Bill Maher's new book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, is out now, and it's a must-read for anyone who's ever wanted to know what it's like to be Bill Maher. He's one of the sharpest political commentators around, someone who's not afraid to take risks, and has been politically incorrect for decades before it was cool.
00:03:51.160They're funny and punchy, but this one I think people should treat like the Bible.
00:03:56.180I think they should put it by their nightstand and read passages each night, and I think it'll help you through your life.
00:04:01.900Well, in part, it's a diagnosis of what's going on with us right now.
00:04:06.120And in part, to me, it picks up on something you said to me.
00:04:08.900Shortly before I came on your show, after my own cancellation at NBC, and you said, you seem to me, privately, you said, you seem to me kind of like me right now, which is somebody without a political home.
00:05:16.620I mean, I can't even understand that, and I understand that Biden is deeply flawed, but he does believe in our way of life.
00:05:25.440And, you know, I mean, I was the one who was saying from the very beginning when everyone was laughing at me that Donald Trump will never give up power, and he didn't.
00:05:33.240He still hasn't conceded the last election.
00:05:35.020I don't know what could possibly be more fundamental to you or anyone than you have to concede elections.
00:06:40.440And now he's had four years to put in place people who will make it work again.
00:06:44.420I don't know if there'll be a John Raftenberger in Georgia, a noble Republican who stood up to him.
00:06:50.580He thought last time that he could count on someone being just a Republican to do his bidding.
00:06:57.660And what he found out was that there are a lot of decent people who are Republicans, which is something I'm trying to tell the Democrats all the time.
00:07:45.760But look, I agree with you that the majority of the Republican Party doesn't believe that.
00:07:49.660But I do think there's a difference between it was stolen, you know, the nonsense with Dominion voting machines and all that, versus it wasn't fair.
00:08:17.040There are polls that show some 10% to 12% of the electorate says they would have changed their mind had they seen it, had they known about it.
00:08:23.700It wasn't right to suppress it, but nobody gives a fuck about Hunter Biden's dick.
00:09:07.780And that's more important than what I was bringing up about not abiding by election results, not respecting what always made this country great, the peaceful transference of power.
00:09:19.000See, I don't disagree with you on that.
00:09:20.260You're not going to get me to say it was a great thing the way Trump behaved.
00:09:22.760I don't have to get you to agree or disagree.
00:09:24.600You're obviously someone who looks at an elephant and a mouse and cannot tell which one is bigger.
00:10:12.040How could anybody vote for somebody who keeps this border open with the number of rapes and the number of murders and the numbers of crimes going on with these immigrants?
00:10:20.260But again, these are the normal sorts of issues we've always had in this country that should be taken care of through the normal process we've had.
00:10:29.800You're talking about the difference between this and something fundamental, which is our democracy.
00:10:37.720The fact that you have to respect who wins an election, or else you don't have the kind of country we've always had before.
00:10:46.620I mean, I feel like we keep going around the rose bush about this, and we're not going to make any progress, so let's stop talking about it.
00:10:55.960I just, I mean, you keep saying sort of, I'm nuts, because I don't see the difference between the elephant and the mouse, and I'm telling you, I identify them differently than you do.
00:11:03.460Hillary Clinton, of course, is the original election denier.
00:11:30.800She said those exact words repeatedly.
00:11:32.600Okay, I mean, she conceded the election.
00:11:37.320Whether you're interpreting her disappointment at losing it as the same thing as Trump not conceding it, I don't know if that's where you're getting it from.
00:11:48.560But again, it's a tremendous false equivalency.
00:11:51.400You could ask Hillary Clinton right now, who won that election?
00:12:14.540But don't try to tell me that Hillary Clinton wasn't an election denier and Jamie Raskin and a whole host of Democrats who are now in prominent positions on Capitol Hill.
00:12:23.140Doesn't make it great what Trump did, but they don't have clean hands either.
00:12:27.400But you bypass the immigration question.
