Ep. #548: Tristan Harris, Malcolm Nance

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Thank you.

How you doing?

All right.

Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

I know.

Thank you very much.

I know.

I'm humbled.

Thank you very much.

I know why you're happy today.

Four states, more states now have legalized marijuana and not a moment too soon.

I mean, almost the whole country now, and this not only strikes a blow against the repressive prohibition that has compromised justice in this country for way too long, but it significantly expands where I can tour.

Oregon, how about this?

Oregon decriminalized Coke, meth, ecstasy, and heroin.

And experts say this is a major win for Charlie Sheen's cargo shorts.

But,

okay, so let's see.

What else is in the news?

Oh, yeah, Biden won the election.

Not that we're taking sides.

I just wanted to report that no matter who you voted for, we can all be proud that we live in the third most democratic country in North America.

Now, I don't know.

I mean, it's four.

We go on at seven to the west, ten to the east.

So we're three hours before this goes on.

The networks still are too chicken shit to call it, but plainly he's won this election.

But you know, elections in America, whew,

they're a lot like losing your virginity when you're a lesbian.

You know

between the late ballots and the recounts and the lawsuits and the Electoral College, it's hard to actually know when you're finished.

And

now, of course, until all the ballots are counted, President Trump is telling everyone to stay calm and classy and respect the process.

Of course, he's not.

He's throwing a tantrum like the two-ton whiny little bitch he is.

And

he doesn't like it that for the first time he's on the other end of an eviction notice.

He doesn't like it that he probably will lose the popular vote by as much as 7 million.

Biden got the largest percentage against an incumbent since FDR.

It looks like the Democrat

Biden will win Georgia.

Georgia.

And

also the most conservative state ever, Arizona.

Arizona.

It seems like Arizonans like presidents who don't shit on John McCain.

You know, that's.

It's funny, during the week while they're counting in all these different states that are still out, Trump's goons were outside the counting center saying, stop the count in Pennsylvania and count the vote in Arizona.

What do we want?

Justice.

When do we want it?

Not now.

I mean, Trump's...

Trump's whole thing is like, I've seen some pretty low things, some pretty low tricks by the Democrats, but counting all the ballots.

That is a bridge too far.

Of course he's saying it's a fraud and a hoax, and he's suing.

He's been telling us he's going to do that for a year.

I've been telling you for three.

And yet.

And yet the media is perpetually shocked by this.

They're like the announcer at a wrestling match.

Oh my God, he's going to hit him with a folding chair.

Yeah, it happens all the time.

A pundit on Fox today said, Trump may have the greatest moment of his career bringing us together with his concession speech.

Really?

Because I'm picturing something more like the end of Scarface.

Concede.

Concede.

I'll be surprised if he comes out of the bathroom.

But look, let's be gracious in victory.

I just want to say, Mr.

Trump, if you are watching, as you do sometimes accidentally,

you may have lost the election, but there's one thing that you will always have, and that's the knowledge that your father never loved you, and your mother had sex with an ape.

All right, we've got a great show.

Rosa Brooks and Malcolm Nance are here, but first up,

bringing it all back back to that.

We had to do it.

He is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, who is featured in the new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris.

Hey.

How are you doing?

Great to see you.

Okay.

So, first of all,

what a great documentary.

Not all documentary.

There's some reenactments in there, and I'm going to get to that in a minute, but I wanted to ask you first about the election.

You know, everyone who voted thinks they made a free and fair choice, certainly free, my free will.

But what you're getting at is that because of the manipulation that goes on from social media, where most people get their news now,

it really wasn't a free choice in every sense of the word, was it?

No.

Well, I mean, so the thing I think people need to get is that we are 10 years into this mind warp where we have been fed a individualized reality.

Roger McNamee, you had on here a few years ago, talks about as the Truman shows.

We've got three billion Truman shows.

And everyone thinks that because, you know, imagine a husband and wife couple, they follow the same friends on Facebook.

They've got the same friends, so if they open up Facebook, they should see the same feed.

But that's not actually how it works.

They'll actually see completely different realities based on what the algorithms will say, this is the thing that's likely to keep you here.

And what that did is took the shared reality we have, put it through a paper shredder.

and gave each of us a micro reality in which we're more and more certain that we're right and the other side is wrong.

And it's totally confused us.

I mean, we are so confused.

We're 10 years into this process now.

Which nobody voted on.

No.

It just happened.

And we, of course, are always seduced by convenience.

No one wants to give up the phone.

I mean, you know, I can't imagine doing that.

Correct.

