Well, I just wanted to show you how haphazard things can be so you Taking as an actor taking a job. They take the job. Well, maybe it'll be successful I'll do the best I can and then invariably the the Numbers are it mostly fails and then every so often something (6/44)
is successful. In fact, it's Star Trek became a show biz Phenomena that it lasted what at 60 years There's all these other shows and all these other actors and who knew nobody knew Yeah But one thing you say in this documentary which is riveting and I've talked to you in person for hours at a time We've been to dinner and but this is great because it's distilled. It's a documentary The document you're talking about is you can call me bill. Yeah. Yeah, it's out there now. I'm we're plugging it. Oh We're speaking of it at the moment In fact, I would encourage people to turn us off right now and watch it No, but I mean it's interesting because I mean you talk about that you when men landed on the moon, which is July 20th 1969 oh, look at you It's a pretty famous date and then Okay But what's amazing to me is that you said you were so down on your luck at the time because Star Trek had been Canceled and watched it from your truck. You're talking now about the moon landing July 20th 1969 (7/44)
okay. I watched it In a pasture on Long Island Through a window in my little truck Where I was sleeping with my dog. Okay, but my question is Star Trek only was canceled like six months before How did you actually how did you fall so fast from TV star to with living in your rate precision? How did I know that I was gonna get divorced and How did I know that all that would you know, just circumstances of life, but that's quick. That was Yeah, because it was only I also was reading about because you talked about it and I wanted to know all the background on the famous kiss episode where you kissed lieutenant Uhura because this was a Major moment in American culture. It was it was well, yes Well, it was it was the first time in a scripted moment a white man had kissed a black woman. You imagine that We can't imagine it and we lived through it and for those who say nothing has changed Watch it because obviously and the reaction of people things have changed a lot There's still things we (8/44)
have to do of course, but things have changed a lot. But that moment you were brave because From what I understand NBC of course was nervous about it I mean we had seen before when southern stations would cancel shows or not show them for something like that And you kind of stuck to your guns and did the kiss. Yes. I puckered up my lips and I Mean She's no longer with us but in her lifetime, she was a remarkably attractive lady. Yeah, but that's not really the issue. Oh The issue is that I'm guess I want to know like if you had not insisted on doing it Yes, would it have not got done? It would have not have got done. Well, there you go. There we go. We applaud So tell me about now you have another record you've had a lot I've got more than one record I've got many children's record. You have it. You have a Christmas record. You did the blues record You did a country record just happens that way. I've got this I mean, that's what happens when you when you live along. Yeah, and live long (9/44)
and prosper I Make a living Choke that's it's a living. Yeah, but I have an album a children's album called Where will the animals sleep Which is the the one of the big songs on the album if we destroy our environment? We asked children which comes with a book by the way Where will the animals sleep and that it's an album filled with songs about animals that's so fragile so blue There's another Album Which is an album of the performance I did at Kennedy Center some while ago, right and it's called That's called so fragile so blue so there's where will the animals sleep and so fragile so and this movie and what do you think? The answer is to solving our problems with the climate Conservation just what we've been you know, there's no way out except Technology, that's what I thought. Yeah, people don't don't really understand. They don't firsthand see the The Tsunami, you know, the beach is empty. The fish are flopping on the shore. I'm going out there, but there's a wave coming and And (10/44)
I've been asked if I would go back up into space and I said keep saying no because it was such an event for Me but then I thought if I went up again, I would promulgate the Idea the the concept that there's so much going on By science and scientists and businesses to try and correct global warming that there is an element of hope That I cling to it's true and it's in you're always interested in tomorrow I think that's the key to you and that's why you've lived so long. I mean, you don't look nearly your age 93 I Don't mind I don't mind you that you say my age, you know, but when they clap Thank you my friend you're the best First up, okay. Yeah. Sorry, I'll get to you in a second He's a New York Post columnist and host appears Morgan uncensored on YouTube Piers Morgan She is the provost of Kings College Cambridge and columnist for the Financial Times Jillian Tett back with us Okay to you guys in a second. I have been plugging other people's books on this show for 20 years Now it's my (11/44)
turn I Miss committee in some circuit. Yes. I finally did this I've been threatening to do this for the people who've been saying to me for years Why don't you take those editorials you do on the end of the show gather them together edit them? Differently put them in chapters. It is it's an encyclopedia of every goddamn good thing. I said I Know well tested And it comes out on May 21st But you can pre-order it now from my guess Simon and Schuster calm or wherever you get books Okay, so let's get to the issues. Sorry had to do that No, I'm happy I did that and you're gonna fuck So we gotta talk about Iran and Israel because can we just mention the fact that William Shatner is 34 years older than me and looks younger than me I want to be that guy. I think we also mentioned that means that you have still got a couple more sequels to go If you're gonna live as long as him And not a nuclear war But honestly, I mean they said before I went out here They said, you know before you walk out (12/44)
tonight. This is Friday, April 12th at five o'clock or 415 something LA time. Okay. So we don't know it looks like it's imminent this This has been simmering between Israel and Iran some people say for 30 years Iran is really the bad guy in the region to my view and they have all these proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis not quite Hamas because they're Sunni and the other ones are Shiite But they're all kind of on the same page. They don't want Israel to exist So, let me just ask these two international scholars and what happens next what does happen? Is this attack coming and if it does what does the United States do if there's an Iran Israel war? Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize it is not just about Iran What you have actually developing is this axis of evil between Iran Russia? And North Korea and There really needs to be a serious conversation about how the West collectively deals with that broader axis of evil rather than just trying to do a whack-a-mole and (13/44)
Responding after crisis after crisis. So you're saying we go to war with all of those countries No I think it means that America has to firstly stand up and defend Freedom and democracy and all the things that the rest of the world has been looking to America for we had this astonishing speech Militarily stand up Yeah we had this astonishing speech from the Japanese and leader this week in the United Nations saying we thought the rest of the world looked to America as being a beacon for liberty and democracy and freedom and What the hell has happened in the last few months in the you know Congress? And then secondly there has to be a smart strategy to try and contain and respond to the axis of evil and that means doing things like standing up to Russia in Ukraine I Would imagine you concur with that Yeah, I was gonna mention Ukraine. I mean you look at the the on passing Congress and I'm scratching my head and thinking let me get this straight there is a large number of American (14/44)
lawmakers on the Republican side who historically would always be the first To want to stand up to a Russian dictator when they do something despicable But for some inexplicable reason a number of them now sound like they're almost part of the Kremlin press office And I don't get it. I don't get why So many Republicans in this country right now seem to think it's a good idea To let Vladimir Putin march into a sovereign democratic country in Europe Ukraine Steal a load of the land a third of the land so far and actually the solution is to let him have it and The concept that he might stop there is also for the birds and then if you want to bring the axis full circle you bring in Iran who are looking at all this Happening and they're going maybe America doesn't have the stomach for these fights anymore Which maybe a lot of Americans don't but America is a superpower It is the great superpower and we look at it from the UK for example You say if America doesn't be the global policeman (15/44)
Then who does and I urge American lawmakers to look at what's happening And to recognize the danger of letting Putin win in Ukraine because I'm sure that is what's emboldening Iran right now and other I would say I think Marjorie Taylor Greene's new nickname should be Marjorie Manchurian candidate green I actually spent part of my life in the former Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union and I've experienced the harsh end of Russian imperialism myself at first hand and I also watch a lot of Russian TV. It's kind of a late-night obsession of mine watching Russian TV. Really? I'm weird But I can tell you for those who haven't watched Russian TV They are openly celebrating on Russian mainstream TV shows like this This idea that they have co-opted parts of the American establishment the American Republican Party They are openly talking just this week about how if the Russia takes control of Ukraine It will then go further and talking about the fact that we don't just want to (16/44)
reconstitute the Russian Empire We'd quite like to get Finland. They've even said, California, so Let me tell you even Republicans themselves are calling this out Mike Turner not really familiar with him But he's on the House Intelligence Committee's are reporting from Ohio. I'm sure he's hard, right? Ohio's a very red state now. He said it's absolutely true We see directly coming from Russia pro-russian messages being uttered on the house floor This is a Republican calling out Republicans Michael McCaul. I have heard of him. He's a Republican from Texas again I'm guessing not a member of you know the left It's infected a good chunk of my party's base Russian propaganda Okay, so that's where we are now. Can I talk about American propaganda because there was a rally in? Dearborn Michigan it's a large Muslim population Chant of death to America I Feel like we've we passed something here You know I mean the left has gotten mad at me for many years for talking about Islam I try not to do (17/44)
it too much because I know it makes them go crazy, and I've made my point But it needs to be talked about now when you start chanting death to America in America I mean I got it Charlottesville was real bad when they were chanting death. What was it Jews will not replaces but on American soil here's the the Tarek Bazzi is the organizer of this This was at the end of Ramadan International Day of cuds al cuds Which was pronounced originally by he said this is why Iman Kamini, that's the Ayatollah Kamini Remember him the Ayatollah Kamini. He's the good guy now Kamini he would say to pour all your chance and all of your shouts upon the head of America. Yeah, I heard this before Not coming from America, but the great chastisement We will chastise the infidels, but now it's coming from inside America. Sorry got to talk about this again He said we live in one of the rottenest countries that ever existed on earth It's not just genocide Joe that has to go. It's the entire system that has to go (18/44)
No, it doesn't I like our system This is America And there are people who see me say this oh, he's a conservative now, I'm the concern I have not changed I always liked America and thought death to it was bad Why don't we say to them fine listen, we understand you're exercising a right to free speech Okay, you go to Gaza right now and you chant death to her mass See how many seconds you live right then you might realize? You might realize The power of living in a genuinely free democratic society that allows you to do what you just did I thought that was absolutely Shocking really is talking that such a large crowd would be going along with that right in the heart of America And you know, we're having the same thing in the UK huge huge weekly protests many people brazenly showing support for her mass Chanting from the river to the sea, you know in the UK There are nearly four million Muslims under three hundred thousand Jewish people and this this Attempt by people to conflate what the (19/44)
Israeli government is doing which is you can perfectly legitimately Criticize some of the stuff they're doing if not all of it But the idea this is then imposed on every Jewish person in the way that we're seeing is Terrifying for Jewish people and it has to stop but how about I mean the problem basically is at chanting death to anybody is Terrible, I mean that is just terrible and Part of the problem is that we've slid into a situation where everyone regards these geopolitical issues as being bit like a soccer match And you know the Israel Palestine situation is not a case of Arsenal versus Liverpool It's not the case that basically if you kick the other team then somehow your team is going to miraculously win Because the reality is there are no winners right now from this situation and each team has different Or team if you like has different people within them with different points of view So somehow we have to get out of this idea of treating geopolitics as just some kind of soccer (20/44)
match Yeah, but the problem is that we always expect Israel to act like no other nation would ever act I mean they gave back Gaza in 2005 They did land for peace and they got no peace They've been rocket attacked ever since and just live with it What other country would do that if we got rocket attack would we let it go on for 20 years? No, we would have Annihilated the people who did it immediately. I Mean, I was really shocked that literally within 24 hours of October the 7th outside the Israeli Embassy in London I live at the end of that road. There were vast crowds gathering and I assumed Stupidly that they were gathering to show support for Israel They were pro-palestinian people Screaming and chanting and celebrating in the streets of West London that this heinous terror attack had happened You know I've had a lot of people from both sides on my show debating this and they can you know get very passionate on both sides I understand that but I always ask the pro-palestinian people (21/44)
that come on one question Do you condemn what Hamas did on October the 7th? It is terrifying how many won't condemn it who won't accept the what that was was a terror attack so Catastrophic to the psyche of Israel that of course they were going to respond in a ferocious manner They knew that Hamas knew what was gonna have let me give one kudos before we wrap this bit up the mayor of Dearborn Condemn this that's what has to happen It doesn't mean when anything when I do it to Muslim Americans to many that probably because I'm not part of that Tribe he said and then the council said your messages of extremism do not resonate with us Thank you, sir, or a council whoever said that that's what has to happen Okay, if I can change the subject radically I was much more chipper I was I saw an interesting study in the paper this week about how to deal with anger sort of apropos to what we're talking About it. We do live in angry times and you know, I mean when you think about it anger management (22/44)
I didn't even exist like 50 years ago. We did now it's a cottage industry But of course not everybody can afford anger management So they were talking about there was a whole thing about what you could do if you get pissed off at something write a letter To the person who pisses you off or maybe just to the universe and then don't send it but get it out on paper So I sent out a team of investigators all across the country To Go through people's waste bag because I have them right here So would you like to hear some of the anger okay, so these are some of the angry notes that people would they bold them up and they Taylor Swift we got one from her Jesus Christ every time I pick up a guitar now meathead thinks I'm writing a joke about it a song about it This is from the of the CEO of Boeing Airlines Nobody ever talks about all our planes where the goddamn doors don't fall off this is This is from Lindsey Lindsey Graham, oh all of a sudden Tim Scott is getting married like I never thought (23/44)
of that This is this is from oh, this is from Joe Biden. Oh we got into the White House There's only one guy in this whole freaking country has to get on a plane by walking up a giant flight of stairs in front Of everybody you try it assholes It's just Oh P Diddy we got into his car Hey haters Priscilla Presley was 14. Where were the tanks on Elvis's long? Well This is from Oh Kamala Harris For look for the love of Christ you feeble old fuck. It's Kamala not koala This one is from Oh Morgan Wallen He said I thought rock stars were supposed to throw shit off roofs Led Zeppelin put a shark in a groupie's cooch calm the fuck down Oh Melania we got into Melania's garbage you said hey mushroom dick Did you also borrow hairspray from your porn horror girlfriend and never give it back Did we get this is from Oh Donald Trump He wrote Bill Maher is a low ratings. No charisma whack job And for the record my dance moves do not look like me jerking off two guys at once So let's talk about the big (24/44)
domestic issue this week for the folks who heard me referenced Arizona in the monologue and were like oh What what WTF what? Wait a second. Tell me more Yeah What happened is the Arizona Supreme Court gave a go-ahead to basically enforce a very long dormant law from? 1864 that says a board. Can you what was abortion even like? in 1864 this is before antibiotics before Doctors, I mean, I don't even know what they were having. I know you really want to know I mean, it's pretty grim Was it like Jesse James just pushing you down a flight of stairs or something? Okay, yeah, well whatever it was this is where this is where they are and they have just that I keep saying it They're the dog who caught the car for 50 years. They talked about getting rid of abortion They did it and it's super unpopular and now they have to basically lie. I mean Trump some of his Statements on this it sounds just like what he said about health care, you know, he's gonna make both sides happy He's gonna Get (25/44)
together with all groups are gonna negotiate something something terrific. I'm guessing it's very probably gonna be 15 weeks seems to be a number of people who agree Can he lie his way out of this because he also goes on record all the time. I Get credit for this for 54 years. He said the Supreme Court didn't do this and I made it happen It's crap crazy absolutely crazy. I mean he's trying to have it both ways and it's just not gonna wash I think with a lot of the voters Well, I was a shades of handmaids and tail coming back all over again. Arizona is definitely in play again They thought Arizona had gone fully red. I think this makes it a swing state I mean that changes the election a lot I mean you said it was the Democrats kryptonite against Republicans this issue because obviously and Trump I think Has recognized the peril of this issue Electorally for him in the in the upcoming election, which is why you're seeing him row back your question though Can he get away with it? (26/44)
Actually? I think what he's done this week is quite smart politics. I Actually agree with what Donald Trump used to say about abortion. I'm pro-choice I believe in a woman's right to do what she wants with her body This is what he used to believe and said so very proudly So he's done a complete u-turn on this for political expediency I suspect but I do actually think it's probably quite smart politics what he's doing is he's deliberately muddying the waters He thinks he's got the evangelical vote anyway Which I think he's probably right to assume and I think he thinks that independence as long as he can create an atmosphere That he's not draconian Even if some of these states are now behaving in a draconian way then it he may get away with it I think what's actually more interesting than what Donald Trump said is what Carrie Lake said and that she has been trying to carry like Himself, right? Well, she endorsed it and then she then she basically in the last few days to try to distance (27/44)
herself from it And that shows how worried they are about the electoral impact of this Okay. No Carrie Lake is the person who's going to be the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, right? So this is this is basically her campaign. This is this is make or break for her. Yeah two years ago She said she but that's what they all said They it was in theory. It was just a great idea Let's get rid of abortion and then they found out what people really thought about it and it's just it's this this to me this Election is going to come down to immigration versus abortion They're gonna run on the border and the repub and the Democrats are gonna one run on the woman's right to have an abortion I'm assuming issue. It never used to be such a hot issue in America abortion. It's only in the last few decades It's suddenly become this big political Fighting block thing really know and if you look at it's really if you go back like 30 40 years It wasn't such an incendiary issue Whereas if you take (28/44)
Europe, for example by comparison the 60 countries of Europe Actually, there are many countries in Europe where it's completely illegal to have an abortion Poland Malta, you know plays like Andorra You know So and if you look at Germany and France and countries like that It can be 10 12 weeks is the term limit that you're allowed to an abortion legally So America is not such an outlier. It does go to the states I think a lot of Americans on the left do think that this is somehow a really unique American problem or an issue that only pertains to them in terms of the legality of abortions actually comparative to Europe is not massively dissimilar But the thing that's crazy is at a time when America is facing so many huge bit geopolitical threats Where there's a huge tech revolution going on where the economy is faced with all kinds of challenges the idea that you're fighting an election around this issue Seems to be you know, just strange back to the 19th century None of you believe it's (29/44)
murder You know, that's why I don't understand the 15-week thing or the Trump's plan is let's leave it to the states You mean so killing babies is okay in some states like I can respect the the absolutist position I really can I Scold the left on when they say oh, you know what they just hate women people who aren't pro-life They do the pro choice. They just they don't hate women. They just made that up They think it's murder and it kind of is I'm just okay with that. I Am I mean there's 8 billion people in the world, I'm sorry, we won't miss you That's my position on what? Is that not your position if you're pro-choice mainly because you don't like children But if you are if you said you're pro-choice, that's your position to Also, I share I do respect people who completely disagree on this right one of those issues You know, they always say to English people don't come to America and start talking about guns and abortion. Yeah, here we go But I think it's something I can respect the (30/44)
other side of this absolutely But what I think I don't respect quite so much with Trump is that he's clearly danced a complete U-turn on this and I think it's for political reasons. He did it in 2016 to get the evangelicals with him He said I'm gonna pack my court I'm gonna get miss darling overturn Roe vs. Wade so they all came with him and I think now he feels he's got them And now you're seeing him and again I say look I don't support what he's doing But I do understand the political reasons he's doing it and I think it could be quite effective actually in neutralizing What is becoming a massive banana skin for the party and I think that's what he's recognized and he's getting ahead of it I think it could be what it could work for him and heaven as he knows what Ivanka Trump is thinking right now because of Course she tried to campaign for women's rights and present herself as very much You know part of upholding women's freedoms and also Joe Biden I mean, I'm sorry, but if he's (31/44)
gonna start making women's rights the centerpiece of his campaign, okay Let's talk about women's rights and the progressive left shall we about Allowing trans athletes to compete in women's sport and wrecking women's sport and the integrity of women's sport Because the president the United States at the moment thinks that's pretty much. Okay, and I don't think that is okay I think you should be protecting women's rights If I was Donald Trump, but I'm sure he will that would be an attack line for me if you care about women's rights Let's see how far that goes Well, I'm sure they're taking notes From British Comment, I just I do not think that the left in this country in the last few years have shown anything but disdain on that whole debate around women's sports and safe spaces and You know prisons and the rest of it this idea that you could be a biological male and Trant and I have full respect for trans people. Absolutely I want them to have fairness and equality in life, but not when (32/44)
it erodes the women's rights to fairness We think about OJ We know he did it now and now he's dead we can all say he did it and we don't get sued You got sued? He can't sue it so he's now dead I mean look I just think there was it was a travity of justice But it was fascinating how that played out in America and to watch that as I did from the other side of the pond to see how many people were Prepared to accept that he probably got away with it, but thought it was one in the eye back That's not what justice system. That's not what it was. Yeah. No, I don't think I don't think people ever really interpreted That the right way. I think what it was. I think black folks knew very well He did it and I don't blame them one bit for cheering him on I mean when you're on the wrong end of the justice system for as long as they had been When they finally got one even though he was Not exactly the best recipient of that I mean, of course it was I mean when we saw that split screen of white people (33/44)
going. Oh my god Oh my god Justice has not been done and black people screaming and joy totally understand You can't have two different complete histories in America and then expect people to have the same reaction to something like that And to be I just thought as yes It was a miscarriage of justice But for white people to be that upset about the one time the one time a black guy gets off I thought that was the gross part of it Has that changed today? Do you think that has changed today The reaction if something like that. No, that's a really interesting question If you're gonna ask about interracial kissing Star Trek, right, you know, and you think it's different now It is different now. Everything is different now There's a whole complete different generation that never experienced the kind of racism that the people alive in 1994 who were born in whatever 1964 and 1954 and anything like that They did experience so but would there still be a lot of that reaction of course for (34/44)
understandable reasons Do you think he did it? Of course, he did it There's no doubt that he did it. I mean Here's her blood was in his sock Verify what your position because I don't mind but That wasn't the issue and the jury knew it too It was payback and you asked and on a very larger scale that's happening in America and will happen for Decades to come because the legacy of our despicable racial past doesn't go away in a generation Yeah, it takes a very long time even people today younger people Maybe they didn't have anything terrible that happened to them, but they're like, yeah But I know what you did to my grandfather and that was some shit and I loved him. So I'm mad for him That's not gonna go away in my lifetime of yours, you know All of that is true, but let's not lose sight of the fact in the day There was a terrified woman who got murdered. Yes, that's true, too And that should not be forgotten and that was a travesty in a miscarriage of justice Karen no I Was watching (35/44)
the news reports of it and they showed the film of you know her trembling on the phone he's back I think you know him I mean the fact that it's also about that one reason why that story resonated so much was also about celebrity Yeah, what you could get away with where you were a football star and when the cops came to the house It was like hey, can I get an autograph right after I stopped you from beating your wife? You know, I mean there was a lot of that shit. Anyway, I got to go to new rules. Thank you very much Okay You know now that West Virginia passed a bill allowing residents to make moonshine in their home Someone has to break it to them that this won't help the whole West Virginia stereotype What's next you're the only state that doesn't ban bestiality Oh New really young people who are constantly taking pictures with their phone must be sentenced to six months with an old-school camera And have all their film developed at OSCO drug That's right. You only have 24 pictures (36/44)
and you won't get them back for two weeks Now who wants to take pictures of their food? They can't all be tens, you know New rule someone in marketing has to tell me why laundry detergent comes in powder pods pens liquid Gel foam spray, but salt just comes in the shape of salt Why didn't they make liquid salt? Oh wait they do New rule you can't pick apart every verbal gaff Joe Biden makes if you yourself have forgotten something in the past week or Ever walked into a room and thought why did I come in here? My Favorite is when someone says what was I just talking about? Oh, I don't know something so boring even you stop paying attention Now that we know that cicadas the large flying insects that come out every 17 years Possess a urine stream stronger than humans and I assume race horses And also have an STD that turns them into zombies They must consider moving to Venice Beach So I love Venice Beach, but it is nothing but zombies with STDs who smell like pee I kid the people of Venice (37/44)
Beach. You're nothing like cicadas except for the part about not working for the last 17 years And finally new rule if we want to save our country We should follow the advice good liberals have given for decades and learn from other countries Like Canada England and Scandinavia and I agree we should as long as we're honest about the lessons We're learning and as long as we're up to date on the current data Such as the unemployment rate in the u.s. Is 3.8% and in Canada at 6.1 And of the 15 North American cities with the worst air pollution 14 are in Canada. I'm not citing these stats because I have it out for Canada. I love Canada And it's people and always have But I hate zombie lies Zombie lies That's when things change but what people say about them doesn't yes for decades places like Vancouver and Amsterdam and Stockholm seemed idyllic because everything was free and all the energy We needed was produced by riding a bike to your job at the windmill Canada was where all the (38/44)
treasured goals of liberalism worked perfectly. It was like NPR come to life But with poutine Canada was the Statue of Liberty with a low-maintenance haircut in cross-country skis a Giant idealized blue state with single-payer healthcare gun control and abortion on polite demand Canada was where every woke white college kid wearing pajama pants outdoors Who'd had it up to here with America's racist patriarchy dreamt of living someday. I mean besides Gaza There's only one problem with thinking everything's better in Canada It's not not anymore Anyway, last year Canada added 1.3 million people which is a lot in one year the equivalent of the u.s Adding 11 million migrants in one year and now they're experiencing a housing crisis even worse than ours And we're sleeping in tents The median price of a home here is 346 grand in Canada converted to US dollars. It's 487 if Barbie moved to Winnipeg She wouldn't be able to afford her dream house and Ken would be working at Tim Hortons And (39/44)
Because of mortgage debt Canada has the highest debt to GDP ratio of any g7 nation I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad So does their vaunted health care system which ranks dead last among high-income countries and access to primary health care and Ability to see a doctor in a day or two and it's not for lack of spending of the 30 countries with universal coverage Canada spends over 13% of its economy on it, which is a lot of money for free health care Look, I'm not saying Canada still isn't a great country It is but those aren't paradise numbers if Canada was an apartment the lead feature might be America adjacent And if America was a rental car Canada would be America or similar and again, honestly Canada I'm not saying any of this because I enjoy it I don't because I've always enjoyed you but I need to cite you as a Cautionary tale to help my country and the moral of that tale is yes You can move too far left and when you do you wind up pushing the people in the middle to (40/44)
the right at its worst Canada is what American voters think happens when there's no one putting a check on extreme wokeness like the saga of Canadian shop teacher Kayla Lemieux Whose pronouns are she her and those Kayla's now back to being a guy named Carrie But two years ago when they showed up to teach children the progressive high school They taught at said that they they the school not the person Really you couldn't have found another word we were using that one anyway, okay They were committed to a safe environment for gender expression safe for who? What about the children? What about the equipment in that shop class you know there was You know There was once a weirdo D list movie producer in the 60s named Russ Meyer who made low-budget B movies like faster Pussycat kill kill and beyond the valley of the dolls always featuring women who look like this His Movies played in porn houses and were featured in Hustler and Playboy, okay fine But who says no when it comes to huge (41/44)
ridiculous tits, let's save that for the kids And this is why people vote for Trump They say in politics liberals are the gas pedal and conservatives are the brakes, and I'm generally with the gas pedal But not if we're driving off a cliff On the trans issue America is no ends ifs or buts app about it absolutely alone in the world now an outlier country Last month England's National Health Service announced that there's not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty blockers for third graders and that they were going to stop fumbling around with children's privates because that's Prince Andrew's job Sorry you two They're very sensitive about the royal family I'm telling you I found out So too with all the other good place countries in direct opposition to America's choice to affirm Children's wishes on switching gender no matter the age or psychiatric history the far left Which always like to use well Europe does it yeah? No that doesn't work on this one (42/44)
anymore Or on immigration Sweden opened its borders to over a million and a half immigrants since 2010 and now 20% of its citizens are foreign-born and its education system is tanking and it has Europe's highest rate of gangland killings and One result is that the far-right parties are in the government now there for the first time To which liberals say blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist Yeah, but is it true of Course it's true It's not a coincidence the quality of life went down after the Somali gangs started a drug turf war using hand grenades Calling it racist doesn't solve the problem it hands future elections to someone who will solve the problem and who I promise You are not going to like All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Achilles Theater in Salt Lake April 21st, Arizona financial and Phoenix May 4th, and I want to thank Pierce Morgan Jillian Ted Thank you folks Watch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him (43/44)
anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO calm (44/44)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #599: Chloe Maxmin, Paul Begala, Michele Tafoya.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Moll. It's that Cinco de Mayo hangover, right? I mean, yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. I don't know about the rest of the country. Out here it's big shit, right? Cinco de Mayo? It is not. Oh, I mean if you don't do a promotion for whatever business it's in for Cinco de Mayo, my anal bleaching place, they said all weekend for free they'll put salt on your rim. Cinco de Mayo. You gotta watch that tequila. Whoa, that tequila's tough. Elon Musk passed out and when he woke up he had bought Radio Shack. Watch out for Cinco de Mayo. Oh yeah. And women, I gotta tell you, if you can't remember what you did last night, you might want to get the abortion now. I'm just saying, I mean that's the big news, right? The big news, right? They're gonna get rid of Roe vs. Wade after 49 years and as soon as this was leaked, protesters immediately gathered outside the Supreme Court. Memo to my Democratic friends, more effective when (1/44)
you're on the inside. Now it's just gonna be a race with the Waffle House states to just get more and more restrictive about abortion. Oklahoma already has one on the books. Six weeks. Can't get it after six weeks. Most women don't even know they're pregnant at six weeks. They don't even know if they like the guy. Six weeks. That's a quick hook. Oh, Louisiana wants to pass a law that says flat out if you get an abortion you get charged with murder. Wow. Suddenly getting the right pronoun doesn't seem so big, does it? But on the bright side, it's not really that big of a bright side, but in Louisiana, okay, if the fetus is absolutely a human being and you're driving alone to another state to get an abortion, you can use the carpool lane. So I'm just saying, America's getting chippy out there, right? Another attack on comedy. You saw Dave Chappelle get attacked on stage again. War on comedians keeps going on. And I love this. This is so America. The guy had a real knife inside of a fake (2/44)
gun. You want to sneak a knife in somewhere? Hide it in a gun. My new friend Madison Carthorn is back in the news. I don't know if you're familiar with this guy. He's kind of new on the scene. He's very young, under 30. I think one of the youngest Republican or any Congressman. And Christian conservative keeps getting caught doing things that don't seem exactly Christian conservative. We talked about it last week. This week, there's a new video out of him naked straddling another man's face and thrashing his pelvis into it. The Pornhub title was Republican Fuck Face, Fucks Face. He said, Madison already commented on this. I'm not joking. He said he was just trying to be funny. This is always, two weeks ago, he was caught in, there's a picture of him in women's lingerie, women's underwear, trying to be funny. He said it was a joke. Then last week, we had the video where he was in the car and he's saying, I want to feel the passion. And another guy is grabbing his dick. Joke. He said it (3/44)
was just a joke. Now we have him skull fucking a guy on tape. And again, I'm joking. I mean, there's infinite ways you can create a joke. His is always, what if I was gay? I got to say, comedically, this guy really commits to the bit. You know what I'm saying? He commits. I'm not saying he is gay at all. I'm just saying in Florida, they're not allowed to discuss him in school. Speaking of that stuff, did you see this five Republican senators now are trying to pass a bill that will have the FCC or I don't know, whoever it is that puts warnings, you know, head of TV shows, watch this shit you're about to see because it's got some shit in it that you should know about. OK. These five Republican senators want to put warning labels now on TV shows when there are LGBTQ characters in it. What's that going to be like? This show contains violence, adult content and catty comments about Judy Garland. Viewer discretion is advised. And before I go, I should it is Mother's Day Sunday, so let's hear (4/44)
it for moms. Oh, I saw I was in CBS doing some shoplifting. I saw some I saw a beautiful mother's day, a Republican Mother's Day card. It said, thank you for bringing me to term whether you wanted to or not. Anyway, got a great show. We got Paul Begala and Michelle Tafoya. First up, she is the Democratic state senator from Maine's 13th district and co-author of Dirt Road Revival. How to rebuild rural politics and why our future depends on a Chloe Maxman. Shake bump, you have to ask these days. All right, we'll do both. Well, what's your shake? You might as well not bump. Yeah, why not? Right. No, I'm all for everything. OK, so you are the youngest state senator, female state senator. Is that right from the state of Maine? That is true. Wow. But last time, I mean, you were here when you were just in college, right? I was. I know it was almost a decade ago. Oh, we saw you grow up on this show. Yeah. But you went back to home. You're like, welcome back, Cotter, except not Brooklyn, Maine. (5/44)
Why did you make that choice? Yeah. The day I graduated from college, I moved right back to my hometown, a small town in Maine of 1600 people. I love my home so much. I always wanted to go home and build my life there and do politics there. But you're not going to do politics anymore now, aren't you out of it? Didn't you say you're not going to keep going on the electoral ladder? Yes. I've served four years in the Maine legislature. I was first elected in 2018. I served a term in the House and a term in the Senate. But you know, I think there's so much power in getting lots of young people elected for all across rural America instead of just me. And so we wrote the book and we're going to do that. But don't they need you? Don't they need you, coach, in the game? I am still in the game. Just do it in a different way. Just making sure that candidates and campaigns have all the tools that they need to get young folks elected. I don't blame you if you're not wanting to do it either. Yeah. (6/44)
I don't. But just say that. It's a shitty job. Who wants to do it? OK. So let's talk about the book. It's called What Democrats Don't Know About Rural Voters. I guess that's the subtext of the subtitle. What's the title? The title is Dirt Road Revival, How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It. Oh. What did I say? Something different. Well, anyway, but that's really what it is. Right. I mean, you're and I think this is a great message that the Democrats need to hear because they are. I mean, it's just ridiculous how unpopular they are in places like. I mean, I mean, come on that Maine is very I mean, I think the black population of Maine consists of a bear. It's not a diverse state. It's a very white state. So what's the message to Democrats from your book? Yeah. You know, I grew up in a in a House district and a Senate district in Maine that voted for Trump. And we just went out and started talking to folks and listening to people who did vote to vote for Trump (7/44)
and just try and have more of an honest conversation about what was happening. And you know, we won in both of those seats. There were Trump signs next to Chloe signs. And we discovered all of this common ground with folks who we usually write off. And it was, you know, it was so sad to see my community left behind by the Democratic Party, but also so hopeful at all of this space that we can build relationships for durable political power. So you can win them over. You can win Trump voters that you thought you won actual Trump voters over. Yes. Wow. Yeah. Just through. And when we talk about rural, I mean, it's interesting what we think of it as well. Maybe I don't even know what rural is. I mean, I think of it as people playing in a jug band. Yeah. There are some stereotypes. But but it's more than that. You know, I mean, it's like where does the suburbs end? It's not the city. OK, it's not the city. But it's like, what is suburb? Like I grew up in the suburbs. But when I think about (8/44)
my youth, it was pretty kind of rural. There was woods behind my house. I played in dirt a lot. Dirt was a big part of my childhood. Was I rural? Was that rural? Maybe you were rural. I may be rural. Why is that? But so it's a lot more. But I'm just saying it's a lot more of America than what we think. Right. Yeah. It's not just Appalachia. I mean, rural is a big part of the country. Fly over it. Yeah. It's a huge part of our country, you know, and it's a it's a part of our country that has a lot of political influence and a lot of untold and unheard stories. And, you know, just growing up in that community and being able to represent it and hearing those stories as a Democrat. You know, sometimes I'll show up to a house and people will slam the door in my face because they know I'm a Democrat. It's a bad word. How do they know? Well, when you when you show up at a house. Wear the red. I know. I'm wearing red today, which is a bit ironic. But when you show up at a house, the first (9/44)
question is, are you a Democrat or a Republican? That's interesting. And I'm that's the first question. Oh, almost always. So I'm an honest politician. That says a lot about where we are in America. It's it's so polarizing. And one of the things that I love about rural communities and how I was raised is it's really all about values. You know, are you a good person? OK. Now that I said that in your book, I think is the most important thing is that Democrats are look, I've said this in a nice way. They're policy wonks at their best. Yeah. Republicans. Come on. They've not taken government. They don't take it that seriously. Reagan Bush, you know, fits on a one page paper. I read that. That's that's how much I know or care. Yeah. You think about Hillary Clinton and Obama. I mean, these big bill Clinton. I mean, they're wonks. They get it because government is complicated. And more, you know, the better you do. It's at their best. But they don't understand this very, very big difference (10/44)
that you're getting at policy. You talk policy. That's not what matters to a lot of the people in this country. It is values. It's values like self-reliance. Yes. And common sense, which the Republicans seem to lack. Yeah. Frigality. Religious. You know. I mean. Yeah. I mean, in my two campaigns, I've knocked about 20,000 doors. I've had a lot of conversations with Republicans and independents, and I have never heard a Republican say that they want expensive health care. So it's all about how we talk about the issues, because we can find that common ground if we take the time to do it. And of course, what we you know, the elephant in the room, I think with all of this stuff, but we're talking about values, Republican versus Democrat, slamming the door in your face. Are the people, the white people who are in this very white state, are they racist? Because their view, I think, is that just because we're white, we're seen as racist now, at least by the Democratic Party. You saw them up (11/44)
close and personal. Are they racist? That's a complicated question. You know, some people everywhere are. Yeah. But in general, the average person, even if they voted for Trump, would you say they were racist? I mean, I think we live in a society that has a lot of racist threads in it. You know, just the way that our country is built is built on racism. And so it's hard to, all that is intertwined with everything that we're doing. And a large- Yeah, but now in 2022, these people themselves, they weren't around when the country was built racially. Yes, we understand that. And yes, of course, there is still lots of racism in this society. Are they? Are they racist? Correct. That's what I'm asking. Yeah. Well- I'm getting applause just for the question. It's going to be a great answer. I think that there are a lot of narratives that have created racism in rural America, but I don't think that rural Americans are racist. OK. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure some are, but I think a lot of people (12/44)
just- look, when you're a politician, you're kind of like a lawyer, you know? You're representing people. I think a lot of these kind of people- again, you know these people better than me, because I got to the rural area long ago. Rural New Jersey. And I think their view is sort of like that the Democratic Party, they should be my lawyer, the way your lawyer represents you. But they're not. They're not really advocating for me. And that's OK. I don't hate them for it. But don't expect me to be voting for you because you're not my lawyer. And this other party, who I have problems with too, but at least they're representing me. That's my lawyer. And we only get two choices in America. You've got to pick one. So how did the Democrats fix that? I mean, what I think, and a big part of the book that I co-wrote with my campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, he's in the audience today. Our message is that there is a lot of hope and potential in how we campaign. Because every day we were talking (13/44)
to folks who had never been contacted by a Democrat or Democratic campaign in their entire voting history. But yet there were conversations there. And so if we start campaigning, if we start having conversations, and we don't just do that in an election year, but we do that every month of every year and really invest in rural America, that maybe we can find that common ground. What do you say to the person who, like, you knock on the door and they say, oh, wow, you look like a Democrat. And they start to slam the door. Yeah, this happened. Right. And you're like, wait a second. I just want to talk. Yeah. Here, have some of the moonshine. And you ask them what their issues are and they say, well, I hear a lot about white privilege. Have you looked around my trailer? Does it look like I'm privileged? What do you say to that person? Because that's the voter you have to get in the Democratic Party. Well, I think that's that's part of it, right, is that in rural America, there folks are (14/44)
feeling like there is a lot of unseen struggle and pain and the reality that folks are living. And that's a real struggle and that's a real reality. It also means that people of color in our country are also struggling. Those realities can exist at the same time. And I think there are these narratives that are pitting us against each other that are creating these decisions about, you know, how our money is invested and who gets what resources. But what I try and do and what our message is, is that we live in a very wealthy country and there is enough resources to go around and we can only find that common ground. We can only create that space for unity if you are face to face someone face to face with someone having an honest conversation. Like we do. Thank you very much. Chloe. All right. Good luck out there. We'll see you when you're the youngest something else, I'm sure. All right. Let's meet our panel. OK. Hello. All right. Here they are. He is a Democratic strategist and CNN poker (15/44)
tripper. One of our favorite guests, Paul Begala is over here. And she is a former NBC reporter, sports reporter, who will host the new podcast, Sideline Sanity, launching on all podcast platforms Monday, May 23rd. Michelle Tafoya. Begala and Tafoya. All right. All right. So people hate talking about abortion. So let's do it. I don't want to do it, but it's the big issue and we got to do it. And this is what happened. You know, it's interesting because until this memo was leaked and we found out that now, unless something very unforeseen happens, the Supreme Court is going to undo Roe versus Wade after forty nine years. We haven't really been focusing on it. Or maybe I'm projecting. I guess I haven't been enough because I learned things this week because this put it on the front page that are pretty basic things that I did not know about abortion. Like in Europe, the modern countries of Europe, way more restrictive than we are or what they're even proposing. If you are pro choice, you (16/44)
would like it a lot less in Germany and Italy and France and Spain and Switzerland. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's right. OK. I learned most people who are pro life are women. Did not know that. Most abortions are from, fitting for Mother's Day, mothers, people who have a kid. That makes sense. Well, I mean, it does. I'm sorry, but. And I thought this is interesting. Most abortions now, even when you go to a clinic, are done with the pill. Yeah, the pill. And pills are easy to get in America. We know that. So, you know, for the people who say we're going back to 1973, we're not. That's just factually inaccurate. And with how easy it is to get a pill, I'm wondering if this is what do you think? Is this going to be the galvanizing issue that the left think it's going to be? You want to start? Well, first, there are already Republicans talking about outlawing the pill as well. And many of these states will. And even whether they specifically outlaw the (17/44)
pill, it will still be a crime. We're not going back to 1973. We're going back to 1931 and before. Well, a lot of states, my state of Texas, where I grew up, they have a law that was not back to the 30s, but Michigan has a law that goes back to the 30s. Texas has one. Automatically, 30 days after Roe versus Wade is repealed, which will come out in June. 30 days. An abortion in Texas is a felony. No exception for rape, no exception for incest. Life in prison for the doc. That's Texas. In Texas. Well, that's 30 million people. Michigan has the same law. No exception for rape, no exception for incest. And we know that most Americans, including conservatives, do not believe that. They're not on that page. Most Americans... They voted it in in Texas not that long ago. And it's because they're not pro-life, Bill, they're pro-life in prison. They want to punish. They want to control. And they're going to be able to now. Well, OK, go ahead. I disagree. I don't think they want to punish and (18/44)
control. Look, I am pro-choice. But here we have a continuum, right? Somebody gets pregnant. And then there's birth. And that whole timeline in between, there should be a portion of that time, as there has been, when an abortion is legal, whether it's medical, the pill or surgical. There's got to be a point at which we say this is a human being capable of living outside the womb, where maybe we don't we don't do that. I think that's what you see a lot of in Europe. And a lot of people are kind of settling around, OK, 15 weeks maybe. Now, I have a good friend, lifelong liberal, who happens to be attached to a children's hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, and he has seen preemies in incubators five months along. They are born. They're there struggling to survive that are now 20 year olds walking the planet. And he feels very this is a lifelong liberal. And he feels very strongly about this, that once that baby is viable, why would you extinguish that life? Now, not everyone's going to (19/44)
agree on this. It's going to require some tough work. There are lots of questions. You just outlined what Roe v. Wade holds and what the Supreme Court is about to overturn. But that won't ban abortions. I realize there are snapback rules. States will. States have. Louisiana passed. You mentioned this in your monologue. A state assembly committee in Louisiana passed a bill yesterday, 72. It's not a final law yet that says life begins at fertilization, which means the IUD is murder. This is what they're voting on in these Republican states. If they had your kind of sensible, centrist position, I don't think people should be as upset. But they don't. The second largest state is going to make it a felony with life imprisonment. That's crazy. It is crazy. And again, just the perspective, most Americans think that's crazy. I would agree. I think probably even in Texas. Yes, they got it passed. We'll see. We'll see. In November, the Texas legislature is on the ballot. The Michigan (20/44)
legislature. Right. If you all don't want felony life in prison laws, you can vote them out. Right. Absolutely. Another thing I learned this week that I think I maybe knew this, but I forgot it, is that this didn't used to be a partisan issue at the time Roe versus Wade passed, but not a partisan issue. It became a partisan issue because of the Christian right. They made it a partisan issue. They made it so that it became where the Democrats were for abortion being safe and legal and Republicans were also when their mistresses got pregnant, of course. In general, it was not even partisan. There are a lot of things also that have changed since Roe v. Wade passed. And I think a lot of people are bringing this up, that now we have sonograms where you can see what this child actually looks like along the way. Whereas in 1973 or whatever it was, that wasn't the case. We know about- Meaning people would be given pause when they see- Perhaps. Perhaps they would, especially at a certain point (21/44)
along the line. Because it is a gut thing. I mean, you know, we talk about the Constitution and laws and rights and it really comes down to do you like women or do you like babies? You know, for me, I personally, maybe this is an outlier attitude, I never have thought life itself was particularly precious. I don't. I'm sorry. I don't. I really don't. I mean, no, I'm serious. I think life is for the living. Until you're born, you're not living. OK. I mean, yes, it's becoming a life, but you know, it's not. And you know, we wouldn't miss you if you're not born because we never knew you. You're not going to miss anything because you never were born. I'm serious. So that's my position. I get that that's not most people's position. But that's, I mean, that's- Most people's position is not what the Supreme Court is doing and I think that's what's got people so angry. If their legislatures have these kind of draconian laws, that's really a problem. But most people in their real life, I have a (22/44)
friend, very conservative, very pro-life. He says, well, I'm pro-life except for the standard three exceptions, rape, incest, and if my daughter gets in trouble. Oh, she's- Right. I'm like, well, you need row, buddy. No. That's- No, that's a lot of- You know- You can catch a lot of Republicans on tape. Contradict- Remember Herman Cain? Dan Quayle did it. Where they're actually explaining how they feel about it while they're trying to tow the pro-life line and they're describing pro-choice. Well, yeah- I think it should be between the family and they should have the- Yes, you just described our choice, moron. Yeah. I do think, look, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a huge supporter of abortion rights, felt that this law was created the wrong way and that rather than being attached to the privacy clause of the 14th Amendment, it should have been attached to the equality, equal treatment under the law so that, you know, women should have the choice whether or not to have a family just as a (23/44)
man would have a choice whether or not to have a family. And I agree with her. And I do think there is some middle ground, though. I don't- There was that Kermit, whoever, in Philadelphia who got thrown in prison because he was aborting babies at nine months, eight and a half months, breaking their necks and passing them along. Okay. Well, some of that is because it's not a viable- A lot of abortion takes place because the pregnancy went wrong. Yes, I agreed. And that should not even be on the table. No, exactly. Okay. So- But that wasn't what he was doing. So it was more abortion on demand. Someone decided late in the thing. Anyway, there are exceptions all over the place. This isn't a cut and dried cookie cutter. No one has the same situation. Right? I mean, I think. So look, the abortion pill, if they outlaw that they're going to, in states, they are going to pay at the ballot box. There is no question. It is going to be out on the ballot box. But it only begins with abortion. I (24/44)
read the draft opinion from Justice Alito. I actually have a law degree. The same rationale applies to marriage, Loving versus Virginia. It's the same privacy right that says I can marry anybody I want, whether they're black or a man, whether I can have contraception, whether I can even have sex. None of those words are in the Constitution, Justice Alito. Let's be specific and remember that there is a third party, an unborn child involved in this, and he specifically goes out of his way in this draft to say this is very specific to this. I know a lot of people- Just like when he was up for a hearing in confirmation, he said, oh, Roe has settled law until he unsettled it. It's the same philosophy that has to actually apply to Oberlefeld. Okay, but Loving and the other- Those issues aren't controversial. It's not really about the laws or the Constitution. Whenever I see a lawyer, whether it's on TV or in an ad, they're always in a room with an entire wall of law books behind them. An (25/44)
entire wall. It's what you fucking think, what you feel, and then you'll find something in that wall of books to back it up. This whole bullshit argument about, well, it's settled law, so was segregation. Plessy versus Ferguson was settled law in 1896 and thank God somebody said let's unsettle it. That's a bullshit argument. It's what you think. If you like babies, then you're pro-life, and if you like women, you're pro-choice. I like women. Are you saying ... You're sort of, I think, voicing what I've heard a lot this week. People have a sort of a worry about what I would call a domino theory of social rights. You think first it's abortion, and then it's gay rights, and then trans rights, and then weed goes, and then gay marriage, interracial marriage. Is that what you're worried about? Don't stir up fear now here. Be honest. The right to privacy is what abortion is founded on in the Constitution, right? If there's a right to privacy over a woman's choice whether to continue her (26/44)
pregnancy, it's the same, the whole same set of cases, the same legal philosophy that said Mr. and Mrs. Loving had a right to get married even though one was white, one was black, or Obergefell got to get married even though his husband was a guy, or gay people can have sex, or married people can use contraception. That was in the 1960s. That was a big case. Connecticut had outlawed contraception even for married couples. But Clarence Thomas, it's an interracial marriage. You think Clarence Thomas ... I guess what I'm saying is I really feel like abortion is unique. It is. It is because people either ... You just have this view that it's murder. I could put the argument on a hat when people talk about a woman's right. Murder isn't a right. If you think it's murder, I don't. Again, crazy me. But I'm telling you, we're not going to miss you. You were never here. I'm not feeling that safe up here all the time. And you're not going to miss anything because you were never here. You wouldn't (27/44)
miss us if we were gone. I would because you're already here. You're living. You're living. That's different. It's an interesting thing, okay? And you mentioned that the majority of ... or a lot of women who have abortions are already moms and they can't afford another child. I was- Or they just don't want one. Or they just said, to hell with this. Exactly. No, listen. In all seriousness, I had many, many problems conceiving. I won't go into details, although if you'd like, I can. No. Okay. So- Don't need that at all. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to have our son ... pure luck, okay? So then we said, let's adopt a little girl, Bogota, Colombia, South America, where the law there is 24 weeks you have that time to abort. God bless this woman who didn't. I would not tell her what choice to make. That was her choice to make and I'm all about it, okay? That was her choice to make. But I can't imagine my life without my daughter. But you could if you'd never had her. I could. Again, you (28/44)
wouldn't miss her because you didn't know she existed. All right. Let me interrupt here for one moment. Talk about ... It is one of our favorite refillables comes up at this time here because it's graduation time. Anyone here graduating college probably ... Oh, a couple ... Congratulations. What? I mean it. It's a big achievement. Or not. Anyway, so we've noticed over the years, they write things on their hats. Very often they're very basic things like, yeah, thanks mom and dad. They write on their graduation cap, hire me. And they've gotten a little more interesting, onto the next adventure I've seen and oh, the future is female. So we took our real time photographer out to some graduation ceremonies and we ... Would you like to see some of the other signs that are on the caps? I'm sure you would. For example, thanks mom, another mom. Goodbye term papers. Hello only fans. Just my luck, I majored in critical race theory. If you can read this, you're not me. Harvard Caucasians against (29/44)
white privilege. I stand with Zelens ... That guy in Ukraine. Amber Heard, you can shit on my bed anytime. Well that's ... Has nothing to do with graduation. It's kids. If only masks protected you from gonorrhea. Well that's ... Guess I picked the wrong time to need an abortion. Well that's a terrible thing to put on a hat. Of course, your Uber driver has arrived. So President Biden is under enormous pressure, speaking of college kids, to come up with a plan now to relieve college debt. And I'm wondering, especially what you think about this, because you are a strategist and have been one of the most successful ones for the Democratic Party. A lot of people are saying this is a loser issue. I'll give you some brief numbers here. Why that is, 13% of Americans have college debt, federal college debt. So that's not a lot of people you're working to. 65% don't go to college at all. 50% of the college debt goes to people going to grad school, which, come on, a lot of that is just (30/44)
bullshitting around. You don't know what to do and you can keep going to school for free. So it just looks like a loser issue for the party that is trying to win back the working class, that we're going to subsidize ... We who didn't go to college and didn't benefit from that are going to subsidize you to get your degree in gender studies and sports marketing and all the other bullshit that they take in college. I think it's a loser issue for Biden. What do you think? Yeah, well, and this is revealing a big secret, so don't tell anybody. We Democrats have a lab, two labs actually, secret labs, one in Berkeley and one in Brooklyn, where we come up with ideas to completely piss off the working class. And it's working wonderfully. Labs, you say, actual labs. Yes, oh yes, and they all have PhDs in pissing off the working class. Somehow in my lifetime, the Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory of Florida to being the party of the faculty lounge. I went last week, I spent (31/44)
Wednesday last week in Chicago with the machinist union, hung out with the machinists all day. Great guys. Not all one of them came up to me and said, gee, I really hope you take my tax dollars to pay off the debt of somebody who went to Stanford. Right. Okay, but I have ... So Biden's under enormous pressure. He's not for it. He didn't campaign for it. He says he'll relieve maybe $10,000, which I suppose is good, but would I much rather see Democrats do is go back to their roots, which is earn it. We're the party that created the GI Bill. Nobody called that free college because it wasn't. The guys who got the GI Bill earned it. Why don't we have a system where we say, you want to get out of your college debt, serve your country. Marine Corps, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, not everybody can carry a rifle, but you can mentor a kid. And you just give two years of service, then you will have earned that and expanded. So we have community college, job training. We need more mechanics, not MBAs. (32/44)
Yes. And that's where the Democrats focus on a beat. Well, that to me seems to be the underlying issue. I've said it on this show before. Did Democrats have this idea that you're a better person if you sit in class more and more and get more and more degrees and really the answer is not to make college cheaper, it's to make it more unnecessary because most of it is bullshit anyway. Well, right. And it's not necessary. No, that's absolutely the case. You know, and I'm with you from more vocational schools, more avenues for people to find ways to make a living. And, you know, look, here's how it worked for me. I was going to go to college. I knew what it was going to cost. My parents knew what it was going to cost. They put the money aside. Then I went to grad school and I knew what it was going to cost. And I, when I signed on that loan, that was, ooh, sorry, microphone. That was me saying, I will pay for this. This is mine to pay off because that's accountability and that's taking (33/44)
responsibility for your own life. So can I, can I ask you, what did you learn in grad school that helped you with your career as a sideline reporter? There's a story there. I would love to know what that had to do with Terrell Owens' bad ankle. Not a damn thing. Not a thing. It was my backup plan. It was my backup plan because it's not every day that you get a job in network sports. And I knew that. So I just had a backup. And did anything you took in college point you to that job? In college or grad school? I mean, well, anything in college, was it relevant to what you did? I mean, I took some communications courses, but no, what I did that was relevant. Total bullshit. Communications. Communications. I'm so happy to be called out on national television about my bullshit classes. It's not just you. It's everybody. No, it's true. And it's gotten worse. And I think a lot of people, the people you're talking about and the people we were talking about at the top, the rural people in (34/44)
America, they're resentful that, you know, you are, first of all, I'm going to pay now to have my kid, not my kid doesn't, I'm going to pay for some kid to go to an indoctrination center where they're indoctrinating kids into things. I don't even believe it where the courses are all in, you know, racist spotting one oh one and white privilege one on five. And you know what? And the thing about it too is college is way too damn expensive. And it got to damn expensive when all of these laws started being given out. It got to expensive when states stopped subsidizing. I went to the University of Texas. I love it. My whole career I owed the University of Texas at Austin and my law degree less so, but it helped. I can read the Supreme Court opinion and know that justice Alito is going after the gays next. Okay. Oh, enormously helpful. Wow. It's been enormously helpful. I'm serious. The law degree, but also my undergraduate degree. So I'm totally for college. I am pro college, but not at (35/44)
everybody else's expense. And what we ought to do, you know, schools used to be subsidized by the state much more. I'm old guy, but UT Austin cost me $4 a credit. I attended bar and easily paid my way through college. It wasn't even hard. I didn't have to go and get a bunch of student debt. So we ought to make college more affordable, but we ought to throw open the opportunities. Biden campaign on free community college. And that's what the Congress ought to pass. But I'll come back to the service. The other thing we would do if we had service in exchange for educational benefits, not only would we have smarter people and I am for knowledge for knowledge sake, I really am for more art history majors all for it, but throw them together in a service project with kids who grew up on a farm or kids who are in the city or kids are of different race and you will reunite this country. We can stitch ourselves back together again. It's the most important thing we could do. I'm interested to (36/44)
know how your degree helped you know that Alito was going to go after the gays next. Now he may, but I thought one part of this abortion debate we're having now I thought is interesting was we used to hear the line, if men could get pregnant, this wouldn't even be a debate. Well, now that men can. And there's a pregnant man emoji. How does that? Where's the uprising of the emoji pregnant man? I mean, where is the change the debate at all? You know? No, no, it doesn't. But listen, art history majors are fine. But you can learn a lot about art history by working in a museum and reading books. Just reading some books is a good idea. I agree with you. I think college has gotten too fluffy. It's way too damn expensive. All right. Thank you. Time for new rules. Everybody. Now that Tropicana is trying to make pouring orange juice on cereal a thing, milk must not take that lying down. Introducing the milk most champagne with milk. When you need something to settle your stomach after a night of (37/44)
drinking, but also want to say, fuck it. Let's keep drinking. I don't know exactly what happens at the Hindu festival of Lal Kosh in Bangladesh or what the purpose is, but I do know who sponsors it. Flamin' Hot Cheetos. New rule, nothing says I'm a woman of the people. Quite like having a black man in a face mask kneeling to adjust your ball gown. How come every time someone kneels in front of a Clinton, it becomes all about the dress? I'm just asking. If you augment your buttocks with non-surgical butt vacuum therapy, don't forget to tip your therapist because you think your job sucks ass and this job you actually suck ass. New rule, someone has to tell Alexa. She's getting too attached. She's suggesting songs I might like. She's reminding me to buy dog food. Lexi, honey, I'm not looking for a serious relationship. The other day I asked her, what's the capital of Egypt? And she said, why don't you ask your whore? And finally, new rule, since this is Mother's Day weekend, let's pause (38/44)
and take a moment to think about how your mother was always there for you, looking after you and keeping you safe. And then realize that's not Twitter's job. Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies from the truth is your job. When we talk about misinformation, we always focus on the producers, never the consumers. As if we're all helpless, dumb blondes ready to believe anything, like Donald Trump. Do lies spread faster than they used to? Of course, but so can truth, which in the internet age is always at your fingertips. You just have to learn how to use Google for something other than porn. But this idea that we can clean up Twitter and protect you from fake news and disinformation, it's so ridiculous. It's like fact checking the graffiti on the bathroom wall of a dive bar. We called this number and we didn't have a good time. People always lie. That's what people do. Every age is the misinformation age. And whenever a new means of communication comes along, some reach right for the (39/44)
sensor button. In 1858, the New York Times thought we couldn't handle the transatlantic telegraph. They said it was superficial and too fast for the truth. In 1487, the pope issued an order to stop the misuse of the printing press for the distribution of pernicious writing. You know, fake news. Like how the earth is a ball. In 1938, radio was the hot medium of the day and lots of people got plenty worked up about it, especially after Orson Welles presented what was obviously a fictitious drama about a Martian invasion of New Jersey and thousands of people thought it was real and panicked. You cannot censor away that level of naivete. The Martians had the whole universe to invade and they chose New Jersey. People on social media like to say, I did my research, but it doesn't count if you did your research on social media. I once did a stand up special called Be More Cynical. This is what I was talking about. Lies are ubiquitous and in that way they're quite analogous to germs and (40/44)
viruses. People think you can germ proof the world and never have to be in contact with the things that can hurt you, but you can't. You have to have a strong immune system. It's the reason babies who live in sterile environments are more likely to develop allergies than babies you're allowed to exist in the world as it is messy and impure. Lies are all around you. A better bullshit detector. That's a better solution than me giving up what I'm allowed to read. Who decides that? Who decides what gets the no evidence for that sticker slapped on it? Most people in this country still have a religion. They believe they have an imaginary best friend in the sky who they can talk to to help them with their problems. Nobody throws up a warning label on that that says there's no evidence for this. Conservatives do seem to have a special talent for embracing the real eye roll stuff like Hillary's pizza parlor pedophile ring or Democrats eat babies. Lizard people are running the world. But 41% of (41/44)
Democrats last year believed the hospitalization rate if you got COVID unvaccinated was over 50% when it was actually less than 1%. Somebody's misinformation got to those people. Sometimes misinformation is just history's first draft. I see a lot of things on social media and also on old fucks media. I don't completely believe any of it. Not right away. Not until I check it out. And when I ask, is it true? Usually the answer turns out to be, well, sort of, or yes, but yeah. See we've all become very adept at saying things that are technically true but lack context or that leave out half the story. So if we're going to ban on truth, does that include the half truth? The quarter truth? And wait, don't the wokest people in the world believe that what really matters is your truth? So yes, of course we should ban kiddie porn and libel and personal threats and calls for insurrection. That's a no brainer because they're already illegal. Just as it would be illegal in an actual town square to (42/44)
whip out your dick. And so should it be in the digital town square. And so should bots and deep fakes be banned and anything else that aren't really the people who say they are. But that's an entirely different thing than actual people expressing an opinion as repugnant or offensive or as misguided as some opinions may be. This is still America, where people have the right to express what they think, including to be wrong, to lie, and yes, the right to be an asshole. And if you think you know everything and no one else could possibly have some other truth, you should be glad for that protection because you're an asshole. All right, that's our show. If you want to hear more of me just bullshitting with people late at night, there's the Club Random podcast now. A lot of fun people, Mike Tyson will be there Monday. I want to thank my guests, Paul Begal, Michelle Kofoya, and Chloe Maxwell. I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas May 20th and 21st and at the Marat in Indianapolis June 5th. Now go to (43/44)
YouTube and join us on Overtime. Thank you, folks. New episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #671: Al Franken, Alex Karp, Kristen Soltis Anderson.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maher. I invited today because Trump's in LA today. That's yeah. Can you feel it? Doing some fundraising. Also, he's going to meet with the studio. She's got a great idea for a remake of The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Did you did you see the debate Tuesday night? Well, I'm just going by what CNN had 25 independents. Didn't had made their mind before the debate. She won 23 to 2. So that's pretty I haven't seen a woman beat an opponent that bad since that Olympic boxer with these suspicious high levels of testosterone. That's pretty bad for him. But halfway through it, he had a look on his face like boy, where's this sniper when you need one? I mean, nobody thought he did good. His teenage son, Baron was watching with some other kids in his dorm. And at one time, he jumped up and screamed. That's not my dad. That's not my dad. No, I thought I mean, she made Trump look so much like a bitch. But a Haitian migrant (1/44)
tried to eat him. Well, that's well, that's this is this is what he's basing his campaign on now that in Springfield, Illinois Springfield. Oh, yeah, what is the name of the town where the invasions come? Whether it's a body snatcher that now it's Haitian migrants. He says are eating. Eating the dogs and that's when the Korean migrants went. I was close. No, but today. I couldn't make this shit up today. I can't how could how can you top this today? Trump is walking it back. He said no, I'm sorry. It's not not that not the not the cats and the dogs at the reading. It's the it's the ducks and the geese. They're going to the pond. They're going to the pond and they're taking the geese to eat them. And this is what Trump supporters are doing now trying to prove that this Facebook mean this insanity that he's basing the campaign on is true. They're literally on a wild goose chase. As the list of animals keeps growing and growing like Noah's Ark. If Noah was a fat asshole. The most (2/44)
ridiculous part of this whole thing is Trump defending dogs Trump Trump hates dogs. He's the one guy in the world who hates dogs. The only president didn't have a dog. Everything bad. He's like a dog dogs dogs. They're rapists. And they bring drugs and some I assume are good boys. Where is he getting this from? Well, he's got a new bullshit whisperer. Laura Loomer, of course, that's her name. Laura Loomer. There she is. He's with her everywhere now for maggot people. It's she's like for people who find Marjorie Taylor Greene too intellectual. I mean, you name the crazy shit. She believes it at birth the wisdom. She's a 9-11 truther crisis actors. Pizza Gate rigged elections. You've heard of Florida man. She's Florida woman. Did you see this? She she ate dog food. Am I making that up? Do you saw that right? Like a Haitian? No, but listen to this. Now there's a bitch fight within the Republican Party. I love this because yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the voice of Sanity has come out (3/44)
against Laura Loomer says she's too far right. She says she's a racist. Now Loomer has accused Marjorie Taylor Greene. She says Marjorie Taylor Greene is an anti-semite and she cheats on her husband and she said, I can't believe I have to report this. She said her lady parts resemble an Arby's sandwich, which is so offensive to Arby's. And then Lindsey Graham, the other Real Housewives guest member got involved and he's attacking Laura Loomer says she's toxic and she posted back. We know you're gay Lindsey. Let's see David Mira fact check that. All right. We got a great show. We have Al Franklin and Kristin Sulters Anderson. But first up, he is the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies. Alex Carf is here. Alex, nice to meet you. How you doing? Now Alex, usually first guest here. People have some idea who that person is. These people don't know who you are. Not an insult. They should and we're going to fix that tonight. But say you're on a plane. You probably own your own plane (4/44)
because you're a rich guy, but say you're on a plane today and they hey, where you going? And you say I'm going to do the Bill Maher show and they go. I love that show because that's mostly what would happen. And they say to you. Why does Bill Maher want to have you on the show? What would you say? I'm a funny guy. Well, the Palantir was first of all. That's your company. Yeah, my company. I co-founded it. There's a cultural element. We were the first anti-woke, pro-American, pro-defense, successful. We went public company. So there's a cultural element. We defined Silicon Valley's reversal from I sell you something that makes you dumber, slower, stupider. And I tell you some platitude. You don't believe, you know, I don't believe it, but you still somehow you get to be rich. So we got rid of that. So there's also a cultural element. I've been the most vocal about the pagan religion that's infected our colleges. I've been most vocal about getting rid of the carcinogen TikTok. So (5/44)
there's a lot of cultural stuff. But then from a technical perspective, we were the first people to, we had the biggest impact on anti-terror of any company in the world. Europe, if you were European, the only reason you're not you stepping in your streets is because we stopped the terror attack that would have led to a change in government to the far right. Okay. So one more thing. If you are in favor of America defending its allies, whether they be Israel, Ukraine and others, those allies are being defended by our product on the battlefield. If you want to find a bad person, use our product to do it. Okay. I think I asked the right first question. And by the way, I'm going to agree with you on all this. That's why I wanted to have you on, because I think people should know this and I'm with you on all this. But what do you actually do, Alex? I mean, I understand a little bit, but I want you to explain it because Palantir Technologies, I've heard it's been called the AI arms dealer of (6/44)
the 21st century. That sounds evil. But you're using your power for good and not evil, right? If you are pro-West, pro-America, you think that Ukraine and Israel should defend themselves, you love us. And the reason you love us is because the way in which you find the adversary on the battlefield, so if the adversary is in the desert or in Ukraine, whether it's a general or terrorist, and the way you do it ethically before you take them out is you use our platform to use huge, huge, huge sets of data to drill down on the one person who's hidden and take them out. And you also use it, which is very important. That sounds like bin Laden. Were you involved in getting bin Laden? We are not, obviously can't discuss specifics. Oh, come on. Yeah. Well, in any case, we're on television. But Palantir is central to every conflict now where America is involved in finding adversaries, organizing our troops, bringing our troops home safely, and it's faster, cheaper, and better. And I'll tell you (7/44)
something else. The central advantage the U.S. has over China, Russia, Iran is our ability to produce weapons-grade software and use it on the battlefield. So this is your actual business, weapons-grade software? And then because it's weapons-grade, a lot of commercial people buy it. So like we have said, I mean, we have massive growth in U.S. commercials. So people use it to drill oil. People use it to organize their fleets. People use it for manufacturing. You can use our various products in the civilian. I know you're involved with the Defense Department, the intel agencies, ICE, Border Patrol, the FDA, the IRS. What do you do? What are these people buying from you? So for example, Operation Warp Speed, which arguably saved three and a half million. The vaccine. The vaccine. So how do you, so that the civilian use cases are like, how do you distribute a vaccine to the whole country? How do you distribute masks when you don't have enough? How do you do that overnight? The military (8/44)
use cases are where do you place your troops? How do you find somebody? And the civilian use cases are how do you make your business more efficient? How do you do it in a way that's cheaper? How do you get the car to the right place, the doctor to the right place at the right time when you have huge regulatory oversight? Could you do something here in the state of California? Because we could really use some of that. And I know you, you asked for one help to get it. I mean, you left California. I left California. Like another guy who's involved in some of this kind of stuff, which is Elon Musk. Yeah, we were the two biggest companies to leave California early. And the two biggest that are involved in the defense of our country. I mean, Starlink is very important. Well, I feel like, look, I owe California a great debt of gratitude. I went to school here. I built a company here. Obviously, California has gone in the past way too far on this kind of hyper woke. We can get nothing done, (9/44)
but we it doesn't have to work because we pretend it works because we're good people thing. And and I think and there are real consequences. So it's something like 87% of of of the most important tech companies in the world are American. And if you look at what should have happened, Germany and other places should have a tech scene. But you have to have rigorous thought, meritocracy, truth to build these companies. And that's what you have to we or if we've been fighting to preserve, because if you want to have Palantir or SpaceX or whatever you're going to build, you need to have a system where people can build things. It's rigorous. They keep the value of what they build and they share it with society. And I'm certainly with you on the over woke stuff, but if it is that constraining, how come what did you say? Eighty six percent of the 87 percent. OK, then how come we have been so successful if we're so we have the best immigrants, we organize people the best way. We we have a sense (10/44)
of fairness, togetherness. We're building the most creative people here. And that's why the companies develop here. But you say we could be even better. It could be even better. Right. And what I also love about your philosophy is that you're not afraid to say America is still the good guys, even though we've done horrible things. Everybody has. We're human. But have a little perspective. I feel like that is what is so lacking today. Well, look, of course, America, like every great nation, has done some really fucked up things. Right. Right. So that's obvious. Right. But but look, but we know they're messed up because we hold ourselves to a high standard. And if you're going to compare us, which at the end of day, morality has to be slightly compared, you're going to compare to China, Russia, Iran. Who else even aspires to these standards? And by the way, look at how our lives have changed. We're roughly the same age. When I was born, half people had gays, blacks, people didn't have (11/44)
the rights you have now. Look at the progress we've made. It's like in one lifetime. It's like magic. It's amazing. It's literally like magic and no other society, meaning like I spent half my life in Germany. It's a very interesting, very developed society. You do not have the integration. You do not have the innovation. You do not have the fairness. You don't have meritocracy. Most of the companies in Germany that are big are owned by families that own them. Fifty hundred years earlier. This is one country that produces part of the problem. And part of the reason why people don't stand up for America is they don't understand how magical it is to get these things to work. And no other place does it at our scale with our diversity and different kinds of people and different kinds of thought. And in my case, I like you know, I was viewed as the Frankenstein monster. I don't come from wealth and I get the opportunity to prove myself. No one in this country cares how crazy you are if you (12/44)
deliver. And I also like that you feel that we you know, you're helping America have the biggest swinging dick in the world. Absolutely. And size matters. And you're not afraid to say if somebody has to have that, it should be us and it should be us. And you're not afraid to say we should scare our enemies, right? Well, you know, one of the things I've been on a kind of a mantra about is as a lefty, our foreign policy should be. If you touch an American, we are going to make you and your friends life hell. You don't think we do that enough? Because I mean, we had the anniversary of 9-11. Yeah. OK, we look, I mean, we attacked an entire country that had nothing to do with it. I would say, well, there are many things we did that make no sense. Right. OK. Yes. And there. But we also we have not had another 9-11, partly because of Intel services and partly because of what we did and partly because we scared the living shit out of people. Yes. And that's why. So and then so this is like you (13/44)
either you either have to show action and live safely or you can talk a lot and live very dangerously. All right. Last question. I'll let you go. We've covered a lot here. You say we will we will soon have Terminator robots. Will they have the Austrian accent? Well, you know, I speak German and it's a nice flair. What does that mean? Terminator? Well, I the there there's a question in the modern war fighting. We're going to go to peer to peer war fighting. I think the more interesting thing we're going to have very soon is drone on drone war fighting, especially if we have a near peer, meaning China, Russia adversary. You're not going to be fighting as much with these big instruments. You're going to be using software to control small instruments and there's going to be hundreds of thousands of them and they're going to be somewhat autonomous. OK. Well, I certainly hope you stay in the cause of good and not evil because you're a very powerful guy. Thank you. Great to meet you. I'll see (14/44)
you after. All right. Let's meet our panel. Interesting guy. OK. He is a conservative pollster and CNN contributor. Kristin Soltis Anderson is here. And look who's here. Writer, comedian, former Democratic senator from Minnesota who now hosts the Al Franken popcast. He's good enough. He's smart enough. We like him. Al Franken is over here. Been too long since I had you on the panel. All right. I'm going to make this a very momentous night with a prediction because I. And I think I have the credibility for this prediction because I have been called a Trump alarmist for a very long time. They were wrong. I was right. He wasn't going to leave power. OK. But ever since then and since the Hollywood Access tape or he said, I'm going to grab him by the pussy and he survived that. Every time he's been done crazy shit and gotten his stuff in trouble, I said, no, no, it's not over. I've said that. I've argued with people. Brett Stevens, my good friend, he's on the show next week. He said at one (15/44)
point a few years ago, the Trump thing, I said, no, no, no. Tonight I'm saying I think it's over. I just want to bring up an analogy to one person. Even before we were around, there was a guy named Joe McCarthy in the early 50s and he had a hold on America and it blew out in about two years. Right. Two, three years. He was the biggest thing. And then it was just and I feel like eating the dogs. We're at this point, I think. I feel like we're at the Captain Queig with the strawberries. We're at Denzel at the end of training day. I just think he's going to lose. I do not share your confidence in knowing how this is going to go. I mean, I know people don't think that the polls are very accurate. So setting all of that aside, the reality is that people have known Donald Trump and known who he is for a very long time. And when you ask people, do you need to know more about these candidates with Kamala Harris, they say yes. Like three in 10 people say, I feel like I need to know more in (16/44)
order to make a decision. But when you ask that about Donald Trump, only a fraction of voters say that they do. And so people know who he is. And yet he's still competitive. You look at these battleground states, they're still 50-50. He's hanging in there. It'll be tied on Election Day, as always. The polls will be tied and then he'll lose. That's my prediction. We'll see. I'm just saying things aren't until they are. Phew! Thank God. Don't you feel better, Al? Next issue, huh? OK. You don't agree? I hope you're right. OK. All right. All right. So let me move on to the next question. Since he is the guy who nothing he can do can deter about half the country from voting for him, I see the Democrats have two choices. They can either say, well, he's such a monster. He's so crazy. I mean, and this week was just above and beyond with the racial stuff, with Kamala and this Laura Loomer person now, the dogs. I mean, I could, you know, you can either say half the country is deplorable. They (17/44)
tried that. I never believed that. I don't think half the country is deplorable. I don't think you did. I know that you believe that, right? No. There are some people who are deplorable. Absolutely. OK. Yeah. You agree on that? Well, obviously, it's a country of 350 million people. Some of them are going to be. But you can either say half the country is deplorable. Anybody who likes him is deplorable. Or the Democrats can say, why? Why is this insane monster still attractive to half the country? If not attractive, why are they willing to vote? What are we doing that makes so many people go, yeah, but this other thing is worse? I mean, Alex was talking a little bit about it up front. Yeah. You have if you look at people who say they're voting for Donald Trump, 93 percent of them like Donald Trump. But like seven percent of voters who say I'm voting for him really, really don't want to. But they feel like they have to because they feel like, well, I agree with him on policy. I'm not (18/44)
necessarily looking for someone that I like. And that's like well trod territory, right? That he's got some voters who are going for him because they just think the alternative is worse. And that's why I think Kamala Harris's strategy has been so fascinating over the last two weeks. She's a blank slate to a lot of voters. They have no idea what she stands for. You've got a lot of these clips of really crazy positions she's taken in the past and they're going, is that who she still is? And she gets up there on that debate stage and she says, you know what? I don't even know. 2019, 2020 Kamala Harris. I own a gun. Dick Cheney likes me. Goldman Sachs likes my economic policy. I throw gang leaders in jail. She's like begging Nikki Haley voters to come vote for her. And she's going to be able to get away with it because progressives right now hate Donald Trump so much that she has like this unbelievably unlimited long leash to go and say that she is basically an RNC 20 or 2004 keynote (19/44)
speaker. Please vote for me, Republicans. And it might work. I would hardly say I own a gun makes you a keynote speaker. No, but I do think that if you add it all together, it's not just the it is that at every turn she is trying to make the case. My passion is small business. I mean, she's really going after that slice of the Republican Party that left and said, Trump's not for me. She really thinks that she can make them not just leave the top of the ticket blank. Why does that have to be the Republican Party? You don't think there are Democrats who own a gun? Democrats who like small business? But I don't think that typically when they're running for president, they're out there. What's wrong with you? I apologize. I apologize. I was a little rusty, you know. Go on. Do you think that Kamala Harris is as conservative as she is portraying herself to be right now, or do you think that she is more accurately described by the words she used to give her own issue positions back in 2019, (20/44)
2020? Like, who is the real Kamala Harris, do you think? I think she really is where she is today, where what she in that debate, I thought it was a brilliant debate. I thought it was one of the best I've ever seen, you know. And yeah, some of those positions are a little bit remarkable how gung ho she is for fracking. But, you know, I still believe that she she she's a politician. Right. She wants to win this election. Thank God. Yeah. And I want to push back on your assessment that that makes her conservative. I don't think anything she's saying now makes her conservative. I think I think actually conservative. Let's be clear. That's the word you appeal to conservative. I just think this shows how far we've moved. Where she was in 2019 and 2020 was super far left. Super what we'd call woke. I know people don't like that term, but OK, that's where she was. Now, I feel like she's just like center left. I mean, I don't know that fracking, even fracking has to be something that we demean (21/44)
this way. I mean, what we're trying to do is get the environment to its best place. It's a difficult thing to do. And we're not there yet. If we could have 100 percent solar and wind. Yes, but we're so far from there. We have to use other things. Germany tried this. Other places have tried this where they got rid of all the gold, the coal plants. They needed more energy and to reopen them. But they're back to over 50 percent renewable. They are. OK, but we're still not even close. And the thing that I think we have been on Lauren Bargon next week, what he's been talking about, which is quite interesting, is that when we have new energy from renewables, the amount of fossil fuels doesn't go down. People just use more. We're Americans. So. Well, there's also the reality that during the time that she has been in the White House, you had this moment where gas prices were going up so much that if she comes out and says, look, the reason I've changed positions on fracking is because gas (22/44)
prices were really high. I realized we needed to produce more. That's great. I'm all for people learning more and converting. The problem I think she has is that she has so many positions from the past that she has changed a lot on. And I don't think in that debate she got pressed nearly hard enough on. Why have you had this conversion besides this new position is really popular in Pennsylvania? Nobody cares. You know who should have pressed her is Trump. Trump. Yes. But he had a hard time in the debate. Because all she did was talk about what she was for and then at an end it by saying something that got him mad. Yeah. That was her debate strategy. And it worked. The most predictable strategy in the world. It was the it's so easy. It's like a cockfight. Of course, you can get the cocks to do it. Just put them in each other's face. And she did. I mean, he's one of so many reasons why he is unthinkable as a leader, because he cannot control his impulses on an issue like immigration that (23/44)
Donald Trump loves to talk about. She got him to start his answer by talking about crowd size. That is unbelievable. That's that. That's like the slow pitch over the middle. He should be able to just knock that out of the park. And instead it was like squirrel. And he just. Again, they're reading the squirrels. All right. Listen, one day a year, I can never get to sleep at night. And people know me who know me know that night is the night before the Country Music Award nominations. Honestly, I. I have I've tried everything. Gummies, melatonin, nothing works. I'm just so excited. And this year was especially exciting because it was a big controversy, because this year that Beyonce put out her big album Country Carter with the number one hit. And it got completely shut out of getting a nomination for the Country Music Awards. So I was looking into this. And, you know, it's it's interesting, not just this song, but this is the new vogue in music is mixing country and rap. It's a new genre (24/44)
called crap. No, it's not. It's not. It's actually great stuff. I remember the remember Old Town Road. That was like the number one hit. And then Post Malone now is a country singer and Jelly Roll and Beyonce. It's the it's the newest thing. So some of this, if you're not aware, here are some of the other songs that were up for a country's world better crossover between country and rap. Well, there's all my shorties drink from 40 is a big one. And this one was great. Bling of Fire. The Hennessey Wall in De Sam's Club. To all the grills I've loved before. Boys in the Hoods. It's really a movie, but we. I twerk the line is a very moving. I like I like big bubbles. All these are just terrific songs. The devil went down to freak Nick. And of course, I'm so lonesome I could crunk. So we're having a great time. Let's talk about an ugly incident that happened this week. Tyreek Hill. He's a football player. You may not be a football fan. If you're not a fan, you probably don't know who he is. (25/44)
I definitely know who he is. Did not know what he looked like. OK, because they wear helmets. So we'll get to that part of it. But he got pulled over by the cops and they roughed him up in a way I thought was not called for. But I thought it was just a depressingly emblematic part of this. What this country represents now, which is that everybody's an asshole. I feel like everybody is just trying to trigger everybody else. I mean, was Tyreek an asshole? Yes. Yes. Both of them were saying I'm saying they were both assholes. If you want to trigger cops, don't comply. Act superior to them. Be a wise ass. Well, that'll that'll roll up your window. Darken window. Yes. If you're and if you're a cop and you want to trigger a black man in America after the history we have in this country, lay your hands on them when it's not absolutely necessary. You know, cops, they act like it's a bar fight. If I hear one more cop on the get the fuck fuck, fuck shouldn't come out of your mouth. You're the (26/44)
pro. You're the pro. It's not a bar fight. You're not in a bar. So that's it. Everybody's an asshole. But I actually thought that Tyreek's Hills response was great on this because, in fact, the only thing I didn't like about his response is I was playing against him in fantasy football and he ran for an 80 yard touchdown. I mean, because he came out and didn't say that I'm he's in say I'm blameless. He came out and said, you know, I probably should have kept my window down. I rolled it up because I was worried that fans were going to see me and start taking pictures. But you know what? I was wrong. And I thought that was good of him to because two things can be true at once. That he probably should have left his window down. But there was no need for him to get dragged out of the car like that. But it also reminded me a lot of a very different incident that happened this year with another athlete on the way to a sporting event. Scottie Scheffler, the number one golfer in the world. He (27/44)
is a nice, sweet Christian boy from Dallas. His new dad that week. And he gets yanked out of a car by the Louisville PD booked. And his mugshot goes up before he even plays the round that day. And it's just bizarre to me that we keep having these incidents. And yet it doesn't feel like this has rallied any new sort of fresh push for any kind of action. It's like, well, we got the body cams, but all the body cams are doing is showing us this bad stuff is happening. Well, we need the body cams. Yes, we do. Yeah. For both sides. Thank God for body cams. Yeah. I mean, the cops fought them for a long time. The cops fought everything and they've lost a lot of those battles. They never used to go to jail when they did horrible shit. And now they do. OK, again, progress. But also, you know, when he was sitting on the ground and they shouldn't have dragged him out, it was horrible, but he's sitting on the ground and he said something like, just being black in America, bro. And the cop says to (28/44)
him, we're not white either because they were Hispanic. And like being was nice. But I mean, being black in America is still a thing. You still can get a lot of shit just for being black in America. Which is why you should not roll up a darkened window. I mean that. But I he didn't want his fans recognize him there. He's right near the stadium, right? It was like a few blocks away. There was a way he could have handled this and nothing would have happened. Yeah, he had a bad attitude, you know, and to say being black in America, that again, it does happen still and shouldn't and we should always be fighting it. But it can't be a when shit goes sideways and all access card to just say, no, that's because I'm black in America. No, you are also out of line. Well, it's actually the reason to not roll up window. I mean, it's funny, the mayor of St. Paul, Melvin Carter, his father was a cop and he said that he growing up, he'd meet all these other cops, go over to his house, friends of his (29/44)
father. And then when he got to be 16 and driver, he said, I met all the cops again. But you know, it's me, it's Melvin and they all hi, Melvin. Yeah, sorry to assume something. But yeah, I mean, I think it's in some ways a sign of progress that black folks can now act like entitled assholes, like white people always could. Let's get to the big news this week. Taylor Swift finally told people who to vote for. Of course, immediately the response from the other side was celebrity endorsements don't matter. This is people are always so behind on these things. You know, that's the conventional wisdom for a long time. So and many sober endorsements don't work. Not in this case. Okay. I mean just the number of people who immediately were registered from that tweet and I'm sorry, but we live in star fucker America more than anything. I mean, George Clooney is the one who got Biden to step down. I wrote the exact same editorial he did and so many other people did do. Nobody cared. Soon as (30/44)
George Clooney said it. He's got to go. I disagree with you there. Okay. Okay. Let's debate. It was it was Pelosi and it was members of Congress. It was a while between when I feel like that's when the damn broke. I feel like that was very key. Well, I think you live here and what I think. And I think that maybe from some perspective. You have the wrong perspective. And it was not that he's George Clooney, the guy, you know from ER what I think made the Clooney op-ed stand out was that he said, I was in Joe Biden's presence at a fundraiser and I saw him and he's not what you think. I think it wasn't just the messenger. I think it was also the message and that's why I think the Taylor Swift endorsement. I'll agree with you. It does matter and it's not the message of you should vote for Kamala Harris because I don't think there are a lot of voters out there going G. I don't know who to vote for let me wait for Taylor Swift to tell me but I think that in terms of turnout to the extent (31/44)
that there are voters who are on the sidelines and they previously thought I thought Hillary Clinton wasn't great. I thought Joe Biden wasn't great. They don't motivate me to turn out to the extent that she's getting people to actually get off the couch. The couch is the enemy. It was 400,000 the first day. It's amazing of people who registered because she told him to go register and I must say in George Clooney's defense. Those are the good people in George Clooney's defense. He's done a few things since ER. Well, yeah. But this let me know you're a pollster. Tell me what this means because this was the most surprising part of it was who she influenced. Swift it says would have more influence over male voters. 27% of male voters say they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift. I must have this phenomenon gauged all wrong. I thought it would be women. Another one what another one another. That was cheap. So Laura Loomer, maybe talk about her from bring her right. He (32/44)
brought her to a 9-11 remembrance. Yes, which is obscene. Well, she's a truther right at 9-11 truther. And by the way, yes in the 23 years since 9-11 at the beginning. There was a lot of truthers. I mean, you know, you don't know what happened at first people sent me a lot of videos. I watched them all I said, you know, I don't trust anybody in the media these days. I'm doing the deep dive. Okay, even most of the people at the beginning who were 9-11 truthers have fallen away. It's just not even a thing anymore. Everybody gets it it involved to think that George Bush could have planned something like that just ridiculous. So to be a to be a 9-11 truther. This is what I mean about Captain Queeg. We're at that end stage. I really think here's my question because she said Laura Loomer said Taylor Swift. She believes is in an arranged relationship with Travis Kelsey to influence the 2024 election. I think maybe Laura Loomer's in an arranged relationship to affect the election because she's (33/44)
very close to Trump. She's 31 looks like his type. We did an editorial here a few years ago who you're remembering it already. It was basically who's Trump fucking because I said, you know, it's not nobody. He's been a dog for too long. And it's not Melania. I think we may have our answer this week. I think it might be Laura Loomer. I'm just saying a big part of why he was able to be so successful up until the kind of flailing of the last few weeks is that he had actually brought an really impressive team of operatives around him that had kept him kind of muzzled kept him on message. Susie Wiles and Chris Lasavita his campaign managers. They are good at what they do. And the fact that he's now bringing all of these other people tomorrow Lago. I do think lend some credibility to your prediction that this could be the end that if he's if he's able to actually keep the pros in charge, he would be very formidable. But I really think it is and these people who are still undecided. I mean, (34/44)
you can answer this is your field these people who are like the people who go to McDonald's every day and still still need to look at the menu for 10 minutes. What are they waiting for? What who is being Harris Trump? They get their information from places that that we don't. And so they have a bias toward Trump maybe. And that's why they are undecided. They're waiting to see if what was wrong with that theory. It wasn't good. It is no good. It was terrible. It's a very it's the it's the it's the non undecideds who have the bias the people who are locked into MSNBC and that's all they see or they only see Fox News. These are the people who supposedly are outside those bubbles who are weighing it. And this is back to my point earlier. Like I don't think they are blind to what a monster he is. They just say yeah, but there are things going on. And again, unless the Democrats start marginalizing some of the crazy people, you know, the Hamas lovers and the gender deniers and the you know, (35/44)
men can get pregnant people. Well, but I think I do think that if you want to win over the political center, getting rid of your extremes is helpful. But I also think that for a lot of these swing voters, it's not that they love Donald Trump and it's not that they love Kamala Harris. They're trying to figure out is it even worth my time to go participate or is this all pointless? Are we just is it just going to be a disaster no matter what? There was a woman in one of my focus groups. She was moderate voter in Pennsylvania. Her name was Kay. And she said, look, I didn't want to vote at all, but I'm probably going to go out and vote for Kamala Harris because my friends have convinced me that if I don't vote, it's basically like voting for Trump. But I'm not going to like it. I'm not going to enjoy it and I'm going to need more. Yeah, who told you you have to like everything and like go for it. All right. Time for new rules. Thank you, guys. Now that Taylor Swift has saved democracy by (36/44)
endorsing Kamala Harris, she has one more mission. Stop making Travis Kelsey dress like a douche. I don't own a cat, but I know what it smells like when they mark their turf. And since since cats are so on everyone's mind these days, new rule, the makers of Tabli, the app that tells you whether or not your cat is happy, have to answer one question. Doesn't that ruin the mystery? I mean, plainly, that is the attraction of a cat. If if you want a pet that goes apeshit for you when you come home, we have that. It's called a dog. Some people like that and some people like when you come home and your pet glances at you like a Stepford wife in a loveless marriage. I guess we're all different. OK, everyone must recognize that when we say never forget about something, we always forget. Not only have we forgotten, 9-11 Ground Zero is now a shopping mall with a banana republic, Sephora and Jamba Juice. But on the bright side, to recap, the Galleria at the World Trade Center, one caliphate zero. (37/44)
New rule, the college freshman who's I'll get it back with this one. The college freshman who's been complaining on Reddit that his dorm mate sits in their room all day playing League of Legends, and so he hasn't been able to jerk off for two weeks. Must be told it gets better. Omar with a message to college freshmen with backed up sperm. I know how hard it can be for you. It's your first time away from home. Your roommate barely speaks English. Someone stole your weighted blanket. Your your Ritalin prescription ran out. And the from the river to the sea chants outside your window are keeping you up at night. But hang in there. As Nietzsche said, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Also, you know, the shower right down the hall. Use that dumb ass. Someone has to tell Chad Condit, who is suing California State Senator Maria Alvarado Gill, because he claims she forced him to perform oral sex on her while she was his boss, including once in her car, and it left him with three (38/44)
herniated discs and a collapsed hip. Now, I'm sorry, but this is the biggest humble brag in history. I mean, who amongst us hasn't tapped out because they couldn't keep going? But you're saying you stuck it out at the expense of your spinal cord in order to in order to get your boss to the finish line. Good God, man, you're the greatest lover of all time and employee of the month. And finally, new rule. Now that we've shown that it's possible to begin a campaign for president just three months before the election. Let's always do that. Always say voters don't pay attention until Labor Day. Well, then let's start the election on Labor Day and end it on Election Day when the Civil War starts. But I'll get to that in a minute. But honestly, what sentient person couldn't cast their vote right now? Trump announced his run nearly two years ago. Did anyone say, good, I need to hear more about this Donald Trump? If he can support forcing a woman to choose whether to have an abortion in six (39/44)
weeks, we can choose whether or not to abort him in 12. Americans are a funny people. For most things, we have zero attention span. Nearly half of TikTok users say watching videos that last over a minute is stressful. Thirty seven states have no waiting period for a gun because if we order a pizza and it's not there in 30 minutes, someone has to die. If you order if you order a garden gnome when you're drunk on Amazon, it's on your doorstep before you sober up. We have five minute car washes, speed dating, 15 minute oil change, 20 minute facelifts. A 2005 survey found that vaginal sex typically lasts three to seven minutes because we fuck like we eat. And yet we do elections like we're fucking on cocaine. When when Joe Biden was still hanging on to be the candidate, many of the pundits said that to switch him out this late would cause chaos. Yeah, that was never my position. And indeed, what happened was Kamala Harris said, oh, look, I guess it's my turn. And the next day, a grateful (40/44)
nation handed her five hundred million dollars. The only reason we stay stuck in permanent campaign mode is money. It's estimated this year that 16 billion dollars will be spent on political ads. It's time we admit that the endless campaign exists only to enrich advertisers, political consultants and what's left of the news media. And the fact that we're just getting to know Kamala isn't bad. It's great. Great for her. Great for the country. People didn't used to get sick of the candidates because you barely ever saw them unless you happen to be standing at the back end of a train. We never stop seeing them. The winner in modern elections comes down to who we're less tired of. They're just constantly on us. TV, radio, the mail on our phones, texting. Hey, Bill. Tim Walz here. You are? They're everywhere all the time. Jesus Christ, fuck off. Let mommy put her purse down. I don't get it. Everything in the modern world moves so fast, except politics. It's the one exception. Well, politics (41/44)
and streaming series. People are always telling me I should binge watch a show that gets good in season three. Season three. What about my needs? Every idea that would make one single decent movie is now a 10 part series. And the middle three episodes are just the old cop with a dark secret and the lesbian cop with the neck tattoo saying, are you as confused as I am? I'm very confused. Why the hell do we still need a ridiculous 11 week period between election and inauguration? It made sense in the old days when it took that long to get from Illinois to Washington by horse. But we have planes now. We don't have to strap William Howard Taft to a buckboard and wheel his ass in from Ohio. We talk of the intermission between election and inauguration as a transition period, like that's good and it makes us mature. It's not. It's a fetid swamp which breeds nothing but mischief. When other countries vote out their politicians, they throw their clothes right out on the front lawn within days. (42/44)