00:13:41.620The left wing, because they're so afraid always of being called racist, they let that color every issue and very often wind up with terrible policies that wind up not helping people of color.
00:13:58.460Don't you think that's what's happening to him on the trans issue, too, which is my big issue that I mentioned off the front?
00:14:02.840Well, I think what Joe Biden is is a guy who does not want to fight with the left wing of his party.
00:14:07.220He sees that as I don't think he understands a lot of what's going on in the left wing.
00:14:12.440I mean, I don't doubt if he heard the word trans before he was president.
00:14:17.720But that's that's what he has chosen to do.
00:14:39.660You get Donald Trump, a criminal election denier who is going to transform this country into an authoritarian place like we've never seen before.
00:14:50.000Or you get Joe Biden with all his flaws, also a criminal.
00:14:57.560Special Counsel Robert Hurst said he committed felonies, but he wouldn't indict him because he was a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.
00:15:03.900He couldn't get a conviction in front of a jury.
00:16:28.420You're taking me back to my childhood with that reference.
00:16:30.080But why can't the difference be one actually had the ability to declassify documents and keep them because he'd been the president and one didn't because he should have been looking at documents only in a skiff while a sitting U.S. senator.
00:16:43.940And clearly he stole classified documents that he wasn't entitled to and never had the ability to declassify them.
00:16:53.240Maybe you know more about that than I do.
00:16:55.140I don't remember that part of it, and I always don't trust anything I hear until I vet it from the other side because everybody sort of has their one-sided view of it, and narrative is more important than truth.
00:17:06.540I know this is the right-wing narrative.
00:17:20.760All I can tell you is those are the facts.
00:17:22.500And Joe Biden also has behaved in a grossly, grossly extra-constitutional manner, not only the nonsense of trying to skirt the Supreme Court on the eviction moratoriums and the student loan, quote, debt forgiveness, which he's bragging about skirting them on, but the four indictments, which obviously the White House was behind and promoted and wanted.
00:17:46.840Four indictments of a former sitting president, which we've made it almost 250 years without doing.
00:17:52.580If that's not extra-legal and weirdly non-normy, I don't know what is.
00:17:57.700What are the four indictments we're talking about now?
00:18:00.680The two federal indictments against Trump and the one in New York and the one in Georgia.
00:18:04.460Oh, you're talking about the Trump indictments.
00:18:05.680Yeah, I'm saying this administration 100% was behind at least those two federal ones.
00:18:11.120And there's evidence they were behind the other two, or at least in coordination, though they deny it.
00:18:16.880It wasn't Trump committing those crimes?
00:18:19.500Do you really think – you don't think that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton could have been indicted for what they did when he left office with all the furniture?
00:19:44.360I mean, I feel like more people than ever are on team me, whatever that is, because, you know, they're the normies in the middle who don't want to be ideologically captured by either side.
00:19:57.300That's who I feel like I speak for people who are not afraid to call out their own team.
00:20:02.860If you have a team or a team that you are more on the side of when they do stuff that's goofy and I think they appreciate it a lot.
00:20:12.920I mean, I notice in my standup shows, you know, the audience is kind of half and half.
00:20:17.340And the liberals will laugh at woke nonsense and the conservatives will laugh at Trump jokes.
00:20:26.800Most people in this country, I think, understand that there are deep defects on both sides.
00:20:34.100And they just want they just want the extremists who seem to have the megaphone on either side to go away or stop being so powerful.
00:20:42.500You know, everybody is like, why can't we just be, you know, common sense and why can't we just, you know, be the people in the middle?
00:20:50.560But at the end of the day, no one sort of stands up for that because it's just so easier to pander to the people who are a team because those are the people who wind up scaring the other people.
00:21:01.580I mean, certainly on the left, that happens.
00:22:17.480And also, I think there's just a lot of people who have my back and and they appreciate what I do and they appreciate me having that bond with my audience that I don't pull a punch and I never will.
00:22:29.720And it's made me, you know, lose some audience.