But one thing I love that you portray, as I was alluding to a minute ago in the movie, is you personify what an algorithm is, really.

I mean, an algorithm is just inside the computer.

But you have three actors there as.

From Mad Men, in fact, the actor from Mad Men.

Right.

and and they're watching this guy on screens and they're and we see them making decisions about how they can manipulate him or we're going to send him an alert or we're going to say he got a like on that oh we're going to tell him that there's a woman he's interested in within a hundred feet or his ex-girlfriend that he hasn't seen in a while so maybe we'll use the ex-girlfriend that'll get him back and this is what's i mean without people actually doing that

That is what's going on, right?

Yeah, that's right.

So even take, if you try to be elite, it is evil.

I mean, that's the whole point.

Because of this competition for attention, the company started getting really aggressive about what could they dangle in front of your nervous system to get you to come back.

If you ever try to delete your Facebook account, it'll actually show you five friends' faces and says, are you sure you want to delete your account?

These five photos, these five friends, they're going to miss you.

So it's like a digital drug lord.

When you leave, they try to figure out something to dangle in front of you to convince you to come back.

And it's really just, you know, it's destroyed our mental health of our teenagers.

It's polarized our societies.

it's addicted each of us, and it has really warped, I think, the psyche that now we are in the middle of with this election.

Because I think, much like a psychotic patient has a mind that is fractured against itself, our national psyche is now fractured against itself.

If you look at even the examples of count the vote people and the stop the count,

there's a great stat recently that Republicans estimate that a third of Democrats are LGBTQ,

even though only 6% are.

And Democrats estimate that 38% of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year, even though it's only 2% of Republicans make that much money.

So we really have been confused by these individual realities that have warped all of our perceptions.

And it's especially dangerous now because a great deal of the country is going to believe that this election is stolen,

that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president.

And then

what happens?

Because then it's not like Facebook is going to shut that side down, or are they?

Are they going to, I mean,

the companies have now taken moves that we never saw up until a few months ago.

That's right, and it's due to a lot of the public pressure that they haven't acted enough.

So there's this weird situation we're in, where if you let the Frankenstein run without any controls, and so anything goes viral if it gets the most clicks and likes, that just rewards the most conspiracy theories.

YouTube, for example, recommended Alex Jones' InfoWars conspiracy theories 15 billion times, which is more than the combined traffic of New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Fox News combined.

And when you just realize the scale

of all of that, conspiracy theories are especially dangerous because they're like a trust bomb.

They warp your perception of everything that comes after it.

In fact, the best predictor of whether you'll believe in a new conspiracy theory is whether I already got you to believe in one.

And once you believe, for example, the election is rigged or it's stolen, then you perceive everything through that lens, and it warps all of your perceptions.

But also, I don't think they're doing it well.

I mean, Twitter, can I read you what was blocked on Twitter just last week?

Now, this is from the head of U.S.

Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan.

I don't really agree with this comment, but this is what he said.

He's talking about they're continuing to build the wall every day, which is...

his domain.

Every mile helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country.

It's a fact, walls work.

I could take issue with some things in there, but it's an opinion.

This should not have been blocked.

This feeds into them.

Right.

Saying, you just don't want to hear anything that you don't agree with.

And this is a platform.

Twitter, it's about expressing opinions.

And here somebody expresses an opinion, may agree with it, but then it's like, well, my opinion isn't your opinion, so you can't talk on my platform about opinions.

That's fucked up, too.

It is.

Wow, I got the liberals to applaud for that.

Good.

I think, no, I mean, we have to protect freedom of speech.

I think the distinction that Rene D'Aresta makes is freedom of speech is not the same as freedom to reach, meaning we're all granted the right to speak, but are you granted a football stadium-sized audience to say anything you want without accountability?

And when you let that become the default, like that's what makes up our information environment.

that the default information all of us are consuming is each of us get a football size stadium and say whatever you want without any accountability.

Like imagine how you would feel if all your ex-romantic partners could get on a football stadium TV screen and say whatever they wanted without any accountability.

You don't end up with a healthy information environment.

And we also get more rewarded the more extreme things that we say.

And the more extreme thing you say, the more likes and feedback you get, which leads us into our own distortion of, hey, we're really right.

We have all these supporters.

We're on the righteous side of history.

So, what is the answer?

I mean, how do you protect free speech while also

not looking like you're censoring?

I saw Trump made that outrageous statement yesterday.

Yeah.

And I noticed CNN didn't cut into it.

But fuck, but MSNBC, right away.

Cut into it, meaning to cut away from it.