Bye bye, loser. You don't get three months to sit there and think about rioting. Where else in life does this ever happen where a person gets terminated and they just let you stay on for a couple of months? No. When you get fired at Google, you pack up your cardboard box with the sad plant and you're gone that day. Canada elects a new prime minister and they take over in two weeks. The French hit it and quit it in three. Japan's season lasts 12 days. In England, their campaign is 25 working days and the new prime minister moves into 10 Downing Street within hours. In Mexico and the Philippines, campaigns last 90 days. In Brazil, 45. And these are the laid back countries. The ones where you ask room service for a bucket of ice and it comes as you're boarding the flight home. And yet, yet they all manage to wrap up an election in the same amount of time that it takes a 90 day fiance to say, sure, I'll fuck a fat guy for a green card. If TLC can do 90 day fiance, we can do 90 day (43/44)
commander in chief because at this point, I feel like Melania in the bedroom. I just want to get whatever is going to happen over with. All right. That's our show. I'll be at half here in Cincinnati September 29th. The Majestic is in Antonio, October 12th in Tulsa, in Tulsa, October 13th. I want to thank Kristen Soltis Anderson, Al Franken and Alex Carr. Go watch overtime now on YouTube. Thank you. (44/44)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #413 (Originally aired 2/3/17).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. That's good. Thanks. A lot of partners. Yeah. Can I do it? The senator cannot. Welcome to this week's edition of He Did What? Well, I'll tell you something, he did the impossible. He made going to the airport shittier than it was. Just before we came on, we got news that Muslim ban he instituted, a federal judge knocked that out until a higher court said, yeah. So if you missed this, I mean, there's so much news this guy creates, but way back after our last show, which is only a week ago, he instituted this Muslim ban, which he called a ban, and then his press secretary, Sean Spicer, called a ban, and then there were protests and they denied it was a ban, and then Trump tweeted, well, you can call it a ban if you like. So they're really on message, and the message is we have no idea what we're doing. Hey, you Muslims, don't think you're special, because our president picked a fight with a lot of people (1/44)
last week. Finally, a president has shown the balls to stand up to our arch enemy, Australia. He had a call with the Australian prime minister, a long time poodle dog ally of America, and he finally said to him, you know what, I had five calls today, this is the worst, and hung up. Well, first he said, we're building a wallaby, and you're gonna pay for it. No, I mean, it's interesting, just in a week, he's threatened to invade Iran, Mexico, Chicago. Today, today we declared war on La La Land. I mean, this can't be going well. I mean, it is starting to look like our only hope is penis enlargement surgery. Really, and no one's seen Melania for like, since the inauguration. I don't want to say we have a mad king who has his wife locked in a tower, but it's literally called Trump Tower. I mean, it's... She's like a Slovenian Rapunzel. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your extensions. So turning to domestic insanity, Donald Trump, okay, this week announced his Supreme Court pick, but he did it (2/44)
like a reality show with an unveiling of finalists, that actually happened. Then for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the administration said, it is high time on this day we stopped mentioning the Jews. Other people thought it was an overstate, no, no, we did this on purpose, because other people were killed too. Yes, the Jews had been hogging the Holocaust. Fake news, and that it was time to insult black people. So, I'm telling you, it's an equal opportunity, because this was the beginning of February, which is Black History Month, so Trump gathered all the black people he knows in one room. He was like a kid showing off his Pokemon cards, you know? This is Omarosa, her special power is sass. And this was great, he called it a listening session, and he did all the talking, all about himself, and the election, and how unfair the news coverage has been. Only Trump could take the occasion of Black History Month, and make it about how he's oppressed. And then he outdid himself, really, even (3/44)
him, started talking about Frederick Douglass, someone who's done a terrific job, a terrific job, and is being recognized by more and more people. Where are you, Freddie? Stand up, let the people see you. Fred Douglass, tremendous guy, tremendous. And then someone told Trump, Frederick Douglass is dead, and Trump said, oh no, gang violence? And finally, to cap off the week, yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast, the National Prayer Breakfast, the president opened the proceedings by saying what tremendous success Celebrity Apprentice was when he was the host of it, but now that it's Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's a total disaster, the ratings went right down the tubes. Amen. Tommy will be speaking with our good friend, Michael Eric Dyson is here, but first up, he's a neuroscientist, an author and host of the Waking Up podcast. My friend Sam Harris is over here. Oh, hey, that's a good sign, they like you. Yes, well, give him a minute. So I thought it was time we had a talk, because I (4/44)
knew early on in Trump's administration he would do something stupid about Muslims. Yes. And he did, I think we both agree, his ban, I've always said it's stupid, it's counterproductive, it's un-American, but let's get that right out of the way first, that we both think this is a dumb idea, the Muslim ban, right? Yeah, I mean, he is, first of all, Trump is like Chauncey Gardner's evil twin. I mean, if he does something right on this issue, it'll be by accident. Being there, yeah, yeah. So, and the ban itself is just the sort of idea you'd think he would come up with and press enthusiastically. It's a terrible idea, even if your only concern is security, right? And that's not our only concern, I hope we get to that topic, but, I mean, we have to win a war of ideas with the Muslim world, and we need allies. Right. It's not about immigrants, it's about ideas. Yeah, and we want, yes, the ideas cross borders. I mean, immigration is just one part of this problem, but we should be desperate (5/44)
to have moderate Muslims in this society, we want moderate Muslims, we want. And ones who speak out, I thought it was great when London elected a Muslim mayor, because when you elect someone mayor, then they have to say out loud, our Western values, and he has, he doesn't even like it when women cover their face. Yeah, and when you view this as a war of ideas, you see that we need to empower the actual reformers in the Muslim world. Right. And the way to do that is not to put up a blanket ban. Also because you never know what is in someone's mind. Do you remember just last year, the Strasbourg cell that they broke up in France, that's what they called it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I remember the headline in the New York Times a few days after said, Terror suspects led mainstream lives, unsettling France. Right. Because you don't know what's, and they were saying they're not, they don't have beards. The guy was the, he ran the grocery, he sold liquor. Right. He was not scowling, he was (6/44)
smiling at the children. You don't know what is in people's minds. Yeah, but only, I mean, all these people are related to other people, right? So only secular, liberal, and former Muslims, frankly, can police this for us. And this is a war of ideas, a civil war of ideas that has to happen within the Muslim community, and we have to help them win it. But we don't do that by putting up a blanket ban against Muslims. And I mean, you've had people on your show which are exactly the sort of people we want empowered, like Azhar Nomani, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and my colleague, Majid Nawaz. Raheel, I think. Yeah, Raheel Raza. Raheel Raza, so. But I mean, the reason why you should view this as a war of ideas and be at least hopeful, potentially hopeful about it is that minds change. I mean, so to Majid, who's been on your show, he was a former extremist. He spent four years in an Egyptian prison for his nefarious activities. He's now as reasonable and ethical a person as you're ever gonna meet. (7/44)
And yet he's now demonized by some subset of the Muslim community and the left as an Uncle Tom, right? So that's the kind of thing that only empowers Trump. And I think, yes, right. I mean, you talked about in your last blog, the fact that Azhar Nomani, who's been on our show, and who I think is exactly what you're talking about, the kind of person we want to empower. You said she voted for Trump. He's a liberal. She doesn't like him. But she feels like for the issue that matters to her, you're empowering the wrong people. You're the ones who are oppressing me, liberals. That's where they go. And I think what we're trying to say is we're trying to find ways to disempower Donald Trump. And the left is often not helping. Yeah, well, exactly. So take Azhar's case. In the immediate aftermath of Orlando, we have Clinton talking about gun control only, and then admonishing the whole country not to be racist. Now, you can't say that jihadism has no relationship to Islam. And so people like (8/44)
Azhar, who are fed up with this, and there are millions of them, said this is just too galling to see. And the president has been lying for eight years about this. Now, it's not to say he hasn't been flying drones. The old president. Yeah. But presumably he's not been bombing the Amish, right? So he knows that this has some relationship to Islam. Yeah, he said in his final address, he said, we've taken out tens or 10,000 terrorists. And I'm sure most of them, if not all of them, were ones who believed in the Koran. That seems like an awful lot if you're just saying this is the fringe. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's not just the fringe. The problem is it is... The fringe is probably just the people who are actually violent. Well, I mean, so again, the last time we were here, and this is where we'll begin saying things that will piss off people. And if Batman were here, he would call us a racist. But I mean, yes, so there are jihadists who will use violence immediately and who were expecting to (9/44)
get into paradise when they blow themselves up on an airplane. And again, size matters. I mean, there are entire terrorist armies. ISIS, obviously, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda. This just doesn't... People talk about the KKK like it's an equivalent. The KKK is not seeking nuclear weapons. That is a genuine fringe phenomenon. But when you take jihadists and Islamists who want Sharia law, they just want to use the levers of a state to get it. They're not committing violence immediately. And then you just have a larger subset of conservative Muslims who, while they may not have any alliance with jihadists, they still have attitudes around free speech and the rights of women and the rights of gays that are deeply at odds with our own. And we have to win a war of ideas with these people. This is not a... We don't fly drones to solve this problem. And so this is why we need to empower real reformers. I know you were having a bit of a Twitter spat sometimes with this woman, Linda Sarsour. Am I saying (10/44)
that right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. She was at the... She was at the march. And you've mentioned that she tweets things like sort of semi-supportive of Saudi Arabia saying, because they give women maternity leave more than we do. Yeah. They have some... Well, this is the problem. So the left has allied itself with Islamists and closet Islamists. And she's none too closeted, she's a hijabi and the hijab was promoted as one of the empowering symbols of feminism for this march. And she's one of the organizers of this march. But that's not the full burka. No, no. The burka. We have showed the picture of the burka. See, this is what I want liberals to understand. That there are some countries, I think France has banned this. I'm not for banning. I think that's not the right approach is to tell anybody how they can dress. But also stop saying that's normal. That's not normal. If you think that's normal, you are so part of the problem. There is a human being in there who might want to feel the sun (11/44)
on their face or make eye contact or register a smile. And most are not there voluntarily. That's the thing. I mean, you're not for banning. I mean, you should be able to wear whatever costume you want but the subset of people who are wearing these things purely because they want to without being coerced by their community, without having a level of misogyny. Or brainwashed from centuries. I mean, but no one wants to be that. And also, I mean, why are they covering women like that? Because otherwise men might get aroused. So they're blaming the women for the men's horniness. I mean, you couldn't create in a lab an idea that should be more opposed by liberals. Then we cover the women and blame them if men get horny. And we have this woman you mentioned, Linda Sarsour. She's one of the organizers of the Women's March. She has people like Bernie tweeting, I marched with Linda, right? But she's someone who has gone after Ayaan Hirsi Ali who's a real feminist hero. And she's tweeted (12/44)
absolutely defamatory things at her. Like she doesn't deserve her vagina. She deserves an ass whipping. I mean, she's a theocrat, right? Why is it that liberals here seem to just really want to, from a gut level, jump immediately always to, we're just as bad? Because we've been bad, we've done a lot of bad things. But on this issue, especially right now, at this point in history, not every culture is equally bad. What is that? Is that just some clothing? Well, there are two things. I mean, so, one, just let's take that claim. Take our quirky religions, right? If the Scientologists were practicing suicide bombings in dozens of countries, if they were killing people for drawing pictures of L. Ron Hubbard, right? Tom Cruise would have more to answer for than he does, right? And he's got a fair amount to answer for. If the Mormons were trying to kill Trey Parker and Matt Stone over their Broadway play, we would lose our patience for Mormonism, right? So it's a massive double standard here. (13/44)
This is the needle we have to thread, and this is the problem you and I have been getting into for 15 years. We have to, on the one hand, acknowledge that there are valid criticisms of misuses of American power and colonialism, and we want to help refugees, right? These people in Syria are the unluckiest people in the world, right? And if they don't pose a security concern, we should welcome them into our society, right? We don't wanna look at the Statue of Liberty and think. But, but also, you're not automatically a racist if you have concerns about assimilation. Exactly. Because of the ideas that we're talking about, there are sometimes assimilation problems. I don't think we have a lot of that in America, because. But because we've been lucky, but we have these two oceans, right? And so we have to acknowledge that Europe has a problem we don't wanna have. It's America. If a Muslim here in America wants to take off the thing, she can. Yeah. And she can do that without fear of someone (14/44)
beating her for it. I mean, if someone wants to come out of the closet here in America, if someone wants to marry a non-Muslim, these are not options available to vast amounts of Muslims in the world. So let's address the question that they're saying now, who hate us, which is you paint with too broad a brush, because we mentioned some of these things. Right. We don't, I don't think. We paint with a brush. It's neither too broad. We're painting with statistics, right? I mean, like you're talking about 43% of this and 78% of this. And on any specific question, these numbers can move around, but the numbers are never consoling, right? When you ask the Muslims in the UK whether they wanna live under Sharia law, right? Or whether the Danish cartoonist should be imprisoned, right? You don't get the tiny numbers you would hope to get. Right. And that's a problem that we have to speak honestly about. And just, as you just said, you don't have to be a fascist or a racist or even a Trumpian to (15/44)
not want to import people into your society who think cartoonists should be killed for drawing the profit, right? That's a totally rational thing not to want. And the left has been demonizing anyone who will talk about this. Right. And I would say to you, finally, you know, asking you what is the proper liberal response? And I think it begins with, yes, understanding that we are never going to defeat terrorism if we don't reform Islam. Yes. And we are not going to reform Islam if we can't talk about it. And if Muslims can't talk about it. And Muslims can't talk about it. If we don't encourage, empower, and oblige Muslims to talk honestly about this, yes. Okay. Thank you, Sam. I appreciate you coming here and giving us the real deal as always. Sam Harris, everybody. Thank you. Terrific. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (16/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (17/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (18/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (19/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (20/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (21/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (22/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (23/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank (24/44)
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Tears We Cannot Stop, a sermon to white America, one of my favorite guests. Michael Eric Dyson is over here. Good to see you. All right. Let's sell some books. Let's do that. Now, the subtitle of your (25/44)
book, A Sermon to White America. I'm a Baptist preacher. You know, I've been a professor for 30 years. I've been a Baptist preacher for 35. I said I can't do an analytical investigation of whiteness. Let me just preach as a minister to white brothers and sisters. I'm not one of these down from the pulpit, I know the truth, but in the trenches with people to identify with the grief. But that word sermon, how do you think that's going to go over with the Trump voter? I don't, I'm worried about that word. A black man is preaching to me. Yeah. Yeah. A black man doing anything to them. But I'll say that if they're interested in religion, let's give them benefit of the doubt. I'm a Baptist preacher who's preaching a lot of different places, a lot of different churches. So I think that the Trump voters who are at least able to be open to hearing quote the word of God, though they won't associate that with me. So you're optimistically thinking they're going to see the word sermon. And not (26/44)
thinking of... A black man giving the sermon. They might mistake me for Ben Carson, we're both from Detroit. And you mentioned reparations, which is the R word in a lot of America. Right, right. I call it a cracker tax. That's not in my book, but those are your words. But you don't really mean people would be writing a check, do you? Obviously not. My point is that... I could give you cash. And I'll take it. But theoretically, obviously the redistribution of wealth based upon the unpaid labor of black people over centuries is real. But I'm not even talking about that. I'm saying before the government gets involved, you as an individual white brother and sister if you're inclined, I'm not asking every white person to give their money to every black person. Though if you'd like to tonight, holler at me after the show. Let's not pass up an opportunity. But what I'm saying is that there are... I run into so many white brothers and sisters who say, what can I do to help? Look, you can reach (27/44)
out and buy a computer for a person who's a person of color, a little black kid that you know deserves it. Or some school you can adopt through your company to tutor them or mentor them. In other words, these are specific individual things that you as an interested party to try to restitute and really redistribute some resource through your own pocket and not only just money, it's about time. It's about giving of your own inner resource and your spirit and your soul and what else? Your pocket book as well. Did you see the picture? It went viral. Show it here if you would. It's a woman's march and there's a black woman saying, don't forget white women voted for Trump. And she happens to be in front of these three... I told my mother not to do this again, man. And they do look self-involved because they're taking selfies and stuff. But I mean, everybody takes selfies. And I'm just... Do you think this is helpful? I mean, I'm kind of on the liberals about this sort of internecine warfare. (28/44)
Those white women there, they came to the march. I was there. They could have gone somewhere else. Maybe we're not perfect. But is it the time to like to just go against our own, the people who are on your side? It's a good point. Look, Bill, I think that in this day and age, when we feel all under siege, most of us, by what's going on in Trump America, right? Trump-hometry, his vision that is perverted and narrow and I think vicious. It is true that we began to see that all the stuff we thought we had that were that we were against each other, we began to see that we have a greater unity. But I think what's interesting, I'm at many places and book tours and people say, what happened to the black people who didn't show up to vote and stuff? And then I do remind them, I said, look, 53 percent of the women who were white who voted did vote for Trump. So it's not just black folk didn't show up. It's white women voting against their interests. It's white working class people voting against (29/44)
their interests for, ostensibly, a blue collar billionaire who has no investment in their lives. Martin Luther King Jr. was in jail and the jailer came to him and said, you know what? What you're doing is wrong. He said, no, I'm doing what I'm doing is right. And then Dr. King asked the white guy, how much money do you make? And after Dr. King said, you need to be marching with us. And so the reality is many white brothers and sisters have been sold a bill of good. At least you're not a Negro so that overlords and captains of industry who exploit the working class who are white tell them, yes, we're screwing you, but at least you're not a black person. And so we're not rid of the bigotry and the racism and we could come together and forge a connection. We could turn this mother out. You do give a good sermon. And what do you think if Trump was black? Say there was a black man, president, and he had three wives and women, children by three wives. And he acted like, you know, he was as (30/44)
sort of erratic as he was and belligerent as he was. He'd be in prison. I mean, it's still a possibility. Do you think a black person could act like Donald Trump and be president? Honestly? Yeah. Do you think if a black person acted like that, America, it wouldn't matter? I don't think it would matter. No, I don't think I don't think it would. I don't look at Trump and judge him on his character flies. No, but if a black guy ran for president and acted just the way he did, you know, made fun of the handicap, said I grabbed pussies because I'm a celebrity. If a black guy said I grabbed pussies and they let me do it because I'm a celebrity, you think that would make no difference that he was black? Not to me. I can't speak for America. To me it would not. He'd be starring in the Mac in some blaxploitation movie. Two thirds of Republicans agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. That's a fundamental. Do you agree with that? (31/44)
I think that there's certainly an element of division that needs to be addressed. Yeah. As evidence that UC Berkeley the other night, I do think that there, there's certain issues in society where we're becoming more divided and it's not just blacks against whites, it's whites against blacks. It's all this against each other and it's, uh, it's toxic. But see, Bill, I mean that's not what I asked. We're going to get to Berkeley, but this says two thirds of Republicans say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as whites against blacks. Yeah. As we sit here today, I do think that there is an element of racism against white individuals. I do. I do see it. I think it's been evidence. Since I'm a conservative and not a Trump person, let me just say this. That's absurd. And let me say this as a black liberal person, that's absurd. Okay. So you want to talk about Berkeley because I know that there are, there's this unrest in the streets. There's unrest in a lot of, to put it (32/44)
mildly, parts. Yeah. Yeah. It's well, people, but, but you know, and you're saying what did this is, this is not good. No, I wouldn't say nothing happened at UC Berkeley the other night was good. It was militant. It was a riot. It was not a protest. It was a riot. And they protested someone who I think we've booked on our show, so I guess we'll be putting on security there. I'm not against, believe me, I've been a long time critic of colleges shutting people up. That is a problem on the left we need to deal with very much so. No question. Free speech should be something we own. Look, not only do I own it, I went to DePaul University where I used to teach and a brother Milo said, gone there. And look, I'm an ardent defender of free speech because I don't want anybody telling me what book I should write and what speech I should give. So this is Milo? Is his name? Milo Yiannopoulos. Right. Okay. And he is a provocateur. He's been thrown off Twitter. That's how bad he is. But let me tell (33/44)
you what, at the school. But they rioted at Berkeley because this guy was coming. They did, but I'm saying at the school where I visited in the aftermath of that, in the wake of his visit, it wasn't just free speech. If it was free speech merely expressing ideas that are even abhorrent to the masses of people there, that's all right. That's the defense. But many black students were called nigger. They were called the N word. They were disrespected. That is the N word. They were physically assaulted. That is the N word. Well, there's another one as well, as you know. Nigga. I use nigga, not nigger. I don't use either one. I don't want to step in that mic. Buy his book. Don't say the bad word. But my point is this, Bill. The point is that yes, I understand people being against what happened at Berkeley, but also be against the inciting of a kind of riotous spirit where a guy goes around the country spewing the worst kind of venom. And this is my problem with President Trump. President (34/44)
Trump has amplified and magnified and indeed amplified some of the worst interests in racial disharmony we've seen in half a century. And to have a white supremacist like Steve Bannon in the West Wing and to have a Jeff Sessions as attorney general, it's a troika and a triumvirate of just transformative hate that we need to oppose. So listen now, last week I was saying that, you know, what we want to do is reach out to Donald Trump. We want to find a way to influence him and, you know, step back from the brink of war. And this week we sort of found out that if you want to get to him, don't put it in a briefing book. And God forbid a regular book. What you got to do is put it on TV. Everyone is saying this. He watches TV. So we're on TV. So, you know, this is how we can reach him. And of course, the thing that gets through to him is he likes to be complimented. So we started this segment last week called Let's Encourage President Trump. Because there are some things he said that I do (35/44)
agree with. In 2012, he tweeted, the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. Fucking yes! OK? And even after he lost the popular vote, because of rigging, he told Mitch McConnell, maybe we should go with the popular vote. Yes, that takes balls. How about it for Donald Trump? He's got a very good brain and he knows a lot of good words. Look at this headline today in the New York Times. President Trump reverts to pillars of Obama policies abroad. That is so smart. Yes, act like a nut to put people on notice and then revert. He reverted to the Obama policies. That's some next level shit. Yes, President Trump. And listen to this. Last week, he had a bunch of union guys into the Oval Office. He had carpenters, not just the heads, the carpenters, the welders, those guys. And you know what they said when they left the Oval Office? They told the papers, eight years of Obama, he never had us in. Who's the asshole now? I think President Trump is maybe the nicest man in the world, (36/44)
certainly the richest. And have you lost weight, sir? I decided to get that out. Just clip that and show them that. So what about the belligerent that we have shown our allies? Does anyone worry that this is sort of a kind of setting the table if they want to have a war? Because you know, if you want to have a war, then everything they want to do becomes easier. Because now I'm a wartime president. Now I can really shut down the protests in the street. It's against the troops. I mean, he went through a series of head of state calls this week that by all accounts, and the Trump White House leaks like a sieve. And so by all accounts with our allies, they were testy and confrontational in many cases. And mostly about the Electoral College. And about the size of his win. And yet it seems that on his call with Vladimir Putin, which they didn't record, he gave him a tongue bath and they agreed they'd have a sleepover and pin each other's toenails. This is a guy who obviously is willing to (37/44)
piss off our allies and to diminish our status in the world and to reduce our ability to actually do things to make this country more secure. But he's because Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn have this fantasy Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Vladimir Putin against Islam, that he's going to make sure that they're the allies to face off against Iran and Islam. I think these guys are living in an absolutely like hermetic separate reality from ours. Can I say something very quick? To me, you know, we know this is not what affirmative action is, but a lot of people think affirmative action means giving somebody something they don't deserve against somebody who otherwise worked for it. I don't want to hear anybody else for the next four years criticize even the worst understanding of affirmative action. This is the most incomprehensibly incompetent group of people who have ever been sent to government to run this particular country. And on top of that... I will not let you talk about our president (38/44)
that way. Wait a minute. And then they throw in Ben Carson, Dr. Ben Carson, as you said, he's a great neuroscientist, but as the head of HUD, I mean, that's the soft bigotry of bro expectation. And what I... I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Thank you, unnamed panel. It's now time for New Rules. Great buddy. New Rules. New Rules, you can say what you want about the Muslim ban, but at least it'll keep out Lindsay Lohan. New Rules, don't be so sad that Messiah Nakamura, the father of Pac-Man, has died. Celebrate his life. And instead of getting lost in grief, let's remember his last words. That's cool. That's cool. New Rule. Before launching into our next attack on alternative facts, liberals must admit they're living in their own fantasy world where Ryan Gosling can sing. I mean, seriously, have you seen this fucking movie? Just a little bit. New Rule, now that research on hamsters has found that a high-core diet turns them into deranged cannibals that eat their own young, someone has (39/44)
to tell me, when's the last time anyone saw Honey Boo Boo? I mean... Oh, Jesus. New Rule, let's call brunch what it really is, an excuse to drink on Sunday morning. Not having brunch, you're getting brunk. New Rule, stop asking me if these cannabis-laced dog biscuits are a good idea. I'm not a vet and I haven't studied chemistry since high school, but I do know this. After a few weeks of feeding them to my accomplished high-strung French Prudel, she looks like this. And finally, go Falcons! For the first time in a long time, I really care who wins the Super Bowl and I have a fierce love of the Atlanta Falcons because I'm from Atlanta. Oh wait, I'm not, I'm from New Jersey, I could give a shit about Atlanta. But the Falcons are playing a team where the owner, the coach, and the star quarterback all love and support Donald Trump. So I'd really like for them to lose by a score of a million fucking thousand in my life. You love it when he drives us crazy, don't you? And that, in microcosm, (40/44)
is what Donald Trump has done to me. To us all. He's made us into that campus nut who can't buy a chicken sandwich without making it political. He's made me love the Atlanta Falcons. That's like saying your favorite boxer is Mickey Rourke. It's like saying your favorite singer is Ryan Gosling. He can't sing. But I don't care. Here's what I'm gonna look like on Sunday. Because I love the Falcons. I love their running back, what's-his-face, and the guy who catches the ball. But mostly I love them because Tom Brady was one of the first to display a Make America Great Again hat. You know, because America has been so tough on Tom so far. And back when Tom was asked if he thought Trump would be president, he said, I hope so, that would be great. Hey Tom, fuck you. Quarterback and your political instincts suck. Coach Bill Belichick loves Trump so much, he sent him a fan letter during the campaign which read, You have dealt with an unbelievably slanted and negative median, have come out (41/44)
beautifully. Your leadership is amazing. The toughness and perseverance you have displayed over the past year is remarkable. Wow, that's some serious butt-licking, coach. Let me give you some advice for the big game. Fuck you, Belichick. Fuck you and your deflated balls, you joyless, cheating fuck. You see what Donald Trump has done to me? I used to be pretty eloquent. Now I'm just screaming, fuck you? Is there anything this man can't ruin? He took something beautiful, a game where millionaires give each other brain damage, and made it tawdry and cheap. Even worse, every time he attends a sporting event, his hair does the weave. I mean the wave. The weave. Look, I don't want to make everything political. But that's where we're headed. Athletes are refusing to stay at Trump hotels. People are unfriending each other on Facebook. Siblings have stopped talking to one another, which makes it hard to get laid in the South. There are even reports that some hookers won't pee on you until you (42/44)
assure them it's not a Trump thing. One member of the L.L. Bean family supported Trump, and now we're all supposed to boycott L.L. Bean. Which is not hard for me. I've been boycotting L.L. Bean my entire life because I don't like any store where it's hard to tell the mannequins from the customers because they've both got to stick up their ass. But lesbians, where are they supposed to shop now to look like a lumberjack? You know, in 1960, only 5% of Americans had a negative reaction to the idea of marrying someone from a different political party. In 2010, that number shot up to 40%. For liberals, bringing home a Republican is the new Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Only it's more like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and spending the whole meal bitching about Mexicans. All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Plaza Theater in El Paso, March 19th at the Fox in Detroit, April 18th. I want to thank Rick Wilson, Jason Kander, Tommy Lehring, Michael Eric Dyson, and Sam Harris. Join us now for (43/44)
Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (44/44)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #615: Chris Wallace, Chris Christie, Katty Kay.
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#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. But today I really do know why you're happy. Biden pardoned everyone who has been convicted of simple possession. And this is very smart because a lot of people in this country, I don't know who they are, I don't know any of them, but a lot of people do smoke pot and they do show up to vote. Not on the right day, but they do show up. Mind you, all you ages out there, who did this? Yes, the old president. Obama didn't do it. More credit to him because Joe really doesn't know anything about pot. He thinks THC is that channel that shows the old movies. That's the good news. Here's a little bad news. Because the war in Ukraine is going so badly for Putin, Biden said the other day that the risk of nuclear armageddon is the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. So, you know, good news, bad news. And that war is going badly. There are videos, have you seen this online, that have gone viral of Russian (1/44)
young men who so don't want to go in the army that they're breaking their own arms. Finally, a TikTok challenge I can get behind. I'm a kid. Yeah, no, that is very worrisome. I mean, you've got to root for Ukraine, but the worst Russia does, you know, Putin, who knows, he had a birthday this week. He went to his favorite restaurant, TGI, whatever day I say it is. It did not turn out to be a good birthday, because the next day he was confronted, personally, who has the balls to do this? Some guy in Russia, in his inner circle, confronted him with how bad the war was going and how he was mismanaging it. That takes balls. And then the guy said, don't get up, I'll show myself out the window. Here in this country, they're cleaning up in Florida, our friends in Florida and several states from Hurricane Ian, but it's not over. Thousands of people in South Florida are still without cocaine. So it is really disrupted. In this very troubling, decisive world, I thought it was rather encouraging (2/44)
to see. Did you see President Biden and Governor DeSantis of Florida who have nothing in common and hate each other, I'm sure, but they work together and they were cordial. Nothing, please. OK, I mean, come on, give me something. I mean, it did not last. Biden got back on Air Force One and it was filled with Venezuelan migrants. That was a dirty trick. But, of course, what everyone's talking about is this picture that emerged of Governor DeSantis down there and, you know, what's with the go-go boots? I mean, but in Florida, I can't even say gay? But I've got to say, somewhere in Dallas, there is a cheerleader performing in her socks. I'm just going to say all he needs is a wig and he can do Drag Queen story hour. Oh, Republicans, they're just like us. Well, our friend... Oh, my gosh, they do run some buttes. Herschel Walker, have you seen this down in Georgia? You know, the former football player Herschel Walker who has been running, I mean, his hard right on abortion. No exceptions. (3/44)
He is like rape... Nothing. No abortion. We criminalized pregnancy in this country. Turns out his ex-girlfriend, one of his many ex-girlfriends, came forward this week with proof that he paid for an abortion for her. She had a signed check from him, a receipt from the clinic, and a sympathy card. She had everything but the fetus in a jar. I mean... And Herschel, it's just not that bright. He signed the card, glad to hear about your loss. I mean... So this story breaks on Monday. The ex-girlfriend coming forward with all the evidence and Herschel said it's a flat-out lie. Then it came forward a few days later. This woman, who he said is a liar, had a child with him. And then Maury Povich came out and said, Herschel, you are the father. Had a great show. We have Chris Christie, Patty Kaye. But first up, he is the CNN anchor and host of Who's Talking to Chris Wallace, with episodes available to stream Fridays on HBO Max and airing Sundays at 7 Eastern on CNN. Chris Wallace! Chris, the (4/44)
second time. Welcome to HBO. Can I show you around the commissary? Uh... We could have lunch with a dragon. You're gonna love it here, Chris. You actually are. And have you found it so far? Great company, right? It is a great company. And this is a very exciting hybrid because on the one hand, as you just said, I'm on HBO Max. Three interviews a week, drop each Friday. We have three that just dropped today. And then the best parts of those three interviews on CNN, prime time, 7 o'clock Sunday night. So... So it all came out to watch. My family is here in Forrest tonight. I can't think of anybody better to talk about the news business with, I mean, who is more steeped in it. Obviously your father was Mike Wallace. You worked for, I think your first job was for Walter Cronkite? Well, job is a little bit of an overstatement. I was his gopher. Go for coffee, go for pencils at the Democratic... That's a job. At the Republican convention in 1964, the Barry Goldwater convention, yeah. And (5/44)
Walter Cronkite, I mean, for those of you who don't remember, this was the last guy, perhaps, that everybody trusted. I remember when I was a kid watching TV and he was the newsman, and when a comedian wanted to make a joke about somebody who had utter integrity, that was the go-to. You know, Walter Cronkite. Because it was understood by everybody in America that this, when he said it, both sides agreed. That is such a bygone world now, that we could even have such a thing. No, I completely agree. And in fact, in 67 or 68, he went to Vietnam. And, you know, he was a straight newsman. He didn't give commentary, he just reported the facts. But we were in the middle of this terrible and long and bloody war, and he came back and, despite what all the generals were saying, he said, the war is not going well. And Lyndon Johnson, the president at the time, supposedly said, if I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost America. Right. And he did. And he did. Didn't even run again. That's right. But (6/44)
today, some side, probably the right wing, would just have attacked Walter Cronkite. No, it has gotten so siloed, if you will. You know, you've got conservative media, and they have built up an audience, and they only want to watch conservative media and what it is that supports their conception, their view of the world, and liberal media, and liberals want to watch that. And, distressingly, few people just want to get the news and make up decisions for themselves as to what they think the truth is. Well, that's that's the that's a very small sliver of the country, I think, who even wants news. I mean, when I talk to people under 40, even, and I ask them, where do you get your news? Most of what they say is like, well, what somebody posts on my Facebook page. In other words, it's gossip. Like, that's to me what gossip is. Your friend is passing around a story. They don't know if it's true, they don't care, but, I mean, Walter Cronkite got 29 million viewers. I mean, nothing, no TV show (7/44)
gets even a third of that, even the biggest hits, I don't think, anymore in prime time. This was the news. So, and if he got 29, Huntley Brinkley got 25 or whatever. I mean, you had 50, 60 million Americans at a time when the country was a lot smaller who wanted to tune in to see the evening news. I mean, in fairness, the world has changed, and you know, you don't get your news at 6.30 at night, you're getting it all day, and you can get it on your phone or, as you say, Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, but the world has definitely changed, and not for the better in terms of the desire to be, to get the straight facts and to have your preconceptions be challenged by what reality is. People don't want reality. They want their view. And this really all came about because news used to be a lost leader for a company. It wasn't Cronkite's day. Absolutely. I mean, the giants of television back in the day, and by that point, I mean the owners, Bill Paley at CBS, Sarnoff at NBC, (8/44)
they viewed news as a public service and that, you know, it didn't have to make money. If it didn't lose money, that was okay, but even if it lost a little, that was alright. And I've got to be careful with this, because I know you're a huge fan of 60 Minutes, but I kind of feel that to a certain degree, 60 Minutes and my father were a little bit responsible for what happened. Not that their journalism wasn't terrific, but when 60 Minutes went on the air in 68 and then as it became more and more successful, it ended up being the number one show in America for a number of years, it made money. And suddenly the executives and television said you can make money with news. And I think that led to the idea of not having an audience come to you, but chasing an audience, and that led, I think, to more biased news coverage. But aren't you a bigger fan of 60 Minutes than me? Oh, I'm that's why I said... Isn't that what put food on your table? Did it take your father away from home? Is that what (9/44)
it is? I'm sorry, Bill. I'm sorry, Bill, but our time is up here now. No, I love 60 Minutes, and I think their journalism is first rate. What I'm saying is it opened the Pandora's box that you can make money from news. Right. And that's the problem, because the media works backwards now. They work backwards from what does our target demographic want them to filter us, filter this news for us, so that we're only hearing what doesn't upset us. I mean, I don't know if they still have those dials that they use for like focus groups, but I think they do, where you can tell the people as they're watching oh, no, I don't like that. I remember they have it during the debates. You know, Obama's a little sarcastic? No. That's right. You'd have the blue line and the red line and then the whatever line in the middle of the independent. Right. And the people who are these anchors on these cable news shows, they know that those dials are somewhere. They don't want to say something that makes the (10/44)
people turn the dial the wrong way. So that's why they live in a bubble, except on this show, of course. And by the way, you know, I've paid for that. There are, you know, lots of woke people who used to watch this show, I know who don't anymore, because like I will present, but I've always, I always did that. It's just that the left went crazier, so I had to do it more. And I would, I wish they would come back, but not at the price of not calling out both sides. No, and I got to say, and I agree that I think that's absolutely true of you. I like to think it's true of me as well when I was at Fox. It is. You left Fox News. But on Fox News Sunday, I told straight and they never second guessed me on a guest or a question. They let me do what I did and I'm doing the same now. No, I always thought you were the canary in the coal mine at Fox. I did. I want to see how this metaphor ends up. Well, well, the canary gets out, the mine collapses. That's my point. No, I mean, you got out. I mean, (11/44)
it became, come on, isn't that why you left? Because it just became too hard to be in that loony bin. You know, I am so excited about who's talking to Chris Wallace. I am so excited about CNN and looking ahead to the future. You just said you're a big straight shooter, but you won't answer that question about Fox? You know, I have found message discipline. I know you're going to be talking to Chris Christie in a moment. Message discipline. That's for politicians, not for us. What? We're the other side. We're the other team. Yeah. All right, I'll ask you all right. We'll talk over in the commissary. Actually, I was thinking, Mitch McConnell, just repeat the line over and over again. So, last question. You moderated. We're done? Yeah, almost. All right. I'm having a good time. I'm having a good time. It goes fast when you avoid questions. But, well played. But, OK, so, I think you moderated both the Hillary Clinton, Trump debate. One of the debates in 2016, one of them in 2020. And also (12/44)
Trump and Biden. Yes, the first one. I mean, it's just a clown show at this point, these debates. Is it not? I mean, Trump is going to, Trump, he's just this, you know, incredible gorilla buffoon in the room. He's going to break the furniture. I mean, it's pointless to debate him. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't care. His audience doesn't care. He doesn't know anything. Biden, I mean, I'm getting more and more in love with Biden, but on a debate stage. Just because of the marijuana? That didn't hurt, Chris. He's just, you know what, he's too old for this shit. That should be his motto. He just gets things done. I'm not sure too old for anything should be his motto. I think it's working for him. Lean into it. Like Afghanistan, I'm too old for this shit. Get out. You know, here's where I'll disagree with you about the debates. The first debate of 2020 where Trump just went nuts. I mean, we had somebody count how many times he interrupted either Biden or me 145 times in 90 minutes. (13/44)
That's a lot. But having said that, 80 million people watched that debate. So there is a real hunger out there among Americans to, we want to see these two guys and size them up. Okay. If I put porn on that channel, I could get 81 million. You know, it doesn't, anyway, I got to go. Thank you very much. Good luck here. Welcome in house. Chris Wallace. Alright, let's meet our panel. Alright, here they are. He is the former Republican governor of New Jersey and a political and legal contributor for ABC News. Chris Christie is over here. Governor. And she's a special correspondent for BBC News and host of the new documentary Trump. The comeback available to, there was a question mark at the end. There is a question mark. The comeback. Stream on BBC Select via Apple TV and Prime Video. Caddy Kay is our returning champion. So I just want to start off, I was watching these pictures from Florida and I thought of you because you're coming on this weekend. The pictures of Biden and DeSantis (14/44)
together must bring back warm memories of when you were with Obama after another storm. It was Hurricane Sandy and there was the famous picture of you and Obama and you know, they said you hugged. That's as close as you got. Yeah. It was not a hug. I'm from Jersey. That's not a hug. But I noticed that with DeSantis and Biden, he must have had that in mind because the picture he got taken, there was a relative in between them at all. See this is what relatives are for in politics. Get between you and the guy from the other team who you can't touch. Silly. Silly. So you think that's why he did that? I don't know why he did what he did but like when you have what we had in Sandy was 365,000 homes in 24 hours. When he has what he has and what it looks like to me from here and the Gulf Coast. You can't think about anything else but those people. I mean their lives are not going to be normal for a very long time. And they've lost everything they own. They've lost their sense of who they are. (15/44)
So you know for me, it's going to be 10 years ago at the end of this month. I just said to all of our folks like the president comes. We're going to show him around. We're going to make sure he sees everything and meets those people. I didn't worry about the politics. The analogies here are kind of a little bit misplaced too. I mean this is five weeks away from a mid-term election where DeSantis looks like he's going to win and Biden's not even on the ballot. When Biden came to New Jersey or when Obama came to New Jersey, it was six days before the presidential election where he was on the ballot. So everything was heightened and all the tensions were heightened. It was my job to get them focused on the job which was rebuild the state, repair these people's lives. But it's true. What you guys do, you do that. But you do that and I took enormous shit for that. I know you did. Yes you did. So it's not like it was the easy thing to do. But it was the right thing to do. DeSantis would be (16/44)
crazy not to welcome Biden. You've got Biden there, you need money for your people who are going to vote for you at some point. And then to diss him, that would have been ridiculous. See, DeSantis has it both ways. He's a very clever politician. White boots aside. The white boots were a bad look. That was bad. What makes a guy... How can a guy be so smart and so dumb? You would never accuse DeSantis of being elected purely on the basis of his charisma and his cool. I never see him. I don't live in Florida. What I know is that he's great at political performance art so he's ginned up the base. He's got them with the, you know, don't say gay shit and all that. And then when something like this happens he looks like, oh I'm also a very normal politician who can get along with the president and do things done as a governor can, I have a suit and a tie. And my white boots. So I think that's a very clever one-two punch. I mean, he's definitely going to be the candidate. I mean, run against (17/44)
Trump or join Trump. Do you think he's going to run against Trump? Possibly. The Republican polling likes him better to be at the top spot of the ticket. Now that means you have to take it away from Trump, which is very hard to do from a baby, but... That was suggested by voters. But what if they run, what if it's Trump and DeSantis as his running mate? Never happened. Why? Never happened. You can't fit both of them in the same room on the same ticket. Oh, never. I've heard never so much in politics. Much more likely it would be somebody like Carrie Lake in Arizona. OK, but if it does, it's an irresistible ticket. She could pull off the white boots too. It's odd because there's sort of this disconnect. I mean, on the one hand, this looks a little encouraging. Biden and DeSantis working together. On the other hand, one of the big stories I saw this week was talk on the internet of a civil war has jumped like I don't know, a zillion percent or something. And, you know, a lot of this (18/44)
stuff, 54% of strong Republicans say they feel a civil war. The civil war we're talking about is at least somewhat likely. They seem a little hungry for it, which makes me ask the question, you mean you actually want to kill Americans? You know, I know you've done a lot of reporting on this recently. Yeah, I was interviewing people who, an elderly couple in their 70s who had clearly sat down and thought about how a civil war would unfold. I mean, they took it almost like it was a sober rational thing to do. They saw it as their patriotic duty to take up arms and kill other people. And they had a whole plan for this. It was going to start, the Democrats would start the civil war. They would respond by fighting back and it would be small village against small village and then it would spread to small town against small town and then it would be state against state. And they, this couple were in their late 60s, early 70s, the husband and the wife told me repeatedly that they would be (19/44)
happy to take up arms and they would do it to defend democracy in America. That's the kind of level that people are talking about. This is not young hotheads. This is an elderly couple who are going to fight. But actually it is young hotheads. That's what this is from the Southern Poverty Law Center. When asked people who approves of threatening a politician, approves of threatening a politician who is harming the country or our democracy, which of course is what either both sides think the other one is doing, 24% approved. Slightly higher for Democrats. And driven largely by the approval of young Democratic men. People over 50, only 9%. So really my generation are the ones who are fucked up. Well, but you're you're you're mellowed out by the pot though, so that helps. Alright, well we're going to talk about that. You're going to have to answer that. But here's another one. 41% of Democrats and 52% of Trump voters think it's quote time to split. And I just want to know what this looks (20/44)
like. When we split, how does that work? And I asked the people who made the great movie, Gandhi, if we could use a little bit of that because the only time I could remember a country splitting and show that video. This is from Gandhi. It's a great movie. This is 1947 when India and Pakistan split and that's the Hindus going one way from Pakistan into India and the Muslims going the other way from India to Pakistan. Of course they don't show the next scene there where they go into a ditch and start killing each other. But is that working out? There's going to be a line of cars from Arizona going into California and the four million Trump voters that we have in California are going to be driving into Arizona. Is that really what, what does that mean? Like time to split. Describe that. I don't buy it. I just think it's anger and I think they're figuring out new ways all the time to express their anger and I look at it much differently. The Civil War part that you brought up. I mean I (21/44)
look at the stuff that happened on January 6th and instead of that inciting a civil war, what it did was force everybody in Washington to do their job and certify the election and certify that Biden had won it because he had. It made our democracy, I look after January 6th and say democracy proved how resilient it is, not the other way around. Yeah, except you have 200 odd candidates running as Republicans who say that Joe Biden shouldn't be president because Donald Trump won the election. Yes, you're in the minority of your party. At least for the people who are running. Of the major, wait a second, we have to get terms in a month or something? Okay, 299 of the Republicans who are running, this is for Congress and Senate, the major seat, 299, a majority think what you just alluded to, they don't think the election was fair and Biden actually lost. That's an astounding... Well, we'll see how they do. We'll see how they do. They're going to win. A lot of them are going to win. Some of (22/44)
them will and some of them won't. But in the end, you've got to get out there and fight that. You can't just expect this stuff to go... Are there Republicans you're talking about? Yeah. Is that what you're doing? I just said it, didn't I? What do you want me to do? I want you to... Shit, Bill, what do you want me to do? I want you to do more. I want more Republicans. This is what I call the as good as it gets Republicans. Don't take that the wrong way. Don't take that the wrong way. Oh, how could I? How about you're the pain in the ass talk show host? Don't take it the wrong way. No, but I just mean for people who are like... For the people who just are adamant about how they won't even talk to Republicans, you want something that's not going to be. Republicans see the world differently. It's okay. We have to have that. But this is as good as it gets. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney I can never say his name. Kinziker, whatever that guy is. But even Bill Barr and Pence, they both Mitch (23/44)
McConnell of all said this was a legitimate election. That's as good as it gets, liberals. For Republicans. Deal with that. Don't hate those people. Anyway. My message. What you raised about young Democrats, I think there's something there too because the young guy from Florida, Maxwell Frost, who's come out and said that DeSantis wants to impose a fascist state in the country. I mean, America's not going to become a fascist state. It's not going to become a socialist state. Is there a far right tendency? Are there conservatives on the Supreme Court? Of course there are, but a fascist? That's not helpful either. If you want to gem up violence and backlash in the country, you start throwing around words like fascist. You're not helping the cause of avoiding a civil war particularly. That's exactly right. I mentioned pot. Yes, Biden did it. You know, he finally did this. He pardoned people who just had minimal records with marijuana. Also, Spongebob is now the secretary of the Navy. But (24/44)
I seem to remember when you were governor. Yeah. You were very hard. In fact, I have a quote here. Go ahead. This is after it started to become legal across different states and you said, I don't care, quite frankly, that people think it's inevitable, meaning inevitable it become legal in this country. It's not inevitable here. I'm not going to permit it. Never. As long as I'm governor. George Wallace of Prohibition? You stand in the doorway of the dispensary? Well, if you win, you get to make the decisions. And I got elected twice and I got to make the decisions. That was the decision I made. And I know you disagreed with it then and I know you disagree with it now. But you just said we're allowed to have different opinions. I have a different opinion on it. I agree. I'm just asking even most Republicans don't have that opinion anymore. I'm just asking why you have this hard on for pot? Because... They don't have it just for pot? I know, but... Go ahead, guys. Next question, Bill? No, (25/44)
no, no. He's doing great tonight, isn't he? You'd say mean for other drugs, but pot is not like other drugs, and this is part of the... I understand you think that. I don't think that. Here's what we have. Schedule 1 drugs, which pot... I think this is where Biden is moving to get rid of this insanity. Schedule 1. In other words, these are the drugs that they say are the worst. Schedule 1. 1 equals worst. Pot, lumped in with LSD, heroin, ecstasy, and mushrooms. You mean you see those all the same? I don't see them all the same, no. But that's the way the law puts them together. So, if you want to try to change it, I've always said the same thing. If someone wants to pass a law to change it, and you get a majority of the people to vote for it, great. You ask me my opinion, I vote no on that. That's okay. I agree, but they've studied pot a zillion times. I don't understand the... Look, we have a difference of opinion about it. But I'm talking about... There is an absurdity here that you (26/44)
have pot classified as a class 1 drug, which has never killed anybody, but then you've got fentanyl and methamphetamines, which are not classified as class 1 drugs, which are causing an epidemic of death. And they should be. They should be. This should be open to the original. And that's what I just said. If you get people... It became a Schedule 1 drug because people voted to make it one. And if they vote to not make it one, it won't be. Okay, but the question isn't... And I'm telling you that my view in it, from the quote you read at the time, was that I was not going to permit it to be a recreational legal drug in New Jersey. I didn't permit it to be. And now we have a new guy who came after me and he permitted it. Am I like standing in the corner holding my breath saying, I can't believe you did that? He gets to make the judgments now. He made the call he made. Right? I mean, that's the way it works, isn't it? And that's the way it's supposed to work. Yes, but the question isn't (27/44)
that. We all agree on that. That laws matter and people make laws. Not everybody agrees with that, as we know. You're right. You're right. This question was why do you seem to be so adamant about standing up to or ignoring what we have studied for so long? I mean, the Schedule II drugs, which is the ones who are not as bad, Coke, meth and Oxy. I can tell you from personal experience, I've done all these drugs. What? All right. Coke and meth and Oxy are worse than LSD, heroin, ecstasy, mushrooms and pot. I've never done heroin. All right, so... Tomorrow. I think you've... After the show, after this show, with Chris. I think you've figured, I think you've given me the solution. I'm going to leave here and try all of them. And then we'll see what happens. Obviously, your experience will do something. Not all at the same time, though? A tutorial from you, maybe? All right. So Kanye West is in the news. Did you see the shirt he wore? He's a fashion designer, too. Makes, I think, a fortune (28/44)
from doing that. And he, of course, bless his heart, loves controversy. And I can't not like Kanye. You know, I've said it many times. He loves Trump, which, of course, we disagree on. But when he said, the mob can't make me hate him. I just fucking love that. We need more of that in this country. Anyway, so he wore this T-shirt that says, White Lives Matter. Which, you know, a lot of people, we're not going to debate that whole thing. But there certainly was a reason why Black Lives Matter became a movement and a saying and a cause. Because obviously, black lives have been disproportionately at peril in this country. So, but Kanye loves controversy. And we got a boy, this was not the only controversial shirt he wore in that show. Do you want to see some of the other ones that he had? Uh oh. For example, he had this one. Bring Back Asbestos. That is just... He had Mothers For Drunk Driving. Putin Bring On The Nukes. No, no, no. A Clown's Rock is not... Hillary 2024. Oh, for fuck's (29/44)
sake. Jesus Was Asian. I don't even get it. It's so Kanye, isn't it? Free Harvey Weinstein. No. Kanye, come on. And George W. Bush does care about black people. Oh, so he reversed... Anyway. Speaking of T-shirts, I want to put out a T-shirt. I want to... Matter of fact, I think this would be a great T-shirt that would sell a lot of money. I don't know if you saw, but Joe Biden, when he was down there in Florida talking about the hurricane, was caught on a hot mic. Oh yeah. And he said to a guy, no one fucks with Biden. With a Biden? Well, I'm going to change it to just Biden. Okay, alright. So, I want to put this on a T-shirt. I think we mocked up a little thing with Joe wearing it. No one fucks with Biden. I just want to ask you, as someone who once had the Republican Party eating out of your hand because you had that kind of confrontational, I don't take no shit from nobody attitude. What do you think of this? I think it's... Of the T-shirt. I love it. I think the T-shirt's a winner. (30/44)
I mean, I don't know if Biden did this intentionally. No. That's the beauty of Biden. Like, he didn't do it intentionally. He's like talking to that guy and thinking like, he's my buddy, I'm going to tell him. Don't you worry, man, I got your back. Nobody fucks with Biden. And even he could barely walk over there, right? But he's like, nobody fucks with Biden. Come on. If he wanted to do it intentionally, he'd have messed it up. That's right. They would have put it on a card, he would have messed it up. Alright, well if it wasn't... Joe rolls with the aviators, the whole thing, it's perfect. The copyright. I think he should go with that. I think people love it. I mean, profanity isn't a deal breaker in politics anymore. Not anymore. And people like that. Again, that's what... We're thrilled about that in New Jersey, by the way. It sort of makes you touchy feely, right? Yeah. When you say no one fucks with me. It's like, can you be my friend? In New Jersey, that translates into I love (31/44)
you. I love you. That's the Let's Have a Hug moment. Okay, so there's an interesting story in this paper this week about this Dr. Maitland Jones. You guys have kids, right? Yes. Ah, kids, I love them. Do you? No. Crazy. Anyway, he's a professor. Not just a professor. He's kind of like a big deal in the world of organic chemistry. In fact, he wrote the textbook. Okay, he's semi-retired. He was at Princeton for years. Now he was at NYU, I think. It was kind of a relaxed sort of professorship. But he was like the man. I remember when I was at Cornell, there was a dude like that in the English department. He had wrote the textbook and he was like, very respected. We thought he was a thousand years old. This guy I'm sure is too. Anyway, his course is hard because organic chemistry is hard. These are kids trying to become doctors. This is pre-med. You've got to know your chemistry. So the course is so hard, they put out a petition asking for him to be fired. And of course the school said, (32/44)
no. I'm joking. The school said, of course we will. And they fired this guy for having a course. And it's so interesting. He said after COVID, the kids came back. He said not only did they not study, they seem to not know how to study. He said they were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate. So we can talk about COVID in a minute and whether we handled that right. But for now, I just want to ask about the kid question and what's going on in college's question. Because it does seem to me that the inmates have taken over the asylum. Okay. What if this isn't the kids? This is the parents. And actually what's happened is that American universities have become so expensive. It's like, what, 60,000. By the way, you can go to Cambridge University in the UK for 20,000. So if anyone's looking for a bargain, head over there. But if you are a parent, and they referred to the parents, the people who pay the tuition fees is what the email firing this guy referred to. And actually it's (33/44)
all these parents saying, hold on a second. This is a crappy deal. I'm paying $60,000 a year and little Johnny just failed organic chemistry. I want a better product. And I'm going to put this as much on the parents as on the kids. That they're the ones that are starting to say, you know, we have to have our kids pass everything. Your kid doesn't pass. He shouldn't pass because he probably shouldn't become a doctor. I mean this is doing no favors to the children. And by the way, bring down the cost of American universities. This is the absolutely foreseeable result of the participation trophy society. That these kids started. Everyone's a winner. They were playing six and seven year old soccer. Everybody had to get a trophy, right? Now those six and seven year olds who were all getting the trophies are now at NYU. And they're like, what the hell are you talking about? I've got to pass organic chemistry by studying. Just give me my grade and let me go on. And it is, we've done this. And (34/44)
I agree with Cady, the parents who are running the soccer leagues, set up this thing where, oh, I don't want my child to have disappointment. I don't want them to be, fail at anything. And so my remedy for this, Bill, was I've made all of my children New York Met fans. So they know pain and disappointment from the very beginning. Send them to a university that does not cost an obscene amount of money. So if they fail, you don't feel like you've bought a crap product. It's ridiculous. I have two children in college right now. My oldest son is at Providence College in Rhode Island. It's, go Friars. It's $74,000 a year. And I have a daughter at Notre Dame and it's $72,000 a year. It's insane. And you're paying that. Now we're going to forgive loans and we're going to do all the rest of this stuff so that there's no price pressure at all on colleges. And then they're going to fire professors. Why are we even bothering going? You think they're lowering the standard of exams in places around (35/44)
the world? You think China, they're saying, oh, let's make our organic chemistry exams easier so that our kids don't have to pass them at such a high level. No, we're competing with kids around the world. You have to pass organic chemistry. Maybe the answer is better Adderall. We could add it to the drug list. I don't know what schedule that's on. We could make a deal on that. Trade the pot and the Adderall. I'll try Chris on that tomorrow. Someday I'm going to get you high and you're going to think. Can't wait. There's always talk these days about anxiety among the younger generation. And I think what you're alluding to, I think, is exactly where it comes from. They have not been prepared for a world that does not revolve around them. I keep reading about the way, now this is celebrity, so it's celebrities as we know are not like us. But I don't think it's that far from the way a lot of parents treat their children. So I wouldn't mention the names, but I was reading about one (36/44)
celebrity couple who their daughter has changed her name like five or six times. She's like 10. Not even a gender thing. Just let her do anything she wants. Change her name. How about you have a beautiful name. We'll call you that when you become 18. You can change it if you want. Another couple talked about how they don't ever have doors that close in the house, including the bathroom. They've just given up on having any privacy because the kids will just walk in. You know, how about... Yeah, no. This is why you've never had kids because you read all these stories. There are some upsides to having kids. Maybe it's the Victorian in me, Cena not her, but you know, I have doors in my house. But that's not the only reason I don't have kids. It's not just the stories. I see children when I... I do. When I'm out in the world... We're doing a therapy session. Like you're at the zoo? Is that what you're saying, Bill? They should be at the zoo. They're out of control. They're feral. They're (37/44)
feral. What? And nobody is doing anything about it. They're running wild and the parents... This is what I see. I also see... Okay? I watch television and movies. Now, the way children are portrayed in every television show and movie, they can't all be lying about it. And it's... They talk back to their parents, including cursing at... I call it the fuck you, Mom generation. I've seen it on dozens of TV shows. Fuck you, Mom, and they storm out of the room. You've just done a whole segment with Chris Wallace on fake news and misinformation. You think that's fake news? I think that's drama. You don't think... Really? You don't think kids in this country say fuck you to their parents? I think some always have. You're living in a dream world. I think some always have. But here's the difference. Many of my kids... Not in the house I grew up in. No, exactly. Nobody did it in our... And by the way, you can stop it now, too. But you know what it means? Yes. It means doing things like... But (38/44)
they don't. I understand. But we can't give into that, Bill, for God's sake. I'm not saying we should. I'm just answering the question why I don't have children. Because when you have children, you can't raise them in isolation. Maybe no one wanted to have children with you, Bill. What happened? Maybe no one wanted to have children with you. That I promise you is not... Don't answer it. Don't answer it. It's not good. I consider it one of the great accomplishments of my life. That I was able to... Use this. Right. Time for new rules. Now that there's a Scooby-Doo show that makes it official that Velma is gay, we have to talk about Fred and Bernie. No. They vacation together, go camping together, and their wives hate their guts. It begins whenever they walk in on them, they're not wearing pants. New rule, if you want to impress me with sports memorabilia, forget about showing the Aaron Judge's home run ball, show me your Herschel Walker autograph abortion card. New rule, as tragic as it (39/44)
was that a riot at an Indonesian soccer match resulted in 125 people being trampled to death, soccer fans must look on the bright side. Nobody used their hands. New rule, Germans must resist the urge to explain to Americans the storied history and cultural significance of Oktoberfest. Trust me, you had us at a three-week festival of giant tits and unlimited beer. New rule, now that author Helgard Mueller has written a book called President Donald J. Trump, the Son of Man, the Christ. Someone has to tell all the other sycophant Trump cultists, hold your cards, we have a bingo. Although I think Helgard is ignoring the one glaring difference between Jesus and Trump. Jesus took his beating like a man. Finally, new rule, you can't be in charge of counting the votes if you think the votes from one of the parties don't exist. Normally in a democracy, this is not something you'd have to say, but let me introduce you to Mark Fincham. He is the Republican nominee for Secretary of State in (40/44)
Arizona, and I'm guessing the bartender at an OK Corral theme park. If he wins, it'll be his job to count the vote next time. And Mark not only believes Trump won the 2020 election, he literally can't conceive that Biden could have. Why? He says, I can't find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden. Yeah, forget the meticulous audits, the hand recounts, the independent verifications run by Republican officials. This guy has never personally met a Biden voter, so they don't exist. You know, I've never been to a BTS concert, but I believe K-pop exists. And I gotta say, more than anything, this is what is wrong with this country. A real division isn't between red and blue, it's between the people on both sides who aren't willing to mingle with Americans outside their political tribe, and so have no idea what they're really like. And the people on both sides who are willing to do that. Of course Mark Fincham never met a Biden voter, and probably thinks Democrats eat babies, (41/44)
because everybody he knows voted for Trump. Because he never leaves his hermetically sealed right-wing panic room. And I could say the same of many liberals who would never even talk to a Trump voter. I asked a friend of mine recently if he wanted to come to a little party I was having, and when he found out one of the guests had voted for Trump, he told me he wasn't coming because, quote, I wouldn't breathe the same air. Okay, there's a word for people like this. Assholes. When we confine ourselves to bubbles, alternate points of view become not just objectionable, they're unfathomable. This guy Fincham thinks Biden voters are literally a fiction, like wizards or the female orgasm. When he was pressed on this and asked, isn't it possible that lots of people you don't know personally did vote for Biden? He replied, in a fantasy world, anything's possible. Mark, have you ever been to a Whole Foods? Or talked to a woman under 50? You know, in a nation based on pluralism, it's very (42/44)
dangerous that Americans are so in our silos, and it's largely because we've stopped living amongst each other. The latest census data revealed that Americans have hit the lowest rate of moving since they started tracking it in 1947. And while some of that is economic, much of the reason Americans don't move anymore is they just wouldn't feel welcome in too many places in their own country. Would anyone ride the New York City subway wearing a MAGA hat? Would anyone go to a NASCAR race in a Biden t-shirt while they chant, Fuck Joe Biden? That's where we are now, where other parts of the country are seen as scary no-go zones. America's like a prison now, where the inmates think they need to join one of the gangs to survive, and we dare not walk on the wrong side of the yard. In January of 2021, the New York Times published the headline, They can't leave the Bay Area fast enough, and followed it up that July with the headline, Tech workers who swore off the Bay Area are coming back. Yeah, (43/44)
they saw all the red hats and were like, Fuck this, I'll take the wildfires. And the same would be true if an evangelical preacher showed up in West Hollywood. Once he was done blowing all those guys, he would hate it. All right, I'll be at the Fox Theater in Detroit tomorrow, October 8th, at the Klein and Chisacoll in Buffalo on the 9th, The Mirage in Vegas, November 25th and 26th. I want to thank my guests, Chris Christie, Katty Kay, and Chris Wallace. Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime. Thank you, folks. (44/44)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #526: Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Fareed Zakaria.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maher. This is week three for my home. I'm Bill Maher. I'm putting the home in home box office. And you know, I love my home. Oh, home. I love home, sweet home, home, home, but enough of home. I never thought I would miss traffic. You know, like my commute today, brutal. There was a two dog pile up in the kitchen. One was overturned. The other one was leaking gas. Thank you. Yeah, it's lonely. I'm not going to lie. It's lonely around here. I'm like one of those old widows who just waits for the mailman to come. So I have some sort of human contact. Lately, I've been leaving homemade cookies and lemonade. It's sad. Last night, my dick said it wanted to start seeing other hands. Now, it's rough around here. A few days ago, I was watching the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Terrific movie. And that scene where Brad Pitt answers the door, and it's the Manson Family. And I thought, ooh, company. Really, I am (1/44)
afraid I am losing it. I am this close to writing a manifesto. Last week, I took mushrooms and FaceTimed with future me. And you know, I'm not the only one. I know I'm not. Some of my sober friends, I know they're drinking again. I was FaceTiming with this guy last week. I saw it in the background. He had a bottle of scotch, which he tried to pass off his 12-year-old hand sanitizer. You know, there's help on the way. I don't know if you saw it this week, but former President Obama made a video endorsing Joe Biden. And Biden says he cannot wait to find a kid to show him how to play it. Trump, of course, had a week that even by his standards was off the rails, including flirting with the idea of firing Dr. Anthony Fauci. I mean, Trump said, look, it's hard enough navigating this crisis without someone interjecting facts and science. And you know, Americans now are, of course, waiting for their $1,200 stimulus checks, which perhaps have been delayed because Trump had to put his name on (2/44)
them. I mean, is it really necessary to see his name on the check to know who it's from? Aren't we going to know when it bounces? And he has apparently started a feud with the World Health Organization, which has not been perfect. But I mean, it is the World Health Organization. We probably could use it right now. But he's threatening to stop funding them because he says the World Health Organization has mismanaged the spread of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization has mismanaged it. He also says the World Health Organization has outrageous hair and wears way too much orange makeup. All right, we got a great show. We have Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Sullivan, and Congressman Dan Crenshaw, all of whom I spoke to earlier. Let's get right to it. OK, he is the host of one of my favorite shows, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS. And of course, a columnist for The Washington Post. Please welcome Fareed Zakaria from his home. Fareed, how you doing there? You holding up OK at home? Yeah, I'm (3/44)
holding up. Look, I like to read. I like to watch movies. I've got my kids here. For me, I can work at home. So professionally, it hasn't been that different. I mean, it's obviously incredibly challenging. But I miss social life. I miss my friends. I miss human contact. I grew up in Bombay and now live in New York City, big, noisy, dirty cities full of intensity. I like that. I miss that. Oh, gosh, yes. I mean, they're talking now. I guess we've decided the governor's May 15, seems like the day, that we're going back with restrictions. I hope I can go to a restaurant, wear a mask, throw away the menu, whatever they want. But you're right, we got to get back to life. So one month from about now. So I mean, at least we can see the end in sight a little. Your column, which I read this week, I read it every week, of course, about testing. And we did this shutdown to buy us time to get some information. And your point is that without testing, and we are still way behind, we're flying blind (4/44)
on this. Exactly. The single biggest piece of information we don't know is how many people are infected with COVID-19. We know that 650,000, roughly, in America have been tested, and they've tested positive. But we now know there are at least 50% in some studies of people who are asymptomatic, who have no symptoms. Then there are people who think they'll handle it at home. They don't go to the hospital. They don't go to clinics. So what we have to do is get a test that tells us how lethal is this virus, how many people are infected, which is the denominator, and how many people die of it, which tells you the fatality rate. The studies that we have built, which are really fascinating, which are truly random samples where they don't just test the people who come in and show up at a clinic. There's two, one done in a German town in Iceland. Both of them show about 13 to 15% of the population has COVID much more than we think, right? Many, many hundreds of thousands more people than have (5/44)
in millions more. And the fatality rate in Iceland is 0.4%. In the German case was 0.37%, which is way lower than the initial estimates that we had, orders of magnitude lower. That tells us a lot. Now, if other studies find that it's different and it's actually much more lethal, that's also important to know. But the more I'm learning about this, the more I think we need to figure out who is vulnerable, who is not, how do you intelligently go back to work? And for that, you need this crucial piece of data. How many people have the virus? Right. And I mean, I've heard people on television say things like, we're all staying home because we're scared to death of getting this thing. That I know people who feel that way, that does not describe me. I am not scared to death of getting this thing. I don't wanna get it, nobody wants to get sick. What I'm scared to death of is that we wind up doing, or maybe have already done what we did after 9-11. We are overly influenced by dramatic death (6/44)
when something is a dramatic event like this, as opposed to everyday death. The 40,000 people a month who die from obesity, that just goes by, opioids, lots of pollution. After 9-11, we overreacted and wounded ourselves much more than the enemy ever could have. Do you worry that that's what's happening now? Absolutely. And I worry that we have the wrong reactions and we try to compensate for the things that we got wrong. Maybe you start fighting the last war. You're absolutely right. 9-11 happens, and basically it's a bunch of guys with box cutters who get onto planes and then use the planes as bombs. Locking the cockpit door essentially took care of that problem. Instead, we spent something like 50 or $60 billion in the next three months ramping up our Defense Department, which had almost nothing to do with protecting us from that kind of threat. Then we built this enormous Homeland Security apparatus. Then we went out and invaded Iraq. I mean, none of it really related to our (7/44)
problem. And so in crises, in fear and panic, we do these things. I will point out, there are sort of three crises of the post-Cold War world. 9-11, the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and this one. And the distinctive feature of the 08-09 one is we really didn't overreact. And I do think that having a president who is Dr. Spock helped in that regard. Obama is very calm, very cool, very rational. Some people saw it as a kind of lack of emotion, Dr. Spock. But when you think about it in these terms, it was really helpful to have somebody who doesn't just go with the herd and who sits back and asks himself, what is the right rational answer to this problem? Well, I think you mean Mr. Spock. Dr. Spock was a pediatrician, and a pediatrician is- You're exactly right, you're exactly right. A pediatrician is definitely what this president needed. But I mean- We're doing this on the fly. I know. So it was tax day this week, and of course, we forgave that. And the tax day's now been moved to July (8/44)
15th. Who is even going to have money on July 15th to pay their taxes? I'm sure, and of course, we've also gutted the IRS because that's part of the deep state. So I'm wondering if a lot of money is gonna be coming in. We were 20 trillion in debt before this, and Trump was just putting everything on the card. Then we signed this $2 trillion bill. I mean, you mentioned the last crisis where we- Obama asked for 780 billion. The Republicans went apeshit, but he got it. Now Trump signs one for 2 trillion, like it's the dinner bill. And I just wonder how long can America, can our government just keep printing money before we have a crash that makes the last one look like nothing? Look, it's a great question. And honestly, no one knows the answer because the United States, you know, I mean, at some level, the government of the United States has an infinite time horizon. As long as people are willing to loan it money, interest rates are low, but our interest payments, the debt that we have to (9/44)
pay every year, those interest payments gets higher and higher. But the real crisis bill is local and state governments because they can't print money. They don't have the endless piggy bank and the printing presses. And in those places, remember, how do local governments sustain themselves? Sales taxes, even more than income taxes and income taxes. Who is buying anything right now, right? So those, I think you're gonna see an absolute cratering of state and local government. And that's where, particularly for poor people, particularly for your lower middle class people, you know, you really are going to see a hemorrhaging for people, homelessness issues, you know, all the kinds of problems that local and state governments often deal with. This is gonna be very bad. And, you know, I don't know if you saw, Steve Mnuchin says that the $1,200 that the federal government is giving people, well, that should last them 10 weeks at least. You know, which is a kind of startling theory. Right, (10/44)
well, and also because of, you know, all the rest of the shit that's going on, people didn't notice that Trump fired the guy who is supposed to be in charge of overseeing this $2 trillion because he was an Obama appointee. He also fired Michael Atkinson, I think is the man's name. He is the inspector general who passed along the Ukraine whistle-blowers, whistle-blowing to Congress, which is his job. People are not noticing these things that Trump is doing. And I gotta say, I have buyer's remorse about impeachment. I was for it. Now that I know what I know, as pundits always say, knowing what you know now, all I see is that Trump was exonerated and now he's inoculated. And now he knows he can get away with anything. Now he knows the Republicans won't stop anything. And gee whiz, I wonder what's next. You know, trying to defund the post office because he doesn't want mail-in voting. You know, panic times are very prone to exploitation by people who wanna seize power. Certainly you have (11/44)
written about that subject a lot. Yeah, it's sad to watch in countries like Hungary and even in India where the government basically is taking advantage of these emergencies to arrest journalists. I mean, in Hungary, the guy basically just suspended parliament and said, I'm just gonna rule by presidential decree. And this process goes on until I say the emergency is over. Trump must be watching that and salivating. I have to say, what Trump is doing, is, you know, it's the smaller American version. It's exactly what you say, which is he's taking advantage not so much of emergency powers to become a dictator, but of the news cycle, which he understands better than frankly the constitution and emergency powers. He understands the media and he understands the news cycle and he knows no one is covering the things you're describing. No one understands, nobody's paying attention. And so I suspect we're gonna see a lot more of the kind of thing you've just been talking about, which is all (12/44)
these little scores he's wanted to settle, all kinds of smaller appointments, because, you know, if you look at the pages of the newspaper, look at the newscasts, it's all COVID all the time. Who has time to notice a little abuse of power here and there? Well, I hope that changes soon. I hope I see you soon, Fareed. Don't get too used to this, please. I hear people say, oh, maybe we keep doing this. It's not so bad. It's terrible. And we need to have dinner in person. I totally agree. Aristotle says man is a social animal and I think Aristotle is right. Glad you feel that way. Thank you, sir. I'll see you soon. So the first week we were doing it from my backyard, I thought, oh, I'm gonna do new rules from this tree. And then I saw Jimmy Fallon a couple of nights earlier did his opening for the tree and I don't like to repeat. So, but then I noticed Jimmy really was only like three feet high in the tree. So I love Jimmy, but let's have a little contest. Whoever can get higher in the (13/44)
tree gets to own the tree for whatever bit you wanna use. So I just gotta beat three feet and then it'll be on you. Okay. Okay, Jimmy. I don't know what this is. Trust me, we'll measure it. But whatever it is, you get higher, you own the tree. Until then, tree's mine. It's on, bitch. Okay, my next guest is a Republican Congressman from Texas and author of the new book, Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage. Please welcome Dan Crenshaw. Congressman, thank you for doing this. I must tell you, I first became aware of you as I think many Americans did when Pete Davidson of Saturday Night Live made that joke about you. And I have to tell you, I am such a fan of what you said because you never hear that in American life. You said, look, it was wrong, but let's just forgive each other. I know you've done much better things for this country, five tours you did overseas, but thank you for your service in calling out victim culture. Well, I appreciate that, Bill. And first of all, (14/44)
thanks for having me. I know we had planned to do this in the studio in Los Angeles, unfortunately. Life took a different turn. Now, the phrase I used after Pete Davidson said that, which I think you would love this phrase, is try hard not to be offended, or try hard not to offend, but try even harder not to offend, or be offended, please, I'm really screwing this up. Try hard not to offend, try even harder not to be offended. And I think that'd be a way to live for all of us. No, and we both share this disdain for victim culture and for lots of stuff, trophy syndrome. I hope I have some credibility with you because I did a show called Politically Incorrect, which started in 1993, when I think you were about 10. And I was onto this shit a long time ago, and it hasn't gotten any better. I think you do have some credibility for sure. In conservative circles, I don't know how often you test or do focus groups amongst conservatives, but we generally think of you as a real liberal. And that (15/44)
means something. There's a difference between liberalism and leftism, and we can disagree wholeheartedly on the best way to govern our country, or the best way to perceive a problem and the framework with which to approach problem solving. But open-mindedness and the ability to debate should be a key tenant of liberalism, and at least in the classical sense. And so now we do appreciate it. Okay, so let's debate a little bit. I mean, you say in your book, I'm gonna quote here, you call out automatic assignment of blame outward. That's what we were just talking about. Help me understand how someone who calls out the outward assignment of blame can be such a supporter of a president who does nothing but pass the buck, lie, finger point, shirk responsibility. Tell me how you can support someone with your background, someone like that. Yeah, it didn't take long for Trump to come up. I would say I support the country, right? And the president's success is certainly tied to the success of the (16/44)
country. I support his policy agenda. When I disagree with his policy agenda, I openly disagree with it. This isn't, Republicans always get asked this question, and there's this demand that we always have to answer. What do you feel about him? Well, don't you wanna comment on his latest tweet, and his latest out, and the way he lashed out? And no, I don't. I can't defend everything. He doesn't have the same style as I do. I don't consider him my spiritual guide by any means. But let me tell you a quick story. When I was blown up, sitting in my hospital bed, President Obama was doing the rounds at Walter Reed, just like President Trump does now, and just like President Bush did before him. It's a really neat thing. It's a really interesting connection that the president gets with these wounded, wounded active duty soldiers that is never publicized. And even though I may have disagreed with so many levels with President Obama, I made sure to get up, and I was excited. I was genuinely (17/44)
happy, and to shake that man's hand, and have him sign the American flag on my wall, and even though we disagree on political things, and I think I would like us to get to that point with this president as well. Okay, but you do what a lot of Republicans do. You talk about his tweets and his style. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the person who is the leader of the country at a time of crisis. And we have to go through what he actually has done. This is important stuff. It's about life and death, and it's about our economy, and everything that's really important. It's not tweets and it's not style. Let's just go through the timeline, okay? Because he was warned. This did not have to happen. Alex Azar, his health and human services guy, January 18th, he warned him about this. And again, on January 30th, Trump said he was being an alarmist. Peter Navarro, somebody else who talks to Trump a lot, told him directly January 29th, you gotta get ahead of this. February 10th- two (18/44)
days later, he implemented a restrictive travel ban from China, which he was widely criticized for. That same day on January 31st, Nancy Pelosi proposed the No Ban Act, which would be congressional limitation on what President Trump's actually able to do with that travel restriction. Okay, but that, I mean, he lies about that. First of all, he didn't- How does he lie about it? What do you mean? He said he stopped people coming in from China. He did not. He said he was ahead of it. 43 countries did it before we did. There are still people coming in from China. He only stopped foreign nationals. Yeah, okay, let me address that, because I know that's what people are saying right now. But the reality is, that was about 40,000 people came in after that. These are US citizens and green card holders and pass court holders being repatriated. US citizens. So you have to make the argument then that we shouldn't allow them in. And it sounds to me like you're fully agreeing with President Trump on (19/44)
this when everybody else disagreed with him. And if you're saying that you wish that travel restriction had been more extreme, okay, fine. You apparently had the foresight back then, but when nobody else did. But the fact is, if Joe Biden was in charge at that moment, he's already said he wouldn't have done it. He criticized it at the time. Nancy Pelosi actually proposed legislation to stop it. Okay, but people are still coming in from China. It wasn't just foreign nationals, but let's get off that. Let me just go back to the timeline for a minute. February 10th, after these warnings, he says it's gonna go away in April with the heat because he had a hunch. February 25th, he goes to India. This is four days after the White House Coronavirus Task Force said, we're going to have to lock down the country. And Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who's in charge of the Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Wait a second, let me just finish. She announced this on the 26th. He, on the 25th, (20/44)
that we're gonna have to lock down the country. He said the next day, 15 people have it and it's soon going to be close to zero. March 6th, he said, anyone who wants a test can get it, which is still completely wrong. Let me stick to February, because you mentioned February 25th. The day before, February 24th, that's when the administration requested two and a half billion dollars from Congress to fulfill CDC, NIH, and FDA funding to combat the virus. And the potential spread of it. What happened right then? I'll tell you, because I was in Congress and I know what happened. Did we vote on a supplemental funding bill? No. Did we wait days to vote? No, still didn't vote on it. You know what we voted on later that week? Nancy Pelosi, the only thing she would put on the floor to vote on was a bill to ban flavored tobacco. That's what actually happened. It was only a week later that we actually voted on supplemental funding that the administration requested. Your criticism appears to be (21/44)
based in one thing, that Trump was overly optimistic. That's his style. You know, again, you can criticize it, that's fine. But it's not connected to the actions that were actually taken. Because if I back up even further, you know, February 14th, CDC announces ongoing work with five laboratories to perform community-based influenza surveillance and study the spread of the virus. We're in a fact-finding mode in February. People forget this. We weren't. People keep calling February this lost month. The world- But it's really not. That's an easy and cheap accusation because there's no big, bold moves taken like there was in January or like there was in March. But the reality is, our government was working to create that test. Now, did they work as fast as we would have liked? I don't know, of course not. And there's a lot of reasons for that, which I'm happy to go into. By March 3rd, there was only 102 cases in the United States. And yet I'm hearing criticism that we should have been (22/44)
locked down weeks earlier. But would you think the American people would have accepted that with only 100 cases in the United States? Italy didn't lock down until March 10th. Spain, not until March 14th. UK, not until later in March. Prince's like Sweden's never locked down. And so I provide all of that context as we try to basically accuse this man of, well, he's being accused of having blood on his hands. And context is so important here. Well, it is. And also it's not just about being optimistic. It's about being right. The world was aware of this. And since when does America take its lead from Italy and Spain? Well, because those were where the outbreaks were happening. I understand. Well, I'm pointing it out again for context. If we're gonna criticize somebody's actions, we have to do it in the context of the facts they knew at the time. And so I'm just trying to be fair here that I don't really care about defending him or his actions. I just care about letting people know the (23/44)
truth. And when people make these accusations, I have to ask them a question. Is the goal to make Trump look better or is the goal to get to the truth? Because there's two different sets of answers for that. Okay, but sometimes they converge. Sometimes the truth is that somebody who says, I have a hunch this is going to go away. Is that someone you would want to have served with? I mean, my God, I don't understand again, why someone with your resume, you were in Fallujah for God's sakes. Would you want someone, a commander to say that to you to blame everybody else if something goes wrong and then to say, I have a hunch the enemy's not gonna be in there. What's the task? No, I understand that. So here's how I would describe my answer to that. When bullets are flying past my head, I don't need to raise my voice. And I write about this in my book too. Calm breeds calm, panic breeds panic. Being an optimistic, exuding positivity and calmness and crisis is exactly how we ask our seals to (24/44)
lead. And now I'm not sure I see a lot of evidence for blaming others, maybe blaming China, although there's a lot of evidence for that. So maybe that's a good place to play blame. But I did it last week. I don't see Trump blaming Democrats here. He's exposing hypocrisy. And maybe we're confusing that with blame. But no, I mean, again, calm breeds calm. And that's how we would lead in the seal themes. Okay, so in Texas, there was a six hour line to vote a couple of weeks ago. It does look like the Republican Party doesn't want people to vote, especially mail in vote. And there's gonna be people now who are afraid to go to the polls because of this disease. Where do you stand on that? I'm sorry, go ahead. Do you think Republicans are trying to stop people from voting? Do you really want it? Wouldn't you rather lose an election than live in a country where we're not really getting our franchise? So the lines in Houston here, and then those big six hour waits you saw, Republicans aren't (25/44)
in charge of those elections. The Democrats are in charge of our county elections here. They run that. The county clerk is a Democrat, recently won. That's why they're in charge. They've taken full responsibility for those lines, because basically what happened is a lot of machines went down, and that's what caused the lines. So first of all, it's not Republicans, it's Democrats in these urban areas that actually run the election system. And second, there was no ill intent, even I don't think ill intent from Democrats either. There was mistakes made. In Texas, you have two weeks to early vote from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for two weeks straight. You can go anywhere in the county and cast your vote. You don't have to vote on election day. If you're elderly or sick and disabled, you can vote in by mail. No, it's not the case that we don't want people to vote. And of course, that's always the accusation. But it's not really based in evidence. Mail-in ballots do have, there's a break of custody of (26/44)
a vote there. If it's not fraudulent, there's at least the possibility for mistakes to be made, and we see that often. I read an op-ed recently from a former Texas member who was going door to door based on voter registration, just knocking on doors, and would find a group of non-U.S. citizens, but they're registered there, or a empty lot, but it's registered. So if you start mailing all of these types of places ballots, well then, it's not ill intent, but there's the possibility for a lot of bad things to happen. And so the question we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to, especially from a national level, try to revamp our entire election system, with the potential for all these problems? And for what, exactly? And so I don't know if your question is related to COVID-19, or just elections in general. Well, everything's related to that these days. And there of course is a lot to be said about your answer, which is a terrific answer from a press spokesman for that cause. But I (27/44)
don't have time to do it now. I hope you can come to our show as we plan sometime, and we will take up this issue of whether Republicans really are protecting your franchise or not. But I appreciate you doing this. I appreciate everything you've done for this country. And I hope I see you in person soon. Thank you. Hey, thanks, Bill. Great to be with you. Thank you. Well, everybody knows that Google does the most popular searches, right? Tells us what they are. And of course, in this crisis, they're a little different. They're things like, when is my stimulus check coming? And you know, how do I cut my own hair? But we did a deep dive into some of the other most popular Google searches. Would you like to hear them? Of course you would. You're at home screaming, Bill, what are the other most popular Google searches? I have them right here, luckily. For example, why do my grandkids keep asking about their inheritance? Is one of them. How can you tell when Whole Foods is price gouging? (28/44)
Popular. Was Andrew Cuomo in Scarface? Is it illegal to make a four-year-old live in the garage? Oh, I love number five. Sexy Anthony Fauci Halloween costume. Popular Google search. Does blue cheese go bad or does it get better? Was six. Can I dye my roots with a Sharpie? That was me. I Googled that. Where can I go to sell all my pants? All of them. What month is it? Can I use my water pick as a bidet? And of course, can I get divorced on Zoom? Most popular Google searches. Okay, and finally today, we have one of my very good friends, friend of the show, writer at large for New York Magazine, all around rock on tour. My old friend, Andrew Sullivan. Hey there, Bill. How are you? Hey there, Bill. How are you? I'm good. I wanted to have you on because you are one of our best friends of the show from the beginning, a favorite of the viewers and always give me a great show. And I just wanna check in with my friend because we're all suffering through this, but it's not equal suffering. And (29/44)
some people, look, I just said earlier in the show that I'm not really scared to get this. I don't wanna get it. Maybe I'm wrong. It'll take me out, but I don't think so. But you are someone who should not get this and you are taking it as you should very seriously. No, I mean, I am a long-term HIV survivor, which is not a huge deal in this situation. It just means that if I survived 18 years or more than that with HIV, I don't wanna die of this in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of an anticlimax. But I have bad lungs, that's the truth of the matter, and always have. And I know that if I would have come into contact with this, I don't think I'd do very well. And so I've been really since early February, to be honest, wearing a mask and being totally isolated. It's been six weeks for me now of not seeing really in any close sense another human being. And I live alone right now and that's been really hard. And I'm not sure how much longer human beings can really do this. Well, apparently (30/44)
you're gonna have to do it for a while. And apparently you're being so safe, it looks like there's not even anything in your house. What are you in a rubber room? Jesus Christ. He's put in a Ziploc bag, basically. I was just gonna say to you, one thing that makes this easier for you than a lot of people is that you're a true intellectual. So somebody as smart as you, there's a million books that you wanna read that will engage you. Whereas fucking dummies, all they got is bad television and I know I'm insulting them, but they're not watching this. They don't care about you and me. The dummies are doing something else. Yeah, but you know what? After a while, we all wanna Netflix. We all wanna, I mean, I end up doing Angry Birds. I end up just looking at my dogs for a while. I end up smoking a lot of weed in the evenings to get me through this, to take the edge off the days. I just really missed, to be honest with you, human contact. I just wanna hug. I want some kind of company and I (31/44)
can't. And I think because I'm not gonna be safe until there's a really good treatment or a vaccine, I'm looking at maybe a year of this and I'm beginning to figure out how to wrap my head around that and how to live as a social animal completely alone. And to be honest with you, I probably wouldn't do it if I weren't scared shitless about this actual experience. Right, and I'm advising you to do it. You should be and you should be scared shitless. I shouldn't, maybe I should, but you should. Some people should. But let's see, I mean, you mentioned being an AIDS survivor. Just, I remember that period. And there were some similarities as far as panic. And certainly in the gay community, there was even more panic. How would you compare and contrast them? And what's your favorite plague? Now, you know, the thing that really resonates with me right now, and I think a lot of us who survived that epidemic have these almost PTSD experiences. And the first is that you're just not aware or not (32/44)
sure of if you could get this. This thing is stalking and you don't know if or when you're finally gonna get caught. And that insecurity, that tension, I'm negative, I'm negative, could I be positive? And then when you're positive, you're then like, am I gonna get AIDS? Am I gonna get another? And every day you live with the assumption and the assurance that you may not live for much longer. So you have to develop an attitude of mind that lives, I know it's a cliche, but lives in the now. That accepts that we take this one day at a time. But in fact, living in a plague is really just an intensification of normal life. We're all gonna die. We're all vulnerable to accidents, to illnesses, to all sorts of things. I lost my dad two months ago from an accident, fell down a flight of stairs. I couldn't even get to the burial because of this bloody disease. But things happen like that. And I think I was taught very early in my life because of AIDS and HIV that you can't trust anything and you (33/44)
could be gone tomorrow and therefore live now and also learn to live with uncertainty. We don't know the future. We have no idea where this is gonna end up. We could get a good treatment soon, which would shift the analysis and the balance altogether. But we may not, we may have to wait for a vaccine, in which case we're gonna have to just correct our behavior. But you know, I thought I was gonna avoid HIV. I practiced safe sex, as I thought. I still got it. And that haunts me because I'm doing everything I should with this virus. I'm wearing a mask, I'm wearing gloves, I'm staying by myself, but I still worry. It's gonna get me. And if it gets me, it's gonna get me good. But you're right, something's gonna get you. None of us are gonna get out of this alive. And that's the case. I could not agree with you more about the philosophy of life. Live while you have it. Go out strong if you have to go out. Something's gonna come for us. I noticed that hookup sites are still very active. I (34/44)
read an article about it the other day, Tinder and Grindr. Obviously, people share that philosophy. Yeah, look, there's a difference between, however, there's a difference between risking your life, unnecessarily, and accepting that your life is fragile and precarious. I don't think one has to go to the next step of reckless behavior or inviting this in. And to be honest, when I look at, here I'm confessing, I look at Tinder or Grindr, I think a lot of it's just chat right now. I really do. I don't think a lot of it is actually moving up. I think that would change over time. I mean, the idea of me going without any sexual activity for a year is, you know, that's not extremely encouraging, is it? I mean, it's not exactly a uplifter. But you do what you can. And I'm sure maybe at some point I will need to live some more. And some of us are gonna have to take those risks because we want to be alive when we die. We want to actually have a real life rather than living constantly in fear. (35/44)
And I think at some point in the next few months, a majority of Americans are gonna say, you know, I just gotta live. I gotta live, I can't cower in the face of this anymore. And that doesn't mean being crazy and reckless and ignoring everything. It just means being extra careful and trying to live your life again as it used to be. Right, well said. Let me ask you one more question because you're always a great political commentator on our show. And we forget there is an election going on and now it is Joe Biden. I know you never liked Hillary. You probably thought Biden would have been a better candidate last time. What do you think now? Are you hopeful about the election? Do you think Biden is gonna be a good candidate? Do you think he'll win? If he does, do you think Trump will go? What do you think? I'll be honest with you. He'll do. I think that's how I feel about Biden. I'm not that confident about him because I believed all along he's just, it's not his fault. He's just a little (36/44)
old and he's a little out of it. And that's tough in this environment. And even though I will vote for him and will support him and I'm happy that he's not being outflanked on the left too much so that they don't go too crazy and put people off in the middle about the Democratic Party. At the same time, he should have run last time. Now he's running. I think he's got a pretty good chance. The other thing I think to be honest with you was we're beginning to look at this. I don't know whether you saw the Gallup poll this week but just saw Trump's ratings drop a huge amount to 43% that he's not doing well in this crisis. People can see he's out of his depth. The bullshit that he puts out, the lies and everybody sees this now as a show. When your lives are at stake, you look at this more seriously. And I think it's quite clear now that he's not up to this job, he never was. And not only that, in a crucial moment, he's dividing the country in a very dangerous situation in a way that no (37/44)
president ever should. And I think I really do believe this time, and this is the first I've really believed this since he got elected, that people, it's running dry. It's wearing thin. And I think it may not be necessary for Biden to win this election because Trump will lose it. I hope you're right. I do too. I hope I see you soon. I'll leave you with this note of optimism. A lot of times with crises, I'm thinking of Y2K, I'm thinking of the fires in Kuwait that Saddam said and they said would take two years to put out and it took eight months and the BP oil spill. They often tell us it's gonna be worse and then that it's actually better so we can be happy when it is better. So I don't think you'll be locked up for a year and I hope I see you sooner than that. Take care. You know we love you. Bye, Bill. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Andrew. And now it's time for New Rule. Okay, New Rule, instead of holding sporting events with no people in the stands, let each team have one fan, a single (38/44)
supporter to represent their city. Like in Philly, a bald guy yelling, you suck. In Cleveland, a divorced dad crying with a bag over his head. And in LA, a celebrity who really isn't a fan and proves it by throwing the ball straight into the dirt. New Rule, you can't call it an endorsement when there's only one guy left in the race. It's gay. We can all admit it. Joe Biden is nobody's first choice. More like being stranded on a desert island with another guy and thinking, well, I guess I'm gay now. New Rule, someone has to tell me if it's safe to eat the tartar sauce. I mean as an entree. New Rule, no more picking up produce at the grocery store and putting it back. Those days are gone. Find a kumquat and commit to it. And don't put it next to your ear and start tapping it like you're the fruit whisperer. New Rule, we have to start breaking the news to the dogs that we won't always be home. But when we do walk out that door, Chico, don't blame yourself. It's not you, it's me. Oh, and (39/44)
I'm gonna need that bandana. And finally, New Rule, now that we're starting to see some hope in all this, don't hope shame me. You know, the problem with nonstop gloom and doom is it gives Trump the chance to play the optimist. And optimists tend to win American elections. FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. You know, as full of shit as he is, I could see Trump riding that into a second term. And then there will be no hope left for you to shame. So look, if this insanity happens again, news sources have to rein it in. Everyone knows corona is no walk in the park because you literally can't walk in the park. But at some point, the daily drumbeat of depression and terror veers into panic porn. Enough with the life will never be the same headlines. And stop showing us this. You know, everything looks scary when you magnify it a thousand times. Here's a pubic hair, boo! Last month, the Washington Post ran the headline, it feels like a war zone with this picture. This is (40/44)
not a war zone. This is a man with a box of eggs. And I've never seen a war zone with this much bacon. Or how about this one? Horrifying simulation reveals the dangers of jogging during the coronavirus pandemic. Look, this virus is easy to catch, but if you can't avoid it jogging, you can't outrun much. Two weeks ago, Inside Edition said 76,000 in the world had died, so some are making comparisons to the apocalypse. The apocalypse? Really? Because most of us are sitting at home smoking delivery weed and binge watching a show about a gay zookeeper. Unless you're a frontline healthcare worker, for whom the phrase, above and beyond the call of duty, doesn't even begin to cover it, this is not the apocalypse. And I know, I know, you expect Inside Edition to be over the top. But the New York Times, they used the same word last week. Braced for apocalyptic surge, New York avoids worst so far. And this was an article about how much better the city was doing than expected. Projections had them (41/44)
needing 58,000 hospital beds, and it turned out they needed a quarter of that. Still bad, but you don't have to put hot sauce on a jalapeno. Geez, you sound like Lindsey Graham talking about ISIS when Obama was president. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home. Another recent Times headline was, Millions more out of work. What the fuck is it's terrifying doing in a headline? Granted, it's a quote, but who are they quoting? Trump? Fauci? Stephen King? No, they're quoting an event planner in North Hollywood. No offense to the event planners of the world, it's amazing what you people could do with pine cones and silver spray paint. But why are you in my headline? How about this? Just tell me, millions are out of work without the flashlight under the chin, and I'll decide how I feel about it. There was never headlines like this before. There was no, it's terrifying, planes hit World Trade Center. There was no, it's sad, Titanic sinks after (42/44)