00:23:30.420Because the stuff that, for example, you just said penises in the swimming pool and the stuff that is threatening to people that comes from the left is so much more in their everyday life.
00:23:56.060But I know about my kid coming home from school and saying, well, they're telling me I can't tell you if I change my sex.
00:24:07.060Or saying, as we discussed on your show when I was a guest, suggesting to your perfectly normal son that he might be a girl at my all-boys school.
00:24:16.540They kept asking them over and over, raise your hand.
00:24:19.260Where are you on the scale of girl to boy, zero through five?
00:24:22.180I did an editorial only like three weeks ago, and I used the word entrapment.
00:24:27.540I mean, it was about comparing what goes on in the schools with entrapment.
00:24:31.960I don't think anybody had ever put it that way.
00:24:34.080But entrapment in the law, I'm sure you know this better than I do, means suggesting someone into a crime.
00:24:41.180Something they wouldn't have thought of to do anyway.
00:24:44.320I mean, I used the example of after 9-11, there were a number of cases where law enforcement basically entrapped people who were not really going to be terrorists.
00:24:54.380The one case I mentioned was the Liberty Seven, seven guys in Liberty City, Miami, a poor section of Miami.
00:25:01.100And they basically went to them and said, you know, wouldn't it be cool if you blew up the Sears Tower in Chicago and taught the man a lesson?
00:25:10.560And these guys who didn't even have a gun, probably the only guys in the neighborhood who didn't have a gun, said, yeah, that would be pretty cool.
00:25:24.340And I was saying, look, when you constantly talk to little kids about sex and gender and constantly put out the idea that maybe the body you're in is not the correct one aligning with what's in your mind, that's entrapment.
00:25:42.960You're suggesting them into something they wouldn't have thought of anyway, because I promise you when I was a kid, it never crossed my mind.
00:25:49.040I never thought, huh, maybe I am a girl.
00:25:52.740I mean, I thought a lot of, you know, how could I learn how to talk to a girl?
00:25:57.180But even at that age, we didn't want to talk to a girl.
00:26:02.060See, this is like this is where it's just so frustrating to me because.
00:26:07.260I looked at that Biden event where he had all the trans people out in front of the White House and it's like some trans is a guy with fake breasts showing his naked breasts on camp, like on the White House lawn.
00:26:22.400It was like National Trans Day of Visibility, which is every day in America now.
00:26:45.060Like how why didn't the Democrats replace him?
00:26:47.420And why did the Republicans renominate Trump?
00:26:49.480I think it's I think I know I think they thought he was the strongest candidate, the one who could sort of be the strongest leader and take take Biden down.
00:26:56.900But I look at Biden and I feel like the Democrats really could have made a switcheroo.
00:27:00.240I know he didn't want to give it up, but they could have made a switcheroo.
00:27:02.580I mean, my first show back after the strike ended, which was last September, the first editorial I did was called Ruth Bader Biden.
00:27:11.460I was the one who I was the one who coined that phrase.
00:27:14.220I was saying if he continues on, if he doesn't get out of the race, he's going to be Ruth Bader Biden.
00:27:20.340He's going to be the person who's hung around too long, destroyed his legacy and probably the country with it.
00:27:26.940But he's got to get out now because, you know, too long at the fair.
00:27:37.160And I'm sure she did some great things and was a pioneer.
00:27:39.400But her ego would not let her go away.
00:27:42.780And I mean, the story goes, oh, Biden, oh, Biden, Obama, Obama had her to lunch once, like I think in 2013 and was kind of hinting around, hey, wouldn't it be great if you spent a little more time with the grandkids?
00:27:58.980And she didn't take the hint and thought she'd live forever, which was really crazy because she had been through a lot of really serious medical issues.
00:28:10.620And then, of course, Mitch McConnell, who would not even give Merrick Garland a hearing, which was talk about unconstitutional, suddenly, of course, found it in his heart to push through Amy Coney Barrett immediately.
00:28:25.660So that's what you get for trusting the other side.
