Bill Maher stops by The Ben Shapiro Show on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher to talk about his new show, The Daily Show with Bill Maher, and why he should vote Republican in 2020. Plus, we revisit President Trump's presence on the world stage and his relationship with Russia, and what it would take for Bill to finally cross the political aisle and join the Republican Party. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. If you haven t gotten a VPN yet, get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.me/Ben ShapiroShow and use promo code: "ExpressVPN" to get 3 months of 3-months for FREE! Get 3 months for FREE when you sign up for 3 months at ExpressVPN and get access to all of the features and features you ve been asking for. You don t have to take my word for it, by the way. It s rated No. 1 by Business Insider and countless other tech publications, and it s rated #1 by many other media outlets, including Forbes, TechCrunch, and countless others. The problem with Big Tech is that not only do they attempt to censor you, they also track what you do online. So, what do they do online? They track you? What do Big Tech and Big Government have in common? Ben Shapiro asks the question: What do they want you to do? And what do you do to make sure you re protected from Big Tech, Big Government, and Big Tech? What are they want to silence you from your voice on the internet? This is a question Ben Shapiro answers in this Sunday Special, Sunday Special! on the Ben Shapiro show Sunday Special with Bill's Sunday Special featuring Bill Maher and Ben Shapiro. . Subscribe to Ben Shapiro on HBO s Real Time with Bill Maher on his new stand-up comedy special, and much more! on his show, What's Florida treating you better than Florida? and so much more. Subscribe and review Ben Shapiro s Sunday Special? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe in iTunes! Learn more about Ben Shapiro's new book, The New York Times bestselling novel, How to be a better than Ben Shapiro? Get a copy of his new book out on Amazon Prime Day, The New Adventures of The Five Guys by Ben Shapiro, on my new podcast, and more! Subscribe on Podchaser, wherever else is Ben Shapiro is on the air?
00:00:03.000It's arguing with some kid you went to high school with.
00:00:06.000You were in chem lab together, and now you have to talk about who's on the Supreme Court?
00:00:11.000That's, I think, what is tearing America apart.
00:00:14.000Because there's a million things you could talk about that aren't political, and you find out, oh, this person is not that different from me.
00:00:39.000In this episode, Bill returns the favor.
00:00:41.000His long-running show, Real Time with Bill Maher, hits its 20th year on the air next year.
00:00:46.000It's been Bill's vehicle to challenge, and often mock, politics of the day from his liberal perspective.
00:00:51.000But Bill's one of those old-school liberals you don't see too much of these days.
00:00:54.000Progressive ideas on taking care of people and the environment, but also an adamant defender of free speech and a critic of wokeness, meaning his commentary and joking about news and politics often hits the left, too.
00:01:19.000Given the Russia and Ukraine news right now, in this episode, we revisit President Trump's presence on the world stage and his relationship with Russia versus that of President Biden.
00:01:27.000We'll also discuss left-wing media misinformation and dishonesty on COVID the last couple of years, and what it would take for Bill to cross that political aisle and finally vote Republican.
00:02:03.000You want to talk on social media about the right to bear arms.
00:02:05.000Well, chances are very, very good that your post will be flagged by a content moderator You might end up on some kind of government watch list.
00:02:11.000If you want to fight back against having your voice censored by both Big Tech and Big Government, I recommend ExpressVPN.
00:02:17.000See, the problem with Big Tech is that not only do they attempt to censor you, they also track what you do online.
00:02:22.000What you're searching for, the videos you watch, everything you click.
00:02:25.000And they can match your activities, your true identity, using your device's unique IP address.
00:02:29.000When I use ExpressVPN, they can't see my IP address at all.
00:02:32.000My identity is anonymized by a secure VPN server.
00:02:34.000Plus, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of my internet data for protection, from hackers and eavesdroppers.
00:02:40.000ExpressVPN, it's by far the best VPN I've tried.
00:02:42.000You don't have to take my word for it, by the way.
00:02:44.000It's rated number one by Business Insider and countless other tech publications.
00:02:48.000What I love most about ExpressVPN, it's super easy to use.
00:02:50.000The app has one button, you tap it, you're protected, you're done.
00:04:56.000You know, I have a lot of quarrels about how this coronavirus was handled.
00:05:01.000I mean, you can respect it and have compassion for the people who suffered from it, and still have, as I do, and I have made this very known to my audience, who mostly doesn't like me for it, that I don't think it was handled the right way.
00:05:17.000Yeah, I mean, for us, I mean, for my family, we actually moved mid-COVID from L.A.
00:05:21.000to Florida, and this is one of the reasons.
00:05:24.000I mean, in L.A., they shut down all the public parks.
00:05:27.000And then there were a bunch of riots, and it was like, well, if I could take my kids rioting, it would have been okay, but I couldn't take my kids rioting, so I had to be double quarantined in my home.
00:05:34.000I was quarantined for the virus and then quarantined because there were riots outside my door, and it was like, I'm getting out of here.
00:05:39.000I mean, one of the first editorials I did when I had to be doing the show from my backyard was about how Just in general, I think we should handle any disease, but especially this one, more internally, not just externally.
00:06:24.000But this one because America is so unhealthy.
00:06:28.000That's the essential part we don't address.
00:06:30.000So unhealthy to begin with that it's great we have a vaccine because that is what is saving the lives of everyone smart enough to get the vaccine who is not in good health to begin with.