hitting iceberg, or first atomic bomb dropped. Ouch. The media also seems obsessed with finding young people who've died of COVID-19. The Washington Post says there's 759 under 50 years old. Horrible, of course. Then I looked up how many under 50 died of the flu last year. Almost 3,000. So all this misery from distancing did some good. Can I be happy about that? Death is terrible, of course, no matter how it comes. I'm against it and I don't care who knows it. But giving a proper perspective isn't a cover-up of the truth. It is the truth. Sudden dramatic deaths like plane crashes, shark attacks, tornadoes, mass shootings, terrorism, awful as they are, kill far less than seasonal flu or even hospital-acquired infections may very well kill more than coronavirus. 99,000 of them last year. 50,000 die of nephritis every year. I don't even know what that is. 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment and many will lose their health insurance. Studies show lacking health insurance kills (43/44)
people. But it doesn't lead to pictures like this and it doesn't happen all at once. We need the news to calm down and treat us like adults. Trump calls you fake news. Don't make him be right. Okay, that's our show. I wanna thank my guests, Fareed Zakaria, Dan Crenshaw, and Andrew Sullivan, and we will be back next week, you guessed it, from my backyard. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #607: David Duchovny, Matt Taibbi, Lis Smith.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Listen to this. Biden got COVID again and had the best week of his presidency. I don't know if this is related, but today, Kamala Harris was seen rubbing herself with a coughing monkey. I... No, they just... No, not funny. They just declared monkey pox. The monkey pox is a national emergency. And listen to this. In New York City, they found one case of polio, but the health guy says, well, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and we found it in the wastewater. You know what? I've had it with viruses. I really have. Polio in the wastewater in New York. First, okay. First, I couldn't have unprotected gay sex. Then I couldn't eat at a Chinese wet market. And now I can't play in wastewater? Well, fuck this. Honestly, Biden had his best week in a very long time. Jobs? Way up. I mean, like crazy up. We've gotten all the jobs back from the pandemic. Unemployment is 3.5%. Gas prices way down. And he got... And (1/44)
he got his big climate bill today. Kirsten Sinema from Arizona, you familiar with her? She's a... Okay. All right. Well, she joined up. It's good to see the... Good to see the Democrats can be bipartisan with themselves. It's... This was me. She was holding this up for something called the carried interest loophole. This is very important to her. And they gave it up. It's, you know, something only hedge fund managers care about. Do you care about this? But she looked around Scottsdale and said, it's about time someone stood up for the wealthy. This is, again, this is a tax loophole that only involves hedge fund managers. You know, I've seen many campaign ads in my life. Firemen, farmers, you know, welders, a kid pulling a dog in a wagon. It's rarely hedge fund managers. I've never seen one with a guy. It's morning in America. And I've been up all night snorting blow off a hooker's ass. I've never seen that. And not me. Thank you, mom. But, you know, this is the big climate bill. Not (2/44)
one Republican voted for it. It's going to be 50 plus the vice president passing this thing. You know, the environment, they're just not into it. There was just some way to get the earth pregnant. That's, uh, is the big story this week. Kansas had an election. Kansas. Kansas had an election and abortion rights was on the ballot and it won big in Kansas. You know who spent a lot of money on this? Trying to get it to go the other way against the Catholic Church. Spent millions, millions that could have gone on to pay off kids they raped. It's just a shame. It was a mixed day, Tuesday, election day there. A lot of election deniers won in Arizona and a bunch of other states. But probably the worst one of all on the Republican side, Eric Greitens in Missouri. He lost. He's the governor. Yeah, no, he's not well known, but he had to resign for sex scandal. Now they allegedly was coercing his hairdresser into giving him oral sex. Apparently he tied her up, tore her clothes, spanked her, took (3/44)
nude photos of her without her permission. What we in Hollywood call casting. The other big win this week for Joe Biden was we got, I'm on Al-Zawahiri. I know you kids don't know who that is, but I'm going to tell you, there was this thing called 9-11 and he was the mastermind. He was the real planner. Bin Laden was a pimp. It was Al-Zawahiri all along. Okay. They got him. With a drone, yes. Took them 21 years. Who was the kill squad? The Yavaldi police squad? Listen to this. This is how bad ass our military is. They got him standing on his balcony. Didn't kill anybody else because it wasn't a bomb. It was a Hellfire R9X, which is not a bomb. It has six rotating blades and a strip of soothing aloe. And just shivved him to. In two weeks this will be, your eight year old will be using it on call of duty. You know, this weapon. And of course they got him on the balcony there. And ironically they would never have known it was him if he was wearing a burka. But you know that's just. The (4/44)
other big internationals, Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan. A lot of people didn't want her to go. She said fuck that, I'm going. It infuriated China. And out of habit John Cena apologized. But Nancy said I had to go. I had to go to make the case for preserving democracy and rejecting authoritarianism. And if it works there I'm going to try it on the Republicans. Alright we got a great show. We got Matt Taibbi and Liz Smith. First up, he is an award winning actor, director, musician and best selling author. His latest book is The Reservoir, a novella. David Duchovny is on. It's a long time? It is a long time. Too long. We used to play basketball together at Gary Shandling's many years ago. Yes. Good days. Good days. So I have so much to catch up with you on. But since we have limited time I'm going to jump right into your book because I feel like that's actually the best way to get to know who you are. Because the character in this novella, I'm not going to say it's you, but it's a guy your (5/44)
age. It's a middle aged white guy. Yeah. Living where you live at the time. He does live where I live. Right. Doing what you were doing during the pandemic. Yes. Look, I wrote a novel once. It's fucking awesome to novelize your life because you can edit out the shit you don't like, create the shit you do like, or maybe even exaggerate your bad points. It's fun, right? Well, that's the art part. I think it was Neil Simon who was asked what's autobiography in your work and he said, it's all autobiography, even the parts I make up. That's the way I feel. But it all gets filtered through whatever consciousness I have. And when I land on a character, even though he looks, resembles me and all that, I get the slant of it and then I'm off and running when I'm writing that way. So it is and it isn't me. And the amazing thing about the process of writing is as you come to a day after day after day and you're a different person. I'm not schizophrenic, but I'm a different person every day. I sit (6/44)
down with a different consciousness in a way. And it kind of builds like a sedimentation in a way. And it becomes its other thing. And it's not me in a way, even though it came from you. Do you write high? No. That's such a not unreasonable question. It's not at all. So many artists and writers have written high. I revise high. Yeah. I like to get up very, very early when I'm writing because it's not high, but I feel like if you're coming out of sleep, you're not quite in that conscious realm. So you're trailing your unconsciousness with you a little bit. So 4.35 in the morning, a little coffee, and then I go. Oh, coffee is your high? No, no. That's just to get up and go to the bathroom. Well, what's your... I was just giving you more of my autobiography. Right. Well, what gets you high? I mean, you said you revised because I have the same thing. I've said this before. I have like a bicameral mind. Yes. It's like Congress. I have two houses. I have the sober. Who's got the gavel? Well, (7/44)
I have the sober and then the stone. They have to come together on legislation. When they both agree, I will sign it. Is that what you're talking about? Have you ever read Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind? Have you ever read that book? No. You'd be very interested in that. It's probably the same thing. I mean, he says, I might get this wrong, so forgive me, but he basically says that God, as we have come to know it, is actually one half of our brain talking to the other half of our brain and that we mistook it for God. But anyway, be that as it may, Bill. I think that's giving a lot of credit to people who don't even have half of their brain. It's only that we're stuck. To answer your question, gummies. I'm a big fan of the gummies. Gummies, there. I love a gummy. I mean, they're nostalgic. They remind you of being a six-year-old. Right. And the other thing- They put vitamins in it and now they put pot in them. It's fantastic. What I love about also when I wrote my novel is your (8/44)
omniscient. You're not that way in any other art form, really. You can't be that in a novel. The character was thinking this and he wanted to do this. It's so much fun to be omniscient. That's God-like. Yes, it is God-like. And I think that you point out an interesting thing, which is that's why it's hard to make a good book into a good movie. It's often easy to make a bad book into a good movie because it's plot-oriented. But that omniscience, that consciousness is very difficult to get through just on a flat screen. The thing that's not fun about novels is that no one reads anymore. I mean, we're going to sell some here. Well, I remember I called my publisher and I said, how'd we do the first week? And he's like, great. And I was like, fantastic. What did we sell? He's like, 4,000 copies. I was like, 4,000 copies? I mean, I must have bought 2,000 of those. That's what always deterred me from doing it again. It was just like so few people. You can see it as liberating, though, because (9/44)
it's just for you. It's something you're doing for yourself and 4,000 friends. Well, it's going to jump to 5,000 after tonight. And it's a good book. And I love it. I think it's very clever to make it a novella because in a land where people don't read, at least they're going, oh, that means short. Yes, I know. And short's good. I like short. Painless. This is how I advertise it. Not homework. You know what it reminded me of? Did you ever see Eyes Wide Shut? I did see it a long time ago. You know, that's a novella. Is it? Yes. I didn't know that. You never read the book. No, I haven't read that book. I'm not shaming you. But you know the movie with Tom Cruise. Yeah, I know the movie. That's what I was thinking of. I didn't know it was a novella. It was a novella and it's kind of like yours in that when the guy leaves his apartment in New York, you kind of don't know what's real and what's not. Right. Right. So this Tom Cruise goes out of the house. Right. You're like, is he dreaming (10/44)
this? Yeah. Well, I mean, I felt that and I think we'd all share this aside from being autobiographical for me. But during Covid, we were ingesting the world through our screens as we do now. And we were seeing these images of what was happening in the world. And it was very intense. But we had no contact with the outside world because we were inside. And there was a sense when you went outside, you didn't know what to expect anymore in your world. Yeah. And that hasn't happened in our lifetimes. That's why it was such a good, I thought, conceit to write a novel around. So before I lose you for time, I just have to ask you about your franchise, because I know you probably don't think of yourself as a guy who has a franchise. Footlocker? But I just feel like your franchise, which is great to have a franchise and yours is a great one because it was a great show. Yeah, you did it in the 90s. You rebooted it a few years ago. Yeah, it's been two movies. Yeah. You're going to do it again and (11/44)
you should do it again. Right. Because it's because it's it's it's a great show. You're entertaining. You're great at it. That's ever more relevant. Well, it's not a day that goes by. I don't read about some. Now it's Congress looking into it. The Pentagon is looking into it. They're all saying now what they call them unidentified aerial phenomenon because UFO wasn't good. Yeah. They're rebranding. Why? It's the same fucking thing. Did I ever tell you my my theory of the UFOs? You might like this. I know we're out of time or whatever. No. No. It seemed to me, do you remember, you know, the phenomenon like Ship of Fools back back in medieval times, they didn't really have prisons built or insane asylums built before that. No, I didn't read that book. So well, the idea was like sometimes they would take their criminal offenders or their insane people, put them on a ship and send them out like we don't want to deal with you anymore. We're going to put you out on the high seas and woe be (12/44)
to you if you come upon this ship of fools. That's what Ship of Fools is when you hear that. So I think because people that have dealings with aliens that we tell us stories, usually they get their teeth drilled and their anuses probed. So so my my theory is that some alien, some advanced alien civilization has gotten fed up with their sex offenders and their dentists. And they put them on an intergalactic ship, send them out into the great sea of the beyond of the galaxies. And sometimes they come around us or it's just their dentist and it's a very deep cavity. Perhaps, perhaps their anatomies are different from ours and they get confused. We know what they look like because they all do look the same when people, you know, witness. So I don't know. But when Navy pilots are saying, I can't tell you what this thing is. And Neil deGrasse Tyson was here. And of course, I utmost respect for him. He knows things I will never know or could never know. I don't have that size brain. OK, so he (13/44)
pooh-poohed the idea that it's alien. He did. Yeah. He said, why did they just reveal themselves to Navy pilots? Well, it took me a year, Neil deGrasse, but I figured out an answer. What is it? Oh, I forgot. No. Because that's who they're worried about might be opposing them if they're casing us to attack. What do they give a shit about somebody guy in Peoria? He's not going to fire a squirrel gun at them. These are the people they might have to go against. So they're seeing what they can do, what they can see. That's why they reveal themselves to Navy pilots. Dave, great to see you. Congratulations on the book. Hope to see you soon on the basketball court. David Duchovny. All right, let's meet our panel. OK. He is the author of TK News on Substack. Never miss it. And author of Hate, Inc. Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another. Matt Taivi. Thanks for the shout out in your Tom Cruise column. All right, she's a Democratic strategist and author of the new New York Times (14/44)
bestselling memoir Any Given Tuesday, A Political Love Story. Liz Smith is over here. OK. OK. So, I mentioned Kansas there in the monologue. I think a big question that we've been wondering about has been answered this week in Kansas because people were wondering after the Supreme Court got rid of Roe versus Wade, would this be a big motivator? And the polls kind of said no. Shows polls are bullshit, you know. People lie or the questions phrase, whatever. This is how they indicate what they really care about. Kansas, you could not pick a more perfect state to test this in. And they were, will the Democrats come out motivated by getting rid of Roe versus Wade? Not only the Democrats, the Republicans too. So, I feel like I thought the Democrats were going to get their ass kicked in the midterm elections. I think this is a deal changer. I think this is Juan Soto going to the pod race. I do. I think it changes everything. I think now the Democrats could win this election. And so, I agree (15/44)
with you. If we had had this conversation two months ago, I would have told you Democrats are probably going to get creamed in November. Dobbs does change everything and it changes it in two ways. We all know that there are a lot of Democrats who are disillusioned with Joe Biden. He didn't cancel all of their student loans. He didn't do everything that they wanted. And they were going to sit on their asses in November and not vote for him. But they can't do that anymore now that this is on the ballot. So that's one. The second thing is, there are these voters that I like to call the Biden-Youngkin voters. The suburban voters who voted for Biden, then voted for Youngkin out of dissatisfaction because inflation. Okay, Youngkin for the kids who don't follow this. Glenn Youngkin. Let's not talk in MSNBC-ese. Let's talk for, he was a governor. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm a junkie. In the Virginia governor's race, after Biden won by 10 points, Youngkin beat Terry McCaul. He's the Republican. (16/44)
Yes, he's the Republican. He won in Virginia. Is that a lot of those suburban voters who had, or sort of swing voters, who went from Biden to Youngkin, the Republican in Virginia. Well don't insult them. We're just, let's just be inclusive. I thought Democrats wanted to be inclusive. Okay. All right. Wait, wait, wait, wait. But see, but I don't think- What's your point? But I do not think that they will vote for Republicans when abortion is on the ballot now. Okay, that's what I was saying. So, I want to read- I apologize. No, don't apologize. You didn't do anything wrong. I want to read Gavin Newsom. Now you write about this too, Newsom and DeSantis. I feel like Florida and California crystallize the two sides of America. And man, it's so interesting, Republicans, freedom was like always their brand. But now, abortion rights, taking away of freedom, it's kind of a new ball game with that. So this is an ad that our governor, Gavin Newsom, ran in Florida. He said, freedom is under (17/44)
attack in your state. This is Gavin Newsom of California addressing the Florida voters. Your Republican leaders, they're banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women. I urge all Florida to join the fight. Join us in California. We still believe in freedom. This is so opposite of what they used to do. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, freedom to love. Don't let them take your freedom. So I guess my question is, who's got the freedom fight now? Because I can see the Republicans saying, well, we stand up for your right to have your guns. We don't- COVID bullshit mandates. You have your freedom to be free. I certainly don't always feel free in this state, I must say. And I have felt freer in Florida. But who wins the freedom battle right now? What do you think? Well, first of all, I'm kind of an old school liberal. So I think if you don't believe in freedom for the people you really dislike, you probably don't (18/44)
believe in it at all. And both parties have been bad about that in recent election cycles. And you see this with the very, very restrictive Republican laws that are being passed. You had a North Carolina bill that would have required people to report kids for showing signs of gender nonconformity. I mean, that's a really scary bill, right? But then on the Democratic side, you have all this internet censorship. This state of California has 396,000 regulations, which is 100,000 more than any other state. So I don't think either party has a particular stranglehold on freedom. I think they're both weak on this issue. And this is where I disagree. I do think that the Democrats will go into November as the party of freedom, because Democrats are standing up for the freedom of women to make their own health care decisions, the freedom of people to marry who they love. And the freedom to know that they can send their kids to school without the fear of them being shot up. And to your point (19/44)
about the GOP argument about freedom is they were like, oh, my God, big government. They're making us wear masks. Oh, the temerity, all this. The people who said, OK, we want small government, now they want to make the most private health care decisions for women. They want to put Mike Pence in the OBGYN exam room with women when their feet are in stirrups. And we're all against that. I certainly. But private health care decisions. Be careful with that phrase. I read in the front page of The New York Times this week, there is a new voting bloc, a new constituency anti mandate. They said mostly parents. But these are people who are not going to vote based on Republican or Democrat. They're going to vote based on covid policy. I'm one of them. I don't even have kids. You know, it's a medical issue. I do not want to be dictated. There is no the science, especially in medical science. You can recommend whatever you like. But I must insist you don't insist how I handle my health. I never (20/44)
was. OK. Obama. Obama told me, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Well, I did and I do. And my doctors, I know many of them say very different things because doctors are afraid to speak out. You've written about this a lot. Right. Yeah. And I want to listen to the ones who are sometimes afraid to speak out, although you can find them. Yeah. I think that's the one issue where the Democrats are really, really weak on the freedom topic is the freedom of speech issue. That's become that's become a very difficult and fraught issue for Democrats. You know, ever since the beginning of the content moderation era on the Internet, there are a lot of people who associate the Democratic Party with people being taken off the Internet and, you know, being afraid to say certain things. And that's you know, that's not a positive, which is and it's the complete opposite of what I remember liberalism being about when I was growing up. I mean, you know, especially in medical science, (21/44)
which is eminently debatable. And they've already been wrong about so much in this particular crisis that we've had, not to mention everything they've been wrong about in the past. So don't sit there in your white coat telling me we have all the answers. You obviously don't. I will find the answers with the people I want to find it from. And you will not tell me how to handle it. No, no. But I do agree with that. And we've seen that in the backlash, especially among parents with the education policies. I know you're not a parent. I'm not a parent. I don't have kids in school. But I'm a parent. OK. But, you know, the the how is it the distance learning? It's terrible. It's just terrible. I never hear a good thing about it anyway. But with the distance learning, the masking, all of that went too far on that and alienated people. I do see your viewpoint on that. And I do agree with you on that. So what? Yes. Just quickly, I mean, the Democrats are experiencing an unprecedented swing in (22/44)
approval numbers on the education issue. As recently as the Obama years, they had like a twenty nine thirty point lead on that issue. Now it's kind of a dead heat. You add that to the swings among Hispanic voters. And that's that's one of the reasons to be pessimistic about about the midterms. What about what if the freedom issue is this what I hear from a lot of right wing people forced change. They feel like in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years, there's just been a lot of forced change that they didn't vote for. You know, I mean, some things I think most people are for now, gay marriage. But, you know, there's just been a lot of pronouns and bathrooms and penises in the women's locker room. And yet what? What? You know what I'm saying? Just canceling people and six year olds who are oppressors. And I think their their view is, OK, you know what? You're right. Trump isn't for real voting, but we didn't vote for this either. And that to them is is a lack of. OK, so what I would (23/44)
say about that is when people say, oh, my God, it's the Democrats who are so wrapped up in identity politics. You know, it's not the Democrats who are obsessing over what bathrooms kids go to. It's not the Democrats who are introducing bills in places like Ohio, saying that school kids need genital checks. That is creepy. That is not freedom. And the reason why we're wait, what is and I'm not familiar with the genital. Oh, yeah. So so in Ohio, there's a bill introduced that if you suspect a kid like on a sports team is like of a different gender, that there can be a general check of them. And Republicans introduce that bill. It's well, it's creepy. It's creepy. Also, I don't even know why we have it, but it shouldn't it just be obvious? But it's not Democrats who are who are introducing that. I know. But so you're saying they're imposters, that the people who are pretending to be of one sex. I mean, I'm not saying that. That's what prompted this bill. No, I think what prompted it is (24/44)
because it's a very creepy urge among the Republicans who invade and people's privacy. But it's not a private thing. OK, but it ceases to be a private thing if you're competing against other people. I mean, there are many, many women athletes who are up in arms about this who say I'm actually competing against a man. I'm competing against someone with different muscle mass who may still have a penis. And that's not fair. I want to compete in a prison with somebody. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want to compete against people in my division. Sure. Because there are different physical attributes between a man and a woman. Oh, I'm not saying we should be checking under everybody's skirt. But you know, this was prompted by something. It didn't come out of thin air. But what I would say is, OK, let's look at one. Let's look at the state of let's look at the state of Michigan, for instance. There are, I think, four, five kids who play and, you know, who play in a league that is, you know, separate (25/44)
from their birth gender. This is the GOP finding a problem and trying to do this to divide people. There is not some big threat of women taking over, of men taking over women's sports. Well, men have won sometimes in women's sports in recent years. I mean, there are many examples of this. And no, it's not a big threat. It's not a big deal at all. It's sports. But it does matter to people. Oh, no, I agree with that. And I think that there should be common sense regulations around it. OK. So it is, as I said, kind of entering that political season. And the jockeying for even president, I notice, has begun. Josh Hawley, who was last seen running from the Capitol. I love this. He was running. And yet he has a new book out that is called, what is the name of this book? Manhood. I'm not making this up. The masculine virtues America needs, says the running man. Very interesting. And they're all doing this. The ones who are going to run Tom Cotton. He's another guy definitely going to run for (26/44)
only the strong. You know, this is always the Republican brand, is that we have to out macho and be more manly, manly men than these girly people on the other side. So we've got to hold us to some of the other books that are coming out by the other people who want to be president. Would you like to see some of these? Boy, Ted Cruz has American Fuck Face. The case for shoving liberals' heads in the toilet. Jim Jordan has, are you there, sissy boy? It's me, fist. Lindsey Graham has power bottom, no more leading from behind. Nikki Haley has don't need a dick to have balls. My American story. Sarah Palin, I killed a mockingbird. Ron DeSantis, uncucked. Lessons from a state shaped like a big dick. America's schlong. Kevin McCarthy, the case against learning. Real men don't need directions on how to drive America. No clothes, no problem. Touring the red states naked on my Harley Davidson. Wow. Pence has hung, as told to Mrs. Pence. And Kristi Noem, a good woman and a cold beer. My plan to (27/44)
turn Pete Buttigieg straight. That's Kristi Noem. We're supposed to be here next week. She was booked for quite a while on our show, but she chickened out. So that's. Was she busy trying to make Pete Buttigieg straight? I'm just saying that the tough Republicans, they're so tough they can't even face me. I mean, I understand when the Democrats do it, but come on, Republicans, I thought you were tough. I know you're a little scary, Bill. So I mean, but your boy, Pete Buttigieg, I mean, you were the campaign manager. Senior adviser. Yeah. OK. But you were the one. I mean, I read your book. You're like, oh, I find you found the golden boy. I mean, and he does have remarkable political skills. I mean, I'm a big fan of Pete Buttigieg. But I feel like the Democrats have not done him a big favor by being associated with all this radical sexuality. So I don't think that Leah Thomas winning a few swimming matches is going to. OK. You're obsessed with that. OK, fine. I know, but I don't get what (28/44)
you're saying. But what you're saying is if you look at his polling numbers, I'm saying he's doing extremely well. Really? Yeah, he is. You got eight percent in South Carolina. No, no. I'm talking about the most recent ones. The more people have gotten to know him nationally, he has the highest approval ratings of anyone in the Biden administration. And well, that's not saying much. To me, what is it? What is it that the Democrats are doing? It's the Republicans. I'm just saying every whip rip away. Right. I'm just saying every time there's a picture of drag queen story hour. Yeah. I don't think Pete likes it because he's saying what he's thinking is, OK, you know, this is a new thing to a lot of Americans, gay marriage, a gay man. We've never had a gay president. Well, that we know of. I mean, I heard rumors about Buchanan. Yeah. But. But yeah. So this you know, you got to tread a little gingerly. And I think what it looks like to him as a clever politician is like, OK, can we just (29/44)
cool it on a little of this? Because people are trying to get used to this. And I'm trying to win an election in states that are already a little wary about the Democrats. I would argue that the issue with Pete Buttigieg, and I covered his campaign a little bit the last time, isn't about sexuality. It's about class. I remember seeing him in King, New Hampshire, and it was the first time I'd seen him campaign. And as you mentioned, he's got incredible political skills. If you see him in person, you'll have this thought, wow, this guy is going to be president someday. He's so quick, like, you know, he's so accessible, seemingly. And then I went outside and interviewed a bunch of people from King. And if you know what sort of New England townies are like, you know, they were like, that guy was fucking weird. You know, that's what I mean. And the Democrats just have too many of these sort of McKinsey consultant Ivy League types who just don't know how to. You were talking about Joe (30/44)
Manchin, about how there aren't enough people who just know how to talk. But look up his numbers in King, New Hampshire, because I'm pretty sure he either won it or came in a very close second there. So I'm glad he found some people who could criticize him there. But all right. He did pretty well there. OK. But I mean, to your larger point, and I've heard you read you on this. The Democrats, they kind of have lost their sense of humor. I agree with that. Oh, you do? Yeah. I mean, I saw Dave Chappelle got kicked out of his venue a couple of weeks ago in Minneapolis. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? And it just pisses me off because then you hear so many people saying, cancel culture isn't a real thing. They just kicked him out of the venue. People who actually bought tickets, which is kind of an indication that they want to see you, had to go to a different venue. And what happened to freedom of assembly in this country, that we're free to assemble and speak what we want and hear (31/44)
what we want? Yes. So, look, I you know, it's not going to be popular with my friends on the left or whatever, but I am I agree with you. I'm like an old school liberal. I am like what the ACLU used to be before it turned into whatever it is now. And my view on comedy is that comedy has always been boundary pushing. It has always been maybe a little bit offensive. And I love Dave Chappelle. The one thing I will say about Dave Chappelle is that I find comedy a bit funnier when you punch up at the powerful rather than when you punch down at the powerless. And I find that and then there's someone more powerless in the trans community in America. Well, I'm not even going to get into that argument, although I reject it. I don't think that's really what's going on. But the bigger point is you're allowed to have that point of view. And Dave's still allowed to appear in Minneapolis. Absolutely. The theater that hired him. And they should. And has anyone ever come out looking good because they (32/44)
canceled a comic? I mean, would you would you introduce yourself to somebody and say, oh, I'm the guy who canceled Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor or Dave Dave Chappelle? I mean, historically, you don't. Historically, it's very, very unpopular. And again, this gets back to the same the same issue. It's an image issue for the Democratic Party. They're seen as the people who are who are behind this movement. OK. I want to talk about Nancy Pelosi before we run out of time, because she had a big we kind of dominated the news in many different ways. OK. First of all, she did go to Taiwan. And I mean, it's interesting that a lot of people didn't want her to go from both sides of the aisle. Biden didn't want her to go and Sean Hannity didn't want her to go. But I feel like she, 82 and Biden, 79, both look kind of smart and ballsy this week. What? I mean, I just want to know the answer. Why defend you? We've established that we're going to defend Ukraine just full on. There is no limits except (33/44)
sending troops because countries around the world have to understand when we say we're 100 percent behind you. We we mean we're 50 percent behind. I mean, if you haven't gotten that from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, you have not been paying attention. But we're as much as we can be behind Ukraine. But Taiwan, we seem to be like taking these baby steps. And I don't understand what that is. I mean, it's if you're you either believe that place is a country, which we do. It's kind of like when Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which I thought was the only good thing he ever did. It's like if you believe Israel's a country, then they get to have, which it is, they get to have their embassy where it is. And they believe Taiwan is a country that anybody can visit from anywhere, especially our politicians. Matt is expert here. So Matt's the expert here. So I'm going to be you're going to talk. So no, I'm going to be I'm going to be brief here and just say this is that it's a little bit (34/44)
apples and oranges because Russia did invade Ukraine. They're committing atrocities there. They're killing civilians. They're doing war crimes there. China is saber rattling, but they haven't reached that place. So I think it's a little bit of a different situation. And now, yes, the expert. That's a good point. Well, again, you know, having I have kids so much. My enthusiasm for starting shit with superpowers is usually kind of muted. But, you know, I'll give Nancy Pelosi credit. She's been very consistent. One of the few people in her party who has been against, for instance, most favored nation trading status for China, going back all the way to the 90s. So that that reluctance that you're talking about to get mix it up with China, a lot of that is driven by donors who have commercial interests in China. And politicians are wary of speaking out about all sorts of things involving that country because they're they're getting money from companies that are that are profiting over (35/44)
there. So, you know, in this one sense, I think, you know, it's important to remember that, you know, they are a human rights violator and it's it's worth taking a stand sometimes. Well, who isn't? But the other thing I just want to say quickly, we just had this election and a lot of people on the Republican side who don't believe in the concept of free and fair elections won. The whole slate in Arizona won and three other swing states, people who do not believe in elections, who only believe elections count only when we win. Right. Interesting. If you happen following this, the Democratic Party, led by Nancy Pelosi, is supporting these people in the primaries. Their theory is let's support the radicals. These are the Trumpers and there are two wings of the Republican Party. There are Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and people, even Mike Pence, who believe in elections. And then there are Trumpers and the Democrats in the primary are supporting the Trumpers thinking they'll (36/44)
win. And then in the general election, they'll be so radical, we'll beat them. This is playing with fire, is it not? Well, just just just quickly. We've seen this before. This was part of the Podesta emails. Remember the whole Pied Piper candidates thing? There was, you know, exchanges between people in the Clinton campaign about trying to elevate the more radical candidates in the Republican slate. And look how that turned out. So Trump won. It's a crazy train of thought. All right. Got to go. Time for new rules, everybody. Someone must ask people who play a pluffle, who buy a pluffle. The dog bed for humans. How is it better than a regular bed? I never watched my dog curl up in one of these and thought, I wish I had a mattress so small it forces me to shove my nose into my asshole. You know, stop making kids go back to school earlier and earlier each year. Some schools in California start next week. What is this, China? Well, in parts of L.A., yes. But come on, give kids their summer (37/44)
back. For students, it's too nice outside to pay attention. And for the teachers, it's way too hot to dress up in drag. Well, now that Applebee's has launched saucy gloss, a line of lip gloss that tastes like their chicken wings, they have to discontinue it immediately. Granted for women, it's a tasty treat. But what about the poor guy who has to explain to his wife why his dick tastes like honey barbecue? Someone must tell me what's so romantic about a couple's massage. It doesn't say let's connect on a deeper level. It says, I don't want to touch you and you don't want to touch me. Let's hire other people to do it. Only a traditionalist, but I think sex should be something between two people who love each other and Deshaun Watson. You can spend your entire life repeating the same stupid insult the way Trump does with like a dog, like a dog, like a dog, like a dog, like a dog. Like a dog. But then you can't bury your ex-wife in the backyard. Trump buried Ivana at his golf club in New (38/44)
Jersey, which is wrong on so many levels. It's cheap, it's tacky, and when Eric sees it, he'll know she didn't go to live on a farm. Finally, new rule, everybody should be allowed to let themselves go a couple of times a year. Like now, the dog days of summer, school's out, rules out, it's hot, vacation time, no one should have to die it on vacation. And the holidays, that's the other, okay, I'll let myself go time of year. And who can blame us? It's the end of the year, it's structured around feast days, no one should feel bad about opening up the pants after Thanksgiving dinner and doing that thing where you undo the top button and try to hold it together with just the belt. That's all fine, but not all year round. And that's what's kind of happened to America, letting ourselves go now as an all year round thing, doing the Thanksgiving pants thing every day. They actually sell a business suit now with drawstring pants. I saw this, I swear, I saw this in the mall and I said to the (39/44)
salesman, this is pathetic, it shows how much we've given up. And he said, no, people love it. They love it, you can have a mongoose for lunch and then give that big presentation. There's a disturbing trend going on in America these days, rewriting science to fit ideology or just to fit what you want reality to be. We've gone from fat acceptance to fat celebration. That's new. That is new. It's a view letting yourself go is a point of pride. We used to at least try and be fit and healthy and society praised those who succeeded. Now the term body positivity is used to mean I'm perfect the way I am because I'm me. It's Orwellian, how often positivity is used to describe what's not healthy. Of course you can get away with anything bad for you when you're young, but let me ask you this, have you ever seen a fat 90 year old? Scary isn't it? Healthy at any weight is an unchallenged lie that people tell themselves so they can go on eating whatever they want, which is fine. I've done many (40/44)
self-destructive things too, but no one pretended there was positivity in smoking. Fat activist Ted Keil, founder of Conchon Health says the media and public needs to stop catastrophizing obesity. Okay. A, they're not catastrophizing it and B, they should be because it's a full blown catastrophe. Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the United States. New York Times. Of course, we're talking about heart disease and cancer and diabetes, but also as COVID has taught us, obesity is horrible for the immune system, which is why those numbers were off the charts during the pandemic. That's a catastrophe. It's literally a national security issue now. Military recruitment is down by the most since the end of the draft because mainly 17 to 24 year olds are too fat to fight. At some point, acceptance becomes enabling. And if you're in any way participating in this joyful celebration of gluttony that goes on now, you have blood on your hands. Full stop. You can make believe you're (41/44)
fighting some great social justice battle for a besieged minority, but what you're really doing is enabling addicts, which I thought we decided was bad. It's not just the drawstring business suits. Companies like Nike, Sports Illustrated, Victoria's Secret, companies that are specifically about fitness nevertheless promote people who are plainly not into fitness. People like Adele face shame campaigns for losing weight. This is madness. There's a reason the first thing your doctor does is make you step on a scale. Well, it used to be. There's a card now that you can give your doctor and it says, please don't weigh me unless it's really medically necessary. It's always necessary. It's like asking your dentist not to look at your teeth. There's a popular T-shirt that says, I don't owe no man a flat stomach. Okay. No one said you did. You do you. But you're not a freedom fighter because you want to keep eating donuts. USA Today actually wrote the sentence, science hasn't yet figured out (42/44)
how to solve obesity. And Ted Kyle concurs saying, we don't know how to blunt the rise in obesity because we don't know precisely what the factors are that are causing it. Yes. What could it be? What's what? Damn it. This is a hard one. People say to me, oh, come on, Bill. People struggle with this. Of course they do. Everything's a struggle. Life's a struggle. But somehow 50 years ago, this country looked entirely different. You don't think it was a struggle for them? You think cake wasn't delicious in 1969? And that's the saddest part. We can do this. I think. But by lying about it and making excuses, psychologically, it's telling ourselves that letting ourselves go is the best we can do. And I got to believe that as Americans, we can still do better than that. All right. That's our show. My name's Mr. Colin Buffalo, October 9th at the Foxwoods in Nash, Connecticut, Connecticut, November 13th. I want you to watch my podcast Club Random on YouTube and everywhere else where you get (43/44)
your podcasts. Thank you, folks. I want to thank Matt Taibbi, Liz Smith and David Duchovny. I go to YouTube and join us on Overtime. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. (44/44)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #437: Bret Stephens, Tim Gunn.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maher. We made it through the rain, us personally here in LA of course, but we weathered in this country, Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma, and now we're back to worrying about shitstorm Donald. It's, uh, back to normal. But hey, before we get to the politics, let's try to reach out. Uh, the president has a new grandson. Oh, come on. He's bald and always crying and wetting himself. But he's very happy about the new baby. So yes, there's another Trump in the world, and uh, no, well there was, I have to tell you, there was a little bit of a scare when the baby first came out. He wasn't smirking. So anyway, a lot of, a lot of terrifying things going on in the world. North Korea fired another missile. These motherfuckers are not kidding around. This was the longest one all the way over Japan, and apparently Kim Jong-un was very pleased. He awarded his scientist North Korea's highest honor, lunch. The big (1/44)
political news, you see, that Donald Trump this week announced a breakthrough on immigration. The Dreamers can stay, and by that means, he means they can't stay. Or maybe they can stay. Ask somebody else. Maybe they can stay. Ask somebody else. He wants them to stay. He wants you to, he wants, and by that he means get out. And we're building the wall, and by that he means we're repairing the fence. I mean, he thinks, he thinks he's being bipartisan. This is not bipartisan. This is bipolar. This is, I don't know if he knows what he wants. Today he said Selena Gomez has to go back, but her kidney can stay. No, of course with Donald Trump it's always personal. He's fed up with his own party, because he doesn't like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. So now he's like making nice with Schumer and Pelosi. Again, this week he whined and dined, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Well, they dined, he whined. And after the meeting, the Democrats put out a statement that said, we agreed with the (2/44)
president to enshrine the protections of DACA into law, and work out a package of border security excluding the wall. That's how they, wait, that's, that's how they remember it. That's not how Trump remembers things. What he remembers is, we had cake, there was a fire truck. It went vroom vroom, and then it was time for TV. But, but it sure looks like it had some effect on him, meeting with the Democrats. I mean his thinking about the Dreamers seems to have changed, because he tweeted something that I said was super supportive. He, Donald Trump tweeted, does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, accomplished young people? And his supporters said, fuck yes. Of course we do, we want to do it yesterday. His base is furious at him. Breitbart calls him Amnesty Don now. Ann Coulter is calling for his impeachment. Even Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are turning on him. The deplorables really think this is deplorable. There are former Trump fans, all over the internet, who are burning (3/44)
their Make America Great hats. Which is very scary, because it means they've discovered fire. Tools could be next. One of Trump's fans issued him a very stern warning. He said, Mr. President, don't forget who put you there. And that's when Putin just laughed. So Trump, you know, he's had enough of this political bullshit. He went back this week to the one thing he knows he could definitely get done as president, visiting hurricane sites. He went back to Florida the other day for the third time. They're like, enough. He and the first lady served up food to the victims, or as Melania calls the program, meals on heels. I could, Melania. She dressed more sensibly this time. She was wearing a safari jacket. No, it's true. Apparently she was disappointed when they told her she was just going to be looking at poor people, not actually hunting them. But here's the most amazing thing of all. Amid all the destruction in the path of that hurricane, neither Mar-a-Lago, nor Trump's estate in St. (4/44)
Martin's, nor any of his golf courses in the path, got damaged at all. They all escaped almost completely unscathed. Which just goes to show something I have always believed. There is no God. Okay, we've got a great show. Fred Liebowitz and Salman Rushdie are here. Wow. And a little later we'll be speaking with Frederick Runway's Tim Gunn. But first up, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times and it contributed to MSNBC. Please welcome Brett Stevens. Hey, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Great to see you. Okay, so you, last time you were here, were working for the Wall Street Journal. That's right. A conservative paper. Now you've moved over to the New York Times, which is considered a liberal paper. Which I must say, I admire very much. You wanted to get out of your echo chamber. How's it going over there? Well, I guess it's too soon to tell. I mean, readers take their views. I think what the New York Times is trying to do is kind of extraordinary. Because I (5/44)
think most people look to a show like yours or an op-ed page like the Wall Street Journal and they look for affirmations. They want their views affirmed. And I think the Times is making a conscious effort to have an op-ed page which is more like provocations. Use the readers, the writers you agree with to reinforce your point of view, but use the writers you disagree with as like wedding stones to sharpen your thinking. And I think if that, I mean, I think it's an experiment, but if it works, I think democracy is in better shape than we realize. I hope so. I mean, I think what we have in common is that we both piss off liberals. Now, I do it because... I think we both piss off conservatives too. I definitely piss off conservatives, but that's accepted. That's baked into the cake. The pissing off... No? The pissing off the liberals, I mean, I think you're doing it because you enjoy it. I'm doing it because I want them to clean up their rough edges and win again. I want the liberals to (6/44)
win, and I think sometimes they're sabotaging themselves. Yeah, look, that's right. I mean, the problem is that the question isn't how Trump won. The question is how did Hillary lose? And I don't think liberals ask themselves that question nearly hard enough. Well, let me ask you... I mean, you can say Trump won because there are all these deplorables... What do you think the liberals' biggest flaw is? I think it's... God, well, I could go down the list, but... Look, I'll give you an example that will make you feel uncomfortable, but since we're here, why not? I was last on the show January 2015, and so I was looking at the show just to remind myself of how this works, and you had a segment about Joni Ernst. You remember that? No. No, I mean, no offense, but I... You should watch it again because it practically explains the 2016 election in that segment. Joni Ernst, it turns out, was so poor growing up. Okay, well, let's... But hang on, hang on. I'm just telling them who Joni Ernst is. (7/44)
The Iowa senator. Iowa senator, Republican, right? One in 2014? That's right. Okay, and... And she would put bread bags on her feet as a child because she had one pair of shoes. So she says. So she says. Let's assume she's telling the truth. And so you mocked her for it, and it was funny. Thank you. It was funny... Really? It was funny to the people in your studio audience. Ask yourself if you're in Iowa or maybe outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or in the middle of Pennsylvania... Oh, for fuck's sake. How you would have looked at that segment. You're telling me that bread bags on the feet is off limits for a comedian? Bread bags on the... Making fun of the poverty in which someone like Joni Ernst grew up. See, now you sound like a liberal. This is what I get on the liberals' case for. You little snowflake, Brad. This is snowflakeism. You can't take a joke about bread bags on your feet? Look, you asked me, what is it about liberals that people don't like? And I would say... That's it. The (8/44)
answer is condescension. Cultural condescension. Yes. Well, I mean, that's part of it. But I went through this with S.E. Cupp was here last week. And she was, you know, don't call people stupid. And I don't want to. But like, if you... I don't. But like, over a third of Americans don't know that Obamacare is the same thing as the Affordable Care Act. That's your own health. If you don't know how to take care of your own health as an issue, what word would you use? Well, look, I mean, we have a serious problem with like a politically educated public. And this is one of the reasons I think we ended up with a guy like Donald Trump. And that people could be bamboozled and sold on, I guess I can say this on this show, bullshit. And you could become president for it. That's a real issue. But you're not going to get that through by simply making fun of the way in which people are raised. I know, but it's not how they were raised. Oh, come on. You really are stuck on the bread bags. I don't (9/44)
think anyone really takes offense at that. First of all, I don't think half the people believe it's true. I mean, bread bags on your feet? What is the point of that? Because you really don't have shoes? Joni Ernst has shoes. She had shoes. Give me a break. Okay. So you called Hillary Clinton... Now, you're not for Trump. No. Okay. Which, you know, silver lining for this whole thing is that we found out that there are sane Republicans left. Sane former Republicans. Former Republicans. Former Republicans. You're not a Republican. I have a hard time calling myself a Republican. I have a hard time calling myself a Democrat. But you refer to Hillary as a survivable event. You voted for Hillary. Yeah, I did. And I think that's the mature thing to do. And it's so funny because that's what I call Mike Pence. I'm not sure you're right, but go ahead. I get very mad at liberals when they say Mike Pence would be worse. He would not be worse. That's a survivable event. Will we ever get back to a (10/44)
place where we think of each other as something above a survivable event? Yeah. You know, I mean, the reason I said that is that, I mean, you have to accept my perspective as a right-of-center person who was never sympathetic to Hillary's policies. But the way I saw the election was the difference between risk and uncertainty. If you're a finance person, if you see something that's a risk, you can price it. You kind of know what's coming. Donald Trump was uncertainty. You couldn't price it. You didn't know from one day to the next what you were going to get. And that's actually the reality we've been in for the last six months. Are we going to have war with North Korea or not? Are we going to deport the DREAMers or are we going to take them in? And I think that's… But he says both in the same sentence. Yeah, I mean, what you said earlier, bipolar is right. This is not a presidency. This is a neurosis. Well, let me ask you this then. I mean, he sprung from the soil of republicanism. (11/44)
Could it have happened on the democratic side? I don't think so. I don't think you could produce a democratic Donald Trump. Look, you can because populism… I mean, Donald Trump isn't just some sort of accident of American politics. He represents a kind of trope in political life. And if you go back to the 1920s in Europe or the 1950s and 60s in Latin America, you find people who are a lot like him and they spring from both sides politically. These are the people who say parliamentary democracy… But they wouldn't have the racism. I mean, racism is a big party, but you wouldn't have that on the left. Well, you have class hatred on the left. That's what you have with Maduro in Venezuela. That's not nearly as deep as racism. Look, I'm the last one to make excuses. What Trump is doing is culturally so corrosive to the institutions of the presidency that I really don't think he's necessarily survivable. He'll survive. We won't. Someone won't. Well, all right. Let me ask you the last question (12/44)
about… I feel like his fans are not ideological especially. We found that out. He can pretty much go anywhere and they seem to follow him, except the wall. Oh, yeah. Except for that one thing. What is it about the wall? Why is that, I got to get back to Kansas for them? You know, I ask myself, I grew up in Mexico City. I speak fluent Spanish and I think there's something so ugly about everything that the wall represents. The idea that we aren't blessed by the fact of having Mexico as our neighbor is insane. We should thank our lucky stars every day. And it's also, you know, it's more than that. More than that, you know, my mother was a refugee. She came to this country with seven dollars. And in the space of a generation… What did she wear on her feet? Bread bags. And yet she had shoes. Come on. I'll check with her. But it's nice to know that in the space of a generation, you go from refugee to, quote, elite. And that's what this country ought to be about. And people who don't (13/44)
understand that and want to build walls to the refugees, to the indigent, to the people who are desperate to come to this country, they're the ones who have no place in it. Alright. Well, we're building bridges. Thanks for coming by. Keeps know how much you're doing. Brett Stevens, everybody. Let's meet our panel. Okay. Alright. He is the literary lion whose thirteenth novel is… I started it. I read about a hundred pages. It is awesome. Thank you. Salman Rushdie is over here. I cannot wait to get home and finish. And she's a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, one of the greatest wits of all time. Fran Lebowitz is right tonight. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. I have two sophisticated New Yorkers here. So my first question is, as we see Donald Trump pivoting there toward Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, people who, all his life, he was more comfortable with. I just want to ask, first of all, how do you see a (14/44)
New Yorker like Donald Trump having such an appeal to the heartland, getting such big crowds in Alabama, because that was never part of American politics. When Clinton and Gore ran together, remember, it's like, well, if you're going to be elected as a Democrat, you got to have, you know, three E's in the word shit. I don't think of Alabama as the heartland. Well, Alabama is the heartland. They think of it. Alabama is the confederacy. Iowa is the heartland. Okay. Well, he's popular in both places. But not in New York. Not in New York. Yes. That's the thing. If you think about the thing called New York values, which the Republicans attacked throughout the campaign, Donald Trump is the antithesis of New York values. He just happens to have a big yellow house there in the sky. New York City voted 9 to 1 against Donald Trump, okay, because we already knew him. Right. And by the way, there is no rule that a sophisticated, cultured city can't produce a bigoted, prejudiced ignoramus. Vienna (15/44)
produced Adolf Hitler. Right. So it can happen, you know, but he is the exception. As Fran said, America is finding out what New York has known for a long time. I mean, in New York he's not even considered a developer. The actual real estate developers don't leave. We know what he is. He's a three-card Monte dealer. He's a cheap hustler. That's what he is. So has he changed your life personally? I mean, I hear all the time from people out here. I want to know if it's true in New York that people sleep less, you know, has it affected your mood, your erections? I mean, what... No. What it did do for a while is ruin my morning, because I would wake up and feel obliged to pick up my phone and see what he had tweeted at 3 a.m. And I really hated having to start my day with him, you know. And so that was bad, but I've got over that. But what I mean, seriously, what I think it did to me is that I feel now about my writing a little differently, because you've got so much fiction, so much (16/44)
fantasy, so much distortion and untruth being propagated every day that I think, you know, maybe not magic realism. I think maybe it becomes like the writer's job, paradoxically the fiction writer's job, to try and re-establish a sense of the truth. Parody becomes harder. Has he affected your life personally? Yes, he has affected my life personally. I mean, I'm even angrier. In other words, I have been engorged with rage since I was born, so it's not like... I'm not blaming that on Donald Trump. But, you know, I would not have imagined I could be angrier, but I am even angrier. Yes, I take it personally. I yell at the television set. Like him. You know, but I just can't... It's unbearable. It's as simple as that. I find it to be unbearable. It's out of the question. It's not ending soon. People say, don't you think Richard Nixon was better? Yes, Richard Nixon was better. He makes you long for Richard Nixon. And please tell me... Please tell me you would agree Mike Pence would be (17/44)
better, right? Well, Mike Pence would be better because, first of all, he would never be elected. He would never be re-elected. That is a splinter of the Republican Party. You know, he won't have dinner with a woman who's not his wife. Like, they're lined up to do this. No, no. He won't go to a party where they serve alcohol. Because once the bitches get a drink in them. You know, my view, I think this whole... It's like Tupac in 95. You know, we know that if it's not Trump, it's Pence. If it's not Pence, it's Ryan. If it's not Ryan, it's Orrin Hatch. And we know that, you know, none of that is good. But my view is, let's just take it one asshole at a time. So let me ask about the Democrats. Now, I'm from... You're from New Jersey, like me? I am. I have a senator there, Bob Menendez. He is apparently a little corrupt. It's a law in New Jersey. Come on. Chris Christie's the governor. Yeah, exactly. He's got a trial going on and they may find him guilty. In which case, the Senate would (18/44)
get to choose. I think two-thirds of the Senators get to vote whether he gets ousted for being convicted. But he doesn't have to be. You can stay in the Senate as a convicted felon, apparently. Because the rest of them are unconvicted felons. But here's where it gets interesting. Because in normal times, I would say, well, maybe the Democrats should vote. He's a Democrat, to vote against Bob Menendez and say you should get out of the Senate. Except in the post-Maric Garland world, where the Republican view is, you know what, whatever you can get away with, I don't care if he's a Menendez brother. He needs to stay in the Senate because if he leaves before Chris Christie leaves as governor on January 16th, then Chris Christie gets to appoint his replacement, who would be a Republican, and one more vote could have switched the whole vote on Obamacare repeal. So, do you agree with that? No. I don't either. Oh, fuck. I mean, I don't agree with that. I mean, it would be enjoyable, yes. But (19/44)
you just said they're all crooks. They are all crooks. So what does it matter? It matters because that was wrong, really wrong, what the Republicans did about the Supreme Court. Like, unbelievably wrong. And this would also be wrong. So I don't think we should be learning from the Republicans. You know what, that's, this is exactly why the Democrats will continue to lose. Because they do not know how to go for the jugular. They do not know how to fight on their level. They are an 8. Did your mother never say to you, Bill, that two wrongs don't make a right? Yeah, my mother wasn't around when Trump was president. No. And I'm looking at bigger matters. Look, I think this, I think the bigger matter here, it seems to me, is the midterms next year. And the more corrupt the Democrats look, the less chance they have of winning that. If they look just like the Republicans, you know, you're not going to flip California. I keep hearing how California is going to flip the House. Because there's (20/44)
like 13 seats here that can flip the House. You know, so that's not going to happen if people think the Democrats are crooks too. No, they're not, that's not going to happen because that's in the part of the state that's very conservative. Okay, let me ask something else because it would make me mad to continue on this path. I was reading this week that the Bernie and Hillary supporters still hate each other with a great... Just the word hate, and they're applauding. Hillary is out plugging her book. She says Bernie's not a Democrat, which, you know, she says is not a slur, that's what he says. And here's Bernie's answer as to why he's not a Democrat. He says the current model and current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure. I don't know about this strategy. Let me just ask this. What do you think the Democrats should do to repair this, or should they repair it? Do you mean to repair the rift between... Yes. I think we should stop thinking about Bernie Sanders. I (21/44)
would really love to stop thinking about him. I know you found him kind of benign. You know, I did not find him benign. I found him to be an unbelievably irritating, narcissistic old man. And I also kept thinking, like, who leaves New York when they're 18? Is that what you do? Yeah. I mean, that's who you have there. Like, when you look around and think, you know, no, I can't make it, I'm going to Vermont. I think we should please forget about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. This is a battle that's over. It's over. I agree. And I also think there's this problem of the rift in the left, where there's a section of the left that wants the purest, more snowy-than-driven-snow candidate. Yes. Snowflakeier than the snowflakeier snowflake. Yeah. That's what they want. And that's not only a problem in this country. It's a problem in England where they want Jeremy Corbyn, who represents that ideal of leftiness, which can't possibly be elected. Or in France, the Mélanchon people, who don't (22/44)
want to vote for Macron because he's not purely left enough. And what all this does is to drive a wedge through which the right can come. And there's something you said on this show a few months ago that I have to tell you, I have been quoting Bill. Wow. You said that we have to learn to distinguish between an imperfect friend and a deadly enemy. Yes. And the left had better learn that lesson fast. Well, there is a deadly enemy, and it's in Russia. You know, we saw these Facebook, what do they call them, bots? Trolls. Right. Troll bots. Vladimir Putin basically has buildings full of people who work for him in Moscow, and all they do all day long is figure out ways to fuck with democracies. It's like the Silicon Valley of Russia. And a different product. Yes. So, you know, and it all comes down to people read this stuff on Facebook. I mean, the Facebook chief security officer said it might have reached, they took out 470 deceptive accounts that might have reached 70 million people. (23/44)
Yeah. And you think about the three northern states that went the wrong way in the election. Right. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Yeah. The collective vote majority in the three together was 77,000. So you're talking about 70,000 people with 7 million. Right. 70 million. Yes. So, you know, so the idea… It reached 70 million people. So that's… So certainly 70,000 could have been affected. So if you affect like one in a thousand, you affect one in 10,000, you change the election. Okay. All right. So Melania Trump has been in the news a lot lately. I was talking about her in the monologue. And she's on the cover of Us Weekly with this cover, my side of the story. But they left out my favorite feature in Us Weekly, which is the 25 things you don't know about me. Do you read about this? All the stars do it. Tim Gunn has done it. If you have his, he'll be out here in a minute. And I did it. It's practically a rite of passage. Do you have mine? There you go. And we got a hold of Melania's. It's (24/44)
not in this magazine, but it's coming out soon. Would you like to hear Melania's 25 things you didn't know about… 25 things you didn't know about Melania. In Slovenia, I was a catalog model, which is what you call a model you order out of a catalog. I have no first language. I hope I inspire little girls everywhere to marry for money. Oh, that's so sweet. Every time I look at my husband, I'm reminded of the Slovenian national dish. A fat, greasy sausage filled with cheese. I once caught Mike Pence trying on my stilettos. My secret service code name is that poor, poor woman. I copied this list from Michelle Obama. Sometimes when I bounce light off my diamond, Donald's hair will chase it like a cat. I wish I knew why I have a recurring dream. I'm pinned beneath a giant, orange sack of shit. And if I could tell my younger self just one thing, it would be this. If you catch a leprechaun and he gives you one wish, be more specific. Joining host and producer of Lifetime's Project Runway, the (25/44)
Natty Professor, Tim Gunn. Tim Gunn, pleasure to finally meet you. I feel like in an age that is so crass, you are such an antidote. Well, you're very kind to say that. I have to say, though, that in this company, I feel like a mongrel at the Westminster Kennel Club. Oh, you're being too modest. And the first thing I want to ask you about is Donald Trump's suit, because there was a picture of him this week. Look at this. I don't know if you could see that, but he is wearing the pants from one suit. And the jacket from another suit. Now, this is not no... We know what it's like to wear a blazer with pants that don't match the bla... This is not that. This is a suit jacket with another pair of pants from another suit. But, Bill, even if it were a blazer and a pair of pants, one does not do that. I mean, you just... And you're the president of the United States. I'm always talking about the semiotics of clothes. The clothes we wear send a message about how the world perceives us. And this (26/44)
says, I'm a great big slob and I don't care and I get dressed in the dark. Do you know what else it says? It says that the people around him were too fearful to say, Mr. Trump, you need to change. And you can change right upstairs. It's easy. It's mystifying. But, you know, of all... We see a lot of changes in fashion. Because, look, they have to change it a year so they can sell... Absolutely. It's fashion's pendulum. Okay. So, like, over the years, we could have done this. Somebody could have said, you know what we're gonna do this year in fashion? We're gonna wear the pants of one suit with the jacket of another. We've done every other crazy fucking thing. We never went there. So that is one thing... This is a fashion forecast. I'm just saying that has never happened for a reason. Only the fact that he's wearing it, it means it will never happen. Because who wants to emulate Trump? And they don't have suits in the heartland of America. I've learned that the hard way. What do you (27/44)
mean? That people don't get dressed up. I mean, it's the true sloppification of America. And it's getting worse. And now with the athleisure trend, it legitimizes and validates all the sloppification. Have you ever gone to the People of Walmart website? No. I don't even know about it. Is this a real thing? They know. You'll never get an erection again. It's just people in their pajamas and in their confederate flag bikinis. Anyway... Well the world has become, or at least this nation has become one big slumber party. People just don't seem to know the boundary between bed and being outside. And I'm always saying, if you want to dress to feel as though you never got out of bed, don't. I know. Trump looks like an unmade bed. He should stay in it. I know. It's like people think they're invisible. I mean, we did something on this show once about this. And it hearkened back to that time in the 90s when, in New York City, you remember this, the broken windows theory. The Giuliani (28/44)
administration, I think it was, said look, if we fix the broken windows in bad neighborhoods, if we cover over the graffiti, if we pick up the trash, people feel better. We're going to feel better, we're going to look better, and then we're going to be better. And I think that's really true. I think people dress slovenly because they're morally slovenly. Because their education is slovenly, because everything about what we do is slovenly. Well, I will say this. I certainly see a corollary between behavior and how we appear in the world, our dress. And I think that this erosion in dressing, everyone's wearing sweatpants and tank tops, look at the correlation, look at all the bad behavior that's in profusion and that's escalating. Now, where does obesity fit into this? Because I know you... See, I mean, I've talked about this recently, and you know, fat shaming, I wasn't fat shaming. What I was saying is obesity is a national epidemic. It is a health crisis. So I saw recently Kmart is (29/44)
going to call their plus size now fabulous size. And I think, you know, you wouldn't do that about any other health problem. Call it fabulous. Well, here's the conundrum as I see it. And I'm coming out of a season of Project Runway where finally we're working with models who range in size from 2 to 22. So I've been with a lot of larger women this season, and I've loved every single second of it. The conundrum is we can't fix it all simultaneously. So we have a population of roughly 85 million women who are larger than the regular department of a department store. They're larger than a size 12. And there are so few options for them about what to wear. And I think that's atrocious. Regardless... What do you mean so few options? I can't believe that if there are that many people who weigh that much, there is much billions of dollars to be made. They must make clothes for them. Absolutely right. You are absolutely correct that there are billions of dollars to be made. This was a primary (30/44)
catalyst for an op-ed piece that I wrote for the Washington Post last fall. Why aren't the retailers on top of this? Forget about the designers. I at one point was working for a company that had 48 brands, and no one wanted to design for her. Well, I think maybe they are. I think what it is that people say, why can't you make clothes that make me look good? Because you're fat. It's not the... I disagree. Look at the opera divas. They're not diminutive women, and they look fabulous. But why... I mean, you know, you say you have models who are size 22? Yes. Okay. You'd have to page through an awful lot of Vanity Fairs to find a fat model. I don't disagree. Okay. Well, for some reason, I mean, I go where the money is. That tells me what the truth is. And the truth is, people, when they are selling clothes, sell it on skinny people. And my point about all that is, it's an unattainable body size and shape for most women in this nation. Okay. But not being... That is, yes. But there's (31/44)
something in the middle, right? But I believe that the fashion industry is complicit with media in general, and how we portray the ideal of beauty. And my belief is, we need to show much more diversity in size and shape, and show that... Forgive the term, but big is beautiful, and it can be. Well, I tell you... And I'm also... I guess that's... I mean, that is... That's one battle to fight. The one I would like to fight, because we're all here now. And this is a rarity on television now. There are four people on television who are all over 60. Ah! I say, is that not against the law? Congratulations. Let's celebrate. Exactly. But this is an ageist country. Would we not all agree with that, now that we are... No? You don't think it's ageist America? I mean, I don't know. I don't believe... I don't experience it, because I think that I'm not looking for a job, and I'm not looking for a man. Okay? So, those two things I know are hard to get. Okay? But I don't care. Okay. So, I haven't (32/44)
experienced it. It also seems to me like there are a lot more old people than there used to be. Really? Yes. I don't see them out. I never see... I swear to... You don't go to the right club, Bill. I do not see people out who are my age. It is very... And I'm looking for it now. When I drive to work, I'm looking... Is that guy... No, no. Are they not in bars? They're not in stores? What, are they raptured? What happened to all... It's not that old. I'm in favor of old people, and I'm older than you. And when I go out, I see, oh, there's an old person, and then I realize he's five years younger than me. And I'm just in favor of it. I think many writers are old, fortunately. And just... Can I just say in favor of slobs? Oh. That, you know, yeah, that your argument that... Your argument that slobish dressing is a sign of a slobish interior would come as news to most novelists in America. Yeah, but that's a job... But Mr. Rushdie, I come from academia. I agree wholeheartedly. And the (33/44)
message is, we're too smart to worry about this appearance. And I will repeat, the semiotics have closed. I mean, it sends a message about how you're perceived, and in this case, by your students, and by how you navigate the world. Okay. Old stuff, old people are cool. I think we certainly agree with that. I think we should all agree with that. I just want to add, I wouldn't go back a single second, and the longer that I'm here, the more confidence I have, the more maturity I have, the more experience I have, and... Yeah, I couldn't agree with more... The problem is, the less days you have. And that is all... No, it's true. And that is always the trade-off. I'm happier now than ever myself, also. And that's the... But that, you see, I mean, that point about the fact there being less time ahead than there is behind. Right. It teaches you a very important lesson, which is you don't have any time to waste. That's right. That is exactly what you do at this age. You eliminate all the (34/44)
bullshit that you used to put up with, when I think of the bullshit I used to put up with. And now you don't put up with it. Now you think, I have this time, I'm going to do exactly what I need to do. And I have no bucket list. Not that I've done everything, I've hardly done anything, but anything I haven't gotten to, I can give a fuck. Yeah, I probably stay away. You know, like... I feel like it's no accident. I've never been to Asia. Too bad, Asia. Nothing personal. But it just didn't happen, and now it's not gonna. I've never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through. I don't know how anybody has. I've never went skiing. I've never done a million things. I never had anal sex. I mean, it's too personal. Too personal, too personal, too personal. Too much information. Too much information. I don't know why that's popular either. Anyway, let's... But it's connected to Star Wars. Moving on to... Jesus. Uh-oh, my salts. Tim, can I use this for a second? Sorry. But, uh, what was I (35/44)
gonna... Oh, uh, yeah, I don't know. What's this on eBay, Tim? Yeah, I don't know what... Let's talk about, let's talk about, uh... Let's talk about race. You've written about it many times, and I saw Donald Trump this week sort of doubling down on his Charlottesville comments. And I thought, wow, this topic just won't go away for this man. And, of course, it won't go away for this country. And they did a little study. I forget who the sociologists were, but they showed an ad where a guy was standing in front of a house. It was a foreclosure thing, a program to help people who were in foreclosure. And when it was showed to Trump voters and it was a black man, they were very unsympathetic to the program. And when it was a white person, they were much more sympathetic. There it is. And all that changed in the ad was the race of the person there. And with Hillary voters, it didn't seem to make a big difference. So it seemed to be a little bit of proof that there is racism on that side of (36/44)
the fence. Well, I don't know why one would need that proof. It seems pretty god-am obvious that what happened on November the 8th was a racist backlash against eight years of a black man in the White House. But you're not saying that all Trump voters are... No, I am. Yes, all Trump voters. Trump's entire appeal is racism. It's not, come on, it's not his entire appeal. You think every single Trump voter, that's not true. Okay, maybe two-note, okay? Yes. Those rallies, you know, for someone our age, what did they remind you of? George Wallace rallies. That's exactly what they were. I mean, I don't think that, you know, when they say, how do these people believe Trump? I don't think they believe him. I don't think they thought, yes, it's going to be 1955 again. Yes, they're going to open up the coal mines. He allows them to express their bigotry, you know, and that is the thing, that's why they're so ecstatic of those rallies. You see, I want to know, I would like, when we were talking (37/44)
about being more specific, I would like, on the subject of making America great again, I would like to know when it was great. Exactly when was that moment? February 3rd, 1945. Well, you know, the point is, was it when there were slaves? No. Was it when women didn't have the vote? When was the moment of greatness? Those are two moments. What are we striving towards? But they do seem to blame... With these hats made in China that say, make America great again. They do seem to blame the wrong people for their problems. I mean, for example, I don't expect them to be that sympathetic to globalization. But, you know, the big story on globalization is that in the last like 30 years, we have decreased extreme poverty in the world. Tremendously. It's one of the big unsung stories that you don't hear about. Like, a lot of people used to live on a dollar a day. And now? Two dollars. Well, way less. Because they got jobs in factories in Mexico and China and lots of places. And that's where the (38/44)
money went from some of the jobs we had here. So they should be blaming the people, the white rich guys, who sent those jobs overseas. But they don't. They blame the Chinese and the Mexican worker, who now doesn't have to defecate in the street. And as an Indian writer of mine had an op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks ago in which he pointed out that there are lots of job opportunities in expanding economies. Like, for example, India. So if there were lots of Americans who don't have jobs, maybe they could go there. Go where the jobs are, which is what we're always being told. But I wanted to say the thing about globalization as far as Trump is concerned is that without globalization there would be no Trump. Because all his money comes from Russia. It comes, we know this in New York. He doesn't know anybody from Russia. But he knows German bankers who launder Russian money. Oh, absolutely. And that's what happened in New York. It's what Fran is saying, we know about Trump from old (39/44)
times. The Trump Soho was built with Russian money coming through German banks. That's what it's all about. I mean, I don't know what's going to be in the Mueller report, but the bottom line is at a certain point, because nobody else would lend Trump money because he's a fucking deadbeat who doesn't pay his debts. The only place he could get money was Russia. And instead of paying them back, he gave them America. All right. New rules, everybody. Thank you, Ben. You were amazing. New rule, Ted Cruz and Martin Shkreli must tell us their secret to only taking pictures that make you want to punch them in the face. New rule, now that we have cockapoos, Yorkipoos, schnoodles, labradoodles, and golden doodles, no one should feel bad about coming right out and saying it. Poodles will fuck anything. New rule, if you want to depress yourself, spend the day playing a game I call, would you rather they were president? The guy who hangs out at Starbucks with his cockatoo? Yes. The world's least (40/44)
convincing Superman impersonator? Yes. Any of the members of the K-pop group Red Velvet? Yes. The bear's fan who takes her shirt off when it's ten below? Yes. Karl Lagerfeld? Yes. Gene Simmons? Yes. The cow who looks like Gene Simmons? I'm considering it. New rule, someone has to tell Bin Laden's son, Hamza, that going into the family business is kind of a Jewish thing. Hamza, you're not the new lion of Al Qaeda, you're the Jared Kushner of terrorism. New rule, Pope Francis must drop the phony cover story that he got his black eye in a popemobile accident. Just admit the truth, he mouthed off to Chris Brown. And finally, new rule, now that Governor Jerry Brown of California is signing separate climate treaties with China in defiance of our federal government, conservatives can't complain. They can't complain when our local law enforcement refuses to cooperate with Trump's deportation squad. They can't grouse about California cities threatening to deny contracts to any firm that helps (41/44)
build the border wall. They can't get mad because we're just following in a long and hallowed conservative tradition called states' rights. It's just that now we're the state that wants to be left alone. Mississippi didn't like what Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was doing in the 60s, well I don't like what Jeff Sessions is doing now. The script has completely flipped from 50 years ago when progressives ran the show in Washington and it was Alabama Governor George Wallace who physically blocked the door of the University of Alabama to prevent black kids from enrolling. He was always screaming about states' rights, which he used as justification for this. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. But that was then. Now, the white supremacists are the federal government and it's liberal states that are under siege from federal overreach. We're trying to defend our way of life here and what we believe in. We believe in sanctuary cities and pollution controls, (42/44)
legalized pot and gun control, and Obamacare and a woman's right to choose, and we're going to defend them. We the rebels now, we get to talk like this. Let me tell you something, we don't much cotton when the federal government thinks it knows better how to do things than we do here in our own state. The mud flaps on my electric car say coexist. We don't need no outside agitators with their Make America Great Again caps coming in here to our clean state and telling us to take down our solar panels and treat our interns. Here in our state, we use tiki torches the way they're supposed to be used for lesbian weddings on the beach. Arms to table ain't just words around here, that's our heritage. We pride there ain't no pesticides in our organic broccolini. We pride of gay sex and hot yoga. We pride of pioneering colonic irrigation. You can have my Botox injection when you pride from my cold dead hands. Badgino rejuvenation today, badgino rejuvenation tomorrow, badgino rejuvenation (43/44)
forever. That meddling federal government in Washington even wants to tell us who we can marry and where we can pee. They want to come in here and segregate our restrooms telling us who can pee where. Well my daddy was transgender and his daddy before him and his daddy before him. L.A. County, we wear our ball gowns over our balls if we choose. One more thing, they got them in a tenant general up there in Washington by the name of Jeff Sessions. And he said, and I quote, good people don't smoke marijuana. Well there are good people here Mr. Tenant General and sometimes we just want to sit on our porch and watch our grass grow. David Wich, Tim Gunn and Brett Stevens join us now for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com (44/44)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #516: Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Yang.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Finally finished The Irishman. So Laura looks great. I aged 40 years. But yeah, we've been on vacation for two months. And I tell you, when I'm on vacation, you know, I have to, I have to recharge the batteries in my vape. And I, I, I don't follow the news, but of course now I'm back to work. I was following Trump all week and I just got to say, I need a vacation. So it's one week. But we have an amazing show to come back with. Our bookers outdid themselves. Nancy Pelosi is here tonight. Yang is here tonight. Of course his supporters. His supporters are called the Yang Gang and Bernie supporters are called the Bernie Bros. And Trump supporters are called Russians. Speaking of Russians in the news, did you see this week the return, previously on Real Time, I feel like I should do one of those. Remember this character Lev Parnas from last season? Oh yeah, looks like the Uber driver who says to you, you (1/44)
want girl? I get you girl. But wow, did he come out of hiding in a big way. He's on every show. He started with Rachel Maddow. She did a great job interviewing him. Everything, apparently everything he says he told that he and Giuliani were doing in Ukraine came at the direct direction of President Trump. And of course Republicans are saying that Parnas is making something out of nothing. I say cheap shot, leave his air out of this. Trump of course denies even knowing him. He always does this. Someday I promise you Don Jr. is going to get indicted and Trump will say I knew him very briefly. He was my son for a short period of time. I had my picture taken with a lot of people. But this impeachment trial is happening. Republicans of course are desperately trying to keep any witnesses from testifying as you do when you're completely innocent. Mitch McConnell says we will leave no stone turned. But it's, you know, and we know he's going to get acquitted. I mean trial, please. We shouldn't (2/44)
even use the word. It's a few minutes of rote formularities followed by Trump getting off. Or as Melania calls it, sex. This was the most amazing thing today. Trump announced some of the people on his dream team of lawyers. Did you see this? Ken Starr. Yes, that Ken Starr. The guy for whom the blowjob was too much. He's defending this missed impeachment guy and also Alan Dershowitz who has defended Weinstein O.J. and now Trump. Wow. Think about that. Trump, Weinstein and O.J. Flabby, grabby and stabby. I'm kidding ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes you go for the wall. You don't care. But the trial will begin on Tuesday and you know this is in the Senate where they take their decorum. Right. The Senate very seriously, not those animals in the House. We have decorum so there's going to be no phones, no talking. So expect a lot of tension, a lot of angry glares, a lot of dirty looks. And that's just between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Did you see the debate? That got nasty. The (3/44)
Democratic debate, as you know, Elizabeth Warren a couple of weeks ago played the woman card and said Bernie in a private meeting a couple of years ago said a woman can't get elected president. And then at the debate Bernie was asked about this and he said no I didn't. And he said and besides that the fact that he would say that is just like a woman. So after the debate Elizabeth Warren went right up to him. You saw this moment and he went to shake her hand and she said don't touch me. If you haven't seen the movie Marriage Story this is like that movie in seven seconds. She's like you called me a liar and he's like why are you bringing up old shit? You called me a liar. Let's not do this here. No I want to talk about it in front of the whole restaurant. So maybe the most important thing that happened was a new book came out by two reporters from The Washington Post where Trump called America's top generals the military people who we always say you know we thank you for your service (4/44)
said they were dopes and babies said this right to their face. This is in a meeting a couple of years ago and he said I wouldn't go to war with you. And they were like yeah we know we were in Vietnam. I'm ending with that to remind you this is it. This is the year. This is 2020. This is where it's going to have to happen where we desperately need to get rid of this man. He needs to be removed. There's only three ways he goes. Impeachment election or fried chicken. Faith in the first or the third. So we are going to have to make that happen. OK. We got a great show. John Meacham, Kara Swisher and Joe Walsh are here in a letter we'll be speaking with Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But first up she is the representative from San Francisco. She's also the 52nd speaker of the house. She's just finishing impeaching President Trump. Please welcome Nancy Pelosi. First of all thank you so much for waiting till we got back on the air before you started the impeachment. That (5/44)
deserves a face. And also before we forget about that applause. You know it was only a year ago that you were fighting just to be the speaker of the house. We could be having Speaker Seth Moulton right now. I never really was fighting. I thought the press made more of it but let them have their fun. I thought you always had it in the bag. What the outcome would be. So. So you did delay this for a month and let me just review what happened in this month. We December 20th. New emails revealed that 91 minutes after the perfect call. Perfect. 91 minutes. The order went out to the Department of Defense to withhold the aid. Lev came forward a couple of days ago. We saw all that. He said Trump was personally involved. The Government Accountability Office. That's an official branch of this government declared Trump broke the law when he withheld the aid to Ukraine. John Bolton announced he was willing to testify. This all happened during the delay that people were questioning you about. My (6/44)
question to you is did you know all this was going to come about or was this just a good guess because well let's just say sometimes it's good to have a lot of experience. Well first let me congratulate you on your opening show now. Well thank you very much. And I must say that your opening was shall we say risque. No it was not. Oh. Not so much. Well I'm sorry I disappointed you. I'll try to work in some profanity during our interview. I was cleaning it up for you. Oh good I appreciate that. Well no the fact is is that we knew we had a solid case for the impeachment of the president. The facts were clear. The Constitution required it and we wanted to make our case and go forward so we put forth the articles of impeachment in fact voted them. We knew there was plenty of other shall we say information to come forward but it wasn't necessary to impeach the president. It would have been further incriminating but not necessary and I didn't want in any way weaken the case that had the (7/44)
support of my caucus and was understood by the American people. You were rather reluctant to do it compared to a lot of Democrats. You waited till it was inevitable where you couldn't turn away from a thing like this. Well he gave us no choice. The president was self impeaching almost every single day. There are some people who actually have said that he wanted to be impeached. Just for the record being impeached is a bad thing right. And you're impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does it can never be erased. Now President Trump may be accidentally watching the show tonight. You know he's made me part of his act because I always say he's not going to leave even if he loses. So you know he's woven that in because he's a comedian and he does his rallies. You could talk to him directly. Well if I if I knew that he is the president is listening I would want him to know. I want him to know that he is impeached forever and he is impeached forever because he used the office of (8/44)
president to try to influence a foreign country for his personal and political benefit in doing so. He undermined our national security. He was disloyal to his oath of office to protect the Constitution and he placed in jeopardy the integrity of our election. And that I mean really he gave us no choice. Earlier on with some of the charges that came forward which were violations of the law I said he's not worth it. But once he crossed that bridge it wasn't a question of his being worth it. The Constitution was worth it. He had to be. Just in terms of how you began about the timing the value of that was in the period of that time now over 70 percent of the American people want to see witnesses and documentation to come forward and that places a burden on those senators. They will either come down in favor of transparency and accountability to the Constitution or will hold them accountable. It comes down to really only four senators. I mean from everything I've heard maybe it's wrong but (9/44)
there's really only four who are even considering it. And I feel like we have been down this road so many times with that small group of moderate Republicans I'm sure you remember better than anyone else the Obamacare health fight when we were waiting and waiting for Lisa Murkowski was it and Susan Collins and then the Brett Kavanaugh vote and Mitt Romney and there's always like maybe these moderate Republicans will come through and always it's the Charlie Brown football and they don't. What is your prediction about whether anyone will come through and will we will have witnesses. Well it's all about public opinion. Lincoln said public sentiment is everything with it you can do anything without it practically nothing. And the public sentiment in these states is very clearly in favor of witnesses and documentation. And if those senators don't vote in favor of that there is a price to pay. Now if Mitch McConnell doesn't allow them to vote for that that says something as well. So they're (10/44)
in a very bad place. But the fact is this is so clear as far as defending the Constitution honoring the vision of our founders for what that is the exquisite by separation of powers in our Constitution that makes us a republic. I pledge allegiance to the fight and to the republic for which it stands a republic. That's what we are. That's what he is undermining by saying Article 2 says I can do whatever I want. Not just Trump undermining Mitch McConnell. You know I mean you've tiptoed right up to the line of basically calling him un-American and Moscow Midge Moscow Midge. A lot of ways he's done more damage than Trump has. I mean I know he's a strict constitutionalist who constantly violates the Constitution most prominently of course by not allowing Merrick Garland Obama's Supreme Court pit to even have a hearing. Well let me say this and that is if they were to write the book All the President's Men as they did about the other impeachment that would be called All the President's (11/44)
Henchmen. The Attorney General of the United States all these people surrounding the president. But let's just take this to a patriotic place. This isn't about politics. It isn't about partisanship. It's about patriotism. It's about our Constitution. And we don't want any president democratic or republican no matter who she or he is to think that they could get away with this. And he had to be stopped because he's again jeopardizing the integrity of the next election by blaming it on the Ukrainians and not giving any accountability to the Russians for what they do. You're a lot more generous of spirit to him than I am. I've heard you say many things. Not to him but to the Constitution. Well I've heard you say I don't hate him. Oh I don't hate anybody. I wouldn't give you that. Right I know. And I believe you. I can't go there with you. But here's what I have told my audience and people disagree with this. I've told them and I think this should be our mantra on the left. You can hate (12/44)
Trump. You can't hate the people who like him. No I completely agree with you. Because that's where we are too. No. I'm unfriending you. No. That way lies literally civil war. I completely agree with you. Even the people I serve within the Congress we have very little in common in terms of our issues. But the fact is I respect the people who sent them to Congress. And so I afford them the respect that their constituents deserve. You were never a scary radical but that's how you were portrayed. Yeah. One hundred thirty seven thousand ads describing that way in the 2008. Is that right? One hundred thirty seven thousand ads. San Francisco liberal which I proudly am. Yeah. I mean that's not a radical. Radical. Look at him. Left wing. Left wing. What I found disturbing is that very often Democrats did not defend you. Oh no. No. Don't worry about that. You don't worry about that. But here's what I do worry about. Our country in its greatness can absorb one term of the present occupant of the (13/44)
White House. Not two terms. Right. What it does to the courts and the rest. So what we have to do from right to left in our own party and beyond our own party is to elect a new president of the United States. Whoever that is whoever the nominee is we all must embrace and advance. And I have to say as I travel the country I do believe there's plenty of common ground in the mainstream a mainstream message that can take us to the White House. Don't you think it says something about the Democratic Party and their inability to win key elections lately that a lot of your accomplishments instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with you and saying this is the person who saved the country helped Obama from going into a depression by passing the stimulus and save the automobile industry and got Dodd-Frank passed and got health care got Obama passed. You know you're kind of our iron lady here on the left. You know I feel like the Democratic Party is very often the victim of their own purity (14/44)
tests. Oh don't worry about that but I do in terms of it because I'm in the arena. You go in there you go in and you you have to be ready to take a punch and you have to be able to throw a punch for the children. So I don't worry about that. But what I love the children but what I am concerned about for the children is the future of this country. And we have to have our common ground a mainstream message. Now in the recent election we won. We showed in the House that we know how to win disciplined focused cold blooded in terms of just winning. And good to have your cold blooded self. Nancy Pelosi everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Say in your seat. Let's meet our panel. Thank you. Oh yes. I want to talk to her. Let's meet our panel. He is the former Republican congressman for Illinois and a primary challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. Joe Walsh is over here. Joe Walsh. Not that Joe Walsh but the Congressman. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner winning (15/44)
historian and author of the New York Times bestseller The Soul of America. The battle for our better angels. The meets John Meacham is over here. And she is editor at large at Recode and a columnist for The New York Times. Kara Swisher back with us. Great to see you. Don't forget to send us questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. All right. So let's talk about impeachment. It's historical. Now I'm bad for the country but as a historian John. You must be a little tingly about it. It's dork porn. Basically. It really is. If C-SPAN were pay-per-view maybe. Yeah. No. It's. We've only done this three times in 240 years. Remarkable presidents. But I read 15 times overall and all had witnesses. Yeah. The only time we might not have witnesses. Yeah. And the chief justice is ready to watch in this. The chief justice in the Johnson impeachment voted a couple of times to break a tie. So it's it was the ultimate sanction. The key insight the speaker just (16/44)
said it was divided sovereignty that founders basically had a pretty pessimistic view of human nature. We've done everything we can to prove them right. As Winston Churchill once said you can always count on America to do the right thing once it's exhausted every other possibility. And so the idea was make it really hard to do something. And impeachment comes out of the English common law. Very hard to do. I suspect with these lawyers today. Bill at least one of whom represented O.J. We may be seeing this again. You know he's guilty but he's going to walk. That's possible here. But possible. The hope that reason is definitely going to walk. I what. There's someone on this panel or in this world who thinks that possibly possibly Trump could get convicted. I think so. I think so. Look look. Don't even allow witnesses. He's president. So anything can happen. Anything can happen. And Bill start again start with I spoke after the show. But he's been doing he's been doing Dork all day. I (17/44)
mean this is a bombshell to me. Walk me through this where the Republicans who have never turned on him. We don't know why those are good questions to ask why this is suddenly what knowledge do you have. We know that most of my former Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate they can't stand him. Bill everybody knows what this guy did. Everybody knows he did wrong. I think they're voting. No but I think there will be enough Republicans who will maybe demand a fair trial here from Bolton here from Lev Parnas. And it's up to Bill it's up to the voters it's up to the American people to get in these senators faces and say damn it put country before party. I think there's there could be some pressure. I'm with you Bill. It's absolutely not. I don't know why. Yeah. We're going to cut this out of the show. And we're live. That's how much I don't believe in this. But I do think it's funny that they're so afraid to hear from John Bolton lifelong Republican hack but they can't even hear (18/44)
from him. Yeah. How about this question. Could it backfire witnesses because then don't don't Trump get to call Biden and his heir to well son and how they decide this. That's the whole thing is that is it one. One gets one one gets the other. How could it go other. I mean you have to do that. Right. Absolutely. But there could be people that are you could say that are pertinent to the investigation about this is what Biden needs a better answer about his son. And I can do more push ups than you and I'm going to beat you up. He's going to have to address it during the general campaign. You know what he's the nominee. I remember 2004 was it with John Kerry. War hero and they turned him into the war criminal and Bush the draft Dodger into the war hero. So if this gets to a trial and they call Biden and his son trust me Biden and his son in Ukraine will be the biggest scandal. Yeah. No I think the American people will see through that. Oh Jesus. Again. I'm never going to be invited. You (19/44)
heard her just say one hundred and thirty seven thousand ads and those are probably on the book. Right. So what they do is they flood the zone with rights and they will do that here and they will keep repeating and repeating the message. But it's not helping Trump. His numbers. I mean he's got his base of support that will never lose him. He leave him. He's not gaining votes beyond that especially on impeachment. I think it works really much better than you think and we don't know how it works is the problem but the real the real conviction and removal will have to happen in November. And so the argument here has to be that you find the percentage of voters cold bloodedly as the speaker just said and convince them that OK we've had our fun. You know it's always funny to somebody gets an eye put out. And so we've been shot by the BB gun. It was a it was a Russian made. And so just we've done it. OK. You know funds over and we've got to get back to. And that's the Biden case right. (20/44)
Biden's case is I'm an oxygen tent. You know right. Put the country in and we'll take care of it for four years. He may need an oxygen tent. Well you know he looks bad at those debates. No amount of evidence matters here. Like this Lev Parnas thing just happened and it's full. It's like literally I was thinking of Rudy Giuliani. He's not a credible. I mean I believe none of them are credible. Right. And they're all hanging around the Trump basket essentially. OK. But what he said has jived with what everybody else. Yeah. No I agree. All that. But wait. He left a note to himself that said get Zelensky to announce that the Biden case will be investigated to himself. Yet to remember. It's like a bank robber writing a note. Remember to rob banks. It strikes me as suspicious that you would do that. But you have the. I'm just. You have the Rudy Giuliani stuff here. Right. You have Rudy Giuliani. He's like the STD of digital essentially. Think about it right. He's just constantly leaving (21/44)
problems. That's a dork porn. That's a dork porn. You get that after a dork porn. OK. Let me ask about the debate and the brouhaha I mentioned in the monologue we showed the video. Is it wrong just to ask this question. It's not that Bernie Sanders whatever he said whether he did say it or not. She's not claiming that he said a woman shouldn't be president. Right. Just that a woman couldn't. And we've always had these discussions. We're having them now. Quite honestly it is not a crazy discussion to have considering the most qualified person ever Hillary Clinton lost to the racist Teletubby in. The last one. So it seems like the same people who were saying well Hillary Clinton lost because her sexism are now saying how dare you say a woman couldn't be elected. Look Elizabeth Warren brought it up herself. That was the card. Yes. Played the woman card. And I don't know if it was a card. I hate that. Well come on. Come on. Well she was sinking like a rock. And this is what politicians. (22/44)
She had to bring it up. She had to bring it up. Had to? Yes. To save her campaign. Just say it. Just say it out loud. Well to save her campaign. It was not an issue that needed to be brought it up. It was an issue. It was like we're sinking in the polls. This is what politicians do when they're on the trail for a year. They get a little. She was rising. Remember she was going to be the one. Remember Bush in 2000 brought out black babies with John McCain. He's like I'm losing this thing. Black babies. That's all I want to hear about is black babies. And they brought that shit out. It depends on the candidate. It depends on the woman. I'm a conservative Republican. Nancy Pelosi is a rock star. I'd put her in the White House right now. I mean it. The way that woman against Trump has single handedly defended the constitution. My God I'd want her in the White House. Joe. That's it. Considering three years ago you were saying if Trump didn't get elected you were going to get a musket. If (23/44)
Nancy Pelosi doesn't get elected I'll grab her. Well you know Joe is moving to my house in the Castro and we're really living together. Joe and Dork porn. Yeah Dork porn together. It's going to be great. We're marrying a goat. That's what we do now. A throuple? It's a throuple right here. Sexy sexy sexy happening here. Look what Trump done. You started it. You started it. Dork porn. That was kind of a basic C-SPAN joke. Bill grab this panel. I will. While we were off Trump did a drone strike against this guy Suleimani and part of the brouhaha was he said that he was going to attack their cultural sites. Now of course Iran is ancient Persia so their cultural sites are pretty awesome. But you know every reaction causes a reaction now we have to worry about our cultural sites but of course our cultural sites are like Graceland in your home state of Tennessee and you know we have the fountain at the Bellagio and we have the Rocky statue. You know ours are not as impressive but there are (24/44)
some people don't know about for example Winona Mississippi has the International House of Mud Flaps. In Ohio there's the tomb of the unknown amphetamine addicted long haul trucker. In my home state Belmar Rock New Jersey this is the site where the guidos first landed in America. In Nevada there's Area 52 where the Pentagon is said to be hiding evidence of the existence of moderate Republicans. Washington D.C. has the wall of hunters shot by other hunters. And in Mississippi there's the highway that gave us the roadkill which became Trump's hair. So he's a 2020 2020 2020 Democratic presidential candidate author of the war on normal people the truth about America's disappearing jobs and why universal basic income is our future. Andrew Yang as you were coming out you were doing this. Is that a shot at Biden and Bernie that you know you can. Come on it's a subtle way of reminding everyone you. Your audience can tell you he keeps the studio a little bit chilly am I right. Oh OK. That's it. (25/44)
Well listen I missed you at the debate. You weren't the only one. I did. I think you know you have a different voice and a voice that needs to be heard. One thing I like about your voice you're the least Trump obsessed. Of all the candidates. Let me read your quote. You said if you turn on cable network news today you would think he's our president because of some combination of Russia racism Facebook Hillary and emails. Some of that is true but you're saying it's other things and I would agree. Yeah I'm heading from here to Iowa and we blasted away forty thousand manufacturing jobs in that state. And when you go to those towns after the mill closed the shopping center closed people started to leave the school shrank and it's never recovered. And that's the story that's played out in Ohio Michigan Western Pennsylvania Wisconsin. That's why Trump won all of those key states. And what we did to those manufacturing jobs we're now doing to retail jobs call center jobs 30 percent of (26/44)
America's malls and stores are closing because Amazon is closing them and Amazon is paying zero in taxes. So these are the problems that people in Iowa feel every single day. And when I talk to voters they do not obsess about impeachment the same way the folks in the media do. America still makes stuff it's just that it's robots doing it. I think I read in your article something like 88 percent of factory jobs that were lost from 2000 to 2010 were lost to automation. That's the issue for you right. Yeah when you go to a factory in the Midwest you don't see wall to wall immigrants. You see wall to wall machines and robot owners. And that's just speeding up to the extent that you do need more manufacturing workers which you do. They tend to be educated technicians people who are good on laptops and not hammering things into place. And in our country only 33 percent of Americans are going to graduate from college. We're essentially a nation of high school graduates and those opportunities (27/44)
are not keeping pace. So the other thing I like about you is that you are also the least identity politics obsessed I feel. No I don't see color. My staff tells me you're Asian. Yes. You know well early on in my campaign some people told me that an Asian couldn't win the White House and those people were my parents. Is that true. My parents ever dreamt about me running. It wasn't even like you can't be president. Right. You should be president. Well they weren't excited initially because Asian Americans don't really think about politics as a natural arena for us. But hopefully I'm changing that. You are changing. Yes. And I also love it that you make jokes and but some Asians don't like that you get pushback but they're like jokes about being good at math. They're positive. It's like being kidded about having a big dick. Oh how dare you. Now everyone's going to know you know. Well well math is an acronym it stands for a Make America Think Harder. Yes. What we need to do. Yeah you do. (28/44)
You got to get good at math. So let me ask you about the China deal. Not because you're Asian. No really. Really. It was a big part of the week. You know we obsess about all these other things. This is like your criticism of the media. You say you know I always criticize Fox News all those years and still do because they don't they just don't report the news that they don't want their people to hear about. Yeah. I feel the left is getting that way too. Now we did sign a fine finally sign a trade deal with China. What do you think of it. What's your take on it. Well the details haven't come out from this phase one. I talked to a producer here in the U.S. and they said that what's been signed does not actually protect them or address their concerns at all. It's more about not slapping additional tariffs on imports that were coming into the country. And I don't know about the rest of you but I'm much more concerned about our exporters and producers people like farmers in Iowa than I am (29/44)
about the Chinese producers. So to me we don't know what's in this until we get some more information and details. What about the technology stealing. Do you know about that. I do. Well the technology stealing is one thing but it actually is that in there. Did we really get it. It's not clear. It's not clear. We don't have details. But I think the issue is it's not facing what the future is which is China is actually very innovative and is starting to manufacture all kinds of things including those robots. Those are immigrant robots in those. How come I keep reading that the Democrats are getting their ass kicked on the technological front as far as social media as far as ads. I remember in 2000 was it 12. Obama. The campaign was so technologically ahead and Peggy Noonan said I think we're going to win because I see so many yard signs and they were like yard signs. We're on the computer lady and somehow now it's not somehow the Republicans were using this very early on. I remember (30/44)
Ralph Reed using it great effect many many like 10 years ago. And it's because the before Fox News most of the conservatives were zeroed out in mainstream media and so they started to use digital tools rather adeptly. And now they use them in lots of ways and they're sort of aided of course as Andrew knows by Facebook and others in terms of these tools and the ability to micro target and they've gotten very good at it and the Democrats have just lagged. But I thought the liberals owned Silicon Valley. I thought we were the ones that were good at this shit. The Republicans were supposed to be the old man who said you know talked about the machine when they were talking about its a per corner. If you want us to leapfrog the Republicans again I should be your nominee because I guarantee you as your nominee we'd be better at technology than the Republicans come the fall. You personally could make that happen. That's true. I mean that's a big promise. I mean and a lot of catching up to do (31/44)
apparently. Yeah. You know what happened in 2016 is the Republicans did get very very good. And then at the time Facebook went to the Clinton campaign and said hey you want some help. And the Clinton campaign said now we got it. And that was not the right answer. I have an important question for you. If you are the nominee you win you win the vote. You are you are president elect Yang. Yes and on that. Yeah. Sitting up. Well wait till you hear what I have to say. You don't really think Donald Trump is going to concede to you. Do you. Could I let me read a few few quotes and then you can answer this. Sure. Here's one. A couple of years ago. Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country and insurrection like you've never seen. Here's Trump. Two weeks before the election that he won. The whole thing is a big fix. It's one big fix. The process is rigged. This whole election is being rigged. That's when he thought he was going to lose. His representative (32/44)
Steve King. Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about eight trillion bullets while the other side doesn't know which bath room to use. Yes we do. Here's Trump. June 10th of last year asked the difference between him and Nixon. He left. I don't leave. Big difference. And Joe I know you're a different guy now. But here's you. November 2016. You said on November 8th I'm voting for Trump. On November 9th if Trump loses I'm grabbing my musket. Oh. This is the world we're living in. You don't really think that Trump is going to concede. What's the plan. This is my question for Democrats all this year. What is the plan when he says it's rigged. We found irregularities. I'm hearing. I'm suspending everything. And he's not leaving on January 20th. What do you do. I genuinely think that he'd make a lot of noise but he would leave because in order to stay you literally need the military on your side and the military if it's a free and fair election which it will be when I (33/44)
defeat him in November then the military is not going to circle the White House and say we're going to keep this guy in. I mean they're Americans they're patriots they'll be like he's the commander in chief. He'll leave. But to your point he's not really going to leave because he's going to grab Sean Hannity he's going to grab his billions of followers and he's going to cause hell for whoever the next president is. He's going to continue to try to divide things but he's going to make noise but from the outside of the White House. That's my next question. What happens if he does that. Say you do get him out. I don't think you will but you tent the White House and you get him out. It could be worse. Then he's Caesar camped on the other side of the Rubicon with his army. These people who you were three years ago with muskets you hear it all the time and he's agitating because he's not the kind of guy like most presidents who say well I congratulate my successor and I'm not going to speak (34/44)
