Ep. #549: Jenna Ellis, Caitlin Flanagan

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 gonna 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.

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

Thank you.

Thank you very much, space people.

Plenty of room in here.

Plenty of room.

Everybody do this.

Do this.

See, you can...

Oh, I see.

You're clapping.

You can't do that.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

We are so far apart.

No spread of the disease in here, right?

We are safer than fuck in this place

That's our motto here anyway

We have one more show after this we have this show we haven't done this shit could happen now

And then one more and then that's the end.

What a year boy.

Wow started with the flu ending with a coup

Spin-off.

Oh my god, I mean

People know this, you know, there's like five stages of grief after a loss.

You know everyone knows this denial anger bargaining depression, acceptance.

I don't want to name names, but somebody seems stuck on the first two.

Because this

has been the most drawn-out transition since Caitlin Jenner.

I mean, Trump, we thought he was a Russian plant.

Turns out he's an Irish relative.

Yeah, this guy reminds me of the remember the movie The Sixth Sense remember that movie the main character doesn't know he's dead

Now really if this pres if this presidency was a bar it is way past closing time

We need that guy who goes you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

But you know

The president is making an interesting case for himself.

He's saying he's uncovered a conspiracy, a widespread conspiracy involving tens of millions of Americans voting for his opponent.

Really, that's his case.

His case is basically, if you don't count all those votes for Biden, I won by a landslide.

As much as I can glean.

And also the will of the people, very unfair.

Very unfair.

But don't ever say these people don't try.

I mean, the president has been sending out his...

Rudy Giuliani

went to, that's a laugh itself, isn't it?

Went to contest the vote in Pennsylvania.

They said it was going to be at the Four Seasons Philadelphia.

It was at a Four Seasons total landscaping.

I'm not joking about it.

I wish I was.

This would make a great sketch.

It was in a fucking Home Depot

where he was going to bring out witnesses to the fraud.

One of the witnesses to the voter fraud that Giuliani brought out didn't even live in Pennsylvania and turned out to be a sex offender.

Yeah,

when they offered him the job of poll watcher, he thought they meant something completely different.

But don't think that just because all this is going on, the president has stopped presidenting

Because Wednesday was Veterans Day and Trump visited the tomb of the unknown soldier and accused him of voting illegally.

All right.

We've got a great show.

We have Caitlin Flanagan and Max Brooks.

But first up, she is a senior legal advisor for the Trump 2020 campaign.

Please welcome warmly Jenna Ellis.

Jenna?

Thank you.

Thank you, Belle.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you for doing this.

Can I call you, Jenna?

Absolutely.

My friends all call me Jenna.

Okay, well I hope we're friends.

I hope we can have a honest conversation without talking points and stuff.

I mean first of all I do admire you for coming on.

This is a tough argument you have to make.

Would you acknowledge that?

Well, I think that the argument we're making and I appreciate you having me on because what all Americans should be concerned about is that every legal vote should count fairly and accurately.

And so

this is about the future of our presidential elections.

And you're agreeing with that?

And I wish that Joe Bennett's a vote.

Joe, I mean, right away we used the talking point there, the

legal vote.

No one is contesting the idea that we are not wanting to count legal votes.

That's really not

showing me.

Joe Biden, his press conference last week, he said, let's count all votes.

What he hasn't acknowledged is that he wants to count all legal votes.

What he's wanting is the late ballots.

He's wanting all of these ballots from dead people, from non-residents, all of those.

He has not come out and ignored the power of the people.

When I say

welcome to the show,

please give a hand to my guests.

I don't have to say, please give a hand to my guests who are sitting on the panel.

We assume certain meetings.

It's a very important thing.

When someone says votes, we assume it means legal votes.

But let me ask you, today, the president was out talking about the coronavirus, and he said,

We're not going to talk about that, but in the middle of it, when he was talking about we're not going to be going into a lockdown, he said, hopefully,

whatever happens in the future,

who knows which administration it will be?

I guess time will tell.

Okay, you talk to him on a daily basis.

You know his mindset.

I have not heard this tone since Election Day.

What he tweeted a few days before was, I won this election by a lot.

This seems to be a different tone.

Are you guys admitting that maybe you lost?

I don't think it was a different tone at all.

And I met with the president actually right before that press conference.

I was in the Oval Office.

And again, he is wanting to make sure, not just for his own election, but for every future election, that we know that we have free and fair elections in this country.

And so I think that

we are acknowledging.

We don't know that.

We have evidence, and we have lawsuits that are currently going on.

We have recounts.

Some recounts, like in Georgia, with the margin that is so close, is actually a mandatory recount.

Your lawsuits are being laughed out of court.

I mean I'm sorry.

I don't want to make this a contentious issue.

Not all of them.

I'm just trying to present what is the truth in what's going on in the courts and also in your own administration.

The Department of Wait a minute.

This came out today.

The Department of Homeland Security.

Now this is going to sound, I mean you work in government, you know now.

Very bureaucracy.

I actually don't.

I actually don't.

I want to clarify that.

I don't work for the White House.

I work for the campaign and for the President directly.