00:08:00.000I mean, there's a lot of silliness on both sides, a lot of bad information on both sides.
00:08:06.000I don't think the liberals liked it when I pointed out That I think it was something like 41% of Democrats, when asked the question, I mean, and this was in the New York Times, they had Republican versus Democrat views on COVID.
00:08:22.000And something like 41% of Democrats, when asked the key question, how many people who get COVID need to be hospitalized, thought it was over 50%.
00:08:39.000To be off that much about the... No wonder they think you need a mask everywhere.
00:08:44.000If you think half the people who get it need to go to the hospital and it's really 1%, how did they get that bad information in their head?
00:08:52.000And I said, you know, Fox News and the right wing has a lot to answer for, for a lot of misinformation out there.
00:08:59.000I would put climate change as top of that list.
00:09:03.000But the left-wing media should answer for that.
00:09:06.000How did your audience get that bad idea in their head that so many people need to go to the hospital who don't?
00:09:15.000And, you know, as you started to say, I did an editorial about this about a month ago.
00:09:18.000Again, not well-received by a lot of people, but I was just, again, giving the facts.
00:09:23.000We know who gets this and dies from this.
00:09:33.000Okay, they weren't trying to be wrong about it, but, you know, my overarching opinion was, modern medicine, it's wonderful, but you're wrong about a lot.
00:10:44.000Where do you ever see that in any story about anything?
00:10:49.000And of course, 78% of the people who died or are hospitalized were obese.
00:10:56.000And that's another one that's not a popular opinion to talk about, but I Feel like I have to because it's such a salient fact in this.
00:11:04.000If you just said to somebody, okay, there's an X factor in this of 78% of the people who get it, this X factor accounts for 78% who die or go to the hospital.
00:11:19.000Wouldn't you be a little curious, if you were a news organization, wouldn't you be talking about that fact all the time?
00:11:25.000And yet we're at such a crazy place with obesity.
00:11:29.000It is the ultimate third rail in discourse.
00:11:33.000I'm talking about everything you could possibly talk about.
00:12:09.000So my basic theory is that as a society, we've really cracked down very hard on the idea that people have any sort of control over their lives, and whenever you imply that somebody has control over their life and they have a problem, and that maybe they can avoid that problem, they get very, very angry at you.
00:12:23.000And obesity is a great example of this, because the vast majority of people who are obese are people who probably should be eating less and creating caloric deficit.
00:12:32.000You silver-tongued it beautifully, Ben.
00:12:34.000I was just gonna say they love to stuff their face.
00:12:36.000But it's really the same idea, isn't it?
00:12:39.000Yes, I mean, that's... But we are in a different place with it than we were even five years ago.
00:12:46.000Five years ago, it at least was thought to be a good thing to try to lose weight.
00:13:59.000I'm just saying we were never going to solve the health care crisis in this country until we get our arms around this thing.
00:14:08.000And we're not allowed to talk about it or else you're a bad person.
00:14:12.000And anyone who doesn't, I'm sorry, you have blood on your hands.
00:14:17.000Anyone in the media who doesn't talk about this because you're so afraid of the reaction, you have blood on your hands because you're not doing these people a favor.
00:14:34.000I mean, you're either going to die fast from COVID, especially if you're not vaccinated from this, or slowly.
00:14:41.000And also, it's going to bring down, as it was before this, The economy of the country.
00:14:47.000Because, I mean, when we were debating health care in this country for years, and Obamacare, and on and after, it was always about, we would look at the charts, we would see how much health care spending is going up, and people would say, we can't do it.
00:16:39.000But, boy, you're just a bad guy if you say that about food.
00:16:43.000So in a second, I want to ask you about how that kind of ties into broader issues of identity politics.
00:16:47.000But first, since we're talking about your imminent death, let's talk about life insurance.
00:16:51.000If somebody relies on your financial support, whether it's a child, an aging parent, even a business partner, you need life insurance.
00:16:57.000Typically, life insurance gets more expensive as you age, so you should really get it sooner rather than later, because every single minute that passes, you are getting older, which means you're getting more expensive to insure.
00:18:08.000So let's talk about identity politics.
00:18:10.000So one of the things I think that we're speaking about here is the attempt to turn everything into an identity.
00:18:16.000And so if you are, Adele is bad because she shed her identity as an overweight singer for a new identity as just a singer who's not overweight.
00:18:25.000And there's this feeling about nearly everything in American life.
00:18:28.000Everything can be boiled down to an issue of identity.
00:18:30.000And the problem with that, of course, on a broader political level is once everything's an identity, including your political perspective, every political argument becomes an attack on you as a person.
00:18:38.000Because if your identity is your politics, and then I disagree with your politics, that's not us having a rational debate.
00:18:49.000You hear this sort of language all the time in a variety of issues.
00:18:53.000You're trying to erase me as a human being.
00:18:55.000If I disagree with you, obviously the most obvious example is on transgenderism where the argument is that if you don't want Leah Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, swimming against women, this is because you're trying to erase Leah Thomas's transgender identity.
00:19:08.000Once everything becomes an identity, even putting that example aside, then It prohibits you from actually having rational conversations with people.
00:19:17.000The entire basis of rational conversation is my identity doesn't matter.
00:19:19.000What I'm arguing up here with you is what matters.