00:39:48.140And again, as the guy who is trying to like be the common sense person in the middle, just speak for the normies, everything I think to a lot of people strikes it the way it strikes me.
00:39:57.480As we start with one thing, this idea over here, and then we're all the way on the other side over here.
00:40:04.680In this issue, of course, you know, as we were saying over there, there are people who are bigoted and that's wrong.
00:40:10.640And, of course, it's great that we got more impatient with racism in this country.
00:40:16.920That is the appropriate response I think we should have toward racism, being impatient with it.
00:40:36.320China puts the Uyghurs in concentration camps.
00:40:40.960The president of Burundi was on the front page of the New York Times a month ago saying we should march the gays into football stadiums and kill them for just being gay.
00:40:53.680Boko Haram captures entire villages of children, but none of these crimes are coming from white people.
00:41:36.500Descendant from Genghis Khan because he colonized a lot of vaginas.
00:41:41.480I mean, yeah, I mean, look, it was a different era.
00:41:44.560I also, there's a couple of really funny editorials, essays in that book about time and the idea that the woke have this crazy idea that, you know, people who lived 500 years ago really should have known better.
00:41:58.320You know, they have this magic moral time machine where they imagine what they would be doing in 1758 and it's always better than what you would have.
00:42:07.540And it wouldn't have been using the term master bedroom.
00:42:12.320And again, that's another point I'm always trying to make is that the difference between old school liberals like me and the woke is things like that.
00:42:20.840People, I think, people, I think, have this idea that wokeness is an extension of liberalism and it very often is something that goes so far, it actually turns around and becomes the opposite.
00:43:44.040Yes, and things have, yeah, things have changed a lot.
00:43:46.100They also, there's an essay in there about progressophobia, which was Steven Pinker's great term that he coined, that it is a real problem on the left.
00:43:54.300They do not want to acknowledge progress, which is crazy, because it is the product they're selling.
00:44:00.400Because somehow in their mind, if you acknowledge progress, then you're not as pure as the other person who says, no, things are still horrible.
00:44:08.720Well, lots of things are still horrible, and things just objectively are way better.
00:44:13.660Can we just live in the year we're living in?
00:44:32.280So they gave him an honorary degree, and he did, you know, gave a speech.
00:44:35.720And first of all, the fact that they're giving an honorary degree to Joe Biden, who's like, I mean, the list of racist comments that guy has made is as long as Santa's scroll, but okay, fine.
00:45:00.200It was like he was trying to stir up racial hatred right there live to the point where a couple of the black students turned their backs on him, which was pretty extraordinary.
00:45:39.940Immigrants don't like it that the left seems to have this unrelenting negativity toward the country that these immigrants worked so hard to get here.
00:46:01.680Why do you think I got on the ocean on a raft or walked a thousand miles because I was living in paradise?
00:46:08.880There are places that are shitty in this world and the immigrants know it.
00:46:14.440And, you know, it's not corny or conservative to say that you should to acknowledge that you're lucky if you're living in this country at this moment in history.
00:46:25.500Yeah, well, it was a different message at Morehouse.
00:46:49.680If black men are being killed in the street, what is democracy?
00:46:53.900You have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot.
00:46:56.920Most of all, what does it mean, as you've heard before, to be a black man who loves his country, even if it doesn't love him back in equal measure?
00:47:11.560Well, that's my commitment to you, to show you democracy, democracy, democracy is still the way.
00:47:19.960If black men are being killed in the street, we bear witness.
00:47:22.840For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy, root out systemic racism.
00:47:31.020I stood up for George with George Floyd's family to help create a country.
00:47:36.560We don't need to have that talk with your son or grandson as they get pulled over.
00:48:25.520I mean, there's certainly they've done studies on this where the same person goes in for a job who's black and white and the white person does get it more often.
00:48:37.640It's also true that there are places in this country where it's an advantage to be a person of color at this time or gay or anything other than white and male and straight.
00:48:49.540I mean, I'm over 60, white, male and straight.