So all the people on Twitter who are saying, hey, you work for me because I'm a taxpayer, maybe they need to read my Twitter profile a little more closely.

Apologies.

That's okay.

Thanks.

Department of Homeland Security, that is the government.

Yes.

Okay.

They have a branch called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

This is what I'm trying to say.

It's getting very bureaucratic, but that's what government is.

And by the way, that's one reason why we love government, why we're not a third world country quite yet,

is because we have people in place

who are people of goodwill from both parties who do a tough job, as this election was, and they did it brilliantly.

In the Department of Homeland Security, under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, there is a group called Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council.

They came out today and said

there was no

fraud, no evidence of fraud.

This is not a

most secure election in history.

And

Chad Wolfe, who is a Trump appointee, a Trump super loyalist, he would not fire the head of the security agency when he said this.

When you lose Chad Wolfe, isn't it time to say, maybe we lost this one?

It's not a shame to lose this.

Well, you know, if we had said that, if we had said that bill when everyone was telling Sidney Powell to stand down on Michael Flynn and, you know, the Russia collusion hoax and also impeachment and everything else.

Trump's lawyers, myself included, we have prevailed on all of those things and we have shown through the evidence and through the fight that we are willing to stand up against the deep state and

just because

where have we prevailed in in Pennsylvania we have actually received

yes we have so

in Pennsylvania we have we have a court order

you have not prevailed because you have not prevailed on any

I'm sorry.

But this is

your lawyer in Arizona.

We actually have.

So,

well, now you're switching states.

If we can go back to Pennsylvania, we have prevailed on two things.

One is that we have the meaningful access part of this, where we got a court order from a judge that said, because this is a long-standing tradition, that both Republicans and Democrats need to be able to observe the ballots being counted.

That was not going on in Pennsylvania or Michigan.

Of course, the judge in Pennsylvania said, absolutely.

No, it was not.

We actually have, have, there are 682,000 ballots that were counted without meaningful access from Republicans or Team Trump.

Those ballots.

Not what they say in those states, even by Republicans.

You just.

No, that's not true.

And we have,

it's 682,000 ballots

that were counted without meaningful access.

Just stop.

And so that's.

So, go.

So do you know more than this judge in Pennsylvania?

Have you recently joined the court that I'm not aware of?

This is the case.

Let me read you what the judge in the Pennsylvania court said.

You were talking about observers.

By the way, this whole idea that you need observers, there are always observers in elections.

Do you think that either party would go in?

By law.

Do you think that either party hadn't thought of this before the election?

Oh, wow, we should maybe have our team in there looking at ballots.

Of course, both parties have their people in the room looking at ballots.

This is

the extra observers.

Judge Douglas is a little bit more than a moment.

We're not talking about extra, Bill.

No, let's you want the facts.

We are not talking about extra observers.

We're talking about meaningful access.

If you have two people in the room from 100 feet away and they're not able to actually observe what's going on and they're actually seeing that there are ballots that are being manipulated, that are counted twice, that are being changed, that the signature matching, some of the envelopes are being destroyed.

These, we have over 11,000 credible reports that are coming in through our election hotline

that are simply fraud.

Yes, they are.

And again, I would ask you, are, yeah, and so

they are incredible, and that is what our lawsuits are trying to do.

This is, again, I'm just going to read this one more time, but this is from

your own Homeland Security Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency.

There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

I will tell you what the lawyer, the judge in Philadelphia said.

He was asking, he said,

are your observers in the counting room, which is what you care about?

Your campaign said.

Your campaign guy said there's a non-zero number of people in the room.

I'm not making that up.

A non-zero number?

That's got to be a new one for Washington, meaning there are people in the room.

And then Judge Diamond said, I am asking you as a member of the bar are people representing the plaintiffs in the room Trump campaign yes Judge Diamond I'm sorry then what's your problem

and I will answer Bill our problem

so no Bill I will tell you again yeah a non-zero number means that we could have one or two people in there but you know what they did in Pennsylvania that they took the court order and they said we will move up the election observers by six feet and then they moved back the ballot counters counters by six feet.

If you have two people in the room from 100 feet away, that's why the term meaningful acts are not.

Yeah, I don't know where you're getting 100 feet away.

They're reading the ballots.

Okay,

and that's exactly why we are contesting this.

We got the court order and we won in Pennsylvania.

But what you and your boss are contending is not what your lawyers are even fighting in court.

Here is the Trump campaign lawyer in Arizona, Corey Langhoffer,

said this is not a fraud case.

We are not alleging fraud.

We are not saying anyone is trying to steal the election.

Ann Bill,

and let me explain that.

So, of course, that's one of your talking points, and I understand that.

What's going on in Arizona is that you had this don't touch the green button, where if there was a problem with the machine that was being used,

the election officials were telling the voter to touch the green button, which effectively canceled out their vote.

That is not fraud.

That is a different problem in Arizona than we're alleging in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Georgia.

So when you say we're not alleging fraud and you're using that as a talking point, you're mischaracterizing what the attorney in Arizona said and you're applying it to all of our lawsuits.

It wasn't a talking point.