Right away to say, this is bullshit.

And of course it was bullshit.

But the people who don't know it's bullshit or think it's bullshit or have been trained to not see that as bullshit.

And let's be honest.

The underlying of all of this, what we're talking about, is that the American people are just too stupid to be governed.

They have no bullshit detector.

They believe a lot of kooky stuff on the left, and on the right, they believe in QAnon.

I mean,

there is no bullshit detector.

There's no knowledge of the past.

You can't scare them by saying Trump is becoming a totalitarian.

What's that?

You know, like East Germany, what's that?

During the Cold War, what's that?

If they have no, I can't scare someone with this if I don't know what I'm talking about.

Well, I think.

Not this audience,

we've No, it's true.

Whoever gets you?

Well, I mean.

If you come to this show, you're not that guy.

But that is what we're dealing with, right?

I mean, I think we have to realize that.

Technology wouldn't be so scary if people had a better brain to deal with it.

Right, but what has social media done to our brain?

What's that?

But what has social media done to our brain?

That's the problem.

So social media is the downgrading of our attention spans, our critical thinking, our ability to form an opinion on anything that's not the hyper-present.

We don't read books anymore.

We have polarization, conspiracy theories.

That's a part.

So even the time suck.

Yeah, absolutely.

The time sucks.

But we just don't have time to do things that are deeper.

Right.

Because...

Because the business model, so long as we're the product, which is the point we make in the film, we are worth more when we are addicted, distracted, outraged, narcissistic, polarized, and disinformed than if we're a thriving citizen, an informed citizen of a democracy.

Right.

And the same thing is true.

A child is worth more if they're narcissistic and attention-seeking and seeing how many likes they have than if they're actually a free, you know, growing, developing kid playing with their friends.

And so, just as Justin, who's the inventor of the like button, who's in the film, says the end, you know, so long as a whale is worth more dead than alive, and a tree is worth more as two by fours than as a tree, in this new model of this attention business model, we are the whale.

We are the tree, we are the thing that is being mined to

be converted, that was a balloon.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Did you plan that?

It went smoother in rehearsal, but I thought we pulled it off.

All right.

But let me, one more thing, and then I'll let you go.

But you said a few minutes ago about we destroyed the minds of our teenagers.

How can you tell?

How can we tell?

I feel like you should be making my points for me.

But

that's a powerful statement.

Yeah.

Well, I think so.

Because they're going to be the leaders soon and the voters.

Yeah, so the teenagers aren't stupid.

I want to make sure I'm really clear here.

I don't want to do naive moral panic.

So we've always worried about television, radio, video games, et cetera.

I played video games as a kid.

I grew up on technology.

I'm pro-technology.

The difference is that this technology, the business model, is converting us into someone who cares more about the number of new likes and followers and comments that we have than living our lives.

Because Now each of us get to participate in a system that profits from social performance, where we each perform and that's what we're doing with our time instead of actually doing any of the other things that we care about.

And if you look at it from a national security perspective,

it's almost like, you know, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs.

Take the United States brain, you add Facebook to it, it just downgrades us compared to societies like China or Russia or other countries that don't do that.

They don't have the same, they're not going to have the same problems.

So it's actually a competition for who downgrades their population the least.

All right.

Well, thanks, man.

You did a great job with the movie.

Keep the message going.

People do need to hear it.

All right.

All right, let's beat our panel.

Hey.

I will not touch anyone.

I already did my.

I already did my fall.

All right.

She is the founder of the

death of me.

She is

the Transition Integrity Project and author of the forthcoming book, Tangled Up in Blue, Policing the American City out in February.

Rosa Brooks is back with this.

Great to see you.

And he is a career U.S.

counterterrorism intelligence officer and MSNBC contributor.

Malcolm Nance is over here, my friend.

Okay, so.

While the

balloons will still be popping,

I want to make a program.

We have two more shows for the year.

We usually end today, but I knew the election was not going to really be over.

Okay, so we're on for two more weeks after tonight.

The best news, is it two more weeks?

Yes.

The best news is, I think, that the deep state, which I say with affection.

You're welcome.

Yeah.

Right.

Which Trump has been hollowing out.

I mean, we saw like all eight FBI leaders who were there under COM, they're all gone.

I mean, Chad Wolf is head of Homeland Security.

John Radcliffe is the director of intelligence.

I mean, these are Stooges, Bill Barr.

I've always been asking, how deep does this go?

Not to the level of local election officials.

These people did their job.

We haven't gotten that bad.

