Ep. #550: Michael Eric Dyson, Alex Wagner

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Moss.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

You sparsely populated

people.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

I know it, sir.

Thank you.

Our last show.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much and for doing what you had to do to get in here.

It is our last show of the season, and it has been 17 days now since the election.

Trump is still behaving like a psycho-beauty pageant queen who will

not let go of the tiara.

And this is also the last time I will see anybody publicly before the holidays.

So merry and happy, because it's been that kind of year.

Merry, happy.

Oh, wait.

God.

Thanksgiving was always when you pigged out at 2 in the afternoon, just passed out on the couch.

Now, every day this year was that.

From now on, I'm going to be referring to this period in history, because we need a name for this, as the fucking.

The fucking.

We had the Great Recession, and then we had an economic expansion, and this is the fuckinging.

That's what we are in now.

I mean, it's been, I was in a store the other day.

It is depressing.

The big hot novelty toy item this year for the holidays is Elf on a ventilator.

This is...

I don't get this country.

The Trump people, they don't want anybody to wear a mask because they say it's all about conformity.

These are the same people who want everyone to kneel.

Not to, fuck that joke.

But I was, you know, the people who, they want to kick you out of the country if you want,

forget it.

You get what I was trying to get there.

It's the last show of the season.

I'm losing it.

But you know what?

They can all jump in a lake because

like, no, seriously, because Democrats who are always preaching wearing the masks,

they keep getting caught.

doing what we're not allowed to do.

Nancy Pelosi did, Laurie Lightfoot did, now Gavin Newsom.

He said, you see this?

He was at some sort of birthday party indoor.

I haven't eaten indoors

publicly since March without a mask.

And at the table, there were lobbyists from the California Medical Association.

This is like getting shit faced with mothers against drunk driving.

Good, yes, let's keep it even.

But, you know, they say there are two new vaccines

that are coming in just in time for the holidays.

This is big news.

They say they're almost impossible to get, and there is about a 90% chance of them working.

Maybe I'm thinking of PlayStation 5.

Oh, and the president, oh, he, I tell you, he's in the holiday spirit.

Yeah, he had a screening last night of his favorite holiday movie, How the Grinch Stole Pennsylvania.

This guy, I mean, it just,

I mean, did did you see what Team Lunatic was

putting forward this week?

Rudy Giuliani was out there.

He's having quite a third act.

But he's not looking for his dick and his pants.

He's out there.

He's out there as Trump's lead lawyer because all the regular lawyers have quit.

And he's got a new theory about who fixed the election, Venezuela.

Venezuela.

Apparently he says Dominion, that's the voting machine company.

They're actually out of Canada, but he says they're owned by another company, which is funded by a Venezuelan associate of Hugo Chavez, who is dead.

At this point, MSNBC just cut away to a cuckoo clock.

This was.

And

wait, come on.

Wait, that's not all.

Spain.

Spain is involved.

Yes,

Venezuela, they make the machines.

That zombie Hugo Chavez, he makes that.

But then the votes got sent, he says, to Barcelona, Spain, where they were fixed for Biden and then sent back to the U.S.

At this point, Rudy just kneeled down like James Brown, and two handlers came out and put a straitjacket on him.

It was

And then the judge said, order in the court.

And Rudy said, tank array and tonic, please.

And then things got weird.

I'm going to show you a picture now, but warning, the following may be disturbing to some viewers.

Viewer discretion is advised.

This is what happens when Dracula gets out of the coffin too early in the day.

I mean,

that's his hair dye.

You know how the Trump people are always saying, these colors don't run.

Sometimes they do.

Apparently they do sometimes.

Even Jeffrey Toobin was like, God, that's embarrassing.

All right.

Jeffrey Toobin.

All right, never mind.

We got a great show, our last show of the year.

John Meacham and Alex Wagner are here.

But first off, my good friend, he is a distinguished professor of African-American studies and ethics at Vanderbilt University now, and author of Longtime Coming, Reckoning with Race in America.

Michael Eric Dyson.

You are hilarious.

Mike James Brown.

Straight to the bottom.

I'll look that for you.

Appreciate that, man.

How are you doing?

Man, I'm pretty fair for a square, as they say in my neck of the woods.

Yeah, well, thanks for going through all the stuff you have to do.

You came just in time.

I think we're closing down soon.

Yeah, you're shutting down, man, on the curfew, so I just missed

it.

I think we're going off the air just at the right moment.

Hopefully it will be better next year.

But I wanted to ask you about this year, first of all.

I mean, your book, great book.

I read it quickly.

It's a great, quick read.

Thank you.

Serious stuff, of course.

But the year 2020, I mean, 2017 was the year of Harvey Weinstein and then the Me Too movement.

And it seems like everything changed to a degree with

gender stuff.

Are we going to look back at 2020 that way with race?

Yeah, that's a great parallel too.

Yeah, I think so in this sense, that

George Floyd opened the minds and eyes of so many other people.

Now, those of us who have been victimized by it historically and consistently, some among us said, well, dang, I guess you missed like the slavery part and the Jim Crow part and you miss the

other stuff.

But I go,

whenever people wake up, they wake up.