It was a quote from your lawyer.

It's a talking point when you're using it in a way that is misleading your audience.

Do you want your audience to know the fact and the truth?

You invited me on to explain what Team Trump is doing, and I'm telling you, you're mischaracterizing that statement to apply it to other lawsuits outside of Arizona in a way that does not apply in the context of what our lawyer said in Arizona.

Okay, agreed or disagree.

We are alleging fraud, fraud.

But again, we are alleging fraud in the other states.

Arizona is very specific to the green button.

Let's move on.

I see we're not going to come to a meeting in the minds here.

Let's move on to a more philosophical discussion of this because the president himself has said, leading up to the election repeatedly over and over again, the only way I lose is if it's rigged.

Is that your view also?

Because it seems like if you have that view in your head, then you could not just accept that you might have lost.

Can you accept that you might have lost?

Of course we can accept that we might have lost.

And the point of this though, Bill, let me clarify, is that we want every legal vote to count.

There's always a winner and always a loser in every election in the United States of America.

What we want to make sure is that

we're going to fight it out.

No, that's not true, actually.

That's not true.

Hillary Clinton still has not conceded the 2016.

And let me remind you that Al Gore in 2000 had more time to contest this and have a recount in simply one state that had a one very narrow issue, and it took 37 days for that to be resolved.

Because it was 500 votes in a giant state.

And, and, Bill, that was that was the issue.

That Bush's brother ran the issue here.

The issue here is that we have 682,000 votes in Pennsylvania alone that we have not been able to see how they were counted.

We have reports of election fraud and irregularities across multiple states.

There are seven states now.

Don't you care about free information?

Do you care that since 2000, voter fraud has been studied by many, many organizations, including conservative ones like the Heritage Foundation.

They found out voter fraud, in-person voter fraud, is not a thing.

It's just not a thing.

So why is that?

It doesn't happen on any kind of level that has ever affected any vote, and it hasn't on this one.

Aren't you a little bit ashamed of how you're denigrating...

Wait a second.

How you're denigrating the people who work so hard in the most difficult election in memory.

They work so hard to make

them.

If they were working really hard for this, then they would want to make sure that their states are certifying an accurate count.

They are.

Including Republicans.

You can't say that.

You can't say that for sure, Bill.

Don't you want to know that this election and the result is an accurate count?

How much fraud is okay with you?

Why do you think so many people on the right, including people like Rupert Murdoch, Karl Rove,

Erdogan, the strong man of Turkey, the Pope.

China now congratulated Biden.

Why have so many people come over to this idea that, okay, America had a free and fair election.

We're congratulating the new guy.

That's the way it works.

You win some, you lose some.

Why?

Well, China is definitely congratulating Joe Biden because they know they can control him.

Beijing Biden is something that actually really needs to be looked into.

Oh, I walked right into that one one in the next question.

Yeah, you really did.

Yeah.

All right, so you go.

So China congratulating Biden is not a really good thing.

But we have always had contested elections through the legal channels, through the recounts.

And just because we have the Pope or somebody on media who is congratulating Joe Biden, no states have yet certified their results.

And that's all that we're asking is to make sure that the results that are certified are the legitimate count.

And I think that that is absolutely fair and every American should agree to that, just like Al Gore as a Democrat candidate, did in 2000.

All right, I will ask one last question.

I'll let you go.

Again, I commend you for coming here.

And you got a smile on your face like all you happy warriors do.

I got to admire that.

I am a happy warrior.

It's a great day to defend the Constitution.

Oh, that's what it's about, yeah.

So, okay.

So, but let's just, for the final question, let's take a little truth serum.

My guess is if I gave you a truth serum, you'd say, yeah, I know Joe Biden lost this one, but

I'm with a group of people who just believe that the ideas the Democrats have are so dangerous for America, I think this is what you believe, that we just can't let them take over.

And so whatever we have to do.

Now, Trump tweeted out, retweeted John Voigt's tweet the other day, which said, this is now our greatest fight since the Civil War, the battle of righteousness versus Satan, which I guess makes Biden Satan.

And then he continued, yes, Satan, because these leftists are evil.

I know you're an evangelical.

Do you believe Biden is Satan?

Do you believe leftists are evil?

Do you believe that it's okay to do anything to prevent them from taking over?

Anything, no.

I am an evangelical.

I'm an outspoken Christian, and I believe that we have a country that has a rule of law rather than rulers.

And that's what we're defending.

I campaigned very aggressively and very hard for President Trump because I believe that the American people should have re-elected him for four more years, but that was the campaign.

On November 3rd, the people cast their ballot.

And what I'm fighting for now is to make sure to protect the American system, which requires that every legal vote be counted fairly and accurately.

I believe in our system, the separation of powers, and that the judicial branch at the end of the day needs to intervene to make sure that whoever is declared the winner is the legitimate fair winner.

Just like in baseball, the umpire has to call balls and strikes fairly.

I am aggressively fighting for election integrity.

Trump got the right girl for his job.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it, Jenna.

All right.

Let's meet our panel.

All right.

This will be a somewhat different discussion.