It hasn't seen, you know, another four years?

Maybe.

But, you know, we're not, you know, you know Iraq, Saddam and his sons, Don Jr.

and Eric, they ran that country.

And back in Iraq, the election officials would all have to be Bath Party members.

We're not there yet, right?

No, our process does not suck.

And in Arizona, we have a Republican legislature and governor, and we still have the election officials saying, hey, shut up, things are fine.

There is no fraud.

The same is true in Georgia.

You know, the only person who's saying the election's been stolen is basically Donald Trump and his stooges.

And I I keep thinking, yeah, who do you think is stealing the election, the voters?

Well, he said,

to be fair, what he said is, we have claimed, I love that.

We have claimed the Michigan.

What is he, Balboa?

We have claimed the Michigan.

So will anyone,

Fox News, any republic, will anyone tell him you lost?

Will anyone go to him like they went to Nixon during Watergate?

Remember those four senators?

And Barry Goldwater, I think, was one of them, and they told him, you're out, buddy.

Will anyone do that to him?

Well, you know, it's interesting because I stood up, I was up all last night watching the election coverage.

And, you know, there's this reluctance to come out and say what we all know.

I mean, these counts in other states were just

were easily thrown and called by other news organizations, but they won't do it for these last four.

And in fact, to be quite honest, you called the election.

Yes, I did.

No.

I have called the election.

Exactly.

No.

You will have been the first voice in media to actually come out and say that Joe Biden has been a very good person.

Which is obvious.

He did.

It looks that way.

It sure does look that way.

Yes.

There's not going to be a giant upswing in votes from Philadelphia for Trump.

That's not going to happen.

The difference is, you know, I mentioned Nixon.

They once asked Trump about Nixon, and he said, this is Trump's exact words.

He said, he left.

I don't leave.

Big difference.

Remember those words.

He left.

I don't leave.

Big difference.

You know, I'll tell you the most hopeful sign to me right now, and I'm usually the one who's predicting doom and apocalypse and catastrophe, but

we have seen some rats swimming away from the sinking ship.

We have seen some GOP officials when Trump's like, the election is still in.

They're like, no, no, no, no, no, it's okay, it's fine.

We've got to count the votes, shut up.

To me, that's very hopeful.

I think it is not actually impossible that we see that kind of Nixon intervention where Trump is still stamping his feet and sulking and having tantrums.

And we get some, you know, maybe even the Mitch McConnells of the world say, dude,

you're gone.

I don't know because 48% of the people voted.

Well, maybe that'll go down by a percent, but that's a lot of people.

who voted for Donald Trump.

And a lot of them, as we were just talking about,

think this is illegitimate.

They don't believe it.

Nixon didn't have that going for him.

And I mean, I've been saying it for a long time, but I don't think Trump is,

I don't know what's going to happen, but we have a stalker now.

Whether he's the president or not the president, he is the ex-husband who kills his family on Christmas Eve.

Seriously.

He's OJ and he does not like seeing America driving around with Ron Goldman.

Private island with, you know.

No extradition treaty, private island.

How about that?

You know, third world leaders used to take a billion dollars and would run off to the French Riviera.

Yeah.

Right, and settle.

That doesn't happen with dictators anymore.

You know, CC in Egypt, you know, Mubarak, all these guys could have taken their money and gone.

Donald Trump is like them.

He wants to stay here.

He wants to be part of this system.

I mean, a better analogy I thought would have been sleeping with the enemy, right, with the towels.

We're going to have Joe, Kamala, Donald.

Every morning you're going to come in and there's going to be an extra towel in your bathroom.

He is, but you know, as funny as all this seems, we are going to have a really serious problem here.

I'm going to give you doom and gloom.

We are going to have a political paramilitary insurgency.

in which Donald Trump will be Saddam Hussein.

We already got Uday and Kusay, his sons and his daughters.

So you're saying military, paramilitary, in other words, not actual military, like in these countries, but they don't want to use the official military, so they have their Boogaloo Boys.

Right, Boogaloo Boys, Proud Boys, the rest of the vanilla ISIS crew out there.

You know,

the rough people.

Remember, he calls them the rough people.

We have the rough people.

Bikers.

Good people.

And the problem is, these convoys that we saw in the run-up to the election, what I'm most concerned about is,

you know, these ISIS-like Trump convoys of

200 trucks out there.

What happens when somebody says we don't recognize Joe Biden's election and those convoys become armed convoys and they start blocking highways?

They're not now?

Not yet.

I mean, we've seen some down in Maricopa County with Alex Jones guys coming out with their long rangers.