Whenever they become aware, they become aware.

And I think, look, we were all at home, those of us who could afford to stay at home with the pandemic, and we're looking at our screens anyway.

And when George Floyd's image flashes across the horizon of many of these devices, it was astonishing.

And many white brothers and sisters said, wait.

So black people have been making claims.

We've been like, well, okay, you must have said something.

You must have acted or misbehaved.

But my God, we can see here, prostrate on the ground, a black man meaning harm to no one, being the recipient of Derek Chaubin's neck, his mortally depressed column, his neck being squeezed and asphyxiated for no good reason.

And I think that shook America to its core.

And not just America, people all over the world were responding.

And you think this is more about racism than policing?

Well, I think, well, the two go hand in hand.

I think it's about the persistence of what now has become a term systemic racism, and I think it's about the fact that police people have been way out of control for too long when it comes to African-American and Latino people.

Give me a comparison of

1980.

2000, 2020.

Yeah.

I mean, there's some difference.

Well, there's no doubt.

Well, 1980, you've got the rise of Ronald Reagan, right?

And hip-hop.

I mean, with policing.

Right.

Well, but I'm saying, so with racism.

Racism is in general.

You've got racism in general, right?

Look, you got law and order stuff.

You got Nixon 20 years before talking about law and order.

Then in 1980,

the restoration of an American society that had gone off the rails, people perceived.

So Ronald Reagan was there to police it back into order.

You think about 2000,

what happens?

You know, Jesse Jackson has run a couple times for the presidency.

People have said, oh, look, there are different avenues and possibilities that are now awake to us, but then you had the fights against affirmative action in the courts.

And then when you think about even 10 years ago, in 2010, you know, we're in the second year of the presidency of Barack Obama.

And so that was a huge shift.

That was a Gutenberg shift in the consciousness of American culture that now this black man can be the face of America, the avatar of American democracy, the embodiment of the noble aspirations of James Madison and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is now this sun-kissed son of America who embodies the best ideals and the noble aspirations.

But at the same time, beneath it all, you have this undercurrent of the mistreatment of ordinary everyday black people and the police.

And I can tell you, Bill, I didn't write much about it in this book.

I've written about it in other places.

I've been victim of that kind of brutality for most of my life.

And it has become routine for many of us, 10 and 2, put your hands on there, put your wallet on the dashboard, you tell your kids, be as, look, and a lot of other people have to do this too, but we have to have a special attention paid to that.

Be extremely careful, be deferential, because we want you to get out with your livelihood.

What I'm asking you is the difference between like from now and 20 years ago.

Right.

Your answer might be there is none.

I just want to know that because like

I think, look, there is a difference, but there's a difference in awareness of people seeing that the police have mistreated black people consistently.

Look, we can trace it back to the 1700s when the slave stuff got started, the slave patrols in Virginia.

Since that time, I'm telling you, Martin Luther King Jr.

talked about police brutality in 1963 in his March on Washington speech.

So yeah, things have shifted in terms of awareness, possibility of black upward mobility, people getting along better.

Rodney King's answer, can't we all get along?

Well, some of us got along better in some places.

But I'm saying the lethal persistence of anti-blackness in this country has been a constant drumbeat that has accompanied the social dance of black people in many areas in America.

That's the reality.

That's the hurtful thing.

But you, I mean, in your,

is it

one of the last chapters in your book called White Comfort?

Yes,

you acknowledge that there is diversity in thought.

No doubt.

In the black community.

No doubt.

Extremely.

And I assume you are for that.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So, I mean, mean, I've heard a lot of, I've had some of them on the show.

Coleman Hughes was here, Camellia Foster.

John McWhorter, professor like you.

He talks about the religion of anti-racism.

He wouldn't agree with everything you're saying.

He says we've never been less racist.

Now, that doesn't mean there isn't still racism in place.

Right.

Right.

But

what is your view of that view?

Look, I think, look, John McWhorter, a friend of mine, very smart guy, I respect all the people you talked about.

They don't represent the masses of black people, number one.

They don't represent the basic belief of black people.

And here's the point.

Well, most black people want more policing, not less.

I was about to say, black people are culturally conservative.

They're unlike, look, I don't represent the mainstream, if you will, of black thought when it comes to things like that, right?

As an ordained Baptist minister for 40 years, I've seen some of the stuff that goes on in these churches.

Now, black communities say, look, we want people to protect us.

We want

when we call the cops, though, the cops not to fail to distinguish us from the criminals.

And the problem is black people call the cops more than anybody.

If you want to get down to who calls the cops, black people.

Look, mama, I told you I want those biscuits, butter.

I'm calling the cops on you right now.

So the thing is,

and you ain't done it right.

But the point is that we want when the cops show up.

not to direct a common ordinary interchange between two human beings into something lethal.

What do I mean?

So when the cops stop Sandra Bland for a traffic signal or something on her car, and it ends up she's in jail, hung two days later, Walter Scott down in South Carolina, he stopped because his left turn signal was wrong and the guy ends up shooting him.

So the ordinary interactions that many white brothers and sisters can take for granted end up in death for black people.