He's a fellow, a fellow, hey fellow, at both the Atlantic Council and the Modern War Institute and author of the novel Devolution, Max Brooks is here, and someday I'm going to be a fellow somewhere.

Me a fellow.

All right, she is a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of Girl Land.

Caitlin Flanagan is back with us.

First off,

thoughts on Jenna?

Well,

first off, what a lovely interview with the black knight from Monty Python's The Holy Grail.

I mean, that literally was that scene.

Your arms off.

No, No, it isn't.

Yes, it is.

I have a real, though, I have to correct her on something, though.

When Jenna said that we have this precedent of taking a very long time because of Gore Bush, Harry Lippmann pointed out this week that the 9-11 Commission, one of the things that it said that is just a factor to consider in 9-11, was that there was not a new president being read into security briefings for much longer than usual.

And that this period of transition, it's not just about about hiring people and it's not just about decorating the Oval Office.

Very important things are being postponed because of this lunatic.

Okay, again, but this is the supposition that Biden is actually going to stand there on January 20th.

I still don't.

It could happen,

but I'm sorry.

I've been using the term slow-moving coup in this show since

before the last election was over.

And finally, I heard somebody else say it.

Barry McCaffrey this week said, we are watching a slow-moving Trump coup to defy the Biden election.

Believe your eyes.

Now, maybe this won't come to pass, but

we terminated him as president.

We didn't cure him as a narcissist.

You cannot break up with a narcissist.

Yes.

I've read about this.

Yes.

We know from Michael Cohen's book that Trump has spent all his life just having these aggressive lawsuits about ridiculous things.

I was one of them.

Okay.

I had to spend like 100 grand in court to defend the fucking ape thing.

Right.

And he will go on and on and on about these things.

And it pisses me off that there is no repercussions for a frivolous lawsuit.

It's like, take your shot.

If you don't get it, no harm, no foul.

Same as this.

There should be repercussions for trying this shit.

You shouldn't just be able to like, oh, I'll try to steal the election.

And if I can't,

well, there might be.

From a philosophical point of view, we have to remember that Trump is a dishonorable man in a system that operated on the honor code.

Yes.

And so a lot of things

were not done simply because they were not done post-Trump.

And that's, by the way, why we have laws.

Laws take over where personal morality ends.

And so therefore, a lot of things that were just not right will have to be illegal in the post-Trump government.

But again, I don't think that that we're at the end of this process just because he sounded a little, although she denied it,

a little more conciliatory.

I think

first he tried to stop people from voting altogether.

Yes.

You know, vote suppression.

That didn't work.

Then you go to the courts.

If that doesn't work, then you go, I've said this, we go to the Electoral College.

The state legislatures are in the hands of Republicans.

They actually pick the electors.

If that doesn't work, you got the Supreme Court.

And then, of course, we have to talk about the purge at the Pentagon.

The last step,

if you can't get it any other way, is the military.

It is very

disturbing to me that he is getting rid of the top people.

He fired the Defense Secretary and the three guys under him.

This is what coups do.

They put people in place when you need them in place.

You're a military expert.

Well, and I can tell you that when coups happen, this is the difference.

For a successful coup to happen, you need to have people in place who actually are not just loyal to you, but have the loyalty of the people under them.

So these loyalists he's put in place are grade A consummate fuck-ups who don't know what they're doing and have no loyalty from the people.

But in the military, you just, in the military, you take orders from the fuck up above you, even if he's a fuck-up.

But that's what the main thing in the military is.

I got to do what the fuck up above me says.

But remember, that's you frag him.

And that's a good point, because these are all civilians.

As far as the uniformed services, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was very, very clear.

And I was actually, I was in a conference once where Milley turned the cameras off because he doesn't screw around when it comes to the press.

He said, I do not want a soundbite taken out of context and spun for a political image.

I'm glad you brought him up because if he's the next to go, we're in trouble.

He's the head of the Joint Chiefs.

He said, I think his quote was, I didn't belong here when Trump did that thing where he emptied Lafayette Park and you brought out the military.

So that couldn't have gone over well with Trump.

And he said the military, as we've always known, should only be a last resort.

It should not involve impersonal politics.

And it shouldn't be used against your own people is another good idea for the military.

But if we start, if I see a purge of generals,

even colonels, because that's what happens.

I've seen it in other countries.

We've read about it.

That's when you know you're in trouble because they're getting, Stalin did it.

You getting rid of the officer corps that doesn't agree with you and leave.

And we know the military has this super Christian element.

And as, I mean, I'm not saying anything about evangelicals, lovely people, she's one, but there is a big connection.

More than we thought, between Trump and the evangelicals.

I would say because they are gullible people, they're used to believing a bunch of nonsense.

And now QAnon comes along, and Donald Trump does.

Yes, and you believe

this nonsense.

And I feel like Trump is using this Christian arm now.

Well, that's the whole theory of the case for these Republicans is that the Democrats have organized a SWAT team of poll workers, and that they're highly organized.

I don't know if you've ever met a poll worker.

I mean, and it's a hugely important job.

My mother would do it every four years.