There are states that have open carry.

Yeah, there are states with open carry, but we're talking about moving from the legal realm to them believing their world is legitimate and in their world Donald Trump remains president.

So there's not a world where the Republicans have a come to Jesus meeting

and they all get in a room, Mitch McConnell, and they say to themselves, look, we got out of this guy as much as we could have hoped.

We got three Supreme Court picks.

We threw a good scare into the lib charts.

Let's cut our losses, get up from the table.

No, right, because of the people in the streets.

That's why, right?

I'm more optimistic than you, Malcolm, a little bit, which is really unusual, trust me.

But

I think, you know, hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

The scenario you outlined is not impossible.

We need to take it really, really seriously, but it's also not inevitable.

I think most of the Republicans in Congress, all the evidence is that they secretly hate Trump's guts, that they will be so happy to see the last of them, that their incentives are starting to differ from his, that they're beginning to think, you know what, maybe my channel is

better off.

Their voters like him

better than they like.

But this goes back to your conversation with Tristan.

I think here's the, there's good news and there's bad news, and the bad news dovetails with what Malcolm said.

The good news is I don't think the 48% of people who voted for Trump are nuts.

I think a lot of them are misinformed because of all the issues Tristan was raising.

But I don't think they want to see a civil war.

There is bad news, and Malcolm knows more about this than I do.

The bad news is that when you look at al-Qaeda, when you look at ISIS, when you look at other terrorist groups and insurgencies, you don't need to have a majority of the people supporting them or even a plurality.

You just need to have a really tiny group that is really ruthless, really well armed, really well financed, and really organized to cause havoc in a society for quite a while.

That said, I don't think we're there in this country yet.

I think right now those organized right-wing militia groups are not very organized, frankly.

They're pretty messed messed up.

Do they need to be organized?

Yeah, they kind of do because they keep getting caught because they keep screwing up.

Well,

and our job, but you know, and that could change.

I mean, Malcolm, you're absolutely right to be worried about this because this could change.

Our job in the next few years is to make damn sure that those guys don't go from being a bunch of klutzes to being an organized group.

Well, this is why I was saying that this is more like a paramilitary, political paramilitary insurgency.

Phase one insurgency starts off with this gruttlement within a certain population and then the support of terrorist or paramilitary,

the fired Baath Party.

You know, I have said this many times this week.

We are looking at Baghdad,

April 2003, where the Bath Party disappears after they all lose their jobs.

Right.

And there is no Iraqi army anymore and we think we've occupied this country.

And then out of nowhere comes this low-grade insurgency.

Granted, a lot of these guys are a bunch of rubes with rifles, okay?

And this is why we fund SWAT teams, right?

To handle people who are going to work outside of the law.

But in their mind, and this goes to what Tristan was saying, they live in an alternate reality.

which has been crafted by their own propaganda, which has been using this social media distribution system to allow them to believe that their America is the we the people America of the revolution.

And I'm sorry, these guys think they're the sons of liberty.

Oh, I know.

I've seen people say we should ask

and feather people.

Let me tell you something about the 69 million people that voted for Donald Trump.

I'm going to channel my inner Eddie Gloud and Jason Johnson.

They have been on air saying this.

These people have revealed themselves for the racist that they are, for the tribalist that they are.

They don't care about e pluribus unum from any one.

They care about, I got mine, and you know, you shouldn't get anything of your vote.

You think that's every Trump voter?

They've voted for this consciously, knowing what Donald Trump stood for for the last four years.

They know him.

And they've,

they, look, they're almost a level of fanaticism I've only seen in some cult groups and Middle East terrorist groups.

But I'm going to disagree with that.

Middle East do.

And again, this goes back to Tristan's point, right?

You know, everybody's in their information bubble.

And I've talked to Trump voters who, you know, there's like, it's like parallel lines.

They don't intersect.

They're in their world, we're in our world.

We think with some reason that our world is reality based and theirs is not.

But they're looking at stuff, they're looking at all this crap, and they're reading like, Trump has done more for the black people than anyone since President Abraham Lincoln.

They're like, wow, that's great.

That's awesome.

He's not a racist.

Look how good he's been.

And they're being fed a line of crap, yes, but as Christian said every algorithm is feeding them that crap and if that's all you're hearing and Uncle Joe and Uncle Bob say the same thing and cousin Mary says the same thing and the guy at the hardware store says the same thing and the radio and one of the really sinister things that's been happening is the far right has been buying up dying radio dying local radio and TV stations keep the same logo keep the same branding 90% of it still coverage of bak sales and high school football games 10% of it's QAnon crazy you know but it's sort of like if somebody bought up NPR or whatever and we didn't know, and 10% of it was nuts, you know, and we'd be like, oh shit, that's terrible.