So yeah, a lot of black people don't want the police to be abolished.

But Bill, and I know that that term, Jim Clybert and others have said, hey, that's the death knell.

You talk about abolition.

Do you know in the 1850s, most white people were not in favor of abolition of slavery?

So things do change.

So the thing is, is that, are you interested in the commercial or the product?

I'm all for whatever language gets us over.

I'm not a stickler for if it's abolitionists versus reformists.

I just want the fact that police people seem to consistently and repeatedly murder, kill, maim, harm, and destroy black life with wanton abandonment without being held to account.

And when they do,

they have a qualified immunity that protects them.

But I remember doing doing editorials about the police that I was sure was going to get me arrested on this show.

Right.

Five years ago even.

And part of the point I was making was there's never any repercussions.

Now there have been.

Now you go down the list and lots of police have been put in jail, tried and found guilty for stuff.

So, I mean, you would admit.

Well, a few more.

It's not a good idea.

It's not a tsunami.

It's not a tsunami.

Okay, it used to be none.

No doubt.

And that's progress.

But Malcolm X said, you can't put the knife in my back nine nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call that progress.

Well, it is.

There has been acknowledgement.

No, no, I'm acknowledging that there's been some progress, but do you know the overwhelming majority of black people live in fear?

LeBron James, who's a rich guy who plays for the LA Lakers, says we live in terror against what the police will do to us.

That's a reality that I think many white people hadn't seen until these snuff films.

The pornography of black death is repeated in the cinema of black existence.

And these films show us that no no matter what, hands up, get shot, hands down, get shot.

Speak to the police in a saucy way, shot.

Don't say anything at all, get shot.

No matter what we do, the crime is not what we do, it's who we are.

And that's the reality that we have to confront when it comes to police brutality.

All right.

Well, I thank you always for your perspective.

You're amazing to listen to your talk.

Thanks.

I wish we could have dinner as we usually do.

I wish we could hang out a little bit next year in Jerusalem.

All right.

Michael Eric, nice one.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Let's meet our next brother.

Appreciate it.

He got too close.

All right.

Okay, here they are.

He is the author of His Truth is Marching On, John Lewis and the Power of Hope, who occasionally advises President-elect Biden.

John Meacham is over here.

John Meacham.

And she's a contributing writer for the Atlantic and the co-host of executive producer of Showtimes the Circus, Alex Wagner.

How you doing?

Okay,

so

I've got to start with my favorite topic, Trump not leaving.

It's

17 days after the election, and the leader of the ruling party

keeps insisting that he won in a landslide against his opponent, Yosef Bidenshenko.

And the pesky courts, you know, we still have courts that seem to be working, right?

Because they keep saying, you know, we can't allow this claim of fraud because there's no fraud and little things about legality and evidence.

Although, Jenna Ellis, Jenna Ellis, we had a Trump lawyer, we had her on last week.

She said with Rudy this week in court, this is a quote, your question is fundamentally flawed when you're asking, where is the evidence?

And Rudy said, when I went to bed on election night, he was ahead in all those states.

How is it they all turned around?

Well, first of all, Rudy, we know you sleep in the day

so you can hunt at night.

My question to you is, we come back on this show January 15th.

Where are we on January 15th?

You're not going to have a concession.

Donald Trump is, let's be explicit.

Donald Trump is trying to stage a coup right now.

That's what's happening.

He's trying to undermine the results of a Democratic, free, and fair election and trying to throw out legally cast votes so that he can win.

I mean, I think we should need to be explicit about what we are undergoing as a country right now.

I see no future in which he concedes.

I think he will probably avoid having to deal with the White House exit and turn over to Joe Biden in some creative way.

But you can bet there will be a rally, there will be some kind of public event, there will be probably some sort of Trumpian de facto White House somewhere else in the country.

This man is not going to say that he lost ever.

So we'll have like two popes.

Like when there was two popes.

Mar-a-Lago meets Avignon.

Yeah, exactly.

I hadn't thought of that until right now.

That's a good point.

I think the future

is key to how many of Trump's voters, all 70 million or so of them,

are going to follow that papacy.

And I think the reason that so few, relatively few Republicans have spoken out about this, I mean it's sort of if the Marx brothers did a coup, and so it's easy because it seems so incompetent to make fun of it, but this is an administration whose fundamental incompetence has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the most significant weakening of institutions that, however flawed, have produced, by and large, a more perfect union.

have given it the most stress and strain since the 1860s.

So

it's easy to be amused by Rudy, but we're just lucky that our authoritarians are so incompetent.

Yeah, and everybody's incompetent.

It wasn't just Trump that led to those deaths.

He certainly did his part.

Right.

But we're an incompetent country.

Well, that's true.

And an unhealthy one.

But I got to say, though, I spent a considerable amount of time with these local election officials, especially those in Pennsylvania.

These are civil servants who spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of focus trying to make sure that this election came off with a hitch.

And it did.

It's our one feather in our cap.

Well, but that actually, I mean, that matters because if Trump had been able to find any opportunity to say there's been fraud, even without it.

But here's the problem.

Rudy said in his statement the other day, what we are seeing is a massive influence of communist money from Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China.