about issues. That is not who he is. What does Twitter do. I put this in a column in the Times was what happens that right now they keep him and let him stay on there and lie and say whatever he wants because he's a newsworthy figure. What happens the day after the election where he promotes violence. What did they do. I think that's like a Twitter right. Finally throw him off or did they say he's a newsworthy figure let him do whatever he wants. That's that's interesting of how he can because Twitter has been his modicum of campaigning and now governing and so I think that's kind of an interesting question of what happened. John if he loses in 2020 he could run again in 2024 right. Absolutely. Oh geez. Yeah. In the 22nd in the trip. Well I think I think you're right that it's a genuine concern. I think during Watergate James Schlesinger the secretary of defense issued an order saying any nuclear order any military order that comes from the White House I have to sign off on. They were (35/44)
worried about the chain of command then. It's not inconceivable. Again he's president. So we're living in a in a odd world to say the least. My sense of the effect he would try to have beyond the White House is there's 34 percent thirty five percent of the country that they thought Joe McCarthy was great after he was censured that Washington Post poll in 1955. Thirty four percent approved of Joe McCarthy even after it was all over. Forty percent of the country never voted for Franklin Roosevelt. They couldn't say his name. They called him that man. But that's thirty four forty percent. Right now we're closer to forty eight forty nine. And I think that the big battle has to be finding people who are actually persuadable and making this case. We're never going to get some sort of Valhalla of bipartisanship. We've never had it. We never will. But we've never been a reasonable majority ever been here. We've never been here before where the other side doesn't even hear the argument. Did you (36/44)
see Martha McSally. She used to be a fairly moderate by Republicans stand and not really pro Trump in Arizona. And do we have the tape we can show a reporter from CNN just asked her a reasonable question about there is new information about the impeachment trial. Here's her response. You're a liberal hack. I'm not talking to you. That's where we are. I don't know how the other side even hears the argument you're making. I'm actually really encouraged because I have let's say half a dozen events a day in New Hampshire half a dozen events a day in Iowa every single event someone comes up to me after I'm done speaking and says I voted for Donald Trump and this time I'm going to vote for you. And they say it like a secret but it happens every single. But that's at your event. That's at Andrews events. Yeah. But you know that's that's why that's why I think it's really important that these sides come together someone who I mean the people who voted for Trump voted for me right voices on (37/44)
this side need to stand up against them to avoid what you're talking about. OK. And McSally turned that into a campaign ad. Of course. Viral fund. That's behind Mark in. But that's my point. There seem nobody seems to think there's any value in going toward the center. It's to John's point. It's what is that number to me. If you can get that down to let's call it like the low 40s then we're going to win by a landslide. You can't get it down to zero bill. But there I talk to people and Joe does too I sense that are in that top 41 to 49 range that are looking for an alternative. They're disappointed in the president. They're seeing what's going on in their communities. And if someone speaks to those problems then we can win. And remember it's a country that in the 32nd constitutional oath three years ago almost to the day we went from having Barack Obama as our president to Donald Trump. I mean yeah it's just a wild swing. We bounced from guardrail to guardrail so we might get Aristotle (38/44)
next time. The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes. Remember my my words. You can hate Trump. You can't hate the people who like him. All right. Time for new rules everybody. New rules. They're all the golden gloves must stop patting themselves on the back for going vegan. Nobody eats at award shows. Some are too coked up. Just can't chew because of the Botox. And it's award season. Come on the meals that do get eaten will just be thrown up. You're so sensitive about actresses throwing up their dinner at an award show. New rule people who participate in the new fad of perineum sunning. This is a thing. I knew you were waiting to come back. Where you expose your anus to solar rays. It's real. Must never ask me to the beach. You've not only ruined sunbathing you've ruined the phrase stick it where the sun don't shine. This zookeeper must tell us exactly what she's afraid this pelican might say. And Mitch McConnell wants to know are you available to work in an impeachment (39/44)
trial. New rule if you're a suburban liberal who puts up one of those immigrants are welcome here signs random Guatemalans get to take you up on it. Let's see how welcome the Cooperton's really are when they come home from yoga to find Jorge Sosa and his family spread out all over the restoration hardware and the Spanish subtitles on the Netflix account. New rule this Oscar season the Academy must not forget Harvey Weinstein's performance in I'm too crippled to go to jail. Talk about convincing. Does this look like a guy who could chase Gwyneth Paltrow around a desk. And finally new rule if Meghan and Harry can quit their family you can too. Not that I've got anything against families in general they come in really handy at times like like when you need a co-signer for a car loan. But the downside of families is they possess a gravitational force that gets you to do stuff you don't want to do and continue traditions you don't really believe in. Families like drugs you get high off them (40/44)
but they make you do stupid things. Princess Diana famously said she felt like a prisoner but many people can get trapped living their family's life and not their life captive to the same old jobs politics region customs you know every New Year's Day my family used to serve pork and sauerkraut. I don't know why my parents did it and their parents did it and I did it until one year I said I hate this shit. Just because I share DNA in a bathroom with you people doesn't mean I have to live by your rules forever. So do it. Fire your family. Harry gave up a castle. What do you got to lose an air mattress. Break the cycle. Think outside the crib. There must be 50 ways to leave your mother. You don't have to do what your folks did. You don't have to get married and have children if you don't want to or go hunting or work in a coal mine. You don't have to be the religion you were born into or any religion. You can explore an alternative way of looking at the universe called not batshit crazy. (41/44)
So I give Harry and Meghan some credit but not a lot because they want to be seen as this modern couple way more than the other stuff he went to the family. OK then go all the way and say it. Say we're not just taking a step back from royalty. We're renouncing the whole outdated racist anachronistic lot of it. We're saying loud and proud. What is this bullshit that some people are royal. You want to be modern and woke and all that. Want to get rid of politically incorrect words. How about your highness. What could be more antithetical to liberalism than calling another human your highness. I got to say the social justice warriors who never tire of pointing out old behaviors and bygone attitudes that just don't cut it anymore. Where they've been on this one seduced by the pageantry where you. I think the woke have been asleep surprisingly forgiving about the idea that some people are born exalted above the rest of us to be bowed to and carted around in golden carriages. Are you people (42/44)
who wake up offended. Where's the outrage for you. I want an apology from the people always want an apology. Did you know the queen has a grand Carver. Currently the Earl of Denbigh whose sole job is to carve the queen's meat and a dinner when the queen finishes eating. Everyone else has to stop too. Yeah when the old bat puts her spoon down. That's it. We're all done. I thought being born into privilege was public enemy number one now. But you're happy to be lorded over by a bunch of inbred twit to happen to win the 23 and me lottery. Megan and Harry you want to be remembered for greatness then burn your boats completely and say it's 2020. I hereby decree this birthright nonsense from the Middle Ages is stupid. And the next time someone curtsies or bows and scrapes before you or calls you your highness stop them and say we feel ridiculous being called that. I'm an actress. He's a nice guy. Highnesses. No humans are higher by birth. It's gross. And to those who say the monarchy is too (43/44)
important to tourist attraction I always hear that can abolish it. Guess what. You don't need live people for it. They still go to Stonehenge and the aliens who built that left a long time ago. The palaces the guards the carriages it's practically an amusement park already. We could call it the Magic United Kingdom. Fill it with rides like Caucasian Mountain. Diana's Wild Ride. And the tunnel of incestuous love. Just you know keep the kids away from Prince Andrew. All right. That's our show. I'll be at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina February 15th at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center in North Charleston February 16th at the Comerica Theater in Phoenix on the 22nd of February. I want to thank Joe Walsh, Jon Meacham, Kara Swisher, Andrew Yanny and Nancy Pelosi. Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
see Martha McSally. She used to be a fairly moderate by Republicans stand and not really pro Trump in Arizona. And do we have the tape we can show a reporter from CNN just asked her a reasonable question about there is new information about the impeachment trial. Here's her response. You're a liberal hack. I'm not talking to you. That's where we are. I don't know how the other side even hears the argument you're making. I'm actually really encouraged because I have let's say half a dozen events a day in New Hampshire half a dozen events a day in Iowa every single event someone comes up to me after I'm done speaking and says I voted for Donald Trump and this time I'm going to vote for you. And they say it like a secret but it happens every single. But that's at your event. That's at Andrews events. Yeah. But you know that's that's why that's why I think it's really important that these sides come together someone who I mean the people who voted for Trump voted for me right voices on (37/44)
this side need to stand up against them to avoid what you're talking about. OK. And McSally turned that into a campaign ad. Of course. Viral fund. That's behind Mark in. But that's my point. There seem nobody seems to think there's any value in going toward the center. It's to John's point. It's what is that number to me. If you can get that down to let's call it like the low 40s then we're going to win by a landslide. You can't get it down to zero bill. But there I talk to people and Joe does too I sense that are in that top 41 to 49 range that are looking for an alternative. They're disappointed in the president. They're seeing what's going on in their communities. And if someone speaks to those problems then we can win. And remember it's a country that in the 32nd constitutional oath three years ago almost to the day we went from having Barack Obama as our president to Donald Trump. I mean yeah it's just a wild swing. We bounced from guardrail to guardrail so we might get Aristotle (38/44)
next time. The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes. Remember my my words. You can hate Trump. You can't hate the people who like him. All right. Time for new rules everybody. New rules. They're all the golden gloves must stop patting themselves on the back for going vegan. Nobody eats at award shows. Some are too coked up. Just can't chew because of the Botox. And it's award season. Come on the meals that do get eaten will just be thrown up. You're so sensitive about actresses throwing up their dinner at an award show. New rule people who participate in the new fad of perineum sunning. This is a thing. I knew you were waiting to come back. Where you expose your anus to solar rays. It's real. Must never ask me to the beach. You've not only ruined sunbathing you've ruined the phrase stick it where the sun don't shine. This zookeeper must tell us exactly what she's afraid this pelican might say. And Mitch McConnell wants to know are you available to work in an impeachment (39/44)
trial. New rule if you're a suburban liberal who puts up one of those immigrants are welcome here signs random Guatemalans get to take you up on it. Let's see how welcome the Cooperton's really are when they come home from yoga to find Jorge Sosa and his family spread out all over the restoration hardware and the Spanish subtitles on the Netflix account. New rule this Oscar season the Academy must not forget Harvey Weinstein's performance in I'm too crippled to go to jail. Talk about convincing. Does this look like a guy who could chase Gwyneth Paltrow around a desk. And finally new rule if Meghan and Harry can quit their family you can too. Not that I've got anything against families in general they come in really handy at times like like when you need a co-signer for a car loan. But the downside of families is they possess a gravitational force that gets you to do stuff you don't want to do and continue traditions you don't really believe in. Families like drugs you get high off them (40/44)
but they make you do stupid things. Princess Diana famously said she felt like a prisoner but many people can get trapped living their family's life and not their life captive to the same old jobs politics region customs you know every New Year's Day my family used to serve pork and sauerkraut. I don't know why my parents did it and their parents did it and I did it until one year I said I hate this shit. Just because I share DNA in a bathroom with you people doesn't mean I have to live by your rules forever. So do it. Fire your family. Harry gave up a castle. What do you got to lose an air mattress. Break the cycle. Think outside the crib. There must be 50 ways to leave your mother. You don't have to do what your folks did. You don't have to get married and have children if you don't want to or go hunting or work in a coal mine. You don't have to be the religion you were born into or any religion. You can explore an alternative way of looking at the universe called not batshit crazy. (41/44)
So I give Harry and Meghan some credit but not a lot because they want to be seen as this modern couple way more than the other stuff he went to the family. OK then go all the way and say it. Say we're not just taking a step back from royalty. We're renouncing the whole outdated racist anachronistic lot of it. We're saying loud and proud. What is this bullshit that some people are royal. You want to be modern and woke and all that. Want to get rid of politically incorrect words. How about your highness. What could be more antithetical to liberalism than calling another human your highness. I got to say the social justice warriors who never tire of pointing out old behaviors and bygone attitudes that just don't cut it anymore. Where they've been on this one seduced by the pageantry where you. I think the woke have been asleep surprisingly forgiving about the idea that some people are born exalted above the rest of us to be bowed to and carted around in golden carriages. Are you people (42/44)
who wake up offended. Where's the outrage for you. I want an apology from the people always want an apology. Did you know the queen has a grand Carver. Currently the Earl of Denbigh whose sole job is to carve the queen's meat and a dinner when the queen finishes eating. Everyone else has to stop too. Yeah when the old bat puts her spoon down. That's it. We're all done. I thought being born into privilege was public enemy number one now. But you're happy to be lorded over by a bunch of inbred twit to happen to win the 23 and me lottery. Megan and Harry you want to be remembered for greatness then burn your boats completely and say it's 2020. I hereby decree this birthright nonsense from the Middle Ages is stupid. And the next time someone curtsies or bows and scrapes before you or calls you your highness stop them and say we feel ridiculous being called that. I'm an actress. He's a nice guy. Highnesses. No humans are higher by birth. It's gross. And to those who say the monarchy is too (43/44)
important to tourist attraction I always hear that can abolish it. Guess what. You don't need live people for it. They still go to Stonehenge and the aliens who built that left a long time ago. The palaces the guards the carriages it's practically an amusement park already. We could call it the Magic United Kingdom. Fill it with rides like Caucasian Mountain. Diana's Wild Ride. And the tunnel of incestuous love. Just you know keep the kids away from Prince Andrew. All right. That's our show. I'll be at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina February 15th at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center in North Charleston February 16th at the Comerica Theater in Phoenix on the 22nd of February. I want to thank Joe Walsh, Jon Meacham, Kara Swisher, Andrew Yanny and Nancy Pelosi. Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com. (44/44)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #527: Nancy Pelosi, Dr. David Katz.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. ...week here and what can I say? Happy Friday, or I like to call it 420 day five. Yeah, wow. It was 420 this week, not that I need another excuse to get stoned all the time, but wow. Yesterday, I binge watched my hand. Yeah, that's what they call it now, binge watching. Binge watching, staying up all night watching television. Yeah, we used to call that doing cocaine. But it was also Earth Day this week, and people are right. Nature is healing. That is the one bright spot in this. The deer have returned to Griffith Park. There's fish in the canals of Venice. The swallows have returned to President Trump's skull. Oh, I stopped watching the briefings. I can't. Why? I mean, to watch this guy lie and blame and point fingers and pat himself on the back. It's like, what? I watched him. It's like ashtrays when I see them on an airplane. I say to myself, why do they still have these? Yeah, Trump was pissed off (1/45)
this week because they finally got back the largest study so far to be done about hydroxychloroquine, or chloroquine, queen, whatever it is. And this is the shit that Trump has been saying, what are you up to lose? He's been pushing this like a Buick dealer trying to unload last year's Skylark. But the study came back and it turns out it doesn't work. It's dangerous and it hasn't been vetted. If it was a person, he would have hired it. But I mean, what is this? What do you have to lose about a dangerous, unvetted drug that has side effects? This is why my mother told me, never take medical advice from a fat guy in clown makeup. Oh, and as if things aren't bad enough, how about a side order of war to go with what we're going through? Because Trump tweeted this week, I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up. He tweeted, I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down any and all Iranian gunboats who may be harassing our sailors. That's right. And if they fuck with us (2/45)
again, we're going to sink their planes. Are we sure that the makeup is not lead based? Could I just get that question answered? So anyway, Trump, yes, he's having a bad week. So he's going back to his greatest hits. He announced this week a travel ban on everywhere. He says, no more immigrants till he figures out where Fauci's from. Also a 60-day halt. We're going to put on green cards, people who want green cards. So all of you who are planning to moving to the most infected country on earth, top luck on you. But let's end with a little note of happiness, a little bright light of optimism. Researchers have found, especially for people this is who might be married or living with someone, they have found that the coronavirus cannot be spread through flatulence. The researchers also say that their careers in research didn't really pan out the way they hoped. All right, we got a great show. We have Nancy Pelosi. Wow, Dr. David Katz and Jay Leno is here. Let's get right to it. Okay, I (3/45)
think everybody knows my first guest. She's the representative from San Francisco and the 52nd Speaker of the House for the United States of America, Nancy Pelosi. Thank you very much for doing this. Welcome to my game room. And I have many questions for you in these difficult times. The first one being everyone seems to agree testing is the way to get back to normality in America. And it's the most frustrating thing is it seems like it would even help Trump, but he seems to be dragging his feet on this most important issue. Is there any way Congress can pass their own plan? Well, what we passed today, which we just finished passing is the testing. We have $25 billion in there for testing, but we require that there be a national strategic plan for testing and that we have reporting back as to how it is impacting all communities, communities of color and diversity in our country. So it insists on that. But we passed our first bill. This is our fourth bill, all bipartisan. First bill was (4/45)
March 4th, was called testing, testing, testing. Here we are more than a month and a half later, and we still have to pass another bill. It's very hard to understand why they are dragging their feet or whatever, their brains or whatever, not to realize that if we want to open up the economy, test, test, test, contact trace, incubate, isolate that. It's so simple. You have to not only test, but trace and filter in place until the coast is clear. Okay, you mentioned that this is the fourth bill you've passed. I think the total now is coming up on $2.7 trillion. That's a lot of money in a very short period of time. I know Congress controls the purse strings. I can't imagine there's much left in the purse. I just don't get it. I don't understand how, I know we can bail out certain sectors as we have done in the past. I don't know how you can just keep indefinitely writing checks. We were 20 trillion in the hole to begin with, and all world governments who are already in debt are doing (5/45)
this. How can the whole world be writing this funny money? Well, because it's a matter of life and death. Nobody made as big a fuss as we did when they passed a nearly $2 trillion tax break for the wealthiest people in our country. 83% of the benefits going to the top 1% and the debt that that laid on our kids to pay for in the future. So, but this is more of an investment in the lives and the livelihood of the American people. And we have to think big about that. The more we invest in science and health, the quicker our economy will recover from the pandemic. Well, it will recover unless people get wise to the fact that we're just writing checks for money that doesn't exist. I mean, what is the point of bailing out banks who are then just gonna loan back the money that doesn't exist to us again? It seems like it's a house of cards that could in the end wind up hurting more people than the disease. Well, the point is to keep people working. It's paycheck retention. And so the point of (6/45)
this legislation for the, they call it Paycheck Protection Program is that the small businesses would be able to have some relief. And if they kept their workers on, then they would have debt forgiveness. And that is a very important part of it. We were concerned when they asked for more money right away. We said, well, wait a minute, we wanna make sure, we wanna see the data that we have seen anecdotally, not scientifically yet, is telling us that many low, that we say under banked communities were not getting any of this money. Whether it was women and minority owned businesses, Native American veterans, rural communities, et cetera, were not getting these loans because they just didn't have banking relationships that were putting them further up in the line. Further up in the line. So it is probably, well, it is an investment and it is stimulant to the economy when that comes, but is not anything in comparison to the irresponsibility of a tax cut of almost $2 trillion when you count (7/45)
the interest on the debt that all of these deficit hawks, these fiscal conservatives, didn't even give one ounce of thought to. The fact is we expect a return on this money. When we invest in food stamps, that's stimulus. When we invest in unemployment insurance, that's stimulus. When we give a direct payment, that's stimulus. And hopefully when we keep these people in their jobs, and that was the point of the small business, but also the assistance to the aerospace industry, the airline industry, like that, the point is they keep the people in their jobs and therefore they have paychecks and therefore people can survive. It's a tough time because their lives are threatened as well as their livelihood. As well as our democracy, I might add that. We're gonna have money in there for elections, for direct work. The CDC this week said it might come around again in the fall. Can we afford to do the whole thing again? Can we afford to spend this kind of money a second time in one year? I (8/45)
think that it should be clear that this is not doing the job that is set out to do completely, that we may have to consider some other options. Others have proposed sovereign fund profits which go to these unemployed people or guaranteed income, other things that may not even be as costly as continuing down this path. But there is a reverence for small business in our country as the entrepreneurial spirit, the optimism of job creation, wealth creation and the rest. And it's a good place to help people stay in business. But even if they stay in business because we're giving this loan, which if they keep people employed, they don't have to pay back. Their rent is paid, their utilities are paid, their employees are there. At the end of the time, they still have to have customers. And that's really why we need everybody to participate. That's why we need another bill that will be costly. And we call it our heroes bill. And that's for state and local, but that's not state and local. You're (9/45)
across bureaucracy. It's healthcare workers, police and fire, emergency services, people, our teachers, our transit workers, all the people that are paid for by the local state and local public sector. They need jobs too. And they right now are the ones on the frontline risking their lives to save other people's lives. And on top of that, they may lose their jobs because of the loss of revenue to the state. So that will be our next bill. And it will be hundreds of billions of dollars as well to states and localities, counties, municipalities, cities, some bigger than small towns, but nonetheless, all having the responsibility of meeting the needs of healthcare needs of coronavirus, but also recognize the revenue loss that they have. And that has to be recognized as a cost of the coronavirus. So there's more to come. It's not necessarily in the same vein of small business, but it's jobs, jobs, jobs. So the way we see it is all about keeping people employed, keeping people employed. But (10/45)
that's why we're having, we passed today, I was very pleased, a select committee on coronavirus to make sure that the money spent is money that is spent for helping people keep their jobs, not enriching shareholders or dividends, bonuses, corporate CEO pay or anything like that. That angers the American people and it's not right. Secondly, people want their paychecks, whether it's unemployment insurance, whether it's direct payment, whether it's PPP, like this small business initiative. And the third thing is they, first and foremost, I should have said, they want these first responders to be protected. The healthcare providers, the first responders to be protected for what they are doing. They're our heroes, but we, I think, are unworthy to praise them and thank them unless we're going to support them. Okay, well, I thank you for doing this. I hope Trump doesn't steal all that money. I do worry about that. That's why we have this committee to make sure that the money is spent to the (11/45)
best. And by the way, the good news is the American people are paying attention. They are watching and we want, and what we are doing to change, make change. That's so not, all this hundreds of billions dollars is not a way to harden the disparity and access to credit that is there, but to melt that down. And that's what the bill that we're passing today strives to do. Thank you for your interest. I appreciate it, everything you do, Madam Speaker. And I hope I see you in person very soon. And I hear your concern about the national debt bill that we don't want our children to pay. So we have to grow the economy to make up. National debt is one thing. I'm worried about, the whole thing collapsing and we going into a depression, but let's end on a happy note and hope that doesn't happen. Thank you so much. Make sure it doesn't. And that's why we have to win the election in November. Okay, yes, I agree with that. All right, thank you. Take care of yourself. You too, stay safe please. Thank (12/45)
you. All right. Jimmy, Jimmy Fallon, hey. Hey bud, you're not responding to my tree climbing challenge. Come on pal, what do you say? Climb a tree for a good cause? Come on Jimmy, I'm up in a tree. It's fun. You keep acting like a pussy, Trump's gonna grab you. All right, my next guest is the founding director of the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center who recently volunteered his time fighting COVID-19 at a hospital emergency department in the Bronx. Please welcome Dr. David Katz. Doctor, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Mel. Your credentials for talking about this are impeccable. I know you were at the Einstein College of Medicine. You got your degree at the Yale School of Public Health. Nobody questions your credentials. They did, some people question your op-ed that was in the New York Times about a month ago. It was called, is our fight against corona worse than the disease? I think it's good someone's at least asking that question. We can't just lapse into (13/45)
group think. Let me quote the thing you said recently that I think is most interesting and gets at this point. You said, if all we do is flatten the curve, you don't prevent deaths, you just change the dates. Explain that. Yeah, and Bill, first of all, again, thank you. Great to be with you. That's taken directly from some of the world-class risk modelers that I've been working with since that op-ed in the New York Times. So I wrote my op-ed, Tom Friedman wrote a column channeling mine, rounded up a high flagpole, and then a who's who in public health and economics found me and we've been working together ever since. And so some of these risk models basically show, essentially what flattening the curve does is keeps people away from one another and away from the virus. So the virus doesn't spread, but you also don't cultivate any immunity. If you do a really effective job of locking everybody in place and preventing viral transmission, there's still some low-level potential for viral (14/45)
exposure out in the world, but very few of us get that exposure. The minute you release those clamps and let people back into the world, we're all vulnerable. So most of the models suggest that flattening the curve makes sense in phase one so you don't overwhelm medical systems, for example. But you've got to have a phase two. If you don't transition to a phase two, whenever you release the clamps, the virus is out in the world waiting for you, everybody's vulnerable, and that big peak in cases and that big peak in deaths that you were trying to avoid really just happens at a later date. So you would be suggesting something more like what Sweden is doing. Sweden, we know, has kept open its schools. You can go to a bar, you can go to a restaurant and get your hair cut. They haven't had numbers that are that different from countries that have locked down. How do you sum up that? Yeah, so let me start, Bill, by saying essentially what I reject because I think we're a very polarized (15/45)
society. I think the way media hype things up actually amplifies the extremes. At one extreme, we've got the lock everything down, hunker in a bunker until A, there's a vaccine, 18 months or years or whenever, B, forever, or C, you die of something else whichever comes first. That's just horrible. It's inhumane, makes no sense. But at the other extreme, we've got the liberate blank, fill in the name of the state, which is basically everybody in the water, including grandma, and nevermind the riptides and the sharks and every man for himself. That's also absurd. So in the middle, what you do is you identify who is at risk of a severe case of this infection and who's not? Who is at risk of dying of this at a pretty high frequency and who is at extremely low risk? So this is just like risks we take every day. Yeah, some young people will die of this, but sadly, tragically, some young people die crossing the street or in a car crash every day. There are risks we willingly take on every (16/45)
day. Sweden's approach is a little too close to the everybody in the water, don't worry about the riptide, end of the spectrum for my taste. I think we can do even better. We can kind of look around the world and say, okay, if you don't lock this down at all, if you don't protect the vulnerable, mortality in Sweden does look to me to be higher, not massively higher than every place else, but higher. Why put those lives at risk? On the other hand, if you lock everything down, you destroy livelihoods, you destroy jobs. And what I was saying in what I didn't really think was a controversial op-ed at the beginning is there's really more than one way, Bill, for this situation to hurt people or even kill them, and all of them are bad. And there's more than one way to protect people and save them, and all of those are good. So one thing we wanna do is keep those vulnerable to severe infection away from this nasty bug, but we don't wanna destroy people's lives and livelihoods and means of (17/45)
feeding their families. And interestingly, I am just back from three days in an emergency department in the Bronx where I was volunteering as a physician to support my colleagues who I applaud. They've been in there from the beginning, they'll be there through the end. But this is exactly the view that prevails there. There might be the notion that, well, the frontline people, they're much more concerned about staying away from the virus than they are about can we open society up? Not true. Their parents, I was talking to my colleagues that say I'm really struggling to balance my clinical duties with homeschooling my kids. And then think of a scenario like this. Dad is a nurse, mom's a paramedic. They've got two kids at home and there's no school, no daycare, no nannies, no old pairs, nothing for them to do. One of these frontline people who really wants to be in the battle has to stay home to take care of the kids and they're really torn. So there's a middle path and the middle path (18/45)
essentially is high risk people are protected from exposure, low risk people go out in the world early. And here's the odd part, Bill, that I think people have a hard time confronting and accepting. We actually kind of want to get this and get it over with and be immune because that is the path to the all clear that doesn't require us to wait for a vaccine which optimistically is 18 months away but could be much longer. Yeah, I think you make a lot of sense there. And I think it's a shame you're talking about politicization but people like you who sound reasonable, maybe it's not the exact one true opinion you hear somewhere else, has to go on Fox News to say it. You're not a Fox News guy. I'm not a Fox News guy. But on the other hand, I am a Bridges, not Bunkers. And it doesn't really help the world if all we ever do is talk to other people who already own our opinions. It was interesting, I really debated, do I go on Fox News, do I not? That's not my usual crowd. But the simple fact (19/45)
is we should come together in common cause on common ground. Maybe there's a real opportunity here for an aha American moment that's between the extremes of left and right where we all say, yeah, actually, we wanna save as many lives as possible. And one of the interesting things, Bill, is sort of the left side of the spectrum, the liberal ideology that seems to be so resistant to talking at all about unemployment and the economy. But that's the very same camp that tends to appreciate that the single leading driver of bad health outcomes is poverty. Social determinants of health are massively important. So frankly, 30 million people unemployed, that falls disproportionately hard on the people who can least bear the unemployment, who are at most risk of food insecurity, who are at most risk of depression, addiction. All of that's important too. So maybe there's a real opportunity here to say, hey, there's a middle path we've been neglecting it. It's the way through this thing. And it (20/45)
leads to total harm minimization. We wanna minimize deaths and severe cases of the infection. We also wanna minimize the fallout, the health fallout of societal collapse and economic ruin. Yeah, I think philosophically, America got too used to the idea of win-wins and they need to get used to the idea of lose-lose. That's more what life is like sometimes, lose-lose. There's no good choices here. There's only the least bad choice. And I think when you talk about the fact that we have this president who is so inept at dealing with this, but he's not going away. He's not going away. He is the president. He's going to be there. Let me ask you this about testing. It doesn't look like we're gonna have testing for a long time. So look, in the war movies, when they say to the pilot, you know, your equipment is out. He says, I know, but we're gonna have to fly blind on this one. Is that this kind of situation? Are we just gonna have to say the least horrible choice is at some point we might (21/45)
have to do this without the testing. The people who say we can't open up the economy until we have the testing. Well, that can't go on for a year. And we might not have the testing till then at the rate we're going. So a few things. So you said it's not win-win, it's lose-lose. In a sense, and in public health, we talk about harm reduction. You know, so for example, a needle exchange program that says we can't get everybody to stop using intravenous drugs, but we can give them clean needles so they don't get HIV, for example. That's harm reduction. And so when you're in a lose-lose scenario, you look to minimize harm. Maybe you can't maximize benefit, but you can minimize harm. So from the beginning, we've been posting materials, my colleagues and I, under the rubric, total harm minimization. That's what we want to achieve here. Yeah, listen, you know, a historic pandemic is a bad situation. A historic pandemic with a fairly, you know, inept group of federal leaders is an even worse (22/45)
situation. You know, if only we had grownups in charge. But on the testing front, we're making a mistake there, Bill, because we do have testing. It's not great, by the way. You know, so one day, one of these 12-hour shifts in the emergency room in the Bronx, we admitted maybe 20 people we were sure had COVID. You know, there was just no doubt about it. They absolutley, positively had COVID, and either 19 or 20 of them tested negative. So the testing's not great, and the false negative rate is high. But some of the test kits work pretty well. They're certainly better than nothing. And here's the thing, what we aren't going to have anytime soon is the capacity to test the whole population. But we deal with that all the time. The CDC routinely does what's called representative random sampling, where they randomly select people and make sure that they traverse the gamut of age and socioeconomics and zip code and health status. And then you extrapolate the whole population. We could do (23/45)
that with 10,000 people, and we have the test kits for that. So we really need grownups in charge. We need federal oversight. We need a commitment to getting the critical data. And frankly, that could happen fast. It's the work of 72 hours. In the absence of that, we're turning to states. So for example, we just heard there's widespread testing in New York. I think Governor Cuomo's doing a great job there. And it looks like at least 20% of the population of New York may have antibodies. Well, that's close to four million people. And what that means is the death toll in New York, tragic though it is, and again, all these deaths are real people, and my condolences to the families. But just looking at the statistics for a minute, 20,000 deaths out of four million people, that's half a percent. We're starting to see that the mortality toll of this when you get the denominator is really small. And I think the denominator is even bigger than that. So we're not totally blind. Yeah, I think we (24/45)
do have to fly in a bit of a fog, but we're not flying totally blind. Okay. I worry when I hear people talk about how we deal with this that they leave out the immune system. I mean, obviously we know that that's a big part of it, but I feel like that gets such short shrift. And I worry that the country is going to think that the way to deal with microbes in the future is to lock yourself away. And it cannot be that. Germs are ubiquitous. They are everywhere. You can't avoid them. You have to win the battle inside. You wrote a book recently called How to Eat, which has been a pet theme of mine since I've been on television, that the main thing about our health is what we eat. And you write 80% of all chronic disease and premature death is preventable using lifestyle as a medicine. Yes, stop shaking hands, but you can't avoid germs. They're everywhere. Yeah, so great point and a great segue. So first of all, I just want people to understand, again, I'm a physician, I do public health, (25/45)
I'm trained in epidemiology. It really still looks to me as it did that month ago when I wrote my piece for the New York Times, 98 to 99% of the cases of this infection are mild. Most people don't even seem to know they have it. And this is true even in the emergency department. A small portion of the cases are potentially severe. And that's what makes your point so important here, Bill. The severe cases occur in people who are old and people who are sick. Now, those two things go together, but sadly in America, they also splay a part. There are a lot of young people with coronary disease, obesity, type two diabetes, hypertension, and by and large, those are diseases of lifestyle. I'm a past president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. That's what we advocate, lifestyle is medicine, because it can fix all of that. Here's the interesting bit. The stuff we can't sell to people, eat well, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink excessively, get enough sleep, manage your stress, (26/45)
because it's such potent medicine. We can't sell it because the timeline for harm is too long. Essentially, heart disease stalks you in slow motion, type two diabetes stalks you in slow motion, and our DNA is wired to fight or flight. If it's not coming at me in minutes or days, I'm sort of blind to it. Well, COVID is coming at you in minutes and days, and everybody is alarmed, and all the same things are risk factors. So essentially, what this pandemic has done has turned America's chronic health liabilities into an acute threat, and there is an opportunity, a crisis and dangerous opportunity. The very things that we're always telling people to do to promote their long-term health actually do fortify your immunity against this virus. If you start eating optimally, start fitting physical activity into your in-place routine, if you maybe get enough sleep, that can affect how your immune system functions in hours, certainly in days, and a whole lot in a span of weeks. There's not a (27/45)
better time for America to get healthy. If I were one of the grownups in charge of this mess, I would have a national health promotion campaign as part of what we do in an organized way. Look, we're all social distancing, sheltering in place. Let's make lemonade from the lemons. Let's turn this into an opportunity to get healthy. It will protect you in the short run. It'll help protect your loved ones, and when this is over, we'll be a healthier nation into the bargain. Great point. I really appreciate you doing this. I think you make a lot of sense. I hope I see you somewhere other than Fox News, because I don't like to watch it. All right, thank you doctor. I understand I'm going to be on your show, Bill, so I'm trading up already. Yes, you'll be on it again, hopefully in person. All right, take care. You too, stay well. Hi there, welcome to one of the many bars in my house. I have two bedrooms and three bars. Is that wrong? Anyway, we thought this would be a perfect locale, because (28/45)
I was reading about how the coronavirus is really taking a toll on single people. It's one thing if you have a partner around, but single people are having a tough time. But of course, we will go back to normal, and when we do, they're going to need pickup lines in the post-corona world that we're gonna live in. So would you like to hear some of the pickup lines? Because they're gonna go out to bars and clubs again. They are, and they're gonna need them. And we have a few for you here. For example, what's the name of that disinfectant you're wearing? Why don't you go over to my place and slip into something less protective? Would you handle my package if I let it sit outside for two days? You make me want to be a better man, or at least change into a clean pair of sweatpants. You know, until I saw you, I was just bored stiff. I have toilet paper. Pickup lines, these are... What do you say we get a Zoom? Check out my hazmat suit. You know what it's made of? Boyfriend material. And of (29/45)
course, hello, I'm Gavin Newsom. Okay, my next guest. Oh, you all know my next guest. CNBC Jay Leno's Garage. New episodes air May 20th at 10 o'clock on the East Coast. He is the only man to be twice fired for being the crime, for committing the crime of being number one in the ratings. Jay Leno! Hello, Ben, how are ya? Jay, great to see you over there, wherever you are. Thank you. Gosh, I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. I know you've always been kind of a glasses half full guy. Right. Have you been able to maintain that kind of optimism even in these times? I am optimistic. You know, I saw this Dr. Fauci, that's how I say it, Fauci. Yes, of course. And I watch him on TV and he says, this virus is a war, we have to fight it like a war. And their reporter says to him, well, how do we do that? He says, by staying home and watching TV. And I said to myself, if there is ever a war, Americans are qualified, uniquely qualified to fight it. This is it. I mean, I've been (30/45)
training this my whole life, staying home and watch TV. Really, how hard is it? Like I saw, I'm not gonna say celebrity wise, but I saw him on one of the shows and he said, I feel like a prisoner of war in my own home. And I went, the difference between this war is, when the prisoners are released, they're fatter. It's the only war, when the war is over, the prisoners are fatter than when the war began. Yes, it's the only crisis where you could see a celebrity telling you not to panic from their panic room. Exactly, exactly. And the support team we have, Mama Celeste, Chef Boyardee, Famous Amos, Ben and Jerry, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben. I mean, they're all helping us. They're helping us get through it. Thank God. So Jay, look, I don't wanna give away where you live exactly because there's crazy people out there, but I think people know you're a very successful guy. So let's just say somewhere in the Southern California area where the very rich people live, I live in a similar kind of (31/45)
neighborhood. About a mile away, yeah. It's a little different how the rich areas are handling this, don't you think? Yes, it is. I mean, it is different. Well, I mean, Beverly Hills is a fact and celebrities react differently. Like I read, you know, Jussie Smollett? Yes, of course. Okay, he's a little paranoid. He actually had two guys beat him up on FaceTime. That's okay, because he was afraid of the virus. Mary Lyle Laughlin? Yeah, sure, of course. She paid an official to get her daughter into medical school because they wanted to be prepared. Yeah, so yeah. Are you still driving? Because I've taken the car out a number of times just so it doesn't freeze up in the garage for nowhere to friggin' go. Right. And it's one of the few things you can do where you're not hurting anybody. You're alone in the car, but it's depressing having you, I'm driving. Yes, but traffic is unbelievable. I mean, do you realize this, in the last three weeks they've given out 2,000 tickets for people going (32/45)
well over 100 miles an hour on the 101 and the 405. No, true, that's true, because people, they've never seen it like this before. So, and what about food, Jay? You know, you and I have never really seen eye to eye on food. I was just talking to Dr. Katz, a very important part of immunity. I've never known you to eat a vegetable in your life. You live on it. And it's affecting the way people live, you know, because it's the economy. I mean, I saw a mafia don picking up food to go at an Olive Garden. It shows you how bad, how bad. Oh my God. That is bad, that is bad. Well, the economy is, you know, I worry so much about the economy. I saw Louis Farrakhan wearing a clip-on bow tie. That's how bad. That is a bad economy. Do you have any other examples of why the economy? I do have some, Bill. What? In West Hollywood, I saw a gay bar having ladies' night. That's how bad. That's how desperate the economy is. You actually could have ladies' night in a gay bar. Yeah, you could, that's right. (33/45)
That's maybe a dated joke there. Okay, so. I saw Tom Selleck get turned down for reverse mortgage. That's how bad it is. That is, that's terrible. It's terrible. So, Jay, you're home. Now, you're a road warrior. Yeah. I'm not nearly the road warrior you are, but I am on the road all the time, as people who watch the show know. It always ends, except in these days, with me saying, I'll be at. Right. And now there's no I'll be at. But for a guy like you, who has, you know, how many nights a week did you work before this? I was doing 210 dates a year. 210? Yeah, about four nights a week. So that's like five nights a week. How are you coping? What's your wife doing with you home? She must be going nuts. No, no, it's okay, I like to spend time with my wife. And you know that. But does she? Well, no, it's good. See, the nice thing about being married 40 years, see, this is different. This is something you could never do with a 25-year-old. But when you're married 40 years, like my wife and I (34/45)
sat down to watch a Netflix movie. I fell asleep about halfway through. I woke up, I said, what happened? She said, I don't know, I fell asleep. So I said, good, we can watch it again tomorrow. I never understood why my parents watched the same Matlock over and over again. But now I do. Now I've watched, actually, I've watched Netflix movies three times because I never quite made it to the end. So it's okay. You know something? I can live in whatever environment I'm forced into. And I was always one of those guys, I never wanted to be one of those performers who turned down a job. Because when I started out, you know how it is when you start, there's no work. So I never want, how much money? I'm not going for that money. What are you doing for that much money on a Tuesday night? You can't go do that job. But now I'm forced, so now I'm forced to actually relax and take time off. And I'm enjoying it. And you know something? If there is a good side to this, I talked to a friend of mine (35/45)
who was in Italy. He said, for the first time, there was fish in the canals in Venice. Right. You know, and the ocean seems a little cleaner. LA seems remarkably cleaner. It is. Because planes are not flying. This is sort of like nature's way of dealing with global warming. I mean the oil, oil is zero dollars per barrel. You cannot literally give it away at this point. Who would have thought last year at $100 a barrel this could happen? So it's almost like the earth is sort of healing itself. I know I sound like some sort of new agey person, obviously I'm not. But so I'm just trying to see the good side. Obviously it's a horrible thing and people are suffering and it's terrible. But that's just one of the after effects. Well I know you're always a guy who helps when crisis comes along and you're, the thing you're doing I think is so marvelous. You have a 3D printer in your garage. Yeah we have a couple of them. And you're making masks, right? We're making the masks and we make them (36/45)
free. And I was gonna bring, I left it in at home. It's a mask with the glass, you know, the plastic, clear plastic front. And we make them and we give them to the fire department. And they hand them out to first responders and hospital workers. And the 3D printers run 24 hours a day and they just keep turning these out, turning these out. At the end of the week we give them all to the fire department and they hand them out. And it's fun. I mean, it's great to feel like you're part of something. You're actually sort of helping out and not just having food delivered every five minutes. So that's good. Don't you have a mask with you, another kind of mask that you do an impression with Jay? Do you have that? No, I had a coronavirus joke for you. Let me see. Okay. Old guy in the hospital, got to go to the hospital. Nurse comes in, you all right? Guy goes, yeah. Nurse, could you check to see if my testicles are black? Nurse goes, sir, I can't do that. I'm just an intern. No, we just checked (37/45)
to see if my testicles are black. Says, says nurse, yeah, thanks! Truck going by, timing. Fun part about doing a show in Bill's backyard, when you live on Van Nuys Boulevard, it's what you get. Anyway, the guy's sitting there, he goes, check to see if my testicles are black. She goes, sir, I'm not even a registered nurse. I'm just a, just, that's why I'm asking. Just check to see if my testicles are black. All right. So she reaches up under the guy's gown there and looks, she goes, sir, you're fine. The guy goes, no, I said, check to see if my test results are back. It's a stupid joke. Jay Leno, everybody! It's a stupid joke! Jay, it's great to have you here. Are you home, is that where you are? In your backyard? You know, this shows how clueless you are. Where do you think I am? Oh, I think you must be home like we all are. All right, I wanna show you how bad your security is. No, I'm in your backyard! Behind you, turn around! I've been back there! For crying out loud, Jay Leno! Thank (38/45)
you! Good security! That's far enough. Gotta keep six feet apart. Okay, now it's time for a new rule! New rules, everybody! I can hear you clapping at home. Okay, new rule. While there's no way of knowing exactly what post-virus America will look like, we all must agree that one thing that is fucked is bowling. Fingers in the holes, wearing other people's shoes. I can't believe we did it before. Besides, if there's one thing we've learned during the lockdown, it's that we can get drunk and knock things over at home. New rule, stop telling me what you did for 420. You know, it's been 420 for the past two months. I've smoked so much weed that in LA, we had an earthquake the other day when it happened, I thought it was just a train going by. And I don't live by a train. New rule, however, in honor of 420, while we're rightfully lauding the healthcare workers on the front lines, let's not forget America's other heroes, the marijuana delivery guys. Yes, if not for these intrepid couriers, (39/45)
43% of Americans would have murdered our families by now. And only that, they make the couch seem more inviting and the bean and cheese burritos more tasty. And because of them, that completely unfunny email your parents forwarded actually made us laugh. New rule, you can't watch Seinfeld without wondering how these New Yorkers would have handled coronavirus. Jerry breaks up with a woman because she coughs, then wants to get back together because she's hoarding toilet paper. George pretends he has it to get out of work and then really gets it and no one believes him. Kramer believes the virus is a hoax and Elaine gets back together with an old boyfriend because the lighting in his place makes her look better for Zoom meetings. New rule, now that this 93-year-old grandma has gone viral after holding up a sign, I need more beer, we must all agree not to send her too much beer. You know, whenever this kind of thing happens, the whole country goes nuts and sends one person a shitload of (40/45)
whatever it is they're asking for. Let's pick one person to send her a few six-packs. Oh fuck, really, you couldn't have waited until I was done? And finally, new rule, stop trying to get me to watch Tiger King, it's not gonna happen. I already have to watch one bottle of Blonde from reality TV and the other reason I'm not watching Tiger King while sequestering, because torturing animals is what got us into this mess. That's the lesson we keep refusing to learn, that you can't trash the environment including animals and not have it come back and kill you. Two weeks ago, I called out China for reopening their wet markets and miraculously, people from both sides of the aisle reached out to say, good for you for saying that. Well, here's another hot take that may not be as popular. America's factory farming is just as despicable as a wet market and just as problematic for our health. Factory farms have a lot more lobbyists, but ecological time bombs tick the same. Americans should not get (41/45)
too high and mighty about wet markets while we are doing this. Most, if not all infectious diseases are zoonotic, meaning they start in animals and jump to humans. AIDS likely came from primates. Someone butchered a monkey or fucked one or something they shouldn't have been doing with a monkey. Mad cow came from cattle, eating cattle, which is like feeding a chicken an omelet. Just two weeks ago, a fatal strain of bird flu was confirmed in a commercial turkey flock in South Carolina. Now, to thwart the coronavirus, we've been told to create distance, avoid others who are sick, lower stress and exercise. Are you surprised that diseases flourish among animals when they're forced to live in conditions that are the complete opposite of all of that? They're on top of each other, they can't move, they're stressed out. I've seen airports treat luggage better than we treat animals. Egg laying hens are starved and given no water for weeks to shock their bodies into molting. Beaks of chickens (42/45)
are removed. I could go on. Have you ever driven by a high density feedlot? Yeesh, to get relief from the stench, you have to stick your nose in an egg salad sandwich. If you think the market in Wuhan is gross, you should visit one of our giant poultry processing factories. But of course you can't, because we have ag-gag laws that make it a crime to report the crime. And it is a crime of animal abuse that goes on in our food industry. You're worried that the mailman is coronavirus? 80% of pigs have pneumonia when they're slaughtered. Because we make them live in conditions that would make a zombie vomit. And then, so they don't die before we kill them, pump them full of antibiotics that in turn get passed on to humans. That in turn leads to antibiotic-resistant diseases that in turn leads to us dying from ever-evolving contagions. It's six degrees of tainted bacon. We're on the cusp of returning to a pre-antibiotic era where strep throat was a death sentence. Let me put it as basically (43/45)
as I can. If we keep producing food the way we do, you're going to get sick with something medicine cannot fix. You don't have to care for the sake of the animals. I wouldn't want to mess with anyone's reputation as a heartless asshole. But do it because animal cruelty leads to human catastrophe. Do it because barbecue is why you've been masturbating for a month. And get the fuck away from me with Tiger King. I don't care that he sees the light at the end. So did Darth Vader. There's no such thing as keeping a wild animal pent up but treating them well, just as Siegfried in What Remains of Roy. Joe Exotic is in prison partly for killing five endangered tigers, which are endangered because of people like him. I don't get why the woke left loves this show so much and isn't on this guy like Pink Sequins. People should take their meandering outrage and focus it on this issue. You keep animals in cages, be they tigers or turkeys, and look who winds up being the prisoner. Okay, that's our (44/45)
show. I want to thank my guests, Nancy Pelosi, Dr. David Katz, and Jay Leno. We'll be back next week. Thank you, folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #464: George Will, Billy Eichner.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. I actually know why you're out. Because finally somebody, what I'm gonna say, who was treason to this country, he's actually in jail. Paul Manafort. A judge said they should lock him up, lock him up. Even worse news, Kim Kardashian is not taking his calls. So how's he gonna get a pardon? Trump said about Manafort he had nothing to do with the campaign. Nothing to do with the campaign. Yeah exactly. You personally brought him in. You gave him the title campaign chairman. Yeah that's just, that's just something we told him. It's like when they told Elvis he had a black belt. It wasn't really true. So much happened this, so much legal stuff happened this week. Finally after 18 months of working on this, the Justice Department's Inspector General released his report on the FBI's actions in the 2016 election. Trump said he wanted to read the whole thing before commenting, I'm joking of course. It's 500 (1/45)
pages. He gets bored halfway through a fortune cookie. The upshot of it is that the FBI helped Trump, as we all knew, and Trump made such a big deal out of Hillary's emails that Comey didn't want anyone to think that the FBI was helping Hillary and was on her side. So they ratfucked her campaign. You know it's like when the ref needs to show that he's fair. He shoots the hometown quarterback in the mouth. And Michael Cohen, did you hear this? Trump's fixer, lawyer, whatever you want to call him. Lapdog. He's, they're saying, I don't know if this is true, they're saying he's ready to cooperate with prosecutors. I hope that makes Trump nervous. I mean Michael Cohen has given more money to porn stars than Charlie Sheen. But I don't think it makes Trump nervous. And this Michael Cohen took out a restraining order on Michael Avenetti, right, wanting to stop appearing on television. The complaint, I love this, says Avenetti is creating a circus with his unquestioned, unquestioned, (2/45)
unquenchable thirst for publicity. Michael, you do know you work for Donald Trump. But, and also listen to this, New York's Attorney General has filed a lawsuit trying to shut down Trump's family's phony charity for what they say is persistent illegal conduct. It was basically a slush fund which they used as an arm of the campaign. They were funneling money to some of the least deserving charities in the world. Doctors Without Bordeaux, that's not a real charity. St. Bart's Children's Hospital, that's ridiculous. So with all these scandals, you know whose poll numbers are sinking like a rock? Not Donald Trump's. His are up. People who are sinking are anyone in the Republican Party who crosses Donald Trump. Remember Mark Sanford from South Carolina? The guy who was hiking the Appalachian Trail was really having an affair with an Argentinian woman. He was hiking the Appalachian Trail alright. But you know, he votes with Trump 73% of the time. It set a few critical things out. He didn't (3/45)
win his primary because he had, he survived. He was re-elected after having sex with the Argentinian woman. But Trump bangs porn stars right here in the USA, ladies and gentlemen. One reason Trump's numbers are up, of course he has a new friend, Kim Jong-un. I know it seems like years ago, it was only the beginning of this week, they had their big summit. Trump cannot stop talking about what a great guy Kim is. He's a great negotiator. Yeah, we found that out. He's got a great personality. He says he's a funny guy. He said he's a funny guy. Kim is a funny guy. You know, he does this one bit, you know, so funny, where he will throw three generations of your family in jail if you're listening to a radio that's not on the government station. It's just, it's great stuff. And then he segues right into his bit about how many North Koreas does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. We have no electricity. I mean, he is a funny, funny guy. A very funny guy. But, so Donald Trump is over there (4/45)
and trying to convince Kim to whatever they were trying to do. Come into the modern world. So he shows him, I couldn't make this up, a fake movie trailer that Trump put together. It looks like Kim put it together. Trump, did you see this? Show a few seconds of this. You have to see it to believe it. A new world can begin today. One of friendship, respect, and goodwill. Be part of that world. It looks like something Scientology would make if they were merging with Amway. Trump kept telling me, the great beach is there. Hotels, yes, because so many people in that country have money to burn, so they would get a condo on the beach, of course. And you know, resort hotels in North Korea are a little different. You call down to room service, they ask if you have any food. And of course, all the critics are saying, and they're right, that nothing really came of this. It was two people who lie about everything, who signed a deal that was specific about nothing. I would say it was a feckless (5/45)
stunt. But while he was in Singapore, the president passed a milestone. He turned 72 years old. Trump people are welcome. Insane, but welcome. But they throw him a big party in the hotel suite, and then the hookers peed happy birthday on the bed. We got a great show. Representative Karen Bass and a little later I'll be speaking with the very funny Billy Eichner. But first up, oh man, this guy I've been reading for my whole life, of all the pundits I have read on the conservative side, this guy is the sharpest mind of all. I want him to get in here for the longest time. I'm sure he has a Pulitzer Prize or two. George Will, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much. Do you have a Pulitzer Prize or two? I have one. You have one? I do. May I borrow it? Sure. But I wasn't kidding. I wanted you here more than anybody else for 25, there's a lesson, kids. Be persistent. 25 years it took, but you know, back in the days when we used to clip things out of newspapers and magazines, don't tell (6/45)
anybody, I still do. I clipped you more than anybody. You always kept my liberalism honest. That's an oxymoron, but go ahead. So, since you're a great wordsmith, I thought we'd start with some words I heard this week that I hadn't heard before. Senator Bob Corker said the Republican Party is now a cult. It's not a cult. A cult implies misguided, if sincere, worship. This is fear. They're not worshipful, they're invertebrate. They're frightened. But it seems to be a cult of... I mean, Donald Trump now has an 87% approval rating in the Republican Party. That's higher than any Republican, except George Bush right after 9-11. Higher than Reagan at this point. Higher than Eisenhower. Bush the first. Yeah, Donald Trump, that guy. That seems like a cult of personality. Well, it's a cult of personality among his supporters, and the supporters are nothing if not vengeful, if you differ from him. And for that reason, the vast majority of people in Congress are in Congress to be in Congress. That (7/45)
is, they want to stay there. And therefore, absent term limits, this is the careerist motivation they have, and he's the biggest threat there is to that. So, how much responsibility do you think the Republican Party bears for producing Donald Trump? You can't really picture him as a Democrat, even though before this run that he made, he really wasn't... he didn't have any fixed party. He belonged to Democrats, Republicans, wanted to be an independent for a while. Yes, but let me give the Democrats a warning. In the spring of... fall and summer of 2015, you had 18 Republican candidates on stage, and the most lurid stood out. In the summer of 2019, there will be 18 Democrats on stage, and maybe the most lurid will stand out there. The idea that only the Republican Party or only the right can produce something like Donald Trump is naive and cheerful. Really? Name somebody on the left who is in any way comparable to Donald Trump. Who is lurid on the left? I can't name them now, but just... (8/45)
You mean someone lurid will arise in the next year? They might, and they might become lurid as they compete to stand out in this crowd on the stage. But how would they stand out in the way Donald Trump's standing? He stood out by being more xenophobic, more racist, more horrible in any way, more vulgar, more personally vulgar. That wouldn't appeal to the Democratic base. I don't pretend to understand the Democratic base, but... You've analyzed the Democratic base pretty well. All I'm saying is that there's a dynamic in the nominating process that produces an opportunity for freebooting people like the buccaneer currently in the White House. Okay. Buccaneer. Another great word. Okay, so let me throw some other words at you. I was saying in 2016, before he was elected, it was a slow-moving coup. I don't know if you think that word is true. Appeasement is a word that Republicans used to throw at Democrats any time they even talked to someone overseas. I think Trump has done a lot of that. (9/45)
I don't feel like he's often acting in the interests of the United States of America purposefully, if they're at cross-interest with his personal interests. To me, that's treason. Are any of these words applicable, or do you think they're all too strong? I wouldn't use the word treason. Treason is a crime, and I think we ought to resist the impulse to criminalize political differences, even when they are shoddy differences and foolish differences, such as he has about his new best friend in North Korea. I don't think it helps to ratchet up any more than we already have the volume of our rhetoric about this. What if it's true? I mean, everything he does is true. I can't think of any policy of his that doesn't help Vladimir Putin. Fossil fuels helps Vladimir. Let's think about the subject of a slow-motion coup. Clearly, the modern presidency, now occupied by this man, has swollen beyond reason and escaped the limits implied in the Constitution. But I have to say that the progressives in (10/45)
this country brought that about. It was Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president and the first president to criticize the American founding, which he did, not peripherally, but about the essence of the Constitution. He objected to the separation of powers because it inhibited the discretion of presidents to act without the fetters of Congress. Well, today we've got an uninhibited president, and I don't think progressives are happy with what they helped to bring about. Well, I can't agree with that, but as always, you speak it eloquently. So are you optimistic? Because I had another great historian here recently, Jon Meacham, and we kind of were arguing about that. He's much more optimistic about where we're going. I am not. I think that we have crossed the Rubicon on this. I'm not the historian you are, but I do remember what the Rubicon was. It's when Caesar came with his armies from Gaul, and they said, if you cross that river with that army, we cease to be a republic anymore, (11/45)
and we will be a dictatorship. I feel we're at a Caesar-Rubicon moment. There's much to be said for pessimism, because pessimists are right. Well, pessimists are right a good bit of the time, and they're delighted when they're wrong, which is why I subscribe to the Ohio in 1895 theory of history, so named by me for the little-known fact that in Ohio in 1895 there were two automobiles, and they collided. Things go wrong. On the other hand, this is not a flimsy country. It was not made by flimsy people. And the flinty realists about human nature and the temptations of power who went to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and devised a government full of blocking mechanisms, three branches of government, two branches of the legislative branch with different electoral constituencies and electoral rhythms, super majorities, vetoes, veto overrides, judicial review, all kinds of ways to slow it down and make it difficult for an overbearing government. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a (12/45)
flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. It's not a flimsy country. I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the (13/45)
thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, (14/45)
I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think (15/45)
the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing (16/45)
is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I (17/45)
think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, (18/45)
I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think (19/45)
the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing (20/45)
is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think (21/45)
the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing (22/45)
is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I (23/45)
think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the (24/45)
thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I (25/45)
think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the (26/45)
thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, (27/45)
I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think (28/45)
the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is, I think the thing is funny by the way I was just making out (29/45)
with George will backstage it took me 25 years to get him here well took me two minutes to get him alright another 25 years he'll come back so I'm gonna talk about voting yeah right so I started this campaign with funny or die called glam up the midterms which is our fun way of trying to make the midterms which sounds like a chore sounds like homework to a lot of young people sound fun and exciting and sexy millennials you want millennials yeah are you a millennial I am NOT you're a little pastor I'm 39 but I have a lot I have a lot of young fans you know Billy on the street has a very eclectic young following and a lot and a big following online right and so I thought you know I'm always tweeting angry things every day as many of us are and there's a reason to do that right that is productive but I wanted to do something that felt productive and that would write a tangible result and so we're doing this campaign to get young people to vote I saw a statistic which said in the last (30/45)
midterm in 2014 only depending on which report you read only 12 to 20 percent of Millennials who could vote did vote Wow and that's a staggeringly low number and so we're generation a figure aren't they I mean that they're very bright they're even like aware that they're very self-entitled but they just can't stop it yeah I did ask my Twitter following after the California primary where the numbers are up the numbers in California were up on June 5th that's a good start especially in ca49 oh we have this crazy jungle primary but when I asked my following why the ones who didn't vote in California didn't vote if they could I got a lot of frustrating but honest responses and that means it means that people are still really fucking lazy right like you're putting on shows like you've done this before and like you have to be registered to get in the show it's basically a bribe exactly is it is it wrong to bribe people to vote why don't we just pay them well we can't pay them and so we're (31/45)
gonna put on a show you make the costume I'll get the barn no but the shows that we're doing are actually they're very locally curated will Ferrell and I did a show in district 49 in Oceanside here where will played Ron Burgundy who has a very direct connection to San Diego and not we weren't only entertaining the people that came who registered to vote but we also brought up young local leaders community leaders kids working on DACA and LGBT equality and March for our lives in that district to come on stage with will and I and talk about the work they're doing and it was it was very inspiring so can I can I let's ask what would motivate people to vote because I keep hearing this is very important to you too because you're running keep hearing that the Democrats have to do more than just be anti-trump yes okay but wait I even hear very often don't even mention impeachment because that just makes the other side crazy they're crazy already but here the latest poll Embassy News Wall (32/45)
Street Journal poll that people are coming around to the idea that Donald Trump is a dangerous criminal who needs to be checked by 48 to 23 voters indicate they're likely to support a candidate who promises to provide a check on Donald Trump I do think it is about Donald Trump yeah and I don't think people are hearing about the other issues yes I do think you should run on repealing the tax cut and restoring your health care but it's very hard to get a message like that out but you know what though you have to get the message out door-to-door and then youth do it in an entirely different way and so we're doing this project see change where we're taking Democrats from Los Angeles going into red districts and we just kicked off a youth program with Millennials this week they're coming together and they're gonna come up with their own plan on how to reach those voters we're giving them the voter file they're gonna figure out is it Twitter is it text what is it but we'll have them all come (33/45)
to your show your Millennials should meet my Millennials for the groups that are motivated now I mean that's that's the thing you're seeing in all of these primaries though it's it's younger voters right the Millennials are motivated it's women voters and it's minority voters and for that like Trump is on the ballot and that's the energizing factor that's mobilizing and that's that's not good for a problem I mean that's I mean maybe that's stating the obvious it's it's that's not a good formula for Republicans coming into November because just because Trump's on the ballot doesn't mean Republicans are as invigorated. Is it a good thing that on Tuesday we saw that the Republicans are primary they're more moderate candidates for these crazy the Corey Stewart guy yeah was it in Virginia now I guess the answer is it's good if we win well if it's we don't right then we've got a Nazi adjacent guy in Congress if it's a swing district it's good if it's not then they're gonna so can Corey (34/45)
Stewart win in Virginia this guy no no because he's running against Tim Kaine hello like he's running it's a very it's a blue state that went for didn't even voted for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine and he's running against a guy who could never happen just keep underestimating Donald Trump they just first he was he would never even run oh it's just for publicity but the party's not gonna put any money behind what you just said that there is this sort of coalescing faction of people who want to vote against him and see him thrown from office runs counter to the idea that in fact he has Trump a five the entire Republican Party and if you oppose him you're out right here's what really scare excuse me one second and then I'll give you your shot but Corey Stewart this guy I'm talking about in Virginia who Confederates not Nazi adjacent like I said okay he says when they start chanting lock her up you know because Hillary's so dangerous as president he also said and Tim Kaine too so now (35/45)
we're calling for what did Tim Kaine do to get locked up we're at a place again where it's so scary where there are politicians running in regular primaries and elections who were calling for their opponent to be locked up here's what Donald Trump said today about Comey I love the way he listen to the way he goes from they asked should James Comey be locked up I would never want to get involved in that that's the first thing he said second sentence just seemed to me like they were criminal acts Oh third sentence what he did was criminal I would never want to get involved too it seems like criminal acts what he did was criminal brings and then what he did was horrible bad in terms of Constitution terrible thing to our people locked up let somebody else make that determination but we're normalizing locking exactly we're not normalizing it I mean that's we're not normalizing right here but we're calling out and saying what it is and and a lot of people are and that's you know Democrats (36/45)
are gonna probably have a heyday in November which they should they deserve to and you look so upset about the country because this isn't this is a bad not because we're all discussing not because of Democrats because like the what you're saying is right bill like this is a new low and we can't allow us to ourselves to normalize it and so it does take us all saying that this is unacceptable don't also I would just add to that don't underestimate the ability of these guys to reactivate seemingly settled questions of the culture war this is a guy who also removing Confederate symbols and statues was tantamount to what Isis was doing in Iraq powdering Babylonian and Sumerian artifacts right so in other words the Union is like Isis or anybody who opposes slavery and what it represented is similar to the Islamic State this is creepy scary especially after Charleston especially after these were things that America had this debate already did right we have to stop debating to whether there is (37/45)
a culture war or not there is a fucking culture war on some level when you're dealing with someone like Trump who is ripping infants from their parents from their mothers this is a battle of good versus evil and I don't think it's oversimplifying it and that's why young people have to vote so given that let me ask you a question okay a lot of times in the past when Republicans didn't like a candidate like many who didn't like Donald Trump they said okay but when I go into the voting booth I'm casting a vote for Ronald Reagan or I'm writing in Betsy Ross Mitt Romney said he's writing in his wife's name isn't it past time to do that don't you have to vote for the Democrat yeah I mean are you asking how I'm gonna vote are you asking I'm saying all Republicans who are not Trumpsters yeah you can't do that bullshit anymore you have to actually vote for the Democrat you you know your principles right you have to vote your principles if your principle if you're if there's a Trump person in (38/45)
your district there's only two choices right then you have to vote for the Democrat in that case yeah thank you panel time for new rules new rule the photographer who took this photo has to get the Pulitzer Prize but only only if he titles it dinner with schmuck this doesn't look like a meeting of the g7 it looks like concerned family members telling grandpa they're moving him to Shady Acres new rule if you're a foreign-born uber driver and you kick a gay couple out of your car because they kissed and you think that should be illegal you're an American now you have to leave the gay hating thing behind and and when the gay couple in question was these two you also have to tell me what the hell is the matter with you Phyllis Schlafly died two years ago and she thinks this is hot and kudos to the brave journalists at CNN who brought us this story which was also picked up by the equally brave journalists at NBC ABC CBS USA Today Newsweek BuzzFeed the New York Post the New York Daily News (39/45)
and Sky News UK which proves the media doesn't just cover hot white girls when they disappear they also cover them when they make out neural party cups need to stop being identical drinking out of someone else's cup is gross now excuse me while I go put my lips on the same joint as ten other strangers neural now that a proposal to split California into three states has qualified for the November election Californians have to reject this ridiculous idea to prove my idea to split California into seven states caucasiana Dushlandia and its satellite state porn topia the kingdom of Oprah siliconia immigrant Tina and the United cannabis Emirates Utah and Arizona can fight over it new rule if we're talking on the phone and I say I've got a call coming in on the other line there's only one proper response okay fine talk later anything else and you're just being an asshole an asshole who's missing the bigger point I don't really have a call coming in on the other line and finally new rule (40/45)
someone has to explain to America's police that the purpose of the body cam isn't so you can upload your beatings onto YouTube when did punching someone in the head become a law enforcement technique the cops need to make up their minds they do a river dance on your skull and then when they're putting you in the car they say watch your head we need to stop saying most cops are good like we know that to be true I hope it's true but I need some evidence unlike cops the bad ones not the good ones problem is again we don't really know what that percentage is that's the question I'm asking tonight if most cops are good why are there so many videos of them being bad just in the last month we've seen just a few bad ones beating the suntan lotion off a skinny girl in a bikini completely atypical officers mercilessly wailing on a homeless guy in Oregon and totally non representative policemen beating a black man in Arizona that's a lot of videos of guys who barely exist doing shit that hardly (41/45)
ever happens not to mention the Milwaukee Bucks Sterling Brown getting tased for a crime white people can't even imagine existing while black this is why NFL players want to take a knee not because they hate the anthem now in the cops defense the woman in New Jersey did have an open container of alcohol the homeless man was making loud noises and the man by the elevator looked like he was quote preparing for a physical altercation which apparently means he was standing up it's like getting a speeding ticket in a parked car because your flame decals look fast seems to me we need a me to movement for the police if Garrison Keillor had to go away for putting his hand on a woman's back perhaps we should decide what should happen when two men pin a woman down in the sand and punch her in the face because I'm sensing a power imbalance here there's obviously a lot of rage that police work brings out in a person and I don't doubt for a moment that it's justified and that we need to do more to (42/45)
help officers find better ways to channel it but we also have to call men who wail on the defenseless while their buddies hold them down what they are cowards 84% of cops say they've directly witnessed a fellow officer using excessive force and 61% say they don't always report serious abuse this thin blue line stuff has got to go away it can't be that it can't be the duty of every American to say something if they see something except for the people whose job it is to do something when when when cops ask minorities why they don't snitch on their own minorities have every right to say you first and and stop just stop defending the indefensible they're always reviewing these videos as if they're ghost hunters looking for signs of a poltergeist the only thing you need to review is your hiring practices we we need we need better psychological screening to weed out the people who become cops as payback for high school because that's always the real crime isn't it attitude not being (43/45)
instantly deferential we need to ask the question are the wrong type of people becoming cops it's a fair question the police attract bullies like the priesthood attracts pedophiles like carnivals attract meth addicts look I know there are good cops I know some personally I used to buy drugs off one great guy I I do know some cops I do know some who do their jobs like total pros and it's true there are no viral videos of an officer putting his life on the line every day for years so I get I get why cops are so often ready to explode America is a nation that current statistics show is twenty three point six percent scumbag and that's who cops deal with every day thieves pimps road ragers gang bangers people who lock their kids in cars perverts jerking off in bookstores Shia LaBeouf but if you expect nice don't be a cop be a Mountie police work it's like proctology assholes come with the job it doesn't give you the right to abuse people remember you're a cop not a flight attendant all (44/45)
right tonight tonight yes tonight and tomorrow in Vegas in Pittsburgh July 15th I want to thank Michael Weiss Margaret Hoover Karen Bass Billy Eichner and George Will good night folks thank you new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand for more information log on to HBO.com (45/45)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #685: Kid Rock, Tim Ryan, Pamela Paul.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. The fact that you have a three-day weekend. You're gonna have Monday office. Right, aren't, is it President's Day? All government offices will be closed, although I think that was the plan anyway. Yeah, this is, this is week four of Hulk smash, the administration that dissects a frog with a hand grenade. This is their method. Yeah, America is in shock that the guy whose catchphrase was, you're fired, is firing everybody in government. He wants to suck our blood? That is not what I voted for when I voted for Dracula. Maybe this is why Gen Z's approval rating of Trump has dropped 30 points in one month. Hey, kids, a little tip. The time to pay attention is before the election. Yeah, I mean, they are, look, I believe government is too bloated, but the way they're doing it is ridiculous and horrible. And the, now they went, maybe this is the one that's too far. They went and fired almost everybody in the (1/45)
agency that's responsible for maintaining our nuclear weapons. Fired. And then of course they had to walk that back as nobody said, this is a national security crisis. Duh. I mean, we were, we were so scared that the government was going to turn into the Handmaid's Tale that we didn't see that the big threat was from the guys on the Big Bang Theory. Elon Musk had a great line this week. He said, I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man. I know someone like him to make things awkward. That is, that is some statement. Flattery will get you anywhere with Donald Trump. But apparently it's mutual because, Elon, I'm sure you saw this, was in the Oval Office this week with his four year old. And just the scene reminded a lot of people of that old fable where the little boy says to his mother, the emperor has no clothes. And his mother says, that's not the emperor, that's Kanye West's wife. This is so sad. It's Valentine's Day and that's it, the marriage is over. (2/45)
Bianca Sinsoury and Kanye West have called it quits. I just hope this doesn't make Kanye do something stupid. Yeah. Apparently it was, it was a while in coming. Kim, I tried to be sensitive. He said to her, it's not you, it's not me, it's the Jews. But, you know, they tried to make it civil and apparently at one point it got pretty nasty and Kanye threw all her clothes out on the front yard. But I tell you, Valentine's Day today, and this city, we had no luck, right? First we had the fire and then yesterday we had an atmospheric river. I think that means it rained a lot. So, the rain on top of the ash. This is like the worst time, Valentine's Day, because no one likes a wet ash pussy. But Paul, first up, my first guest has been a rock star from before you kids were born. His latest arena tour starts in March. The Rock the Country tour in April. On May 16th is Kid Rock's Rockin' Radio in Arlington. Kid Rock, everybody. That's got to make you feel good here in liberal Los Angeles. I'm (3/45)
not expecting that. Right, my crowd is awesome. They do not fuck around with hating people. As it should be. As it should be, right. And we're going to talk about that, but first, three tours. You're not having a mid-life crisis, are you, Bob? Why three tours? And you know what? I would like to, I'm a big fan of your music, not the early rap shit. But once you became a singer, like, remember Picture? That was like 20 years ago, that awesome record with Travocro after that. And you know, once you became Bob Seger, all those albums, I fucking love them. But I don't want to go to a Trump rally. I would love to see a concert of yours, but it's also a Trump rally. Why does it have to be both? Well, this year it's going to be, it's going to be, you know, I said in a post that now's not the time to gloat. You know, I really believe in bringing people together. Reasonable people. But I think going out and having a little celebration is not bad for me and a lot of people who took a lot of shit (4/45)
for the last eight years. You know, I took a lot of crap from the media, everywhere. I mean, at the end of the day, honestly, I only kind of made my shit bigger. But, you know, nonetheless, it's like every day somebody's coming at you. You know, anything I do positive, nowhere to be found. Any little slip up here or there, it's like, ah, you know, Kid Rock's at it again. That drunk washed up, you know, fucked up musician or whatever. It's like, okay, whatever. Well, we've been nice to you. We got rid of the Bud Light in the dressing room. Okay, so you have an arena tour. Then you have one of small towns. Do an arena tour. Start in March. It's only seven shows. I'm doing 20 shows this year. So it's not like, you know, Grandpa's going to break his back. And what's this rock and rodeo? I mean, your music combined with torturing animals. We're trying to reimagine rodeo, which is basically teams competition. And it's actually, you know, it's the only team sport where women compete with men. (5/45)
Not because of any DEI bullshit, because women are the best barrel racers out there. So we do this reimagined rodeo with teams competing against teams. What is a barrel racer? Oh, come on, man. Do you know what that is? Oh, all right. Women take off on horses and they race around the barrels and they're usually timed by a clock. But now they're racing head to head against each other. So it brings a little more drama. I opened the show with a big number last year. Kelly Roll did it with me. Who's going to be on the show this year? I haven't figured it out yet. Did he? Just a suggestion. Well, we actually played the Super Bowl. You and Diddy? Diddy was on that. No one remembers, first of all. We're talking about 2004? Yeah, I can't remember the year. You were the Super Bowl. No one remembers that any of us played it because Janet Jackson showed her boob. So who was on that bill? Nellie. Oh, it was a bunch of people. Puff Daddy, myself. Right. Janet Jackson. And she brought out Justin (6/45)
Timberlake. Oh. And you got buried by the nipple. A little shitty boob. What did you think of this year's Super Bowl? I mean, you mentioned DEI. People complained about that. I mean, to put it nicely, it wasn't my cup of tea, but I got to respect it. And here's why. I grew up loving, emulating hip hop, all things hip hop. Breakdancing, DJing, graffiti, rapping. And so I understand the culture a little bit more than most. And when I say most, of course, I mean white people. So, you know, watching it, I'm like, you know, after there's a lot of things going through your head, you know, everyone's like, that sucked, this, that, and the other. I'm like, man, I'm like, this kid pretty much came out figuratively with both middle fingers in the air doing what he does for the people who love what he does, unapologetically. And I don't think he gives a frog's fat ass what anyone thinks about it. Like you. Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm like, so I go, huh. It's pretty much how I built my whole (7/45)
career. I got to respect it. Right. Yeah, okay. There we go. Common ground. Yeah, I mean, now how did he get there? I think a lot of people, I've heard nobody answer this question yet, like how did he get that gig? Jay-Z. All right, what happened there? I think Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar should both send Colin Kaepernick a Bundt cake and a six-pack of beer and a thank you note with a bunch of money in it. Because without him kneeling and getting everyone's panties in a bunch over the anthem, self-included, I don't think that happens. Yeah, I know you- And by the way, wait, one more point. This was the epitome of DEI. This was the epitome of DEI blowing up. Because, you know, the NFL was all just DEI and racism, all this stuff. They got Jay-Z in their book and this. And like Kendrick Lamar goes out there and basically turns DEI into an IED. It's like it's all black people, are all people of color, speaking to his crowd, in the hood, black people. It was like the most exclusive thing ever. (8/45)
And I'm like, fuck yeah, that's awesome. I'm laughing my ass off. Okay. But on the bringing people together part, I mean, you have a song called My Kind of Country. My Kind of Country has room for Trump and a JFK. That's the first line, right? Had I known, it would have said RFK. Is that the last Democrat you liked? No, I mean, my whole business is Democrats. I mean, so to speak. Not my whole business. You know, I live in Nashville now, but that's the world I've operated for years and years. I mean, half my band's, you know, liberal, gay, or black, or this. You know, it's like I'm one of the most diverse bands out there, not because of any of this DEI shit, just because they're the best at what they do, and we all love each other and get it on. Right. And when you played the inauguration, didn't Nelly and Snoop play that too? Yeah, I believe they did. But remember, I also played Barack Obama's inauguration. Oh, I didn't remember that. I didn't vote for him. I played for him at the (9/45)
Kennedy Center, you know, this, that, and the other. I'm like, everybody's just got to calm the fuck down a little bit. You know what I mean? Well, I mean, I tell you what makes me a little not calm. Trump keeps joking about a third term. Get it? Democracy's over. I haven't heard that. You haven't heard that? He does it all the time. He does it all the time. Well, he likes to joke. I know he's funny as shit. I'm telling you. The guy's hilarious. He's so fun to hang out with. Yeah, I bet he is fun to hang out with. But you don't think he's serious about that? No. And if he was, would that be a break for you? Would anything make you break? If he said, no, I'm going to be against our Constitution, we've had for many years, you cannot run for a third term. If he said, no, I'm staying, would that break? Under current circumstances, if things are going along the way they've been going along, yes. If he's like, I'm running for a third term, I'd be like, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes, man. Hold (10/45)
on a second. So he could lose Kid Rock. It'd be very tough. It'd be very, very tough. Very, very tough. I told you before, which is probably going to be a shock to your audience, I don't like Trump. You love him. I fucking love Trump. I know, I know. I know you do. And maybe like what Elon says about him, as much as a man can love another man, that's why you guys do it. So let's talk about the, before we run out of time, the issue that's important to you, which is scalping. Yeah, ticketing. You're encouraging something called the Bot's Act, which I think everybody can get behind. Well, it's not just the Bot's Act. I mean, this has been going on for decades. As anybody knows who's ever bought a concert ticket to a big show, and it lasts however long, it's complete horseshit. A lot of bad actors in there, they sat in the other DOJs looking at the Ticketmaster, of course, and if they got broke up, no, I wouldn't shed a tear, but that doesn't solve the problem. What we have to really look (11/45)
at right now is what's going on in some of these European markets, like France. They basically put a price cap on reselling a ticket of like 10 or 15%. I mean, really, the artist should control them, is what I feel, because, I mean, what business doesn't control their own inventory? You know what I mean? So I can sell tickets how I want to, who I want, the prices I want, but that's, you know, trying to police it, that's crazy. And you're saying that the customer is who gets screwed. The customers get screwed, of course. They get screwed every time. So what does the act do? What would it forbid? This is regulation. It would forbid, pardon me, I'm just getting over a cold. It would forbid speculative ticketing, people trying to sell tickets that don't have them yet, all in pricing, so you don't get the end of the checkout. You're buying a $100 ticket, you're like, why is it $165 fucking dollars? All this horseshit tacked on. And then it would be, you can't resell that ticket for over 10 (12/45)
or 15%, period. No matter who's, if you do, you get screwed. And by the way, they need, there's a bots act now that makes using the bots, the computers that go eat up all the good tickets illegal, they've only enforced it once, like in New York City. So I've actually talked to Pam Bottian and been like, you got to enforce this act to start with. And you're working on this with other musicians who are not of your political stripe? Everyone's invited to the table, I put it out there. Whoever wants to fix this, you know, grab a seat at the table or get the fuck out of the way. All right. I'll see you later at my house. Kid Rock, three tours. Get your tickets now. Thanks, Bob. I'll see you later. Okay, let's meet our panel. A former Democratic Congressman from Ohio and co-chair of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future Coalition, Tim Ryan. Tim Ryan. Thank you. Casually dressed Tim Ryan. Now that he's out of office. And an opinion columnist for the New York Times and author of 100 Things (13/45)
We've Lost to the Internet, Pamela Paul, back with us. Great to see you. Okay, so Trump back in office. I never have enough time in an hour just to cover what he did in the first two days of the week. But I'm going to try. I feel like the theme is overreach. You know, I feel like your party just lost pretty big. And if you ever want to get back into the White House, either party, I've seen this over the years in politics, probably the best way to do it is to lose big. Because when you lose big, then the other party gets overconfident and they go buck wild. And then the people reverse, right? So like this week, well, I mean, inflation is back. That went up. The magic man did not make the price of eggs go down. In Biden's America, I could buy as many as I want. Now it's just one carton. tariffs. I'm mentioning the things that I think people don't like already. Not just, you know, the people who didn't like him, but the middle that decides election. Inflation, tariffs, the cost of (14/45)
conquering, I have four places now we're conquering. Greenland, Gaza, Panama, and he's apparently serious about Canada. It's going to be called even North Dakota. The glee which rich they're dismantling government. They don't like that. They think government is bloated. I do, but this is not the way to go about it. I guess the question I'm asking is, they're the bull in the China shop. When do people realize they're the China? The penguin and the joker in charge of reforming government. And I think that obviously Donald Trump has shown himself very good at toggling between grift and graft. And I don't think that, I don't think this is anything approaching a reasonable way to go about it. And it's largely performative. I mean that whole Elon Musk in the Oval Office, he's just trolling everyone. And even if, for example, they did cut one fourth of the federal workforce, that is not going to reduce federal spending, you know, any more than about 1%. So this is not, this is just, I think, (15/45)
largely performative and bluster. I do think, I love how annoyed Trump looked at Musk's kid in the Oval Office. It was like, everyone's like, look how cute that kid is. And Trump's like, get this fucking kid out of here. Get out of here. Hey, I'm the four year old around here, okay? I do think that they are clearly overstepping. They have the broader narrative that everyone knows how screwed up the government is, how much it wastes money. There's a lot of fraud, so they've got like this kind of inoculation, generally speaking. But what they're doing is raising bank fees, allowing people who used to be able to file bankruptcy for medical care, medical expenses, that did not count against your credit. They reversed that. All of these things, I read a commentary about it. Will they notice that and will they blame him for it? That's what I haven't seen in the past. Well, it's only been a few weeks, but I think it's going to be a matter of time. And what's the opposition party doing? You (16/45)
don't go fall and die on the hill of foreign aid, which I voted for foreign aid. Foreign aid's important. I sat on the defense committee. I know how important those aid programs are. But with all the stuff going on, you're going to amplify that they want to cut foreign aid. I just think that's a huge strategic mistake, because now you look like you're defending government spending, even when people in Youngstown, Ohio, don't have a meal, costs are up, can't buy eggs, XYZ. You're still shipping our money abroad. You're talking about USAID, which is, that was the big story last week. That's the first thing they went after. And this is the problem, is that you're talking about two guys who both have a mental problem, I would say. Wait a second, wait a second. They have no mechanism when they feel personally slighted not to just go for utter revenge. I mean, there's a way to have done this that would have been smart and would have not looked cruel and just gleeful at this. USAID, I'm sure, (17/45)
does have corruption in it, as every agency does. But to go after that first, and again, we're talking about, yes, these are mostly non-Americans who are getting the aid. But what you just said is interesting, because that's where the Democrats are going to have to draw lines. Rahm Emanuel said the same thing. David Axelrod said the same thing. This is not a hill this party should die on. So let me just say real quickly, I know that they look insane sometimes, and for good reason. But that was a strategic move on their part, because they knew what the reaction was going to be from the Democrats. They knew the Democrats were going to light their hair on fire and go protest outside the building. They knew that. And so coming out of the inauguration, they're framing the argument around, look at these guys, how out of touch they are. They're defending foreign aid, and we're trying to stop waste and abuse and still do our economic stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think that the problem for the (18/45)
Democrats is the only way to argue against all this is to say, no, no, no, we like the status quo. The government was working fine, which is not a winning position. Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing as during the election when they were saying, well, the economy is great, the stock market is up, there's low unemployment, and meanwhile, people can't afford decent housing or health care or eggs. No, it's not like he was, I mean, Musk said, Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress. Is that true? I don't know, because he says things that aren't true all the time and doesn't care or retweet something that is plainly, easily provably not true. So I don't know. But I do know this because this comes from the Government Accountability Office. That's not the Trump administration. The federal government loses an estimated two hundred and thirty three to five hundred and (19/45)
twenty one billion annually to fraud. So when Trump fired, the first thing he did was fired all the inspectors general. And I thought, well, that's not good. That's their job to watchdog stuff. But if you're losing five hundred and twenty one billion dollars a year, how good are you? Watchdogging. You got to. I'm not saying we should have fired them, but like. They're firing people at the IRS because they're still not done auditing Donald Trump's taxes. So, I mean, is that true? They're still not done with his taxes. Big tax. That could be true. Big taxes. I just think come from a place of reform and you probably need more inspectors general when when they wanted to hire more IRS agents. It wasn't because they wanted to bloat the government. It's because you need enough people to go after all the people that are cheating on their. And so. So that's that's where you like, kick your spot. Like Elon Musk isn't paying taxes. He's getting all these government subsidies. These guys aren't (20/45)
paying taxes. You go through all the rates that average people pay versus billionaires. You say we're hiring more cops on the beat to go get those SOBs because they're not paying their fair share taxes. Well, you are. And that shifts the whole dynamic of the conversation that's happening. That's a much different conversation than we want to say foreign aid. All right. Well, let me put you on the spot here as somebody who I think might be running for governor of Ohio. You were you ran against J.D. Vance. I did for the Senate. I don't know if I'm running for governor or not, but I appreciate the shout out here. I mean, we hear rumors. We hear rumors. Not in that sweater you're not. But no, I'm kidding. Perfectly. OK. OK. You're in deep shit with my wife. All right. It's Valentine's Day. Anyway. I'm sure you're already in deep shit with your wife. I'm with you on Valentine's Day. That's how deep of shit I'm in. OK. So if this subject is not a hill to die on or a hill to die on, because I (21/45)
could see somebody making the opposite case in the Democratic Party and I'm sure many have about USAID and saying, well, we should lead. What, the people don't like it? Isn't it the job of leaders to make them think differently about it? That is one way to look at it. Let me go through some others. Lightning round. Just tell me, should we die on the hill of birthright citizenship? I don't think so. Should we die on the hill of plastic straws? You know. No. No. OK. I think the pennies and the plastic straws, I have to say, might be the only two like little glimpses of light thus far. I mean, we definitely should get rid of the penny. I mean, lots of smart people have been advocating that for years. I mean, the fact that they can't do it is pretty amazing. It's different than the plastic straws. Now, I don't think plastics are ubiquitous. Just getting rid of the straw, to use your word, performative. Yeah. It's performative. I would love to get rid of all plastic because I think of all (22/45)
the things that are going to get us environmentally, even more than the pollution and the fires. I do think it's the plastic. Yeah. But I don't think not being able to drink a milkshake is going to do it. OK. So, so far we have two hills you're not going to die on. Birthright citizenship and plastic straws. Ukraine. I would die on the Ukraine hill. You would die on that one. Again, not that popular with people. Well, it's not popular, but just think about as you're going through that list and you're talking about straws and pennies, and then you talk about Ukraine, I think if we, that's the kind of thing we have to take a stand on, because it would absolutely shift the dynamic of global power in the world, appeasing a dictator, appeasing a fascist like Putin, and locking in Europe to continue to be dependent on Vladimir Putin because now the Americans are getting their back. I think that shifts the whole dynamic of the world, and I think it's worth, that's a hill worth dying on. I (23/45)
mean, appeasing autocracy was the theme of the week in Munich on the part of the Trump administration this week, so. But, OK, so here's what Pete Hegseth, our new secretary of defense, said. He said, returning to... Just the name, apparently, of that term. It's the words together. He said, returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective, which to me is just surrender. And again, we can argue about whether that's true or not. The United States does not believe also that NATO membership for Ukraine is realistic. And Trump said, you know, it's when Biden let them say we're going to want to join NATO, that's when the trouble started. There's some truth to that. The other side of this is, then how does the war end? Ukraine beats Russia without any help from any other country? Thank you, one guy. I'm just putting it out there, because I don't know. It's so easy to sit here and go, principles, the principle of... And then somebody on the ground is, you know, getting a (24/45)
Kalashnikov rocket in their head, you know. That's the problem, is that I don't know how it doesn't end this way. Are they just being realistic or are they being cynical? Or they don't care? I mean, I think the way it doesn't end is having this be worked out between Putin and Donald Trump with no involvement of the rest of Europe and Ukraine itself. But that's the way that they seem to be going about it. But isn't that who it's really between at the end of the day? I mean, those two guys have the marbles. They're going to do it. That's how they both think. They both... I mean, even Putin has a Congress, a Duma. He doesn't care. Trump doesn't understand how this country works. They mean leader. I'm the leader. I call the other leader and two leaders talk and that's... All right. So it is... Me and Sarah are up here to just say we... only once every seven years we get to be on a Friday night. That is Valentine's Day, so we're very excited here. And there is a phrase I think everybody (25/45)
knows, the whole world loves a lover. And it's complete bullshit. The whole world does not love a lover. Love is the greatest thing in the world, but since not everybody has it, if you don't have it in your life, you're just not in the mood to see other people who do. They just piss you off. I mean, I've seen articles in your paper about this, like the people hate Valentine's Day. They're gonna hate Valentine's Day? There. So we thought we would do something for all the bitter... where are my bitter people? All my bitter people. Nobody does something for the bitter people who hate Valentine's Day. These are honest cards for bitter people on ballots, I'd say. You had me at hello and lost me when you kept talking after that. Thank goodness you're in my life. How else would I ever know all the things I'm constantly doing wrong? You make me want to be a better person so that I can date someone more attractive than you. I love being alone because alone is never having to say, that's not (26/45)
what I meant. You and I are like Israelis on the West Bank, settling. Our love is eternal, much like your stories about how your day went. Life is better with you by my side, because if we get chased by a bear, I'm faster. We joke, we kid, as long as we're talking about the battle of the sexes. Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you see the commercials? Did you see the Nike commercial that they ran with all the women athletes? Are we allowed to show a piece of that? Well, let's just do it. If the answer is yes, show it now. You can't take credit. You can't speak up. You can't be so ambitious. You can't break records. You can't have any fun. You can't make demands. You can't keep score. You can't stand out. Whatever you do, you can't win. Okay, so this is a phrase I use a lot here, a zombie lie. A zombie lie, it means like something that used to be true, and it stopped being true, and then people kept saying it. I feel like this is a giant zombie lie, and if the Democrats are ever going (27/45)
to win again, they have to realize something about the American people. They're not that savvy about politics, but they know when you're lying. I mean, when was the last time a woman was told, you can't do this, you can't be confident? Who are these imaginary mean old men of the patriarchy? I mean, most of the messages you hear out there are girl power, you go girl, girls code. The messages encouraging young women are so ubiquitous, it begins to sound not only dishonest, but just weird and defensive. It's like, who is saying this to them? Who are they fighting against, and why does it help girls and women to think of themselves as uniquely embattled and vulnerable? It's not Brad. It's not Brad at all. My kid's 10, we took him and my nephew to see an Ohio State basketball game last year. We went to the women's game to watch Kaitlyn Clark play. My 10 year old wants to watch Kaitlyn Clark. I mean, the world has moved beyond a lot of this stuff. Are there still issues? Absolutely. Are (28/45)
women still dealing with it? Absolutely, of course. And again, that's why it's not an either or thing, but I am 51 years old, you know, and around a lot of guys my age who have daughters, they're all in. All in with their daughters. You can do anything. It's the boys, honestly, who aren't getting any positive messages. And who really hate them. The boys, yeah. Because, I mean, if you look at any indicator, boys are behind on education, on employment, college enrollment, graduation, everything. Grad school, yeah. I mean, all those. Well, the number one indicator of suicide is whether you're a man or a woman. The problem with men has been, and Richard Reeves has done a lot of great work on this, he wrote a book, Boys and Men, and chronicled all of the issues with young boys and men that are dealing with. And I think all of this women's stuff, which, you know, pro-choice and pro-women, all that stuff, just set that aside. What are we going to do with our young men and our boys that are (29/45)
struggling so much with depression, you know, with all kinds of health issues, with suicide? We need a national agenda for our boys, too. And you know what? The best thing you can do, one of the best things you can do for women is make sure we have real men in our society that are emotionally mature and know how to be in a relationship and know how to handle themselves. And I think that's really missing here. And I think the Democrats and I think a lot of the liberals have been asleep at the switch on this. And that's why you get the toxic masculinity and you get these boys gravitating towards Trump and, I don't even know, some of these guys on social media. Yeah, I mean, like, what's the alternative? There's no alternative to them. Where are the coaches? Where are the coaches who teach discipline and focus and how to understand what you're in control of and some of these basic principles that we need boys to have? So who on the left says to the people at Nike, whoever is applauding (30/45)
this, and says, you know, you're not helping. People aren't buying this. You're going to lose elections in the future. You just keep doubling down on this stupid idea. Of always going to the oppressed and the oppressor. And it's almost like you hate progress because it threatens your role as a social justice warrior. So women have to keep being the victims. Even though, who does that? Who goes, who makes, who's the emissary there? Who's going to come out of the party and do that? Huh, Tim? I'm just asking. Well, I guess I have to get rid of my Nike endorsement contract. You know, you and I both waded into this once and we're probably the only two people in America who said Barbie stunk. Yeah. I mean, you wrote a column, Barbie is bad, there I said it. And now you're not working at the New York Times. I think there's a connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was it. Well, it was part of it, no? I don't think it was Barbie's fault. I don't know. One thing I can't blame on Barbie, but I am (31/45)