You know, it doesn't make them, I don't think it's that people are dumb.

I think it's that people, you know, how do we know what we know?

We know what we know because people we trust talk to us.

And if everybody you trust is being fed the same shit, then people

shit in.

Trump did a lot better with the black vote than he did last time.

We don't really know that.

We don't really know that because the exit polling we saw were people who showed up at the polls.

There's that 100 million Americans who actually voted by mail.

So I'm not sure I buy that.

And that's sort of like in the same thread of propaganda that we generally get from conservatives, right?

Everything they do is better than the others.

Well, this I read in the New York Times.

Yeah, well,

it's not a conservative vote.

They're only going with what data they could get on Election Day.

And we're now seeing the data, you know, the votes that weren't shown on Election Day.

So you just deny the premise.

No, I mean, maybe you're right.

I mean, that's true.

The mail-in votes, maybe we don't know.

We don't know.

But one thing that is for sure

is that the far right, the extremist, violent, white supremacist, far right, has been waging an insurgency warfare, primarily using information warfare for several years.

And Malcolm, you've got a book coming out about this.

And I think it's taken until quite recently for Democrats and the left and the Senate to even wake up and notice.

So they are so far ahead in terms of sophistication and creativity.

Obviously our side is kind of constrained by this sort of quaint loyalty to telling the truth.

Their side is not.

Well let me tell you something.

I'll tell you a little spy stuff here.

Or maybe people just see the world differently.

You know,

I don't think it's terrible.

I mean, I think he's a terrible leader.

But I don't think it's terrible that there is diversity in the black community.

No.

Or in any community.

And I don't know, you know.

I mean, I was a Colin Powell conservative way back when.

Right.

Now called far-left liberal.

But I was about to say, let me tell you some spy stuff.

I worked the Rwanda mission back when Rwanda had its genocide.

Wow.

And in the run-up to that, in French language, all the broadcasts from Radio Mille Colleen, their cockroach station,

was using what we called eliminationist rhetoric.

German, yeah, that kind of thing.

Eliminationist rhetoric.

Hitler stuff.

I see that rhetoric every day, all day, as I monitor right-wing sites.

And the thing is, it's now starting to percolate up into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

QAnon's in Congress.

Well, by next year, I suspect that the Republican Party's main platform will be QAnon's platform of that, you know, all liberals who are a satanic cult and must be put to death.

I see it now

all the time.

It's beyond the frame.

So we have had a tradition here on this show since we've been on for a long time.

This started in the 2004 election, that after a hard-fought election is over, that we would salute some of the people who we won't be seeing anymore.

I'm kidding.

We're saying

good riddens to some of the people who you will never have to see again.

So, if you would please roll our reminder.

Farewell, douchebags,

A tradition here since 2004.

Farewell douchebags.

But again,

they're not all going away.

I mean, even if Trump does not prevail with his recounting stuff, I just want to say, a few weeks ago I did an editorial at the end of the show here, and I was saying he's going to Gus the electorals at college.

Gus is my sort of password for meaning the movie we talk about where they signed a mule to kick field golds because

a team did in the movie because the rule book doesn't say specifically that you can't have a mule on the team because we didn't think we had to write it down

and we've seen Trump guss everything else if you don't specifically write it down he does it and I say he's going to guss it down he still does it what if you write it down he still does it

to a degree yeah but that's a good point but but a lot of it is not written down and the Electoral College, the fact that whoever wins the most votes in that state gets the electors, not written down, not in the Constitution.

I said he's going to gust the electoral system.

Here's Steve Bannon yesterday.

State legislatures controlled by Republicans, controlled by Trump faction, get to select the electors.

I know you don't like it.

Then he mentions all the media outlets, but that's reality.

People are going to say, oh, Bannon, you're saying the quiet part out loud.

Well, it's time to say it out loud.

We won this.

We won control of every piece of this.

We control the courts.

We control the state legislatures.

We control the House and the Senate.

Mark Levin says the same thing.

Reminder to the Republican state legislatures.

You have the final say over choosing the electors.

Get ready to do your constitutional duty.

This is their next move.

to steal the election.

I don't think they're going to actually succeed in doing that.

I'm not even sure they're going to make a serious effort because I think they are already hearing, even from those, again, from those Republican-dominated states like Arizona and Georgia, they're already hearing, no, that's just not happening.

