Bill Maher joins me to discuss his new book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, and why he thinks the right wing is much more dangerous than they realize. He also talks about why he doesn t vote for Democrats.
00:01:06.160Right, exactly. I thought I would bring it to the book world.
00:01:10.240No, I used to joke that once you start talking in teases, you've been in TV too long.
00:01:14.800Right. But I had a book, a New Rules book out about 15 years ago, and the subtitle was A Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, which I thought was hysterically funny.
00:01:24.100But every disc jockey in America did not get it.
00:01:27.260They just took it. I was like, okay, now that was understatement, and it's supposed to be satire, but never mind.
00:09:12.160How could anybody vote for somebody who keeps this border open with the number of rapes
00:09:16.060and the number of murders and the numbers of crimes going on with these immigrants?
00:09:19.400But 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.
00:09:30.160You're talking about the difference between some this.
00:09:33.360I'm talking about the difference between this and something fundamental, which is our democracy.
00:09:37.800The 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.
00:09:46.140How about I mean, I feel like we keep going around the Rose Bush about this and we're not going to make any progress.
00:10:24.720She OK, well, first of all, saying she didn't say he was an illegitimate, you tell me exactly what she said.
00:10:30.960She said those exact words repeatedly.
00:10:34.280OK, 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.
00:10:46.420I don't know that that's where you're getting it from.
00:10:48.580But again, it's a tremendous false equivalency.
00:10:51.480You could ask Hillary Clinton right now who won that election.
00:10:54.360She will tell you Donald Trump won the election.
00:10:56.680Now she knows she has to because of what Trump has done.
00:10:59.640She came out that night in her dark purple suit and conceded the election.
00:11:14.620But 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.
00:11:22.860It doesn't make it great what Trump did, but they don't have clean hands either.
00:11:27.500But you see, you bypass the immigration question.
00:11:29.540I mean, like that a lot of Republicans.
00:12:41.700The 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.
00:12:58.540Don'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?
00:13:02.900Well, I think what Joe Biden is, is a guy who does not want to fight with the left wing of his party.
00:13:07.540He sees that as I don't think he understands a lot of what's going on in the left wing.
00:13:12.820I mean, I doubt if he heard the word trans before he was president.
00:13:17.840But that's that's what he has chosen to do.
00:13:39.740You get Donald Trump, a criminal election denier who is going to transform this country into an authoritarian place like we've never seen before.
00:13:50.100Or you get Joe Biden with all his flaws, also a criminal.
00:13:57.660Special 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.
00:14:03.980He couldn't get a conviction in front of a jury.
00:15:28.500You're taking me back to my childhood with that reference.
00:15:30.180But that 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.
00:15:44.040And clearly he stole classified documents that he wasn't entitled to and never had the ability to declassify them.
00:15:53.280Maybe you know more about that than I do.
00:15:55.240I 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.
00:16:06.620I know this is the right-wing narrative.
00:16:20.860All I can tell you is those are the facts.
00:16:22.580And 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.
00:16:46.960Four indictments of a former sitting president, which we've made it almost 250 years without doing.
00:16:52.660If that's not extra-legal and weirdly non-normy, I don't know what is.
00:16:57.780What are the four indictments we're talking about now?
00:17:00.760The two federal indictments against Trump and the one in New York and the one in Georgia.
00:17:04.540Oh, you're talking about the Trump indictments.
00:17:05.700Yeah, I'm saying this administration 100 percent was behind at least those two federal ones, and there's evidence they were behind the other two, or at least in coordination, though they deny it.
00:17:16.980It wasn't Trump committing those crimes?
00:17:19.600Do 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?
00:18:44.280I 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.
00:18:59.060People 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.
00:19:34.200And they just want the extremists who seem to have the megaphone on either side to go away or stop being so powerful.
00:19:42.600You 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?
00:19:50.660But 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.
00:20:01.660I mean, certainly on the left, that happens.
00:20:13.240Because 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.
00:21:17.560And 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.
00:21:29.820And it's made me, you know, lose some audience.
00:22:31.900Because 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.
00:23:07.180Or 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.
00:23:19.340Where are you on the scale of girl to boy, zero through five?
00:23:22.260I did an editorial only like three weeks ago, and I used the word entrapment.
00:23:27.640I mean, it was about comparing what goes on in the schools with entrapment.
00:23:32.060I don't think anybody had ever put it that way.
00:23:34.180But entrapment in the law, I'm sure you know this better than I do, means suggesting someone into a crime.
00:23:41.540Something they wouldn't have thought of to do anyway.
00:23:44.000I 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.
00:23:54.480The one case I mentioned was the Liberty 7, seven guys in Liberty City, Miami, a poor section of Miami.
00:24:01.440And 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?
00:24:10.640And 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.
00:24:24.420And 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.
00:24:43.040You'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.
00:24:49.120I never thought, huh, maybe I am a girl.
00:24:52.860I mean, I thought a lot of, you know, how could I learn how to talk to a girl?
00:24:57.300But even at that age, we didn't want to talk to a girl.
00:25:01.900See, this is like, this is where it's just so frustrating to me because I looked at that Biden event where he had all the trans people out in front of the White House.
00:25:14.500And it's like some trans, it's a guy with fake breasts showing his naked breasts on camp, like on the White House lawn.
00:25:22.500It was like National Trans Day of Visibility, which is every day in America now.
00:26:33.400Ruth Bader was a, Ginsburg was a justice the liberals loved.
00:26:37.220And I'm sure she did some great things and was a pioneer, but her ego would not let her go away.
00:26:42.880And 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?
00:26:59.680And 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.
00:27:10.060And 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.