These are just buzzwords.

that his people hear.

Okay, so they had the MAGA march on Saturday.

Okay.

I mean, I saw people interviewed there.

They think

to a person, they think he won the election, that there will be a miracle where he will still stay in office.

If not, it's stolen because he is the rightful heir to the seven kingdoms.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Here are the stats.

88% of Trump voters think he won the election.

Over 50% of Republicans, all Republicans.

What do these people do?

This is over, this is like 70 million Americans, which sounds to me like if they don't think the president who's installed is real, that's a fifth column.

That's a large fifth column in America.

What do they do?

How does a country, talk about not, House not being able to survive, you know,

cannot stand.

I think this is the key question for all of us, because what we've done is we have managed to, as a country, consign reason to the sidelines.

We don't think anymore, we feel.

And that's a large part of the pandemic tragedy is I don't feel like wearing a mask.

I don't feel like listening to a doctor.

I don't feel like listening to experts.

Well, we don't really care.

I mean, the purpose of the Enlightenment was that your thoughts and data and fact would at least have a chance against feelings and emotions and passions and appetites and ambitions.

And we've done pretty well for a long time with that, not great.

What's basically happened, I think, broadly, is that, you know, in 1964, a historian named Richard Hofstetter wrote a book, essay called The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

And it's this recurrent suspicion, as you laid out, that there is a larger conspiracy out there of unseen forces because people have a fundamental human need to believe that there are these secret forces that are arrayed against them.

And every moment is Armageddon.

Every moment is existential.

And so therefore, compromise is not possible.

And what's happened is the paranoid style, which was the John Birchers

in 64, has widened to a huge swath of the country.

And the big task for all of us, and I think it's a task of citizenship and talking to your neighbors and just actually trying to say, look, there is such a thing as fact.

Well, it's been aided and embedded by a conservative media echo chamber that has.

And the internet.

John Birch had to come to your house with a pamphlet.

Yeah.

The MIME of the championship.

I mean, I spent the entire fall talking to Trump voters.

They live in a parallel universe.

They do have alternative facts.

Those facts are fed to them in a systematic, for-profit way by the Murdoch family, by right-wing media outlets, and by the unleashed conservative echo chamber online.

I mean, putting that genie back in the bottle is going to be a good idea.

That's what I would say.

The only person in this country who has the power to really change the direction of this country is Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch.

That's interesting.

Because,

you know, Trump is already trying to peel people away because Fox News is kind of divided about him, but they have certainly been critical, and some people have called the election for Biden.

And it looks like Murdoch is doing it.

It looks like he is throwing his lot in with

reality

for a change.

A lot of the Fox viewers will stick with Fox.

They'll be divided.

But I think Rupert Murdoch, more than anyone else, holds the fate of this country in his hand, an Australian.

An Australian.

Fucking Australian.

You know how I feel about Australians always sleeping on your couch and trying to steal your girlfriend.

The world is flat.

I'm just speaking for myself here, not for any transition or anything.

But we do have a shot here.

If

the government and the private sector under President Biden can take care of the pandemic, there's actually a case study here.

I'm not saying it's going to be a panacea, but if there is competence, if there are, you know, and if the vaccine timetable works, you may have a moment where people will be able to look at

the institutions of which they are so skeptical right now and say, well, things are getting a little better.

This election was not that far outside the historical mainstream in terms of the margin.

I think one of the things that

liberals need to get over that, I think.

Right?

Liberal,

they need to look at why.

Right.

So many people consider that detoxic.

That was my editorial last week.

We won't get back into it.

But there are many reasons.

Biden comes in with a larger percentage of the popular vote than Truman, Kennedy, Nixon in 68, Carter in 76, Reagan in 80.

Trump also won more.

Clinton either time.

He did, but he didn't.

But Biden's at 51%.

So just, you got, I mean, we can look back all you.

It's 1%.

We are a 51%.

We are a 51%.

But considering what they had to look at for 41 years.

I know you love this image.

You're preaching to the choir here.

I get that.

But it is a 51% country.

We killed 750,000 000 people to abolish slavery it was not a con we didn't have a conference at the 19th century brookings institution and say hey let's go do this yeah which was a substantial percentage of the whole country at that time yes i grew up in a region where until 52 years ago we lived under legalized apartheid at the ballot box in our lifetime so

I'm not saying let's therefore let these folks let this stuff go but let's have some sense of proportion.

I don't know.

I think we have a battle right now against an unseen enemy, and one side has no interest in fighting it for completely partisan reasons.

I mean, that is a cravenness.

The inability, the inaction, the dismissal of COVID-19 as a deadly virus just tells you the ends to which the Republican Party and Donald Trump will go to preserve a sort of partisan worldview.

And that is, you know, I mean, maybe the distribution of the vaccine and the, you know,

getting out of masks next year will help things, but I think Donald Trump is going to be on the sidelines, A, claiming credit for it the entire time.

His followers will believe that.

And I have a hard time imagining they're going to come back into the fold of institutional democracy, despite the fact that institutional democracy will have saved their lives.

I mean, there's going to be going around everywhere.