The vote count is accurate.

I think they're going to get pushback from within their own party.

And I didn't think that a few months ago.

I was much more worried.

But

that's a crazy nuclear option.

Nothing is impossible, but

I don't think they're going to get away with it.

it.

But why do you have this optimism when you've seen it?

So weird, I know.

I mean, every time, I mean, I've been having this argument for four years on this show, and I'm always the guy saying, but don't you see?

He didn't stop by this goal, this obstacle you put in his way.

Why is it always people thinking, oh, but this one is now, maybe.

I almost never think that, trust me.

I'm always like, the sky is falling.

But you're saying now it's going to stay up.

Because

Because I think that thousands and thousands and thousands of people worked really hard to prepare for this, exactly this,

called up people at the state level, called up people in national level.

Do you want to be the guy who fucks up American democracy permanently?

Really?

Are you sure?

And I think that that actually had some effect.

I really do.

And what if it goes to the Supreme Court?

He's talking about that a lot.

Now, last week we saw Brett Kavanaugh,

he tried to stop the vote in Wisconsin.

And the ruling he issued was laughable.

The things he cited, it looked like he'd been drinking.

No, really, I mean, for a bright guy,

he's a man who likes beer.

But I mean, he said, you know, if you count the ballots after Election Day, there's going to be chaos.

This is a point, a talking point he took right out of Trump's ass.

There's no evidence.

There's no evidence of it.

We've done it many times.

I mean, even some Republicans like Marco Rubio are saying, yes, that's what we do.

It takes sometimes a few days to count the vote.

Now, if Brett Kavanaugh has already tipped his hand that that's where he is on this, do you trust them?

You know, you're right.

Four years of you saying, you know, hearing people say the quiet parts out loud.

This administration tells you what they're going to do.

Right.

All right.

First off, let me say something about Steve Bannon.

Why, in God's name, are we listening to that fat criminal bastard talk about anything?

Right?

He's

literally trying to create a fascism academy in Italy so that he could perpetuate all these things we have been warning about.

These people,

listen, they may not be able to do it.

The mechanics of it may not work for it, but they're thinking about it constantly.

That's my point.

Perhaps they're not.

And they're not just thinking about it.

about it, they're putting it out there.

They absolutely are.

And if Republicans are good at anything, it's the kindling and then the fire, and they all get in line, they plot in their evil lair,

and then

they all get on the same page.

But you know, Democrats never do that.

They get on the same page, they have great messages, they have great words,

they never say stupid things like pack the court that sounds like.

We're going to the Supreme Court, and it reminded me, are you guys lawyers?

No, you guys are.

It reminded me of this old like.

Yes, I am.

And I'm.

Classic law school first-year thing professors say.

They outline this ridiculous situation where somebody has absolutely no basis for a claim against somebody, and they say to students, can they sue?

And the students are like, no, because that would be absurd.

And the professor says smugly,

they can sue.

Anybody can sue anybody for anything.

Well, anybody can go to the Supreme Court about anything.

It doesn't mean they're going to win.

And right now, I am not seeing any non-ridiculous argument that the Republicans have.

Republican judges all over the country have basically been throwing out their claims because they're crap.

It's not impossible.

You know, of course they will try to go to the Supreme Court.

But I think even this Supreme Court, even with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, they know 20, the election of 2000, Bush v.

Gore, 5-4 decision, partisan lines, devastating to their institutional legitimacy.

We saw it in all the sort of measures of public confidence in institutions, plummets after that.

I don't think, I think even a lot of the conservatives on that court, maybe not Brett Kavanaugh,

you know, I don't think they want to be the ones who are seen for the second time in 20 years as, for partisan reasons, tipping the election to the guy who did not win the majority of votes.

This goes back to your point

about

maybe they're going to have a come to Jesus moment.

Maybe they're all going to sit together and decide that, you know, maybe, you know, we're not going to do anything this time, we're going to work with Biden.

This is not happening.

Okay?

It's not.

Hard reality time, people.

I mean, what's happening here, for every idiot they have in leadership, they have two very intelligent people who make money off of that idiot.

And they have lawyers, they have scholars who have justified everything that they're doing, okay?

The same way that, you know,

a certain regime in the 1930s and 40s justified everything they did.

Have you ever seen the movie Judgment at Nuremberg?

That is about the Supreme Court of Nazi Germany on trial

having passed laws to justify the genocide in Nazi Germany.

Don't think that they're not going to do anything that they say out loud.

They will make an attempt.