00:27:26.320So that's what you get for trusting the other side.
00:27:29.400So I thought he should step down, but apparently that hasn't happened.
00:27:32.880I would hope the Democrats, some of them would think it's still not too late.
00:27:37.500You could do it before the convention.
00:27:38.920I mean, weirder things have happened in American politics, and I don't think anyone would bat an eye that it was out of the ordinary.
00:38:43.700And 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.
00:38:52.920As we start with one thing, this idea over here, and then we're all the way on the other side over here.
00:38:59.180In this issue, of course, you know, as we were saying over there, there are people who are bigoted, and that's wrong.
00:39:06.780And, of course, it's great that we got more impatient with racism in this country.
00:39:12.460That is the appropriate response I think we should have toward racism, being impatient with it.
00:39:33.040China puts the Uyghurs in concentration camps.
00:39:35.780The 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.
00:39:50.320Boko Haram captures entire villages of children, but none of these crimes are coming from white people.
00:40:04.460You 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.
00:40:31.980A descendant from Genghis Khan because he colonized a lot of vaginas.
00:40:37.020I mean, yeah, I mean, look, it was a different era.
00:40:40.260I 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.
00:40:53.600You 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 been using the term master bedroom.
00:41:08.200And 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.
00:41:16.380People, 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.
00:42:39.600Yes, and things have, yeah, things have changed a lot.
00:42:41.640They 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.
00:42:49.460They do not want to acknowledge progress, which is crazy, because it is the product they're selling.
00:42:56.380Because 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.
00:43:04.400Well, lots of things are still horrible, and things just objectively are way better.
00:43:09.320Can we just live in the year we're living in?
00:43:27.840So they gave him an honorary degree, and he did, you know, gave a speech.
00:43:31.280And 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.
00:43:56.020It 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.
00:44:35.500Immigrants 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.
00:44:57.240Why do you think I got on the ocean on a raft or walked a thousand miles because I was living in paradise?
00:45:04.920There are places that are shitty in this world and the immigrants know it.
00:45:09.240And, you know, it's not corny or conservative to say that you should to acknowledge that you are lucky if you're living in this country at this moment in history.
00:45:45.260If black men are being killed in the street, what is democracy?
00:45:49.440You have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot.
00:45:52.460Most 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?
00:46:05.020Well, that's my commitment to you, to show you democracy, democracy, democracy is still the way.
00:46:15.860If black men are being killed in the street, we bear witness.
00:46:19.160For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy, root out systemic racism.
00:46:25.580I stood up for George with George Floyd's family to help create a country.
00:46:32.020We don't need to have that talk with your son or grandson as they get pulled over.
00:46:44.940See the one guy popping up from the back.
00:46:46.320It was almost like he was like, what did you just say?
00:46:48.020And it's not that there isn't still racism in this country, of course, and racist, just as there will always be criminals, there will always be racist.
00:46:56.660And we should always be mindful of that and do what we can to call it out.
00:47:01.140But it's a very different country than it was even 10 years ago.
00:47:06.660And to be telling black students that you have to be 10 times better to get ahead, that's anachronistic.
00:47:21.400I 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.
00:47:33.600It'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.
00:47:44.720I mean, I'm over 60, white, male and straight.
00:49:33.420It was when that whole thing went down in 2019, I think it was.
00:49:36.020It was 19 or 18, but I think it was 19, right before George Floyd.
00:49:39.240I think it was 10 million arrests and of all of those in the country.
00:49:46.560Between 12 and 15 involved the shooting of unarmed black men, not 12 and 1500, 12 to 15, depending on how you interpret unarmed.
00:49:57.900Some 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.
00:50:05.280But that's out of 10 million arrests, 12 to 15 in the year preceding George Floyd.
00:50:29.400I think it's absurd to say that not everybody has the talk.
00:50:31.720We're all afraid when we get pulled over by cops.
00:50:33.880I'm not worried that I'm going to get shot in the way that I know some black men worry about.
00:50:38.620But 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.
00:50:47.240OK, but I mean, if I got the talk, how old were you when you got the talk?
00:51:51.860And I mean, a lot of the most famous celebrities and most admired are African-American.
00:51:57.840I 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?
00:52:09.700Because a lot of these shootings, I mean, some of it is the drug war.
00:53:03.100And then obviously there's too many guns floating around.
00:53:06.760But 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.
00:53:19.320And pretend we're doing something because we're over here saying, you know, this is the way we want you to refer up.
00:53:53.640I don't know if I would use the word dramatically, but it did shift.
00:53:56.300I mean, she definitely she said in the trial, she said it again, kind of the same thing that she said on the show.
00:54:02.180But she also talked about the incident in ways that she certainly hadn't back when I was interviewing her, that we used all the buzzwords of the Me Too movement of the power imbalance.
00:54:13.860And I was afraid to leave and he blocked the door and I was afraid.
00:54:17.600And then the thing that was so preposterous, I thought, was, you know, I blacked out.
00:54:21.960She lost fingers in her feeling in her fingers and toes, Bill.
00:54:25.040Well, I mean, as I said at the time, you know, this is someone who's not unused to having sex with strange people, not strange that they're people, just that they're strangers to you because she's a porn star.
00:54:36.740So when you're a porn star, it's like, hi, meet Bob.
00:54:39.440He's going to fuck you in two minutes.
00:57:10.360It's in the book also about I saw this movie when it was called Kill Bill, when they did it with Bill Clinton.
00:57:17.060And people just do not like it when they go after presidents for their sex lives.
00:57:20.820And 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.
00:57:34.260Because, you know, again, you're the party of family values.
00:57:37.880So it's it is, as you say, baked into the cake.