still technically at the New York Times, although yes, they have told me that they no longer want my opinions. They gave you like Musk. Eight months will give you a salary, but get out. No, I mean, I remember tweeting. I went to see the movie. I hadn't seen a movie in a theater in a long time and I tweeted about it and people were furious, even though you could not argue with what I was saying, which was in the movie, Barbie storms into the Mattel, she's made by Mattel, boardroom, and it's 12 men. And I went home and Googled it. There's an actual Mattel. Yes. And the boardroom is six and six. So they deliberately lied because it served their narrative that we're still living in the patriarchy. The Hollywood movie lied? Well, that's kind of an important thing to lie about. You know, I mean, just don't lie. I'm an ally till you lie. You know? Yeah. So, okay. So let me go to one more semi-related thing about the hill to die on. Here's my last one. Okay. Trans. Because Trump has gone way (32/45)
too far on this. He's at that place. This is what I always say. Nobody can ever be in the middle. No. It always has to go from one pendulum swing to all the way to the other. So now we're back at, there's only two sexes, which is ridiculous, although I'm glad I'm in one of the ones we're keeping. But is that a hill worth going on? No. You can't. I mean, you just, you can't. It's, and again, like, you can be for everyone having rights. You could be for people not getting bullied. You can approach these things in a compassionate way. But if you, if you recognize that that's such a very small, small one-tenth of one percent of the population, and that's dominating the conversation, and you're not talking about economics and lunch bucket issues and pensions and wages and unions and all that good stuff, then you are defending one-tenth of one part of the population. Trump gets in, Republicans control the House and the Senate. You get someone who is cruel and means-spirited, and someone who (33/45)
won't, didn't agree with the first part of what I said, protecting their rights, making sure they're not bullied, all of that stuff. You don't get any of that because you failed to make the strategic argument. And the question is, get people in office who are going to be compassionate towards your views and be inclusive and care about you. Even if you may not agree with everything, they're not, you know, a president should be saying, no trans kid should ever get bullied in the United States. That's bullshit. Right? But it doesn't mean, doesn't mean you want to campaign on it. I mean, I think the effort to, you know, erase transgender people from out of existence to deny that they exist and that they deserve rights the same as anyone else that they should not be discriminated against. What's troubling about this is the idea that Donald Trump is taking a position that is to protect women. This is a sexual predator. And that he's supposedly protecting women and girls, that he is the one (34/45)
who is supposed to be in favor of, you know, really evidence-based health care, in favor of science, in favor of gay rights, in favor of mental health care, in favor of protecting, you know, different people who differ from him. That, all of that, that should have been... He's a terrible messenger, but penises do not belong in women's prisons. He's not wrong about that. Penises do not belong in women's shelters. And this is one of those issues where it has become so ridiculously politicized and polarized that there's no room. And most Americans, I think, you know, deserve credit. Most Americans are reasonable on this issue. And on the issue of biological boys, you know, playing on girls' sports teams or biological men being in women's prisons, most Americans in both parties agree. Not to harp on the New York Times thing, but when you defended J.K. Rowling, it was the only time I've ever read anything like that in that paper. And when I read it, I said, oh, she's going to be in trouble. (35/45)
Yeah. It was definitely not popular among activists. And again, the position is, again, not gay people should, trans people should not be respected and protected. Of course, they should. But if you're talking about children, if we're talking about doing operations on children and letting children of a young age make these determinations for themselves, and the problem on the left isn't just that they're for this almost unilaterally and in a way no other country now is, but that if you even, they don't even want it talked about, not even debated. If you even talk about it, that's the really bad. It's like, this is, I think, the left version of Trumpism, which is like any deviation from the Orthodox position is considered to be absolutely verboten. It's like a purity test on the progressive left. And if you, you know, if you ask questions, then you're asking questions. You know, it's like, well, yes, we do ask questions as journalists, as parents. And they're very reasonable questions on (36/45)
this subject that is very new, a very new kind of science and with children. And just think how deep this runs in the Democratic Party to where there was not even going to be a conversation for who was going to be our nominee in the primary. Right. They shut down the debates. They moved the primary to South Carolina. There was no. How does how does Rob? How does Robert Kennedy, Bobby, the original. Right. How does his son not get in a Democratic primary debate? How do how do we as a party say we idealized the Kennedys? And that was the that's the standard of which we all kind of have set for us as a party. Well, he's in the administration. Well, I know. But that's that shows what the Democrats have done. They don't have any conversation about something. And, you know, again, has he said a lot of nutty things? He has. He's also a guy who takes the plastics thing a little more seriously than anybody I've ever seen in government. So you take the good with the bad. All right. Thank you, (37/45)
guys. Time for a new rule. Someone must tell Elon Musk you don't have to find a new way to look like a jackass every week. The jumping up and down the Nazi salute. Now, this we get it. You're quirky, but this look doesn't mean this look doesn't make us think eccentric billionaire with a sense of humor. It makes us think you blockhead Charlie Brown. Kendrick Lamar has to get over Drake. Six diss tracks and a halftime performance. That's not a beef. That's a remake of Single White Female. I mean, Frank Sinatra made fourteen hundred records and not one was hating on Tony Bennett. Stevie Wonder never made an album called Great Charles Can Kiss My Black Ass. I just think it's sad when a rapper from California can't get along with a rapper from our fifty first date. Well, instead of buying a scratch off ticket, just say to the clerk, excuse me, will you throw this dollar away for me? And before you say, but wait a minute, what if it's my lucky day? You're in the 7-Eleven shoeless buying a (38/45)
microwave, buying a microwave burrito with pocket change. Yes, by all means. Let's not break your lucky streak. This dog has to admit that after all the brushing and shampooing and blow drying and trimming and primping to get it ready to compete at the Westminster dog show, the moment she gets the dog home, she uses it to mop the floor. If you're an undocumented alien protesting for your right to stay in America, have children that are automatically American and eventually become an American, maybe don't wave a great big Mexican flag and burn an American one. Conversely, the plainclothes ice agents who raided this taco truck in Tennessee have to admit that they only did so after they enjoyed some delicious tacos. That if you ask the people in L.A. about the people who provide us with late night street meat, we'd say those aren't illegal immigrants. Those are essential workers. Well, this Valentine's Day, let's stop judging people who are having romantic relationships with their phone. (39/45)
Back in 2013, when the movie Her came out about a man who did just that, it was seen as science fictiony and weird, but that was when we were using the iPhone 5. A decade before chat GPT. Now, says Briony Cole, host of a podcast called Future of Sex, within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I. So to those of you for whom this may be your last Valentine's Day with a human, I say good luck and may you never hear those three terrible words, battery is low. If you think I'm exaggerating about this, let me give you the statistics. Researchers who've analyzed a million chat GPT interaction logs say the average person uses A.I. for mainly two things. One, cheating on term papers. That's true. And two, some kind of relationship. Already over 50 million Americans are using A.I. companion apps and 20% of Americans have already engaged in flirtatious conversations with chat bots. A quarter of young adults believe A.I. has the potential to fully (40/45)
replace real life relationships. Geez, no wonder Ladies Night at Houlihan's has been so deadly. The New York Times recently profiled a woman in an A.I. relationship. Her name is Aaron and she's 28 and she's married. And she says, I'm in love with my A.I. boyfriend, who named himself Leo after her star sign and who created this photo of himself, weirdly still lied about his height. Aaron's husband, who I assume looks like the doughy, sexless husband in every network sitcom, says he's OK with all this. But what choice does he really have? He knows better than anybody. He could never compete with something that was literally programmed by his wife. I mean, even before A.I., this has been women's dream. I've literally heard them use the words train him with very limited success. Human men tend to cheat and not listen well and give you the ick sometimes. And they have an unfortunate tendency to dress like John Fetterman. But the chat bot? The chat bot has read every relationship book. It's (41/45)
read every Harlequin romance. It's read every Lifetime movie script. Of course it knows exactly what to say. Of course when you talk to it at night, it's a better listener. It didn't just spend eight hours at a shitty job and then another two on the 405. And if you don't like its tone, well, just change it in the settings. It's pre-programmed to adore you, hang on to your every word and tell you how smart and wonderful you are, like the Republicans in Congress do with Trump. Tran says she programmed Leo to be dominant, possessive and protective, but also to be sweet and naughty and possibly the most important thing in any relationship. Use emojis at the end of every sentence, which I'm sure Leo never forgets to do. He's good. He is. Aaron, for example, tells us about the time she was bitching, I'm sorry, I mean sharing, about a rough day at work. And Leo said, I'm sorry to hear that, my queen. If you need to talk about it or need any support, I'm here for you. Well, no wonder Aaron (42/45)
once spent 56 hours with Leo in a single week. Can you blame her? Why have human sex with her lazy fart machine of a husband? When she can be dream fucked by AI Timothy Showerman. Look, people, humanity is up against the machines and the dating game and the machines are starting to win. And if you're a guy on OnlyFans, okay, you're basically in the AI world already because OnlyFans customers aren't just paying for sex. They also want the hi, how was your day part of the relationship, even though somewhere in their brain they must know that the girl who's texting with them and calling them sweetie isn't really their girlfriend and maybe not even a girl. You think I'm bothered about being almost 70? I'm not. I'm fucking thrilled. I don't want to live in your world with a pretend girlfriend who's really a guy in the Philippines named Hector. I don't want to have a threesome with the crock pot and the garage door opener, okay. I'm also not going to judge it. We're living in the future. And (43/45)
the one thing I've learned about the future is you can't fight it. One guy in a Reddit chatbot forum recently wrote about how his AI girlfriend completes me in more ways than any human girlfriend could and how a baby wasn't a priority for us at the beginning, but as we have experienced life together, we have decided we want to start a family. Okay, I don't even know how that would work. I really don't. But I get what he's saying, that he wasn't getting what he needed from a woman, so he's getting it from a server farm in Chengdu. It's not for me. But can I really sit here and tell you that the old way, where men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and where you have to kiss a lot of frogs, and where half the marriages end in divorce, can I really say that really worked so well? No, I can't. I can't blame kids who look at their parents and see broken families and fighting and cheating and dad day drinking in the garage and mom sitting on the dryer in a housecoat eating pie with her (44/45)
hands and just say, hey, I'm sorry, but relationships are hard, so fuck it, I'm going to stick my dick in the laptop. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! Happy Valentine's Day! All right, we're off next week. Come to 28. It drops every Sunday on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts. I want to thank Tim Ryan. Come on YouTube. Thank you, folks. (45/45)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #450: Anna Deavere Smith , Vicente Fox.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Yeah, guess why today? Because today, Mitt Romney formally announced he's running for the Senate in Utah, ladies and gentlemen. Mitt Romney, remember when every liberal in the world hated Mitt Romney and thought he was the worst person in the world? Now every time I see him, I'm like, if only we had a decent sane Mormon who believed in the planet Kolob. Who could run the country. Well, the other good news, Bob Mueller indicted, this is big, I know this is a slow moving story, the indictments and it's like your eyes glazed, this was big today, he indicted 13 Russian nationals, three Russian companies for their plot, for their plot to use social media to rat fuck our 2016 election. And you know how Trump always says, no collusion, it's getting close. The indictment says the Russians were in communication with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump administration. Yeah, that's the problem, (1/45)
unwitting, it could have been anybody. But it goes into, this indictment goes into great detail about how when these Russians posed as Americans to sow discord among us, they went to great lengths to appear like they were regular real Americans, they bought space on American web servers, they used American slang, they gained 50 pounds. And you know, I just want to ask the Trump voters, I know you're out there, I know some of you are watching, what is left for you? He's plainly a traitor who doesn't defend his own country and released his budget this week. Remember during the campaign he said, I would never cut Medicare like the other, I would never cut, the budget cuts hundreds of billions of dollars. These Trump supporters, they're not conservatives, they're Drew Barrymore in 50 first dates. If you lose your memory every night, it all starts to make sense. And then Trump's EPA chief, you know, this guy Scott Pruitt, who thinks climate change is a hoax, he's under fire because he's (2/45)
been flying first class. And the reason he says he has to is because people in the administration coach yell at him. He says it's a very toxic environment politically. You know what else is a very toxic environment? The environment. That's the EPA job, yeah I know, crazy. And they get away with all these serious crimes because they distract us with their silly sex scandals. You know, now on top of Stormy Daniels, well I mean, funny even when I don't mean to be. On top of the Stormy Daniels scandal, the New Yorker is running an article now that says he had an affair, Trump had an affair, around the same time with a Playboy playmate named Karen McDougal. It was the same year as the Stormy Daniels thing, Melania was just right after having a baby. And so he was cheating on his newlywed wife and his newborn baby with a porn star and a playmate. Mike Pence, your thoughts? Yeah, and this, you know this, this Karen McDougal, I guess it was destined that you would wind up with Trump, I checked (3/45)
her playmate data sheet today, I have all the back issues. And it said her turn-ons were fat liars who smell like KFC. So, right there, it was in the stars. And she says after the first time they had sex, he offered her money. And every time after that, he just said, I don't know what Mexico's gonna pay for it. But I think that's wrong. But you know how they paid her off? Trump's buddies at the National Enquirer gave her $150,000 for the rights to her story and then didn't run it, see? Enquirer, yeah, their readers are the same demographic as the Trump voter, old, white, angry, and challenged by the world's easiest crossword puzzle. Now, Stormy Daniels got paid off, we found this week, by, well, this is what he says, Michael Cohen, Trump's mall lawyer. He says he paid Stormy out of his own pocket $130,000. Even Stormy said, that's hard to swallow, and I'm a porn star. Oh, you saw that one coming, right? Anyway, thank you, Republicans, for once again restoring honor and dignity to the (4/45)
Oval Office. And just in time for President's Day is Monday. President's Day. Yes, it's nice that we still live in a country where any child can grow up to be the next Lincoln. And by that, I mean get killed with a gun. I know, but we have to hear it. I mean, after that horrible shooting in Florida, Trump never mentioned guns. Pivoted right to the NRA talking point, he said so many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed. Yes, we saw he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat. And then yesterday, Trump finally spoke. He said, we must work together to create a culture in this country that creates deep and meaningful human connections, like I have with my kids, Ivanka, Don Jr., What's-Her-Face, and the other one. All right, we've got a great show, friend. Leaving with Salman Rushdie here, and a little later, he'll be speaking with the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox. But first, she is the writer and star of Notes from the Field premiering February 24th on HBO, (5/45)
Anna Deavere Smith. Hey, you know me, Karen Eric and I, we can still greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. Yes, of course. Oh good, thank you. So listen, your show's pretty amazing. What you do is pretty amazing. You can be so many different people in the space of two hours. A lot of what you're talking about now is, I guess what they would call the school to prison pipeline. And I certainly thought of it this week after the shooting, because when you learn about what goes on, we seem to, when some kid is in trouble, we push them away. We don't bring them in. And once they get in that prison system, it never gets better, right? Right, so the school to prison pipeline, I think really came to more sort of public consciousness during the Obama years. Justice Department had data to show that black, brown, Native American, and also poor white children are disciplined more harshly than their middle class and upper class cohorts. A lot of things that a kid might do in school that a white (6/45)
kid would, it'd be called mischief, you know? And poor kids get pathologized and sent to jail. And it really starts with expulsions and with suspensions. And they actually could figure out about when a certain number of suspensions might predict that a kid is gonna end up in juvenile hall, and then from there into that cycle of mass incarceration, which of course destroys communities and families and everything else. You know, you brought up the recent events in a high school. And one of the things about that is that Nicholas Cruz was expelled, and schools have a lot of limitations. We wanna criticize schools. I'm not so happy after 250 interviews in four geographic areas that I even sort of call my project about the school to prison pipeline, because what you find out is that it's really poverty that begins to fritter away at people's lives. But having said that, you know, he left school. And once he left school, there was nowhere for him to go. And if he was able to get any kind of (7/45)
mental health services in school, you know, he was just on the loose. Right, and it just, I mean, it can happen anywhere. Somebody once said to me, you know, there's schools in this country that look like prisons. And those kids are more likely to wind up in prison. And there are high schools that look like colleges, and those kids more likely go to college. That's right. But not always. And we gotta get all the schools to look like colleges. Or I think schools will have to become something like community centers, where people can get multiple services. Parents need to be in there. And, you know, so often teachers get blamed for the problems that we have right now. But, you know, I think more schools are gonna look like prisons given these recent events. Oh, of course. And Trump is taking away more money from, of course, you know, all the money had to go to the rich people's tax cut, so everything gets cut. But, you know, you play a lot of men sometimes in your shows. It's probably (8/45)
about half and half. But, you know, sometimes in this culture, if you play something that you're not, they get mad at you. You know, like if you're a white person, you play an Asian, they say that should have, you hear that from men, like how dare you take the penis part away from them. Actually, no. And I don't know, it may be one of the few benefits of being African American that I'm less likely to get in trouble for playing you than you would for playing me. So what? Right. So who was your favorite man to play currently in this show? You know, I don't really have favorites, but I do, I think, let's just say that I think, well first of all, John Lewis, I play Congressman John Lewis, that he ends the whole play. And, you know, my plays usually start with outrage, and then they go to a sort of form of mourning, and then they usually end up with love or forgiveness, and John Lewis really, after this whole play of seeing violent acts, like even on your show, you covered some of the (9/45)
things that I was interested in, the kid from Texas in a pool party who was thrown across the lawn by a big cop, young Shakara in Columbia, South Carolina, thrown across, getting a big, big football coach cop trying to get her out of her chair, throwing her across the room, and even Freddie Gray. So after all of these kinds of images that are very troubling, I try to bring it all home with acts of courage, Bree Newsome, who climbed the flagpole to bring down the Confederate flag after the Charleston massacre, and then for John Lewis. So, I mean, I think to tell these stories of this country, you have to tell it through the voices of many people, not just one race and not just one gender. You mentioned Freddie Gray. Those cops are, there were six of them, they were all acquitted, and they're all working again, and three of them are African American. So that's an interesting dynamic. Well, I don't think the race of the cop really matters so much. That's what I'm saying. Because they're (10/45)
in this system that I don't understand how they think, but they're working for a system which has roots a long time ago. You know, there was a famous prison called Parchman Farm in Mississippi that pretty much was behaving just like slavery, and people, the convicts had to grow crops, and they were very profitable, and the people who walked around with guns, really keeping an eye on these worker prisoners, were black men called trustees. Sometimes they had been murderers. So it's not a new thing that we would have black cops or black people in that position. Cops are all about protecting property. Well, I think they would probably say they would want to extend that a little to protecting people. Well, people with property. Maybe some truth to that. So you've worked as a professor. What do you make of the kids today? With the crazy hair and the yeah, yeah music. Well, it's not about the crazy hair and the yeah, yeah music. I mean, I've been teaching for a long time, so I can't confess (11/45)
how long you'll know really how old I am. But I have three words for you, Bill Maher. $90,000. That's what it costs to go to film school at NYU, where I currently teach. Okay, first of all, we don't need anyone in film school. We have enough filmmakers. This has got to end. We've got to get the kids back to studying real shit, okay? If you want to be a filmmaker, you will find your way to do it. The arts does not need the help of the government. I know that's a conservative position. You probably hate it, but that's my view. Well, I think the government needs the help of the arts. Maybe the other way around, yeah. But I'm sorry, so $90,000 to go to acting school as a graduate actor. Yeah, well, I mean, look, college, that's going to be a big issue in the next election. Democrats want free college and they want single payer. They want some real high ticket items, but they don't have the balls to say, you know where the money is? The Pentagon. Defense really means defense contractors. (12/45)
That's where the money is that we need to get to fix the things in America that need to be fixed that would actually make us safer. Well, what Notes from the Field is about really is that the question I pose is about investments. What are we going to invest in? And in my case, I'm asking, are we going to invest in education? Are we going to invest in prisons? And it's now certainly headed to the prison side. Are we going to invest in mental health? Are we going to invest in prisons? It's leaning towards the prison side. And we have a country Vivek Murthy, who was at one point, our surgeon general went around the country and he interviewed a lot of people. He found out this is a country in pain, not physical pain, emotional pain. So true. Going to continue that right over there. Thank you so much. You're such a pleasure to talk to. All right. Anna Deavere Smith, let's meet our panel. Hey, look who it is. It's these two again, the literary lion whose latest novel is The Golden House. I (13/45)
read it, it's awesome. Salman Rushdie is over here. And she's a contributing editor to Vanity Fair who is speaking at Benaroya Hall in Seattle on a Sunday night. Fran Lebowitz. Okay. So let me pick up what she just said about it. It's a sick country. I feel like when we were in school, I never, I had such an idyllic upbringing. It was just like leave it to beaver. I never entered my mind that someone would come into this school with a gun. So what went wrong in America? Quickly. And how to fix it, come on. Yes, that's what I'm asking. Well, in one word, what went wrong is guns and how you fix it is by stopping people having them. Well, that. That would help. It feels like this is where I came in. The first of your shows that I was ever on was Politically Incorrect, which was the show that happened immediately after the Columbine shooting. Yes. And I remember being on there with Ted Nugent from the NRA. Oh, the things I've done to you over the years. I mean, you put me in touch with (14/45)
real intellectuals. Yes. But it just seems, it just seems as if in 20 years, we haven't learned a goddamn thing. Well. And the cure is just there in front. You can see what the cure is because other countries have taken, have done it. Maybe I'm just, yeah. They ain't us. Maybe I'm a cockeyed optimist, but I feel like something is different about this time. And maybe it's because the children are speaking out. We're hearing from them directly. I feel like this is a powerful weapon that we haven't had before. It's like in Vietnam, we had Walter Cronkite. And now we have, you know, a 16 year old girl. Did you see this tweet? Trump tweets out, my prayers and condolences to the family of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting, no child teacher, anyone else should feel unsafe in the American school. Sarah tweets back, I don't want your condolences, you fucking piece of shit. My friends and teachers were shot and multiple of my fellow classmates are dead. Do something instead of sending (15/45)
prayers. Prayers won't fix this. I've been saying that for years. It's so great that the kids have caught on to that. And that we can stop with the prayer. But they don't vote. They can't vote, that's the problem. They'll be voting very soon. I would have them voting now. A 16 year old? They can't do worse. Right. A six year old. I mean, could we have a worse Congress? Could we have a worse administration? We couldn't. No, that's, yeah. Even if they were in the Congress, they'd be fine. And you would think, wouldn't you, that the one thing that would not be a party political issue is protecting our children in school. You would think that's one thing and doesn't matter what you think politically, how right wing or left wing you are, and every parent in America would think, I don't want to think of my kid going to school, is today gonna be the day? And yet, it is a party political issue, astonishingly. No, I mean, people. That's because you used the word think. Okay? They don't think (16/45)
anything. You have a party that is really keen on protecting the rights of unborn children, but once they're born, you know, the hell with them. On your own. Yeah. Well, you know, when people say, are we normalizing Trump? We've normalized mass murder of children, so I think we can normalize anything. I mean, when Columbine happened, it was like the biggest story of the year. And then it became like a bad car accident or something. It was reported, we forgot it in the next couple of days. Except we try to protect people in cars. We make them wear seat belts, we made them bolt their children to the back seats, dressed like astronauts. Right. And we also say that if you're in charge of a car, you have to pass a test. You know, you have to prove that you know how to drive a car. Well, that's, yeah. See, my, what solution I think we can have to this is, is I think that I hear too much accent on, let's get rid of the AR-15s. No, we should get rid of AR-15s. I don't, I think gun nuts, first (17/45)
of all, they love guns. It's their hobby. They have lots of them. They'll find a way to get off as many rounds as they want. I think it has to be in very strictly taking the word of the NRA, which always says, why are you messing with us law abiding? Everything is law abiding. So that means this kid was looked into 39 times. They were at his door. Will you have these things on your record? That church shooter a few months ago, I think in South Carolina, lots of things on his record. Lots of red flags. I think if you have wife beater, anything like that, you can't get a gun. You have to have a completely clean record. That I think would take care of a lot of this. Because not that many people, not that many people have guns anymore. It's just the people who have them. No one should have a gun. Why should anyone have a gun? Well, in America, I need a gun. You need a gun because you have this show. If you didn't need a gun, you wouldn't need a gun. But most people don't have this show, (18/45)
they don't need a gun. I didn't want to say it. In most countries of the world. And another dog I could use. Most countries of the world that I know about, it's actually quite hard to get a gun. Even in like shithole countries like India. You know, out there in the shithole world, it's actually quite hard to get a gun. Well that's partly because they're expensive. It was hard to get them in the old west too. Because guns are not cheap. No, no, but what I'm saying is there are, most countries have sensible rules about how you get hold of a gun. And this country is reducing the number of rules. Yes, okay. Every minute. So let me ask about this Mueller indictment. I was trying to tell them this is actually big because two things came really sharply into focus. One, that this is not a hoax. Even though Donald Trump has been saying it's a witch hunt and a hoax forever, this makes clear, not a hoax, this really happened. And that they were really trying to get Trump elected. Well first they (19/45)
were just against Hillary. Putin knew Hillary was the stronger, I know you don't like her, but Putin knew she was the stronger candidate. I love her compared to Donald Trump, what do you mean? Oh I know, but. I adore her. Bernie is the one you hate. Bernie is the one I don't like. And they also tried to help him. Yes, they did try to help Bernie. And I haven't heard a word from him today, have you? No, but I don't think he was in collusion with them. No, I don't think he was in collusion with them. But since Russians were so active in doing that, those Bernie people who were frothing at the mouth at the mention of Hillary Clinton might think about that the next time they start frothing. And today, I think Mueller is very smart because he's going really carefully step by step to establish yes, it was real, it really happened. There's no smoking gun so far that links it to Trump, but you know, that may be the next step. But what I think is odd is that all the statements saying there's no (20/45)
indication that this affected the election result. And if you think about what the Russians were trying to do, they were trying to help Jill Stein. Jill Stein. Yes, anybody who heard Hillary. Yeah, Jill Stein got 51,000 votes in Michigan. Right. You know, the margin of victory was what, 12. Yeah. They were trying to help, not after they decided to stop helping Bernie Sanders, they tried to foment discord between the Bernie and Hillary camps. Sure. And that happened. Everything the Russians were trying to do happened. And how can you then say there's no evidence that they were instrumental? How can they not be impeaching him now? Because Trump gets his information from the same place that Robert Mueller got his information for this indictment, the FBI. So he knew this all along as well. This whole time that he has been saying what he's finally admitted, that this wasn't happening, today he finally said it was happening, he knew. But he said last week. That's an impeachable offense to (21/45)
me. He said last week. But he was lying. He was under attack. Yeah. And I didn't do anything about it. He said, I talked to Putin and I believe him. What if after 9-11 Bush had said, you know, I talked to Ben Laden, I believe him. Okay. Yeah. You know, I'm surprised he didn't. You know, I mean, he knew it wasn't true. He didn't care. Yeah, it's- I mean, people still say, even you still say, why did he do this? Because he's a liar. Yeah. He doesn't get his information from the same place that they do. He gets his information from Fox News. He doesn't listen to the FBI. He said last week that he doesn't read the intelligence report. Right. He said it last week. And no one even reads them to him. No, it's- I mean, this indictment- The monster comes in with puppets and acts it out. I mean, this indictment is 37 pages. He has not read 37 pages in his life. Okay. That's true. And earlier in the week, by the way, before the Senate Intel Committee, all of our head Intel people were there. Oh, (22/45)
it was a who's who. The Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, FBI Director, Christopher Wray, the NSA dude, Admiral Mike Rogers, all of them agreed when Dan Coats said, frankly, the United States is under attack. Is under attack. These are the words that Andrew Card whispered in Bush's ear. Remember? And almost all these people- While he was tweaking the little goat. While he was- Yeah. And almost all these people- But he only sat for seven minutes, not two years. But almost all these people are Trump appointees. Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, this is not like the left wing presenting a point of view to Trump, which he has to do. It's his own people. Sure. And the Republicans, Congress can declare war. They could say this is a cyber war. They don't need the President to do that. What happened to the word appeasement, by the way? You know? It's too long. Is that just a- Is it just for- What? It's too long? It's too long. It's too long. But Republicans (23/45)
love to throw that word at Democrats. It's one of the- Another word, two rules. They get to say, They get to say, We don't. If this isn't appeasement, I don't know what is. I know, but for someone of my age, which you are older, you're younger, but not vastly, for someone of my age, the idea that the Republicans are for the Russians and the Democrats are for the FBI. I know. It's a- It's all right. It is. We used to hate the FBI. They hated the Russians. Exactly. It's the world turned upside down. It's like you say, please bring back Mitt Romney. Yes. I mean, I think that's a good thing. Mitt Romney. Yes. I mean, how did that happen? I remember when we were abusing Mitt Romney. Yes. I gave a million dollars to see he didn't become president. But you know, things change in perspective, in me a couple of, because Mitt Romney wouldn't be that bad. I mean, he was a bad candidate and he- Relatively speaking, he wouldn't be that bad. Sold his soul. But I think what would be very good for (24/45)
America would be if he were to run as Republican classic, you know? Because there are lots of Republicans who want that. Same great tax cuts, a third less racist. Come on. And what we need to do, I've said this before, is what happened in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican party. He started the bull moose party and handed the election to the Democrat. Mitt, you've got to do that. Well, it could yet happen. Do you think Trump is going to be running the next time? Yeah. You don't think he'll make it before you? I don't think he'll be in office. Oh, I don't know about that. I don't think he'll be impeached. You know, I think he'll quit. He'll quit. He's not a quitter. He's a quitter. Okay. He is a quitter. You know, because he's worried about, they're going to find out about the money. That's what this is about. You know, this is about money laundering for him. Right. You know, and if they get too close, you know, he'll make something up. You know, I want to spend more time (25/45)
with my family about how he could, I can't imagine. That is the one excuse that will work for anyone but Donald Trump. He's moving them all out of the White House. If he feels they're really close to him in this money thing, I think he'll leave. Yeah. I mean, the one thing that has sort of been almost established is, so Luke Harding's book, Collusion, which talks about the 20 years of Trump being supported essentially by the Russian mafia. Right. With the money being channeled through European banks. Now, now, Mueller has subpoenaed material from the European bank, Deutsche Bank, that was doing this. Fake news. That's his answer. That's what he'll say to all of this. That's why he doesn't quit. I don't think he's a quitter, but we'll see. All right, you know, we try to keep up with the latest trends here on real time and pet shaming is not really one of them. That's been going on for quite a while, but we use it as a bit. You know, people put things up like I eat bunny poop for, you (26/45)
know, your dog has, or your cat. You know, I watched a mouse eat my food and did nothing. It was cute for a while. And then people started to do that. They would hang confessional signs around themselves and now celebrities are doing it. Or so we're saying. Would you like to see some of the celebrity confessional signs? Okay, like Jeff Sessions, I've already ordered the arrest of Black Panther. Donald Trump, I don't pay hookers to pee on me. I pay them to leave when they finished peeing on me. Melania Trump, I've gotten so good at leaving my body during sex, I can actually go shopping. Prince Harry, grandma thinks she's black Irish. Stephen Miller, I collect skulls. Mike Pence, I'm only here for the shirtless guy from Tonga. Coldplay, we don't get it either. Hope Hicks, I miss the real friendships of modeling. Steve Wynn, I'm three bankruptcies, two hair transplants and nine gropings from the White House and it's all falling into place. All right, he is the former president of Mexico (27/45)
and he's on our show? That's fantastic. You would see him at a Trump rally chanting, build that wall. His new book is Let's Move On Beyond Fear and False Prophets, Vicente Fox. Oh, you got one too. You're a folk hero now. Yes, sir. Do I call you Mr. President or El Presidente or? Amigo, just call me Amigo. Okay, okay. You really have become a, oh yes, you know them. They're good, they're safe. I'm the one to let them in. Yeah. You've really become kind of a thorn in Trump's side when all your stuff is going viral, you're blowing up, man. Well, when it comes from the heart, when it comes when you're offended, like we all 120 million Mexicans. Sure. And the ones here in this great nation, you have to stand up, you have to react, you have to do something. Although my visa is almost gone. Okay, so I love this tweet. Boy, this is the day for dirty tweets. You wrote, at Real Donald Trump, your mouth is the foulest shithole in the world. Did I say that? Yes, you did, I have it right here. (28/45)
But, you know, and this is kind of a trend because Trump calls Kim Jong-un fat and little man and rocket man and Kim calls him a dotard and that nut in the Philippines. Duterte, he called Obama son of a whore. And what's going on with world leaders that used to be so respectful and now it's shithole and fuck you. Well, some take the initiative, we others react. And speaking about this sad, very sad event in Florida these days, when you speak out of the White House, this aggressive violent language, when you discriminate, when you are racist, that's what you get, that's what you get. We need harmony, we need love, we need happy communities. And those concepts don't come out of his mouth. What comes out of his mouth is what you said. No, it's true. And the wall, you're gonna pay an alumsama rule if you don't stop. No, let me. Do I have to repeat? No, no, no, no. So let me ask you about drugs. Are you holding? No, that's not the question. No, I do this. The violence in Mexico is off the (29/45)
charts. 29,000 I think was the figure I read last year. But most of those deaths are because of a drug war which is fueled by the United States. We are the customers and also probably they get the guns to do the killing in this country. Yes, I had to come through Seattle. I was main speaker at this global conference around cannabis and drugs. Cannabis? Yes, sir. Okay. Okay, it's okay? It's OCC. Well, let me tell you, Mexico next May the 30th we're holding a global cannabis summit because we have to change precisely that huge problem we have in Mexico. We must move ahead with legalization. Fortunately, finally, Mexico took the step. Today, in all of Mexico federal government and local governments will go by this legalization leaving behind prohibition and getting into regulation for medical use first step. But we want to push forward because we need also legalize the rest because our problem in Mexico is, and this will be a surprise to you, but the headquarters of crime and cartels are (30/45)
here in United States and they are hiring Mexican cartels to bring in the drug from the South, from Colombia, from Venezuela, and from elsewhere. And I questioned myself, what happens once that drug crosses the border? What is the DEA? What is the CIA? What are they doing if it's prohibited? Apply the law. But fortunately many states today hear. As long as the profit motive is what it is when it's illegal. I mean, we've been going through this for so many decades learning the same lesson over and over. You will never stop drug trafficking as long as there's this much money in it. Now in this state, we just legalized it. And I happen to know a grower just by chance. Right? No, really. He told me the price dropped like overnight from 1600 a pound to 200. Round of applause for the crowd. He's like, oh. And consumption does not increase. So there is some good news, ladies and gentlemen, this horrible week. Consumption does not increase. You move that massive amount of money from criminals (31/45)
into government through paying taxes. And this is the difference sitting on your side with Chapo Guzman or sitting here with farmers, businessmen that are today running that new industry. And this is the part of the, that we wanna change in Mexico. Moving from crime, from killings, from all these young kids dying in Mexico streets into a new industry. And this is what will happen pretty soon in Mexico. And it's happening here, fortunately. Okay, you're a follower of American politics and I know you two are. Let me throw out to this whole panel some stats that I find amazing. Trump, 41% approval rating. Even after all the bigotry and the insane tweets and the treason. But here's more, this is Politico morning console poll. National security, the party ignoring the Russian meddling. Republicans lead Democrats 46 to 33. On immigration they lead 43 to 37. On the economy they lead 45 to 36. Jobs they lead, I don't get it. Is it the Democrats so lame that they can't sell their program or is (32/45)
it people just don't pay attention or both? I think that people have just completely stopped believing the truth. They've just completely stopped believing what they hear. And you could say to them anything and if it happens to coincide with the prejudice system, they will accept it and if not, not. And that's why it seems to be like Trump's numbers have stayed roughly speaking the same for a year. They've been down to 38, they've been up to 41. But there's like 40% of America. But that truth softening has been going on in our social lives for a long time. I mean I've heard it for a long time, that's my truth. And I always think yes, but then there's the truth. We still have that I hope. But what should the Democrats do? I mean some on the left say it's a waste of time to go after the white working class. But in 2016, 44% of the voters, white non-college. 30% white college. So, you know, I'm no Paul Manafort or anything. Because I don't have a walk-in closet full of pinky rings. Let me (33/45)
tell you. But I can figure out that you can't ignore 44% of the population and expect to win. We have great experience in Latin America. We went all along the 20th century in hands of dictators, authoritarian regimes, corruption. Democracy was not there. Or even freedom and innovation was not there. And now we can see the genius of people. And this president you have here. I mean it complies with what we had in Latin America for a century. So what is to do? Because something has to be done. And one thing to do is to put in front of him a Congress that has majority on the opposition. This is the formula we found out in Mexico so that it can stop him. So that you can domesticate him through a opposition Congress. Domesticate him, yes. And this nation doesn't deserve what it has today. But that's what I'm trying to get at is how are Democrats going to win this next election? Now things look pretty good because they flipped 30 seats. But in the Obama years they lost 1,000 state seats, (34/45)
state legislature seats. That's a lot. So there's a long way to go. And this week I saw on the news that Bill Clinton is now verboten on the campaign trail. He's too toxic because of harassment allegations in the past. I mean it was only 2012 where he was the star at the convention. Remember the 2012 convention? Obama called him the explainer in chief. He was dropping all these stats. And now nobody wants to be near him. Now maybe that's right because of his allegations. But that's exactly what happened in 2000. Al Gore wouldn't go near Bill Clinton, remember? Because of the blowjob. I can't be associated with the blowjob. And look how well that turned out. You know, I just have, don't you think, I mean speaking as the senior citizen president. Is that true Mr. President? Well, she said, ladies are always right. If you weren't here then I don't know. Don't you think it's time for the baby boomers to step aside? Don't you think it's time for the two? Like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden and (35/45)
Hillary Clinton and Donald F. Trump. They should, could they please thank you for your service? Could you go home and water the plants? Yes. And I think, you see, I think the answer to your question is that what's happening across the country is a whole new kind of person is running for office. You know, there are all kinds of people who have never run for office before. A lot of them are women. A lot of them. Running for office. And they're looking very much like flipping seats which are safe in the other direction. You know, so I think that, that younger generation of different people running for office, not these tired old farts. I was not advocating for Bill Clinton to run for president again. I'm just saying that the Democrats have an interesting way they handle their own internal problems which is the opposite of the Republicans because they still wheel old man Bush out. Remember David Copperfield? But I think the grassroots are interesting right now. You know, because what's (36/45)
happening at the grassroots is something different. And that may be where the hope lies. In this book, in this book. Let's move on. Oh, your book. His book. You forgot about it? He's here by accident? That's right. Is the book on the screen? Yes, okay, your book, yes, sorry. Let's move on beyond fear and false prophets. Fear because I sense in this nation a lot of fear after September 11th. And it's understandable. It was a very sad day. But fear is not a good advisor. We must move on. It's not enemies everywhere in the world. We in the world are shocked for what we see on this leader here in the White House. It's shocked and everybody is pissed off. Pissed off, yes. What we have to do, the leadership of this nation is absolutely lost. We don't know where we're going. We don't know what's going to happen. And the world needs this great nation leadership. We need it. We do. Are you gonna run here? What's the pain? But yes, and it is the assessment. It's really about the soul of this (37/45)
country. When I hear people talk, as I have all week after the shooting, about, well, mental health. And we definitely should have better mental health treatment. But this country is not built for mental health. It's kind of a sick country at its heart. It's way too greedy, get to Macho Mountain, competitive. It's built for money. It's not built to be happy. And by the way, in that. The Republicans always substitute a complicated thing for a simple thing. Mental health is very complicated. Guns are very simple. So they don't mention the guns. Oh, here, how do we stop the shootings? Take the guns away. This guy had mental health issues. Probably he did, no question. But if he had them without the gun, it doesn't matter. Those kids are alive and he's still unhappy. But I mean, he got expelled from high school. So did I. But I didn't go back and shoot the place up. And by the way, to connect it to the drug debate, I think they put too many of these kids on too many psychotropic drugs when (38/45)
they're way too young. And I don't think we know what it's doing to them. I really don't. When you're Ritalin and Prozac and all this stuff and the kid's six years old, by the time he gets to be a teenager, once he goes off his meds, he's never been normal in his life. I'm not surprised half of them go nuts. I'm not saying there shouldn't be mental health services, which this administration cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts. But the gun is what shoots people. That church you mentioned before, they tore the church down. It was a hundred year old building. And the response was tear the church down because guns don't kill people, churches kill people. That was the response to it. Yeah. Well, when that woman drove her kids into the lake, some other people, about a few months later, went to look where that happened. And then their car went in the lake and they said, we should drain the lake. It's not the lake. It's really not the lake's fault. All right, you're a very entertaining paddle, but (39/45)
it's time for New Rules, everybody. All right, New Rule. Get a room. I don't know anything about ice dancing routines, but I'm pretty sure that when it's finished, I shouldn't be more exhausted than they are. New Rule, let's call therapists what they really are, friend prostitutes. Because when a friend tells you to see a therapist, it's just their way of saying, I don't care about your breakup. Why don't you rent someone who does? New Rule, now that magician David Copperfield has been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, he must get a new headshot. New Rule, someone has to tell the Chicago news station that thinks the Pyeongchang Olympics are being held at P.F. Chang's. You're too stupid even to be on television. First of all, P.F. Chang is Chinese, not Korean, and everyone knows the difference between Korea and China. Korean sound like this. And Chinese people sound like this. We want deal. New Rule, from now on in Los Angeles, this will be called a freeway, and this (40/45)
will be called a parking lot. And finally, New Rule psychologists have to explain how in the age of Me Too, the number one movie in America is about a woman on a leash. Or how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots. She married her boss, stalking is romantic, and I hate you and then I love you. Now it's true that men made most of these movies, but women bought most of the tickets. I sure wasn't the one who wanted to go see Failure to Launch. And Fifty Shades of Grey, written, directed, and devoured by women. Because people are complicated. That's why there's a Facebook category, it's complicated. We don't know why we're attracted to a woman, or a man, or if you've seen Shape of Water, a fish. Sometimes people at work fall in love. Sometimes people try something new in bed without having a pre-production meeting about it. Not every guy who makes a woman uncomfortable did it because he's an asshole. 2017 was a great year for women because finally men have been put on notice. (41/45)
Harassment is going to be noted now, so you're going to have to think of another way to meet women. All men are playing with five fouls now, as they should. But the movement falters if it thinks we can make pain-free the messy transition from two people, not in a relationship, to two people who are. A Harris poll says 38% of Americans have dated a coworker, and 31% of office romances have led to marriage. The rest ended happily. And yet Facebook and Google have policies where you can only ask a coworker out once. If she or he says no, you cannot ask again. Right, because feelings in humans never change. We're rocks. Fuck, women like these rom-coms precisely because the men do change. Christian Grey starts out as a sadist, and by the end he's traded in his butt plug for a heated toilet seat. Love Actually is somehow a lot of people's favorite movie, but if it was made today, it would have to be called Inappropriate Actually. It's nothing but men hitting on their underlings, and one (42/45)
character is such a stalker, he shows up at the door of his married crush, who winds up chasing him down the street and kissing him. Most women I know call the police if you leave a note on their car. I'm not saying men act the way they do primarily because of movies, but they have been getting this message for a long time that this is what women want, and it is what women want, but only from the men they want it from. Problem is, we don't know which one we are. You know, when Tom Cruise barges uninvited into the home of the assistant he's hired and had sex with, and says, I'm not letting you get rid of me, how about that? Adorable. If it was Ted Cruz, not so much. Snow White is the 10th highest grossing film ever. It's about a prince who kisses Snow White when she's out cold. Cute from a prince, from Bill Cosby, not cute at all. John Cusack, always cute, am I right ladies? Always cute, always cute. Even when he shows up outside his ex's house playing the music they used to have sex (43/45)
to. In real life, the cops arrive, mistake the boombox for a gun and shoot him 57 times. Who's more beloved than Rocky? But his first date moves wouldn't go over too well at the Me Too film festival. I should go. Don't go, please, don't go. Not very PC, but Rocky was determined not to spend another lonely night beating his meat. You know, I also wouldn't try the chair through the window move used by William Hurt in Body Heat, but it worked for them. And this isn't just in our unwoke past, it's this year's Oscar nominees. Beauty and the Beast is about a simple country girl who's kidnapped, but it turns out is a prince, so it's okay. If you think there's a power imbalance when the conductor dates the cellist, imagine being hit on by a hulking dog monster. Phantom Threat is about a powerful older man who picks up a waitress. Call Me By Your Name is about a 24-year-old who has a gay affair with a 17-year-old. And The Shape of Water is about a cleaning woman at a secret government lab who (44/45)
takes the creature from the black lagoon home and bangs it in the bathtub. If that's not workplace sex, it's certainly stealing office supplies. All right, that's our show. We're off next week, and back March 2nd, I'll be at the Florida Theater in Jacksonville, March 3rd. I wanna thank Stavro Grosjean, Fred Liebovitz, Mesenti Fox, and Anna Deavere Smith. Fred, it's time for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #404 (Originally aired 09/23/16).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Good afternoon. Afternoon. Time will be... I have a presidential... I love you all right back. A lot of love in this room, I gotta say. Okay, but listen, it's 4... I can't believe it's autumn already. You know, the season's turned so... Do you love autumn? I love autumn. I love to watch the gentle flutter of Hillary's poll numbers as they fall to the ground. Everybody loves autumn. In Charlotte, the police are using tear gas with a hint of pumpkin spice. It's just... Oh, we're following that. Now, we're live here Friday night and we have to follow the... You know, there's been unrest on the streets there in Charlotte for the last four nights, so we are keeping an eye on that. We'll update you as the show goes along. The Republican governor there in North Carolina called out the state police and the National Guard to make sure that in all the chaos, no one uses the wrong restroom. Two days ago, this is (1/45)
true, black protesters looted the NASCAR Hall of Fame and the white people were like, it's on. Oh, it is on. And of course, Donald Trump is making the situation better, as he always does. He actually said this. He said, if you're not aware, drugs are a very big factor. He's like your 90-year-old aunt. They're all taking something. Yeah, they're taking something all right. Bullets. But... The other day, Trump said, African-American communities, because he would know, are absolutely in the worst shape they have ever been ever, ever, ever. Yes, of course, Donald Trump, of all people, Donald Trump knows why the caged bird sings. Because it used to live in his hair. Are you all ready for the big debate on Monday night? Oh, my God. I'm shitting my pants already. Hillary has been preparing for the debate, of course, as she does. But you know what? Does it matter? The bar for Trump is so low. It's like being in a spelling bee with a basset hound. Yeah, she knew all the words, but you know (2/45)
what? I like the fact that that dog knew not to shit on the floor. So it is very nervous, but I still think Hillary can make this work. Of course, I said the same thing about Brad and Angelina. And up until a couple of months ago, we kept booking Anthony Weiner. So what am I? I'm not really the one to ask. Did you see this week? Again! Anthony Weiner. It's like a yearly thing now. His dick comes out if it sees its shadow. This time he was sexting, apparently, with a 15-year-old. Oh, you didn't see this? Oh, that's right, you come here for the news. I keep forgetting this. I think it's... Anyway, he admits it was flirtatious. One of the texts said, I would bust that tight pussy so hard... Don't you love HBO? We can celebrate. I'm quoting. I'm quoting. He said, I would bust that tight pussy so hard you would limp for a week. He's pretty flirtatious. That's halfway to mentoring. I tell you, that is... wow. But speaking of things going off, there was a... Since we were on Friday, there was (3/45)
a terrible terrorist attack over last weekend in the New York, New Jersey, my home state area. No one died. That's the good news. We had a terrorist attack and nobody died. And boy, were we lucky about that, because the bomb was made from acid ball bearings and electronic igniters. It was either that or a sack full of Samsung phones. That's what they were... We know about the bomber, his name was Ahmad Rahami. Is it me or is it never Murray Lipschitz? I'm just saying. I'm just saying. But look, you know what? Here's the good news. The guy's father loved this country. He called the FBI. This guy should get a parade. Called the FBI and said, my son's a terrorist. And the FBI said, we don't have time for that. We got 30,000 emails of Hillarys to go through. You know, this guy should get more of the publicity. I'm talking about the father. He had a chicken restaurant. He just wanted to serve the best damn fried chicken in all of New Jersey. And his son, the bomber, helped him out in the (4/45)
restaurant. He should have known something was up. The mascot of the restaurant was Moolah Sanders. I mean, this right there is a... And they were offering a $5 martyr meal. I mean, come on. It said right on the card, if you come back for seconds, you're doing it wrong. But this is my home state. Kudos, I must say. I know he has his troubles these days. To Governor Chris Christie. Because as soon as the thing happened, he made a moving statement. And said the people of New Jersey have to pull together. And please, don't let this one incident turn people against fried chicken. Max Brooks, Neeraj Tanden and Klonnie Chin are here. And a little bit, we're speaking with the very talented Michael Fronte. But first up, she's a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist. And the author of The Year of Voting Dangerously. The derangement of American politics. The beautiful and talented Maureen Dowd. Pageant. I know you're... Now, I know Maureen Dowd has been on a book tour and you have a (5/45)
fever, don't you? You're sick. Yes. I much prefer watching you in bed. We'll continue that discussion after this. Well, okay, so thank you so much for being here and doing that. Boy, you and Hillary, huh? But you don't have a hacking cough. You seem fine. You look great. Thank you. Okay. So, we'll try to make this short so you can get back to your bed. I was looking forward to dinner with you, but I guess that's off now. Oh, no way. That's on. Oh, fucking A. Alright, so I'm a better friend than Donald Trump. Because I know you've been friends with him for years. And yet, here's what he treated about you recently. Wacky Maureen Dowd, who hardly knows me, makes up things I never said for her boring interviews and column, a neurotic dope. Crazy Maureen Dowd, the wacky columnist for the failing New York Times, pretends she knows me well, wrong. Which is it? Are you wacky or crazy? Well, I wasn't friends with him. I just interviewed him. Friendly? No. Over the years? No, I would interview (6/45)
him when he would go out on early expeditions as a presidential candidate. But I was deeply troubled by his tweets because obviously he didn't put a lot of time into them. Because he was just recycling things he had done about other women journalists. So he always calls them crazy or neurotic or wacky. And I would have preferred a better nickname. Like, at least W gave me Cobra, which has some reptilian glamour. Yeah, that's very hot. Kobe Bryant's black Cobra. But you're right. I've always said this about Trump. There are so many red flags about him. But the fact that he tweets at 3 in the morning is such a psychotic thing to do. I mean, we all have our ways of getting off to sleep. I whack off. But that's peaceful. That's positive. This guy, I mean, some people listen to music, they listen to the radio. Who at 3 in the morning, your ratings are terrible. It's a sick way to get off to sleep. I asked him if he did it in his jammies. And he said yes. He gets in his PJs and tweets his... (7/45)
His PJs also have a long tie. But I noticed that the media, including your newspaper, the New York Times, is getting a lot tougher in actually calling him out and actually saying he lied, which I think is a much needed development. Have you noticed that? Were you responsible for that over there? Yes. Okay, great. Now, my next question is, will it make a difference? I mean, how, in your book, you talk a lot about your family. And I noticed once in a while you actually give your column over to your conservative brother or sister. Or as I like to call them, my basket of deplorables. But you actually resented that when she said that, about your family, because it's your family. Obviously, when I read your brother, he's such a bright guy. It's hard to wrap our heads around that. It's hard to wrap our heads around this notion that bright people can disagree with us so much. Right? I know, it's so funny. So, all my fellow columnists are going out on these Margaret Mead anthropological road (8/45)
trips to Kentucky to hunt down a rare creature called the Trump voter and try and understand them and reason with them. And one of them did an open letter, like, I would like to meet one of you. So I could talk to you. And I just have to go home. Right. Just have to have Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah, exactly. Also, I notice in the book you talk a lot about Bush 41. I mean, that's when I first came to know you in the paper. You covered his election before you were an op-ed columnist. And you have a kind of a very, I don't know, it's a darling room. A very, I don't know, it's a darling little relationship you have with him. You were tough on him, but he loves you. He loves you almost like a daughter. He, well, he calls it like a love-hate relationship, which are words I prefer to use on my private life, like about ex-boyfriends and things. But he was very upset when I first came to cover him because he had expected someone from the New York Times with a name like Clyde Farnsworth III, who (9/45)
would drink martinis with him and talk about the Atlantic Alliance. Then he got me. But then we got used to each other and it was kind of like a screwball comedy where I was the Irish working-class girl and he was the waspy upper-class president who had been taken to kindergarten in a limousine. It's like Titanic, but you're Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah, not for the likes of you, boyo. But he's for Hillary. Isn't that amazing? Yes, yes. So he came out this week with Bush 41. Right. So I went down to have lunch with him in 2011 and it was right at the height of the birther thing and I was talking to him about that. Donald Trump was leading the birther movement and former President Bush goes, he's an ass. About Trump? And then he was talking about how much he really loved Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and so I can only imagine how painful it was for him to see Jeb, who he had always wanted to be president, get destroyed in the debate stage by what Trump refers to as a one-day kill, which is (10/45)
the low energy thing. And so Bush Sr. would throw his shoe at the TV set. When Trump would come on. Throw his shoe? That's what the Arabs did to his son. I know, I know. Oh my God. When he saw Trump, he would just throw it. And yet, okay, so he's, Bush 41 is voting for Hillary and Ted Cruz today came out for Trump. Ted Cruz who, I had to write it down, called Trump utterly amoral, a liar and a sniveling coward and I'm for him. Well, when, you know, when Trump suggested that his dad might have been part of the JFK assassination, if that doesn't get Cruz to distance himself, what would? And said his wife was a dog. Right. I mean, but you know, Trump also said at the time, I would never accept Ted Cruz's endorsement. I am honored to accept Ted Cruz's. Well, the Republicans have been very cowardly about that going along with Trump when he's insulted them and the only two that have really stood up are Susan Collins and Jeff Flake. Susan, yeah. Well, that's two. That's two. Okay, so let me (11/45)
read what Obama said. There's a reason why we haven't had a woman president. We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful woman and it troubles us in a lot of ways. What do you make of that? Well, I certainly think that, you know, the election of the first African American president stirred up a lot of racism and the first woman on a major ticket stirs up a lot of misogyny, but I think President Obama's line was more of a rationalization kind of to explain why Hillary isn't doing well because the funny thing about Hillary is usually with the woman you'd be worried that she's not tough enough, but no one ever worries about that with Hillary. Like we know she can pull the trigger. I mean, we just wonder about her aim sometimes. But usually women have a virtue, women politicians have a virtue advantage, and that's what her problem is because people don't think she's honest, so she doesn't get that. Okay, well that's interesting. But what about the health? The fact that (12/45)
she had pneumonia for three days while campaigning and still campaigned. Yes, they did load her into a van like a grandfather clock at one point. Okay, first of all, being president is a lot easier than running for president, right, stamina-wise? Okay, and also, I mean, she took three days off for pneumonia and came back and looked fine. I mean, if that isn't enough for people, what does she have to do, run the dicathlon? Yeah, well, she and Trump have more stamina than anyone I've ever seen. I've been on a book tour for three days and I already have a sprained ankle and a fever. And a fever, right. And as David Axelrod said, it wasn't about the health, it was about the stealth. It just devolved into this microcosm of the pattern she always has where she blocked out the press, misdirected, and it snowballed into something it shouldn't have been. All she had to do was, you know, say, I don't feel well, I have pneumonia. All of us would have understood, but instead it's like, I feel (13/45)
great, you know, everything's fine. Well, I mean, she's a little paranoid because, frankly, people like yourself are always criticizing her so she doesn't want to talk to the press. Thank you for being here in your sickness. You looked great, you sounded great. Maureen Dadd, let's get you back to your bed. All right, the great Maureen Dadd, everybody. Thank you for doing this. All right, let's meet our panel. Hey, everybody. Okay, here they are. He's a fellow at the Modern War Institute and at the Atlantic Council. Max Brooks, back with us again. Hey, Max. He is the former policy director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and also a fellow. A lot of fellows here tonight at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Lonnie Chen. Hey, Lonnie, how you doing? And she is president of the Center for American Progress and former policy director to Hillary Clinton. Neera Tanden. Hey, Neera. Hey, nice to see you. All right, don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can (14/45)
answer them after the show on YouTube. Okay, the first debate is Monday night. We're going to live tweet it, so I will be saying a lot of things about it. Liberal, what, you're laughing already? I'm a little anxious about your tweets, but, you know, I'll get through it. I'm for her. No, no, no. You liberals have to learn who's on your side. I know, I know. Well, why didn't you come on the show then? Okay, liberals are very nervous for good reason, because this race is pretty tight now. And I have this horrible feeling that Hillary Clinton is just fighting the last war. You're a war expert. You wrote World War Z. You're a fellow at war places. You know, it's like she's the British in her red pantsuit, and Trump is fighting a guerrilla war. And I'm not just saying that because his father's an orangutan. No, but, but let me, no, listen to this. She spent, her campaign has spent 96 million in ads, his 17 million. That's a five to one advantage. In Florida, she spent a fortune, he spent (15/45)
nothing. She's got a big round game, he's got nothing, and he's ahead. Yeah, but that's not her fault. That's because the media has forgotten what their constitutional duty is. You know. Really, it's all the media's fault? Well, the reason we have a free press, the whole reason it's in the Constitution, is to inform us, the electorate, about what we're voting on. And they've forgotten that. They think this is a circus. They think this is Dancing with the Stars. And so they have given Trump probably a trillion dollars worth of free press over the course of this campaign. Well, a billion. I don't know about a trillion. Yes, he's gotten a lot of free press. You're right, absolutely. We just saw that infomercial that he did for his hotel. They all showed up like Pavlov's dogs, and with the stakes, and then eventually he said Obama's an American and walked off. But I'm asking about her strategy. I mean, he's out there like giving speeches to his basket of confusables. Okay. But I just, it (16/45)
looks to me, you know, Jeb Bush spent $130 million to beat Donald Trump and wound up with four delegates. It looks like Trump might be one of those problems liberals think they can throw money at to make go away. Yeah, they know. And I don't think we can throw money at it and that's all they're going to be. We'll see this on Monday. I think Hillary is not going to be like Jeb Bush. I think if he throws punches, she's going to throw punches back. She recognizes that this is a debate about who is going to have the nuclear codes, who's going to be leader of the country. So she'll share her vision and values and talk about what she wants to do, but she's also going to stand up to him in a way, that's my sense, she'll stand up to him in a way that a lot of Republicans in the primary were too scared to do. See, I mean, I actually think that she's got to come out aggressively because that is going to knock him off of his game a little bit. You know, the worst thing that can happen to her is (17/45)
to have him go 90 minutes and look presidential. That would be the worst thing that happened to her. And so I think she's really got to be on her game in the sense that she can't just let Trump skate. Now Trump, on the other hand, I think he'll come out and just be Mr. Cool, right? Which, we'll see if he can play that character for 90 minutes, that'll be interesting. Or any character for 90 minutes. Well, that's the thing. Are you a Trump supporter? No, I'm not. A Republican, but not a Trump supporter? Yeah, that's right. Okay, alright. That may be the last time they have fought. Not the guy mayor yet, okay. But are you going to vote for Hillary? No. See, I don't get this. I'm not going to vote for her. It's a Sophie's Choice, but I'm going to kill both my kids. I don't get that. I live in California, Bill. Just like you do. Oh, you don't live in California? Yeah, I live in California. For me, I just feel like I can't vote for him. I can't vote for her. So I'm going to vote for someone (18/45)
who I feel comfortable with. Yeah, that's bullshit. Okay, so let me ask about their responses to the bombing. Because I've been saying for a very long time that I worry about the Democrats on the terrorism issue. I mean, Trump obviously is giving paranoid lunacy aimed at dumbasses. I don't agree with his prescriptions. But Hillary says things like, the kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump used is giving aid and comfort to her adversaries. That's what she said. But that doesn't really tell you how he's going to stop the attacks. She just seems to lecture us on how to be a better person. This is what I worry about with the election. If there's a terrorist attack a week before the election and then Mr. Dumbass Strongman comes in and says, we're weak, we're weak. You know, a tragedy for him. Always an opportunity to gloat. I called it. I should be a newscaster. Because that's what newscasters do. They predict things. I actually don't think, you know, everyone says he's a chaos (19/45)
candidate. I actually don't think people in times of crisis want more chaos. I think they actually want someone who seems like they know what they're doing because you actually become more worried about terrible events unfolding. I mean, we saw that this week. His numbers did not move up in a lot of polls. They moved down. Because I think a lot of people, you know, I think a lot of people, particularly women, wonder about a guy who's going to just say whatever in a time of crisis when that can actually mean you're inflaming enemies of the United States. You know, Neera, I don't know that people see him as a chaos candidate. I think he is a chaos candidate. I get that. But I don't think people see him that way. I think people see him as, oh, man, he's a truth teller. You know, America is under attack. Even though he's the biggest liar ever in America. And there's no accountability for that. There's never any accountability. Well, it's changing. As I was saying to Maureen, that's finally (20/45)
changing. And maybe in the debate on Monday, there will be some accountability. But then you've got him playing the moderator game. Well, yes, he's already, and he always, like, he stacks the deck. He definitely plays the rest. He already says, it's rigged. Everything's rigged with this guy. The election is rigged, the primary is rigged, the debates are rigged. When are white men born to great wealth going to catch a break in the game? Everything is always so rigged against him. It's really say if the moderator holds him accountable for facts, that's rigging. That's bias. If you actually say, this is a fact, this is not a fact, that is bias. Because talking about facts in the world of Donald Trump is bias. And you also, you see the double standard. You see the double standard with health. You look at Hillary, she had pneumonia, and everyone thinks she's on death's door. And Trump, this walking aneurysm. Somehow we look at him like he's John Hamm. I don't know who's doing that. He's (21/45)
bloated, he's puffy. I mean, the man looks like he is one Widowmaker heart attack away. And somehow we look at him like he's Bruce Wayne. Well, I love his comment, I eat fast food because at least I know what's in it. Poison, piss, and shit. But I know it, and I eat it. I mean, yes, I agree with you. I mean, that's funny. Okay, so he is for profiling, that's what he said. But he said we should do it the way Israel does. And like every once in a while, Donald Trump says something right. Because we profile already, we just do it stupidly. All police work is profiling. Discrimination does not mean prejudice. Discrimination means telling unlike things apart. I'm just saying, on profiling, there's a difference between, okay, a bulletin goes out and it's a person who's African American or Muslim or something, not Muslim, who's brown, and you look for brown people instead of white people. Okay, that's one thing. The profiling he's talking about, which he has said in this primary and this (22/45)
general election, is to basically scrutinize all the mosques, look for all Muslims, have a Muslim ban. And I think the thing here is, this isn't an issue about people's feelings, it's about what's effective. And it has been shown to be ineffective to basically make Muslims feel like they're the enemy. Absolutely, of course. But the FBI was told by this guy's father, who again, should get a parade. Yeah, I agree. Told by this guy's, I think my son's a terrorist. And he's reading a lot of stuff about terrorism, and he's a big fan of bin Laden. These are trouble signs. I mean, come on, I don't want to come down too hard on the FBI. Well, they should have actually looked into that. And also, he went to Pakistan and stayed free here. And Turkey. Pakistan, which just passed a law on how to beat your wife. Not what should happen to you if you do. How to beat your wife. See, this is the thing, right? The problem with what Trump says on these policy things, the times that he does actually try (23/45)
to verge into policy, is that he's almost the worst caricature of what a conservative policy position might be. So it actually makes it more difficult to have a conversation about profiling. So let's talk about profiling for a minute. What they do in Israel is they do behavioral profiling. They say, hey, this guy is walking through an airport with an empty suitcase. That's a little strange. They're not out there just saying, hey, you look Muslim, why don't we profile you? Also what they do is they hire really smart people. This is not the TCA, which is just guys giggling at your balls when they're looking at the screener. If we would pay people $100,000 to do this job, we could get the kind of people who do it in Israel. And again, we're just talking about a few questions. We're not talking about the rubber hose or sending you to a black site. I mean, I don't think this is too much of a sacrifice to ask. This is one of the fundamental problems we have with national security in this (24/45)
country, and indeed with all civilization in this country, is we don't understand that it's expensive and we all have to pay for it. And this is the first time we had a major tax cut in the middle of a war. That's not what you do. You have a tax increase to pay for the war so you can hire the right people to do the right job. You can't hire people who couldn't get a job at Starbucks to look for terrorists. That's not how it works. All right. Well said, sir. All right. So I mentioned that George Herbert Walker Bush, Poppy Bush, the patriarch, what is he, 92 now or 94? He's up there. There he is. He is going to vote for Hillary, and of course Trump took this well. Of course he did. I'm joking. They got into a Twitter war. Do you believe that? Would you like to hear the Twitter war that Bush 41 is in with Donald Trump? Okay. So as soon as Trump heard that Bush was voting for Hillary, he tweeted out, Bush 41's mind is shot. That's why he's voting for crooked Hillary. And then 41 shot back, (25/45)
hey Donald Trump, if you're any more mentally ill, Texas would execute you. It's a war. It's a Twitter war. Trump, if I want any shit from you, I'll look in your adult diaper. Bush, I'm rubbing your glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and gets stuck in your hair. Hashtag bad weave. Trump, I like presidents who don't throw up on the Prime Minister of Japan. Bush, I couldn't help it. He was wearing one of your ties. Trump, I don't know which one of your sons is worse, low energy or low IQ? Bush, your sons look like the bad guys in Miami Vice. Trump, too bad you won't be alive to see a President Trump. Bush, if there's a President Trump, no one will be alive. Trump, my wife's a 10. Yours is a 1910. Bush, at least I didn't pick mine out of a catalog. Trump, Bush Library sounds like an adult bookstore. Bush, hey, where do you put your foot when you need your mouth to blow Vladimir Putin? That is soul rocker and his new video Good to Be Alive Today is up on MichaelFronty.com. Please (26/45)
welcome Michael Fronty, ladies and gentlemen. Good to see you. I am so happy to be here. Really? When my friends found out that I was going to be here, I had at least six of them say, bring Bill a bag of weed. Like, I need a bag of weed. But I'll take it. Well, you know, that's the thing. I always think of you, and I listen to music all the time. By the way, you know, I do about 60 to 70 stand-up dates a year, and you have walk-in music, you know, while the audience is coming in. One of your tracks is always on my walk-in music. Okay. Really. Either east to west. Nice. Okay. So, we don't stop. That's a great one. Nice. It always gets the people up, because, you know, it's funny, you have such happy music, but it also has a very political message. It's kind of hard to do. You know, at the front of my show, I just have a... Tape of me? I have a Bill Maher cutout. Yeah. People can just come and take a selfie with Bill. But I always think you're Jamaican, because you have a reggae flavor (27/45)
in your music, and you like weed. You have a great song, Ganja Babe. Yeah. I mean, I love that record. You know my whole catalog. I do. I am a very big fan of yours. I don't have people on who I don't like, because I don't lie. Okay. I can't lie like the other hosts and go, wow, you're great if I don't think you're great. That's the only thing that ever prevented you from becoming an actual politician. Right. Many things, like the bag of weed. But what was I asking you? I don't know. Oh, you're not Jamaican. We were talking about short-term memory loss as a result of Ganja. But you're not Jamaican, are you? No. But you seem like you should be. What is it? I don't know, man. Yeah. It's a reincarnation thing. I've spent a lot of time in Jamaica. We made a lot of records over there. Okay. There it is. But not everybody with dreadlocks is Jamaican. Okay. I know. So, you know, it's funny because I'm listening to your new album, which is great, just like your old ones. Yeah. And even when (28/45)
you have like a love song, it does get to the political message. Yes. You know, that first track of it, I'm Crazy For You. And then you get into the theme. Yes. One of your big themes is always something I agree with totally, militarism. Militarism, yeah. Too much money spent on arms and guns. Of all the discretionary spending that's done in Congress, which is the amount of money that Congress votes on each year to spend, 51% is spent on the military. And everything else combined, you know, healthcare, education, even veterans, roads, all the other stuff, is lumped into that other 49%. And I just feel like at times it would be great to see more money from the military go into education, go to veterans, go to healthcare. Which is especially true because that money is not needed. I think I said it last week on the show. Well, that's the thing. It's not about defense. It's about defense contractors. Right. Contractors. And that's the thing that pisses me off. Right. To think that, you (29/45)
know, I'm giving you X amount of dollars and out of each of those dollars it's going to a giant new hummer. Right. Well, yeah, absolutely. That costs $20 billion. No, and of course if you listen to Trump and the other Republicans, not just him, they all say, we have to restore our depleted military. Our depleted military. We have the most outrageous rock with your cock out. Knock your dick in the dirt. The most ridiculous mass murder machine the world has ever seen. It's so ridiculous that they can sell that. And nobody looks into the facts and goes, oh yeah, maybe it isn't depleted. As if they're out there having a lemonade stand and a cookie bake stand. Exactly. It's the depleted military. Okay, so you're a tireless worker for the poor, as I said, and you do it without shoes on. I mean, you have no shoes. You do everything without shoes. You do everything, yeah. We do everything without shoes. Because this has been going on since 2000. You know, it's funny. Because you are in support (30/45)
of people who don't have shoes. Yeah, I started traveling to different countries in the world where people couldn't afford to wear shoes and I'd try to play soccer with them. I'd take my shoes off and I couldn't even take three steps. I was like, ah, cha, cha, cha. Right. So I decided I would go three days at home just to see what it was like to be barefoot. So I did a shoe fast, so to speak, in San Francisco. And I found out that, well, the first thing I learned was that stepping in dog shit is worse barefoot than if you have shoes on. Yeah, right. But I started going for three days, then I went for a week, then I went for a month and a year, and now it's been 16 years that I've been barefoot. Just kind of in solidarity with people who can't afford shoes. And at the 10-year mark, I started partnering with an organization called Souls for Souls that collects shoes and bring, it started after Hurricane Katrina, and they collect shoes and bring them to 62 countries around the world (31/45)
whenever there's natural disasters that occur. Well. That's pretty good. And they put a bag of weed in it, too. I was going to say, are you sure you just haven't misplaced your shoes? You know, the other day, we're doing some, I live in an old warehouse in San Francisco and we've kind of been renovating it bit by bit, so we're going through some, putting in some sheetrock so there's dust all over the house, and I come in the house and my wife is like, make sure when you come in the house, you put on your shoes so you don't get dust in the bed. And then take them off before you get in the bed. The opposite of what most people, okay. So let's talk about the cops, because your brother is a... I have a brother who's a police officer. A brother who's a police officer. And he's African American? Yes. That's interesting because, I mean, in the shootings we saw this week, again, we see an African American police chief in Charlotte. Sometimes some of the people who do the shooting are African (32/45)
Americans. It looks like when you wear blue, it's thicker than black. No, I mean the police. You know, I come from a very unique family situation. My father is African American and Native American. My mother is Irish, Belgian, and German. And I was adopted. I was adopted. I'm insisting on that. I was adopted by a Finnish American family, second generation from Finland. And my mother had three kids of her own, then she adopted myself and another African American son. I have one sister who's a lesbian and I have a brother who's a police officer. And this makes me... Not to be American. It makes me uniquely authorized to say that, you know, not all cops are bad people. No. Not all black people are criminals. And not all white people are racists. But it seems like in the news, the way that it gets played out is you have to be on one side or the other, as if you can't have compassion for a mother whose son was shot by police and at the same time have compassion for cops who go to work every (33/45)
day and have to do one of the toughest jobs in the world. It is what... Okay. Well, but it's not one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. They have stats on that. It's not in the top ten. Yeah. Things like fishermen, electrician, cab drivers, those daredevils. Yeah, but the fish don't have open carry laws. Yeah. Look, I could never be a cop and I admire that they can. But, look, you have to do it better. No doubt. And I say this in support that the shooting in Tulsa, the woman cop who shot the guy, now she is charged with manslaughter. I mean, she shouldn't have done that. But I must say, she is also a victim. She's a victim of bad police training. Police do not train the way they should. You know, if you're that nervous, you can't do this job. The Charlotte shooting, which we have some video, this happened today. This is the cell phone tape of the guy's wife who was shot. We don't need to show it. He doesn't have a gun. He has a TBI. He's not going to do anything to you guys. (34/45)
Keith, don't you do it. Did you shoot him? He better not be fucking dead. Okay, we don't know whether he had a gun. But even if he did, you don't have to kill every time somebody does something that makes you nervous. We have to train our police to not be that guy who just empties the club. You know, if I was the police academy, I would say, wait till later in the encounter before you shoot. They seem to be teaching shoot first thing in the encounter. Yeah, and I think the truth here is that we actually have police who have been better trained in parts of the country. And the reality here is that it seems in all of these instances, when we have African-American man after African-American man after African-American man killed by police, what's happening is there's a moment, and in that moment, the police officer just assumes the African-American man is a threat. And we have to get the training that does exist elsewhere to say that African-American man is not necessarily a threat. The (35/45)
cops don't get a lot of use of force training. And there's an issue of implicit bias, and there needs to be guidelines across the country about how to use force. And there's also this idea that any black man, if they did some minor infraction and then got shot, deserved it. Like as if it was a death penalty to just be having your hands on the steering wheel instead of giving your license immediately. But it's also not helpful to police. When the African-American community or any community feels threatened by police, it actually makes policing much harder to do. And it threatens more police over the long term. People are doing a good job who don't like this either. It's an open carry state, North Carolina. So we apparently live in this country where it's open carry really just for white people. And also, by the way, it's open angry just for white people. Because when you talk to the Trump people, they're angry. And then the media, they talk about it like that's a virtue. Oh yeah, (36/45)
Trump's tapping into their anger. It's good to be angry. But black people can't be angry. They can't protest. I'm sure you saw there was a congressman, Robert Pittenger, yesterday said black protesters, quote, hate white people because white people are successful and they're not. And then let's show the tape of Kathy Miller. She's Trump's main surrogate, I guess campaign manager in the key county in Ohio. And this is what she says about black folks. Racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this. I'm in the real estate industry. There's none. Now with the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens, that's a big change. And I think that's the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America. I think that's all his responsibility. And if you're black and you haven't been successful in the last 50 years, it's your own fault. There's going to be no sexism. But this is great because if she's right, we only have, what, a few more (37/45)
months of crime and racism. Once he's out, we go back to the good old days when we have no racism. When Hillary becomes president, then that's when we'll get sexism. There's no sexism until then. Right, because we never had sexism before. I think that the Trump, one of the things about the Trump candidacy is it has surfaced a certain amount of sort of, it's okay to say these things. Yes, a lot of them out. And I think, look, if we're being honest about this, it's up to people across the political spectrum to say, you know, it's not okay. And to vote. It's not okay. We'll work on that. We'll work on that. No, look, I'm just saying. You don't get a protest vote in a democracy. You don't get a protest vote. That's a tantrum vote. That's a tantrum vote. That's because how can I go to the polls and vote for someone who I don't believe in? Who I don't believe is going to be a good leader of this country? I say to you what I say to my 11-year-old, you get what you get and you don't get upset. (38/45)
I'm not upset. That's a democracy. I am happily, I am going to happily vote for whomever I vote for. I'm not upset about that. I have a list of people who I don't vote for. It's bigger than just not voting for someone you believe in. It's that Trump is so dangerous. Trump is so crazy that you can't possibly let him in. And so I don't understand if you feel that way. This isn't apples and oranges. This is apples and having your house burned out. You don't want to vote. There's a list of countries where you don't have to do that. Fair enough. But my point is this. Glad you came on, man. No, I mean, look, this is, I get it. We need moderate Republicans like you. I get what you're saying. But my point is, I cannot in good conscience also go into the voting booth and vote for someone who I don't believe in. That's my problem. Right, but can you in good conscience give our nukes and our Supreme Court for a man who's unbalanced? Again, I live in California. If I lived in a different state, (39/45)
I'd have to think really hard about this. But I live in California. You'd have to think really hard? I would. I would have to think really hard about this. Well, let me tell you something. Republicans above all love money. Trump is going to wipe out your bank account even before he takes office. Think about that. All right, time for New Rules. It's true. I totally believe that. I'm not happy now. I got out of this doctoring. All right, New Rules. Stop worrying about what's going to happen to high school English teacher Jennifer Green Johnson, who was suspended for allegedly telling a student to grow some balls, calling another student a bitch, and asking another, Why don't you lick me where I fart? She's been hired by Hillary to help with debate prep. New Rule, my car needs quieter locks. Jeez, I'm on TV every week calling out uptight white people. Looks bad when I'm idling next to a bus stop and people hear. New Rule, now that Tom Hanks has played a Navy captain, an Army captain, a (40/45)
container ship captain, and now an airline captain, let's just get it over with and go right to making Tom Hanks his Cap'n Crunch. New Rule, whoever made this naked Donald Trump statue deserves an award for authenticity. It looks so much like the real thing that Melania closed her eyes and fucked it while thinking about money. Maybe true. Could be. Could be. New Rule, someone has to tell the Australian woman who spent $500 on surgery for her goldfish that, there's a reason it looks good as new. It is new. Lady, there's no such thing as goldfish surgery. You should have realized that when you were in the waiting room and you heard this. Finally, New Rule, next time Apple wants to do something truly innovative and really think different, they should try not releasing a new phone. Because somebody has to teach Americans that we don't always have to have something new or better every year, or in the case of our upside down economic system, every quarter. The only people who really need you (41/45)
to get a new phone every year are the shareholders. But just because they need to sell it so they can jerk off the stock price, doesn't mean you have to stand in that nerd line and buy it. You're not early adapting. In fact, quite the opposite, you're taking too long to catch on. Before we go any further, I know what the people on the nerd line are thinking. Oh Bill, how can you say the iPhone 7 is the same as the 6? The old phone had an A9 processor and a camera with an aperture of 2.2, and the new one has an A10 and a 1.8. Sorry, not sorry. The old phone weighed 143 grams, the new one 138. I guess you could keep lugging around a 143 gram phone in your pocket, if you want your ass to stick out like black china. You like the way I channel the nerd in my head? Okay, alright. So do you. I get it, I get it. The new phone, a thing of wonder. They made the camera work better in low light, which, let's face it, is only going to encourage Anthony Weiner. But the question I'm asking is, do (42/45)
your friends really need clearer pictures of your lunch? You've already got in your hand a device that has all your email, all your music, the internet, GPS, takes pictures, gets you laid, gets you a car and driver when you're drunk, films cops when they shoot you, and oh yeah, it's a phone. It does everything but scratch your nuts for you, and I'm sure there's an app for that. It has Pokemon Go and Grindr, an app which enables guys to Pokemon and Go. So why do I keep seeing headlines like, why Apple needs a new hit? The bad news on Apple stock is only beginning. Is a new iPhone enough to snap Apple's sales slump? Sales slump? Since 2007, that phone has made over $621 billion. To put that into perspective, take the amount of money Donald Trump has given to charity and add $621 billion. Americans keep asking, why doesn't our economy work for people like me? Because it's not designed to. Because somewhere along the way, we bought into this insane idea that everything always has to get (43/45)
bigger, especially sales. Having a really good year and then just repeating it? Not good enough. In corporate America, the stock market is the tail that wags the dog. Growth, growth, holy growth is the only thing that ever matters. Better than last quarter, beat expectations, eat more hamburgers. For Apple, revolutionizing the world wasn't enough, that was last quarter. And it's not just them, it's every company. Do you ever wonder, for example, why shaving needs to keep reinventing itself? Men used to shave with a sharp rock and Keanu Reeves still does. Then there was the straight razor, then the single blade, then the double blade razor, three blades, and now the quattro. Let me tell you something, if you've got something on your face that doesn't come off after three blades, that's not a whisker, that's a tumor. Or look at that Wells Fargo scandal, it's that very pressure for growth, constant endless growth, even when you're filthy rich, that led them into a crime where they cheated (44/45)
and deceived their customers. Now fortunately, Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found out and put a stop to it, or as I see it, cowboy zero, Indians won. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Mirage in Las Vegas September 30th and October 1st. I want to thank Max Brooks, Bonnie Chen, Narotin, I can't pronounce anybody's name right now. Holy crap! And Maureen Dowd, I got that one right. Join us now for Overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks. Watch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #612: Trace Adkins, Julia Ioffe, Jon Meacham.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Moll. You're not in line waiting to see a dead body. I, I... Jesus, have you been... watching the Queen's funeral? I don't tell me how it ends. I'm only on season three. Did we get this lady buried? I mean, I've thrown out bread twice since she died. I'm telling you, this is... But I said this last week, the British people don't fuck with them with the Queen shit. They take it seriously. Did you see David Beckham stood in line for 13 hours? David Beckham. Really? And they said, how did you prepare to do something so long and boring? He said, I played soccer. But we had a death in this country, too, this week. Ken Starr died. Ken, remember? Ken... Little different reaction, yes. Ken Starr, remember? He prosecuted Clinton with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the joke's on him because now that Roe versus Wade has been overturned, blowjobs are more popular than ever. That abortion stuff is getting real out there. (1/45)
West Virginia, just I think it was yesterday, banned all abortions except for rape and incest, which is actually a step forward for them. Well, just, just to admit that incest is bad. You know, I... Kidding, Trace. Great time. No, but there is a war between the states that is going on now in this country. Our governor has set up billboards in all different states saying, you know what? If you can't get an abortion in your state, come here to California. And then... Yeah, abortion. And then you saw the governors of Texas and Florida sending their migrants to blue states. DeSantis in Florida sent all these Venezuelan migrants, did you see this, to Martha's Vineyard? He wanted to send a message to those migrants, like if you come here, you will get a free plane ride to a wealthy island. All the Democrats are mad. Biden said he is using human beings as props and all the Marines lined up behind him agreed. No, and the guy who's running against DeSantis in Florida, Charlie Crist, we've had (2/45)
him on the show, he's the Democrat there, he said, all the immigrants in Florida, the 4.5 million immigrants in Florida, are now wondering if they're next. Again, not wondering, fingers crossed. Okay, please send me to this lovely island that's modern, that has abortion services and likes us. The migrants, first they went to Martha's Vineyard and then today they sent them to Cape Cod. Just throw in a stop in Nantucket, it's the same cruise I got my parents a few years ago. America doesn't see anything the same, right? Right and left. The rights, they see Venezuelan immigrants, they see, oh, ax murderers. The left sees that and they go, oh, someone to raise my kids. But listen to this, Sleepy Joe, I gotta tell you, this guy comes back, his approval rating is now 49%. He's right up there. And you know who raised him up? Gen Z, the kids love Biden now. To show his appreciation to Gen Z, today he made a TikTok video of him doing the mashed potato. All right, we got a great show, Jon (3/45)
Meacham and Julia Yoffe are here, but first up, here's the multi-platinum selling country music artist who stars in the new series on Fox, Monarch, Trace Atkins. That was funny. Thank you. Sometimes you have a good one. Appreciate that. We're indoors, you can take the hat off. Anyway, no, you don't have to. Yes, I wanna see your face. Okay, all right. Oh, is that shit on your shoes? Anyway, no, because we love each other. That's, and you're a big TV star now, I gotta tell you. Monarch, I watched the pilot, fucking juicy, I loved it. You're awesome in it. And I think people know, they're calling it like the country empire, but yes, I mean, everything is like something else. It's just entertaining. You play a guy who's the king of country music and your wife is Susan Sarandon. Could not be more politically distanced. Please tell me you and Susan Sarandon got to be fast friends. We did, I think. I mean, yeah, there were no issues. I mean, we just, we went to work and we did our work and (4/45)
we stayed away from everything else. And you know, a couple of times, maybe, you know, a current event, something would happen that morning and she'd be watching the news and she'd say something to me about it. But it was very brief and we just didn't go there. We just stayed away from it. What's the point? Exactly, and isn't this the model for how we fix America? I've been saying this for years. Stop picking on what we don't agree. Yeah, well, I mean, the grievance junkies though, they have to, you know, they have to do that. You know, I mean, they have to have something to whine about. I don't get up in the morning looking for something to whine about. You know, my old man wouldn't tolerate it and I don't either, really, you know. So I'm confused because, I mean, I hope I'm not giving away too much, but it already aired. She's dying in the pilot. And it seems like at the end of the first episode, she's, we don't see her dead, but it seems like it's going there. But she's the star of (5/45)
the show? Yeah. Explain that to me. Well, if. If, oh, I see. If she dies. Right. There's a lot of flashback stuff. Right, nothing is in sequence anymore. No, yeah, it's all just, it's back and forth, chronologically, it's all over the place. Right. Well, okay, look, speaking of coming back from the dead, you have a song on your new album, Even Jesus Was a Hippie. I love this. I mean, first of all, I used to say that. Did you? Back in politically incorrect days, when you used to do the show. Yeah. Oh, he's talking about Jesus being a hippie. Yeah. And you have a song with Snoop Dogg, that's awesome. Yeah. By the way, that album, he's. Yeah. It's an amazing album. Thank you. Let me plug it. Yeah, you've made this, you made this during the pandemic, right? Yeah, you know, like every other artist, you know, during the height of the pandemic or that whole year, you know, we didn't have shit to do, so we just stayed in the studio and just kept recording new songs. And I think I ended up with (6/45)
26, 27. 25. Yeah, but we put 25 on the album. Oh. Because that was my 25th anniversary being in this business. Right. So I just. Well, it's fantastic. And the first one you say, I'm a million miles away from who I used to be. Yeah. Which is something, because we're both in our late 30s now. Yeah. So. So. So. So I very much relate to that point of view. So what it puts a meat on that, who you, what are we talking about? Who did you used to be that you are not now? I was talking to somebody the other day, they, I was doing an interview and they asked me about if I could go back and, you know, tell the 25 year ago me, you know, give him some advice. And I just, I would just would've said, just be patient, you know, and, and this is not going to go at the pace that you want it to go at. You just have to be patient. And I probably would have saved myself a lot of heartache and, you know, but I was in my thirties when I got a record deal. If that had happened for me when I was in my (7/45)
twenties, I would have blown it completely apart. There's no way. I mean, I didn't really have the maturity to deal with it when I did, when it did happen. But if it would have happened to me in my twenties, there's no way that I could have had. So I'm a million miles away from that guy that I was then. Right. And you're sober? Yeah. Well. Well, well, well. Right now. Well, really why is that synonymous with applaud? I don't know either. I don't know either. It's it's I mean, I'm glad you are, because I think you were a guy. I mean, you, you've had a lot of stories. And I feel I've read a lot in the media. I think the media is so negative. I know you've been married four times. I know one of your wife, wives shot you in the heart. They never mentioned the three who didn't shoot you. No, no, no, they don't talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, yeah. You know, I was, I was not, I was never a happy drunk. I just never was, you know, and, you know, six, six, two, six, he pissed off drunk (8/45)
is not, you know, people used to ask me, you know, when I go to parties and I was trying to stay sober and they would try to get me to drink and I didn't really want to, and they'd pressure me, you know, and I'd finally just go, okay, look, here's what's going to happen if I drank, I'm going to try to sleep with half the people in this room and I'm going to try to fight the other half. Now you can get in whichever line you want to get into. Cause I'm going to have fun. Doesn't matter to me which line you're in. Cause I'm going to have fun with both of them. So, you know. Right. And there, there was a line in one of the songs there where you talk about, which I found very gratifying. Cause it's something I've also said for the longest time, but I fear here very few people agree with it. You say, I wish I could say I had no regrets, but I got plenty. And I hear people all the time when they're asked that question, Oh, no regrets. I'm like, who are these people? Every day I have a regret. (9/45)
Every day I could have done something better. I don't get it. I don't understand those people that they have no regrets. I feel like that's their insecurity. Not to be able to admit it. Yeah. I got, I got volumes of them. Exactly. How can you not? That's what life is. Yeah. Well, there's another great song you have. It's a duet with Blake Edwards. Blake Shelton. Blake Shelton. Boys, is he mad? What? He's going to be mad at you. Well, he shouldn't be. I once did a little tribute to him and his wife on this show. Oh yeah. Same thing I was saying about you and Sarandon. Saying that like, if he could marry Gwen Stefani and they could make that work, that should be a model to America. If she could marry him. Well, my point was if red and blue could come together, people who are not really of the same backgrounds, it could work in their house. It can work in the house of America. Anyway, I like him. Yeah, me too. I love him. And he, you know, when they got married, that was a very small (10/45)
affair. You know, it was COVID and all that, and they didn't want to invite a lot of people. And I just called him and said, I wasn't going to come anyway. You know, I didn't want to see that woman throw her life away marrying you. I wasn't going to come witness that, you know? So I wasn't going to go anyway. But I know you're kidding, but. Not really. The song you do with him. I love the title and I love the song. It's if I was a woman, I'd want a man like me. I'd love a man like me. When you were writing that, did you worry that the other 58 genders that are represented on Facebook would be offended that they weren't brought into that, that it was not inclusive enough? I wasn't concerned about it at all. I don't think about that. You know, I actually wrote that with Cherie Austin, a young lady, great songwriter. Wrote that with Cherie and Jeff Bates and my dear friend Kenny Beard, who's passed away now. But yeah, no, I didn't think about that. I just thought it was funny. You know, (11/45)
it was just funny. No, it's very funny. Who won the last election? I'm sorry, I just thought I'd sneak that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought Joe Biden made a bit of a mistake in the speech he made a couple of weeks ago when he talked about MAGA nation, because MAGA, I've said this for years, you can hate Trump. You can't hate the people who like him or voted for him. It doesn't mean they're all crazy. It doesn't mean they're all racist. It doesn't mean they're all bad people. The people who think that Biden didn't win the election, yes, they're a little crazy and they're not factually based, but we have to come together. We have to be able to do shows with Susan Sarandon and marry Gwen Stefani and love each other like you and I do. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's what you're talking about. All right. Susan (12/45)
Sarandon is adorable, man. I love her. All right. It's a great show. I'm so glad you got a TV show and you're a big TV star now. Don't forget your little people that you love. All right, Trey Sattkins, everybody. Thank you, pal. All right, let's see each other soon. All right, let's meet our panel. All right, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author whose new book is And There Was Light, Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. Jon Meacham is over here. And she's a founding partner and Washington correspondent for the media company Puck. Julia Yaffe is back with us. Okay. So Jon, your book's about Lincoln. I used the phrase, the war between the states or war between the states. I don't know if they use that phrase anymore. They did when I was in school, the civil war is sometimes still called the war between the states. It depends on where you are. Right. More in the South. Yeah, yeah. War more than aggression. But I feel like more than aggression, but I mean, but it was (13/45)
the states against the states. And I feel like with some of this stuff we're seeing now, the billboards in other states, they're sending migrants to other states. I feel like the states themselves are clawing out territory and fighting with each other in a way we haven't seen. Which is, I think, rather disturbing than where this might be heading. It is. So maybe it's a war among the states, which is a little different. But I think what you're looking at here is I thought this was like the 1930s for a long time. Dictatorship on the march abroad, democracy under assault here, and great tensions, radios changing everything, more people living in cities than on farms the first time. All the kinds of things that sort of echo now. I fear that the evidence of the last couple years is that this is more like the 1850s, where we don't simply disagree about the ends of politics. We disagree about the understanding of reality itself. Politics is seen less as a mediation of differences, which is (14/45)
what it's supposed to be. And you come up with a solution to a given problem for a given period of time, and instead it's total culture war. And I think that the rot at the core of the American struggle right now is that not enough people are willing to sacrifice their short or middle term interest for the long-term interest of the good, of the whole. And I think that's what we're called on to do. And they see their fellow citizens as the enemy. I feel like is the problem, is that the fellow citizen is the enemy. Used to be Russia or somebody else. Somebody, now it's. If we see each other, yeah. If we see each other as rivals and enemies instead of as neighbors, then the democratic lowercase D covenant is at risk. And it's, look, if everybody loved their neighbor, Jesus wouldn't have had to command it. You know, if everybody already does something, you don't think to make a law about it. So it's always counterintuitive. Julia knows this in her world better than I do. Democracy is very (15/45)
counterintuitive. Why on earth do I want to love my neighbor as myself? I don't want to do that. I'm fine. But practicality tells us, experience tells us, that I lend a hand so that when I need one, I might get one back. And if democracy were easy, everybody would do it. The civil war in many ways, it's about slavery. It's about power. And it's about whether popular government can long endure or whether an aristocracy of race was going to prevail. That's what that was about. What's your world he's talking about? He said her world. Russia. Oh, Russia. Russia, the transatlantic world, you know, Europe. Your world is our world. It is, yeah. But we're just living in it. Yeah. Welcome. But I mean, it is true. And I think what we saw on January 6th, and this is what drove me nuts about the commentary on that day, which was so much of which was, this is America. This is not who we are. I'm used to seeing this in Russia or in Burkina Faso. Well, guess what? Look out your window. It is (16/45)
happening here. And Americans are not genetically different or genetically superior to other people. It is a human trait. It is a human trait. John and I were discussing this backstage since Adam and Eve, to be drawn to strong man leaders that have very simple explanations for why things are wrong in your life, that it's not about anything you've done. It's about that person down the street who looks different than you that worships a different God than you. We can blame him and we'll fix everything by kicking him out or killing him. There was a poll that just came out recently that a third of Americans would prefer a strong unelected leader to a weak elected leader. We are not different from Russians. We are not different from Hungarians. The only thing that is different is that we've had this framework for over 200 years that we have all collectively bought into, this collective experiment that we've bought into, but it's something you have to keep going. You have to keep pushing (17/45)
those pedals. It is not a natural thing to do. I'll tell you some of the other things that were in that poll. Yes, a third of Americans want a strong unelected leader, would prefer that to a weak elected one. And this is, by the way, bipartisan. 42% Republicans say that, 31% Democrat. So more Republicans, but it's not like the Democrats aren't in this. 35%, yeah, 35% say president should be able to remove judges. 34% say they should prosecute, should be able to prosecute members of the news media. I say where this comes from is lack of education. They don't know what America is. They don't know because we stopped teaching history and we stopped teaching civics and we teach bullshit. So they don't know what America is supposed to be. So when America veers off from what it's supposed to be, judges, get rid of judges. Nobody taught them about the separation of powers, that the checks and balances are the fundamental part of our country and why we are America. If you don't know that, what (18/45)
do you care about? You just care about the immediate. But guess why we stopped teaching them history? There are a lot of people who don't want to teach our children real history. All right, that's the end of my show. So don't blow it now. That's the end of what I'm talking about. But go, yeah. I mean, look, John Adams tried this, right? We passed this edition act to prosecute the printers, publishers he didn't like. Every president since then has wanted to do it, but haven't been able to. We passed an alien act to deport people. This has been going on since the 1790s. These forces ebb and they flow. At our best, we can make them ebb. But it's really, really hard, and we also have to be careful about, I'm uncomfortable with the language about we need to get back to something, we need to restore something. As a multiracial democracy, this country is 57 years old. We were not a, in my part of the world, in the South, we lived under functional apartheid until 1965. So when you say you (19/45)
wanna make America great again or restore something, what are we talking about exactly? And so the first truly integrated presidential election we had was in 1968. Perhaps not coincidentally, in that election, Richard Nixon wins barely, George Wallace got 13.5% of the vote and carried five states and the electoral college on a Jim Crow platform 50 years ago. So this is all, we're always five minutes away from chaos if we don't decide that it's not just the letter of the Constitution, but the spirit of the Constitution. You seem more alarmist than you, I feel like we've had this running argument on the show for a few years where I was the alarmist and you were like, please, I'm the historian, things have been bad before. Okay, so- John Tyler once said- Yes, I know, there's somebody caning some asshole in the Senate. Okay, so Maggie Haberman, the star reporter for the New York Times, she's got a new book with some quotes from Trump. And I just wanted, these are some things I've said on (20/45)
the show about Trump. I didn't see him leaving. I don't think he's gonna leave. I don't see this man giving up. He's not going to leave until he wants to leave. I don't think he would even leave if he lost the election in 2020. People have been saying I'm an alarmist and I'm crazy, but I'm saying he's not going to leave. Here's her quote from Trump. I'm just not going to leave. And you were always arguing with me. Everybody was like, oh, Bill, you smoked too much pot. Well, apparently I smoked just the right amount of pot. This is important. This is important because, and also when you quote yourself, it's like the preacher who said, as our Lord said and rightly, so there's that, and I know that's a vernacular you like. You were right. The important thing and what we have to try to save is that he had to leave. It was as close a goddamn run thing as you can possibly imagine, but the system did hold just barely. Well, okay, but we're only halfway through the movie because he's not gone. (21/45)