This is not an elite fighting force that can, like, screw up with an entire election because they have a heart of assassins.

They're disorganized.

They're small time.

They're doing their job.

They believe in their job.

And it's really wrong to bring their work and their service into this kind of question.

They did an incredible job.

They did.

It's like the one

feather in our cap, the country that can't fucking do anything about the coronavirus or fucked up every other thing.

This one we got right.

The bureaucrats.

But can can I just read,

again, if you don't think it's possible, Mike Pompeo, I thought he was a regular Republican, not my type of guy, but

we're expecting a smooth transition to the second Trump administration.

This is our Secretary of State.

This is days after the election.

Peter Navarro, what is he?

He's something big in the White House.

He said,

We're proceeding under the assumption

that there'll be a second Trump administration.

Newt Gingrich

called what's going on a left-wing power grab,

otherwise known as an election.

Yes.

Mitch McConnell.

I mean, we saw Mitch McConnell do this with Merrick Garland.

We watched that and went, he really wouldn't.

Mitch McConnell couldn't.

He wouldn't.

But he did.

So are we sure he wouldn't?

couldn't?

Well, what you said, I think, is very telling because the people that I have spoken to in national security and homeland security think that while you never want to say nothing would ever happen, you never want to say that a coup would never happen, especially in the age of Trump, the danger right now, the real danger that we're facing is a homegrown insurgency.

Because

think about this is the first time since the 90s when militia enlistment has gone up during a Republican administration.

It always goes up during Democrats, down during Republicans.

During Trump.

Meaning any sort of armed government,

anti-government group, any armed anti-government insurgents.

Clearly not a government group.

No, no, no.

These are just guys in the woods.

No, these are the Timothy McCarthy.

These are guys playing Army in the Woods.

Yeah, right.

Well, they're more than playing ever before.

They're what?

They're more than powerful.

I know, but they're not official anti-speakers.

Oh, no, no, no.

I'm not sure.

They just fought camouflage and they go in the woods.

Yes, these are militias.

These are anti-government militias.

When you say militia, it sounds very official.

No, no, no, no.

I don't mean the militias of 1776 with the tricorns.

Or anything.

No, I mean the military.

They're just guys who can't get laid, who are playing in the woods.

Okay, that's all I want to.

But they're doing a lot more now.

Yeah.

They have guns.

Well, that's the threat.

And we think to ourselves, well, God, what if there is a coup?

What are we going to do?

Do we do peaceful demonstrations, a general strike?

Well, they have a plan.

If they feel like this government has been stolen and they're all that's left, they have their AR-15 and they have plans possibly for the next Oklahoma state.

They've said it.

And they have said it.

We saw this with the attempted kidnapping of the governor of Michigan.

I must go back to John Voigt and say.

Do we?

Yes, because he speaks for a lot of people.

If you think that they are Satan,

and again, this is a big part of QAnon, which is now a big part of the Republican belief system.

If you believe that the other side are

pedophile ring baby eaters.

Blood of babies, which I think isn't, I think, clearly.

Well, the blood is good, but the baby I don't know.

But isn't this straight from just push the baby around on the plate?

I never did.

Speaking from the protocols of Zion, I think it's a very anti-Semitic trope that they're also working into that, that whole theory.

It's always in there.

It's always.

It's always in there.

It's like paprika.

It never hurts to throw a little anyway.

Yeah, no, whenever a bell rings,

it's like pepper.

It's just always a little is good.

But there is a MAGA march this weekend.

Is it tomorrow that it starts?

I know they don't have permits, but they're calling it the million MAGA march.

I'm expecting 50,000 people

based on his estimates.

But say it is a million.

I mean, this is in the city of Washington, D.C.

A black city.

There's going to be counter marches and

good, maybe.

Maybe it's good that these people get, as Napoleon called it, a whiff of the grape shot.

Because I'm putting my money on Black Lives Matter on this.

I mean,

seriously,

I just think they're harder.

They're harder, harder people.

I just do.

I think that the proud boys are going to be the pants boys

if this comes to this.

It could be like Blackhawk Down for them.

They came to Washington and they're sorry they came.

But you know what?

Sorry, Max and I were talking, we're both the kids of World War II.

You know, that's,

I don't know, my father's long past.

Me too.

Okay, so it's like, for the first time in our lives, our country needs us.

We need to stand together, even if the election was lost, stand behind the winner.

We need to, and on our side, we need to start being far more generous about people who have supported Trump and not keep these lists and start saying that we're going to start making a bigger tent, we're going to start working across the aisle, because we can't go on like this.

All right, I'm going to get to that at the end of the show.

But right now, I just want to say Election Day always brings not just the winners, the big winners, but here in California, of course, we are the king of the proposition.

We kind of invented this in America.

We're rather proud of it, although I hate it every year because reading the voter guide takes me 10 hours.

But we like our propositions, and it's caught on all around the country.

And

the results are now in from a lot of different states.

Would you like to hear some of the state?

Okay, this is very important stuff.

These some of the

propositions that were on ballots around the country.

For example, Florida has passed Proposition 7 that makes it illegal to keep your shotgun and crystal meth in the same drawer.