There's blindness on some parts everywhere.

I'm also amazed at how many people have been saying to me lately, oh, I can't wait till 2020 is over, as if when the calendar turns over, oh boy, that year's gone.

And it's like, the virus will still be here.

Trump will still be here.

Okay?

He's not, he could be worse pissing outside the tent in.

I mean, just for one thing, he's going to have, he's going to be the ultimate kingmaker.

He's going to have a veto power if we get him out.

If he's going to have a veto power over every single Republican candidate, but almost everyone.

If you get the Donald Trump treatment, you know you're not going to get

the votes.

That's a scary proposition.

No, it's America held hostage.

Yeah.

Well, if Donald Trump is the Republican Party, we should stop separating the two.

He is the Republican Party.

But I don't think they've ever had someone who could do that.

Anyway, this is our last show of this Annas Harablis.

And, you know, it's so funny,

the paradox of the.

I always think of you and Elizabeth II.

Welcome to the crowd.

And I always think of you when I use a Latin phrase,

which is not that often.

But I'm always amazed that, you know, people have said to me, and I had to kind of agree, we're like, oh, what a terrible year.

And then they go, yeah, and it went so fast.

And it kind of did.

And I thought to myself, yeah, you know, when I'm 100, if I live that long, I'm going to want to remember this year.

It was terrible, but it was.

memorable and it was not like anything else.

So

I made a little video to myself

to future me.

Because, you know,

when I'm 100, I don't know.

So I made it for myself to remind myself of what this year was when I'm 100.

But I figured I'd show it to you.

Would you like to see it?

I'd say, okay.

Well, this is a retrospective, and it's just a

little video I made to my 100-year-old self.

Hey there, future me.

If you're watching this, congratulations on making it to 100.

Soon you'll be old enough to watch Fox News.

Anyway, I'm reaching out to you because I figure at 100, after all the pot we smoke, your mind must be like soup, which you probably have some on your shirt right now.

But look, if there ever was a year that people are going to want to hear about,

It's the famous plague year of 2020.

And Bill, you live through it.

You're going to I say you're going to want to remember some of this because it was a pretty special time

in March we got locked inside everybody all the time and let me tell you we may not have had toilet paper but we had a raw determination to get back on the air and your intrepid producers came through and put the home back in home box office Thank God for backyards and man caves.

You used every square inch of your home, your own home, at first shooting the whole show on nothing but an iPhone.

You interviewed senators, congressmen, and mayors from a chair in front of a cutout of Trump giving the finger and two feet away from a stripper pole.

This really happened.

There were lots of challenges.

Technical,

weather,

doing your own makeup, but always wearing a fresh suit, just like you always had in the studio, so people out there would know.

Fuck you, virus.

But the big one:

how do you do monologue comedy when you had no audience?

Bill, you son of a bitch, you got super high one night and figured it out.

Finally, after five months, she got back to the studio and just in time to see Joe Biden get elected.

And Trump refused to leave.

Something the pundits said no one could have predicted.

I don't see him leaving willingly.

I don't see him leaving.

He is not going to leave.

Oh, I'm the guy who says he's not leaving.

He's not going to leave even if he loses.

I don't think he's leaving.

He's not going to leave.

He's not leaving.

I don't think he's leaving.

I'm right.

And you won't leave.

But he's not leaving.

He's not going to leave.

He's not leaving.

He's not going to leave.

Well, old-timer, I hope that Trump, or even more dreadfully, one of his offspring, isn't president of your watching this.

Most of all, I hope you remember how grateful you were to the entire intrepid, unbreakable staff at real-time for pulling miracles out of their ass every week.

And to the folks at home for letting us do what we do.

Keep both sides honest in good times and bad.

Even when the audience wasn't really there,

you knew they were there,

and you were there for them.

Okay.

What a year!

Crazy.

So, listen.

We usually, whenever we have a break, we have one in December, we have one in the summer, we usually do future headlines.

This is one we did in June.

I just wanted to show you, because sometimes they really come true.

So

we're going to put that up online this year, and it'll be there shortly.

Okay.

So

let me ask you about Georgia.

Because Georgia seems to be the proxy war for all the marbles.

Let's not even go into why Georgia is having this runoff, but they are.

There is 52 Republican senators right now, 48 Democrats.

If the Democrats win those two seats and the runoff is on January 5th, then they get the Senate because

the tie is broken by Vice President Kamala Harris, who Trump calls a communist monster, and he's not given to hyperbole.

So this is like super important.

Is this why

so many of the Republicans will not break with him?

Because it's about the Senate.

Because if you don't win the Senate, the whole thing is almost pointless putting Biden in there.

Mitch McConnell's just going to want to make him a one-term president.

He's going to want to tank the economy.

He's going to rediscover the deficit.

Georgia, it's all about getting those two seats in Georgia.

Yeah.

And another missed investment opportunity was buying a TV station in Atlanta so you could get the ad dollars going forward because you could

another another problem.

George is the new Florida.

It's the pivot point.

It's a really interesting state.

The north part is Pat Buchanan country from way back in 92.

It's where Doug Collins came from.

You have the,

how much poetry is this?