00:19:22.000Yeah, I would agree with all that, but you would, or I would ask you if you would agree that there's certainly a lot of that on the right too.
00:19:28.000What is more of an identity than the Trump voter, the white person who thinks that America is being taken away and becoming a different kind of country than they remember it?
00:19:40.000You know, let's make America great again, wink wink, you know, white again.
00:19:44.000I mean, that is also a type of identity politics, yes?
00:19:48.000I mean, for the people who actually believe that, sure.
00:19:53.000But I wonder how much of that is reading into somebody else's politics, your desired, you know, character flaw.
00:19:58.000I mean, you see that on the right doing that to the left, too.
00:20:00.000I mean, there have been good studies showing that people on the right tend to think that people on the left don't care about family, people on the left don't care about Personal values.
00:20:08.000And then when you actually ask people on the left what they care about, they care about a lot of those things.
00:20:48.000You know, their idea, again, it's sort of your point about identity politics, their conception, I think, and it's wrong, Is that every Latino in America is thinking, boy, more immigration.
00:21:03.000And a lot of them are thinking, no, I'm here.
00:21:06.000The last thing I want is someone else coming over who's going to do my job for a little less money.
00:21:15.000And, you know, I wonder when this is going to sink in, in the Democratic Party leadership.
00:21:23.000I think it's going to be very difficult for them because I think that there is a sort of math that was done in the early part of the 20th century with people like Reuters share writing about this talking about how there was this new emerging Democratic majority was going to be a majority minority coalition as the demographics of the country changed and became less white.
00:21:38.000Inevitably, these minority groups would continue to vote at the same rates that they were voting for Democrats.
00:21:43.000So if you get more Hispanics, you get more black voters, you get more Asian voters, inevitably this would be sort of the new rising wave.
00:21:48.000And Obama really did model that in 2012.
00:21:50.000He had a very diverse coalition combined with college-educated white liberals.
00:21:54.000And so they thought this was going to be the formula here on out, and that was always going to be the formula.
00:22:19.000I mean, Cuban-Americans don't vote the same way that Venezuelan-Americans vote, who don't vote the same way the Mexican-Americans vote.
00:22:24.000The question is whether they're so tied into this sort of intersectional coalition where everybody is described based on their race, as opposed to a broad platform that anybody can ascribe to no matter what, that they can't get out of that sort of mindset.
00:22:37.000And it feels like, sort of, yeah, I mean, I think that's the disappointment of Biden in some ways.
00:22:41.000Biden was supposed to be a moderate who was above all that, and he really hasn't governed that way.
00:23:04.000I can't remember, I read this recently, but somebody wrote an article and said that the Hispanic vote is starting to look a lot like what happened with the Italian vote.
00:23:15.000Or the Germans, or the Irish, or everybody except the Jews who just kept voting Democrat forever.
00:23:20.000But didn't the Italian become much more of a Republican bloc?
00:23:26.000And if the Democrats lose that, they're in a lot of trouble.
00:23:29.000Because that is a rising demographic as far as numbers.
00:23:33.000And if that number even becomes like 50-50, I mean, it's funny because it was only a few years ago that people were saying, oh, well, the Republicans are cooked.
00:23:46.000The whites are going down and the people of color.
00:23:49.000And of course, if the people of color are going up, but they're voting the wrong way, as far as the Democrats are concerned, then you're really in a lot of trouble as far as winning elections, which I assume is what they're still trying to do.
00:24:04.000Yeah, I mean, I think wokeness is such electoral poison for Democrats, not just because it's treating people as members of identity groups that they may not see as their chief signifier, but also because, to a certain extent, they're only appealing to certain identity groups.
00:24:19.000I think that there are a lot of Hispanics in America who looked at the platform of Black Lives Matter in 2020, which said, get rid of the cops, the cops don't need to be here, defund the police.
00:24:27.000And there are a lot of Hispanics who are saying, wait a second, I'm upwardly mobile economically.
00:24:34.000I also may live in an area that has high crime.
00:24:36.000This does not seem like a good plan to me.
00:24:38.000And so, moving in terms of this agenda and making this kind of tip of the spear, the argument for a lot of Hispanics that America is a deeply racist, unfixable place, that doesn't apply to a lot of people.
00:24:50.000It's an argument that really applies to a very narrow segment of the American population.
00:24:54.000No, I always say, let's live in the year we're living in.
00:24:58.000You know, because sometimes when the people you're talking about, you know, you think it was, you know, 1960 or 1860, and it's like, yes, we have a very sorry history, racially, in this country, including a lot of stuff that's still going on right now.
00:25:14.000I mean, it's not like racism is extirpated here in America.
00:25:18.000But it is very different than it was, and we need to live in the present era, in the present time, with the present conditions.
00:25:28.000But when you say woke, you know, it's become, and I make fun of it too, because it's become an eye roll in many ways.
00:25:35.000If woke, I assume at a certain moment, and it wasn't that long ago before we didn't have the term.
00:25:41.000I only heard it, I don't know, what, it was three, four years ago?
00:25:45.000Five years ago at most when we heard the term woke, and it was like alert to injustice.
00:26:43.000Free speech, you know, used to be a left-wing thing that we were proud and owned, and now that seems to be under attack.
00:26:51.000So again, I think I've stayed the same.