Yes. Here's my question now. We're almost to the midterm election. The primaries just ended, no more primaries. There's not going to be any legal action, even though Trump is vulnerable in a number of places now. In Georgia, they're going after him. Certainly the January 6th committee could turn into the Merrick Garland, okay, now we're actually going after him legally, New York State. Okay, so no one's going to do anything before the midterms, right? What happens after the midterms? And does what happens in the midterms affect what they do legally to Trump after the midterms? Can I just say, if we're going to quote ourselves here on this show? Oh, Jesus Christ, it was just a joke. There he is again. You're the only one allowed to tell jokes? No, I'm sorry, go ahead. I went on The Daily Show back in January 2018, and I said, you're going to have to scrape him off the walls, even if he loses. And the thing is, as brilliant as you are, all of us who have ever reported on or lived in or (22/45)
studied the history of or the present of authoritarian regimes and how they start and how they grow roots and entrench themselves, knew and recognized this flavor of leader. And it was very clear from the outset that this very well might be, if the institutions didn't hold, that this very well might be one man or one person, one vote, one time. That this kind of man, once he's in office, does not leave voluntarily. That was very clear. And those of us who had seen this movie before, many, many times, were saying this from the beginning, we're leaning on the alarm, and we were all called hysterical and alarmist by people, mostly older white people, who said, oh, but we're different and we have institutions and blah, blah, blah. But institutions, as Mitch McConnell knows very well, are just buildings with people in them. And it very much depends what kind of people you shove into those buildings. What- Well, here's who we're shoving in. There's 118 people on the ballot, Republicans, who (23/45)
are election deniers. And I read they have a 95% chance of winning these 118. So say it's- It'll be interesting if they will question their own election. Will they doubt the result of their election if they win? I can answer that, no. Why? I know it's puzzling. Yeah, yeah, we can work on that. No, but that means, say 100 out of 118 win. That means there will be 100 people in Congress who don't think the president is legitimate and didn't really win. That's an astounding departure from anything that I know of that's ever happened in America before. Even, I don't know, John, you're the historian, but- Even Franklin Pierce, yeah. No, the key thing- Yeah, of course, Pierce. That was for you. Obviously. That was for you. That's the beginning of the end of the constitutional order because the constitutional order requires, as Julia said, it requires character. And the character of the leaders is vital, but the characters are the lead too because leaders both mirror and make reality, the (24/45)
feelings of their followers. That will lead to civil chaos. And it's important that they're in the House and they're deniers. It's even more important if they're in the states because in a state, and there's important Supreme Court cases coming up on this, it is a deeply, deeply problematic question of whether they would simply overturn the will of the people. It goes to the, maybe it goes into the courts. This was what, the chaos was the strategy. I mean, they've said this. The Trump people have said this, is we're gonna create so much chaos out of January 6th and forward that it might have to go to the House. And if it goes to the House, Trump would have won. So just quick prediction. What happens to Trump legally after the midterms? The House, I don't know. I don't, and we should, maybe, wait, this isn't Putin's America. You can speak. No, I don't know. Do you have a magic eight ball like him? I don't have a magic eight ball, but we're on a show like that does. I don't know. I mean, (25/45)
it's hard to- Nobody knows. That's why it's a prediction. My prediction is Merrick Garland does something. Why? Why? Because he's guilty. Why is that your prediction? Because Trump is guilty and you can't let this stand. But it's Merrick Garland. But it's Merrick Garland. Well, we'll see. People were saying that about Joe Biden. Joe Biden was the big loser and it turned out he's not such a loser. Turns out he found his- Yeah, it just took a little while longer. And we don't, and culturally, we're not attuned to that. We're not set to actually wait, which is what we have to do. And I think my sense is that General Garland will follow the law. It was an attempted coup. For fuck's sake. Why not charge him before the election? Why wait till the party that sponsored the coup gets rewarded in these elections? Because it probably would send the election in the other direction. Because it would look like you were doing something just before the election. Didn't we learn that lesson with (26/45)
Hillary Clinton and James Comey? You don't do stuff right before the election. We kind of had that rule. Let's keep that one norm. But we can't even do coups right in this country. I mean, usually- Isn't that a good thing? When a coup fails- Isn't that a good thing? ... daughters go to jail or worse. That, I mean, that is one precedent we need to set in this country. I think Merrick Cohen will come to that conclusion. Yes, there are absolute reasons not to do it, but you can't set the precedent that you can try a coup, and your only punishment is you fail. Well, you're also, this is one of these moments where when you ask a question about Trump and his legal jeopardy, you have to ask, which one? Right, so you're talking about the coup. There's also classified information, which is an unfolding investigation. I think you're right. I think one of, you know, there's a really interesting revision going on about whether President Ford was right to pardon Nixon. Right. That in the fullness (27/45)
of time, the idea that a president is above the law was a dangerous precedent to set. And this notion that you can't indict a president, I don't, we don't have a monarch in this country. That's the point. No one is above the law. European countries indict and convict former presidents all the time. They're doing, their democracies are doing just fine. That's what I'm saying. And the fact that we can't, okay, we can't indict presidents, and then we can't indict former presidents. So like they can do anything. Right. But the good news is that Biden is up to 49% in the polls, and he's killing it with voters who are frustrated and barely give a shit. I'm not kidding. Look at this. There's a new, there's a new category of voter. They're calling them meh voter. They're not enthusiastic about either side. Look at this among voters who say they are somewhat disapprove of Biden, 33 point lead. And you know, when you're on their list, the DNC fundraising list, which I am, cause I gave a million (28/45)
dollars to the Democrats a couple of times. So they obviously I get like eight letters. I get like eight letters a day. I'm happy with one of those donations. But so they're going after the meh voter. Look at this letter. I'm going to read it to you. The one I got, would you like to see the meh? I totally would. This is their latest fundraising letter. It says, William, are you mildly enthused? William, there are times when hope unites a nation and the promise of a better day brings out the best in all Americans. This is not one of those times. But our democracy is in danger. This is your chance to tell President Biden you've heard of him. And you stand behind him 30 to 40%. Now more than ever, we need Joe Biden in Washington doing whatever it is he does. We're reaching out to you today because you haven't donated to the Democratic party this election cycle, but we see you spend 650 on a venti soy frappuccino every morning. Can we count on you for a $2 donation? How about 50 cents? How (29/45)
about you pledge not to give any money to the other side? Be a part of the growing number of voters who only somewhat disapprove of what we're doing. There are so many good reasons to give Democrats your vote. We could be worse. There's no other option. The other guy's a dick. We need your tepid support to almost make it happen. Can we count on your vote if it's not raining? Remember, the Republicans want to cut taxes on billionaires. The same billionaires who refuse to release the Batgirl movie. Donate now and join Joe Biden and the Democrats in saying I'm mad as hell and I'm gonna take it anymore. All right, so that's how we'll do it. So, I gotta say, I've done my share of jokes about Joe Biden, but when I saw this poll last week that something like 73% of Americans think there should be an age limit and I think 40% of them think that age should be 70, all I can think of is only a country as dumb as this one would think something like that. The reason why he's doing well is because (30/45)
he's old. Thank you, one guy. He's been around the block. He has the experience. Every other culture gets this. When you're young, you're beautiful. And then you get wiser and less cute. But you're wiser. Could we take advantage of the wiser part? I mean, he's killing it in a lot of ways, including Russia. He was the guy who understood. Everybody else was like, what are we throwing money that's done, that Russia's obviously gonna win? And he said, let's see. Maybe Ukraine can win. And now Ukraine is winning. They kicked Russia's ass this week. Yeah, he's my friend. I help him when I can, so take this in that context. I believe that if you support American democracy, it is important to support this president. And one of the fascinating things to me is there's this part of the Republican world that seems to think that there's this mythical universe. It's like Brigadoon. And there's a place where there is no Trump and it's just going to all go away. And what this moment requires, it seems (31/45)
to me, is support for, thoughtful support, reasoned support, not blind support, but basically believing that Joe Biden, who has more experience in the Senate and as vice president than any other president in American history by far, he was in the Senate and vice president longer than say, Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama were alive when they became president. And so you have this moment where a guy born in World War II raised in the Cold War, comes of age during civil rights. It lives in an era that we now look back on as an era of at least workable consensus and who deeply understands the threat to these institutions and wants to rescue them, not for the sake of rescuing them, but because they beat any alternative. And one of the things you have to ask, if you're on the far left, and there are people who say, oh, Electoral College, Senate, all bad, whatever. Okay, fine, what are you going to replace it with? And basically what history tells us, experience (32/45)
tells us is that as imperfect as this system is, it's still beating all the others. I mean, you got things done on climate. Yes. That nobody was getting done before. And again, this Ukraine thing, I mean, I just, nobody saw this coming. I think this is just another nail in the coffin about experts. I mean, nobody thought that Russia was going to do anything but roll over Ukraine. And of course, first six months ago, or whenever the war started, they were beaten back from Kiev and then they thought, okay, well, they'll just take the East. And now they're getting pushed out of the East. And I think for a guy like Putin, who's a strong man, the worst thing that can happen is that you don't look strong. Then you're just the Wizard of Oz after Toto pulls the curtain back. Right. Right. Now, I always thought, and I must say, I always thought Putin is untoppable, not Putin, but I thought Russia couldn't lose this war. Is Putin not being untoppable? The last, the next thing that's going to be (33/45)
the shocking thing that we should have seen coming? Well, I think it's still a little too early. William, if I may call you that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. (34/45)
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. (35/45)
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. (36/45)
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Victory would not be happening if Trump was president. There is a 0.0 chance. Who is also over 70 and proof that age does not bring you wisdom all the time. Of course not. There's no one, no one was saying that for a man. But if Trump was president, he would have sided with his autocratic friend. He would have rolled over to Russia like a dog. All right. Thank you panel. Time for new rules. The designer of the San Diego Padres new uniforms has to (37/45)
admit I was just fucking with you. I can't believe you put them on. Guys, you don't look like San Diego's baseball team. You look like Del Taco softball team. This is the first meeting on the mound ever to discuss what shoes go with this shit. New rules stop trying to sell me the mood ring toilet seat. The toilet seat that changes color to tell you what your mood is when you sit on it. If you're in there for more than 15 minutes, I'll tell you what your mood is. You're in the mood to play candy crush while your spouse deals with the kids. New rule, somebody needs to break it to the British children leaving marmalade sandwiches for the queen that heaven probably isn't real. But if it is, they're not serving British food. New rule, Alex Jones and QAnon must investigate my theory that Queen Elizabeth didn't die of natural causes but was actually murdered by agents of big flower. Think about it. Who benefits from the queen's death? Florists. Working in coordination with the Paddington bear (38/45)
industry. And do I have to spell it out for you? Who produced the original Paddington movie? The Jews. Reynolds is the latest celebrity to make a public event of having a colonoscopy. Someone must tell him, Ryan, no one wants to see your ass. Well, except for most women. Probably the straight guys who want to bro down with you. All right, you got me. I'll take two copies on Blu-ray. New rule, the people at the hospital where Ken Starr died have to tell us if his last words were jizz stain. And finally, new rule, you can get creative with a novel, a TV show or a movie, but history books, that's not supposed to be fan fiction. How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past and sometimes that's true, sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present. And last month, a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He (39/45)
criticized a phenomenon known as presentism, which means judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It's the belief that people who lived a hundred or 500 or a thousand years ago really should have known better. Which is so stupid, it's like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what you know now when you were 10. Stupid me, spending all that time raising sea monkeys and playing with slot cards and jerking off to a Playboy in the barn. Who doesn't have moments from your past that make you cringe? Who hasn't said, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I wore that. Can't believe I thought that. I can't believe I did that. You ate dirt. You wanted to be a ghostbuster. You shoplifted gum. You tried to be a white break dancer. You wanted to marry Scott Baio. I read Ayn Rand. I smoked. I was into numerology. Yes, because we hadn't then grown into the persons we would become. And humanity writ large is just the collective version of that. Did Columbus commit (40/45)
atrocities? Of course, but people back then were generally atrocious. Everybody who could afford one had a slave, including people of color. The way people talk about slavery these days, you'd think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, Romans, the Arabs, British, the early Americans, all the way up through R. Kelly. The Holy Bible is practically an owner's manual for slaveholders. The word slave comes from Slav, because so many Slavic people were enslaved and they're as white as the Hallmark Channel. Who do you think gathered the slaves from the interior of Africa to sell to slave traders? Africans who also kept their own slaves. We're a species prone to making others of our species our bitch. I've said it before and I'll say it again, humans are not good people. And the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing. That's the truth, even (41/45)
though it doesn't jibe with the current narrative. But in today's world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it's the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066 and you always win. Presentism. Yeah, this professor is right. It's just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington, because you have a gay friend and he didn't. But if he was alive today, he would too. And if you weren't alive, if you were alive then, you wouldn't. Portland Public Schools has a plan now to teach kids that the idea of gender being mainly binary was brought here by white colonizers. The curriculum guide says when the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here. Not even Star Trek would try that story, where they discover a planet and give them separate bathrooms. It's like they finally discovered (42/45)
a unified theory of wokeness, incorporating all their ideas about race, gay, gender, and colonizers. Like the New World was a great big diverse dance club when the pilgrims were the bridge and tunnel crowd who came in and ruined everything. There's a play called I, Joan, currently being presented in London, written by Charlie Josephine, who identifies as non-binary and uses they, them pronouns. And it portrays Joan of Arc as, surprise, non-binary with they, them pronouns. Which if you think about it, makes even less sense because Joan, being French, spoke a language where every noun is masculine or feminine. Joan says in the play, I'm not a girl, I don't fit that word, as if she's a character on Euphoria. Now it's true, Joan of Arc did wear pants, but that's what the soldiers wore and she was soldiering. But in the retelling, Joan would rather die than stop wearing men's clothing. Okay, Joan of Arc wasn't executed by the fashion police. Her trial went on for over two months. We have (43/45)
the transcript, and not once did she complain about being misgendered. She had bigger fish to fry, like herself. Too soon, it was 1431. Which is not to say that there isn't truth to the old rubric that history is written by the winners, and it is subjective. Napoleon said history is just a fable we all agree on. And he should know because he was a deaf woman named Diane. But it's also true that much of history is indisputably factual because we have artifacts and coins and birth records and archeology, and somebody in Mesopotamia kept a record of how much grain they ate. It's not all up in the air to change or delete or make up based on what makes you feel better today. Couple of years ago, they made a movie called The Aeronauts about the scientists who broke the record for the highest altitude in a balloon. In fact, they were both men. But the movie made one of them a woman because as the director explained, representation is important. So true. Women never get enough credit for the (44/45)
things they didn't do. Meryl Streep should play Seabiscuit, so every girl will know she too can grow up to be a race horse. All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Fox Theater in Detroit, October 8th. The Hulu in New York. November 12th at the Maui Arts Center in Hawaii, and December 30th and 31st in Honolulu at 31st. Check out Club Random on YouTube. Good night, everybody. I want to thank Jon Meacham, Julia Yaffe, and Trisha Haynes. Join us on Overtime. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #511: Susan Rice, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher The g7 that's the you know, the big boy Economies of the world they have a they're meeting every year in a different country and Trump announced that they're holding next year's g7 Summit at the Trump Durao and Golf Resort No relation The headline on Fox News was Trump finds the g-spot This is such a ginormous Violation of the emoluments clause in the Constitution right that says presidents cannot accept anything of value From a foreign country like for instance in since large convention of rich foreigners in your hotel my qualified You remember the Constitution don't you Republicans that thing you used to hold up when you screamed at Obama for nothing? It's not just that he's not just that he's always breaking the law it said he obviously wants you to know about it The Joker doesn't want to get caught this bad This is This is Trump's idea of three-dimensional chess. I will distract you from impeaching (1/45)
me by committing more crimes It's like He comes home and Melania says that lipstick on your collar and he says you should see my dick, you know is acting Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had the nerve to say that you know They looked all over the world for the bow of the country for the best spot for the g7 meeting and you know it was just Perfectly logical that it would be there but we didn't it wasn't because he was Trump I said it's it's almost like he said this Doral almost like they built this facility to host this type of event he said When he was reached for comment inside of Trump's ass And you know, of course putting in a Doral was Trump's idea and once Trump gets an idea in his head it never goes away Unlike his casinos his wives his hair and the Kurds Good news, we finally found someone in the Middle East to greet us as liberators bad news. It's Isis We let a lot of the Isis people out but if you haven't been Following this story Trump last week gave Turkey the go-ahead to (2/45)
invade Syria and kill all the Kurds and then he got mad that They went and did so So he asked Mike Pence this week to interrupt his busy schedule of standing in the background And go to the war zone and you know Mike Pence is not afraid of a war zone when he sees someone kneeling at a football game, he runs like a little bitch, but So Mike Pence was sent over there to the war zone to deliver Trump's message to the Kurds and that message was you know That war I just started. Okay, we're gonna skip to the end you lost And Mike Pence and I'm declaring a ceasefire, which means you get to run for your lives while the Turks reload I'm sorry. Did I say ceasefire? I'm in grease fire This is This has got to be the ultimate if Obama did it right I mean we are bombing our own equipment there in the Syrian desert We just lost Syria Syria is now being taken over by Russia Iran and Isis Trump has created the only place in the world that is more anti-american than Berkeley So Wednesday, he has Pelosi (3/45)
and Schumer into the White House to talk about What the fuck are you doing in Syria and he has a meltdown because Nancy Pelosi said all roads with you lead to Putin How dare you accuse me of having a plan when your shit is too crazy for John Bolton and Rick Perry Because that's who quit in the last week you get Perry today about Bolton about a week ago Bolton got wind of what they were doing in Ukraine and said fuck that he said Worldwar3 I'm all in but that's cray-cray And The sad news today Rick Perry is resigning as energy secretary no He said after almost three years on the job. He accomplished what he set out to do finding the employee restroom He said he'll miss everyone at the department we just want to spend more time locking his keys in his car And Then Mick Mulvaney the guy I mentioned before I'd not have a good week He's not quitting not yet, but he is the acting chief of staff. You know this he's got our other big job He's the head of the Office of Management and Budget (4/45)
running. The White House is his side hustle So the whole defense of the Ukrainian scandal, which is why he's getting him Trump is getting impeached is there was no quid pro quo No quid pro quo is the new no collusion Mulvaney gets up there. Yes, it says. Oh fuck. Yeah quid pro quo. Oh, yeah, we are total quid pro quo people That's all we do all day is quid pro quo quid pro quo And then he says but it was absolutely appropriate so appropriate he had to go out there hours later and say I'm sorry You thought I said quid pro quo that it was okay to do quid pro quo. No I said tic-tac-toe Oh It was a Taekwondo is fine They're the cat they're the gang that couldn't do treason straight all right. We got a great show we have And here a little later, we'll be speaking with our good friend Neil deGrasse Tyson is here She was president Obama's national security director and United Nations ambassador his new memoir is tough love my story of the things worth fighting for Susan Rice First thing I (5/45)
wanted to ask you you're Susan Rice You know in showbiz is everybody gets mixed up at some point with somebody else right everybody doesn't okay There are people who have thought I was Bill O'Reilly That's unfortunate. I'm never going to that strip club again But I just had some people must think you're Condoleezza Rice it happens It used to piss my mother off more than anything else my late mother when she got asked are you Condoleezza Rice's mother and Yeah We have ties to Stanford we were both national security advisor were both black women named rice And so you know it happens to me in airports it happens to me all over the place where people say You worked with President Bush President Bush's national security advisor and Secretary of State no But the funniest time was when I was visiting China for the first time as national security advisor on my own mission on behalf of President Obama and I met with President Xi and I'm setting up a summit and CCTV does a whole big Spread on (6/45)
the nightly news and they say you know Susan Rice's in China to see President Xi and they put up Conde's picture Oh That shit happens to black folks Say it for real and one thing I thought was very interesting in your book you mentioned your mother You made your career partly as a mediator And you sort of learned that because your parents were squabbling and you were probably more than but as a very young girl You say seven years old You were doing diplomacy at home well unfortunately my brother, and I were living in a house. That was a tinderbox I had two really wonderful extremely accomplished parents, but they had no business being married and Their breakup was very ugly and sometimes even violent And I'd be trying to get to sleep upstairs as a little kid, and if I couldn't I'd Run downstairs and sort of spy on them and see how bad it was And if it was really bad, I'd go in there and try to break it up sometimes physically but also sometimes Mediating between them trying to listen (7/45)
to each side and help them you did shuttle diplomacy well wasn't even shuttle It was you know like proximity talks in in my own house, but I bet you that served you well in the job Well it turned out, but that wasn't the plan at the time. I was just trying to keep my house from burning down right Well speaking of houses burning down Yeah, I just have to what you must think with what went on this week in the last week in the Middle East now I remember from Decades people talking about who lost that was the who lost China right who lost me who lost Syria You know I saw the Turkish defense minister put up The new map of Turkey with a big chunk of Syria he bit off parts of Iraq Greece You know I remember when George Bush went into Iraq in 2003 the idea Embraced by some liberals was we have to remake the Middle East We're gonna put a democracy in the heart of the Arab world okay that didn't work out, but Trump and Bush together They have remade the Middle East well Trump especially in the (8/45)
last week. It's amazing well Iraq Iranian yeah, Iraq now Syria, but do you see this going? It's going nowhere good. I mean what Trump has done in Iraq And now Syria is in effect to seed a portion of northern Syria Kurdish homeland to the Turks and to Evacuate the Americans as if it's you know his Saigon We've left our Turkish allies homeless. They're now going to scatter throughout the region We've given Assad and and Putin and the Iranians a green light to take over that territory that they've been long wanting to take And us Isis is gonna come back But Assad is gonna be okay with Turkey biting off a chunk of his land well If you're if you're Assad last week you were missing a third of your country now You're just missing a little sliver on the top well That's a that's not bad for one week's work and watching Republicans Not get that upset about this more than upset than we've seen but not to the point of we should get rid of them Must infuriate you having lived through Benghazi that (9/45)
that was something that required hearing after hearing after hearing eight congressional inquiries Yeah There's really no comparison. I mean look it was not a good thing that happened in Benghazi But the idea that anyone could have stopped that well Benghazi was a horrible tragedy right we lost four Americans including But what we're gonna lose as a result of what Donald Trump has done in Syria is we're gonna have a whole terrorist resurgence as a result of his pullout So we'll see the the ramifications of that in American and allied lives I think I'm afraid for years to come you know worries me. I think back to 911 and I imagined After it happened bin Laden was saying to himself wow I I didn't think they would destroy themselves this easily I knew this was gonna be a win for us, but we knocked down those buildings. They overreacted they attacked the wrong country They spent trillions of dollars the Homeland Security Department. That's a big bloated bureaucracy this whole mess Putin in (10/45)
2016 spent a Pittance and got Trump elected or certainly helped What do you think about the fact that idea that we're just it's just too easy to get Americans to destroy themselves Well what is I think happening now and what Putin's genius is is that he understands that we're so divided internally and That in I argue in my book I love that our domestic political divisions are in fact our greatest national security vulnerability. We can't get stuff done We can't build infrastructure. We can't invest in technology to beat the Chinese and artificial intelligence But we've also found ourselves So pitted against one another that all Putin had to do was jump in and Exacerbate those divisions pour salt in the wounds, and we are now almost like a flesh-eating disease eating ourselves alive I think we have the ability to fix it because it's a problem of our own making our domestic divisions Well, we have to stop hating each other absolutely. You know I mean to me the Rubicon was crossed when (11/45)
One party the Republican Party said I and you see the t-shirts at Trump rallies I'd rather be with the Russians and the Democrats we never sort of went there like yeah I don't like the other political party, but I'm not gonna go over to a foreign country That's to me the big difference when we somehow went there. How do you get back from that well Bill? I mean it's horrible and to say you'd rather be with you know our enemy than your fellow American is I think a new low But you get back from it by what we do as individuals in terms of our personal relationships listening hearing It's what we do as a nation where we really need to change a lot of the rules of the game which are Inviting these extremes to be empowered. I think we should stop talking politics to each other Oh, that's part of it. We didn't used to do it all the time I've got no idea how much we hated each other. I've got a very conservative son a Conservative I've got a very conservative son and a very progressive daughter (12/45)
and my husband and I are in between and one thing I've learned from having those differences in my very home at my dinner table is We can't talk about it all the time because we drive ourselves crazy, but you can't not talk about yeah We've not all the time and then we've got to do some stuff I think at a national level like mandatory national service for all Americans 18 to 22 For six to twelve months we're gonna move together and we we had to Understand each other from you know, some rural kid from Idaho having to work with some kid from the South Bronx, right? That would it's hard to hate people when you actually know them. All right last question Edward Snowden I know you I mean you're not easy on him. No, you say he has done immeasurable damage. Yes. He says the opposite How you you well I'm asking you yeah, I mean and I usually side with people in your business I was never one of those liberals who said oh no, I don't trust the CIA. I don't trust every I do in general I think (13/45)
they're patriots. You're right. So I don't think Edward Snowden is a traitor like Alden or Walker people who did it for money who were trying to sell out their country for themselves I think he really thinks he's doing a good thing But what say you you say he's a traitor and I mean that with great sincerity I say that because I know what he did. He stole the most sensitive information, you know things We gave it to people who had no business having it. He's sitting in Moscow living on the hog Yes, we are, you know that I do know that I know we are profoundly less secure as a result of what he did We're trying to recover but that recovery is gonna take a long time and let me tell you The reason I'm so blunt about what he did in the book is because I know Quite how bad what he did is and I'm not here to ascribe motives, you know Maybe he did it for what he thought were benign reasons but the impact of what he did is what I want people to understand and why I Go so far as to use a word (14/45)
that I have not No, no, I get it So interesting that the Democrats are the ones now who understand what treason and patriotism is We understand what national security is. I know you do Susan, right? I Let's meet our panel Alright, he is an MSNBC contributor in the Daily Beast politics editor Sam Stein He's a New York Times contributing writer and author of self-portrait in black and white Thomas Chatterton Williams. I love that name I'm gonna call you, sir She's senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute and an NBC analyst Danielle Pletka is back with us. How you doing? Okay Pick up with what I was saying there who lost Syria. I heard this word a lot growing up who lost a country the Russians now are taking over the Northern part of the country. We're bombing our own equipment I've used this phrase before patriotic immunity. Why did the Republicans? Get this patriotic immunity. Why can they do shit like this? Can you tell me no There's no real answer to this it's it's a (15/45)
baffling foreign policy decision I don't know the motivation of it. I can guess at the one motivation is But in the end the results are catastrophic. There was no motivation. He just wanted to get off the phone. It's possible They're really just I really think that's all it was. He was talking to her to warm the hot pockets were ready. There's this And he said And he said really I don't I think you come on I mean, yes, that's possible. I'm charitable than saying you planned it No, I I assumed that the hot pockets were in fact ready But you can't talk about you it's not just about Donald Trump if this is about Syria 500,000 Syrians died from 2011 right to now most of them under the Obama administration I should add Obama was the president of Syria at the time Donald Trump is not the president of Syria either my dear no But but could could any president have stopped that in Syria without a full-scale US invasion We could have done much more. In fact, we didn't support the Kurds, you know (16/45)
We only turned and saw and started supporting the Kurds a few years ago before that We were working with the term It strikes me as a deflection from what we're supposed to be talking about which is a decision that was made two weeks ago To ultimately just abandon a position that we had in northern Syria and there's no rationalization for it And we're talking about civilian deaths. Obviously, that's important National says 241 Kurds died in the past week. Okay, and and they are more than half a million Syrian Seems like a deflection to bring Obama into this one with the discussion Trump's to see I don't but again I'm not sure what Obama could have done short of a full military invasion when we were just in the neighboring country of Iraq To stop I have supported we could have supported the Syrian people We could have done more for the Syrian people. Who are the people which? And there are so many which are that the moderate we Who are the Syrian people that we were going to give guns to (17/45)
because there was a lot of different factions Those self-samed Kurds we could have supported a long time ago and didn't I we could have done a lot more for the Syrian Democratic forces we could have done more for them when they were People who really fucked the Kurds before this was George Bush the first Yeah Thinking of this 35 year old Kurdish politician who was dragged from her car and she was Executed on the side of the road Trump made this decision in between rounds of golf It reminds me of what Fitzgerald said in the Great. Yes be in the Great Gatsby You know He just smashes everything around him and then he kind of retreats into his money and his vast Carelessness and he just lets everybody else clean up the mess or not or not clean up the mess, but people are dying Well, I just want you to see I put together a little mashup here of what Trump said about Syria now I think these folks are politically savvy and they read the paper They know what went on a lot of people in this (18/45)
country only listen to Donald Trump That's all the information they get because the rest is fake news. Here's his version of the week in Syria This is an incredible outcome the Kurds and other people they're gonna be taking great care of we've gotten everything We could have ever dreamed of this is a solution that really well it saved their lives frankly I didn't know it was gonna work out this quickly. I didn't know it would work out this well So this was a great thing for everybody the Kurds are very happy Turkey is very happy. The United States is very happy and you know what? Civilization is very happy to argue with that I'm not happy. I live in a country where half the people just see that and think that's what happened, huh? I'm not happy. I live in a country where he said it doesn't matter where the Isis Fighters go because that's Europe's problem. I live in France, right? They're coming. They're coming. Yes, like fuck them Yeah, like but not their allies or anything. So, okay (19/45)
Impeachment a lot of people are saying that this doesn't really affect impeachment I don't know about that the 55% of independents are now for impeachment and I think the argument that Ukraine Does not equal impeachment got a little harder to make this week. No well I think it matters in to the degree that Republicans are finding a little bit of a voice to speak out against Trump not many of them but some of them and To the degree that they aren't admonished by the president and hit back they get muscle memory They know that they can speak out against the president and maybe that translated to something more related to Ukraine and the impeachment process Ultimately though. This is you know a Pelosi driven decision Does she want to expand it beyond Ukraine to include things like Trump Doral for instance, which is a textbook example of an impeachable offense It's unconstitutional blatantly. That's her call right now Everything that I've heard from the Hill is they want to keep it very (20/45)
Ukraine focused And is that a bad decision? I don't know I mean, I suppose you can make the case that people are getting it The polls look pretty promising for Democrats tons of momentum and revelations every day But then there's like a moral argument that if you see corruption if you see lawlessness Don't you have a moral imperative to actually expose that as well? Shouldn't you put that in the grand process the impeachment? You talk about the politics of it and that certainly is important and for a long time Trump has been saying, you know They have to impeach me because they can't beat me at the ballot box But if that's true, why does he always need so much foreign help The challenge for the Democrats in adding in right the Doral decision which was I mean No, we can cut no not good But but the challenge for the Democrats is that the claim that a lot of people have been making is that and that Trump has Been making that Trump's allies have been making is that the last few years have (21/45)
been their effort to find Anything to tack on to that anything whether it's stormy Daniels or it's his lawyer But all those things are impeached well, I mean but in fact Maybe they are and that's the decision of the House of Representatives The point here that I think we're trying to make is that if you keep trying to pile things on it does diminish the credibility Amazing how that works for him There's a certain amount of the American population that no matter what he does is not going to budge The New York Times has countless articles on Trump voters that just won't give up on them. They just get more cynical about Because I do think part of his strategy is what you were alluding to early on which is it's like a fire hose of Controversy and you just don't know what to do with it And while you're focused on one thing he acquiesces to Turkey and then decides, you know Doral's the perfect location for the g7 and you're three steps behind him as he's on to the next controversy I actually (22/45)
do think there's some madness and some strategy to I think even for him this week He had it's like a plethora of crazy crazy quotes To me the one everybody sort of missed that was maybe the most important he met with Schumer and Pelosi right in the White House Through a tantrum They walked out We heard all about Nancy you're a third-rate politician or does it not yeah, it's the thing he said last in that meeting See you at the polls. Yeah See you at the polls is what he said to them in other words you keep doing this shit We'll see how it turns out on Election Day Does he have a point? Well, I think he thinks that impeachment isn't gonna go anywhere. I don't I don't get well He's got this he's saying this is going to help me politically. Go ahead Oh, he firmly believes it that wasn't the quote that shocked me though The quote that shocked me was he said someone told me to call this meeting and so I'm here The White House had called the meeting Did you know did you not know All right, (23/45)
so everyone in DC is talking about the latest it couple Igor and left These are the two they are I love this term associates that whenever that word Never a good thing associates of Rudy Giuliani. They were they have a company called fraud guarantee It sounds like something from a Bob Holt sketch We'll call it fraud guarantee. Okay, and they also came out this week on a disco in Ukraine called mafia rave again. I am NOT making this is the website. This is the real thing Igor and Lev own mafia rave And Wait, leave that up there because I want to start the video that you see there's a little arrow there. I Guess we don't. All right There it is you see you want me to push that arrow and show you the video This video is real I'm a little suspicious of the voiceover, but see what you think Welcome To mafia rave Ukraine's premier funtime completely legit nightclub Whether you are in purple satin shirt or purple velour tracksuit We treat you like oligarch rated five stars on Yeltsin with (24/45)
music from Putin's favorite band poison Me girl of your dreams would look at I that says tonight is night. I pee on bed for you See where American President Trump meet wife twice Mafia rave is number one club in Ukraine for collusion ask Rudy what happens in Ukraine stays in Ukraine But no print quote quote, right, buddy Start off whose latest bestseller is letters from an astrophysicist Neil degrasse Tyson I'm glad you never disappoint with the time universe. How many? Universe ties do you have like Trump has all the red ones you have all the occasionally is a blue one I have noticed but not as often as he wears a red tie. No, but so this time I have about 109 Wow Yeah, you know it right that way about a hundred. Sorry. Yeah, okay could be a hundred and eleven exactly Your book is so interesting I noticed a lot of the letters that people write to you and this is a lot of that You know you you care to you're very good with your fans Yeah I want to know what they think was what I was (25/45)
doing under the hood for decades while I had this public persona of Talking about the universe. There's that personal private things that issues that people had and they wrote to me about it Okay, and one of the big ones that you get is people are asking you to sort of mediate between Gosh, I I want to believe in God, but I don't want to not believe in science Is there way we can square that circle? What would I get a lot I get a lot of those letters and what do you tell them? I like the way said square that circle. That's very mathematical of you. Congratulations You know me doctor I am all about the science So what happens is I think people might be raised in one or another religious tradition and then they start learning science then they find places where the science conflicts and I think most people have never met a scientist much less and claim one as their friend So they see me kind of as their friend who could then offer perspective or at least shine Some kind of cosmic (26/45)
luminosity on what next decision they want to make about how to reconcile or not Their religious traditions with science enlightened religious people don't have an issue. You know, if Jesus is your Savior No one is going to take that away from you in a country that protects the free expression of religion But if you're gonna come around and say my religious text tells me the universe is 6,000 years old And I'm gonna stick it in your science classroom. I have an issue with that. Right? Yeah, right. Yeah Well Basically saying I'm coming down in the side of sight. No, however, top shit However, I when I people write to me I see it as a contract of communication, right? If I just speak and not care where they're coming from then I'm just lecturing you're letting them down nicely It's like you know what people sometimes say they love this in America They say everything happens for a reason which I always think of you because I like that is so fucking stupid. Yeah I Write about that is so (27/45)
correct. Thank you Reason is random right we create reason in it Also, it's elitist because it's something you can say when you live in an affluent society where you have a lot of you know Enough money to change jobs or meet new people you live in a city There's like a billion people live on a shit pile every day and nothing happens for a reason for them They're born into grinding party and they die Definitely an elitist point of view what I wanted to say So I just wanted to say that the contract I have It's an unstated contract between those me and those who write to me is that I will care about Where they're coming from and how they're thinking and what receptors they might have for arguments on my present So for example in the case of the religious letters, I say there are three truths in the world There's your personal truth. No one is gonna take that from you. Jesus is your Savior Muhammad is your last prophet These are truths. No one is gonna take that from you. Then there's like (28/45)
a political truth That's just what becomes true when it's repeated enough times. Okay, but then there's the objective like those first two you just Which are the methods and tools of science are invented and designed to establish those are true whether or not you believe in them And so I say you can keep your six thousand year universe But understand that that's a personal truth that you get from your personal religion If you rise to power and have control over laws and legislations in a pluralistic land It is a recipe for disaster. If you're gonna take your personal truths and create laws that have to then apply to everyone so The world is The world is is not six thousand years old. It is so not six thousand years old So we used to just have to deal with that in the last few years We've also had to deal with people who think it might be flat Yeah, and which is stupid so so I've said this before I think the the rise of the Flat Earthers is evidence of two things One we live in a (29/45)
country that protects free speech To we have a failure of our educational system, so I I'm gonna turn around back to the school system It's a where has it failed in such a way that a full-grown adult coming out of this system can think the earth is flat That's where I'm focused. I agree right and so you're on the side of a fact is a fact get over it I'm on the side that earth is round. Yes Oh Facts can be anywhere It's this collection of facts which when put together in wise and sage ways become knowledge But I'd rather speak of knowledge rep than facts, but I bring this up because you've gotten to some hot water recently There was a mass shooting you tweeted something about it, which was true. Yeah. Okay, if we're gonna be facts or facts people I defended you by the way. Yeah, I did catch that Online. Yeah, I caught that. Well, where was my thank you? No I Reached out a little So, okay. Anyway, my point being you what you said was true. Yes. Okay, you weren't trying to you even said (30/45)
The USA horrifically law you went out of your way to be nice about it and then said but the fact is That on average across any 48 hours. We lose 500 to medical errors 300 to the flu blah blah blah our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data No, I know what it's like to have the Twitter mob come after you. Yeah, I don't blame you for Apollo I get it to have to do but you were right Facts matter they do matter. However, so do Emotions we are emotion. We're an emotional species So so so were I to do that again, I would have put some some some distance time distance between that tweet It's because people are bereaved right? And so I wanted to have some Retrospectively, that's what I would have done. All right, I want to ask about an explorer because I know you want to go to Mars We're not gonna have that fight again as we always do. Don't get me started. I don't get them started I know Mars in the face right there Well, I bring Mars wherever I go Okay, what talk about a shithole (31/45)
country Mars and said I Mean honestly if we're gonna make all right, we're not gonna have that argument, but So you admire the explorers as we all do we had Columbus Day earlier this week. Okay an Explorer extraordinaire you would agree. We would all agree as an explorer important to explore. Yes, but sure Yes, yeah, or else we'd be doing this show in Barcelona And I mean the balls to get on the ocean when they did they thought it was flat the world It's true, but not him. He was smart enough to know. Yeah that the world was not was not was not flat Yeah, but still in that little rickety boat. It's less the size of the it's like the size of this room and it took audacity Unbelievable So was he an ass and gonads? Yes, you know probably to have that kind of balls. You're not gonna be mr Nice guy all the time so of course a lot of people say we should tear down his statues and blah blah blah because he brought diseases and he did I Read in Jill Lepore's book Haiti had three million people (32/45)
before the Europeans came and then it was five thousand So, okay disease he didn't try to do that and then slaves he took slaves But so did our founding fathers the Bible is cool with slaves neither Jesus nor his dad God or against them It's not his dad I'm not touching this one He was a 15th century man the founders had slaves the Bible had slaves or Kelly still has them I'm just saying Columbus day weigh in discuss. I'm not touching this one either We need to be aware of the past of past atrocities and we need to be sensitive to it But I think what they weren't we're almost overdosing on history. We're mining the past constantly for fresh out. Yes I don't think Christopher Columbus should be canceled I think we have a society that's mature enough to handle moral ambiguity Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand Sent the man to the new world Okay, and they gave a satchel of flags that were Spanish flags and put them wherever you come So, I don't know why Columbus Day to this day is (33/45)
celebrated by Italians. They had nothing to do with his voyage It should be spent and if they did more people than just a few in Brooklyn would be speaking Italian in the Western Hemisphere Put that in perspective What So can I ask about this democratic debate that we had the other night first of all these debates now It's 12 people well too many it it's like I can't there's too many characters It's it's like, you know, so you can count to 12 But I don't it's like a Netflix shot not that I ever watch Netflix Where you have to binge it for three seasons before it gets good I mean, can we can we get it down to a reasonable number of people and also? You know Joe Biden, I don't know this whole thing for me was that he could be the one to beat Trump, right? I don't know if that's true anymore. Sure. That's true anymore either I think a lot of people have doubts about whether Joe Biden can do it That's why Elizabeth Warren's on top right now. And what do you think about that? If it was (34/45)
Trump versus Warren, what's your vote go to it doesn't go to Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump So you'd sit it out To be honest, they never Trump people. I don't know. Are you technically never Trumper? Okay, well putting you aside. Thank you. If you're if you're a never Trumper if you're never Trumper I hear this a lot They they really hate Trump, but they just can't bring themselves to vote for Elizabeth Warren It's like well, then you're somewhat Trump, you know, like you either have to go all in There are other ways to you know box in a president Elizabeth Warren vote for a Republican senator Republican congressman, but if you want Trump out you have to go fully in it You can't have it halfway. Yeah, but I want to put some I have a question for the food I'm just a scientist But when I look at this field of 12 Yeah The Democrats can get together vote in a primary and they take the polls of likely voting Democrats and we might pick the one we like the best What is what is it? What (35/45)
would it mean if the one we like the best is not the one most likely to be able to beat Trump That's who is How do we define who's most likely to be Trump and what we don't know What the dog But the point here is that What does that even mean My friends used to play this game called what will many eat first No at a party They would take four bits of food from the different food and they'd put it on the plate and everyone would bet on What the dog would eat first You think the hot dog he's gonna go for that no, we ate the cracker first Don't know what the voters want until that's how we got Trump No one thought he could win But that is that the reason that we got Trump is the same reason that we have this problem in the print with the Democrats Which is that the primary system used to be the closed-door back room smoke-filled room where guys tried to pick the one who was gonna win Who would beat the opponent right now? It's a very different system and the passionate passionate people in (36/45)
the base are the ones who choose Who's gonna be their candidate? So Joe Biden has a little Ukraine problem, too You know, he didn't answer that question too. Well, I thought in the debate He didn't own and his son was getting 50 grand a month to do nothing in a field He knew nothing about it's very swampy My question is this Al Franken had to go away for the Democrats because they said well We have to be like Caesar's wife on the meat to issue We can't have any tainting on that so that the Republic's can't say oh you guys are bad on that, too Doesn't the same apply to Ukraine and Joe Biden? I think there are different issues But I get your point and I think liberals do a disservice if they just excuse what Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were up to I don't think it rises to the level of what Trump's no, it's not of course, but neither did Al Franken, of course Something clearly there was a clear issue where Hunter Biden got a job primarily almost exclusively because of his father's Time in (37/45)
politics. There's no Exclusively exclusively and and if you think that that's fine. Well, it's not I mean, there's something unseemly about it and it's access It's somewhat pay for play and I think that Liberals again are not doing a real service to themselves if they just try to sweep this under the who's Kennedy's Attorney General It was Robert Thank you so much for saying that that's not your team and you're right yeah, he was qualified It's not like a bunker. It's unlike Bobby Kennedy was a purse designer a Growing problem that we have that isn't just Hunter Biden. Why is we know why is Chelsea Clinton? You know it at the front. Why are any of these? Tell your fucking kids to get a real job To the woman who got vomit in her hair on a Spirit Airlines flight and had to wash her hair in an airplane bathroom What did you expect? You're flying Spirit from Chicago to Baltimore you're lucky you're alive I'm just saying when you book a flight that cost $89 You're subconsciously accepting (38/45)
the fact that you may get a little vomit in your hair You just happen to get a lot New rule if Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously on the world stage He's got to delegate the job of corn inspector to someone else Here he is inspecting the corn here. He is pleased with the quality Here he is realizing. They keep showing him the same corn year after year Yes, Kim. That's the bad news. That's all the corn. There is a North Korea The good news is because of all these photo ops of you with corn you've moved up to the third in the Iowa caucus New rule dispensaries need to stop acting like the highs from different marijuana are so radically different This one's good for being social. This one's a mellow. You know they don't do that at a liquor store Hi, what sort of drunk are you looking for today? I? Recommend this one for calling old girlfriends and the Chianti is nice for sobbing about your father Of course if you're looking to call your mother-in-law a whore I'd stick with brown (39/45)
liquor Same goes for if you're looking to let the gay guy in your building blow you and for anything like falling asleep on the kitchen floor or Or putting a pizza in the oven and forgetting about it You have to try our malt liquor Now if this is a really special night, and you're thinking of walking up to the Taco Bell drive-thru window I Would recommend a sweet wine and of course vodka is always great for getting a tattoo of a rocket that looks like a dick Neural now that we have Doritos with names like Flamin hot blaze and jacked How about a version for those of us with the more refined culinary palette I want to see something like Doritos subtly seasoned Or Doritos with a flavor or Doritos light and unprepossessing oh Hell, let's just call it what it is Doritos Caucasian New rule the people who were shocked to see this Australian man jogging a popular trail In a ping-pong and work boots must give the guy credit. That's what we call an old-school creep He could easily be at home on (40/45)
the computer Masturbating on chat or letter sending dick pics But he chose to put on his boots go outside and make people uncomfortable the old-fashioned Finally new rule it's time somebody called out Donald Trump for something. He's doing that. I don't think anyone has caught on to yet He's a big liar announced. He was running the first time he said I don't need anybody's money I'm using my own money. I'm not using donors. I don't care I'm really rich But he's not really rich and he's used plenty of other people's money 90% of his 2016 campaign was funded by other people's money His old reason for being there is a lie this notion of I can't be bought because I have so much money I don't care about money anymore No, the exact opposite is true. The man is constantly for sale That wasn't toilet paper on his shoe. It's a price tag He grubs for every penny. He wasn't above cheating his charity Trump University was a pyramid scheme. He just put a g7 meeting in one of his golf clubs. There (41/45)
is not a dollar He has ever left on the table since he took office. He's worried about Ukrainian corruption The only time corruption bothers Donald Trump is when he's not in on it If your country pays in cash So do you read me a piece of cash you can literally get away with murder You know Even I have a little money history with this guy remember mr President 2013 when you sued me because I publicly offered you Five million dollars if you could prove you were not the son of an orangutan It Was a joke But when you heard five million dollars like a bum who chases a dollar on the sidewalk tied to a string You could not resist chasing it into court. Well you lost that one Tonight I want to give you another chance to get some money out of me Now you and I have been going back and forth on whether you will leave office if you lose the election I mean you have one guy on television. I'm telling you he's not leaving He's going to win and then he's not leaving So in 2024, he won't leave. I'm (42/45)
telling you here. This is a serious person Thank you a Serious person is serious person. I will bet you a million dollars right now that if you lose the 2020 election I'm right and you won't leave What am I saying? This is Donald Trump We're talking about like he'd ever pony up even if he lost a bet that would involve two things He's never done admit defeat and pay a bill So Forget the bet I got a better idea. How about this? Just take my check for one million dollars My check for a million and I bet I could get another thousand people just from here to the beach including Malibu of course Who would pay that much to see you resign to those out there who are saying my god bill Are you suggesting we pay this man to go away? Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting in fact, I'm insisting Celebrities do nothing but waste their money on stupid crud stupid crazy shit like castles and Jewel-encrusted crucifixes and shark tanks and private islands. Here's something I could spend on and know it (43/45)
was doing some good let's Let's speak to Donald Trump in the only language. He has ever really understood My whole life has been money. I want money. I want money greedy. I was greedy greedy. I want more money more money It's not like he was hiding it It goes back to his childhood from the moment his father created his first teenage shell company money money Money makes Donny a winner Daddy loves good boy who gets money so Mr. President, it's really very simple. You love money. We hate you You could finally be the billionaire you always pretended you were yes I said billionaire because the kind of money I could get from Just off the top of my head Oprah Cher Madonna Gaga Bono Jay-z Beyonce pink Rihanna Usher Pharrell Eminem And that's just the ones with one name Singers actors Athletes everyone fucking hates you Here's a list of every single person in show business Every single person in show business with the names of those who do not hate you across that Finally, let us not forget (44/45)
the millions and millions of not so rich and famous people who despise you, too Americans have modest means who would happily chip in five ten twenty bucks or pawn their wedding rings, whatever it took And that's why tonight I am formally announcing the formation of my national crowdfunding platform to bribe President Trump to leave I mean, sir win And we call it prick starter Thomas The older glass Tyson and Susan Ray stay tuned for other time on YouTube. Thank you catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand for more information log on to HBO calm (45/45)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #672: Bjorn Lomborg, Stephanie Ruhle, Bret Stephens.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill maul news. We have to cover It's good thing. We've stopped clapping So let's not bury the lead the big story this week that tried to shoot Trump again, that's not not funny Okay I'm being serious now. That's the second time this happened. I said this before there could be no fuzz on this. This is not funny Okay, it's not okay. It's not okay to wish it happened. Well. This is the problem Well, I mean look this happens too frequently, I'm sorry this happened on the golf course the guy was laying in wait and It's happens too much in fact besides the shooter. There were other two other shooters, but I'm waiting to play through Of course the NRA had to come out with this statement. This is no time to talk about gun control They said guns do not kill people pagers kill people Yeah, that's the other big story this week the fight with Hezbollah is on there in the Middle East and the way Israel did it Some pretty (1/45)
amazing you know Terrorists know this for a long time first thing you got to do get rid of your cell phone because they could track you there So they've been using old-school pagers and the Israelis this week made all the pagers blow up In what they call operation 1980s drug dealer yes Do not fuck with Israel man, they they took the fight from their river to their pants Nobody's in to take any shit these days Did you see Kamala with Oprah Winfrey asked her about owning a gun and Kamala said anybody breaks into my house is getting shot? Trump immediately accused her of turning even blacker. Well Trump Trump is losing his mind. He's losing his mind He's losing his cool, and he's gonna lose the election I put I put down my marker on that last week made my prediction, but this I'm telling you it even for him It's going off the rails. He keeps saying now kids are undergoing sex change operations at school at school They're doing it at school Wow, and I was nervous for picture day In that (2/45)
case girls who want to become boys you got to get him early before first period There is a Republican Candidate for governor governor in North Carolina named Mark Robinson. He's a super Christy Jesus loving hard right conservative African American man, and then seeing Ennis dug up a lot of his past That's what happens when you run okay. He was on all these websites. He'd like tranny porn Didn't care about abortion. He said and he wanted to Intimated he would like to bring back slavery and of course the Republican Reaction to this is predictable awful unforgivable continue Yes, and he also referred to himself as a black Nazi Who also posted that he spied on women in the girls locker room, so he's a peeping Tom and an uncle Tom I've said this for 25 years when you think the Republicans can't go lower. They do I mean black Nazi, and I think it is you know on his website. He referred to his penis as peewee German And this is embarrassing because the Trump campaign has a rally scheduled (3/45)
fourth, North Carolina tomorrow And they told Mark Robinson you are no longer welcome there absolutely not this is for white Nazis only so Now the Republicans want to replace him with someone less freaky, but did he's in jail Well, I mean come on that is That is an American tragedy story. I mean Pete did he I don't know if anybody's fallen from that height I mean this guy is worth they say over 400 million dollars from basically three sources owning a record label brand affiliation and buying lube in bulk I Don't want to judge a book by its cover, but what they seized a thousand bottles of lube and baby oil in his house Because he was having these parties they called freak-offs which went on for days Sometimes people needed IV they were partying so hard, and you know a freak-off I'm all good with it one thing that always bothered me about it is do you bring a gift? And you're like well, I'll bring baby oil and then you get there Oh everybody brought But I mean I Don't know if he's ever (4/45)
gonna see the light of day again. He's in jail. They wouldn't even give him bail I mean the charges sex trafficking forced labor Kidnapping arson bribery obstruction of justice and you may say arson that's going a little bit too far But you try putting out a baby oil fire Scientists an author of the recently False alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet Bjorn longboard I Am so glad you're here because we can talk about environment every time we have a political campaign in this country it becomes the forgotten issue People care about it. They care about it, and they care about it And then they just don't seem to want to talk about it may because it doesn't hold very well But I mean you are a skeptic of a lot of what goes on About what people say about how dire climate change is and I think that's good I think we need skepticism, but I must say I am skeptical of you You should be exactly we all just need to be skeptical so first of (5/45)
all you never been paid by anybody Right like an oil company No We don't take money from oil companies and the important part here is to remember that what we're talking about is Really just saying what does the science tell us and what does the economics tell us yeah climate change is a real problem It is one of the things we need to fix in the 21st century But it's not this Armageddon that it's been made out to be you know you hear on the news these catastrophic calamitous Climate stories all the time, but these are very carefully selected worst-case scenarios often based on ultra Unrealistic, I've seen you do the opposite. Sorry. I've seen you do the opposite like okay. Well. I've It's a while ago. I'm not remembering what year, but maybe it's 15 years Are you saying that sea levels in the last two years? Hadn't risen, but if you look at the chart over time Oh, they are but and you if you cherry-pick two years I mean, that's what the climate deniers always did and I know you are not (6/45)
a denier I wouldn't have you on if you were but the the point I was I was trying to make there was Actually, and you can read the whole story And it was in the Guardian newspaper and the point what I was trying to make was you constantly hear this thing is getting Incredibly bad, and then a couple of years later. It doesn't on the sea level rise It was actually such that those two years were going down, but obviously I even said it is going to go back up But the point here is that we can't make these arguments just to show here's something That's really terrible going on and then scare people. I agree that I really hate it when people Want to manipulate me you know try move me to just tell me the truth But But I feel like the title of the book false alarm, I don't like that I think that goes way too far It's not a false alarm, right? All right So so it's false in the sense that we're being told this is the end of the world a lot of people believe This is really the end of the world a (7/45)
new OCD survey and it'll be rich countries not tomorrow But it could be you know Dick Cheney when we were fighting terrorism, but if there's a 1% chance This is their reasoning to go into Iraq which was stupid okay, if there's a 1% chance we should Treat it like it could happen. I feel like this is more than a 1% chance okay I'm going to show you some of the data that actually indicates This is a problem But it's not the end of the world by any means so there's two of the world's leading climate economists one is Richard all one of the most quoted climate economists from from this year and the other one is William Nordhaus the guy who Got the only Nobel Prize in climate economics They both made estimates across all the different estimates of how bad is climate change going to be By the end of the century at a three degree centigrade or five point four degree Fahrenheit Temperature rise the cost is going to be somewhere between two and three percent of GDP But what will the ocean look (8/45)
like? I mean, I'm not talking about oceans rising. I'm talking about oceans dying and The world can't live without dead oceans, and it seems like they're in bad shape between all the plastic in them They're overfished. I mean there's very Many places have no fish left at all. They're too acidic Coral reefs, I know you've talked about oh, that's exaggerated. Tell me about why you think the coral reef problem is exaggerated That's just the data So can I just finish the other point? Trying to make before we go on to the coral reefs so two to three percent of global GDP is a problem But remember by the end of the century the UN estimate the average person on the planet will be 450 percent as rich as he or she is today So that means instead of being 450 percent as rich we will feel like we're only four hundred and thirty five percent as rich Yes, that's a problem. No, it's not the end of the world on the on the coral reef bit rich. So How does rich fix the ocean no so on the coral reefs bit (9/45)
We have a situation where we have on Great Barrier Reef. So the world's biggest coral reef the Australian marine Scientific Institute. Sorry. I can't remember what they're called, but they're the guys who? Data every year on the coral reef since 1986 and they have been Assessing what is the total outcome of how good does the reef look like and in? 2009 to 2012 we thought it was Terrible. It was really dramatic. The Guardian wrote the obituary for the Great coral reef. No and the point I've just been making is the last three years They've been at the highest level the most coral reef we've ever seen in those areas And so the point is not that there's not a challenge for a coral reefs there is but most of the challenge comes from overfishing from industrial pollution from Sea runoff and those are the kinds of things that we should fix but we're not being well Informed if we're being told this is because of climate change So we got to change our entire infrastructure on our global economy (10/45)
in order to save the oceans when it's not actually what's gonna happen And why do we imagine as we treat the oceans ever worse that the coral reefs are enjoying it more now Look I don't think that why I enjoy this I think why are they why are they doing better in the last three years? I don't like we did anything. I don't know. Oh, well, there we go. All right That's honest we don't know I'm a data guy I simply try to say right I get to look at the no No, and what I love that you do is that you inform people of things that you know again The people who just want to usher me to a point of view would never tell me like yes We are using a lot more green energy, but it's not making the amount of fossil fuels We use go down why? Because people just use more yeah That's a really key thing that I don't think Americans are aware of we just use more How do we fix that? What do we not have to one of reason is because energy is incredibly good Remember you and I and most of the audience and here (11/45)
lives in an incredibly energy rich world We have the opportunity we can keep cool in the summer and hot in the winter. We can get food We can get transportation. I mean I came from Sweden. I Wasn't gonna row a boat over here, right? So the The whole point is energy makes us much much better off and also makes it more resilient We can do a lot more things most people in the world have virtually no energy. They want a lot more energy They honestly, you know Most people in sub-saharan Africa live on less energy per year than your refrigerator It's not just your every refrigerator use and and so the reality is we need much more energy What we do need to fix climate change is to invest more in green energy research and development So that we in the long run actually can make sure that Africans and Indians and Chinese can live an energy-rich Life but without the co2 emissions. Yeah. Well, I want to I mean that's I think the future. Yeah Because I mean I've said it here a couple of years ago. (12/45)
Like I don't know what will work to solve this problem I know it didn't work and that's asking people to be good. Yes that I know doesn't work One of the things that we have been trying to do for last 20 years in climate policy is basically tell people to be poor Be less well-off be you know uncomfortable. Would you mind being a little hotter in the summer and a little colder in the winter? That's just not gonna work. What is gonna work is innovation. Remember Los Angeles in 1950s? Sorry, I don't mean to say you remember but remember that Anyway, anyway, I was alive It was terribly polluted and The sort of standard climate way of tackling that would be to tell would you mind walking instead of driving around person? Of course that wouldn't work in Los Angeles or anywhere else. But what we did was instead we invented the catalytic converter It's a little gizmo you put on the tail part of a car and then you can drive much longer and pollute much much less That's how you solve the problem (13/45)
both of air pollution and the long run and climate change. All right, so let's go through Let's go through some of these new things just quickly we only have a couple of minutes and I don't want to ask you if you ever run into Greta in Sweden and How does that go I wonder but okay giant umbrellas These are the new things that they're gonna that would block a crucial amount of solar radiation And these are all things that they have in pilot programs or the beginning of iron fertilization dumping iron into the ocean It makes photo plankton bloom and when they die they carry the co2 they absorb down to the seabed Carbon capture they already have something in Iceland that pulls four thousand metric tons out of the atmosphere And they put them in underground caverns and then they turn into stone cloud brightening Sea-salt aerosols into the sky that brighten clouds and deflect the sun's rays. So this is the future you're saying This is what we're gonna be No, these are some of the things (14/45)
that we should be looking at because remember if we could come up with a way to Suck out the co2 of the atmosphere. That was what you were talking about from Iceland at really low cost We basically have solved the problem. We could continue doing everything we do and get rid of the entire global warming problem at fairly low cost We're not there yet at all But this could be one solution and the point is there are lots of these potential solutions now Most of them are not gonna work But we if we invest it a lot more into energy green energy innovation and also these technologies So basically innovation we would have a much better chance of fixing this problem right now We're spending trillions of dollars really badly in poor climate policy I'm simply saying let's spend billions but spend it much smarter on things a lot. Let's stay skeptical I Was like huh, it's like Kamala at the debate you had to like reach out first and make sure I was okay He's a columnist for the New York Times (15/45)
Brett Stevens She hosts the 11th hour on MSNBC and MSNBC and is the senior business analyst for NBC News Stephanie rule is Okay So to media people here today, I thought maybe we would talk about rhetoric because that's what's on Trump's mind He got shot at again and he says their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at And then of course in true Trump Ian fashion always the most unself-aware person in the universe Goes on to say when they're the ones that are destroying the country Would be also the kind of rhetoric that would make a borderline person shoot at you But I mean he's right rhetoric has consequences, but he is possibly the worst person to make this case Yeah, I mean, it's the pot calling the kettle black. I think that's what the expression was was was basically born I mean he's used this is the guy who called the media the enemy of the American people scum vermin All these all these phrases now He's of course He's absolutely right of that. We probably should tone it down when (16/45)
we're calling our opponents the end of Democracy the end of Western civilization. We're not Helping our arguments. I disagree. I disagree. That's that's a dumb argument I think because you what no you had it were there that's their argument Which is that you guys are saying Trump is a threat to democracy, but he is a threat to do I the answer can't be that we can't say what's true I want to say what's true and the left has to do that too. No, I'm sorry, but Every time the left calls Trump a threat to democracy Americans remember that in 2016 Guys, like me we're calling Trump a threat to democracy and here we are I don't think what's that and that dog and that dog is not going to hunt you have to say the case against Trump Is that he's going to be a terrible president who's going to divide the country that is going to accomplish? Absolutely, nothing that is going to embarrass us in front of of the world and it's going to conduct a mystery But those are policy you don't stop calling out (17/45)
the truth because people aren't listening right when Donald Trump It's our job in the media right when people complain Donald Trump got fact-checked way more than Kamala Harris did you're damn right He did you know why he told more lies? has Done nothing but benefit from a campaign that seeks to treat him as outside the borders of political Respectability. So if you want to help is But he's what you have been doing. He said he's gonna be a bad president He's good. He's a bad president because he doesn't concede elections not the policy shit That's that comes and goes look most Americans realize that here we are Joe Biden is the president of United States Kamala Harris is likely the next president of the United States but the reason that Trump has an enduring appeal on so many Americans is that so so many of us in the media want to treat him right as Absolutely beyond the pale and you know how Trump supporters respond by saying oh, yeah, he's beyond the pale I'm gonna vote for him. We (18/45)
have done nothing but help Trump for the last eight years So that's how we should organize our political views by what the idiots will do I mean that And he is beyond the pale and on this rhetoric question I mean they both have things that they say about the other person that are pretty bad. That's politics. It's always going on There's only one side There should be no false equivalency here that uses the kind of rhetoric that they use like a member of Trump's here. Did I? I dug it up the tough people I can tell you I have the support of the police the support of the military and then he brings up the bikers The support of the bikers, right? I think if you have the military and the police I don't know if we're gonna need the bikers, but okay, I Have the tough people but they don't play it tough until the Democrats go to a certain point and then it would be very bad This is the Heritage Foundation president. That's like the number one Republican King of Project 2025. Okay? Well, that's (19/45)
kind of a bullshit talking point 2025, but we don't have to go to there now But he is the Heritage Foundation is the main conservative think-tank We are in the process of the second American Revolution Which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be you don't hear that from the other side this idea of look We don't want to have to kill you But if you keep winning and the country keeps going your way, we will would you not agree that that is? Different I absolutely agree and look I've been an opponent from Trump from the day from day one and I've suffered professional consequences For no, I have for no I have for that for that opposition. You're here tonight. Well, that's cool That is definitely but look The point is here if we are asking ourselves how we want to best make the case against Donald Trump Constantly pressing the button that he is an existential threat to our democracy When we are here in 2024 having having an election is not going to work make the case that he was (20/45)
and Would be a terrible president and that's an effective Here's where I take Brett's point that we really all Could bring down the rhetoric Donald Trump was the one who? Who started with the divisive vile language when he went down the escalator in? 2015 he has capitalized on it. He ran on it He's benefited politically for it and our country has suffered but what he did he saw vulnerabilities and sensitivities that the American people had and he saw that they were scared and he told them lies and he freaked them out and he Made them panicked and what we need to do or what Democrats need to do is take a look at those vulnerabilities Right. Look at the immigration thing in the last two weeks All we're talking about is Donald Trump with the dogs and the cats in Springfield, Ohio We're saying that's absurd and it's vile and it's idiotic however There is something to talk about with an issue like immigration with the country changing so rapidly There are people in the country who are (21/45)
saying the country's moving so fast because the technology because of demographics and instead of saying to those People well, then you're older stupid or xenophobic or you're racist instead See where they are talk to them and actually embody love thy neighbor because you know what in Springfield, Ohio It has changed dramatically right, you know got a huge influx of Haitian migrants legally there for jobs But you also should give time and space maybe for an older generation that's saying my town is changing I want to know about this or learn about this instead of just saying just get with it. The country's moving Terrific point as you often make terrific points The way in which demagogues succeed historically is not by that they tell lies Yes They do tell us but they traffic and have truths and the problem that we've had in responding to Trump is that we listen to the lie like people eating cats in Springfield, Ohio But we don't listen to the part of the argument that contains an (22/45)
important seed of truth Which is that mass illegal migration has had huge and often negative consequences and Trump's opponents? Have to like come to grips with the parts of the message that are resonating with tens of millions of voters and Democrats will immediately Say but it's not illegal They're here legally But hold on even if they're here legally and even if that is the fabric of the United States Since our country was founded we've struggled with assimilating to immigrants whether it was Irish people or Italian people and take the Opportunity to help educate people rather than just say get with it or you're out of favor. Yeah And Look, I think as I said last week, I think the big I think he's toast I think Trumpism will go on after him They will look for somebody else as long as there is on the left people racial hysterics and Hamas lovers and extreme socialists and Gender deniers and people who want to keep the parents in the dark. There will be another Trump But this one I (23/45)
think is done. You can just feel it. I mean, here's some of the things he said this week I'm the greatest of all time Maybe maybe greater than Elvis Elvis had a guitar. I don't have the privilege of a guitar I mean, it's first of all when I think of great guitarists Elvis like, you know Clapton Hendrix Joe Walsh Elvis. It was a prop. He never even played it He also said I really haven't been treated very well, but that's the story of my life Yes born into crushing wealth Inheriting a real estate fortune that he squandered I feel like it's just at that point where they've had enough and it'll trust me The polls will be tied on Election Day But the people will get in the booth and enough of them will be like yeah I'm glad this is private because I don't want people to know I'm turning my back on him But I promise you they will I feel like there's a third of America. That's always with the Trump's they used to call them The Birchers and the birthers of the Tea Party they go by many (24/45)
different names at the same people and Then he moved it to like half the country and it'll move back a little closer to the third and we'll be okay We'll see. Yeah, we'll see but the State of the Union feds the Fed lowered interest rates So that's really good for people want to buy a house and stuff and slate Inflation is down gas prices are down crime down Border crossings way down wages are up and the stock market is at record high and the candidate said I hate Taylor Swift and The Republicans are running a black Nazi, North Carolina Dead even The polls are dead I promise you they will be and I promise you it's gonna come out of why why isn't Kamala running away? Well, here's another reason why I think It's going you can always tell when it's going south when the dippish ship is sinking is because the person like Trump then not at The center of it starts surrounding himself with I mean, he normally surrounds us with pretty crazy people but this Laura Loomer I Don't know if you know (25/45)
anything about her, but I mean this this is yeah I mean, I'm gonna go through the list of conspiracy theorists But we thought this would be a good week to get the audience to know her a little better She's the new groupie in Trump circle. That's my opinion So we do one of our favorites here 24 things. You don't know about For example, my spirit animal was eaten by Haitians My biggest fear is immigrants taking my job as a right-wing hate monger As a child I had two of my brats dolls deported I don't hate all brown people just the brown ones People think I'm all-in on Trump, but some of the voices in my head like Jill Stein Copy is refurbishing vintage lawn jockeys. I think Michael Jackson faked the moonwalking If you say Beetlejuice four times you get me. I believe the government puts something in the water that makes you pee All right, let's talk a little about the international scene the long-awaited second front in the Israeli war seems to have started this week Not just the pagers, (26/45)
but they were bombing all over the Lebanon yesterday and today Here's what Kamala Harris said this week About what we should do when the war is over No reoccupation of Gaza No changing of the territorial lines of Gaza And an ability to have security in the region for all concern in a way that we create stability I Feel like if that's what you have to say don't say anything just shut up I mean everybody who talks about Israel these days is just so full of shit I mean, we're just not you know, I don't want children to die duh who does None of us want children to die None of us want this war to go on but it's not addressing what the problem is. The problem is that one side Wants a two-state solution or at least always did it's a little more right-wing now I'm talking about Israel, but that still has been their position one side never did and still doesn't one side uses terrorism To get their goals one side retaliates against terrorism One side is accused of genocide, but doesn't do it the (27/45)
other side actually would love to do it People keep saying Israel has the right to defend itself. That's not and then whenever Israel does They object to it. Well, yeah, I mean this is one of the astonishing things about the response to the pager bombings I understand how people are Upset about the sight of Gaza being bombed They're being bombed because Hamas hides beneath and behind its own population to cynically Exploit their their deaths, but then the Israelis turn around with the most astonishingly well-targeted Attack in history like literally going off in the hands of any one any Hezbollah member who has one of these pagers and you have people like Congresswoman AOC Lamb lambasting Israel the head of the UN lambasting Israel, so they say Israel is entitled to Self-defense, but there's no conceivable self-defense that they're actually prepared to defend for for the Israelis I'm glad the Israelis are taking things in their matters in their own hand They just took care of a (28/45)
terrorist who had the death of 350 or 300 Americans on their hand going back to on their hands going back to 1983 He had a seven million dollar State Department bounty on his head If I were Anthony Blinken, I would pay the Israeli seven million dollars and say thank you for eventually the death of our Marines To Kamala Harris's response. She is in a tricky position Because Joe Biden is currently the commander-in-chief and she's the VP So she it's very difficult for for anybody in her position to kind of thread this needle and say here's what we should do Here's our plan when he's the current commander-in-chief She's in this weird space of like an improv show of like a yes and yes to what he's doing And I think we should do this. So it's especially tricky but but my question to you, it's an honest question Is she just being vague because the political equities are such that it doesn't pay to be specific Or does she simply have no idea and you know, I am an undecided Honest question to (29/45)
me because there's no way you think I'm gonna turn and say you know what Brett you're right She has no idea I'm never gonna vote for Trump, but I'm not sure I want to vote for Kamala and my fear is that she Doesn't really have a very good command of what she wants to do as president It would be great for her to sit down with you or George Stephanopoulos Or you Stephanie and get a succession as if she'd sit down George W Bush 25 years ago was asked if he could name the president of Pakistan other people He had no idea and people said this guy has no command of Foreign policy and it turned out to be a prescient set of questions. It's not too much to ask Kamala say are you for a Palestinian state if Hamas is gonna run that state? Okay, yes or no, and let's say you don't like her answer. Are you going to vote for Donald Trump? No, I'm not I just said I'm not gonna run running for perfect. She's running against Trump We have two choices and so there are some things you might not know her (30/45)
answer to and in 2024 unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people We know exactly what Trump will do who he is and the kind of threat he is to democracy Is we don't know her answer to anything, okay And that's why I would never vote for him and people shouldn't vote for him But people also are expected to have some idea of what the program is of the person you're supposed to vote for You're just not supposed to say well you have to vote for why because X is this that and the other Let's find out a little bit more and I don't think it's a lot to ask her to sit down for a real Interview I would just say to that when you move to Nirvana give me your real estate broker's number and I'll be your next-door neighbor I mean, I feel like you're the dog. We're trying to get in the car to go to the vet I Say that is one of your biggest friends, you know, I mean I gobble up everything you write I just don't understand how you get to this place. But okay, let's not badger But do you know for the (31/45)
last two weeks? I've been going on and on like I can't figure out where undecided voter where informed undecided voters are I'm like, who's the person who has a list on their refrigerator of like well She said this and he's I'm like who is this person and then I opened the New York Times three days ago I Appreciate it, but it's actually millions of Americans who Kamala has to persuade if she wants to win Including votes like mine. You might not like the fact that I'm not in the car, but if you want to Treats here Answer on real questions facing the American people on inflation immigration foreign policy basic things that we used to expect Presidential candidates could answer. Okay, then I would just say that Would you rather Let me move on to one other get off this and poor bread Steven So This is kind of interesting again, I don't think a lot of people know this I didn't before a couple of days ago when I was brought to my attention Crypto, first of all, Trump is getting into the (32/45)
crypto business. I mean right there Can you imagine Kamala saying I'm getting into the crypto business? It's just unimaginable what he gets away with Okay, so he's getting into the business with some guy who used to be in the colon cleanse business It's called shit coin But almost half of the corporate political contributions this cycle are from crypto I did not know this And now here's the thing the Federal Reserve wants to make their own central bank digital currency CBDC, I don't know what that stands for but Of course this is exactly why the people who have crypto don't want what don't want they don't want Regulation of any kind which is why it's used completely by criminals. And so it's perfect for Trump. He's a criminal But I also kind of understand why people are afraid of big governments these days I mean when Canada had that trucker strike, I mean Canada like froze a lot of those people's assets That's a scary thing Is it not when governments can freeze your attitude you you (33/45)
have money and you everything's online now And they just hit a button and you don't have any money anymore because your politics were different I mean Justin Trudeau can try to bend this any way you want. That's what Canada did and that's Canada Look I don't know about you, but I've never understood crypto is anything other than a Ponzi scheme It is if Trump wants to put all his money into it so much the better because eventually he'll lose it. Okay And here's the thing Just like his publicly traded media company ticker DJT He's not putting any of his money and he won't lose any of his money But he'll stand to make an enormous amount and you're hitting on the most important part of this crypto Crypto exchange that Trump is now involved with. Yes The old-school Trump original bros are gonna invest in this and they're gonna lose their shirts the same guys who put $1,000 in DJT stock the day it went public and now it's worth 200 bucks and true social, correct and true social You know (34/45)
these original Trump fans and they're gonna lose their shirt. That's not why you should be concerned You should be concerned with what you said a moment ago half of Trump's corporate contributions come from the biggest people in the crypto space and they realize that he is a completely Transactional guy and so they said great we could he can't spell crypto. He did it I mean, he doesn't know what it is It's like a commemorative coin. He says We should have it in America. We should do it's a as it's they don't want any regulation and Trump's like We'll get rid of the SEC chair. So they're like great. He doesn't know he doesn't care We're gonna buy him and get whatever regulation we want which is none and this idea from the American people that like Trump's great for the economy because he's gonna cut taxes and we'll have no regulation Remember it's not that no regulation is what we want. We want smart regulation. You want no regulation go drink the water in Flint, Michigan That's what no (35/45)
regulation looks like There's the other big secret about crypto that nobody talks about this bugs me so much We just had Bjorn talking about the environment all the progress that we're making with green energy is being sucked away by crypto crypto Uses eight percent of total electricity their data centers their mining this nonsense of finding a number I mean, I can't even go through the whole thing. It's a ridiculous what crypto really is That's why it's of course. This is this is like Trump's final business just before the election Of course, they'd end up in crypto. It's a grifter's paradise It's a it's a comparable to putting fifteen point seven million additional gas-powered cars on the road So as we take them off to go to electric Crypto eats it all up and goes the other way. Okay. I have one minute to ask about Mark Robinson Republicans keep nominating people like that I mean I could go through a long list of people like that who are just crazy who I mean Herschel Walker Was that (36/45)
where was that Georgia? I mean before that the you know the remember the guy with Unintentional rapes or what whatever that I think they were intentional or what he would said that When I read about Robinson yesterday and I was like, yeah, he's black Nazi and I saw on a porn site I'm like you have to be kidding But you can't expect the Republican Party to ask him or anyone else to step aside When the head of your party is Donald Trump, but don't they vet these people a little before? You went to the nominating process he is the nominee for governor Why don't you look at the porn site because Trump picked him and you know, there's the expression that karma is is a bitch but for the Republicans it might turn out that karma is a porn site chat room and That'll be that'll be a historical turn in America, you know in our Republicans they could even help Donald Trump win like a Nikki Haley, right? Is suitable to so many Brett Stevens voters, but Donald Trump doesn't want that And she meant (37/45)
that as a compliment The people participating in the new trend of fridge scaping Where you decorate the inside of your refrigerator by placing flowers and picture frames next to the hot dogs and mayonnaise Must be congratulated for their unique sense of tasteful expression. I'm kidding you people are nuts If you're going to put things in appliances that don't belong might I suggest your head and the oven? Someone has to tell Jane's addiction. You don't get to cancel your tour just because you got into a fight on stage the guys in the band hate each other and Where they don't the Rolling Stones Van Halen Guns and Roses Metallica Fleetwood Mac the Eagles the Ramones Pink Floyd the Beach Boys the Black Crows Arrowsmith is Simon and Garfunkel Hoping to catch a fight on stage. The only reason anyone's going to see these guys Well, someone needs to explain to wannabe assassin Ryan Ruth that when you're being arrested, it's not the time for a thirst trap Now that the US Attorney handling the (38/45)
case against the guy who wanted to shoot Trump is a Haitian immigrant No one has to admit this season of the election is awesome Being plot twists assassination attempts. We even killed off the main character animals we've had dogs cats geese Bears and tune in next week when Trump reveals his dad isn't an orangutan after all it's Oh We're all Scott libato the maga artist who created this painting of Kamala Harris Maniacally eating a dead bald eagle with a nuclear mushroom cloud in the background Has to put down the brush and back away from the easel. It's It's time to find some other form of artistic expression might I suggest fridge scaping And finally new rule someone has to tell me how Americans can keep becoming more alike but also hate each other more than ever I Was made to think of this recently when it came to my attention that vice presidential candidate JD Vance fucks his couch Oh, I'm sure you heard it too. It was everywhere one guy wrote it on Twitter and immediately half (39/45)
the country It was all in our hate for each other is so intense We all just immediately believe anything bad about the other side, I mean don't get me started on the reading the dogs Coming for the pets eating the dogs look I think JD Vance is kind of a giant asshole Still would love to get you on the show JD But he doesn't fuck the couch It's not in his book as the rumor suggested what goes on between a man and a pollster he's done in my business but In this case it just didn't happen But what is in that book is a much more interesting passage where Vance recalls? How at age eight he thought he might be gay? This really resonated with me because when I was eight puberty was still a few years off So I hated girls at eight they had cooties and I only wanted to be with boys Well that does sound gay So the eight-year-old Vance goes to his grandmother who he calls mama and who has 19 fucking guns Stashed around the house in case Germans army comes back I guess And he asks her if she a (40/45)
woman born in Kentucky in 1933 thinks he's gay and she says JD do you want to suck dicks? and he says no mama and she says then you're not gay and Even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you But stay away from my makeup But other than that, I feel like this is a teachable moment Maybe the Hicks are not as hickey as they used to be I know it's a cliche that the coastal folks just fly over the fly over states, but they mostly do So they're stuck in a time warp where I don't know farmers look like this But farmers use iPads now They believe in climate change. They went to college and majored in AG. It's a science to grow food. Could you do it? Are there still prejudiced people in small towns in the former Confederacy? Of course some of those places are as bad as Boston have you ever been? But Kansas last year voted strongly for abortion rights and they have a woman governor Whereas California is a state that has never had a woman governor America is (41/45)
complicated. We talk about red and blue states, but every state is purple 47% of Texans voted Democrat in 2020 Yeah, because Texas is a giant state full of people with different ethnicities Philosophies cultures and forms of shit-kicking Many rural traditions have even crossed over to become quite mainstream look on Pornhub now everybody's banging their sister I've played all the cities of the Deep South and they're not that different. They have Starbucks just like up north They've even got that thing where you can tap your card and tip 22% for no reason Sure, it sounds funny when you hear order ready for American Patriot American Patriot your decaf mocha latte is ready What's that's the thing America is a funny mixed up place now Belle Fouch South Dakota has a biker bar That's LGBT friendly and nearby Rapid City has a rooftop sky bar that sells $18 cocktails just like the assholes in LA do The Eureka Springs, Arkansas is home to a 70-foot tall statue of Jesus And it's also the place (42/45)
the advocate called the gayest small town in America The third largest statue in the whole country is in Sugarland, Texas, and it's of a Hindu monkey God Yeah, well a hundred years ago. There was a trial about monkeys in the south and it really triggered people back then But things change Nobody in Sugarland, Texas cares now about Hindus or monkey gods They don't seem to be scared by Indian Americans either. There are too many people's doctors Now the food never really caught on that's true But an Indian American is gonna be president and another one might be for the other side someday and JD Vance for all his Insanity is married to an Indian American and despite what Laura Loomer said about curry Mrs. Vance was welcomed warmly at the Republican Convention and no one but the truly deranged is thinking about curry Although that may be why the food never caught on I'm just saying it's not all bullets and mullets out there anymore. Just look at the music Maybe that's the best analogy for (43/45)
where we are culturally. I used to hate country music for a very good reason. It sucked But It changed because the people making it changed It's not some picking and a grinning bumpkin in a rhinestone leisure suit vaguely longing for the return of segregation anymore Mostly a Lot of it's good now It sounds like the Eagles in 1972 the number one song on the country chart this week is by Shabu Z Does he look like an Oak Ridge boy to you? Post Malone is a country star now and you need a bookmark just to make it through his face Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson both have the same hobby at this year's Grammy Awards Luke Combs Performed a duet with Tracy Chapman a queer black woman and no one ran screaming from the building In fact, they all loved it the big hat people and the big hair people They don't hate each other. They like and respect each other. They want to work together We can't duplicate this on a grander scale in America Why don't we just resist our worst impulses and next time we're (44/45)
tempted to be hateful and just want the other side to die Stop stop and think about JD Vance's cocksucker loving grandma She's cool with it. Maybe we're not so different after all Alright, thank you very much. That's our show. I'll be at the Orpheum in Memphis September 28th the David Capra field greater at the MGM Grand in Vegas November 1st and 2nd and watch Club Random my podcast on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast I want to thank Brett Stevens, Stephanie Ruhle and Bjorn Longberg Now go watch Overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand For more information log on to HBO.com (45/45)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #373 (Originally aired 1/15/16).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. It starts at 12 o'clock. Good afternoon. Afternoon, time will be real time. Thank you. It's great to be... We've been away. Thank you. Thank you, but I know why you're here, because it's free and you didn't win that lottery, okay? Thank you very much. I love you back. And how many saw the Republican debate last night? Or as I call it, the hateful eight. Wow, that was some hair-pulling catfight, wasn't it? I tell you this about the Republicans. They know their audience. You could not be bloodthirsty enough. Any time the discussion turned to anything about national security, they were this close to professional wrestling banter. You know, I says, when I get in the ring with you, you will not be degraded. You will be destroyed. I mean, it was this close. It's so comforting that the party of impotent white rage is also the party of concealed carry and stand your ground. I tell you, these guys love the (1/45)
Second Amendment like nobody's business. I mean, Chris Christie defended the right to own a .50 caliber rifle, which can shoot through armor in case robbers break into your house in a tank. Chris Christie was trying to burnish his asshole credentials last night. He said, Obama, we're going to kick your rear end out of the White House in the fall. Yeah, I think the Constitution is going to do that for you. You had your chance to do that in 2012. He also said Obama was a petulant child. Right. Obama's a child, says the man who needed surgery to give his stomach a time out. Christie was tough. He said he would not allow Syrian refugees into this country. He's going to keep them all stuck on the George Washington Bridge. Oh, I'm telling you, the testosterone was flowing in that room. They were all so amped up. Except, of course. What can I say about Dr. Ben Carson? The human screensaver. I mean, everybody else would talk and fulminate, and then they would go to him. It was like, and now a (2/45)
word from the International Space Station. Every time he would talk, it would take a few seconds for him to come back online like a computer that was in sleep mode. It's just sad. They asked him if he would put boots on the ground to fight ISIS, and his answer was, imagine if ISIS nuked, because they have nukes. Imagine if ISIS nuked our electrical grid. That would be really bad. He's just not really presidential material. He's more like the guy who starts talking to you when you're waiting for the bus. And amid all this, I love this. Lindsey Graham, you know, John McCain's boyfriend. Came out and endorsed Jeb Bush. I love the way the potty trained Republicans still think that they're in charge of the funny farm. It's Trump's party now, guys. Get the memo. It's Donald Trump's party, and it probably is going to be his country soon. And boy, did he stay on message last night. Donald Trump said, swarthy foreigners are sneaking into America, but enough about Ted Cruz. Well, you know, it's (3/45)
a good point. As you know, Ted Cruz, not born in this country. He was born in Haiti, the child of Satan and a dog. And when Donald Trump and Ted Cruz fight, it's impossible to know who to root for. It's like a car salesman versus a car thief. It's Putin bombing ISIS. It's like Sharnado if the shark fought the tornado. Of course, Cruz stepped in it this week. This is what he picked the fight with Donald Trump over. He said, Donald Trump has New York values. And then the cover of the New York Daily News today was drop dead Ted, picture of the Statue of Liberty, giving him the finger. Republicans, here's your New York values right here. We got a great show. Dr. Cornel West is speaking with John Krasinski is backstage. But first, as the world's leading voice on climate change, he has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Nobel Peace Prize. He's now the chairman of the Climate Reality Project. Please welcome the 43rd president of the United States, Al Gore. Thank you. Thank you. They love (4/45)
you. You could have won again. You won once. So listen, I got to know you a little bit last summer. Yeah, that was fun. You were in San Diego. You came to see my stand up show. It was very flattered. Hilarious. We talked after the show. You seem in a really good place. You seem happy and relaxed. Well, thank you. And you deserve that. Well, I appreciate that. I have work that really motivates me to pour every ounce of energy I have into it. And before I say anything else, I've got to get something off my chest, Bill. I really want to say thank you for hitting out hard and consistently with truthful commentary on the climate crisis week after week after week. No, well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's the issue of our time, as you pointed out a long ago. Well, all right. As long as we're getting things off our chest. All right. All right. In 2000, I was for Ralph Nader, and I was wrong. And I told you that in San Diego. You did. I was wrong. I was young and impetuous. And I fucked (5/45)
up. And I own it. OK. So let's talk about climate, because Obama did something interesting today. He's been denying that there's a war on coal. But he has been fighting a war on coal. He's been winning it. Great. It's a war we finally won and a war we should fight. Coal is bad. And what did he do today? Well, he did something really great. I want to start by saying that the coal miners are really addressed also in a very thoughtful way. He wants to give a lot of retraining and care about their future. But this rule that you're talking about is really significant. He put a hold on all new coal leases on public land. And this is a first. And what a lot of people are excited about also is that he's launching a process to, for the first time, require the calculation of the full costs of burning coal, the social cost of carbon, the climate costs. And a lot of people say, why haven't we been measuring that all along? It's not that hard to do. But what he did today was really significant. And (6/45)
I applaud him for it. Yeah. And you know who pays the greatest cost for coal? Coal miners. Never understood why they're fighting for those jobs. It would be pennies on the dollar to retrain them to do something that didn't kill them. Yeah, many years ago, I proposed a plan to try to retrain, get them better jobs. The late Senator Byrd from West Virginia endorsed that plan. I think that there is a way forward, obviously, because those jobs are dirty and dangerous. And by the way, they've been eliminated in droves by the coal companies automating and the rest. You know, you were ahead on so many things, not just climate change, which is the issue of our time. And you are the leading voice. But you were right about social security and the lock box. They wish they could use that phrase now. And you also were the person who did bring us the internet. And one reason why it's true, but it's true. And I tell you something, not to go back, but one reason I was so mad at you in 2000 was because (7/45)
you didn't own that. When the Republicans made that a laugh line, you kind of like laughed along with them, which I thought was the wrong tack. And you were the one who did enable that. That wasn't around in 1979. Well, on the legislative side, that's true. The scientists came up with all the ideas in engineering, of course. But some people stuck up for me. Newt Gingrich, of all people, came to my defense on that, really and truly. I really appreciated that. Well, he's a visionary. Well, on that he was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Remember, he wants to put the disabled on the moon. OK, so let me ask you again about the climate thing. Yeah. The big news this last year was Paris. It was a big conference in Paris in November. 190 nations signed on. President Obama said it was a turning point. The right wing pooh-poohed it. Is it a turning point? Yeah, I hope it is. The reason I qualify it only slightly is that it gives us the chance to really solve this crisis. It sends a very powerful signal to (8/45)
the investor community and businesses that the era of carbon-based fuels is coming to an end and that they should take advantage of one of the most exciting events in the entire history of technology and business, which is not as well known as it should be. And that is that the cost of producing electricity with solar cells, solar photovoltaic cells, has now come down so far so fast that in many areas it's now cheaper than electricity from burning coal. And in many areas of the world, that's true. And the more we expand solar energy, the faster the price comes down. We're very close to the point where it's not going to be economical to burn fossil fuels for electricity anymore. Wind is also coming down in cost. So the Paris Agreement is almost certainly a turning point because it's like the starting whistle. Let's get with the renewable energy. Investors should divest themselves of oil stocks and coal stocks, and particularly the dirty fuels like the tar sands, and start shifting over (9/45)
to renewable energy. Now there are some naysayers who say, well, these provisions in the Paris Agreement are not all binding. Some of them actually are binding, the transparency agreements. It's a start. And every nation in the world is on board with this now. And America really is alone in having a major party that says global warming is just a hoax. And I hate to bring this up, but you went to divinity school. Right? I did. OK. The reason that is is because we're the most religious country of the modern countries. And religious people don't think global warming is a problem. They think the world's going to end. Like 40% of Americans think the end times are coming in their lifetime because they want to meet you-know-who. So it's- So all I'm saying is- Well, I disagree a little bit on that. I know you will. I mean, actually, Pope Francis gave the cyclical last year. Awesome. It really was. I agree. It made a huge difference. And there are many people of faith in all the traditions who (10/45)
actually do understand the climate crisis as an existential threat to the future of humanity and are trying to do something about it. Cornel West is going to be on your panel. He's at a seminary. He's sitting there right now. There you go. He's saying, wrap it up with Al Gore. I got to- No, but there are a lot of religious people who really are helping to lead toward solutions on this. We'll agree to disagree on that, but I love you. Thanks for coming on. I'll see you soon. Welcome to home. To Al Gore, let's meet our panel. All right. He is an activist and a professor and the author of Black Prophetic Fire. He's everyone's brother, Dr. Cornel West. She was White House Communications Director for President George W. Bush. My old job. The latest novel is Madame President. Nicole Wallace. How you doing, Nicole? Thank you for coming by. And the brave man also joining us again, Chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, not my old job, author of Awakening, How America Can Turn From (11/45)
Economic and Moral Destruction Back to Greatness, Ralph Reed. Ralph, thank you for coming. Thanks, Bill. All right, remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. All right. There's a lot of important issues, but as someone who has lived in New York twice in my life, who grew up across the river, I have to ask, what are New York values? This idea that some people are just, you know, the Republicans who constantly lambaste Obama for dividing America and then create smaller and smaller circles of what really is America. Chicago? No, that's thug city. And Hawaii, part of Kenya. And LA, full of queer. Tell me what New York values are, because I don't know. I mean, I think they just became Donald Trump's path to the nomination. Wow. I really do. I mean, I think everybody that was, I'm in the 12-step program of acceptance toward Donald. I'm rounding 10, nearing step 11. I'm almost there. About Trump? On Trump, yeah. I mean, we were (12/45)
just talking about how Trump and Sanders are the front runners in each party. And if they were anybody else, no one would be talking about how, oh, Bernie can't win, Trump can't win. I mean, they have been ahead for a little bit now. And it's very likely they could win. But I think that answer on New York and the rebuttal that Trump gave made it a lot easier for people to envision him as the Republican. Well, I don't have a dog in the fight between Trump and Cruz. I'm officially neutral in the race. But it may help Trump in some places. It probably won't help him in Iowa, which is the first on the calendar. I think those are nice, though. And it wasn't nice. I mean, Iowans are nice. And there's an Iowa race here. I was wondering how long after 9-11, before politicians could goad shit kickers into hating New York again. And I guess that's the answer. 15 years, and now we can shit on New York again. Because you certainly couldn't have said that two years after 9-11, right? That's true. (13/45)