You have the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in King's pulpit in John Lewis's district standing in a year where more people voted.

And without that turnout, without, by the way, the most important person.

He's the Democrat running.

And the most important person of 2020, I would argue, is Jim Clyburn.

Definitely.

Without Jim Clyburn endorsing Joe Biden, Donald Trump would be president for real, not just in his own mind.

Yeah.

The thing about the Georgia race is it's going to be an uphill climb for Democrats.

If you look at the numbers from the election in November, Biden won the state by amassing a really broad coalition, not just of the Democratic base, but of peeling off moderate Republicans who just wanted Trump out of office.

But that same group of Republicans did not vote for down-ballot Democrats.

John Ossif, one of the Democrats who's going into this runoff race, got 100,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden, right?

And that's evidence of people who are saying, get Trump out, but Biden doesn't get the vote.

But the two Republicans running are both criminals

I mean I maybe criminal is a word that they would object to but I mean one is is

this Perdue David Perdue who used to run dollar general okay and the other one was Kelly Loeffler who hus whose husband owns the stock exchange I know that sounds like a joke about rich people in an Adam Sandler movie, but

that's a real thing.

He owns the stock exchange.

So they're two regular downhome folks.

Anyway, they were both privy in January to the reports coming out of the government about how bad coronavirus was going to be.

And they went out there and told the suckers that it was all okay and then dumped their stock

in stuff that was going to be affected, like casinos that were going to shut down.

That's not going to affect the vote?

I mean, it...

It didn't in the first pass at this.

I mean, I think there is a real appetite on some parts of the moderate base that's going to be critical in this race not to have a democratically controlled Senate and White House.

And it's going to be a very hard case for John Ossuf and Raphael Warnock to make that this isn't handing Joe Biden the keys to the kingdom.

We all know it's really important.

How does the Republican Party function with this coalition now of QAnon?

which is really the force, that's where the energy is.

And the Charles Kochs, you know, Charles Koch, the Koch brothers, he said last week,

he's very rueful about his past support of Republicans, apparently now.

He's like, boy, we made a big mistake because apparently, you know, Frankenstein's monster got out of control there a little bit.

How are these two going to coexist, the greedy, traditional Republican and the Democrats Eat Babies Republican?

It's a fabulous question because you have the sort of the respectable Republican view and the way that they justified, I think, I bet the Georgia Republicans did this.

I bet there were more than a few Georgia Republicans who probably voted for Biden and then voted for the Republicans down the Senate on this idea that somehow or another Joe Biden, who by the way is about as much of a socialist as my Springer Spaniels, right?

I mean, it's just, they're actually not.

They do have tendencies.

They are more communist than Joe Biden is.

But this is this respectable thing.

We want divided government because we want,

you know, I just think

You know, once to every man in nation comes a moment to decide, and this is an existential moment in American Democratic lowercase D history.

And we have one more shot at this.

The voters of Georgia have one more shot to get this right by sending these Democrats to the Senate.

It's funny that, you know, Biden ran on, you're hurting, help is on the way.

And Trump ran on, everything's great.

And yet,

I'm reading as the returns come back and we get the more detailed analysis of what happened in the election.

Trump won in places where people are suffering.

And Biden won in places where things are going great.

It should be the opposite, shouldn't it?

That's how fucked up this country is.

I don't think policy matters anymore.

I don't think they should ask that question, are you better off than you were four years ago?

It doesn't matter to them.

Well, that's not what they're voting on.

I mean, people are voting on money, though.

I mean, I think that's when you ask the question about what is the Republican Party, the sort of polite establishment Republicans who are still in bed with the party that hosts QAnon supporters, they're there because they think they're going to be able to hold on to more of their money at the end of the day, and they are willing willing to basically make a deal with the devil on literally every other front because they think their tax rate's going to stay low.

I mean, I truly think that is the tie that binds at this point between the establishment, upper-class, educated Republicans and the base of people who have jumped so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole that they can't see their face.

Well, we know about taxes here in California, don't we?

I wouldn't.

I wouldn't say we were undertaxed.

This is not an original point to me, but I think, and this could be a cause for you, partisanship has essentially become religious.

We have structural partisans.

You have your own holy books, you have your own saviors, you have your own view of the world, your own cosmology.

You have people who are hard, hardcore, you have people who show up on Christmas and Easter, you know, tax day and whatever.

And so

the CE Christian is the tax day vote, Trump voter.

And so, therefore,

rationality

that is working through the data is been shoved to the side.

And I think this is much more about culture and identity than economy and health right now.

Well, there's also demographic change afoot.

And I think we're at a hinge point demographically, right, where one tribe, white patriarchy, is on the downslope and an ascendant brown tribe is at the gates.

And I think Trump has successfully stoked a lot of fear around that change, which is happening, which is existential, which is Darwinian in a lot of respects.

And this is the after effect of that fear and that anxiety about a change in what it means to be an American and what this country actually looks like.

And a huge, yeah.

And

a huge question is whether Trump is the last gasp of the patriarchy, or is there more to come?

And how?

There's more to come.

And so,

how long and what happens to this broad anxiety?

How does it manifest itself?

