Bill Maher joins me to discuss his new book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, and why he thinks the right wing is more dangerous than they realize. He also talks about his favorite new rule books, and his thoughts on Donald Trump.
00:05:42.540And now he's had four years to put in place people who will make it work again.
00:05:46.700I don't know if there'll be a John Rauschenberger in Georgia, a noble Republican who stood up to him.
00:05:52.760He thought last time that he could count on someone being just a Republican to do his bidding.
00:06:00.060And 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.
00:06:47.920But look, I agree with you that the majority of the Republican Party doesn't believe that.
00:06:51.840But 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.
00:07:19.500There are polls that show some 10 to 12 percent of the electorate says they would have changed their mind had they seen it, had they known about it.
00:08:10.280And that's more important than what I was bringing up about not abiding by election results, not not respecting what always made this country great.
00:09:14.240How could how 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?
00:09:21.500But 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.
00:09:32.200You're talking about the difference between some this.
00:09:35.440I'm talking about the difference between this and something fundamental, which is our democracy.
00:09:39.900The 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.
00:09:48.220How about I mean, I feel like we keep going around the Rose Bush about this and we're not going to make any progress.
00:10:33.020She said those exact words repeatedly.
00:10:34.780OK, I mean, she conceded the election, whether whether you're interpreting her disappointment at losing it as the same thing as Trump not conceding it.
00:10:48.600I don't know that that's where you're getting it from.
00:10:50.800But again, it's a tremendous false equivalency.
00:10:53.580You could ask Hillary Clinton right now who won that election.
00:12:34.200And you know why it's because of the people who use the word latinx who are trying to lecture him that it's not humane to enforce our borders.
00:13:41.680You get Donald Trump, a criminal election denier who is going to transform this country into an authoritarian place like we've never seen before.
00:13:52.400Or you get Joe Biden with all his flaws.
00:13:59.580Special 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.
00:14:06.080He couldn't get a conviction in front of a jury.
00:16:22.940All I can tell you is those are the facts.
00:16:25.240And Joe Biden also has behaved in a grossly, grossly extra-constitutional manner.
00:16:30.620Not 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.
00:16:43.220But the four indictments, which obviously the White House was behind and promoted and wanted, four indictments of a former sitting president, which we've made it almost 250 years without doing.
00:16:54.640If that's not extra-legal and weirdly non-normy, I don't know what is.
00:16:59.620What are the four indictments we're talking about now?
00:17:02.880The two federal indictments against Trump and the one in New York and the one in Georgia.
00:17:06.660Oh, you're talking about the Trump indictments.
00:17:19.060It wasn't Trump committing those crimes?
00:17:21.680Do 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?
00:18:46.360I 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.
00:19:01.140People who are not afraid to call out their own team, if you have a team, or a team that you are more on the side of, when they do stuff that's goofy.
00:19:36.300And they just want the extremists, who seem to have the megaphone on either side, to go away or stop being so powerful.
00:19:44.680You know, everybody is like, why can't we just be, you know, common sense?
00:19:48.940And why can't we just, you know, be the people in the middle?
00:19:52.740But 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.
00:20:03.720I mean, certainly on the left, that happens.
00:20:15.580Because you can say the most ridiculous thing, and because no one wants to be the one who's called out on Twitter, they'll be like, oh, sure, men pregnant.
00:21:19.660And 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.
00:21:31.900And it's made me, you know, lose some audience.
00:22:34.180Because 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.
00:23:09.260Or 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, they kept asking them over and over, raise your hand.
00:23:21.440Where are you on the scale of girl to boy, zero through five?
00:23:24.360I did an editorial only like three weeks ago, and I used the word entrapment.
00:23:29.720I mean, it was about comparing what goes on in the schools with entrapment.
00:23:34.140I don't think anybody had ever put it that way.
00:23:36.280But entrapment in the law, I'm sure you know this better than I do, means suggesting someone into a crime.
00:23:43.640Something they wouldn't have thought of to do anyway.
00:23:46.100I 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.
00:23:56.560The one case I mentioned was the Liberty Seven, seven guys in Liberty City, Miami, a poor section of Miami.
00:24:03.540And 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?
00:24:12.740And 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.
00:24:26.520And 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.
00:24:45.140You'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.
00:24:51.220I never thought, huh, maybe I am a girl.
00:24:54.940I mean, I thought a lot of, you know, how could I learn how to talk to a girl?
00:24:59.360But even at that age, we didn't want to talk to a girl.
00:25:47.240Like how why didn't the Democrats replace him?
00:25:49.600And why did the Republicans renominate Trump?
00:25:51.660I 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.
00:25:59.080But I look at Biden and I feel like the Democrats really could have made a switcheroo.
00:26:02.420I know he didn't want to give it up, but they could have made a switcheroo.
00:26:04.760I mean, my first show back after the strike ended, which was last September, the first editorial I did was called Ruth Bader Biden.
00:26:13.640I was the one who I was the one who coined that phrase.
00:26:16.400I was saying if he continues on, if he doesn't get out of the race, he's going to be Ruth Bader Biden.