00:50:42.900Before George Floyd, I think it was ten million arrests and of all of those in the country.
00:50:51.040Between twelve and fifteen involved the shooting of unarmed black men, not twelve and fifteen hundred twelve to fifteen, depending on how you interpret unarmed.
00:51:02.280Some of the people who got shot by the cops had like come in, commandeered a car and tried to run down the police and they'd be counted as unarmed.
00:51:09.740But that's that's out of ten million arrests, twelve to fifteen in the year preceding George Floyd.
00:51:29.760You're really not contending that that's an equivalent when we were kids.
00:51:33.860I think it's absurd to say that not everybody has the talk.
00:51:36.160We're all afraid when we get pulled over by cops.
00:51:38.320I'm not worried that I'm going to get shot in the way that I know some black men worry about.
00:51:43.060But it's absurd to suggest that anybody who resisted arrest, especially a man with a cop who knows the stakes are high when he pulls them over, isn't going to be in danger.
00:51:51.680OK, but I mean, if I got the talk, how old were you when you got the talk?
00:52:56.320And I mean, a lot of the most famous celebrities and most admired are African-American.
00:53:02.300I mean, if they if they made a concerted effort to try to implore the end of this kind of behavior, would it would it have no effect at all?
00:53:14.140Because a lot of these shootings, I mean, some of it is the drug war.
00:54:33.660I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
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00:56:02.140I don't know if I would use the word dramatically, but it did shift.
00:56:05.040I mean, she definitely – she said in the trial, she said it again, kind of the same thing that she said on the show.
00:56:10.500But she also talked about the incident in ways that she certainly hadn't back when I was interviewing her.
00:56:17.560That we used all the buzzwords of the Me Too movement of the power imbalance and I was afraid to leave and he blocked the door and I was afraid.
00:56:26.120And then the thing that was so preposterous I thought was, you know, I blacked out.
00:56:29.960She lost feeling in her fingers and toes, Bill.
00:56:33.720Well, I mean, as I said at the time, you know, this is someone who's not unused to having sex with strange people.
00:56:40.880Not strange that they're people, just that they're stranger to you because she's a porn star.
00:56:45.240So when you're a porn star, it's like, hi, meet Bob.
00:56:47.940He's going to fuck you in two minutes.
00:56:53.780So the idea that she would black out because this was such a traumatic experience was, to me, straining credulity.
00:57:02.660But, you know, I didn't think they should have gone ahead with this trial to begin with.
00:57:06.300I mean, first of all, it should have been an election interference trial brought by Merrick Garland.
00:57:10.820I tore him a new asshole a couple of weeks ago because all these trials are probably not going to come to anything and they had four years to do it.
00:57:17.700But it wound up being a trial about falsifying business records in state court.
00:59:18.940It's in the book also about I saw this movie when it was called Kill Bill, when they did it with Bill Clinton.
00:59:25.200And people just do not like it when they go after presidents for their sex lives.
00:59:29.180And the idea that Trump would be fucking a porn star at a golf charity event while his wife was home nursing their newborn is something we just assumed he would be doing.
00:59:42.860Because, you know, again, you're the party of family values.
00:59:46.500So it is, as you say, baked into the cake.
00:59:50.380The only thing surprising was that it was that—
01:00:10.540But when I heard her do her, you know, dramatic reenactment of it all, now it's me too, no feeling in the fingers, I blacked out, I felt threatened because he was sitting on the bed when I came out of the bathroom and I couldn't get to the door.
01:02:25.480The color of the hair was exactly the same.
01:02:28.260If you saw the picture, you know what I'm talking about.
01:02:30.560And so I offered him $5 million, and then they came to court and produced the birth certificate to prove that he was actually not the son of an orangutan.
01:03:47.540He's already said many times, I think we deserve a third term because, you know, we were cheated out of the one that he's not serving right now.
01:04:58.520You know, what we all have to get over is talking with someone who you can be like, oh, I'm so in agreement on this and this and this and this.
01:05:10.620And on this one, I think they're insane.