That's going to be big in Florida.

My home state of New Jersey passed Prop 11.

Oh, this is good.

Establishes contact tracing for those exposed to the cast of Jersey Shore.

This went on in my state.

Oh, California, we passed Prop 18, requires real housewives to recycle their old faces.

This is important.

North Dakota voted on Prop 12, which officially changes the state's name to the real Dakota.

Oh, Portland, Portland, Oregon, they passed Measure 15, which replaces the city's police department with dudes who play ultimate frisbee in the

park.

And Texas passed Prop 2.

Yeah, all decisions now about whether to have a baby are private between the doctor and the slut.

Okay.

But

what were you saying before I had to do my bit?

You know what I was thinking today?

What if Bernie Sanders was the candidate?

I mean, if they went this nuts about centrist old Sleepy Joe.

But they're not afraid of Sleepy Joe.

I mean, we all have to accept that for very good reason, and everybody watched that murder, you know, eight minutes on television, the whole country rose up and there.

And following that, there were 100 days of violence.

And I think the response, even though that was a tiny proportion of the Democratic Party electorate, and even though it was inspired by the most important cause we can imagine, I think they are seeing that.

I think when they say evil, I think they're seeing that, and they're not really understanding that Joe's their guy.

You know, he's been reaching across the aisle.

No, they definitely don't.

I mean, he won by slightly more.

You know, it was a

certain victory, but you know, when you look at the margins,

again, we all know the pollsters were wrong.

We thought it was going to be a much bigger victory.

He won by slightly.

I mean, in other words, the country looked at Trump for four years, and he won by that much more than Hillary.

First of all, doesn't that say that maybe we're not as sexist as we thought?

I mean, it really doesn't seem to be that, oh, Hillary was a woman, we wouldn't vote for her.

They voted for Biden by this much more after Trump fucked up for that long.

But you know, that is how you defeat an insurgency.

You do not do it with street violence because every insurgent you kill, you make another hundred.

And this is exactly what my dad did in World War II.

He hunted what was called werewolves, which were Nazis when the Reich fell went into the hills, vowed to fight the Allies for 100 years.

And you know how we defeated that insurgency?

We rebuilt Germany.

Those guys came back out of the hills.

I agree.

And they said, hey, you, Fritz, I got a job for you.

And if we want to defuse this homegrown insurgency,

we have to govern well.

In fact, if you look at the U.S.

military's counterinsurgency manual, Peel Away the Tactical Layers, it's just a handbook for good government.

But here's the problem.

Wait, we need a Marshall Plan for West Virginia.

Is that

a Marshall Plan?

Well, no, but because this is what we've been talking about ever since I've been on the show.

Globalization has ripped half the heart out of this country, and automation is going to to rip half the other heart out.

And if we don't get a handle on this,

if we don't start to govern by what affects the most Americans, then we will lose again in four years.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's true.

I mean, the Democrats lost their base

of especially white working class voters.

Or thank you, Ronald Reagan.

I mean, the Irish were never Republicans in this country until

Reagan came along, and

the white working class, the Democrats have the policies that support the safety net and that the working class really needs.

But socially, we're very, very different, and it's terrible, it's terrible, it's heartbreaking for the Democratic Party to have lost any of the working class.

So, but here's the conundrum.

I mean, yes, I agree.

You don't want to further alienate the Republican base, the Republican voter.

On the other hand, the Republican leadership so has the whip hand in how power comes about in this country.

And if we get back a little of it with Biden, I think now he'd need the Senate to do this, but you need to, when you have a little of this power, especially since things are so stacked against with the Electoral College the way it is,

that and Senate, two senators, four from the fucking Dakotas.

They have how many people?

And 40 million in Cal with these structural differences, you have to get back power, which means packing the court, which means adding Puerto Rico as a state.

You have to do those moves.

You have to, they've shown with Merrick Garland and now this and everything else Trump has done, they are no conscience about power.

We need to get back power.

We're like

the deer hunter.

They have us in that shack playing Russian roulette.

We got to get more bullets in the gun.

But the best way to do that is to understand how did Trump get elected?

Because every fanatic, no matter Nazis, communists, Taliban, there always starts with the kernel of a legitimate concern.

Correct.

What are those legitimate concerns?

Because people who voted for Obama voted for Trump.

Absolutely.

My aunt, who I love in Yonkers, New York, voted for Trump.

She's not a fanatic.

Why?

So we can fix these problems.

Because, look.

There are issues we all agree on, right?

None of us want illegal immigration.

We just don't want to treat illegal immigrants like animals in cages

Right?

Well, yes, but I mean Democrats did say a lot of things during the primary I mean they made it sound like one come one come all right and you get free health care Well, and that's they wanted to give there were certain elements of our party that said we want to give prisoners the right to vote in prison

So

it will be nice though if I can just fantasize for a minute, if we got back to a place where we we didn't have to operate all the time by, this is what Donald Trump thinks,

and now we have to react to that, as opposed to just what's true or not.

Donald Trump thinks he didn't lose the election.

It's just this bizarre.