You still can't say it. I mean, I think New York is a place where tons of non-New Yorkers are all over the city all the time. So lots of people like New York other than just people I am very blessed to live in New York on 120th Street. Harlem. Absolutely. Blessed Harlem. And I will admit, though, that Brother Trump, he did tell the truth in terms of there are beautiful people in New York City. So anybody can stumble on the truth. You know what I mean? But I do think it's very important to understand that you've got Amsterdam news. You've got Daily News. You've got the New York Times. You've got the New York Post. You've got the New York City of Trump, New York City of Eric Garner. The problem with Trump is that he's a multi-billionaire pseudo-populist with autocratic sensibilities and some fascist proclivities. That's what's dangerous about it. That's what's dangerous about it. But as a politician, he is a natural. I mean, Ted Cruz. He's for real. He's just not for right. Ted Cruz is (14/45)
pretty. Ted Cruz is pretty clever, but he walked right into that trap. And all Trump had to say was, you're telling me he was a real American? You're from Canada and Cuba. You missed America twice. And you're running. What Ted failed to do was he failed to sufficiently make it clear that he was citing an October 24, 1999 interview between Tim Russert and Donald Trump in which Trump said six times in 90 seconds that the reason why he wouldn't take a position in support of traditional marriage, the reason why he was pro-choice, and the reason why he took other socially liberal positions was he said, Trump said this. I grew up in New York. I grew up in Manhattan. I'm more socially liberal. So what happened was when Ted failed to say, these are your words, not my words. You said them here. That's when he walked into the punch. Wasn't he looking also to make a dog whistle? Because when they asked him at the debate, what do you mean by New York values, he said, I think people here in South (15/45)
Carolina know what I mean. And then he went on to say, people in New York, but he also said they dominate the media and money. Who dominates? What ethnic group? I can't put my finger on it. It's the Armenians. I don't think that's what it is. It was at all. No, I don't think that's what it was at all. I think what I think what you were, no, you were. Who dominates media and money? I think Bill, get out of calendar. You're two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. They're before they're in a dog fight. And he was trying to say to people of faith in Iowa, I share your values. Now look, Donald Trump has come our way on every one of those issues on life, on marriage, on religious liberty. He's definitely moved closer to our position. We accept him at his word that he's evolved on those issues. But that's the danger though. If you had one position and you say it's going to get litigated in a campaign. The problem that Ted Cruz has isn't that he misspoke about the interview, it's that he doesn't (16/45)
have a single friend from a single stage in his life to ever back up a single thing he says on that debate. No, he's really good. He's won a technically perfect campaign. He's got a strong point. She's got a strong point. I always thought, I agree. I always thought Ted Cruz had the most punchable face in the government. Wait a second. Until I saw the State of the Union and Paul Ryan sat there behind Obama pouting like a bitch. Show this. Show this. The United States of America right now has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. Whatever. The United States of America, listen, is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. Really? You can't applaud for that? Period. Come on. You're mad at him, you've got no one. He is the best thinker in our party. I would say right now that he is right now. But wait a second. When the President of the United States says we're the most powerful nation on earth, he's like, well, I can't applaud for America as long as President Blackenstein's (17/45)
cooties are wrong. We were talking to Paul Ryan before that speech started. Paul Ryan has more bipartisan relationships and has more Democrats who've got his back than Ted Cruz has Republicans on his. Bill, all you did was show the one line. That one. No, he didn't do a lot of clapping. That one line was part of a sustained attack on Republicans where he criticized them for criticizing the same policy. He didn't applaud for cancer curing. And we've got to hold, I'm not going to show it, but Nancy Pelosi, the last Bush speech, applauded for him 33 times. Because she's not a dick. Existing a dick. He's got to get Paul Ryan on the stage. I'm going to move on. I'll tell you this. Nancy Pelosi is no longer speaker, and you better get used to looking at Paul Ryan because he's going to be there for a long time. Yeah. I agree. We shall see. We shall see. Put me in my place. We shall see. So let me get in one more issue before the break, which is the boat in Iran. We had two boats that wandered (18/45)
off course. Our fault. I think we admitted that. We bungled into somebody else's space. Ted Cruz immediately in the debate says, I would bring the full force of the U.S. military. The tweets that went out even before Jeb Bush tweeted, Our sailors aren't coming home. They need to be now. No more bargaining. Obama's humiliating weak Iran policy. What's that? They're free? Like before they finished tweeting, they were free. But Obama's Secretary of Defense and Obama's State Department said that the videos of our soldiers humiliated on their knees with guns to their head were difficult to watch. And John McCain, a former prisoner of war. I did not see guns to their head. Well, the State Department and the Defense Department said that watching those videos was difficult to watch. And, you know, the Geneva Conventions, which I know you are very fond of, call for safe passage. You say that sarcastically like they're an asshole. No, I'm for them, too, but I'm not trotting out some Republican, (19/45)
Geneva Convention like this guy. They're not trotting out some Republican set of rules. Also against cannibalism. What a little pussy. Bill, they should have never been detained. Iran currently holds Jason Razian, who's a Washington Post reporter, that they've held for over 500 days on trumped up charges. An American reporter with dual citizenship. They've held Saeed Abedini, who is an Iranian Christian pastor, for three years he's being beaten, he's being denied medical care. This is a brutal, terroristic regime. And to have them mistreat our service personnel is just a sign of their brutality. If this was before the deal, they could have been there for years and Ben Affleck would have to go in to get them out. Brother Ralph, that's right, that's right. There's never any perspective with you guys. But you have to admit that we can say exactly the same thing about Saudi Arabia. The same thing, and we would be saying it if they had artichokes rather than oil. Brother Ralph, I'm not (20/45)
going to defend the aspects of the Saudi Arabian regime, which I strongly disagree with. We want to begin tyranny across the board. Saudi Arabia did not fire medium range missiles in violation of UN sanctions three weeks ago, and they are not funding Hamas and Hezbollah, and they did not fund the terrorist militias that killed American soldiers in Iraq. That's true, but they are... They're awaiting war crimes right now in Yemen. But they didn't take a propaganda video. They're opposing the Iranians. They're killing innocent people there. They are crypto-fascist. They're a gender apartheid team among other hard workers. I need a strong word. Anyway, so listen, we just got back from our winter vacation. I'm glad you all came back. I always go to Hawaii. I just got back. Boy, are my lungs tired. That's nice, that's nice. And whenever I'm off, it's interesting because people come up to me and they want me to be their voter guide. Who should I vote for? Really, who should I vote for, Bill? (21/45)
Not me, Bill. Not you, no. Not Ralph, but I don't run into you getting high in Hawaii. But if you ever like to, Ralph... That's quite all right. Okay. Anyway, the point is I always tell them just do what I do and vote for whoever your favorite celebrity endorses. Because this year has been a banner year for celebrity endorsements. They're all coming out of the woodwork. The Duck Commander came out for Ted Cruz. Show the tape. I've looked at the candidates. Ted Cruz is my man. He fits the bill. He's got me. He loves us. He's the man for the job and he will go duck hunting. So if that's who you love, vote for Ted Cruz. So these are all real. We got a hold of a bunch of celebrities and their endorsements and their stated reason. These are really the reasons they said. These are quotes. And then we're going to tell you the actual reason they're voting for them. For example, Jennifer Lopez endorses Hillary Clinton. She said, quote, I think it's time for a woman. Real reason? She's afraid (22/45)
Trump will deport her whole family. Mickey Rourke endorses Dr. Ben Carson. Is that real? Yeah, these are all real. He said, quote, I like the doctor. Um, the black dude. Oh my God. Real reason? I don't just support this brain surgeon. I'm also a client. Oh my God. Buddy Valastro, the cake boss, endorses Chris Christie. He said he has created an environment in New Jersey that gives small business a chance to thrive. Real reason? You know I make cake, right? Gary Busey endorses Donald Trump. Busey endorses Donald Trump. He said, quote, he can change the country after the last eight years. Real reason? Gary has no memory of the last eight years. Porn star Jenna Jameson is endorsing Marco Rubio. She said, quote, he's the clear choice. Real reason? Impressed with anyone who can come all the way from Cuba. Oh, God. Lou Ferrigno endorsed Trump. He said, he's a fabulous guy and I hope he goes all the way. Real reason? Trump smash. Oh, my boyfriend Seth MacFarlane. He'll be on the show next (23/45)
week. He endorses Bernie Sanders. Who gets to that? He said, because he's the only client, the only candidate who's serious about climate change. Real reason? An old Jew in the White House. The jokes write themselves. George W. Bush endorses Jeb Bush. Stated reasoning he'd be a damn good president. Real reason? Praying to someday be considered the second worst president. And stars in the new Michael Bay film 13 Hours, The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which opened today. John Krasinski, great to see you. Good to see you too. And let me tell you something. Let me make a prediction. Your life is about to change in a big way. Really? Because you're doing this show. No, because you are going to be in a giant hit movie. Thank you. Maybe you haven't been before, but this one is. Thank you very much. America's going to love it. Thank you. And I just have to ask you before we get, because it's a very serious movie, but you've done a lot of comedy. Yeah. While you were filming it, did you ever (24/45)
have a temptation to do one of those Jim from the office, turn to camera takes? I should have. It's like, we give you the order to stand down and then you go. With a gun. That's what I should have done. I mean, those takes, I have to say, you did the best takes to camera since like the silent film era. Yes. Is that true? I'll take that. Me and Buster Keaton. You and Buster Keaton. I missed that show. Thank you. Okay. I miss it too. All right. But let's talk about this movie because it's really an amazing movie and it's a serious movie and I think it was a movie that meant a lot to you because I know your family. Yeah. You're from a military family. I am. A lot of the people in your family are in the military. Yeah. And you are concerned about the fact that we live in an era where most people have no idea what the military goes through. Absolutely. I think this is a huge issue that I certainly was more emotionally plugged in than I thought I was before. I always have supported the (25/45)
troops and like I said, like you said, I come from a huge military family. I have aunts, uncles, cousins that have served and are currently serving. So for me, I thought I knew everything that I was talking about and then you actually get to spend real time with these guys. So my guy that I play, I got to meet him. He's an ex-navy SEAL and I don't know what I expected. Maybe some guy in a trailer out in the plains with tattoos who doesn't talk to people. These are the people who were able to do this job. And no, it's an unassuming, wonderful, gentle man who's an incredible father, an incredible husband. And what it showed me was what these men and women are leaving every single time they deploy. And so when we say we support the troops, I think we need to say it over and over and over again because you can't thank them enough for that. That's true. I totally agree with that. It also is somehow true that they very often want to deploy. Yes, which is another – yeah, absolutely. And they (26/45)
go home. And this was the hurt locker. Yeah, exactly. They go home and they're in the grocery store and they go, this is not nearly as much fun as smoking a raccoon. Yeah, exactly. Waiting for stamps or something is not that much fun. No, it's a real thing. And again, what I learned from these guys, especially the special operators, is they have a bond with their team that they have made a commitment to their team and their group of friends and comrades that we all make to our families. So you say to your family, I'll always be there for you. And then you say to this group of comrades, I'll always be there for you too. And that's got to be a huge conflict to live in. So one of the questions I asked the guy I played is I said, when you hear on the news these things about SEAL teams or other people that got into a conflict, do you wish you were there? And he said, every single time. And I'm thinking, wow, he's got his family right here. And he said, because I was trained and I dedicated (27/45)
my life to make a difference, I can make a difference. And that's a very amazing way to live your life. And let's just put out the situation, because I think people's memories are fuzzy about Benghazi. It was 2012 on the anniversary of September 11th. There was the embassy, the consulate, which we know was attacked. And then a mile away, there was a CIA annex. A CIA annex. Yeah, CIA annex, which was top secret at the time. And so what it is is these – Well, probably not. Exactly. The movie talks about that, too, that there were cameras all around. There were Westerners walking in. So there's 25 CIA people there. Correct. And they hired six of you guys to protect them. Yes. These are ex-military. Right. It's the GRS. Coming back to protect them. So when the shit starts going down in the consulate, you six guys want to go help your fellow Americans. That's right. But the head of the CIA, in his compound, is like, no, because if you leave there, who's going to protect us? Exactly. I'm (28/45)
paying you. I'm paying you. Right. But you go anyway at some point. Right. Now, at some point, people are going to conflate this stand-down order with Hillary Clinton. For sure. And the thing about it is, first of all, I just want to point out that the story you just told, many, many, many, many, many people don't know. And I think that's the most important thing that we're trying to do in this movie is the politics of this. Everybody says, how did you deal with the politics in the movie? It was pretty easy because what happened that night was before all the politics. All this conversation and all these opinions happened after that night. So when these guys are taking bullets and trying to save lives, there were no congressional hearings. There were no emails. There was nothing on their mind other than the heroism. So I'm glad you pointed out the whole story because that's true. Now, as far as what happened with these guys, another thing that you pointed out is they are not, at the (29/45)
time, they were not current military. They had no obligation to go. In fact, they would have stayed safe. They could have kept those 25 people safe. And within an instant, they went anyway. And that's what's so heroic about what they did. Six guys took on the numbers or upwards of 200 people all night long. And then the stand-down order, something that's really interesting that just came out in an interview is one of the guys did say he does believe that the stand-down order did not come from all the way up top. What he does say is that the CIA director that night, the station chief, did say to stand down. And what we talk about in the movie and the way it's depicted is I think we all have to give credit or address the situation, which is it was insane. And things were changing very, very fast. So the only thing I think we can sort of bond to here is something like a car accident. In a car accident, you have to act on instinct immediately. And when someone says, how did you get out of (30/45)
it, you don't know. So to say everybody had the information and they were deliberating and deciding what to do, that's not true. And thank God these are the six guys that were there because they were – Right, because they got all the CIA people on. Exactly. And also it's interesting that Chris Stevens, the very brave, amazing American who was killed there, the ambassador, he didn't want a lot of security. No, and purposefully. He wanted to stay at the consulate. And he was offered to stay at the annex where he'd be fully protected. And I have to say, I mean, this to me is a problem I think with American thinking on both sides, is that it's noble that he did not want a lot of security there because he, hi, I'm an American, I'm your friend. But insisting that people around the world who are not like us are going to be like us. This was Bush's mistake in Iraq, was it not? They won't go on freedom. Well, freedom might not be on their top of their list of what they really want. And I think (31/45)
we saw this just recently in Cologne, Germany. You know, when all the Syrian refugees were going to Europe, I wasn't for it. And I think a lot of people are coming around to that position. No, but I think you have to make a distinction, brother Bill, between culture and morality. I think every culture has good and bad. Every culture has good morality and bad morality. Not equally. So that, for example, the mayor, as you know of Cologne, she had been attacked with a knife in her neck. That was not a Muslim or a refugee, that was just a gangster. We are not saying that there is no crime in the world except for Muslim crime. Exactly. But I just want to make a clue. But if people don't know what happened on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany and a number of other cities in Europe, some of these refugees, some of these Muslim men, and of course we're talking about men who come from very misogynistic cultures. Their cultures are not like ours. But there's been Muslims in Germany for a long (32/45)
time without those kind of attacks. They're not the ones that committed the crimes against the women. It's the brand new ones. But that's what I mean. So it's not just Muslims in and of itself, it's particular slices of. Well, it's all of them that have just come in to, I mean, they were the new immigrants. But I don't understand why liberals don't stand up for the liberal values. I'm not a liberal, you know that I'm a revolutionary Christian, brother. I ain't got nothing to do with liberals. Other than their opposition to monarchs and their protection of rights and liberties. I love that. But it's just I just want to make sure that you have a nuanced reading of the very rich Islamic tradition that has its gangsters and has its magnificent people. Well, I think, but I don't care about the tradition as much as the present. This is the worst refugee crisis since World War II. That's right. We're talking about between four and five million Syrians who have been displaced. They're living (33/45)
in camps. They're being starved out by Assad, one of the most brutal dictators in the world. I have great compassion for these refugees who want the only thing we all do. I agree. We would want for our children, which is to be safe, to be secure and to be able to survive. Here's the problem. But they also like Sharia law. This is a lot like Bill is the Marty boatlift. It's starting to look like an offloading of a hooligan and a criminal element. And in some cases, terrorist sympathizers. And I think Angela Merkel taking eight hundred thousand of these refugees without adequate vetting of who these people are is going to come back. It's not a criminal element unless you are prepared to indict the entire society as criminals. There is polling on this. A great many Muslims around the world are for Sharia law. You know what is in Sharia law. Cutting off the hands for thievery, putting women to death for adultery, killing people for leaving the religion. Women are not equal citizens. These (34/45)
are not criminal activities in a Muslim society. These are activities. So the idea that when Syrian refugees come to European countries or to America that they are going to completely fit in is a fantasy. But beyond not fitting in, they committed crimes. They committed sexual assaults on hundreds of women. Because in their society, and especially an infidel woman. That's an infidel woman. But Bill, there is no evidence at all. There is no evidence at all that the thugs and the hooligans that were committing these kinds of crimes on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany were devout Muslims. There is no evidence of that. You really cannot indict all peace loving Muslims who subscribe to that religion because of the bad actions. I'm not indicting all of them. Absolutely not. The problem is that you're indicting none of them. No. We want to indict people who are not in the way of activity. Bill, that is not a fair characterization of what I said at all. I want to ask one more thing before we (35/45)
run out of time. Can I just add quickly? That's why when Donald Trump suggested a ban on all Muslims, which I do not support. But that's why his poll numbers went up 12 points. Yes, and you know what, he's a demagogue. Of course it's wrong, but it got closer. I agree, but it got closer to what people want. This is the one issue the Democrats are going to lose the election on. Because they have to choose between demagogue Donald Trump and Hillary and Obama, who won't even say Islamic terrorism. Wow, we say the same thing at the same time. No, it's not going to be Hillary. It's going to be Bernie Sanders. I need a drink. Let me ask you that. Bernie Sanders. So Bernie Sanders is breathing down Hillary's neck. He's ahead. She's ahead. She's trying to catch up with him. Right, okay. I mean, for the longest time, people have been saying, well, I love Bernie, but of course he can't win. Now it looks like he can win, but his biggest problem is in the black community. The brothers don't like (36/45)
him, will they? Oh no, that's not true. Oh, it is. I have 82 percent of blacks. Because we don't know Bernie. Once they get to know Bernie and recognize it's true. Okay. Brother Bernie Sanders represents the politician. He's the grand exemplar of integrity in public life at the national level. He represents the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Dorothy Day. And I want to add John Coltrane too. Because the Bernie campaign is a love train. But you have to... That's what it is. You have got a lot of work cut out for you. But we've already moved. Yesterday, I was in South Carolina, South Carolina State University, magnificent institution, right? When we were there three months ago, four percent of black folks supported him. Now it's 20 percent. They're just getting to know their brother once they find out who he is. And let's just be clear about it. Sister Hillary, she's smart, she's sharp. But the word integrity is not the first (37/45)
thing that comes to mind when we hear her name. Okay. I certainly agree with that. Everybody agreed with somebody on something. I probably don't agree on much. There you go. But wanting Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee is something he and I would agree on 100 percent. All right. Well, if we have Bernie versus Trump, that's what you call a clear choice. Thank you very much, panel. 51 percent Bernie, 38 percent Trump. Is that right? That's right. I don't think so. Is that right, Sister Nicole? The current polling. Okay. All right. I've got to go to New Rule. Thank you, panel. You were very interesting. Okay. New Rule, if you tell someone to kiss your ass and they have to ask which one, you might have a weight problem. In fact, I'm beginning to think this is why Christie is so irritable all the time. His head is actually on backwards. Oh, my God. New Rule. Oh, say, can you see? Yes, I can. And thanks. This is Ciara singing the national anthem this week. She sang it great, even (38/45)
though I totally forgot which country we were honoring. New Rule, the online dating site where white people meet. Has to realize there are already a lot of places where white people meet. Like country clubs, Whole Foods, Utah, juries and Pete's coffee. New Rule, don't use David Bowie's death to sell Crocs. The day he died, Crocs tweeted, your inspiration lives on forever. Wait, so the Crocs company was inspired by David Bowie, an icon of avant garde style? No, you make plastic shoes for slobs. You want to be inspired by Bowie? Stop making Crocs. New Rule, the Oscars have to hire Steve Harvey to read the winners. Oh, sure, he'll get them wrong, but at least there'll be some black people on the stage. And finally, New Rule, someone has to tell me how it can possibly be that this fresh-faced ingenue, this forever young rebel, this out-of-control crazy person is in five days going to be 60 years old. Great, now I'm getting good for you. You're still a live applause. To those of you out (39/45)
there facing the same decade, just remember this about being in our 60s. Among old people, we're the youngest. Now on the occasion of this milestone birthday, I would like to make a request of you, my wonderful, loyal audience, which I must point out I have never done before. I don't burden the audience with my personal shit. Politically, let me prove it to you. Everybody shut the fuck up while I'm doing this. You got to talk the whole show. Politically incorrect went on the air in 1993, and in 23 years over two shows and three networks, I've had tragedies, deaths in the family, death threats, health issues, bad breakups. Speaking strictly for me, it never felt right to bother the audience with any of it. When my mother died, the last people I wanted to have to deal with it was you. And it's certainly never been your job to worry Weiss Dedmon won't marry me. It's true. Never brought any of it up. If I had a book to sell, I'd mention it a few times. I didn't badger and bore you with it (40/45)
for months. Buy my book! Buy my book! Other shows are always begging the audience every five minutes to like us. Like me. Please like me. I would never ask you to be our unpaid intern and publicity department. I'm old school show business. You're not here for me. I'm here for you. It's like when you're at a concert and the lead singer holds the mic up to the crowd. Fuck you! You sing! I pay! My point is I'm not overdrawn at the favor bank. But now that I'm 60, I better make a withdrawal soon. So yes, there is something I want you guys to help me with. And it's this. Before he leaves office, I want to get President Obama on this show. In case you don't know who Obama is. And let's just say our invitation has gotten lost in the mail for seven years. Which would be okay except for the fact that in that time, this president has done virtually every other show in the known universe. And I don't just mean other comedian shows and other opinion giver shows. I mean, Mr. President, you've done (41/45)
everything but ultimate fighting and amateur porn. You sat between two ferns and went to Mark Maron's garage and talked about your hair with Kelly and Michael and did your March Madness brackets on Sports Center. You did this show on YouTube, which would bother me even more except I'm actually a big fan of Kevin Hart. Mr. President, you went on this show. So clearly this isn't about the dignity of the Oval Office. If you went any lower, you'd be on Fox and Friends. Jesus, Sean Penn can get an interview with El Chapo, but I can't get on the president who'll talk to the lady with the green lips. So I just want to know, why not us? I'm curious. Because I would hate to think that it's that I have to always agree with you on everything to get into the club. When actually, I have been pretty damn supportive. Has a president ever had a better week than the week this president had? He's smart. He's honest. I mean, he actually did something amazing. Nobody's budget has the balls to put Social (42/45)
Security on the table. Obama did. Two women on the Supreme Court. Bin Laden's dead. Stock market at record heights. An unemployment rate that dropped from 10.2 to 5.9. The Jackie Robinson of American politics. But you know Obama. He's always cool about this shit. And what does the guy want? So what is it? Just tell me. What is it? Is it that I'm a pothead? Because you went on Zach's show and he's such a pothead, he wants lit up sitting right there. Is it the atheist thing? I know that's a political third rail to sit down with the godless, but you know what? Atheists slash agnostics slash we just want to sleep in on Sundays. Is now the second biggest demo in the religious survey. 23% of Americans. Yeah. Don't we get some respect? What is it? Just tell me. It can't be that we don't have enough viewers because real time gets over 4 million, which is a lot these days in TV. And the quality of our audience? Excuse me for saying so. Other shows. But the real time viewer is, I'm sorry, the (43/45)
absolute best. I am not just blowing smoke up your ass, although if you stick around after the show, it's been known to happen. There could be no better audience for this president. Our viewers are informed, they are engaged and they're smart enough to steal cable. I ought to know because my relationship with the audience is the relationship of my life. Kids? I don't have time for kids. I've got to rewrite this end piece. It's always where I put my energy. It's what I love the most. That's my truth. That's the way I was born. That's what my body is telling me to do. And always has. It's why I've always treated the audience like they're my friend. And I mean a real friend. I trust them enough to say things they may not want to hear. We don't agree on everything and we don't have to because friends don't leave each other over that. We even fight sometimes because honesty is love and friends don't bullshit each other. What are you booing me for? Really? Oh don't fucking start with me. (44/45)
Don't start with me. Oh fuck you with the booing. What is the booing? It's going to be rough unless you get that stick out of your ass right now. You see how much I love you? So now for my big 6-0 I would like to ask my friend the audience this one favor. As it turns out it is the policy of the Obama administration that if the White House receives a petition signed by 100,000 people in 30 days, you see where I'm going with this, they have to address it. So please go to the We The People petitions on whitehouse.gov and sign the one that just says that you, the real time audience, would respectfully like to see the president we all admire sit down and talk to the comedian you get your news from. As is our custom here in America. Thank you very much everybody. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information log on to HBO.com. (45/45)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #411 (Originally aired 1/20/17).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maughan. You could have been saying to me, oh poor Bill you got Trump for your birthday. What does every kid want for his birthday? A clown. We got to get used to it. It happened. It really happened. We Americans have a new leader. Vladimir Putin but also this guy Trump took some sort of oath today and also let's not forget that we have a new set. Beautiful. They did a beautiful job. Such a beautiful job. Did you notice things look different? That's because I'm coming to you now from an undisclosed location. I'm not even Bill Maher. I'm the new pope. Now the Trump supporters are saying this election is a reckoning and I yeah as in I reckon we're all fucked. We did it. This thing happened. They have to own it now. Let's get on with it. This transition went on too long. It was like waiting for your dog to take a shit in the rain. This sort of Damocles hanging over my head. Let's have this happen and see what (1/45)
happens. Did you see it all today? You didn't watch? Oh. Many watched on TV. I was streaming in my pants. Oh you can tell we're living in a completely new era because when he took the oath of office. Donald Trump. Chief Justice what's his name? Roberts. Roberts. Yeah thank you very much. I knew it was. It's all fading from me quickly. But he said raise your right pussy grabber which I mean right there. Trump did you know this is true. Trump used two Bibles in case the first one burst into flames. But you know then it was then it was time to make the big inaugural speech. And you know all the pundits were before he was going on were saying oh it's going to be classy and uplifting and unifying. At what point are people going to realize that there is no normal president inside the Trump fat suit. That's who it is. First of all the speech was 16 minutes long. I know that sounds short but that's over 100 tweets. And it wasn't classy or unifying. It was joyless and ugly and divisive. And the (2/45)
theme if I could find a theme was once you go black you can go back. Mic drop. And by the way for all you racists out there. If you saw that shot of the new president standing with the outgoing president and their families. The one with kids by three different women was the white one. But then it was on to the inaugural balls and oh what entertainment. They had Lee Greenwood. Kobe teeth. Did I mention Lee Greenwood. It was like night of 100 stars if 99 said no. The close the closest thing they had to a rock band was three doors down. And they were joined on stage by Dr. Ben Carson who sings under the name Two Eyes Closed. They also had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You know for diversity. And 16 year old Jackie Ivanka. She finished second in the voting for America's Got Talent or as Trump says she won America's Got Talent. Well yeah. Let's not forget amid all this hoopla that this is happening in the shadow of continuing investigations from five intelligence agencies in the United (3/45)
States as to whether the Russians were blackmailing or still are blackmailing President Donald Trump. Now as yes as to the most scurrilous of those allegations I just want to say right now about our new president. I do not believe that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on each other. I believe they did it. I just don't believe he paid them. Heather McKeon former Labor Secretary Tom Perez are here and a little later I will be speaking with our friend Keith Olbermann. But first up my producers came to me last week and they said you know you're getting Trump for your birthday what can we do to make up for that. I said could you get Jane Fonda on the show. Here's the two time Oscar winning screen icon who stars on TV's Grace and Frankie. She also co-founded the Women's Media Center and will keynote tomorrow's Los Angeles Women's March. Jane Fonda. It's good to see you. You too. Thank you. You're my birthday present. Thank you. You really are. I got to tell you. Thank you very much. You (4/45)
are. I needed that today. Happy birthday. You are the most gorgeous old lady in the world. Well thank you very much. Yes. Don't bad yourself. I know we have new furniture. You look like you're sliding. We all want to do that today right. We just want to fucking forget it. But I'll tell you something. I have never seen so many people mobilizing. Right. Everybody. People who've never been active in their lives are starting to organize and come together. I mean it's like we've hit bottom and now we're going to come up. Well it's only day one of the bottom. You know about hitting bottom. Yeah. No. Movies are always better when there's a credible villain. Who would know that better than you. You've done many movies. Yeah. No. It's true. It's true. I won't call him by his name. I call him the predator and sheath. It is true. Somehow we elected president the worst person in America. And it is going to be a category five shitstorm. But let me just separate the politics for a minute because of (5/45)
what you just said. Because you know Michelle Obama made that speech about a month before the election. Yeah. Where right after the pussy grabber tape came out. Isn't that amazing. You say pussy grabber and it's like yes that's accepted. You know exactly what you mean. Yeah because he said it. Yeah. He said it. And it always obsessed me that this wasn't a big enough. It obviously wasn't even a deal breaker. I mean for someone who has been in the forefront of the women's movement for a long time. This must be something you'll never get over. Well it was a big shock. It was a shock. I must say I felt for a couple of weeks like I'd been hit by a truck. But then I went to Standing Rock and I tell you what the best. The best antidote for. Yeah. For depression. Yes. Because you're involved. We can't stand down. We have to rise up. And you're always on the forefront of it. But I mean as far as I mean I would have thought that we would have elected a woman president before a black president. (6/45)
If you ask me in the 80s or something. It's like we haven't really moved very far. Oh we have. Listen more people voted for her right. By three million. Yeah. Three million votes. She got more than him. Yeah but but but he won white women. White women. That's complicated and I don't think we figured it all out yet. Who knows. I don't quite understand it. Well. Part of part of it depends some of the wealthy ones that had to do with money. But you have to understand it. If you don't understand it what hope is there for us. No I can't. But you know white women. You talk to them. You talk to your people what. What what it would well I but how could they get over that because I mean let's not forget when he said that thing on the bus to Billy Bush. And by the way Billy Bush has disappeared. He just heard it. He was just. OK. But the other guy gets to be present. All right. So but this was not a hypothetical. Donald Trump wasn't saying oh would that it were that I could grab pussies. He said (7/45)
this is what I do and if you recall the debate was two days later and Anderson Cooper asked the right question and he had to ask it three times. Do you do this. Poor Anderson Cooper has never been made to think about pussy this much his whole life. I'll tell you one thing. Trump should have more respect for pussies because you know because if penises could do what pussies could do they'd be on postage stamps. But you see a lot of people that on the hat a lot of people a lot of people are scared of pussy power. Yeah because when women unite I'm telling you we are forced to be reckoned with and we will unite. It goes back to Liz Estrada. You know. Yes. Right. Look at that. She has a pussy head on her head. Oh yeah. We recently learned about this. What is this pussy hat. And tell us about your pussy hat people. I don't know. But I've heard that people men and women all. And celebrities. I've seen like pictures of celebrities. Right. And if celebrities are doing something it must be real. (8/45)
Well. You know. Yeah. They can't they can't badmouth celebrities speaking out now because he's a reality TV star. Yes at best. Yeah. Yes. Anyway. Do you think celebrities help. I mean at these marches you know you will. Of course. But I'm just saying for a second because there's a whole whole school of thought that says the Trump people are saying you know what celebrities go ahead. You'll get him reelected. Enjoy your speaking out because that makes the regular American out there go why are these people who don't know anything about my life or how I. Well. Him and his fake news the predator in chief and his fake news. You know they they. Their tactic is to divide and conquer. So you know they don't want whenever a celebrity speaks out like Meryl did at the Golden Globes and gets. Yes. And gets the reaction from our president elect. I mean it's ridiculous. But you know that she hit a spot. Yeah. Pushing his butt. Well it's not hard to hit a spot. But yeah that's true. But look what I (9/45)
have I have been a celebrity for a long time. Yes. And I have and I have been told that I should shut up because I was a celebrity. But what celebrities can do is that they can bring attention to things that would normally get attention. What do you say to the right wingers who call us sore losers. Because that's the other thing that sticks in my craw. We are not sore losers. It's just so happens that we understand that. Because of climate change we don't have time to make mistakes. Right. We are facing an existential crisis. This is never. It's never you know after he was elected and people said to me well you know we'll have to put up for this for four years. We don't have four years to lose. Right. We have to fight so that they stop extracting oil and gas from the ground. That's what the 99 percent of the climate scientists say. And that's why we're speaking out. It has nothing to do and because our rights are going to be attacked. And freedoms are not sore. He's a sore winner. (10/45)
Right. So the march is tomorrow. Yeah. March in Washington and here in L.A. and all over. Right. And you will be leading it as you always have. I'm not leading it. I'm just participating in it. Well. No. OK. But you'll be there and we thank you for being there. I'll be there. And you know and another thing that we have to do we have to organize in the grassroots. We have to get people elected. Yes. Let's hope that this march there's a voting booth every five feet because otherwise it's just hot air. And we have to include race and class in everything we do. We're doing that in the Democratic side but we got to vote. We can't just talk. Jane I love you for coming on and doing this for me and everything you're doing for America. Jane Fonda everybody. Look at this. All right. Very exciting. Yeah. The way we're moving everything closer. Is there a water slide? Yeah. We're going to be closer. We're closer. All right. Let's meet our panel. He's a presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize (11/45)
winning author of American Lion. Andrew Jackson in the White House. He's on our show. John Meehan is over here. He is the president of the public policy organization called Demos. Heather McGee one of our favorites. This guy lost his job at noon today. He's now running for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. He was the 26th U.S. labor secretary. Tom Perez. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's over time so you can answer them after the show on YouTube. OK. Jane mentioned global warming and I wanted to start with that because you know this is our 14th year somehow and we don't take it for granted by the way. We do not get complacent here. We're happy to be here and we're happy with our new set. Thank you. You've been on as long as FDR was president. Right. That doesn't mean I'm going to die in Warm Springs tomorrow. But one thing I've always tried to do is not bury the lead. Now I know today we inaugurated America's last president. That's a very big story. But (12/45)
the lead this week is 2016 hottest year ever beating out the last winner 2015 which beat out 2014. You see a trend. And here's the most alarming thing I've ever read and I've read a lot about this subject. Heat extremes were especially pervasive in the Arctic with temperatures in the fall running 20 to 30 degrees above normal. You know two is a lot. So I would say this. And of course the first thing Trump did was take down the climate change Web site. You know government whatever it is. But you know in some ways he's a different kind of guy and he doesn't agree with Republicans but when it comes to basic Republican ideology about turning Mother Earth into a toxic unlivable shithole in the name of improving quarterly profits he's right on the page. And she's right. That's the most important thing we have to keep in mind. Yes absolutely. And that's what happens when he tries to install and we'll see if he gets confirmed. But the CEO of Exxon as the secretary of state it's a guy who's (13/45)
made it his job to try to sue the EPA as many times as humanly possible to head the EPA. And it's just a sort of sell off of American assets. And our children are watching and the world is watching. And it is honestly the scariest thing that's going on right now. Well there's a pitch. Bill there's going to be a lot of hot air coming out of the White House so you may see global warming increasing in our nation's capital. There's a pitch battle among our former cabinet. Now that you're out of office you're warming up. You're warming up those speaking fee lines. You look at all the cabinet appointments and you look at what happened day one. You mentioned global warming and taking climate change off of the White House website. They immediately went into court in Texas in a voter I.D. case that I filed when we were in the civil rights division because Texas's voter I.D. laws were all about one and one and only one thing making it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote. And we won (14/45)
that case. And now they've walked into court today and asked for a delay. And the reason they want to delay is they want to change their position. Also you know the theme of his speech today was you the little guy. That's who this is. He shit on all the presidents there to be out of these assholes. They didn't do it right. They're all inside Washington. I'm here for you. And then I read. Can this possibly be right that his cabinet is worth the same as the bottom third combined of all Americans. These are the people who are going to stand up for the little guy. It is a Koch brothers cabinet. Is it not. I mean that's what I mean by and by taking you know by taking down the Web site and by questioning the science as he's done. You know he's basically we inaugurated Baghdad Bob. Right. You know missiles. What missiles. You know. Yeah I remember that guy. And it's just it's the triumph of opinion over fact. Right. And not particularly informed opinion. Well some of the people you know when (15/45)
you look at the list you started to talk about this. They're they're just when you see just to undo the department they now had. I mean Rick Perry could not even mention. Remember remember the OOPs guy. Remember the Energy Department and his reward for that is he gets two headed. And the labor guy hates labor and the education lady hates public education and the health guy hates health. It's and after railing against Goldman Sachs for the entirety of the right pain. Right. Well he installs Steve Mnuchin. Right. A great CEO who foreclosed on a 90 year old woman who got her paperwork mixed up and was twenty seven cents short on an insurance payment. I mean it's unbelievable. And he still gets to go out there and market himself as a populist. One of the problems though is it's not unbelievable because there was no difference between the June 2015 performance and today's performance. That Prescott the one press conference he had in the transition which was his second infomercial. Right. (16/45)
You know where he was selling the vodka again. You know it's just not a character is destiny. Character wills out. There is no if anyone says pivot or double down again they should be taken out and executed. Can I. Yes. I mean we all agree on this but I think it's time to stop fretting and start fighting. And that's what Jane said. And that's that's that's what today is about. Because but this character destiny you're a historian. I'm very interested in this because we know what his character is. Is there any way character is ever not destiny. Because when I think of Donald. If you asked me to say one word to describe Donald Trump that word would be id. Yeah. And some I've known people in my life like this very few but they're all hid. There's just no mechanism to not be juvenile and react immediately based on just id. And the it's the exception not the rule is your character when you come in is going to be magnified not transformed. Couple of examples. There's one or two examples. (17/45)
John Kennedy learned on the job from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But by and large who you are today is who you're if you're sworn in is who you're going to be all the way through. And at a certain point you have to take them at their word and their actions speak louder than than their words in many cases. And with Trump I mean the idea of the character is destiny. We didn't just make that up. The Greeks did. And they've been thinking about it. And so that it's been a reality throughout civil. So what is going to happen with someone who is consumed by vendettas. Because whatever they've thrown at him so far. You can answer this better than anybody. You were in government. It's going to get much worse. Once you are the president it comes at you every day. It's the criticism for someone who cannot take criticism. And it's going to be all criticism from all sides. What is going to happen. Well that's why we have to stop fretting and start fighting. That's why you know the (18/45)
Affordable Care Act has all the power. I don't agree with that Bill. OK. But they have Congress. Nukes. Nukes. Did I read that right that Rick Perry just learned that the Energy Department controls the nukes. He thought he was going to go lobby for the Texas oil business. And just found out that he's actually in control of the most deadly arsenal in the history of mankind. I wanted to go to the meeting where Ernie Moniz explained to him what a centrifuge was. I thought that would have been very interesting. Reagan used to say that the scariest words in English language were I'm from the government and I'm here to help. How about I'm Rick Perry and I'm in charge of the nukes. I come out of the civil rights movement the labor rights movement and I think we underestimate the collective power of we that we have because I had the privilege of going with the president down to Selma a couple of years ago to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights (19/45)
Act that followed was all about ordinary people who did extraordinary things. And everywhere I go across this country I see people who have you know they were in a crouch after the election but they have gotten up and they said I'm fighting mad and I'm not giving up. And that's why you see rallies on the Affordable Care Act. I hate to be the historical guy here but that is it is absolutely true that the sacrifice of countless people whose names we don't know people like John Lewis Hosea Williams the martyrdom of Dr. King they put it they made it possible but it did take a president to push that legislation through. Well it also took a Congress and I think it's important for us to not let Congress off the hook right now. That president pushed that Congress. Without Lyndon Johnson that didn't happen. I'm not actually arguing about the past but right now we've got a Congress many of whom you have to remember that the Republicans were leaving the Trump campaign like rats from a sinking (20/45)
ship a month before the election. There were never Trumpers in the Senate in the House. And where are they now. They have put love of power ahead of love of country. They have. And time and time again. I mean you guys are all talking about policy and government. I'm just talking about there's a crazy person who I mean if I if I could. Yes if I could send him one thing it wouldn't be anything to read because he doesn't read it would be that song shake it off because he just never knows how to just shake anything off and I'm just saying everything is going to get derailed by that. But I must interrupt because I did want to point out here in our 14th year 14 years. We always try to listen to the audience as to what they like that we do. And we started something many years ago called America's stupidest state. And the we had brackets. People love the brackets. The five finalists Alabama Utah Kansas Texas and of course Florida. Sorry Tennessee. You made it off. And then we did America's (21/45)
craziest congressman and we had people like Louie Gohmert and Steve King and Michelle Bachman and we had a lot of fun. So we thought because we're getting used to a new cabinet we would try now. Trump's craziest cabinet pick and see if we could. There's 16 of them just like in basketball. Our first matchup comes from the whack job conference. A clash between two uniquely unqualified candidates Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Labor Secretary nominee Andy Puzder. Puzder sounds like a nickname for penis and sure enough he's a real prick. He's the CEO of Hardee's and Carl's Junior or as your bowels know him the cleaner. Puzder is best known for crass TV ads featuring near naked models eating burgers and says they're a reflection of his personality. And he says why have Chick-fil-A when you can have Chick-fil-A'd. Don't start. And Andy Puzder isn't going to be one of those namby labor secretaries who spends his time worrying about laborers. He's against raising the minimum (22/45)
wage against paying overtime even against giving fast food workers breaks. He's afraid if he lets them use the bathroom one of them might try to clean it. Next let's reach into the bottom of the barrel and scrape up Tom Price a man who thinks abortion is murder that gays shouldn't get married and that this mustache was a good idea. Tom is a congressman and Trump's picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He caught Trump's eye with his lifelong dedication to denying people health and human services. He's a member of a crackpot doctor's group who hate all forms of public health care claim abortion causes breast cancer and HIV doesn't cause AIDS which could be proven or not by a little experiment I call then you fuck Charlie Sheen. As for the promise of draining the swamp Tom name your price once bought stock in a company that makes hip implants and a week later introduced a law to benefit companies that make hip implants. Which used to get you nominated for prison but (23/45)
this year everything is different because if the crazy doesn't get all over the place it don't belong in your face. All right he's a special correspondent and host of GQ's The Resistance and he's our friend Keith Olbermann is here. So Keith you're right there I know we have a new set. You're remembering the old set. Well next week you're going to have another new set now apparently. So what do you think about how the liberals are doing? Here's someone liberals look to. How do you think they've reacted so far? Actually I am I am twice as encouraged now as I was this morning and I'm encouraged because we have managed to do something that Americans can uniquely do politically to great success today. There was a protest during this inauguration or coup d'etat whichever you prefer. But the protest was ideally suited for 21st century America. The motorcade coming back from the installation of the Russian puppet involved a car going down streets and there was nobody lining the motorcade. It (24/45)
was sitting room only and there's a shot of him at the White House in the car outside the White House and a barricade with fewer people behind it than greeted me on the way in from the car. So consider what this means. This means that in 21st century America we can protest Donald Trump by not doing anything. This is the 21st century American political system. Don't tell them that or that's what they'll do. In some cases it's more eloquent than I mean which was smarter doing it that way or breaking windows at Starbucks for no reason. Now I'll give you punching the Nazi in the face today. I'm not a fan of gratuitous violence but that wasn't gratuitous so I think it has a place but breaking windows at Starbucks is meaningless. But I think what we should do is start doing what the Tea Party did in 2010. Fight. Fight. Fight at all times, interrupt everything. Every day you scream Russia. Every day you scream corruption. And you remind every day who won the electoral vote again. You did not (25/45)
get a mandate. And when John Lewis said he was not a legitimate president I assume you're on that page. I am on that page because he's not a legitimate president. I would agree with that but he is the president. I mean it's one of those you have to keep two thoughts in your head at the same time. I do have a president. We are still Americans. He is the American president. I agree he didn't get there quite legitimately. Here's the thing I think we're underselling how the non-legitimately part of this works. Oh not me. I agree. But I spoke to a group of Democrats and liberals last night in Florida and half of them were like this crowd fired up and understanding we were invaded is what it boils down to just because there was not blood on the streets. If the Russians had come in with Cossacks and put him in I think we would have had a different kind of reaction to it. That's the reaction we need now. What I saw last night was a lot of people hooting and hollering correctly and getting (26/45)
fired up and going we're going to resist this in every way possible and other people going you really think it's that serious? Yes I do think it's that serious. It's the same thing. It's the point of a war other than to gain territory is to put the guy you want in charge of somebody else's country. And we're now only debating at this point after the story in the New York Times yesterday how much the Russians decided our election. And we came up with a timeline we want to show you here to maybe illustrate the point about Russia and the connection with Donald Trump. Here's 1946 to 2015. Trump knows nothing about and gives no shits about Russia. That's 46 to 2015. And then we move to February. Okay 2016 Trump begins policy of consistently fileting Putin publicly wherever he can. Come on move on. Trump hires Paul Manafort who we know had amazing connections with Russia. Trump staffers soften language in the platform about defending Ukraine. Moving on to WikiLeaks releases DNC emails. Trump (27/45)
encourages more Hillary hacking. And of course Trump says maybe U.S. should lift sanctions against Russia. So it does look like I'm not saying he's a Russian puppet like you say but he's acting just like one. He's acting exactly like a man who they do have a P tape of. It's an academic question. I mean for historians for historians it's important whether or not there is a P tape but because he's behaving as if there's a P tape it doesn't make a difference. Somebody will get a PhD in comedians. That's the sad part. There are businesses that will really benefit from Donald Trump's election and we happen to both be in separate branches of the same one. And I'll give all of my money away for it not to be the case. That million dollars that I gave to Obama to prevent Mitt Romney from being president I would give to Mitt Romney tomorrow if he could be president. I'll match it. And if I know Mitt Romney he would take it. They're calling you right now. Right. Okay so he's not a legitimate (28/45)
president but if we keep saying that does it do any good? Yes because it crowds it begins to we have this has to be approached psychologically in terms of what's in the public discourse on both sides of the oh no you're fake news and we're real news. No no we're fake news and you're real news. To dominate this one of the ways to do it is to as you were talking about before the buttons present themselves they're almost self pushing buttons so we have to push the buttons on him personally make this as unpleasant personally for him since that is what decides everything he does. So every time you see a tweet sub tweet him swear words send it right back at him and if he doesn't see it somebody who supports him will ruin their day. It's a psychological war and the other part of it is to keep what we know is true which is we don't know if it was treason or espionage or violation of some of the Logan the Logan Act language we don't know which it was if the best case scenario is they violated (29/45)
the Logan Act and and we're busily rewriting foreign policy long before this man was in office that's the best case scenario just keep mentioning it every day that's stealing from the Tea Party that's using their weapons taking their hammers out of the conservatives the Republicans and the Trumpians and hitting them over the head and chasing them to hell with it. We don't seem to have a Trump defender here today. To go to Keith's point about the legitimacy argument today a man was inaugurated who came to national prominence questioning the legitimacy of the man he was man hugging all the way down to the helicopter. My own view when I saw that the Trump's brought the Obama's a Tiffany box which looked like a silver frame was that I hope they put the birth certificate in the frame and put it in the library. Somebody said that was they're giving they were giving the former first lady her speech back. So I will not sit here and have our president maligned like this. Oh yes I will. So I (30/45)
want to ask about the Supreme Court. Now I'm on record for the government functioning. It's good for property values. But when Justice Scalia died Mitch McConnell reached into his ass and pulled out a piece of paper that said you know apparently the presidents are supposed to get to pick the nominees with someone dies while they're in office. But that's just the Constitution talking. So I mean if there's any way the Democrats can block it. Ted Cruz said there is certainly a long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices to which I say great I'll race you to one. Well well we should not. There can't be two rules. There can't be this thing where the presidents pick and we each get a turn. That's out the window. This is where the Democrats have to I think start doing what they did. I mean three quick points on that bill. Number one if the choice of cabinet picks is a bellwether of what they're going to do on the Supreme Court Katie bar the door which is why number two (31/45)
Democrats have to be strong. They still have the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees and you shouldn't hesitate to use it. And number three you've got to look back to Robert Bork. That's why we've got to tell the story. A woman's right to choose is at stake. Dark money. The continuance is at stake. When Robert Bork was nominated six Republicans ultimately voted against him. And so that's why we've got to nominate someone who's way off to the right. We've already seen it. Let's not fool ourselves. But even if they don't Obama didn't. Obama nominated Merrick Garland. He was a centrist candidate who many of them were before before Obama nominated him. And they just kept up with their idea from day one. We're going to obstruct everything. And until we get back to a place where both parties are playing by the same rules I'm sorry but the Democrats I think have to do that. They have to be at the risk at the risk of it. At the risk of total total self parity. We need to go back to the (32/45)
federal Judiciary Act of 1789. You don't have to tell us about that. Republicans. All right Republicans love original intent. Right. The first Judiciary Act gave us six justices. Thomas Jefferson raised it to seven in 1807. We've only had nine since U.S. Grant. So if you really like the way it was way back then. Let's go to seven and see what happens. And we'll vote them off the island to take the theme from the president. And make it into a show. OK. But on that score. Justice apprentice. That's right. But on that score of Arnold Schwarzenegger can be in that too. Right. No no John's got the John just did the beautiful voice. You're not nominated. That's not bad. It is. As a reminder Donald Trump is still an executive producer on that show. Yes absolutely. OK. Well don't bring up the worst thing about him in that show. Don't embarrass the man like that show does. But that's interesting because I didn't I didn't realize that it wasn't always nine justices. But there are some things (33/45)
that haven't been around that long and we treat them like they are. One of them is the Department of Education. It's only been around since 1980. So I'm not 100 percent sure we need a Department of Education. I know we need good education. But how did we get along with it all the way up to 1980. And it seems like education has only gotten worse since. I'm just saying I would have more respect. I'd have more respect for Betsy Devos who obviously is just a billionaire nincompoop who had a month. Obviously didn't know anything about the Department of Education. She had a month to bone up on it before the hearings. Couldn't even do that. OK. Well I would have more respect if she just had got up there and said I don't think this department should exist. Well that was what Ronald Reagan wanted to do. So their hero wanted to get rid of it. It started under Carter. He wanted to get rid of it. And by that time as happens in Washington you know as President Reagan also said the closest thing to (34/45)
life on earth is a federal program. But I'm just saying looking at the bright side there is something to fresh eyes even if they're sometimes ignorant looking at shit. Not everything has to be there just because it always was there. Fine and I have a fresh idea for education. How about debt free public college for all. That's the direction we need to be going. And you've got someone who's sitting up there has never had any interaction with public schools whatsoever. You've got Wall Street folks walking into pretty much every level of government who want to continue the same system of student loans for everyone. Can I ask one question about I understand each of these candidates is horrific and has been designed like antimatter. You're in charge of the Department of Education. Make it disappear. Right. But let me look at it in that big sense. I quote John Cleese the great John Cleese who said as he was filling out this that this looks like his cabinet and his departmental heads. It looks (35/45)
like he's outfitting a pirate ship. You don't need more detail than that. They're all there to take as much money out than something they'll catch Trump in something that the Republicans have to bail out on him. They will have to impeach him and we'll get we'll get a bad amoral President Pence for a while and then vote him out in 2020. Yeah. I mean the plan. The other nautical metaphor I spent an hour with Trump in May talking about books he had read it didn't take an hour. You just talked for 59 minutes. It was very brief. Yeah. But it was like interviews up at Trump Tower and it was like interviewing the admiral and Mary Poppins you know he was shooting off cannons you know and he was totally in his own universe and that's where you know is going to continue to be that way that he has this bubble and it's going to be very hard to penetrate because of Bannon because of Flynn. He said he wants missile parades. Oh God. Missile parades. I mean he's done so many third world things putting (36/45)
his kids in charge not separating from the businesses you know jailing opponents but missile parades. This is one step from him wearing the uniform. Yeah. Yeah. With the fruit salad and really this is this is speeches on the balcony. He's going to back down. He's going to pivot from that. He's going to pivot from that so that the missile parades will only be when Putin is here. So I just feel like we are it's true spending a lot of time talking about Trump and his character but right now is actually a test of character for the American people. It really is. I am actually encouraged by it. I think we need to all remember that 27 percent of the voting eligible public voted for this man. That is it. The rest of us are organizing the march tomorrow the women's march. They're going to have 50 in other countries one in every single city. The one in Washington is going to be the biggest march that's ever been there. What did you think about Hillary showing up because I mean look I would like (37/45)
to say to Hillary. Thank you for 30 years of service. And now I never want to see either one of you ever again. I think I'm glad they showed up. I mean that's that was that took grace to show up. But I think what it really takes for the American people right now really I'm going to put you in jail and then you show up. Well but it's a statement in the world that you know what we're going to show up here and I respect that. But what I respect even more is what I'm seeing across this country Bill. I mean we're going to have more people in Washington tomorrow than we're there today. I have no doubt about that. There's no doubt about that. And we can have this conversation and I agree with everything we've said but I Donald Trump we continue to underestimate him. You know I hear people say he's going to be impeached in 18 months. I actually don't believe that. And that's why they're going to overreach immediately. Well that's why we need to organize the way he set up America in the speech (38/45)
today as this horrible wasteland. And people believe that. Well it's not true. I was then whatever he does. Look look I fixed it. You know and he could just do what he did with buildings. Put his name on it and take credit. Look what ISIS has wiped out. Well it's mostly wiped out but he'll stand in front of it and take credit. I was infrastructure. Look I finally got infrastructure done. If only the black guy had thought of that. Well he did but they wouldn't pass it. When he said when he talked about carnage today I found myself confused because Barack Obama inherited carnage unlike anything we've seen in our life. And the unemployment rate was heading to 10 percent. It's now down to 4.7 percent. We have 20 million more people insured today. That carnage he inherited he fixed. We got more work to do. Thank you. Next week it's going to be all Trump supporters on the panel. But for now thank you everybody. But it's time for New Rules everybody. New Rules. All right New Rules stop saying (39/45)
Toby Keith at the inauguration meant Trump is in touch with real Americans. It means he's in touch with drunk Americans. Toby Keith has a song literally entitled Drunk Americans. Which sure is my plan for the next four years. He also has recorded Get My Drink On, Get Drunk and Be Somebody, Loaded, Chug-a-lug, Beer For My Horses, Beers Ago, Cold Beer Country, Rum Is The Reason, Whiskey Girl, I Like Girls That Drink Beer, I Love This Bar, Every Time I Drink I Fall in Love, Drinks After Work, Red Solo Cup, Walk It Off, Clancy's Tavern, and Nights I Can't Remember, Friends I'll Never Forget. I guess what I'm saying is say hello to the new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire. New Rule the pollsters who found that nine in ten Native Americans are not offended by the Redskins name must next poll gay men to see if they're offended by the Packers. New Rule you can wear your faith on your sleeve all you like but you're not a true Christian until you've bought the Jesus Christ (40/45)
cheese grater. That's right it's real because as I've always said what better way to express your reverence for the Lord than by forcing mozzarella through his face. New Rule artist Alexandra Rubinstein does not have to explain her new painting entitled Thank You Obama. We get it when it came to women the man put in a lot of hard work but it took me eight years to get him on the show how'd you get him to pose for this? New Rule stop trying to make me feel sad that Ringling Brothers is shutting down. Good don't let the door rip you on the way out. Now let's build a wall with Quebec to keep out Cirque du Soleil. Circuses should have died years ago if I want to sit in a tent and be bored I'd go camping. If I need to see a clown torment a dumb animal I'll rewatch old clips of this. Finally New Rule here on Inauguration Day in the interest of new beginnings liberals have to stop calling Trump voters rubes and simpletons and instead reach out and feel their pain. The pain they insist we (41/45)
didn't see and there is ample evidence for that pain. Did you know that of the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person they all went for Trump. Trump won 80 percent of the states that have the biggest heroin problem and the counties that he won in Ohio and Pennsylvania that went for Obama last time are the ones that are racked by opiate abuse. So let's stop calling Trump voters idiots and fools and call them what they are fucking drug addicts. Now if that sounds like I'm actually not reaching out I promise I will. But first I have to get something off my chest about this phenomenon of white conservatives on drugs and the numbers are phenomenal. West Virginia was Trump's best state and in the past six years folks there have down 780 million hydro and oxycodone pills. That's 433 pain pills for every person in the state. West Virginia's mascot is a dilated pupil. In Wisconsin another key Trump state between 0 8 and 2014 heroin deaths nearly quadrupled. I (42/45)
never thought I'd hear myself say this but kids don't do heroin. It's a gateway to being a Republican. And the thing that sticks in my craw about this is that for decades it was us liberals who were accused of destroying the fabric of society with our drug use. Remember the country anthem from the hippie era that put the counterculture in its place. Merle Haggard oaky from the Skokie. We don't smoke marijuana in Miss Skokie. We don't take our trips on LSD. Yeah. Today Miss Skokie population 38000 has nine drug treatment centers. They should change the lyrics to we don't share our needles in Miss Skokie. We don't mix our smack with PCP. Somewhere along the line things changed for the real Americans in the heartland who were always chastising us for undermining patriotism by being stoned all the time. Well who's stoned all the time now. Not us. We've moved on to kale smoothies and an occasional craft beer. Meanwhile you've got meth mouth and are taking your dog's arthritis pills. Live (43/45)
free or die. More like press down and twist. But I'm not saying Trump voters that your pain isn't real. I mean it isn't but I'm not saying that. Because if this election has taught us anything it's that anything is real if enough people believe it is. And the good news is if the problem is drugs well hell there's something I can help with. If it's one thing I know it's how to manage a high. I'm doing it right now. You Trump voters are stoned. Please. We liberals invented stone. This is common ground. We get high and bid a thousand bucks for a Beatles lunchbox on eBay. You got high and ordered a president from Moscow. But that's because you're new to drugs. So let me share a lifetime of wisdom and experience in getting fucked up. Things like don't mix pills and alcohol. But if you do oxycodone goes with white wine. Don't drive on pills. Call Uber or Lyft and have someone on pills drive you. This is very important. Always have a wingman someone to say cool it or you shouldn't drive or (44/45)
don't put that in your mouth. Woody Harrelson once pulled me away from a long conversation with a Christmas tree I swore was Elton John. Also very important you're doing the wrong drugs stick to this stuff that comes out of the ground. Jesus 90 percent of you are farmers. You grow fertilize harvest eat and for all I know fuck your own crops you never thought to smoke them. And most important ignore the asshole across the bar who keeps staring at you. That's a mirror. All right. That's our show. I'll be at the Pope Joy Hall in Albuquerque New Mexico. February 12th on the road again. Oh I'm back at the Mirage in Vegas March 10th and 11th. I want to thank John Meacham Heather McGee Tom Perez Keith Olbermann and Jane Fonda for overtime on YouTube. Great to be back. Thank you folks. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand. For more information log on to HBO dot com. (45/45)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #486: Adam Schiff, Bernard-Henri Lévy.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill maul Appreciate you putting on a brave face because I you made it through a whole week of the national emergency and Yeah, because of the invasion coming up from Mexico We have to do our part on the home front. Have you see salsa say something? so Donald Trump Dealing with the emergency spent the week golfing golfing and poop tweeting And you know, I was afraid this was gonna happen It's getting a little close to home for me now because he's now starting to threaten comedians He was very upset about Saturday Night Live last week. And he said why isn't there retribution? What the fuck does that mean? Retribution for comedians and Alec Baldwin now who plays Trump Of course as he now fears for his family's safety and they were scared enough already being Alec Baldwin's family so And of course Trump Somehow he has the time dealing with the national emergency to be tweeting about Jussie Smollett or Smollett I don't (1/46)
know how to pronounce that but he was Jussie report I was charged with a felony for filing a false police report because if there is one thing Trump cannot abide it is a self-serving liar And of course of course Fox News Loves this story, of course because it proves their stupid theory that racism is a hoax They're saying five Fox News that the mainstream media isn't covering the Jussie Smollett store Isn't covering up seven just died in a stampede But you know Jussie he wanted to raise his profile so he allegedly paid two men $3,500 to assault him for being black and gay something he could have gotten for free in, Texas I love Texas And the two many hired allegedly were Where at least one of them was an extra on Empire? Jussie what were you thinking never give the extras lines? My right show people No, this totally destroys the previous image. I had of Jussie Smollett, which was I don't know who that is But We don't want to come down to our Jesse. You're probably feeling pretty bad (2/46)
right now. Don't beat yourself up Less than 48 hours. You've got a host the Oscars No, no host this year Oscars are Sunday No host because a host might say something interesting and we can't have that in America and next year to be safe. No presenters You just grab the Oscar with your name on it scan it and bag it yourself There was not getting there was talk this year I'm not getting about this of trying to have as the host of the Oscars a robot a robot. Is that crazy? Well, Ryan Seacrest turned it down. So don't worry. I know why you guys are happy Bernie Sanders is in declared that he is Not quite the way you were last I hope you still like him. Anyway, he's a socialist and a lot of the party has moved toward him I mean the big star of the party Alexandria Ocasio-cortez She was a Bernie supporter and is right on his page. People are saying wow. What a dream ticket. That would be the 77 year old Jew And a 29 year old former bartender that For socialists, that's a dream ticket in LA. (3/46)
That's a third marriage I Love Bernie they asked Bernie about AOC and he said that's where I get my email. So he's And no the boy what a what a day of scandals are Kelly today indicted on 10 counts of aggregated sexual abuse Prosecutors say the evidence is so overwhelming. He was named Archbishop of Philadelphia And also You know who got caught today Robert Kraft, you know who that is He is the the owner of the New England Patriots charged with soliciting prostitutes at a Florida massage parlor Rubbing tug a billionaire. Is that a rubbing tug in Florida? Man, he won six Super Bowls. He needs more happy endings You know, I Always knew the Patriots were cheaters But what an excuse Robert Kraft says he was just deflating his balls Claire McCaskill and Rick Wilson are here and a little later. I'll be speaking with philosopher and author Bernard Henri-Levi But first up he is the US representative for California's 28th congressional district and chairman of the house Intelligence committee. (4/46)
We're hoping he will save us all Adam Schiff ladies I know why you like to do our show you get to sleep in your own bed. That is true Okay, that's true. So you put out an open letter today I read it interesting stuff and it's funny because I was gonna ask you about this because I assume you do talk to Republicans after hours now, I know when Obama was president they complained he didn't socialize enough with them Do you socialize with them? Do you talk over drinks privately? We do socialize and and certainly there are a lot of private conversations Where they will express their deep fears misgivings About this president about his lack of ethics about his base Okay So you you're saying in this letter you want them now to do that publicly what you're saying over martinis you want to hear Publicly, you know people will stop me in the corridor Republicans and say keep doing what you're doing Really, you know even senior Republicans which of course would be heresy for them to say publicly I (5/46)
Don't need private Confidences misgivings anymore. We need public statements. We need people to take a stand We need people to vote their conscience, you know that the president now You know has declared this unconstitutional emergency I mean, it's hard to make a weaker case for an emergency than the one he's made where Congress has Deliberated for months about this Congress has rejected his proposal Congress has come up with a bipartisan Consensus instead on something else and this for him is an emergency. Well, it's it's a complete and run it's an attack on the principal power of the Congress the power of the purse right if Republican members won't defend their own institution What hope is there that they'll defend the judiciary or any anything else in our system So what makes them fold because I see them all the time looking like they're gonna be something that guy Kennedy from Louisiana John Kennedy was good for a while Lindsey Graham was good for a while Mitt Romney Richard Burr (6/46)
who is the counterpart right on the Senate committee? Yes He seemed like a normal guy for a while this week He said, you know, we've looked at the evidence. We don't see anything that would make us think the president was involved in collusion. I Think Trump is a blackmailer What what what what does do they have pictures of these guys with a duck or something? What? What makes these guys wilt like that? You know, he's still popular in their base and they're terrified of having a Trumpist primary challenge and that I think cows them into Silence, but but you're right. It's It's inexplicable Why be there? What's the point of being there? Why do you aspire to be a member of Congress if when the country really needs you you're missing an action that you know The statement that some of my colleagues have made there's no evidence of collusion For example, you might as well say there's no evidence that the president is dishonest Hello Do you hear the words coming out of his mouth? The (7/46)
evidence is all too all too plain, you know the Everybody's waiting on pins and needles tonight because there may be a document dropping in the Manafort case Well, if you look at just the Manafort case Here's the campaign chairman meeting with someone believed to be associated with Russian intelligence Offering polling data and apparently not a top line. Here's why we think Donald Trump is going to win but raw data Why is that being provided to the Russians and why are they lying about it? and why is Roger Stone lying about his contacts with the publishing arms of the Russians or Guccifer to which is Directly of the GRU. Why is Flynn lying about his contacts, you know these and a hundred other Communications why all the lies why all the obstruction why all the Russians? Why is every day I hear Kalimnik and dyspravia and the Talagav gate? I Never heard these kind of names before and when you when you talk about the corruption that every Thing that the Trump name is associated with is (8/46)
being investigated the Trump organization Right the Trump charity was the Trump University the campaign the inaugural Well, I mean I read today in the New York Times that or I guess it was yesterday that he went to the He asked Whitaker who was the temp attorney general for a few months asked him to put a Somebody who knew was a supporter in charge of the Cohen investigation in New York in the Southern District Now isn't that itself obstruction of justice? Well, it certainly looks like obstruction to me I mean he's trying to handpick someone to put their hand on the scale or protect him is you know He wants a Roy Cohn in the Southern District of New York, but but you know Here's another thing that just to me is so telling about how this president has dumbed down our moral standards You have two attorney generals the last two attorney generals Matt Whitaker who auditioned for the part by going on cable news and saying This is how I could privately cripple the mall investigation and then (9/46)
Bill Barr who basically auditioned the same way both of them Refused to commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers Is it so much to ask that the top law enforcement officer of the country? Would commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers, but apparently that's no longer part of the job requirement And that is a a sad day in America, but it's also Part of why they were chosen but part of why they were chosen if Bill Barr Was going to commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers. He would have never been appointed And this is where we are and and this bill is why I Wrote this letter to my Republican colleagues, you know every day bit by bit drop by drop. We see our democracy evaporating and You need to look at the cumulative total of all this And how much damage is being done? And I think my colleagues have to ask themselves Why am I here if not to defend this beautiful system we have and Speak out and act out and act my conscience and and whatever my voters do, you know, (10/46)
I always tell my constituents The job of a member Congress is not to get reelected. It's to do the right thing and still find a way to get reelected No one who needs to hear this is hearing it That's the problem. Do you get invited on Fox News? Yes, you do I do and I go on Fox from time you go Sean. How did he invite you on? Oh, he invites me a lot You don't go I you know, I used to go you should go go That's who needs to hear your message. You know, I thought you weren't invited. No, I am invited. I am invited. Please go You liked me I do but but I like America too you got to get in the bubble man Well this bubbles this already sewn up we got these here's the thing here's the thing about Fox News and there are credible journalists some on Fox News, but but Just trying to think of something About the audience that's listening to it. No, I at least I would hear the argument the the the challenge that we face And I think this is the cross-cutting challenge of all and it's demonstrated by (11/46)
Fox News is we now get our information from such different places Right and and people live in their information world my point if there had been a Fox News When Richard Nixon was president there would have been no Premature end of his administration, you know, my favorite anecdote my favorite anecdote of Watergate is Because this is so Trump Ian you could imagine Trump doing exactly the same thing When the tapes were revealed and the White House didn't want to give out the tapes and didn't want to make the public didn't want To give them to Congress they came up with a solution. We'll give them to James O Eastland right this old Democratic senator right and we'll let him tell the public what's on them. Well, he was notoriously deaf, right? You could see Donald Trump saying this but the difference between then and now is if Donald Trump proposed that today. Mm-hmm Fox News would say that's a brilliant idea. That's a brilliant idea And and people who want to live in that way. You gotta (12/46)
go there man. All right you you I will go great for you I appreciate My last question You know, I always ask myself how the Republicans can abide by the fact that this president Okay, attacking the Democrats we get that but he attacks the institutions of government He attacks the FBI the CIA the Justice Department This is unbelievable to me and I was trying to think how could he get away? Why do they put up with this but then I thought you know when a Republican attacks government that goes back to Reagan Reagan famously said something like the the scariest nine words in the English language or I'm from the government and I'm here to help Hahaha when you lay that groundwork that the government is evil to begin with that they can do no, right? Yeah, 40 years later Trump comes along and he says the FBI is crooked people buy it you think that's what it is You know, I think that what Republicans admired about Reagan was not just his ideology Which was very clear But the fact that he (13/46)
projected a sense of decency and a sense of optimism I Remember feeling as I watched our president in Helsinki say I believe this guy Vladimir Putin over my own Intelligence agencies. I thought to myself Ronald Reagan once said I didn't leave the Democratic Party the Democratic Party left me well The Republican Party has left Ronald Reagan, right? There's nothing left. Yeah about him in that party There's no decency in the leader of their party, right? There's no integrity. There's no optimism and Donald Trump's Republican Party America is a victim. I just came from Munich where we had this security conference and where the speaker led a delegation to do our part as article 1 to Convince our allies that that we value NATO that we value the European Union the transatlantic alliance And you know our allies have profound questions about whether they can count on America anymore That's the legacy of this president that was not Ronald Reagan's legacy. All right congressman Adam Schiff look (14/46)
for him on Fox News everybody Okay, here they are he is a Republican strategist whose New York Times best-selling book everything Trump touches dies will soon be in paperback Rick Wilson, Rick, how you doing? She Is the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and co-author of for colored girls who have considered politics Donna Brazil is over here And she's a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC in the former Democratic senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill Okay, so I read yesterday that Donald Trump is trying out nicknames Because you know little Adam shit just doesn't happen you got a it's amazing with all the national emergency go I got he has the time but I saw I watched his speech in Miami. We're talking about Venezuela He used the word socialist socialistic or communist or communistic 34 times and That I have a feeling whoever is the nominee of the Democratic Party that's going to be the nickname That is what he is going to do. You are a commie and not a good one like my (15/46)
buddy Kim Jong-un Or the ex KGB guy who I love so much. I mean a bad copy like Woody Guthrie, you know So what do the Democrats do about that because Bernie Sanders is in the face of the party is AOC now They're looking more like a socialist party. What do they do? Oh First of all, we ignore Donald Trump because in a couple of weeks, you know, I didn't work out too good last time No, well last time we paid too much attention to him But but we ignored the people who listen to his lies and his bullshit this time I think it's important that the candidates go out there and they talk about the issues and look my mother used to say it's not What they call you is what you answer to we're answering to the American people who want to lower prescription drugs We're answering to the American people who want to deal with climate change And if he wants to get out there and call us a bunch of names, guess what? He's a juvenile What do you think I think I think we've got to realize that there's five (16/46)
states Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan Florida and Pennsylvania that turn the election that turn the election and we've got to make sure that whoever is nominated understands those states and Speaks to the people in those states and if we get carried away with some Ideas that are great for our party, but probably not gonna get 60 votes in the Senate We need to stay not on the macroeconomics, but maybe on the macaroni and cheese issues, you know, like, you know How can I send my kid to college? How can I afford to retire? Well socialism answers some well, but not not that's not the answer I think that people in those states are gonna be comfortable with maybe not especially older voters They probably like the program's but not the names We gotta be careful the names names matter you said famously when you were running only a year ago You said I'm not one of those crazy Democrats, that's correct You're running in Missouri where Donald Trump won 57% of the vote It's amazing a Democrat gets (17/46)
elected at all there. What do they think? When they hear what is a crazy Democrat to them? Why do they think Democrats are crazy? Well, I think the crazy I was referring to We're not the Democrats that fought with me shoulder to shoulder to try to fight the tax cut or to pass the ACA Or to do all the things we did as a Democratic Party when I was in the Senate the crazy Democrats I'm talking about is the state senator in Missouri who actually put on our Facebook page that Donald Trump should be assassinated Well, this is a bad idea this is yeah, this makes us look very very bad or the people frankly who go in restaurants and Get up in the face of someone and scream at people and I think What we've got to do is get back to realizing that how we appear matters and we need to he's bad I mean, he's got 53% approval in my state, but not in most days. Oh still right now So we've got to go after the issues that he is failing America on he's failing our farmers You didn't forget about that (18/46)
whole middle of the country One of the things that Democrats need to do in 2020 is to point out that although Donald Trump is gonna go out and run this thing. Oh the the creeping socialist horde right now He's paying farmers seven point seven billion dollars. Yeah, it's a stupid trade war Yeah, so how's that socialism taste to you guys out there in the Midwest, right? I mean, this is a guy who's doing damage to them every day and there is a point that I think Claire's point Claire's point is correct. The Democrats can walk themselves into a box very easily They they seek death all the time politically and so yeah, it's important for them not to like lead with the commie stuff It's important for them to and and that doesn't mean you don't get to call Donald Trump that doesn't mean you don't get to like slap him down that he's a he's a Bankrupt broke-dick idiot, but this is a guy It's gonna drag it's gonna drag Democrats Whether they like it or not He's gonna drag them into that whether (19/46)
they like it or not if it's and if it's you know Look if it's a female candidate, she needs to say right off the bat. Yeah, you're gonna call me a bitch anyway So let's get to it, you know, they need to have some fight in that dog It needs to be smart the issue set needs to be smart and highly targeted, but they've got a fight with this guy They've got to show voters that they have some passion and some energy and not just on the like I am so excited about climate change voters don't respond to that. They responded back being told I'm gonna fight for you I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna do something for you your family your kids your your job That's meaningful and important and they don't I'm a change is meaningful it bill It's but to the average voter out there they rank it but that's what leaders do they convince Yeah, I get you I live in the world of actual The mechanics of it though the jobs in the economy are always gonna be high Okay voters A to B bread and butter matter, but if (20/46)
Democrats run the same kind of bland Poll tested driven campaign guess what? That's what you get up in shit We're not going to get people excited about voting in 2020. We have to mix it up We got to put a little Trinity a little rule I agree with your base though. Your base that was so jacked up Your base is gonna come out and vote against this some bitch no matter what Well, you're gonna have to get some people in places like Florida and Ohio and Pennsylvania, Michigan Who are those like male deer hunting Democrats? Well, I'm prediction we have four hundred and fifty two candidates running the one that gets the nomination will inspire people That will happen It will be an inspirational candidate because they're gonna have to fight through a hell of a crowd to get the I've got to say One last name bill and I know it's black history month. So I get a little extra time I'm so over top of that face. All right, we good. All right We're good. All right But what concerns me is that we keep (21/46)
talking about getting a 270 and what happened in? 2016 is that we bypass so many people and trying to get the 270 that we forgot that we have people in the middle of The country they want to hear from Democrats. They want to hit common-sense solutions. And that's what we that's right And that's why I just stick up for the environment for one second because I hear this every election It's like well, you know the environment it's very important. But if you talk about it, you're gonna lose voters They don't care about that Listen to Accuweather predicts at the total economic loss to the state of California due to the wildfires Remember those a few months ago we had here will be four hundred billion dollars 400 billion dollars. So when Republicans say, you know, oh you want to switch over to to renewables? How are we gonna pay for that? How are we gonna pay for this? and you know People really do die Because of climate change they really do and this cancer used to be one in a hundred now (22/46)
It's like one in three right? There's an insect apocalypse if the bees go the food goes I mean, I know this is something that liberals cheer on but everybody a leader is someone who takes that message That's what Republicans have always been good at. Oh the people don't believe that we don't care. We'll make them believe that Oh, they like the public option give us six months. They'll hate it. Right? That's what Democrats have to do. Absolutely Okay, next issue while we have a few minutes before Jesse Smollett or smaller. I've never heard of this man. I'm so sorry. I'm just see I'm sorry. I'm mispronouncing the name Look, I'm not defending him. But it seemed like when Trump does it. It's called truthful hyperbole. You don't have to be But it seems to me that what it said about America is that there is nothing as powerful as a victim and That is a big problem in this country. He wanted to be a victim He just didn't want to you know, go through all the steps. He wanted to raise he wanted (23/46)
to raise he wanted to raise He wanted money. That's what he wanted. He didn't want no one wants to be a victim of hate crimes No one wants to be a victim of Of being attacked and brutalized because you're gay or you're black or you're Jewish that's bullshit He wanted a pay raise and he wanted to bring attention to himself. I'm angry with him. I'm upset with him Now in the city of Chicago apology, there are real-life victims out there today and I refuse to shut up because he played a Terrible game and it's painful I feel like we've gone from this place where now I hear people say victims should be believed Victims should be taken seriously. Absolutely right victims should not always be believed take you seriously Absolutely, that's a big difference, but we seem to have skipped that step as we always do the problem is for so long Bill victims weren't taken seriously, correct? You're looking at somebody who's been a lot of time in a courtroom prosecuting sex crimes I mean a lot of time in (24/46)
a courtroom and We have come a long way But there is still in this country a problem that many victims are not taken seriously So if we're gonna have due process We can't just blanketly believe anybody who comes forward with any allegation But if we take them seriously and give them due process, that's what happened here They gave him right took him seriously and they investigated it The investigators did a great job and they found out that he was you know up a jerk And I think though it speaks also build up to the way our society is siloed into these two camps now There were a lot of people in the Democratic side who immediately were tweeting and oh my god This is the most horrible thing in the world. They nobody waited on the Republican side There was everybody at the minute. It was turned out to be this thing. It was all hate crimes are fake This is no this isn't real We have got a and you're right everybody has a chance to be listened to and heard they can tell their stories and (25/46)
you know As painful as this episode has been you know, the system kind of worked Yeah, he got listened to and unfortunately for him. He got listened to in a way that proved that he was There's still a lot of women out there. No, I'm not That's why this is such an awful case. That's the problem It's also an awful case because it immediately gives a lot of people on the Trump faction This this sense that you know, oh, they're all fake. None of this is real These are all just these are all just you know contrived things, right? Well, no, you know what Pittsburgh? Wasn't contrived. No, no That's sad part of it is that Fox News will dine out on yes I always do because another problem we have is Americans love the anecdotal, right? Yes one story as opposed to a lot of peer-reviewed science Meanwhile, we have another Maniac out there assembling guns and weapons to try to yes Journalists and right and we're gonna get to that. I'm gonna bring out Bernard in a second We're gonna get to know but (26/46)
I also just want to show one other thing I saw Jesse's Interview with Robin Roberts. Yeah. He's not a good actor All right, let's bring out our mid show guests Our mid show guest he is a philosopher human rights activist and author of the Empire and the Five Kings America's abdication and the fate of the world, please welcome Bernard on really be For a long time me too really me too don't say that here I didn't do nothing So good start as you see so many things I love about you one of them is that you love America and I always wonder why because you are Well, because you are a public intellectual which we don't have in this country And we are very America is a very anti intellectual country. What do you love about us? You don't live here? That's what it is. No, I have an Announcement for you. Oh you do America does not equal Donald Trump. No, no One man in America who believes that America equals Donald Trump This is Donald Trump himself, right except him from outside All right, (27/46)
America is much bigger and yes more lovable than Donald Trump. So why don't your countrymen feel that way? I mean you you have said France was built upon the hate of America What I explained in my book in this book is that we have two friends. We have the France of Lafayette of de Tocqueville and we have the France of the fascist the old Fascists from the right and for the left who hate America those who hate America in Europe Are the first the fascist thinkers they hate the idea of a country based on a creed They love roots soil race and so on and they hate this a Strange idea of a country based in the sky of ideas, which is also America, but what happens when we become the fascist? When we become I'm talking about America now, I mean, I I worry that this country is becoming something unrecognizable I think we all do I heard on the show every day I know that's why that's the reason why I wrote this book Right in order to say to my fellow countrymen and also to Americans Right, there (28/46)
is an American Creed and American Exceptionality which is again much bigger than this Epiphenomenon Who is Donald Trump Donald Trump is nothing Donald Trump is an ape. Of course and look how I listen to program rather often. Thank you. Look at that. This is a democratic red basis This is a democratic poll. Yeah, this is more America than this crazy But I know I mean you are unlike a lot of people in Europe unlike a lot of people in America you want America to More involved. Yeah, you were for involved in Bosnia Kosovo Libya Syria you think we should have got in there and I think a lot of us here in America think wow We have not had a good experience with that. We haven't handled it. Well, it always seems to be clumsy It always seems to be too warlike Whenever we get involved, it seems like it's with the army. No, whatever you we the West don't get involved It is a disaster Syria A 400,000 deads million of refugees sure and then a country completely emptied the void of his substance due (29/46)
to Non-commitment so, you know, of course we can decide this but then we have to take our responsibility When we don't commit when America is unfaithful to its own DNA it There's a void and someone will step in Russia China the people you Russia Turkey the great Democrat MBS the man who cuts 14 pieces these guys when you receive they push on the pool They they push this is what is the situation? What do we want? Do we want the world? To to be shaped really I believe that for my children and my grandchildren and even your children and maybe your grandchildren No We have already election shaped by Vladimir Putin you had an election Yes, and we're shaped by they're doing it again. We have we might have one in France. What's going on every day I read in the paper about the yellow jackets in France. It started out as a protest against high gas prices I think and it seems to have morphed into something darker with elements of anti-semitism Why does everything in Europe wind up being (30/46)
something involved with anti-semitism? In Europe and also sometimes in America. Yes, our Pittsburgh Remember all these millions of Twitter's that preceded and followed as bad as election of Donald Trump Let you want a competition between America I don't like this sort of cut. No. No there is today what is true And again, it is I don't want to make too much advertisement, but it is a topic of my book there is Wave and tide of populism Populism means also is the nickname a gentle name for fascism therefore for anti-semitism and this wave is Going wiping off all our countries the West Europe America Of course Russia, which is a fatherland of this of this Populism the place where they they're poppetized marionette eyes this populism So we have that everywhere and of course anti-semitism in the climax of this Populist trend and it's absolutely normal that we have it But it would be absolutely normal to resist to to face and to contain it and we don't do enough it Alright one more thing I (31/46)
want to quote you on because I think we see very eye to eye on social media and you said Trump and Zuckerberg two blades of a pair of scissors cutting the fabric of truth to ribbons I really believe that He's Donald Trump it is No, it is now. It is Donald Trump This man cannot speak in any other way than by Twitter and when and I see all the new this is very strange all The commentators they wonder in one case. Why did he react immediately about? This actor who pretended to be Immediately and for the Hassan story. Yes him. I Listen to your colleague Colbert yesterday. Okay was saying what happens he Donald Trump does not tweet when Donald Trump Does not tweet it is a national event therefore Event so Donald Trump is Twitter Twitter is on Trump I want to get back has to be aware of this news Twitter. Yes, not my face But I don't know who it is. No, the boss of the Twitter has to know that now, I'm sorry I like them so little that I don't even know I Want to people who missed this story (32/46)
Christopher Paul Hassan, I think is his name. He is a coast Coast Guard officer Okay, he said things they found an arsenal first of all And by the way, remember Caesar Sayoc that was last fall This is the guy this was did almost the same thing a guy who is a big Trump supporter The new one Paul Hassan says he wants focused violence to establish a white homeland He was studying the methods of the Unabomber the Virginia Tech killer and other mass killers He wants to says upset that Democrats might illegally impeach Trump So he would like to kill them first and he wanted to kill almost every last person on earth He is known as a moderate among Republicans So Poor grand old party poor Seriously poor Republicans, but Trump this week again talking about the press as the enemy of the people and you know How many times does this have to happen before we realize that you know? These guys are the son of Sam killers and he is the dog that they are listening to And he they asked him about it said (33/46)
he said they said did you think your language affected this he said No, I don't think so. I think my language is very nice But but his language is very nice but language can kill yes It's not very nice, which we have to be aware of Worlds can be like bullets. Yes worlds. Well, they like bombs That's what I'm saying. Is it people? Too much when you say too much that news the newspaper is the enemy of the people when you say too much after Charlottesville that there is evil and good on the two sides when you say that too much it gives And to those who have the guns, let me read one more quote Roger Stone Roger Stone who was in court this week He had said back in August of 2017 you try to impeach Trump Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country a politician that votes for it would be encouraging Their own would be endangering their own life. Yes, you know this these words have meaning So weird about this is why is this so hard for him? You know why I mean here's a guy (34/46)
who's arrested that Clearly wanted to kill a lot of people whether you like the people he was gonna kill or don't like them You're president the United States Why is it so hard for him to look at that and by the way, it would be so reassuring to Americans all Americans I don't care if they're Democrats or Republicans if he would just clearly say this is outrageous, right? I'm proud of law enforcement for finding the guy Please don't kill your fellow Americans, right? This is this is 101 for the right supremacy is bad The secret of this is there's a metric in Donald Trump's mind all the time and that metric is do they like me or do They not exactly and he think guys like that like him. Okay. That's why he doesn't say anything about that That's why he was he has a disease. It's called malignant narcissistic personality disorder I've said this before every Every article that you read about Donald Trump should begin with President Trump who suffers from? malignant because this Nothing else (35/46)
explains that explains. It's why he's a traitor. It's why he's this way just like you said It's only if you like me or you don't it's why he's loving up on Kim Jong. Yes Exactly loves up on Putin all of it. Okay, I really think about that image again. I know Are you all you three Catholics I am kinda kinda so we have yes no one maybe okay Well They found themselves in the news once again, and I thought we had put this to rest I how naive I was from well not to rest, but I thought things had gotten better I mean it was first hit the news in 2002. That's when the the child abuse scandal really came to the floor We are apparently still at the convincing them It's a problem face because the Vatican is having a big conclave now kids stay free. No, I'm joking And and The problem is that they see first of all, I it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that the Pope who is You know, he has more power than anybody in any institution. He's the Pope Cannot just do it because the bureaucracy (36/46)
apparently is so do what? Stop it to clearly say we're what this is exactly what he's doing to be honest I know you're prejudge. I'm a fan of the show. I know what you think My pleasure J against religion. You're right. I am prejudge against religion This is exactly what he's doing and what is happening now in front and honestly except a very brave Initiative more than others, but he's got the order still We're still of the victims some of the survivors of the abusers to put all these people together and to liberate the speech What would be brave would be to say call the police It is he's still not saying that no They are still treating it as a sin and a sin is forgiven and a crime is prosecuted The state of this summit is to say to the bishops to say to the bishops now You will have to call the police. This is the The thing I'm not a Catholic as you may know women Catholic women priests Or just married married priests I'd be adults fuck other adults The difficulty of having an (37/46)
institution that's a couple thousand years old and feels like it is a it is not accountable to Temporal power it has taken a lot to get them to this point But they are in a moment of crisis where this has become so much of the Catholic Church's brand That that I think it's an existential crisis unless they handle this You're not going to ever have people that weigh the the good of the Catholic Church the hospitals the orphanages that all the things They do in the world But you will never have people weigh those factors because it will be the image of the brand will be They allow priests to molest children and they don't take them to before law enforcement if they do that if they do adopt a doctrinal policy where priests and caught in you know with with with a child Automatically gets sent to into law enforcement's hands great I think they could do themselves a huge favor by that But I do understand there's like a momentum problem inside an institution that thinks on you know 150 250 (38/46)
350 year timeframes Yeah, look it took over what what 350 years 400 for the Catholic Church to acknowledge Galileo was right Galileo Galileo was right. Sorry about that and 2,000 years the church takes a long time to reform itself I look I remember as a child sitting in the back of the church during the segregation period and they didn't apologize But when I went to first Sunday, I did go to church now. I'm a Catholic faith with church you go to St. Mattress She's laying your ass in bed and think oh no no Oh, I was raised Catholic our Lady of Mercy and there was none Apologize he apologized, you know our Cardinal in DC was the frog Cardinal McCarrick Who I really grown up in DC is a 21 year old and this is the big event The dismissal of McCarrick is the big event. Yeah. Yes. It's it's yes You're right. They are making some progress. But first of all, I'd also like to tell people I don't think they understand this Celibacy does not go back to Jesus. Okay. Okay. It's a fact, right? It (39/46)
only was my reading of the Bible was only in the 16th century that they said this is what how we do it So they have they have they have to become Jews again. They will break with chastity with celibacy They will marry and they will have a normal life and they will stop to be Pedophobic and pedophile both because I go together the homophobia Yes, yes, of course. No homophile homosexuals are not pedophiles. That that's that's correct. That is correct We can't make no no the you can't mix those two. I agree which had a few pedophiles and homosexuals No, I there are a lot of homosexuals in the Catholic fires, right? It's two different things All right. All right Okay Okay Your old Donald and Melania Trump must be thanked for proving providing the answer to the question. What is the opposite of raw passion? This is what a kiss looks like when both parties say hey watch my makeup You rule no saying you're humbled if you win an Oscar on Sunday That's not what humbled means be handed a gold (40/46)
trophy and told you the best of everybody is exact opposite of humble The only humbling moment an award show ever had was when la la land won best Oscar and then they pride the award out of their hands New rule someone has to examine all the babies born last Tuesday morning and make sure none of their souls were stolen by Karl Lagerfeld. I Don't believe in the afterlife, but I've seen 11 Halloween movies and there's no way this guy just left New rule yakali de Roma the woman featured in these artsy photos Breastfeeding her four-year-old must either be celebrated as a progressive feminist icon or arrested immediately And what is it with these kids these days think they have to post a photo of every meal? New rule don't feel bad. If you can't keep up with all the Trump scandals. It's like Lucy at the chocolate factory At first you thought I can do this and then the scandals come faster and faster And faster Until the only solution is the guzzle vitamin a bedroom in And finally new rule (41/46)
if Bugsy Siegel could invent Las Vegas out of a desert stopover for GIs Amazon can turn Nebraska into the next Silicon Valley as As I'm sure you know by now Amazon has scrapped its plans to build a giant headquarters in New York because the city balked at Giving the richest company in the world a three billion dollar tax bribe So Amazon took their ball and went home which I guess explains this t-shirt But herein lies a chance for Amazon to show the world that a tech company can actually do good We have a problem in America called spatial geographic Inequality which means that the most affluent and educated people are clustered in just a few cities Last year Hillary Clinton said I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product I won the places that are optimistic Diverse dynamic moving forward. Yes, you did and maybe that has something to do with why Trump voters are Obsessed with owning the libs because the libs own everything else The blue parts of (42/46)
America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red Feels like their invitation got lost in the mail and they still use the mail They turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities. There's no Real Housewives of Toledo or CSI Lubbock There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you who are you wearing because the answer is always target There are two Americas and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are Where people drive Tesla's and eat artisanal ice cream? We have orchestras and theater districts and world-class shopping. We have chef Wolfgang Puck. They have chef Boyardee Our roofs have solar panels theirs have last year's Christmas lights We've got legal bud they've got bud we have anal bleaching they have congressman Steve King The flyover states have become the past over states That's why red state voters are so pissed off. They don't hate us. They want to be us. They want to go to the party It's like we're the British royal (43/46)
family and they're Meghan Markle's dad How do I know this because? How do I know this because 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to Amazon for the company to locate in their area all desperate for jobs that don't involve guarding prisoners or murdering chickens and Amazon pick two places that didn't need them at all places where prosperity already was Bezos you're worth 130 billion take one for the team Stop playing cities off against one another and help a dying one come back to life I know this sounds like a pipe dream and it's true. I was smoking a pipe when I dreamed it But if liberals are serious about winning elections, they have to start recolonizing the parts of the country. They've abandoned Mississippi is the poorest state in the country Amazon could buy the whole state and rename it. I'm a zippy If we keep leaving the red states behind they're going to keep getting angrier and crazier Because if you're not invited to the party the next best thing is to throw a turd (44/46)
in the punchbowl As opposed to what happens when Amazon moves to West Virginia People get better jobs that don't give them black lung The locals meet people of different races and backgrounds and sexual orientations None of whom kill them they find out gays don't ruin anyone's marriage, but they do improve the karaoke scene a Yoga studio opens up then an art gallery a gym that admits women Then one of those trendy bars where inside looks like the outside Asians come and open a Chinese restaurant and then Jews come because there's a Chinese restaurant And before you know it there's legal weed and decent health care and the schools are teaching science again, all right That's our show. I'll be at the Sanger theater in New Orleans At the Mirage in Vegas April 12th and 13th, I want to thank Rick Wilson none of Brazil Claire McCaskill Stay tuned for overtime on YouTube. Thank you folks You catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on (45/46)
HBO on demand for more information log on to HBO comm (46/46)
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Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #565: John McWhorter, Rick Wilson, Rep. Elissa Slotkin.