00:26:22.520He's going to be the person who's hung around too long, destroyed his legacy and probably the country with it.
00:26:29.120But he's got to get out now because, you know, too long at the fair.
00:26:39.340And I'm sure she did some great things and was a pioneer.
00:26:42.440But her ego would not let her go away.
00:26:44.960And 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?
00:27:01.160And 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.
00:27:12.780And 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.
00:27:27.840So that's what you get for trusting the other side.
00:38:50.320And again, as the guy who was 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.
00:38:59.540As we start with one thing, this idea over here.
00:39:03.280And then we're all the way on the other side over here.
00:39:05.820So, in this issue, of course, you know, as we were saying over there, there are people who are bigoted and that's wrong.
00:39:13.400And of course, it's great that we got more impatient with racism in this country.
00:39:19.080That is the appropriate response I think we should have toward racism, being impatient with it.
00:39:39.660China puts the Uyghurs in concentration camps.
00:39:42.400The 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.
00:39:56.960Boko Haram captures entire villages of children, but none of these crimes are coming from white people.
00:40:11.080You raise this point in the book, too, and I thought it was a really good one, about how when we do our, you know, look back at history, only the whites get excoriated for their bad behavior 200 years ago.
00:40:38.600A descendant from Genghis Khan because he colonized a lot of vaginas.
00:40:43.640I mean, yeah, I mean, look, it was a different era.
00:40:46.880I 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.
00:41:00.220You 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.
00:41:09.720And it wouldn't have been using the term master bedroom.
00:41:14.820And 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.
00:41:23.300People, I think, have this idea that wokeness is an extension of liberalism.
00:41:27.360And it very often is something that goes so far, it actually turns around and becomes the opposite.
00:42:46.080And things have, yeah, things have changed a lot.
00:42:48.280They also were, 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.
00:42:56.480They do not want to acknowledge progress, which is crazy, because it is the product they're selling.
00:43:02.900Because 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.
00:43:10.900Well, lots of things are still horrible, and things just objectively are way better.
00:43:15.940Can we just live in the year we're living in?
00:43:34.440So they gave him an honorary degree, and he did, you know, gave a speech.
00:43:38.000And 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.
00:44:02.380It 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.
00:44:42.180Immigrants 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.
00:45:03.840Why do you think I got on the ocean on a raft or walked a thousand miles because I was living in paradise?
00:45:11.040There are places that are shitty in this world, and the immigrants know it.
00:45:16.700And, you know, it's not corny or conservative to say that you should acknowledge that you are lucky if you're living in this country at this moment in history.
00:45:51.920If black men are being killed in the street, what is democracy?
00:45:56.060You have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot.
00:45:59.100Most of all, what does it mean, as we've heard before, to be a black man who loves his country, even if it doesn't love him back in equal measure?
00:46:13.720Well, that's my commitment to you, to show you democracy, democracy, democracy is still the way.
00:46:21.240If black men are being killed in the street, we bear witness.
00:46:25.960For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy.
00:47:28.040I 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.
00:47:39.820It'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.
00:47:51.340I mean, I'm over 60, white, male, and straight.
00:49:40.040It was—when that whole thing went down in 2019, I think it was.
00:49:42.640It was 19 or 18, but I think it was 19, right before George Floyd.
00:49:45.860I think it was 10 million arrests, and of all of those in the country, between 12 and 15 involved the shooting of unarmed black men.
00:49:58.980Not 12 and 1,500, 12 to 15, depending on how you interpret unarmed.
00:50:04.520Some of the people who got shot by the cops had, like, commandeered a car and tried to run down the police, and they'd be counted as unarmed.
00:50:11.900But that's out of 10 million arrests, 12 to 15, in the year preceding George Floyd.
00:50:36.080I think it's absurd to say that not everybody has the talk.
00:50:38.340We're all afraid when we get pulled over by cops.
00:50:40.500I'm not worried that I'm going to get shot in the way that I know some black men worry about.
00:50:45.140But 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.
00:51:39.780And we've completely written it off as a society.
00:51:42.200Well, to me, that's the most racist thing of all is that—and I've always said, where are the leaders of the community to talk about this?
00:51:50.880I mean, I feel like there are so many people in the black community who are looked up to for good reason.
00:53:09.760And then, obviously, there's too many guns floating around.
00:53:13.380But it just seems like so tragic and unnecessary that this amount of killing is going on and that we just seem to, again, ignore it and not talk about it and pretend it's all the cops.
00:53:25.940We're going to pretend we're doing something because we're over here saying, you know, this is the way we want you to refer—capitalize the word B.
00:53:35.240I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
00:53:39.680It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.
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00:58:21.120It's in the book also about I saw this movie when it was called Kill Bill, when they did it with Bill Clinton.
00:58:27.460And people just do not like it when they go after presidents for their sex lives.
00:58:31.360And 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.
00:58:44.940Because, you know, again, you're the party of family values.
00:58:48.580So it's it is, as you say, baked into the cake.
00:58:52.340The only thing surprising was that it was-