For people our age, it's just bizarre that Donald Trump, that's a joke.

His whole life, he was a joke.

And he still is a joke.

But that he controls our thinking.

Everything, everything.

That we have to pretend all the time.

But the best way to isolate, that's the thing that you do in an insurgent.

You don't destroy them, you isolate them.

Mao Zitong said that the insurgent is the fish that swims in the sea of peasants.

Drain the sea and do that by delivering.

That's how Franklin Roosevelt brought about this liberal world that we all enjoy.

He delivered.

So we've got concrete results.

But here, again, I hate to agree with all this, but making it happen.

I was reading this week about parlor.

Do you know what parlor is?

Oh, yeah.

Do you know what parlor is?

Yeah, I've heard it one parlor.

One guy, good.

Okay.

He's on it.

He's in the military.

No, he's not.

It's, I mean, you can be on it.

It's like

turning into like the right-wing Twitter, the right-wing Facebook.

It was shot to number one on the Apple Store and Google.

Okay.

If you think it's bad that we have curated feeds now, which we do, of course, we don't all see the same news.

We see the opposite news.

That's why a vast majority of Republicans still think Trump won the election.

Right, right.

But now we're going to have different platforms apparently.

This is because, and I was criticizing someone last week for going up, for they Twitter threw off this guy who was one of the heads of Homeland Security and he was giving his opinion about the wall and Mexicans and it wasn't my opinion, but it was an opinion.

It should not have been shut down.

They're not doing it well.

So now these people, of course, are saying, well, we'll go start our own.

And they did.

And now we're not ever going to hear the same information.

I don't know how we achieve these goals that you're talking about,

worthy though they are.

One of the things we can achieve is let people have a forum, but make sure you know who they are.

It's like you're a health guy, right?

In the 1970s, my mother lobbied so hard to get ingredients put on the boxes of the food she was feeding her child.

Well, the social media platforms need to do that by putting a check next to every single member.

I had to be vetted to go on Twitter and Facebook.

I'm sure you did.

I'm sure you did, right?

So people know that it's really us.

Well, that needs to be every single member so I know I'm not listening to Sergei and Igor in Kalingrad.

Right.

But if we want to bring back people, you know, bring back the right, we have to at least pretend slightly that every single major news network is not completely leftist.

Right.

You know, all, I was just trying to watch the returns.

Everyone was crying.

So go to MSNBC.

No, they're crying too.

If we're crying about the returns from Allegheny County, and we're just explicitly showing that our newscasters are so completely biased, of course the right's going to go somewhere else.

Of course they're going to leave the traditional news.

And, you know, the New York Times, forget it.

It has nothing to say to the right.

And I think that's where we all, that's this issue that Our country actually needs us.

You know, we all need to grow up.

The news gathering sources need to grow up.

The people on air, no more crying on the news.

They'll tell you about somebody getting beheaded after school, but then you get the Allegheny County returns and oh my god, they just have to be taken out in a stretcher.

We're just going to have to really suck it up and be a little less partisan in the news.

Agree.

And by the way, to your

point about issues,

marijuana, minimum wage, Medicaid.

When Democrats run on those issues, they win, and they even win in red states.

This last election, New Jersey, Arizona, Montana, South Dakota made marijuana legal.

Even Mississippi made it legal for medicinal.

Trump won Florida, but minimum wage raise won big in Florida, and he was against it.

During the 2018 midterms, expanding Medicaid benefits.

Idaho, Nebraska, Utah.

Can you find a more conservative trio of states than that?

Well, the propositions are.

It's not, the secret sauce is not that secret.

Right.

And the propositions are where people don't feel

I belong to Republicans or I belong to Democrats.

The propositions are where they can just say what they believe, and it's actually they have a lot of common beliefs.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.

This was really enlightening.

Thanks for coming.

Time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

Okay, new rules.

Since Mike Pence vanished for a week and came back wearing a mask, we have to assume he got his lips done.

And Mike, don't stop there.

Get yourself a killer rack because America already has an ass that just won't quit.

New rule, the Trump Winery has to commemorate the election with a special vintage sour grapes

with notes of bitter orange, horseshit, and

something Eric dropped in the barrel.

Sour grapes is a full-bodied, voluptuous, dare I say, morbidly obese wine that

goes with everything from burnt steak to KFC.

Also available in a sparkling variety if they can get the hookers to pee in it.

New rural McDonald's must stop trying to come up with healthy options like their new McPlant sandwich and just lean into being McDonald's.

McDonald's, the greasy, high-calorie junk food for when you want to hate fuck your mouth

with absolute garbage because everything in your life says, ah, fuck it.

Besides, McDonald's already has a McPlant.

They're called French Fries.

New rules, someone has to tell iPhone enough already with the hidden features.

The latest is their touch-sensitive secret button.

Well, good luck waiting for men to find that.

You know, you know, because,

you know.

Because the glitter is.

New New rule, someone must tell Rudy Giuliani, who's been out promoting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the integrity of our electoral process, you might be taken a little more seriously if the last time we saw you, you weren't lying on a bed fumbling for your dick.