And what about just the structural problems we have?

I would just, just to start with the top two in my book,

the Electoral College and the Senate.

We seem to be consigned because of what we were just talking about, the way the demographics are changing.

I mean, Biden's going to win this by 7 million popular votes.

I don't see the Republican...

presidential candidate winning the popular vote ever again.

And the Senate, of course, is run by Republicans.

They have a talk talk about rigged, you know, because, again, my pet peeve, the Dakota Territory

gets four.

Right.

And California, with 40 million people, gets two.

I mean, it is, so we're going to be consigned to this at least semi-minority rule.

That's structural problem number one.

And the other is just idiocracy.

The people just get dumber and dumber.

Tommy.

Not us.

I mean, there's a guy, Tommy Tuberville, he just got elected to the Senate in Alabama, does not know the three branches of government.

This is like the most fundamental question you can ask anybody.

I mean, immigrants who take the test are like, yeah,

ask me the next one.

He said it was the House, the Senate, and the executive.

I mean, and then there's the QAnon lady and the baby eaters that are coming in to follow.

I don't know how,

if the teachers are stupid, how the kids get smart.

You know, I just don't know how we overcome these structural changes.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic.

Yeah, not only is it minority rule, but it's minority rule by a party that has shown itself to have no governing agenda other than

obfuscation and transigence, stonewalling.

Make liberals cry.

What is the Republican Party?

And yet, we need to reconcile what it is because it is going to play the dominant role in American politics in the forthcoming future.

I mean, I think

I don't mean to be totally the most negative person in the world, but President Obama was talking this week about why people turn to America.

And it's not just because we export all these wonderful cultural ideas, but it's also because we are the litmus test for self-governance.

And in this moment, this is what it looks like when that experiment in self-governance begins to fail.

And we make their phone.

But this is what you're, but we are, self-government is only as good as we are.

And so the structure itself is relevant.

But politicians, let's be honest, politicians are mirrors of who we are.

They are much more than they are mirrors.

Right.

And that's some scary.

So one minute left.

Tell me something hopeful.

Something optimistic.

Tell me one optimistic, hopeful thing, and then I'll say mine.

I thought of it last night.

I was like, oh, this would be a great question to end the season with.

Tell me something hopeful, John.

The end of the year is coming.

We like that.

I think that the fact that Joe Biden won the same popular vote more than Ronald Reagan, more than Clinton, more than Truman,

more than Jack Kennedy, suggests that we are a 51% country and it may just be 51%,

but he is president, and Trump is only president in his and Rudy's mind.

It'll be a small thing.

Try.

It's a big thing, actually.

I think we've lost sight of this.

Try as he might.

At the beginning, on January 20th, a woman

who is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants is going to become the country's first female vice president.

Soon the next president.

Maybe the next president.

The American story continues to change.

Mine is

Keith Richards, stop smoking.

I'm just saying anybody can do anything at any time.

I didn't think that would ever happen.

Anything possible.

Change is always possible.

All right, time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

New rule, now that the police chief of Marshall, Arkansas resigned after posting on his social media, death to all Marxist Democrats, someone has to ask him, how many Marxist Democrats are there in Marshall?

If there's two, that's one more than there are streetlights.

It's a one-horse town and unless that horse has been reading the Communist Manifesto, I think we're safe.

New role neighbors of the Georgia woman who turned her porch into a restaurant for chipmunks must conduct a wellness check.

Hey, we all get lonely during a pandemic, but turning your porch into an Applebee's for rodents?

All I know is get there early in the day because dinner is nuts.

Near-old, the woman who couldn't have children of her own and so had her own mother be the surrogate mom, must never say to her daughter at breakfast, hey, clean your plate, grandma worked hard on those eggs.

It's the last show.

New rules, someone must tell the Michigan couple who had a daughter after 14 sons, congratulations.

Oh, and also stop having children.

It's a uterus, not a salad shooter.

New rules, science has to explain why once you turn 60, everyone looks like a child.

Cops look like they're 15.

Major leaguers look like they're 12.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but this is my proctologist.

And finally, New Rule.

Hey, it's our last show of the season.

Screw the rules.

Tonight I'd like to tell...

Tonight I'd like to tell you a tale of Dr.

William Miller, the American preacher whose teachings spawned the Seventh-day Adventist religion of today.

In the 19th century, Miller grew an enormous following by telling anyone who'd listened that he could, by reading the Bible and then applying his own math,

predict the exact date for the second coming, Jesus' big return to show business.

Which, good news, bad news, also meant the world world would be coming to an end.

So, peaking in the early 1840s, William Miller's rallies attracted thousands of people, all focused on this one idea, that the world was going to end on his predicted date of October 22nd, 1844.

That is the day the world would come to an end.

Spoiler alert, it did not.

Christ totally blew them off.

He was supposed to show up and just flaked.

Typical.

Now, when you stake your whole religion on one all-important prophecy that doesn't come true, the logical reaction from followers should be, well, I guess that was a bunch of bullshit.

But no, no, no, no.

No.

No, this sect doubled down and to this day refers to October 22nd, 1844 as the Great Disappointment.