00:26:54.000And look, as long as the Republicans are a party who, in my view, does not take seriously the emergency of climate change, and I'm not sure if they even believe in American democracy anymore, certainly most Republicans, I think, did not, and Congress So let's get to those two issues in just one second.
00:27:14.000trying to not count the votes in an honest election.
00:27:17.000As long as those two issues are what they are for Republicans, I don't think they're even savable.
00:27:23.000Whereas the Democrats, maybe I'm being a cockeyed optimist, but I still think they are savable.
00:27:29.000So let's get to those two issues in just one second.
00:27:31.000First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
00:28:00.000It was made just for me, made just for my wife.
00:28:03.000We actually were able to Tailor the mattress so that there are different settings on each side of the bed.
00:28:07.000If you're looking for a mattress, you take the quiz, you order the mattress you're matched to, the mattress comes right to your door, shipped for free.
00:28:12.000You don't ever need to go to a mattress store again.
00:28:14.000Helix is awesome, but you don't need to take my word for it.
00:28:17.000Helix was awarded the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by both GQ and Wired Magazine.
00:28:21.000So, head on over to helixsleep.com slash Ben.
00:28:55.000So let's talk about those two issues, because I know there are a lot of people in my audience who are thinking, OK, so if we just solve those two issues, then maybe Bill Maher votes Republican for the first time.
00:29:30.000That's the other thing about voting in California.
00:29:33.000It's so different than where the Republican Party is now.
00:29:36.000It's not like if he won he was a crazy person who was, you know, going to start not counting the votes or do the crazy things that Trump did when he was president or, you know, not concede elections or something.
00:29:48.000He was just, you know, he was a Kansas conservative.
00:29:53.000And I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary, I think.
00:30:43.000You know, they should have just said, OK, you know, Bill Clinton, as I think Hillary herself once said, he's a hard dog to keep on the porch.
00:30:52.000That's just... You know, I knew Roger for a while.
00:31:02.000They're good old boys, they like ladies.
00:31:06.000And it's just some of the stuff that went on back then about if he cheated on his wife, how can we know he's not going to cheat on the country?
00:31:19.000So let's start with the climate change thing and then we'll get to the voting thing.
00:31:23.000So on climate change, there's I think sort of a reasonable spectrum of opinion inside the Republican Party and then there are the people who just outright say climate change is not happening, it's not human cost.
00:31:33.000The position that's been taken by a lot of Republicans, including me, I say that climate change is happening, I fully accept the IPCC estimates and the range of estimates from the IPCC.
00:31:43.000I just think that the solutions that are being proposed are completely unreasonable.
00:31:47.000So I think this idea that we're going to just pour money into green energy and this is going to magically solve the problem does not solve the basic problem, which is that most of the forms of energy we're talking about are not nearly competitive on the world stage with carbon-based energy.
00:32:00.000So, a carbon tax would be almost impossible to do globally, is the issue.
00:32:03.000So the biggest emitters, not on a per capita basis, but on an absolute basis, are China and India right now.
00:32:08.000And they're not going to carbon tax anything.
00:32:10.000We still have a global competition with China and India in terms of foreign policy and allowing them to pollute up the wazoo while we sacrifice our own energy ambitions.
00:32:19.000That seems like a bad recipe for Europe right now, for example, with regard to Russia, which means that if you're actually going to do something, what I've talked about before is doing things like building sea walls.
00:33:36.000It's just... But, I mean, this adapter, and it's funny you say that, because I was having dinner with a friend of mine, Just a regular liberal person, not a crazy person, left or right, but generally a liberal person, lives in Los Angeles.
00:33:50.000And I heard him say exactly what you said.
00:33:52.000I thought, oh, that's interesting that he's where you are.
00:33:55.000He said, you know, we're not going to do anything about this.
00:33:59.000We're going to have to start just adapting.
00:34:02.000I still think we should try a little harder for a little while more to do something about it.
00:34:07.000And I mean, you don't think if we led the way at some point that would have some influence on other countries?
00:34:14.000Do you think China and India would just say, OK, forget it, we're just going to hold hands like Tom and Louise and drive off the dreadnought?
00:34:22.000I mean, I think China would immediately take advantage of our Sacrifice on the on the economic front in order to gain more power.
00:34:30.000I mean, this is the reason I say this is because this is precisely what you're seeing from Russia, right?
00:34:34.000Europe has gone way more in a green direction than the United States has, and they're still basically powering their economy with Russian natural gas and oil.
00:34:41.000I mean, 50% of Germany's natural gas and oil were coming from Russia.
00:34:45.000And so the minute that Russia invades Ukraine, all of a sudden the price is double in these places.
00:34:49.000And it turns out all these investments in green energy were making them dependent on one of the world's most aggressive powers.
00:34:56.000Like, they're real, they're real unintended consequences to listening to Greta Thunberg when you make policy.
00:35:01.000Well, I did a whole thing on Greta and Kylie Jenner about three or four months ago, which was an indictment really of the younger generations, because they're the ones who would have to care about this more than me.
00:36:02.000So, until the younger generation cares more than they do, and I don't mean, you know, the Greta's, there aren't those, but in general, you know, I just think people are just gonna use up what we have until it's gone, and that's a bigger problem if you're 25 than if you're my age.
00:36:20.000So on the climate change thing, if the proposals were for seawalls from the Republican Party and not, this snowball means there's no global warming, then you'd be in the ballpark.