And finally, New Rule, with two Senate seats in Georgia still possible, seats that will make the difference between gridlock and progress.

Democrats must figure out why so many voters still say to them, you're good enough, you're smart enough, but doggone it, we don't like you.

Under the headline, Something Went Wrong, the New York Times described a post-election conference call between Democratic leaders where they wept, cursed, and traded blame.

Wait, I thought we won this one.

Which we did.

We did.

And yes, ding-dong, the whiny little bitch is dead.

Celebration is in order.

We took a big step towards saving democracy and in the process lost 280 pounds of ugly fat.

All right, that's my last fat joke.

Fat joke for the next five minutes.

But Democrats were supposed to flip the Senate and didn't.

Supposed to flip state legislatures, not a one.

And they lost seats in the House in a year that was so much about making people aware of racism.

Their share of minority votes went down.

The message to Democrats from so much of the country seems to be: we don't like Trump, but we still can't bring ourselves to vote for you.

If Crackerjack was made of popcorn and dog shit, and half the people threw out the popcorn,

popcorn should want to know why.

Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable, or they can ask, what is it about a D next to a candidate's name that makes it so toxic?

Let's ask Ruben Gallego.

He's a congressman from Arizona, and he was asked how his Democrats could do a better job connecting to Latinos.

He said, first, start by not using the term Latinx,

which the vast majority of Latinos have never heard of, and when they do, don't like it.

Who likes it?

Pandering white politicians who mistake Twitter for real people.

And don't get it that Latinx is like fetch.

You can try to make it happen, but it's never going to.

Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger said after the election, if we are classifying Tuesday as a success, we will get fucking torn apart in 2022.

And that's a Congresswoman.

She was urging members not to talk about defunding the police.

James Clyburn agreed.

Defund the police is killing our party, he said.

Pennsylvania Democrat Connor Lamb says Democratic rhetoric needs to be dialed back.

It needs to be rooted in common sense.

Thank you.

Thank you.

There,

in my opinion, is the crux of the problem.

Democrats too often don't come across as having common sense to a huge swath of Americans.

And these are people who believe in QAnon.

But as I've said before, politics in this country is binary.

You have to wear everything anyone on your side does.

Republicans are the party of

don't wear masks, kids in cages, lock her up, and Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social justice warrior, woke bullshit story in the news.

They're the party that disappears people

or tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things.

Ann Hathaway

apologized last week because in her new movie she plays a witch,

a fictional character that has three claw-like fingers and that's offensive to people with limb differences.

The week before, the NHL's Arizona Coyotes dropped a player after it came out in the press that when he was in eighth grade, he bullied a disabled kid.

Yes, that's a bad thing to do.

But are we really going after people for what they did in middle school now?

Democrats already lost seats for going after what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school.

Common sense.

Last year, I read about how NBC held an emergency meeting to determine if Mario Lopez should be fired from his job at Access Hollywood.

I thought, holy shit, did he sexually assault somebody?

No.

He went on a podcast, and when the host brought up the trend of liberal parents letting toddlers pick their gender identity, he said, my God, if you're three years old and you're saying you think you're a boy or a girl, I just think it's a dangerous as a parent to make that determination.

Cue the groveling apology.

Followed by America saying, yeah, I think Mario's right.

Maybe kids shouldn't make big life decisions while you still need to make choo-choo noises to get the food in their mouth.

I can do this all day, cite stories big and small that are endlessly on people's news feeds, that add up to a constant drip, drip, drip of these people are nuts.

Everybody heard about that story out of San Francisco?

about a guy who got on a crowded elevator with a female professor and when she asked what floor, he said, women's lingerie.

You know, a little joke for which he earned a formal complaint because it left her shaken.

Shaken?

Who are these jellyfish?

Like the woman who almost derailed Biden's campaign because he kissed the back of her head before she went out to make a speech.

She said, her brain couldn't process what was happening.

Really?

Your brain couldn't process that, like string theory or wormholes?

An old man was trying to show support in his old man way.

She said she was embarrassed, shocked, confused.

Well, then the outside world isn't for you.

And certainly running the world isn't.

I talked to a guy in the Midwest once who told me this story about the day he went out to get his car in the supermarket parking lot, but couldn't back out because a mother and her very young daughter were standing behind his car, which was next to their car, which had a Hillary bumper sticker on it.

And the little girl was screaming at her mother, who was profusely apologizing to the child.

And he said to me, I just can't let people like that take over this country.

That's what people vote on, not policy.

Democrats kept saying in the campaign, you can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling.

And many voters keep saying, yes, we can.

In fact, our primary reason voting for him is to create a bulwark against you, because your side thinks silence is violence and looting is not.

Because you're the party of chasing speakers off college campuses and making everyone walk on eggshells and replacing let's not see color with let's see it always and everywhere, formerly the position of the Ku Kucks Klan.

It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this shit.

Democrats need to listen to our new president-elect's old boss.

This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff,

you should get over that quickly.

Quickly, like before they vote in Georgia.

All right, that's our show.

I want to thank Max Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan, and Jenna Ellis.

We'll be back next week week for our big finale.

Thank you very much, folks.

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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