Because of course it's disappointing when the world doesn't end, but the important thing is that you didn't let your faith be shaken in the guy who got it dead wrong.

Okay, so

by now you're saying, Bill, what the fuck does this have to do with what's going on in the world today?

Well, recently there's been another large group of people who had a great disappointment

and will not accept their loss.

And the challenge for us is how do you get people out of a cult, especially when every time you present evidence of what is obvious reality, they take it as proof of you being in on a conspiracy to destroy them.

And for the answer to that question, we must turn to, and I'm sure many of you have already guessed who I'm going to say now, Catherine Oxenberg.

Yes, Catherine Oxenberg, actress, star of dynasty, European royalty, and lady in front of you at Whole Foods.

Catherine Oxenberg, because she got somebody out of a cult, and I know about 70 million other Americans I'd like her to talk to.

Now, if you don't know what I'm referring to, Catherine Oxenberg was recently featured in not one, but two documentaries about a cult called Nexium that brainwashed her daughter India.

Nexium was led by a con man, now serving 120 years, named Keith Ranieri, aka Vanguard.

That was the name he gave himself, Vanguard.

And as I was watching this documentary, I couldn't stop thinking that Ranieri,

I mean Vanguard,

reminded me of someone.

But I couldn't put my finger on who.

For example, like most cult leaders, Vanguard had an extraordinary need to be surrounded by asslickers telling him how great he was.

Has your being a part of my life enhanced my life?

I don't have words to tell you how much it has.

A heartfelt tribute to Vanguard.

You make it possible for us to grow ourselves every day into the people that we want to be.

A very amazing man in many, many, many ways.

Who did that remind me of?

I don't know that I've ever been more proud to be standing next to you today.

Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our president.

You're living up to

everything I thought you would.

You're one heck of a leader.

Oh, yeah, that guy.

That guy.

That's right.

The one who is also always bragging about what a genius he is.

But I'm smarter than him.

I'm smarter than anybody.

I'm a very stable genius.

Donald Trump's very, very large.

a brain.

Well get this.

Vanguard's followers believed he was the demonstrably single smartest person in the world because he told them.

He told them he spoke in full sentences when he was one

and also that he invented his own math.

Just like Dr.

William Miller.

And both Trump's and Vanguard's status status as cult leaders sprang from their creation myths as off-the-charts business savants, when in reality, Vanguard's consumer byline business was a pyramid scheme shut down by the state of New York and about as successful as the three casinos Trump drove into bankruptcy in the 90s.

Oh, and they both started fake schools.

And then there's the fact that both men were such unrepentant sex creeps that they literally could not stop themselves from bragging about it.

If we conquer a woman, if we grab the thing we want to fuck, whatever it is, and fuck it, and if we do whatever we want,

and they like it.

And when you're a star, they let you do it.

You can do anything.

Whatever you want.

Grab them by the pussy.

Yeah, you didn't notice that?

Okay.

It seemed rather parallel to me.

And like all cult leaders, they had to have that one queen bee around them who they deputized to recruit others into their sick games.

Vanguard had Smallville actress Alison Mack.

Trump has Lindsey Graham.

And, you know, when you're fighting a cult, you're not just fighting the leaders, but all the enablers who see you as an enemy.

Truth is a threat to them.

That's why what Catherine Oxenberg did was so instructive.

You've heard the phrase, hate the sin, love the sinner.

Well, she practiced hate the cult, love the cultist.

She didn't scream at her daughter that she was stupid.

She didn't cut her off.

She just kept trying to remind her of who she used to be.

I think we need to try that on QAnon.

You know, the ones who believe that rich liberals are running a massive pedophile ring and eat babies and in some cases are really lizard people

wearing a human mask.

And they were as sure that Trump was going to win re-election as Dr.

Miller's followers were that the world was going to end in 1844.

They were told to trust the plan, that Trump would get a second term devoted to busting the Democratic sex trafficking ring.

But now on message boards, we can see they have doubt and despondency.

One of them wrote, my faith is shaken.

I followed the plan.

Trump lost.

What now?

What now?

Opportunity to lift the scales from their eyes.

But it's not going to happen from mocking them or calling them stupid or making smart remarks like, if Kamala Harris really is a lizard person, why didn't she eat that fly on Mike Pence's head?

Don't do that.

I'm saying don't do that.

Really?

One more and then don't do it.

Rather, if you have Trump relatives over for Thanksgiving, understand they have been through a traumatic event.

Their savior, their strongest, smartest, manliest hunk of a leader who ever lived, just got his ass kicked by the 2,000-year-old man.

So

don't gloat.

Don't even try to argue, because arguing with cult people only makes it worse.

If there's hope, It's not in any of the words that were communicated.

It's in here.

And so it is for me.

To all of you in the audience, thank you so much who put up with so much just to be here.

All of the folks who helped make this possible during this trying time.

The crew who roll with it so well, my brilliant staff, thank you all and especially everyone at home.

Here's hoping for a better next year.

Couldn't have got through this one without you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, John.

Thank you, Alex.

Thank you, Michael Eric Dyson.

We'll be back January 15th.

Thank you very much.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

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