00:36:32.000Yeah, I also think we could lead more.
00:36:34.000Maybe I'm wrong, but I do think if we took the lead, if we planted our flag on the ground and said, we're doing this, I think you can get people.
00:36:43.000I think you can shame people a little bit.
00:36:58.000Developing world, which nation are we talking about here?
00:37:00.000Are we talking about nations where people are burning dung for fuel?
00:37:03.000Because, I mean, by the way, we should mention that when it comes to green energy, it's very easy for first world people to care a lot about solar panels, but when you're burning dung for fuel in Africa, that makes it very, very difficult for you to care.
00:37:13.000But what I'm saying is, third world, okay, places that have not had air conditioning, places that have not had cars, Okay, and now they finally are getting them.
00:37:26.000It's very hard to say to them, look, we've been enjoying these things for quite a long time now.
00:37:46.000I mean, they must understand that what good is it to win the economic race if you can't breathe?
00:37:53.000The air in Beijing, don't they sometimes have to like Take drastic measures because you can't breathe there?
00:37:59.000The nice thing about being in communist dictatorship is that if you more people die, you know, what's a few more beans worth more or less is the nice thing about being a horrific tyrannical dictatorship.
00:38:09.000I mean, unfortunately, you know, communist authoritarian nations don't have a great environmental track record from Chernobyl to Beijing today.
00:38:17.000I mean, a case could be made that we very often are callous about people's life in this country as well.
00:38:24.000I mean, I will say we haven't killed 100 million people for an ideology recently.
00:38:33.000You know, what I said before about woke and like why it's an eye roll, it's like among the many goofy things they believe that they didn't used to is that, you know, maybe communism is worth a try again and capitalism is bad.
00:38:54.000So in a second, I do want to get to the kind of big elephant in the room, of course, when it comes to all this stuff, which is voting and Trump and all of the sort of insanity of the last couple of years.
00:39:05.000First, let's talk about if you need to recruit more employees and better employees.
00:39:12.000If you are a prospective employee, it's always a great idea to keep learning new skills.
00:39:16.000Whether you want to learn how to save more money, or how to own a plant without killing it, or how to make the perfect pizza crust, if you're always learning, it keeps you sharp.
00:40:18.000Okay, so let's talk about the notion that the entire Republican Party is sort of held hostage to the voting priorities of Donald Trump when it comes to his belief that the 2020 election was stolen, or maybe him saying that that's what he believes.
00:40:30.000It's sort of difficult to tell what he once believed, what he convinced himself to believe, or whatever.
00:40:35.000But getting outside of his head... I think he really believes it.
00:40:37.000I think at this point he definitely believes it.
00:40:39.000I don't know if he believed it the day that the election happened, but I think within a couple of hours he had I think they have proved in psychology that if you tell yourself a lie enough, you, you, you know, I think O.J.
00:40:52.000I think if you live a lie long enough, I mean, I know people who literally have changed their age.
00:40:59.000You think that would be something that's kind of like easy to remember, and they really think they're a different age, because they've been telling the lie for so long.
00:41:06.000So I really think Trump thinks he won that election, but... Okay, so that, that...
00:41:12.000The basic idea here is that the Republican Party is a threat to sort of the very health of democracy.
00:41:17.000And that if the Republicans are in charge, again, of say all three branches of government, they can pass whatever they want, that their first move is to stymie the ability of people to vote.
00:41:25.000It seems to me that regardless of what Trump says or what he does, and I've been very vocal about the fact that the election was not stolen in 2020.
00:41:41.000With all of that said, the evidence of widespread voter suppression that has been alleged by, for example, Stacey Abrams in Georgia does not exist in the same way that the voter fraud evidence that Donald Trump suggests is widespread does not exist.
00:41:54.000In fact, there's probably better evidence of mild voter fraud in particular areas than there is voter suppression.
00:41:59.000You really can't name a person in the United States who said, I desperately wanted to vote.
00:42:02.000I'm not going to argue with you a lot about that.
00:42:03.000It is a little bit overblown, that issue.
00:42:04.000And so the idea that Republicans are going to step in and just quash people's ability to vote and this ends democracy, I find that difficult to believe.
00:42:12.000I'm not going to argue with you a lot about that.
00:42:15.000It is a little bit overblown, that issue.
00:42:17.000I do think that the Republicans do want to suppress votes.
00:42:21.000I think when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, I think that was not a good move because I think they were naive, that such a thing was not necessary anymore.
00:42:34.000But I think they have studied this and found that, at the end of the day, it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
00:42:40.000The people who want to vote are going to vote.
00:42:42.000Now, we shouldn't make it harder for them.
00:42:51.000There shouldn't be like one drop box in all of Houston County or something for two million people.
00:42:58.000Drop boxes are typically not the way people vote in the last five minutes.
00:43:01.000There are a lot of examples of chicanery that you must admit should not be going on.
00:43:05.000To me the greatest form of chicanery is what we see in California with ballot harvesting.
00:43:08.000If I'm looking at something that I think is really corrupt, ballot harvesting is the practice where Parties can go door-to-door and pick up ballots from particular doors.
00:43:15.000And so if you have a really well-funded Republican machine, then you go to all of the Republican houses, you pick up their ballots.
00:43:21.000That seems like a real possibility of either voter fraud or intimidation.
00:43:24.000That's more dangerous to me than some drop boxes get taken away.