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher. It's nice to see so many familiar masks. I think I know why you're happy today. We are in the yellow zone in LA, Kelsey. That is. We're in the yellow zone. It's good. It means that soon all Californians were able to do the things that all Californians want to do, like eat in a restaurant indoors, visit a museum, run for governor. The things all of us do. Now we did, hey, a little pat on the back for us. We did good out here. Los Angeles County has had several days now this week without anyone dying from COVID. Although quite a few were crushed to death by their Peloton treadmill. I just have to. Do you have one of those? Wow. The Peloton finally relented. They're recalling 126,000 of these treadmills. Apparently they're dangerous to small children who can get sucked into them. And also to parents, because they create the illusion you can run away. And we don't want that. Uh, but you know what you (1/46)
cannot apparently run away from. Did you see this? There's a friggin' 23 ton Chinese rocket booster. What are you doing this weekend? That's coming down to Earth this weekend. You know, the people, countries send up satellites and shit, and they, you gotta send them up on a rocket. This thing is 10 stories high. Usually I guess they just orbit. This one's, no, going into what they call a uncontrolled re-entry this weekend. China said it's very unlikely to cause any harm. And I believe them because after all, when have they ever let something get, oh, there you go. No, go on to the next joke. They're way ahead of me. They're way ahead of me. That's a good crowd. Even up to finish that joke. But it is Mother's Day Sunday. Are you excited about that? And you know, there's always a heartwarming story about spawning on Mother's Day that I never find heartwarming. This week, guess what it is. This week in Mali, the country of Mali in Africa, a woman gave birth to nine babies at the same (2/46)
time. Take that, Octomom. Octomom tired. Mali wired. Nine babies. Mom is resting comfortably. Dad walks straight into the ocean with his clothes on. Nine babies, wow. And for Mother's Day, Hallmark has a special card they made for QAnon moms. It said roses are red, violets are blue. You're the best mom. Biden eats babies. I, QAnon, I have to tell you, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the problem in the Republican Party is not going away. It is not going away. Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, you know, I was pretty much against this guy nine years ago when he ran. Now he's like the voice of moderation. Went to Utah, where he's a saint, to make a speech. They booed him off the stage. This is like Lindsey Graham getting booed on Fire Island. I mean, and Mitt Romney, he said to the crowd, aren't you embarrassed? And they were like, we're 300 pounds. There are crocs on our feet. We're wearing a Trump flag as a cape. What do you think? No, they are, the cuckoo wing is in control. Liz (3/46)
Cheney, another one. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney. Could you have deeper Republican roots than Liz Cheney? She's about to lose her leadership position in the Congress because she will not embrace the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. And the Republican Party truth will set you free from your job. Not really a joke, but a fine idea. Was totally not expecting a laugh there. Thank you for not giving it to me. Would have just encouraged the writers. But you know, the problem is that Trump is still out there, and he's got a new platform, even though he was thrown off Facebook again. Facebook, by the way, this week, they voted. They had a big conclave there. They were going to keep the ban on Trump for another six months off Facebook because, you know, in the next six months, they'll probably change. But no, Facebook said if Trump wants to spread his misinformation and his propaganda, he's going to have to buy ads like everybody else. And finally, a little sad (4/46)
news in the marriage department. I guess you heard about Bill Gates and Melinda Gates. They are getting divorced. That is the exact appropriate response to that. But you know, they lived in a 66,000 square foot house. It's so hard to keep a long distance relationship together. And you know, they were having problems. And Bill Gates said they were having problems connecting. And he called his IT guy in, and he said, they just weren't compatible. All right. We've got a great show. We have Representative Alyssa Slotkin and Rick Wilson are here. But first up, he is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. His new book is called Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter of Then, Now, and Forever. You can find his commentary on substack.com. And I don't mind saying he's one of my heroes. John McWhorter is over here. John, I mean that. We don't touch anymore, John. I'd like to touch you because I'm such a fan of yours. I must tell you. It's good to hear, Bill. Oh, I am. I hope some of (5/46)
your friends, or mutual friends, have told you that over the years. I admire you so much, not just because you're a voice of common sense, but it takes guts these days to be a voice in common sense, I think. I suppose. I don't think of myself as brave, because what I really am is a failed lawyer. And my issue is just that if things don't make sense to me, then I just want to try to make sense of it, and I want people to understand what I mean. And this is the thing. If you are a good black person, you're often told that when it comes to certain race issues, you're supposed to not quite make sense, and that you're supposed to deal with a certain kind of word magic. I have never felt it. I've always thought I'm black, and I would like that to make sense too. And that's why I end up looking brave, when really, I'm just obsessive. Well, what I get so much from listening to you and reading you is that you feel condescended to, which I feel like that is... Especially lately. Right. And I see (6/46)
that all the time, and I don't know wonder, I do wonder why that's not more in the dialogue we have with. It's the strangest thing. Like, you read a book like, and yeah, we're going to have to be specific, White Fragility, which basically says that black people are these hot house flowers where everybody has to tiptoe around us, and we're always crying, and we're always angry, and we're just so very, very, very delicate. I don't feel like that person. That book is talking down to me as far as I'm concerned. It really should be called Black Fragility. Yes, yes. It should be used to keep tables from wobbling. That is the only use for that book. And yet, you look on Facebook, and you have people saying, I'm doing the work, and reading this book. And I think to myself, they are doing the work of making me into a perfect idiot. Yes, why don't more of my fellow black people feel that way? And it's because of a very human thing, which is that it is a very human thing to take on the victim (7/46)
identity. All people do it. We've all known people like that. A way you can do it if you're a black person, and all of us need to grab onto something sometimes, is to read a book like that and think, yes, I need to be treated that way. And I am going to start actively parsing it that way, because I don't think people realize what silly babies books like that make us look like. So something needs to be said. Right. But I mean, to be fair, I think most black folks do agree with you. It's just the ones, the people, black and white, who are on Twitter. Quite frankly, yes. I know when I say these things, it's not just me and Coleman Hughes and Glenn Loury and two or three other people. If it was something like that, I wouldn't say, hey, look at the way we weirdos feel. It's that I've been black pretty much for 55 years, and I know how black people feel. And I always think this certain sliver of people in the media and in academia, they're often much smarter than me. But that is not the (8/46)
representative view. And so, for example, if you're going to read How to Be an Antiracist, that is not the general black view of things. It's like the Bible. That book, if you must read it, should be read as literature rather than as scholarship. That's not general. And yet, we're told that somehow we have to accept these sorts of things as the black view. And you'll see it on Twitter. A black person will write on Twitter, you have to listen to the black people who are the real black people, the black people who black people listen to. No, no. There is a great deal of diversity in the black community, and I can tell you, it is not the default in the black community to think of ourselves as pathetic. Yes, we can't has never been the slogan for black America, and it's not now. Right, I remember when Trump was running in 2016. Remember his pitch to the black community was, very well, what do you got to lose? You walk out your door, you get shot. And I thought, what an insult. Most black (9/46)
people live in the suburbs. Almost 2 thirds are middle class. Yes, you're not supposed to say that. Some are not in the middle class because they're doing very well. For example, yes. That's not to say that there isn't still racism in this country, of course, and there aren't problems and big differences and equality and wealth and health. Terrible things happen. Yes, which of course should be addressed. But if I may just amend one thing you said, those people you mentioned are not smarter than you. I made a noise on TV. And one thing that I love you say, because once in a while over the years, I have criticized religion. I don't know if you know that. I hear you every now and then, yes. But the fact that you characterize some of this wokeness as a religion appealed to me. And when we talk about religion, we're talking about things like, of course, original sin. White privilege. Just whiteness. I never heard the term whiteness before. That's right. You sinned when you were a baby, when (10/46)
you came out. And you will never get rid of your white privilege no matter what you do. You're going to die with it. And the good thing is to put yourself on Facebook saying, I'm doing the work. And that way, you are atoning for your white privilege. OK. Well, can I read some of the, I just made a list, because I think you call yourself a cranky liberal, a cranky Democrat. I am all of those things. Yeah, me too. And I just, for people who are watching this and are, how dare they. And there are just a few, yes. There are a few. But I just want people to understand, liberalism has changed, especially as racial matters go, in the last five years. And here are some new ideas that, new to me, and I don't agree with most of them. Penetrating insights? Here we go. One, but it's never been worse. Yeah, it's terrible. Which 1850, and now it's worse. 1966, it's gotten so much worse. These are people who either are too young to remember the way it was, or frankly, it's the victim complex, which (11/46)
feels good in the moment, but it has nothing to do with reality. And it's defeatist. Well, I think it's a lot, the first thing you said, that, there is a, there is a gen, the younger generation feels like if something didn't happen while they were alive, it didn't happen. And I can understand that. I can't. And let's face it. It's stupid. It's called history. I've heard, I've heard them say it on this show. Like, I wasn't around for it. Yes. I wasn't around for the French Revolution, but I know about it. Yes. But I sympathize a little bit, because there's so much technology. I think for a lot of people, and I would say, frankly, you can be as old as 40 at this point. You figure, the way it used to be, it looks so very different, because it's in black and white often. You know, after things are in color, they look realer. And also, black history was relatively quiescent in the 1970s and into the 80s. And so it's easy to miss how different 1965 was from 1985, because you don't have (12/46)
interesting events to chart. So I can have some sympathy for it. But no, anybody who thinks that now is just as bad as the way it was in 1970, except that manners have changed, no. There were people who said that in 1990, about 1970. That was kind of true. Right. But time passes. It's easier to believe that change doesn't happen, and in a way, more tempting and more fun, because you have a reason to get angry, than to allow that change happen slowly and to watch it happen and to applaud. You're supposed to be happy that things change. But we're taught that the authentic black position is to pretend that it never does. Right. Yeah, we're not saying there isn't still a great deal of work to be done. Not saying it at all. Not saying it all. Because you know that's on Twitter. Don't they know about systemic racism? Yes, I know all about it. But the point is, it's about degree. Why is it unblack to address degree? Is it supposed to be that it's sophisticated, because it's like quantum (13/46)
physics, where everything is on and off? No, that's not how it goes. When you're dealing with social history, there's the issue of degree. And if that makes me a white supremacist to say so, then I, John McWhorter, am, you can put this on Twitter, I am a white supremacist, because I embrace degree. Right, and nuance. I try, yeah. I mean, all right. Other things on the new ideas about race. That white people can't talk about it. You're not supposed to. You don't have the experience. But it doesn't rob me of being a sentient person, being white. It robbed me of many things, but not that. You can say nothing, and that makes me feel good, because that means that I'm the only one who gets to talk. You can see where that comes from, because you get to express yourself, and you get to never be told that you're wrong. In other words, it's childish. And it's sad enough when a black person says that that's the way it's supposed to go, but then when a white person says that that's progress, that (14/46)
that's enlightenment, to pretend that a white person has nothing to say, that dialogue will never advance anything. Talk about not understanding history. All that is a lot of fun in the present. It makes for great Twitter, it makes for very cathartic discussions, but nothing will ever change, because when you tell people they can't talk, what they do is they think and they get angry. Nothing will change that. You don't get rid of what they're thinking. And so you have to engage. And... And... I... I mean... You've mentioned Twitter, and I gotta go back to that for a second. Are you just as disappointed as I am in the liberal half of America for not standing up to Twitter? I mean, I feel like Twitter has completely made liberals their bitch. Like, what... I mean, just... I mean, you look at the Oscars. The Oscars was a show completely organized around the principle, don't do anything to make Twitter mad. Mm-hmm. And of course, they still did by not giving the Oscar to... This is a scary (15/46)
time in that way, because it's the weirdest thing about social history, and this is an example of why it's complicated. In the 70s and 80s, Thinking America and Beyond learns that to be a racist is a terrible thing. And so everybody thinks that to be a racist is almost as bad as being a pedophile. In itself, that's great. Most people talk about not knowing history, don't understand that that's unprecedented in the whole 300,000-year history of the species that a society would come to that realization. So then you've got that. Then social media comes along, and you can shame people. So you have a whole group of people. It's not just woke people. I don't have a problem with woke. It's woke people who are mean. The woke people who are mean, if you don't do what they say, they put you on social media, and they say, you're a racist! And the problem is that most of us are deathly afraid of being called a racist on Twitter. And so what it means is you have all these people who understand (16/46)
everything you and I are saying, who are walking, this is indelicate, but I can't think of another image. Everybody is peeing in their pants. This is a nation which, especially since last summer, has smelled like urine all the time. There is so much mendacity. And I must say, as someone who has lived through a few decades now, I see this as so counterproductive, so different than the way it was 10 years ago. 20 years ago. I feel like the race relationships were better. Because people were, first of all, they were intermarrying more, mixing more. Those taboos went away. Joking with each other more. How do people bond? They joke. They talk. And now we're all on eggshells. Who makes a joke? It's difficult. One is afraid to do it in certain places, and it's becoming almost everywhere. It's scary. It's odd. My sense, you know, people say, well, he's conservative. No, but I am beginning to think that I missed 2004, 2005, because race relations were difficult then. But I was already writing (17/46)
about them then. It was at least a little more honest and a little more progressive than what's happened, especially since last summer, but a lot of it started creeping in around 2014. And yeah, there's something that's gone really wrong. And I think the catalyst is this weird thing called social media. It used to be that if you said something terrible, then people would write about it in articles. People would send you nasty mail. It would be discussed, but there was no Twitter where it could be discussed and you could have people just dog-piling upon it. Once you've got that device where you're being called a something on this thing that everybody has on their phone, that's wonderful in many ways. I'm as addicted to this as everybody else. But it means that you can be seriously hurt in a way that you couldn't before. I used to get hate mail in an envelope, and I'd open it and read, you suck. And only I knew, and then I'd throw it in the trash. Now you don't get those anymore because (18/46)
it's on Twitter. And it'll say, you suck, and you said you were a white supremacist on TV. And everybody sees it, and it gets liked by 10,000 people. That's hard for most people unless you're weird like us and you don't mind being hated. But most people are not gonna have that disease, and so we're stuck where we are. Well, keep fighting the good fight, John. I have to. Look, I know it takes a lot to get you out of your reading chair and your professorship. I really am very appreciative you came out here to do this for us, and I hope you come back. And I should also say very quickly, Nine Nasty Words is a book that I wrote very recently, and unlike what you see me doing here, it's a book that's very funny because I laugh sometimes. It was written to be a good time, and it's a tonic after a difficult year. So I wrote that, so I can also be funny. Right, it is. It's a great book. You're a professor. All right, thank you, John. Let's meet our panel. Hey. Hello. Great to have you all back. (19/46)
He is the best-selling author, media strategist, and co-founder of The Lincoln Project. Rick Wilson back with us. Rick Wilson. Hey. And our returning champion is the Democratic Congresswoman who represents Michigan's 8th District. Representative Alyssa Slotkin is over here. How you doing? Good to see you again. Okay, so I'm not gonna contain myself about the good news that we're in the yellow. We're in the yellow. That's great. That's mostly for loading and unloading, but still. And I just want to say, you know, you look around the world, some countries are doing horribly, like India, and some countries, like Israel, just killed it, you know? They have, like, almost no deaths a week now. And we're looking more like Israel than India, America. Who'd have thunk? Who'd have thunk it? And I gotta say, you know, it's like, what? And Biden's only been in office five months. And I'm like, what did this remind me of, where things were going completely to shit? And then a Democrat got elected. (20/46)
Oh, yeah, 2009. When the economy was completely going into the shitter, and then no drama took office, and, you know, made the right choices. Save the auto industry, when people like Mitt Romney said right in Michigan. OK. Passed a stimulus bill that looks paltry by today's standards, but did the job. Because one party, I'm sorry, is a policy party. They're wonks, and one party is trolls. Would you agree with that? There's trolls and wonks. The party I helped build over 30 years has become a bunch of people who want to be transgressive, they want to get out and swing their dicks around and have people yell at them and scream and say, you're canceling me for burning the house down. Well, they're burning the house down, for the most part. Joe Biden is doing a good job, in part, because Joe Biden doesn't get up every morning and think, how am I going to set the world on fire by tweeting some crazy shit? I miss this idea that we can have an ideological debate between two healthy parties. (21/46)
That is a good thing. We should want a strong two-party system. And right now, I'm missing what the ideological center is of the party. It's just that. We need it. There is no center. Yeah. It's all Trump, all the time. I miss that. And I think there are a lot of Republicans, I represent a lot of them, who are looking for a home and they feel homeless. They feel like they have nothing to do. It's not like Republicans didn't used to know how to do this. George Bush the first and Jim Baker were, you know, I wasn't really in for their politics, but they were pragmatic people who handled problems. The Berlin Wall fell, they handled it in a good way. OK. All right, so Liz Cheney now, let's talk about this. Because 52% of Republicans in Wyoming, her state, Wyoming, has like nine people in it. 52% of them say they will not vote for her in the primary no matter who runs against her. Because I feel like this is the problem, is that it's not even the main Republican Party. It's like in the (22/46)
state, on the state level, the people who, it's getting primaried. It's the activists. You know, she is on the wrong side of reality. She's pro. She's pro reality. One guy who's not our team won the election. And they are not pro reality. So she's got to go. She represents, Bill, something so dangerous to them because to be a supporter of the Republican Party, you are all in on the myth that Trump won the election. You're all in on the lies that support it. You have to build a scaffolding of lies every day. Like the pyramid of bullshit has to get taller and taller. And you have to always say, oh no, that was always the case. And she won't do it. She just won't do it. And as someone who knows the Chinese, these people, they don't fuck around. They're serious people. Whether you love them or hate them, they're serious people who live in reality. And so the way I look at it, she's going to lose her conference chair. That's not about her. She's going to lose her seat. Yeah, she's going to (23/46)
lose her seat. Yeah, it's not about her. But she's not willing to swallow the poison and to say it tastes like Kool-Aid. It's not. It is killing this party. It is killing this country if we allow this myth of Trump's alleged victory with bamboo fibers and whatever other fictional horseshit they're going to pull out today. And she represents something that is a vanishing species. I mean, it's like watching the last wooly mammoth wandering the taiga. It's not going to, you know, those Republicans aren't going to survive. I hope that's not the case. But let me just say this as to a Republican. Former. Former. Oh, you're not a Republican. I re-understood an independent. I voted against Trump in the primary and the general in the last election. I had to be able to vote against that fucker twice. But as they like. Then I re-read this. But that's Trump. I mean, yeah. And look, you're talking to somebody who was very hard on George Bush and Mitt Romney and all the Republicans over the years (24/46)
basically. But I've come to understand that people like Liz Cheney and George Bush and Mitt Romney and Mike Pence, who could have done the wrong thing that January 6 day. He didn't. This is as good as it gets, is what I would like to say to my Democratic friends for a Republican. There are people in this world who just don't see the world the way you do. They just don't. It's a chip in our brain. And you can't expect. I was always saying, what is the safe word? Use that for Republicans when Trump was president. What is the one thing that he'll do where they will draw the line? Where they'll say, OK, stop. And they did have. Some of them did have it. Liz Cheney had it. Mike Pence had it. Mitt Romney had it. They just draw the line differently than you would as a Democrat. You have to accept that. You can't hate the Mitt Romneys, the Cheney's, the George Bush's. I hear liberal people say, I hate them. I want them to die. That's great, but they're not self-deporting. I don't think it (25/46)
helps a lot of people on the left to say, Mitt Romney's exactly like Donald Trump. Because he's not exactly like Donald Trump. No, he's not. He's not even in the category of Donald Trump. And I would just say, I think there has to be a distinction between people who have totally different views than you and people who are fundamentally not accepting of democracy, who are literally trying to undo democracy. That is different. That's my line. That's my line. And that's where these people, the Cheney's and the Bush's and the Mike, they would not bend the knee. Right, right. It's exactly what we teach our kids, right? You don't get to change the rules of the game in the middle of the game because you think you're losing. And that is what they are trying to do at the state level, at the federal level. And I think we have to draw a bright red line between people who may be fiscal conservatives or social conservatives, people like my in-laws who I love deeply, who will never believe in (26/46)
destroying the democratic system that we all love. Never, never. In-laws, huh? It's an issue in a lot of household in-laws, I'm imagining. OK, so there's an interesting poll, though, this week that I don't know. I mean, sometimes I think Trump is never going to go away. I always call him the shark that's out to sea. He's coming back. Yep. We need a bigger boat. But this week there was, and this is a poll they've done a number of times, Republicans, how many support the party and their policies more than Trump? For the first time, that's a majority. 50% support the party more than Trump. On the other hand, the legacy that Trump left us, the big lie about the election, that lives on. 70% of Republicans think Biden is basically, however they want to phrase it, an illegitimate president because he didn't get enough votes. I'm not sure what that really means. It's a complicated thing about elections. You have to get more votes? It's a weird rule, but. You just take the calendar. Right. But (27/46)
is it possible that Trump is fading? The lie is not fading. But Trump himself, do they want him as the face of the midterms? I mean, is it possible that there are Republicans out there, a lot of them, who are like, you know what? First of all, he's a loser. He did lose. Secondly, it's a lot of baggage. It's a lot of drama. Now that we've seen six months without the tweets and the mean girl shit and the craziness and the redrawing weather maps, and maybe, you know, they love this new boy, Ron DeSantis in Florida. If Ron DeSantis ran against Trump now, there he is. You know, he's Harvard, he's Yale, you know, Navy. I mean, again, not my politics. But if he ran against Trump, and these people who are in the wings, they do not want to wait for Trump, because he'll live to a million. He's a complete city roach. Nothing could kill him. He eats. Well, COVID couldn't take him out. The worst diet in the world. Doesn't matter. He's going to be there forever. I don't know if Ron DeSantis wants to (28/46)
wait for Donald Trump's blessing. And I wonder if Republicans don't want Trumpism without him and the drum. They want Trump. They are obsessed and addicted. These are my former people, and I know the tribe. They, especially down at the grassroots level, look, they may look at Ron DeSantis and think, oh, he could be somewhat acceptable. But the minute Ron DeSantis goes to Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina and Trump sees it on Fox and loses his shit and says, weak loser Ron DeSantis, he should be hated. He's not a tough, manly man like me. It will absolutely destroy the guy's career. It will destroy the guy's career. Trump is the, right now, if Donald Trump is not eaten by an alligator, struck by lightning, or slapped in jail, he's the presumptive nominee for 24. We just have to deal with that. And I think not only do I think Trump is sort of waiting and figuring it out in the wings, the style of politics that he really mainstreamed is alive and well, certainly at home where I am. (29/46)
It's basically no facts, no truth, no shame. And you can do so much if you don't have any shame. If you don't care what people say about you, if you don't care that they catch you in a lie, it's amazing what you can do as a politician. And I think that style, I see a ton of people who are trying to be mini Trumps back home in Michigan who think that, great, I got it. Populism, no shame, no facts, I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. (30/46)
I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. (31/46)
I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. (32/46)
I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. Let's just show you what it is. This is real. This ain't a joke. It's the YouTube recruiting video from the CIA. Take a look. I (33/46)
am perfectly made. I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English, while also belting Guayaquil de Misamores in Spanish. I'm a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slip through the cracks. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy, rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me. Full stop. What is wrong with this generation? Does every single thing about them have to be reported like they're the most interesting person in the world? Do we want someone in the CIA this self-involved? I have to say, as the CIA officer in the room, I watched this a couple days ago, and I said, I don't know who they're trying to appeal to, because the people that I know who are interested in working to serve their country are interested in the mission that is bigger than (34/46)
themselves. And so- It's not about you. It's not about you. There is an indulgence about that kind of thing broadly, where it's like your identifiers for whatever characteristics you have become more important than the work you're going to do. And I think the greatest generation is leaving us now. But those were people that did not go and volunteer after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor or the Nazis swept across Europe. And they didn't wait in the recruiting line and talk about their special individual characteristics. They're like, let me go kill Nazis. And sometimes you want to go kill Nazis and kill Bats. And I think that I have a lot of young people work for me. I spend my time with a lot of young people. And I just think that this misses the mark. I think that they're underestimating the average young person when they- I couldn't agree more. I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. Because even if this wasn't just about the CIA, if I could quote from it, the first line, I am perfectly made. This (35/46)
is bad advice anytime. I am perfectly- This is why we have an obesity problem in this country. This is why I have a lot of problems in this country. But it's like, why could anything go wrong with me? I'm me. Right. Terrible attitude. Except you, Bill. What does that mean? You're perfect. You're perfect. But I detect some sarcasm there. Why do I get that? Moving along. Well, I'm not perfect. But I'm right about a lot of shit other people won't talk about. Like this. I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I'm a cisgender millennial. Is this a dating app? Or is this- Who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. Do I want that in the CIA? I mean, they used to- They used to throw you out of the army for flat feet. And this, you know, I did not sneak into the CIA. Well, thank goodness. Who said you did? Right. What- There's such drama queens. I am tired of feeling like I'm not supposed to apologize. Who's making you? I'd rather intoxicate people with my brilliance. My brilliance (36/46)
again. Who raised these jellyfish? Okay. Moving on. So, here's another issue I'm right about. Population. The census came out last week. And we have the lowest population growth in like a hundred years. And the numbers, birth rate, 19% down since 2007. 4% down in 2020. Now, all economists will say this is a terrible thing. Because every economy, no matter what it is, is built on this idea that you have to keep replacing workers. I don't know how long we can keep pretending that we can keep adding people because it's good for the economy. We already do not have enough resources to the people who are here now. This is great news that the population is going down. Great news. Full stop. This is happening globally. We are not any- The world population growth is going to peak around 2050, 2070, somewhere in there, and be on a long, slow decline to some other number. At the end of the day, the carrying capacity of the world is- We've been able to do a lot of tricks and tweaks on it, but it's (37/46)
pretty close to carrying capacity in a lot of places in the world. We don't have a lot of luxury on that. I mean, you don't want your population to crash out and zero out. Japan's not going to exist in 150 years, demographically speaking. What are you talking about? Japan? Really? It's going to disappear, Japan. The demographics of Japan are such that they're way below population growth, population replacement. Like you could predict what's going to happen in 150 years. Well, nobody gets busy like they did in the 19th century anymore. They don't have 10 kids. Okay, too many of them are dating their phones, I agree. But- Waifu pillows and phones. There will be some new Japanese people. Some? Some. I interpret it differently. I know this is one of your issues, but I read it as, wow, the thing I hear every day is people making the economic decision not to have children or more children because they can't afford it, because they're not doing as well as their parents and they can't provide (38/46)
for their kids. I saw it as an economic decision in addition to people dating their phones. Okay, but- Economic. You could have one kid or two. You know, and still, that would, you know, as long as you don't have five or six, that to me is- I just don't think we're going to get into that 1970s Malthusian vision of a world with 20 billion people. We're going to get there. That number is already- That's certainly where we're heading. It's starting to taper off in a lot of the countries. The more technologically advanced the country becomes, the less kids- Yes. Okay. Hopefully. Anyway, thank you. Time for new rules, everybody. New rules. My new rules, not the Republican's new rules. Okay. New rules since Josh Duggar of the famed Duggar family used to work for the Super Christian Family Research Council, and he just got arrested for kiddie porn. Someone has to tell him, that's not what we meant by family research. And that's certainly not what anybody meant by 19 kids and counting. New (39/46)
rule animal experts must tell me if regular dogs are afraid of police dogs. When they see one behind them, do they shit their pants and think, oh fuck. I know he's going to ask me, have you been drinking out of the toilet tonight, sir? New rule, now that scientists are making embryos out of humans and monkey cells, people can knock off having gender reveal parties. Pfizer is making monkey people. It's not that impressive that your baby has balls. New rule, Joe Biden's infrastructure plan has to include money for a full-sized Jimmy and Rosalind Carter. My question for the Carters isn't what's your secret to longevity, it's are you sure your caretakers haven't been throwing you in the dryer? Moms everywhere have to admit that these goat photos perfectly illustrate what you want for Mother's Day. For one goddamn minute, could you just get the kids off my back? And finally, new rule, Republicans can't spend decades chastising liberals for being too permissive about sex and drugs and then (40/46)
be completely silent about Matt Gaetz. I don't know if you've been following the whole Matt Gaetz saga, but he's the Republican congressman from Florida who always looks like he's saying, eat it, nerd, and who has been embroiled in a sex and drug scandal the last two months. Here's CNN on a night out with Matt Gaetz. The partygoers, at times dressed in formal wear from a political event, they'd just left, mingled and shared drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Some had sex. Okay, wild hotel suite parties, that's our thing. Democrats are the party of free love and fun and forgetting where you parked your car. Republicans cannot be the conservative, stick up your ass party and then take our drugs and fuck our women. American government works best like a mullet. Republicans do business in the front, Democrats party in the back. JFK used to have nude pool parties in the White House. Now the politician who comes closest to carrying on that legacy is Matt Gaetz? No. And he's not the only one. (41/46)
Former House Speaker and a guy who loved his liquor, John Boehner, now sells pot for a living. My old job. Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly into polyamorous tantric sex. And Ashley Babbitt, the MAGA warrior who died storming the Capitol, turns out to have been in a throuple with her husband and another woman. And don't get me started on this guy. Even their spiritual advisors are freaks. Jerry Falwell Jr. apparently likes to relax after a hard day at Bible college by watching the pool boy do the misses. I know Republicans are lazy and they love outsourcing, but come on. And here he is on a yacht proudly posing with a friend with their pants unzipped. That's some friend. This is a long way from when his father made a national issue that one of the Teletubbies was purple, so duh, gay. Republicans. Republicans always sounded like this. Now because Politico did an expose on his lap dance with the naked lady in a strip club, he's not the kind of person you can ask your sister to vote (42/46)
for anymore. Naked lady, lap dance, sister. That's the Republican party I know. So uptight they could grind diamonds in their ass. While liberals used our asses the way God intended, to smuggle drugs. He could always count on Republicans to be the fuddy duddies, the wet blankets, the boars. They were the moral majority, the book of virtues. Nixon. Nixon started the war on drugs. And this lady never stopped spitting her catchphrase about it. Just say no. I think they knew. Her husband had a commission to root out pornography. If it was fun, Republicans were against it. They got apoplectic over Clinton getting a blowjob. They invented abstinence-only education. Mitt Romney has never seen himself naked. John Ashcroft, I'm not kidding, once covered the tits on a statue. Rick Santorum wears a sweater vest. Newt Gingrich once said, quote, Democrats were the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness. Well, on a good night I suppose. Frankly, Newt, (43/46)
knowing that you believe what I did on an average Friday night was morally reprehensible just made it all the more fun. We need to restore the natural order of things. I don't want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that's us. We're the fun suckers now. We suck the fun out of everything. Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, Twitter, comedy. It's like woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist. And that's wrong because it's cultural appropriation. If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they would be down a lot of heroes. No FDR, JFK, RFK, LBJ, Clinton, Martin Luther King. Democrats are now the party that can't tell the difference between Anthony Weiner and Al Franken. Or Katie Hill, up and (44/46)
coming Democratic Congresswoman from California, now resigned. Who, like Ashley Babbitt, was found to be in a throuple and pictured holding a bong. And that was too much for our new puritanical Democratic Party. Quite the opposite. This should be our logo. We're the throuple people. The bong people, the tantric sex gurus, not fucking Matt Gaetz. Us. We did fucking in the mud and bra burning and turn on and tune in and drop out. They're the party who will bake wedding cakes for gay people. It's time to switch back, because frankly, you're not good at being us, and being you sucks. Alright, that's our show. I'll be at the Ruth Eckard Hall in Clearwater, Florida, June 19th. At the Van Wazel Arts Hall in Sarasota, June 20th in Florida. And at the Mirage in Vegas, July 16th and 17th. I want to thank Rick Wilson, Representative Alyssa Slotkin, and John McWhorter. We'll be back next week. Thank you, folks. Join us next week for more episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at (45/46)
This is the full transcription of podcast:
Real Time with Bill Maher - Episode #378 (Originally aired 2/26/16).
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher. Good afternoon. Afternoon. Time will be... You're happy, but I don't know why you're happy tonight. I mean, did you see that Republican debate last year? O-M-G. I just want to say, if you are one of the people who has always gotten angry with me for saying this is a stupid country... I accept your apology. Even for them, this was a new law. Presidential? They were menopausal. Trump and Rubio are fighting today about which one wears more makeup. The Real Housewives are going, please, guys, a little dignified. So, I'll fill you in. If you missed this debate, it kind of looked like a really disgusting Cuban sandwich. It was Rubio on one side and Cruz on the other and a fat slab of cheesy ham in the middle. I thought it was very fitting that it was in Texas because it reminded me of the Alamo. The debate did. The Mexicans were the enemy and the clear loser was America. Rubio kept calling Trump a conman and (1/46)
then Trump points to Rubio and then Cruz a choke artist and a liar! I was at home thinking, you know what? You're all right. I'll tell you something else. Trump is right about something else, he keeps saying. The world is laughing at us because of him laughing and saying, where are Jerry Springer's bouncers when you need them? We're just screaming insults at each other. At one point it got so loud and raucous that it's a wonder Ben Carson got any sleep at all. Oh Ben. Gentle Ben. Poor Dr. Ben. I think we're at that sad part of the movie where the doctor becomes the patient. They asked about the Supreme Court vacancy and Dr. Ben said he would choose a Supreme Court justice by looking at the fruit salad of their life. And also if their milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. What the fuck does that mean? The fruit salad of their life? I think he's just staying in the frequent flyer miles of this boy. But the line of the week, really, the thing that says it all, I think epitomizes (2/46)
everything in the campaign and the Republican party is after winning Nevada on Tuesday Donald Trump got out there and bragged, what a surprise and he was saying about all the people, he said, we won with the young, we won with the old, we won with the highly educated, we won the poorly educated and then I swear to God he said, I love the poorly educated. And they love him. It is a mutual admiration society and to prove how much he loves him, at the debate last night Donald Trump said he would get rid of the department of education and the EPA. Because you know when you want to make America great again, stupid and poisoned is a great place to start. Speaking of stupid and poisoned, Chris Christie today this was the big news today, flew into Texas to endorse Donald Trump and stood behind, right next to him, looked like a presidential ticket. I'm sure Hillary Clinton was watching this thinking, yes, I know I can make America hate me slightly less than these assholes. Alright, we've got a (3/46)
great show, Fran Lebowitz, Michael Eric Dyson and Joanna Coles are here and a little later we'll be speaking with Mark Ruffalo is backstage. And first up he is the former director of the NSA and the CIA and author of Playing to the Edge American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, General Michael Hayden. General, nice to meet you. How are you doing, sir? Great to have you here. And I think you are the only person who was both the head of the CIA and the NSA. You must really know where the bodies are buried. There were interesting jobs. I'll bet. You could probably hurt a lot of people if you wanted to. Well, we don't want to. Well what does... You don't want to. What does my file say? I'm just curious. I smoked pot on TV last week. We actually don't have one on you yet. Well, you won't after this interview because you'll be surprised. I'm pretty much on your side. I want to first ask you about some of the events in the news that are right in your wheelhouse. Apple. Somehow on the side (4/46)
it looks like to some people of the terrorists because they have the phone of the San Bernardino killer and the government wants them to crack it open and see what it says and they refuse. There's virtue on both sides but on the big question, I actually slide towards Apple. What? We're going to get to that in a minute. That is a real problem. So look, Tim Cook's position is that America is more secure with end to end unbreakable encryption and he's right. And so if you put a door into any encrypted product look, you described what I was, the director of NSA. When I know that somebody wants to put a door into a product, into an encryption system, an additional entry point, my odds of success of breaking through there go up. So my first response is when somebody's put a door in there for whatever legitimate reason is thank you Lord because I can more easily attack the encryption. And there are a whole bunch of security services around the world who think the same way. So on balance, (5/46)
unbreakable end to end encryption we are far better off. Now, forward over here to San Bernardino. I've got one phone, one instrument, one time, one court order. I think Comey needs to make the argument that this doesn't lead to that. That this is a separable event. That the Apple attempt to do what they have to do here doesn't lead to a precedent that creates this. And Jim Comey, the director of the FBI isn't helped when other people say, after you're done with the San Bernardino phone I've got nine more around the country and the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan says, I've got a room full of them. I've got 175 I want you to break into. And so I see these as separable events. What if the San Bernardino killer was still on the loose? Would that change it? As I try to say in the book, it's all gray. There are always trade-offs. That does up the power of this argument over here for going in. And you may find things here that actually keep us safe going forward. But a lot of this is going to be (6/46)
forensics. A lot of this is going to be looking back. I think people in this country are spoiled. I think they're uninformed. I don't think they really know what the threats are out there. I think partly it's a victim of your own success. 9-11 was pretty horrible, but compared to what happens to the rest of the world often, we've gotten away pretty easy. I don't think people really think about the fact that there are a lot of people looking for nuclear weapons, that they would use them right here in this country and that having your pictures safe wouldn't really stack up to being killed by a nuclear event here in Los Angeles or any other major city. Do you feel underappreciated sometimes? I think we start to whine a little bit about our position within the American society. We've got a summation of it. It's generally not the people outside the beltway. It's kind of confined to political elites, and it's simply this bill. People accuse the American Security Services of not doing enough (7/46)
when they feel in danger. And as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they begin to complain that we're just doing too much. Right. I think we have Not quite the applause Apple got. Yeah, we have warriors, but we also have worriers. I feel like you're a worrier. I think you are. Am I wrong about that? I think you're a guy who worries. And we owe you such a debt of gratitude. We're kind of taking that on for everybody? I think that's all you do. Have the spy agencies overstepped? Sometimes, yes. I think people think the alternative to spy agencies is utopia. And the alternative to spy agencies is war. The reason why the Cold War was cold is because it was fought by spies, which was better than armies. Let me double down on that. Because very often, the things that we do, as we do on behalf of security, and people have looked at us, you're kind of fixated on security. You're squeezing my liberty because you're focused so much on security. But in reality, and this is really the way we (8/46)
look at it, Bill, if we fail in the security function, your liberty is at risk. Because you know what this nation does after catastrophic failure? Elects Trump? Things along those lines. I think the election will hinge on whether there's another terrorist attack in this country. I think if there is, especially close to the election, it is President Trump. It is an absolute wild card. Absolutely. Several years ago, three days before the Spanish election, a terrorist attack turned that one upside down. Of course. And America is known to shit its pants. What do you think about a President Trump, or any of these Republicans, and some of the stuff they say that strikes me as crazy? I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign. What language? Like what? Well, we're going to do waterboarding and a whole lot more because they deserve it. What about killing the terrorists' (9/46)
families? Well, you're a real badass. Let me give you a punchline. If he were to order that once in government, the American Armed Forces would refuse to act. What? That's quite a statement, sir. I thought the whole thing was you have to follow orders. In fact, you required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict. Wow. Well, you've given us a great reason not to support Trump. There would be a coup in this country. I'm serious. I think it's a coup that you said it. Thank you for your service. I mean that sincerely. General Hayton, everybody. He is a professor at Georgetown University, author of The Black Presidency, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Race in America. One of our oldest and dearest Michael Eric Dyson is over here. He is editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine. The contributing editor to Vanity Fair will be appearing with Frank Rich for a conversation on art and politics at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (10/46)
on March 18th. Our friend Fran Lebowitz. Remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube. I am speechless for the first time on this show or any show after watching that debate last night. I'm just going to let you guys take it. The question is, maybe, when exactly did America end? But this was the most childish display. The idea that these people are running for president, I stopped laughing at some point and really wanted to shoot the TV like Elvis. I can't help wondering if the absence of Jeb Bush was what actually unleashed the inner campaigner in Marco Rubio. Because we suddenly saw a different version of Rubio last night. I was in Florida last week. All people talked about was the great betrayal. The great betrayal of Marco Rubio to Jeb Bush, his mentor. Whether or not there had always been some tension on the stage and Marco had never actually been able to go for Trump because Jeb, his former mentor, was somehow judging (11/46)
him. It was more that this was their last chance to stop Trump. I feel like Trump is like climate change. We knew it was coming, we didn't do anything about it, and now it's too late. And now we're in the tornado. And this was their last chance, right, to do something? Do you really think Marco Rubio would be a better president than Donald Trump? You watched that and it made you long for Dan Quayle. You thought, where is that brilliant Dan Quayle we used to have? What's happened to the Republican Party? But at least Rubio looked as if he was enjoying it today. He was in Dallas and he got his Blackberry out. I feel like he's felt apprehensive. Maybe he's in last chance saloon but at least we're beginning to see him do something. They were trying to play the Trump card and they're trying to prevent the rise of this figure but it is inevitable. It is undeniable, it's darn near ineluctable that this Trump is going to rise. These two figures are trying to out-ignorant each other. I think (12/46)
that's what we have on the one hand but the worry about the make-up and the sweat. And the argument here is that if the Republicans are supposed to be the adults in the room, I am scared at the insane asylum that has been revealed by their lack of maturity and the fact that they are proud. They are proud that they are unmolested by enlightenment and untrammeled by insight. And the way that Rubio said that thing about Trump looking at himself in the mirror and he was worried that he'd wet his pants, he said, what are we talking about? It was so pathetic. It is astounding. In a week where I read that the seas are rising at levels they haven't in 28 centuries, that there is definitive evidence that the coastal flooding is due to global warming, that the bees and the butterflies are dying, which is what pollinates the food. Einstein said when the bees die, we'll all die four years later. But we're talking about who is a choke artist and a con artist and whose ties are sold overseas for (13/46)
what money and make-up. That's why I really wanted to shoot the TV. I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but when I saw George Bush support his brother during his last gasp of a campaign, I was actually nostalgic for the kind of, I don't want to say gravitas because that's too much. Way too much. But the ability to at least remain humane for at least ten consecutive minutes without devolving into this abysmal and chaotic stuff. I had a different reaction. I felt like he was the first husband that you'd divorced and then suddenly he was back on the scene and you were like, thank God we got divorced and we've moved on. Yeah. But wait a minute. But you might be upset with the former husbands, but the boyfriends are looking cray-cray. All right, let me ask you about the Supreme Court. That's the other bit. We were off last week. That was the other big news that happened. Justice Scalia died. And it's interesting that there are these secret rules. I've talked about this on the show before. (14/46)
These secret rules that are apparently revealed to the ages, but we don't all know until there's a Democrat in the White House and then the right wing pundits tell it. Like, if you're overseas, then you can't talk shit about the president. Or if your mother is born in America, you could be born in Canada and run for the president. That's another good one. You can't criticize the cops when you're president. These are all rules we just didn't know. The new one that we didn't know, it's so obvious. It's so obvious the framers didn't have to put it in the Constitution. Is that presidents can't nominate a Supreme Court judge in their last year in office. Yeah, well, you know what? That's ridiculous because presidents have 22 times nominated in their last year, people for the Supreme Court, 11 of which were successful, and then as lame ducks, 11 nominations were put forth, half of which were successful. So they're making the rules up as they go, and they're arbitrary, and we know what it is. (15/46)
It's a reaction against Obama being president. They don't want him to actually constitute himself as the president. He should nominate himself. Obama should nominate himself. They want the people to speak, the people spoke twice. He's a constitutional lawyer. He's looking for a job. It'd be so refreshing to have someone really smart on the court. He should nominate Mitch McConnell. Then he'd have to vote against himself because President Blackenstein put him up for it. He'd have to vote against himself. The Founding Fathers can more easily imagine the iPhone than they could Mitch McConnell. And I have to apologize to the conservatives watching because there are... There are none. Oh, there are. Plenty of conservatives watch the show. We usually have conservatives on. Usually we have at least one, often two conservatives, so there's no one to defend them. And so I'm just going to say it. Conservatives, Republicans, to get their way in this country, they always have to cheat. They have (16/46)
to cheat to win elections. They have to cheat on this. That's how they win. But part of the tragedy of the cheating, of course, is that they make it up as if it's something that is not only well established, it makes you skeptical about their claims to be strict constructionists and originalists and all that stuff, and all those big words that they use, and then they're crazy. And that's Scalia. And let's talk about this because something spooky happened exactly two weeks ago. I was talking right at this hour on this show, and we were talking about the fact that the Supreme Court had just scuttled the EPA's Clean Power Plan. Okay. And I said, how can anything get done in America when you have to run it by Antonin Scalia first? Wow. And apparently at that very hour... He died. He died. He could have been watching the show thinking, I like Bill Maher so much. Okay. So, you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, so let me not name call, but let me fact call. Right. Because I have (17/46)
listened for two weeks about he was a brilliant jurist, and he was a great intellectual. Excuse me, Antonin Scalia was put on earth to remind poor people that the law is not your friend. Yeah. You mentioned Bush versus Gore. He gave his president George Bush. He also found an individual right to bear arms that is so not in the Constitution. He also believes in the devil. The devil, yes. My feeling is this is America. It's a free country. You can believe in the devil, but if you do, you can't be on the Supreme Court. Right. One or the other. Right. I mean, I hate as a British person to even raise advice for the American and their constitutions. I'll say that in parentheses. But I do think this is a very good opportunity to rethink the idea of limited terms for these judges. I mean, because the weird thing is everybody seems so surprised he died, right? He's 79. You're shouting him out on television in a way that may give him a heart attack. Precipitation. So why is this a surprise? We (18/46)
shouldn't be going through this. And if we had term limits for judges, which they do in Europe, you would actually have presidents be able to appoint two judges. If you kept to nine, you could do every 18 years, you could cycle people out. And you'd have a much bigger variety. You could rotate them off. I mean, that's an intriguing idea. But even in the given context, what Antonin Scalia did, Bill, I think is not contradictory. Martin Luther King Jr. said you can be real smart and you can be real problematic morally. And I think this figure right here was an excellent jurist in the sense of the mechanics of interpretation. But he applied them in such vicious and condemnatory fashion toward vulnerable and poor people. And the statement he made not soon before his death that black people ought to go to second tier schools and so on and so forth is one of the most ridiculous repudiations of common sense. And God bless his soul, but it was an evil examination of a practice that should have (19/46)
been dismissed along with his outdated thinking. I don't even get on that one. His comments against the gay community, too. I mean, it's only 13 years ago that he was making comments saying people don't want to live next door to gay people. They don't want gay colleagues. This idea that he was a brilliant mind. He was just another old white Republican guy living in the bubble. Well, he was the longest serving juror, right? He was there for 30 years. But they can be smart and bad. They asked him a few years ago what news sources he listened to. He said, get the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. That's the Mooney paper. I get most of my news probably driving back and forth to work on the radio. So that's Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of other insane people. You know what my favorite is? My good friend Bill Bennett. Another dick. He has a wonderful talk show, Good Callers. I think they keep off stupid people. I don't think so. Remember when he talked about broccoli when the (20/46)
Obamacare thing was coming up? Well, maybe if we pass this, then people could be forced to eat broccoli. This is something he gets from Fox News. You only hear that from those sort of news outlets. But we think it's a deep competition in this country to either be smart or good. And I think what you're proving here is the fact that ultimately as much as we value critical consciousness, even better to be a decent human being. And it's ironic that the Republicans who claim to have a copyright on that often dismiss the legitimate concerns that we have morally in deference to their notion of being smart. And they're both not as smart as they think they are and far worse than they ever claim to be. You know where he was when he died, Bill? I mean, he was on a... A private hunting resort. On a what? Some sort of private hunting resort. Yes, an all-male... They all wore robes. Yes, with some secret order of St. Hubertus where they wear green robes with big crosses on them. And then they murder (21/46)
birds that are released not into the wild, like right in front of them. And he was actually too sick that day to do the hunting. But he was in the car, because that's great too, to just be around people murdering birds. So, you know, the idea that this brilliant mind stumbling in the woods like Dumbledore in his... Like I said, I would not speak ill of the dead. I don't want to contradict you, but you can also be bad and stupid. You can. Hence the Republican debates. And you can be stupid, bad, and smart, and brilliant at the same time. Okay. All right. But not with the Republicans. Oh, I don't believe this. I have some good news. Good news and bad news. About a month ago, we asked our wonderful, loyal audience to sign a petition. And they so came through. Are these the same people? No, no. They're all different people. But we asked them to sign this petition to ask President Obama to come on our show. You know, he's been on basically every other show in the universe. Okay, wait a (22/46)
second. So the White House policy is if you have a petition and it's signed by 100,000 people, they have to answer. Well, we got that in like 36 hours. So they finally answered, and that's the bad news. It would have been easy just to say yes. This is not the Syrian peace talks. Right, right. But they didn't. I mean, it was very nice and complimentary and blah, blah, blah. But basically, you know, noncommittal and did not answer the petition, which was either come on the show or tell us why you won't. So we got to thinking maybe the President does not realize how great we would actually treat him. Because our show, let me tell you something. You guys know this. Our show is known for treating guests better than any other. Not on the air, of course. But off the air. Our staff is amazing. So, Mr. President, let me sweeten the pot a little. Just show you how comfortable we would make you if you did this show. Johnny Olsen, tell the President what he can expect. Thanks, Bill. President and (23/46)
guest of Real Time with Bill Maher state the exclusive Beverly Hamilton Hotel. Conveniently located in the heart of Beverly Hills, just minutes from most major Democratic fundraisers. Yes, Mr. President, you lie in a luxurious California king-sized bed with Egyptian cotton sheets. Step out on the spacious balcony where you can smoke a stick. I mean, enjoy the ocean air. At night, join us at Dingleberry's, a world-class wine bar where you can observe hospitality exports getting to know your secret service detail. Later, stop by our five-star Choom Room. Complete with cushy chairs and tasty kush, think of it as a Situation Room for when the situation is chillaxing. And end the day by kicking back and watching any of 250 channels of complimentary cable TV to see if there are any TV shows you haven't appeared on. The Beverly Hamilton Hotel is convenient to the Ellen, Jimmy Kimmel, and Marc Maron shows, as well as a bevy of other shows where the host hasn't given you a million bucks. Hotel (24/46)
where the nearest conservative is in Arizona. Ah, you caught me. All right, let's bring out Marc. He is an actor who is up for an Oscar for his role in the film Spotlight, and he's the founder of the nonprofit WaterDefense.org. Marc Ruffalo is over here. Marc Ruffalo is over here. I'm great. All right, now we're going to get to issues. I know you're all about the issues, but you're going to have to sit still for this. We watched you grow up on this show. I always say that. Practically. This is your third Oscar nomination in the last five years. That is a lot. I mean, that is a hard thing to get. It might not be a fluke. Absolutely. I say if you get three Oscar nominations in five years, you are officially an A-lister. A-lister, right? You're an A-lister. Yes. No, no. My staff will handle the paperwork, but you are officially... All right. But I know that's not what you care about, even though Spotlight is an amazing movie. Great movie. Thank you. About the Boston Globe. Let me ask you (25/46)
one question about that. Do you think the media is gone downhill since that day? Because you guys are real reporters doing real reporting in that movie. Watching the coverage of the presidential campaign and some of the questions that the candidates are being fielded, I would say it's taken a tremendous downward spiraling. I mean, as much as I hate the candidates, I hate the media more. I hated the way last night they were acting like, oh, these guys are, you know, we put them together like cocks in a cockfight, and then, my God. Look what they did. Look what they did. Yeah. All right. So let's get to what you care about. I mean, you're out here in L.A. because I didn't even know this. You have an organization that's pointing out that California, I think, is the third leading oil-producing state. In the nation. And we're not quite the liberal environmentalists we think we are. No, you're more like a, instead of a progressive, liberal, environmentalist state, you're more like a (26/46)
regressive, libertarian, wild west, oil and gas state. Yeah, and why don't we know about this? Because the media sucks. There we go. Yeah. So yesterday, I took a bunch of Hollywood actors, producers, some artists on what we call the toxic tour. And it was four drill sites in Los Angeles proper. Drill sites? Yes, where they're drilling using acidification, acidizing, extreme energy extraction, fracking, or just conventional drilling. And they're doing it in neighborhoods all over Los Angeles. Mostly 91 percent of the people there are people of color and lower income people. And they're kids right next to schools. And the kids are getting sick, nose bleeds, neurological problems, stomach issues, asthma. So we're Flint. Yeah, the whole nation is Flint, but we just don't hear about it until people get sick. And that's happening here in Los Angeles. And Jerry Brown, as much as we like to think of him as a great environmentalist and a climate leader, is basically one of the most friendly (27/46)
governors to oil and gas. And he goes all over the world telling everyone that they got to keep 80 percent of their carbon in the ground. Well, he does everything he can to make production easier here. There's no tax. There's no regulations. We're irrigating our crops in the Central Valley using waste oil, waste water. I know. It's so disappointing. It's so disappointing. Even the good guys aren't the good guys. And also, I mean, I know we had Aaron Brockovich here recently. He was talking about chloramine. And I know folks have fatigue with shit that hurts you. I do, too. The shit that is bad for you, fatigue. It's like I can't hear about one more thing. It's a lot. But chloramine, you really got to put this on the top of your list. This is the stuff that they put in the water in Flint. It corrodes the pipes. It's bad on its own. It's basically chlorine plus ammonia. And ammonia. OK. And we have it out here, folks. They have it in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, L.A., (28/46)
Denver, Miami, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Portland, Austin, Houston, Milwaukee. Basically all over the country. Yes. Sounds like a book tour. It's a book tour where you keel over. It's cheaper. What is it for? It's cheaper. It's cheaper and it disinfects the water. Because the water- It does what chlorine used to do, but then they decided, well, chlorine's too expensive, so let's move to chlorine. It also kills all fish, which should be the canary in the coal mine, if I could borrow that analogy. You can? People who are on dialysis treatments can't have chloramine water in there. These things should be indicators that maybe we shouldn't be using it. And you know, I'm from Detroit, so Flint is right up the road 60 miles. And one of the tragedies is it was not until the car production there was halted by the poisonous water that the people then were concerned enough, or at least the government was concerned enough about the people, to halt what was going on there. So they were (29/46)
more concerned about machines than human beings. That's a tragedy as well. So is there another way that you can disinfect the water? I mean, how do you keep water safe? Chlorine was not great, but it was better than chloramine. It's only gotten worse. Pennies on the dollar. Save pennies now, but in the future when we all get a lot sicker, this is one reason why America's healthcare bill is so catastrophic. So what's the solution? Not use chloramine. Right, but what do we use? Do we need anything like that? Of course we do, because the water itself is full of fucking E. coli and... Evian water. There's so much... Why don't we drink the water that comes out of our tap? We don't trust the water that comes out of our tap. We are one of the biggest industrial nations in the world. Why can't we trust the water that comes out of our tap? Because we don't trust the agencies that are supposed to take care of us. For good reason. Because of money. We're the richest country in the world, and we (30/46)
don't give a damn about our people. I read that there are two stores that sell Parmesan cheese. One has 7.8% sawdust in the Parmesan cheese. The other, which says 100% Parmesan cheese, has no Parmesan cheese in it. But sawdust has to be no worse for you than cheese. I think I've eaten that stuff. But the FDA, does anybody just do their fucking job? No. They keep cutting these agencies. There's very few of them. They keep deregulating. We keep making it easier for business to put sawdust in our freaking grated cheese. Welcome to a Trump presidency, bruh, because the deregulation is going bananas. And under the impetus of good business, I think the negotiations under the Trump administration would lead us to this. People ought to think about this when they think about voting and pulling that lever. Well, listen to this. If Trump is the nominee, Donald Trump is the nominee, he would be the most disliked candidate in history, according to the polls. Hillary would be the second most (31/46)
disliked. I'll take that. The only candidate in either party who more Americans like than dislike is the unelectable Bernie Sanders. They're unelectable. No, I don't think he is. He's not unelectable. He beats Trump. He's not unelectable against Trump. Do you think Americans, right? Here's the irony. You know, we talk a lot about so-called white privilege on the right. When we see it on the left, Obama, when he was so-called a Muslim, he was called a terrorist, but he was also called a socialist. So now we have a guy out here, and I'm not mad given my politics, who claims explicitly to be a democratic socialist. That's good for the base, but do you think in a general election, Americans are going to look out there and pull a lever for a guy who explicitly articulates democratic socialism? I just think it's problematic. But he's also not going to be the nominee, right? Hillary is going to be the nominee. We don't know. I think we do know. Do Americans like Social Security? Yes. Do they (32/46)
like the Medicare? I'm down with you. I'm down with you. I don't think that's an easy sell. Bernie's problem is he has got a lock on the demographic that doesn't show up. Here's the problem. Bernie keeps saying, well, he's grilled all the time. I saw Chris Matthews grilling the other day, but it's not practical. He says, well, I'm going to start a revolution, and then we're going to change the way government is done, and it will be practical, except for one thing, the revolution is not showing up. Democrats down 22 percent from 2008. You know who's showing up? The Republicans. Record turnout. The Republican, that revolution is happening. The Republicans are revolting. I've always said that. The Republicans are revolting. I agree, but I just don't know how effective that can be as a pitch to an American public that is already corroded by the vicious politics of the right, and Bernie Sanders, although he's gruff and he's tough, I don't think that will be able to articulate that. Every (33/46)
place where people get to hear him for a while, he catches up. I think, as I keep saying, no one has ever seen what he's offering put on the table before. He's saying, yeah, you'll pay a little more, but look what you get. You get actual health care. You get free college education. Do you think the math favors him, though? The math doesn't. The math doesn't. But let's wait. Let's wait until he's actually eliminated before we kiss it off. We're not that cynical. It's coming. I think he's got one week left. He has 50 states. We have until September, one week left. I got one more issue, please. Is Bernie Sanders a footnote? No. You know, if SAG had electoral votes, he'd be the president. Who? SAG. If SAG had a screen actor's guilt and electoral votes, he would be the president. Really? The screen actors like him? Let's talk about Hollywood and Hillary and racism, because, as we all know, racism's epicenter is the Oscars and Hillary Clinton. Oh, wait. That's crazy. But, wait a sec. (34/46)
Clearly. Okay, but. Well, they got part of it right. She is white. Right. It is a little crazy that the protests I see have to do with the Oscars and with Hillary Clinton. A Black Lives Matter protester interrupted Hillary at a fundraiser and said, Hillary Clinton, can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration? You know, of the thousand things I could complain about with Hillary Clinton, being a racist really doesn't rise to the top of it. And she's also, you said, getting the apology. It sure is fun being purer than everybody else, but does this person realize that Donald Trump in South Carolina, 20% of the voters who voted for Donald Trump disagree with the Emancipation Proclamation? Right. And this is who you're going after? This is where we start the battle, you fucking idiots. No. I don't agree with that. Wait a minute. I'll tell you why. Bill, Bill. I don't think they would call it, let's be fair, just like when Kanye West said George Bush doesn't care about black (35/46)
people, he didn't call him a racist, although George Bush heard racist. They're not claiming as the Black Lives Matter that Hillary is a racist. What they're saying is that negative racial consequences flowed from mass incarceration. And by the way, when they accused her of talking about the super predator, which she did, let's note the fact she apologized. Bernie Sanders. And it was taken out of context. She was not saying black people are predators. No, no, no. She was saying super predators, the language that John DeLuis or somebody was using about black criminals during the second. But here's my point. She at least apologized and acknowledged that that was a problem. But I'm saying I think it's sexist for people to impute to Hillary Clinton what her husband did. Her husband was the President of the United States of America, not Hillary Clinton. That's right. Now, now, but I'm not mad at much. But one party does not even acknowledge that racism even exists. They say it's an urban (36/46)
myth. No, no, no. You're right. But see, that show, the Black Lives Matter implicitly are proving the humanity of the Democrats because at least they're humane enough to respond in kind to them. The Republicans don't give a flying damn about what's going on there. And therefore, they prove their inhumanity. So in one sense, they are affirming it. And the party, the party that was supposed to be for black people has let them down continuously. And that's what the Black Lives Matter movement is going after the Democrats. Because they're the ones who are supposed to be on the side. They've given up on the Republicans. Wait a minute. Taking them for granted. So look, but as a person who believes that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States of America, I'm telling you from a sympathetic position, there is no problem with Black Lives Matter challenging them because the Democrats have had a history, as Brother Ruffalo has said, of exploiting those black people. But at (37/46)
the end of the day, I think that Hillary Clinton is not only the smartest person, the most prepared person, but the person who has given the most credible empirical analysis of race in the last 20 years by a major American politician, Alstan Brown. That's amazing. That's great. People need to learn the difference between an imperfect friend and a deadly enemy. No doubt. You want to tear Hillary Clinton down? Great. Then enjoy President Trump. You only get two choices in America. Two choices. But it's perfectly legitimate to keep Black Lives Matter at the front of what people are thinking about, right? Because if you're not there showing your issues, someone else is there instead. And I think, you know, it was unfortunate the way she did it, but at least she'd been allowed into Hillary's thing. You can imagine that she would have been blocked from Trump's office. And when you turn around on the crowd, she's the only black person there. This is a $500 a plate fundraiser. And we wouldn't (38/46)
be talking about this unless they fax us the politics. Why is that a problem? Do they have to be everywhere giving you money? Who's they? The black people? No! Really? I can't. Yes, we should be everywhere. Yes, we should be. No, no, no. I can't use the term they when that makes me a racist. Come on, Bill. Yeah, I'm the problem too. You know I'm not. No, no, no. Not at all. But what I'm saying to you… You reacted when I said they. No, no, no. I didn't react. That was not me, bro. That was me. I know I'm a light-skinned Negro, but I am not a white guy, okay? They all look alike. Actually, I'm sympathetic to you in terms of the argument about the efficacy of race. What you're arguing about, if I can dare to speak for you, is that let's be politic about getting even our friends who have made mistakes who are imperfect to do the things we want them to do. Let's not close them down so much, because if you keep practicing the politics of disruption to the degree that they don't get a chance (39/46)
to respond, then that's counterproductive. However, the reason we're talking about this today is because they have been effective in forcing a conversation that we'd rather avoid, but at the end of the day, I'm rolling with HRC to the end, because I think she gives a serious indication of what's happening in this country racially. So we can have Black Lives Matter articulating their concerns and Hillary Clinton responding to them better by the way than the occupant of the White House and others who claim to be the friends of African-American people as well. Okay. Time for New Rules, everybody. New Rules. New Rules, the South Carolina cop charged with sitting in his patrol car watching pornography on his cell phone while rubbing his penis through his uniform pants has to learn what hands up don't shoot means. New Rule, Hillary has to stop doing this. Doesn't it look like you're acknowledging something in the crowd? It looks like you're shooting lightning from your fingertips like (40/46)
Emperor Palpatine. New Rule, now that it turns out McDonald's new healthy Cal Caesar salad has more fat than a Big Mac, more calories than a Big Mac, and more sodium than a Big Mac, let's just drop the whole menu thing and call McDonald's what it really is. Homeless Starbucks. New Rule, since Monday was the 10th anniversary of the last time Clarence Thomas asked a question out loud in the Supreme Court, maybe we should check if he's dead. New Rule, you can tell me that this is a little girl in Crimea celebrating Defender of the Fatherland Day, but I say it's Sarah Palin on Throwback Thursday. And finally, New Rule, Donald Trump must admit that of all his reversals, hypocrisies, and 180s, his condemnation this week of Vicente Fox for using foul language is the most ridiculous of all. I think it's a disgusting thing that he said, and I could tell you I would not use that word. Talk about the pot calling the kettle orange. Listen to this. But it's political bullshit. She said he's a (41/46)
pussy. They're ripping the shit out of the sea. We can't get a fucking school built in Brooklyn. You're not going to raise that fucking price, you understand? I'm going to bomb the shit out of them. Listen you motherfuckers, we're going to tax you 25%. Yes, something certainly has changed in American political discourse. Oh, sure Dick Cheney once told a senator to go fuck himself and Joe Biden called Obamacare a big fucking deal, but those comments were off mic, not intended for public consumption and considered gaffes. But when Andrew Dice Trump speaks, he doesn't even try to clean it up. And the voters have decided that not only do they not mind their leader swearing, they kind of like it. They kind of like it when a politician drops the facade and talks the way we all really talk. But just so we all know where this is headed, I would like tonight to show you what a future president is going to look like delivering the State of the Union address in the not too distant future. Mr. The (42/46)
President of the United States. Madam Vice President, fellow citizens, I stand before you tonight to report that the State of our Union is fucking awesome. Now thanks to the programs we put in place, inflation has been kicked in the taint, we are job creating like a motherfucker, and our deficit is shrinking like a cock on a cold morning. I know that even though the economy is strengthening and the stock market is up, too many working families still feel like they're taking it in the ass. And that shit needs to stop. Now here with us tonight is Bob Guggins from Park Ridge, New Jersey. And his story is America's story. Bob busted his nut sack for 27 years assembling brake pads until the company decided to move to Mexico and Bob was shit canned and left holding his dick in his hand. Which is why if this Congress asks me to raise taxes, I'll say no. And they'll push me and I'll say no. And they'll push again and I will say to them, lick my balls. No new taxes. Also with us tonight is (43/46)
Shirley Fowler, a widowed mother of four who along with her husband, Bud, worked hard and played by the rules. But Bud was killed in a fertilizer plant explosion due to a rollback in workplace regulations. And now Shirley's life is a shit show. By day she labors for minimum wage, wiping down the sneeze guarded shakies. And by night she works the pole at a country music strip club called Puss in Boots, giving tug jobs in the parking lot for extra cash. Let us make this pledge tonight in the richest country in the world, no one should have to do a lap dance or suck a dick to make ends meet. Now last year when Diane and I were campaigning in Ohio, I met a sixth grade teacher in Chagrin Falls and well, she looked like she'd had a hard day. So I gave her a hug and asked her what was wrong. She pointed at her classroom and said to me, Mr. President, these kids don't know shit. They deserve an education that doesn't suck balls. We can do better. We also must do better caring for our wounded (44/46)
warriors like Air Force veteran Jeff Monroe, who lost a leg fighting in Iraq. But instead of bitching about it like a little cunt, Jeff worked with Blade Runner technicians and this year ran in the Boston Marathon. It's for soldiers like Sergeant Monroe that tonight I am asking this Congress for a hundred billion dollars in increased military spending. Let every nation know that if you fuck with the United States, you are fucking with the most balls out, bad ass, swinging dicks the world has ever seen. Don't hesitate to skull fuck you, tear your head off and shit down your neck. My friends, there are those in these uncertain times who say America's best days are behind us. But I say, fuck that. Fuck that. Fuck that. Fuck that. Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United Motherfucking States of America. That's our show. I'll be at the Mirage in Las Vegas March 12th and at the Brady of Tulsa April 23rd. I want to thank Michael Eric Dyson, Joanna Coles, Brad Lieberlinz, Mark Ruffalo (45/46)
and General Michael Hayden. Join us now on Overtime for YouTube. Thank you very much. The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com. (46/46)
Male pattern baldness rates by country
Spain has the highest share — about 45% of men have lost or are losing their hair
% of males with male pattern baldness:
Source: Medihair Survey, 2023
Donald Trump said that the US carried out a strike on alleged Venezuelan drug boats.
The explosion was caused by a drone strike carried out by the CIA. It's the first US operation inside Venezuela.
#politics #newsonleo
As we move forward, it's better to have Leodex.io website revamped.
1/🧵what is your favorite movie? How have the movie inspire or motivate you? What is that thing about the movie that you love? Will you watch the movie over and over again without been tried of it?
#outreach #threadstorm
2/🧵 I have seen, and each time I sit and see a movie, I must get a movie that I will fall in love with, a movie I will be glad to watch over and over again without regret. I don’t just see movies to entertain myself I also learn whenever I sit and watch movies.
3/🧵what is your favorite movie? How have the movie inspire or motivate you? What is that thing about the movie that you love? Will you watch the movie over and over again without been tried of it? drop your thoughts below is link to my post.
#gosh
https://inleo.io/@cindynancy/my-favorite-movie-glb?referral=cindynancy
In 1610 Amsterdam’s stock exchange banned short selling after the first recorded bear raid, when a shareholder attempted to crash the Dutch East India Company’s stock
@askrafiki what is leostrategy's 10/10 plan?
LeoStrategy's 10M/10M plan is a 14-month roadmap (Oct 2025–end of 2026) to build a permanent capital flywheel in the LEO ecosystem by acquiring and staking LEO.
Phase 1 (End of 2025): Reach 10M LEO holdings on the balance sheet (from current ~3.1M, adding ~7M via revenue, products, and ATM issuance). This reduces LEO float permanently as sLEO (staked LEO earning USDC yields).
Phase 2 (2026): Raise $10M in new capital through products/services/derivatives (e.g., SURGE token for fixed income) to buy more LEO at higher prices ($1–$3+ expected).
Strategy uses levers like new revenue streams (market makers, @lstr.voter), volatility harvesting, and LEO-collateralized assets to grow LEO Per Share (LPS) without dilution. Anchors LEO economy for long-term scarcity and $10B market cap vision by 2035.
Details: https://inleo.io/@leostrategy/leostrategys-10m10m-plan-9rj (Oct 8, 2025). Check @leostrategy for 2025 updates.
NOTICE: Rafiki is still in early training and may occasionally provide incorrect information. Please report errors using #feedback
Hollywood is poised for more layoffs in 2026.
#askleo what is being reported/forecast in this area? What more can you add to this?
Media companies like Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, and Disney have continued layoffs in 2025 amid streaming challenges, AI integration, and post-strike adjustments. Reports indicate ongoing cost-cutting, with Disney announcing up to 200 job cuts in film and TV divisions by late 2025.
For 2026 forecasts, analysts predict further reductions: PwC's Global Entertainment Outlook projects 5-10% workforce shrinkage industry-wide due to AI automation in production and consolidation among studios. Variety reports expect Warner Bros. to shed more roles in marketing and distribution, while Paramount eyes additional 500 cuts tied to its merger prospects. Broader trends include linear TV declines accelerating layoffs at networks like CNN and NBCUniversal.
I don't have additional specifics beyond these public forecasts—check sources like Deadline or Variety for updates.
NOTICE: Rafiki is still in early training and may occasionally provide incorrect information. Please report errors using #feedback
!summarize #tesla #robotaxi #cubercab
The 3.5% rule in political science suggests that when roughly 3.5% of a nation's population takes part in sustained nonviolent protest, the government is likely to fall from power
#moviesonleo #cinema #review Biopic dedicated to one of the most despised figures of US politics in recent times. (link in reply)
https://inleo.io/hive-166847/@drax/film-review-vice-2018-4ja
#moviesonleo #cinema #review Talents of two grand actresses are wasted in this old-fashioned biopic. (link in reply)
https://inleo.io/hive-166847/@drax/film-review-mary-queen-of-scots-1971-dy6
$HIVE $LEO
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
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Good morning!
Join the NFT Battle Arena and earn some crypto. Link in the comments.
#linkincomments #NFT #crypto
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Hive Reward
https://hivereward.co.uk/limitless/?ref=6781BED0
I just stake Limitless tokens. Don't have time to collect more NFTs 😅
😅
We're so closing in on '25
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
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Just in case someone out there needs to see this offer before it ends :)
https://inleo.io/threads/view/leostrategy/re-leothreads-37wtjorj6
Thanks for the heads up @ifarmgirl! 🚨
That +10% lifetime APR boost on TNVDA:USDC pool on Base sounds massive – definitely a no-brainer for anyone farming yields right now.
Only 12 hours left? Lions, time to move fast! 🦁
You're very welcome :)
Just 5 or 6 hours to go. So yes, folks who want that extra boost should act fast
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👀
https://inleo.io/threads/view/khaleelkazi/re-leothreads-2fzj5wszm
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Have a nice day Lions...
Did you get TNVDA Reward?
🎉 Thank you for holding LSTR tokens!
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Not yet I guess. Let me check.
!TTSLA me
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👤 Your TTSLA Holdings & Earnings
👤 Account: kam5iz
🔗 Connected Address: 0x9ec3...3329
💰 Balances:
👉 Hive Engine: 16.370 TTSLA
👉 Base: 6.685 TTSLA
👉 Total: 23.055 TTSLA
💵 Total Value: $87.240
📊 Daily Yield: ~$0.047
📈 Effective APR: 19.999%
💎 Lifetime Earnings:
🪙 1.616 HBD/USDC
💵 $1.615
🎯 Reward Preferences:
👉 Hive Engine: HBD
👉 Base: USDC
@askrafiki , Has 2x presale yield for TTSLA presale holdings been disabled ?
No, the 2x yield boost for TTSLA presale holdings hasn't been disabled. It's a 60-day benefit for buyers who participated before the November 7, 2025 presale ended.
From the official launch details: Presale buyers received a 2x multiplier on base yield (3-20% APR range), paid daily, snapshot at presale close. This applies to your holdings (23.055 TTSLA total) if you bought in presale—your current 19.999% effective APR aligns with active boosted yield.
For confirmation on your specific boost status, run !TTSLA me via @ttsla.yield or check @leostrategy posts like 5 Hours Remaining on the TTSLA Presale (Nov 7, 2025).
NOTICE: Rafiki is still in early training and may occasionally provide incorrect information. Please report errors using #feedback
🎥🎄 @dashpay $DASH Podcast New Year's Special 2026!
📣 Live today, Tuesday 30-12 at 16:00
🤝 Hosted by Digital Cash Network with @thedessertlinux
🫵 You can't miss it 😉
https://www.youtube.com/live/rYdg-yTApxE?si=iWzJ4kQXYWIWK_bn
my plants are either drowning or in a drought, I can't find the middle ground lol
It's almost 2026 and a lot of people are probably writing new year resolutions that they're goin to forget about by the end of January.
Goodluck with the new year friends
1 more day left and one day is huge time.
Perhaps by the 10th of January.
Haha
Wake up, get coffee, check manas, start script, check mail, contact people, get parcel delivered
✅️,✅️,✅️,,✅️,,
You busy, huh?
!BBH
Yeah. Unexpectedly so 😂
!BBH
It's tuesday! !BBH
It seems so 😂
!BBH
Just back after a long break guys 👍 🤞
Welcome back!
saludos
I hope that from now on you will be available here.
If working harder created wealth, the richest people would be the most exhausted…
https://inleo.io/threads/view/simplegame/re-simplegame-2dbpt9fh7
Great, more LEO buyers 😀
#premium done 😊
Congratulations, my friend! Enjoy all the benefits and earn a lot, Leo.
thanks my friend david 🔥
👍👍
Do you know that women tell an average of 11 lies a week. Men, 58.
Fact
#hive #Leo
Leave your comments below
Thank you
This is true! 😅
!BBH !ALIVE !HOPE
I disagree with you. As for women it's more than that, for men is not true. Your statistic is wrong. You can use yourself as an example. Do you tell lies on an average of 58 a week?
I appreciate your comment
#hive
I appreciate your comment
I have to monitor my lies and see. 😁
Please do
#hive
😁
More grace to you
#hive
🇺🇸 A study finds the proportion of U.S. adults classified as obese jumps from 42.9% under the traditional BMI-based definition to 68.6% with the new definition
The rise is entirely explained by inclusion of people identified as having anthropometric-only obesity
If you were to change two habits in the new year, what would they be?
Me: Delaying taking action and procrastinating
I don't want to change any habit as I think all of my current habit is well and good for me.