00:43:29.000But this is not even where we have the major contention.
00:43:38.000Most people are okay with getting a voter ID.
00:43:41.000Even gerrymandering, which everybody's all up and hot and bothered about.
00:43:44.000I mean, it happens when Republicans are in charge and when Democrats are in charge, and it doesn't seem to have all that much of an impact on a broad national scale in terms of the allocation of the vote.
00:44:01.000I just don't think that... If we had fair districts, People would have to come to the middle.
00:44:08.000And that's what would, I think, more than anything else, save this country.
00:44:11.000Because we're breaking down into this country where the only people who get elected are the far extremes of either party.
00:44:18.000And of course, you can't legislate, you can't come together, you can't compromise when you have those two kind of factions in the Congress.
00:44:30.000My worry more about what we're talking about is what Trump is doing now, which is trying to, behind the scenes, put people in place so that in the next election, When he tries to do what he did in the last one, it works.
00:44:46.000When he calls up, as he did, and why he wasn't impeached for this, I don't know, when he calls up... Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State of Georgia.
00:45:12.000So if that were to happen, obviously, that would be a crime, and if people were to be falsifying... But you don't think that's going on right now?
00:45:17.000You don't think that's what Trump is trying to do?
00:45:19.000Put his stooges, his loyalists, in places where there were Brad Raffsenburgers before?
00:45:24.000Everybody who's run in a primary with the platform that they wish to do that has lost.
00:45:29.000And so my great worry about the... The platform for... I'm going to be throwing out votes, for example.
00:45:36.000Like if you're running for state election official in... I'm not sure about that.
00:45:42.000If you're running on the platform, then I'm going to be able to throw out ballots that I just don't like, or I'm going to... Well, send electors.
00:45:49.000Well, alternative slates of electors have to be selected by the state legislature.
00:45:51.000I mean, I've seen no evidence that their state legislature... They're changing the law sometimes where it's not the state legislature who gets to make that call.
00:45:58.000Well, this is why they need to reform the Electoral Account Act, right, at the federal level.
00:46:32.000So, you know, with sort of all of this said, and I think that you're right that it feels like the country is separating right now in some pretty extreme ways, it seems like, to me, that that's a problem but it could be partially a solution.
00:46:46.000The reason I say it could be partially a solution, as a member of the great sort, as somebody who moved from a blue state as a person who votes conservative to a red state, and Florida's growing increasingly red and California's growing increasingly blue, As that happens, it seems like to me, the hope for the country is not that we start electing moderates at the national level who start coming together and doing things.
00:47:03.000It seems like the hope is that everybody sort of says, if we're going to stick around in the same country, it's got to be weapons down.
00:47:09.000In other words, the federal government needs to let California be California, it needs to let Florida be Florida, it needs to get the hell out of the way, because otherwise it's going to be a bare majority.
00:47:16.000I think it has to start with an attitude adjustment.
00:47:18.000their views on the 49% of blue or vice versa.
00:47:21.000So either we go back to a much more strong federalist system in which all of the localities that are now much more sorted politically sort of govern how they want to, and then we all share a couple of things like national defense and roads, or we're going to just get this kind of rock em, sock em robots till the end of time.
00:47:39.000I don't think it's going to get better.
00:47:41.000I think it has to start with an attitude adjustment.
00:47:43.000I mean, when I sat down, that cup you have there that says leftist.
00:48:14.000But I think we've got to step back from that, because we're at a place now where we're just loathing each other.
00:48:22.000Maybe, I don't know, I wasn't alive for it, but I don't think people all through the history of this country had this kind of loathing for each other, where we see people with t-shirts on the right that say, I'd rather be with Russia than the Democrats.
00:48:37.000But that's the feeling of a lot of people.
00:48:40.000Yeah, and on the left, vice versa, for sure.
00:48:42.000Well, I don't know if anybody on the left is wishing they'd rather be with another foreign entity than the Republican Party.
00:48:50.000I've never seen an equivalent of that on the left.
00:48:55.000The hatred for Trump, in particular, was strong enough that if you'd given people... Of course, he was everything that was wrong with a human stuffed into one man.
00:49:31.000What I mean is that Barack Obama literally sat with Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 and pledged him flexibility post-election if Russia would back off.
00:49:38.000What I mean is that the Democratic Party... You're saying that's an equivalent to... I'm saying it's much worse than Trump saying That he believes whatever he believes because no one took Trump seriously about anything.
00:50:09.000Okay, but if you're the president... You didn't take Bill Clinton seriously when he was banging everything inside.
00:50:14.000I don't really see why you're taking him... What does that have to do with this?
00:50:16.000No, I mean... I mean, you're talking about what the president... Bill Clinton in his life is... the comparison is Bill Clinton in his sexual life is frivolous.
00:50:22.000Donald Trump in many of the things that he does, including his political life, is frivolous.
00:50:26.000I don't treat him with the same seriousness I would treat Barack Obama.
00:50:32.000It doesn't affect me or the nation what Bill Clinton did in his personal life, his sexual life.
00:50:37.000It matters very much what the president does in his political life when he stands with a foreign leader who is an adversary, almost an enemy, now an enemy, for sure, and says, I believe him over the people in my own government, my intelligence agencies, the people who keep us safe, and then lied about it when they came after him.
00:50:56.000Believe me, in that Helsinki press conference, I went after him with a blowtorch, but the actual impact of that was far more negligible than the impact of Barack Obama saying to Dmitry Medvedev what he said.
00:51:08.000Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea two years later.
00:51:11.000And Barack Obama, one year later, was handing over Syria to the Russians.
00:51:14.000So I mean, like, in terms of actual hard policy, this is one of the problems with trying to gauge Trump that I always had, is that for every other president, you could see a direct connect between the thing they were trying to do and what they actually accomplished.
00:51:25.000The things they were saying were intended to accomplish a particular purpose, and then it would either accomplish the purpose or not accomplish the purpose.
00:51:31.000And with Trump, as I've said before, I feel like on his epitaph, it will say Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, he said a lot of shit.
00:51:39.000He said a lot of s**t. And we all know that, instinctively, that when you read his Twitter feed, you weren't reading the well-thought-out press, you know, focus-grouped comments of Barack Obama, who actually, as much as I dislike Barack Obama's policy, he thought through what he was doing.
00:51:55.000I don't think anybody thought that Donald Trump was anything more than a bundle of impulses in a lot of ways.
00:51:59.000But he was not a game show host at the time that he was saying this s**t. What was the impact of it?
00:52:13.000We're going to find out how this war goes in Ukraine, won't we?
00:52:16.000The question there is whether that was incentivized by Donald Trump or whether it was the pullout from Afghanistan, whether it was the last six months of saying we would do nothing.
00:52:23.000At that very press conference, they asked Putin, would you like Donald Trump to be an officer?
00:55:21.000So I could see that Trump could actually win that election easily, especially if the Democrats keep doing the stuff they are doing to piss people off, like in schools, with all that kind of stuff.
00:55:53.000I mean, when you look at Ukraine, I mean, the Ukraine issue that he was impeached over, yes, I think it was an impeachable offense, absolutely.
00:56:01.000But to most people, it's like Ukraine.
00:56:04.000I mean, the Palin family working as a team couldn't find it on a map.
00:56:27.000That's what I worry about with the Democrats.
00:56:29.000And in that scenario, Trump could win.
00:56:33.000But if he doesn't, if he loses like say about the way he lost last time, not by a lot, but you don't think, you think he's going to go gently into that night?
00:56:43.000No, and I don't think it's going to matter.
00:56:45.000And the reason I think it's not going to matter is because I think that the constitutional structures have proved themselves extraordinarily durable.
01:00:03.000So in a second I want to ask you about, you know, kind of America on the world stage since Ukraine is obviously in the news and where you think that's going.
01:00:10.000First, let's talk about another podcast you should be giving a listen to.
01:00:19.000It's a top-shelf podcast named Best of Apple in 2018.
01:00:22.000So don't just ignore my suggestion to listen to this one like you probably do when all your other friends tell you to listen to a podcast.
01:00:26.000We here at the Daily Wire, we are fans.
01:00:28.000Jordan dives into the minds of fascinating people from athletes, authors, and scientists to mobsters, spies, and hostage negotiators.
01:00:35.000Harbinger has an undeniable talent for getting his guests to share never-been-heard-before stories and thought-provoking insights.
01:00:40.000Without fail, he pulls out tactical bits of wisdom in each episode.
01:00:43.000All with the noble cause to make you a more informed, critical thinker to better operate in today's world.
01:00:48.000Even though I don't always agree with Jordan and what he says on his show, he is definitely one of the sharpest guys in the non-political interview game.
01:01:04.000That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, go check out the Jordan Harbinger show today.
01:01:13.000I promise you, once you put it in that podcast rotation, you're going to want to listen to every single episode.
01:01:18.000Alrighty, so let's talk about the Ukraine situation.
01:01:21.000So, it seems to me that when it comes to Ukraine, there are, I mean, not just seems to me, it's pretty obvious, there are no good options.
01:01:28.000When deterrence fails, there are no good options anymore.
01:01:31.000And the grave failure of the West was that we spent 30 years basically thinking that bad people are not bad people if we talk to them strong enough and if we negotiate with them or if we ignore them taking pieces of territory in Georgia under Bush or under Or Crimea under Obama.
01:01:45.000If we just ignore it hard enough, then maybe it sort of goes away.
01:02:06.000I think this is actually turning out to be, I mean, obviously what's going on for the people of Ukraine is horrible right now.
01:02:12.000But I think in the long run, I think it's going to be a good thing because, first of all, Putin is being shown to be way less strong than we thought he was.
01:02:21.000I mean, this is, I don't know what the opposite of Blitzkrieg is.
01:03:24.000But that is, and I think that's what is in his mind, is I'm going to reclaim this.
01:03:29.000Yes, the Russian state moved to Moscow, but it's almost similar to the way Kosovo, I mean, when Milosevic started the Balkan Wars.
01:03:37.000It was all about, the year was 1989, it was the 600th anniversary.
01:03:44.000In that part of the world, that's like yesterday.
01:03:47.000You know, that's so far into the way Americans think, but it was 1389.
01:03:50.000There's this battle in Kosovo, which again, not even part of Serbia anymore, but it was the ancestral home of Serbia, and we got to get it back.
01:04:02.000That is what he thinks in his mind, and what he's finding out is that not only the Ukrainian people hate him for doing this, but the Russian people hate him for doing this.
01:04:26.000So I think it's just going to turn out horribly for Russia.
01:04:29.000The question I was going to ask you is, do you think it was the right thing to Not only keep NATO going after the Soviet Union fell, but to encroach right up to Russia's borders.
01:04:45.000I actually do think that, well, I think that, here's the thing, if you are going to make overtures to a nation that they should try to join NATO, and then not back it up, that's the worst thing you could do.
01:04:54.000So we took sort of the worst path with Ukraine.
01:04:56.000We were encouraging them, maybe you'll join NATO, maybe you won't join NATO.
01:04:59.000If you make an overture, maybe we'll consider it.
01:05:01.000And so that leaves them in an incredibly vulnerable spot, because we're basically saying to them that you have to make overtures to us.
01:05:06.000And meanwhile, Russia is on your eastern border.
01:05:08.000And so Russia is looking at that going, no, we're not going to do this at all.
01:05:12.000If you're going to make a move, make it strong.
01:05:14.000In other words, if you're going to have Ukraine join NATO, make Ukraine join NATO and you make sure that they have the armaments necessary to defend themselves and you have a mutual alliance pact.
01:05:22.000If you're an independent armed nation, by the way, right now, like to me, the one long-lasting ramification that's incredibly dangerous, if you're a non-aligned nation right now, you don't have a mutual defense guarantee with either China or Russia or the United States, how fast are you looking for a nuclear weapon right now?
01:05:36.000I mean, you are looking like hell for a nuclear weapon right now because you don't want to be in a conventional war with a major power.
01:06:10.000As opposed to keeping this organization going, Past the point where it had a reason to be going.
01:06:16.000I mean, the question is whether you really thought that Russia was going to be and develop toward being a friendly nation to the West or not.
01:06:22.000If you were a skeptical... But that caused them not to be.
01:07:08.000And that was indirect opposition to, at that point, Putin, right?
01:07:12.000You're talking late 90s, early 2000s, since Putin took power in 1999.
01:07:15.000So I think the sort of optimistic vision, which is that if we had made more nice overtures to Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin was a plutocrat and he was an incompetent plutocrat at that.
01:07:24.000And then he was replaced by a much more competent plutocrat and a dictatorial plutocrat who had territorial ambition.
01:07:30.000And so I tend to be much more, you know, hawkish in terms of not trusting other nations to spin on a dime and suddenly become our friends.
01:07:39.000And so the idea that... It worked with Japan and Germany, didn't it?
01:08:16.000meaning the idea that we were going to take a...
01:08:18.000We have bases in Germany to fight Russia, to fight the Soviet Union, which doesn't exist anymore.
01:08:22.000Yes, but in the aftermath of that, we fully toppled the regime, and then we proceeded to occupy and help reconstitute the government in that regime.
01:08:29.000We had to occupy them right after the war.
01:08:31.000I'm not making the argument against occupation of Germany or Japan.
01:08:33.000Okay, but then we occupied them until they were able to stand on their own feet, and then we left.
01:08:38.000The bases there were for them because they were our allies now.
01:08:55.000We also made the emperor go on the radio and admit he wasn't a god.
01:08:59.000Right, so there's a really good book by a woman whose name escapes me right now, it's called Secondhand Time, won the Nobel Prize a few years back, and it was an oral history of Russians talking about the Soviet Union post-Russia.
01:09:13.000So it's just her interviewing a bunch of people who are standing around in 2000 talking about what the Soviet Union was like, and there's one particular Interview that's really striking, where she's talking to an old Soviet who had been imprisoned, tortured in Lubyanka by the KGB, who'd had friends and family members shot by the KGB, and ended up, or the GRB at the time, and ended up, GRU at the time, and ended up in World War II seeing a person who'd tortured him.
01:09:39.000And the person looked at him and said, we're both Russian.
01:09:41.000And he says now, he says, I don't understand the world I'm living in.
01:09:44.000My kids want Levi's and they want radios.
01:09:46.000Why can't we have that Russian greatness back?
01:09:48.000And I think the biggest mistake the West makes generally, and this is true with Russia today, it's true with China as well, is that we tend to think that everybody wants the same things that we want.
01:10:01.000They want their kids to go to good schools.
01:10:03.000On a fundamental level, unfortunately, I think that that's not always true.
01:10:06.000I think that there are a lot of people who want... George Orwell wrote this about Hitler in 1940.
01:10:11.000You know, one of the reasons Hitler is successful is because what Hitler realizes is something that we in the West don't, which is we say we want a washing machine and we want nice radio.
01:10:20.000What Hitler understands is sometimes people want blood, struggle, toil, and tears.
01:10:23.000And if they don't want that, then it takes them a while to realize that the cost of that is too high.
01:10:28.000And maybe that's what we're seeing right now in Ukraine, we can hope, is that the Russian people are beginning to realize... The Russian people, by the way, five years ago were polled about Stalin, and 70% of whom said, good guy.
01:10:38.000Maybe they're starting to realize there are too many costs to this.
01:11:08.000Communism was so evil, I mean, what it did to the psyche, the cynicism that it incurred in people, that you're not going to get over that in just a generation.
01:11:17.000I think it's a very cynical country, a very cynical mentality there.
01:11:21.000And, you know, when I hear people nowadays, fact free, talking about how, you know, a lot of, you know, if you look at Gen Z, it's like a lot of them think, oh, maybe communism Be good to give that another try.