Right.

And it doesn't,

and I must say,

I think Biden's going to get 306, but it didn't help that it wasn't more of an overwhelming victory, which we expected.

For someone who is as repugnant as a human as Donald Trump and as ineffectual as a leader who didn't deliver the wall or health care or jobs or anything, for For someone that bad to, his vote total went up.

And, you know, whenever I would ask people for the last three years on this show, you know, like, he's not going to leave.

What are you going to do?

First they would say, Bill, you smoke too much pot.

That's not going to happen.

Which is wrong.

I smoked just the right amount.

And then I would press the case and say, but what is the plan?

What do we do?

And they would say, well, first we got to win big, which always pissed me off because we shouldn't have to win big.

We should win by one vote.

It's the same as them.

One vote should win.

The fact that he could win by seven million and we're sweating this out, well, that's the Electoral College.

We'll get to that too.

But

did not win as big as we thought he would.

What is it about the 70 million people?

who are still voting for Donald Trump?

And we look at them and you go, how could you prefer him

to what we're selling?

What about him or what about us

is so off-putting that you don't see that we're better?

What's that answer to that question?

Well, I'm going to go back to your original guess.

There's a disinformation bubble out there which has allowed these people to live their true selves.

You know that joke everybody's been making about the hoods are off now?

Yeah, the hoods didn't have to go on.

This is the way they live.

But it doesn't have to be that they're racist.

They can be nice.

They can make apple pie.

They can be your best friend.

I have a neighbor who has a giant Trump sign in front of him.

I think he may have stolen my giant Biden sign.

But you know what?

I don't hold that stuff against them.

I'm seeing now they hold this against the other 60% of America.

And I'm afraid that they are going to live in that bubble.

where they're going to have to do something to restore that.

And whether that's, you know, like I said, a low-grade, you know, political insurgency or Donald Trump giving them orders via Twitter.

As you said, he ain't going away.

This man is going to subvert and undermine everything

that happens for the next four years, and he thinks that he can put his regime back into power.

Some of them may think that armed force might be the way that they do it.

I don't know.

I'm just not taking any chances.

We need to rule.

We need to lead.

We won the election.

Joe Biden needs to run this country for all Americans.

They ran the country for 40% of America and ran roughshod over 60%.

We need to do it right, and if they want to come along, they'll get free health care, y'all.

I think we need to do two things at the same time.

One is that we need to get way smarter about essentially the information domain, you know, that

we've got to be actively and creatively fighting that disinformation from the right because it's not going to stop.

And if we don't take it seriously, there is a real danger that it whips things up into stuff that we don't even want to think about, right?

But at the same time, I also think,

you know, we're not that great at figuring out how to talk to people who disagree with us without saying, hey, you're pretty stupid, or you would have realized that Donald Trump is an asshole.

You know, you're pretty deplorable.

You must be a moron.

And nobody's mind ever got changed.

Maybe their disinformation weapon system, Facebook, needs to be broken up.

That would help too.

But I also think we actually know a lot.

Not only do we know from the work people that Tristan and others have done, we know a lot about how to make people hate each other.

And actually, it turns out it's pretty easy.

Unfortunately, we seem to be hardwired for, you know, dividing people into my tribe, your tribe, I hate you.

But we also know.

And the algorithm.

The algorithm.

The algorithm that we can fix those things.

But we also know a lot from social psychology about how you can break down differences.

It's harder, it's slower.

It consists not of saying, you suck, you're racist, you know, you're sexist, you're a jerk, you just obviously don't know anything.

It consists of saying, huh, you know,

I feel, you know, what made you feel that way?

That's interesting.

I will end on one

positive possibility.

I think if the Republicans do as you say, that they maybe come to him and he knows that he can't actually get there anyway, I think he's such a narcissist that he'll leave early.

Like if he knows he's,

if he knows he's going to get thrown out on January 20th, he's going to go, fuck you, you take it, Ben, if you don't want me.

All right, time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

Okay, new rule, if your position is they have to stop counting the ballots in the states where you're ahead or it's fraud, and they have to keep counting the ballots in the states where you're behind or it's fraud, you have to consider maybe it's you who's the fraud.

On the bright side, when you're constantly pulling things out of your ass, it makes it harder for the door to hit you there on your way out.

Neurol, stop saying you still can't believe COVID didn't kill Trump.

It may have, but when the Grim Reaper came for him, Trump refused to go.

You're dead, Donald.

No, you're dead.

Many people are saying very strongly, I've just been born.

Neurol, someone needs to break it to the woke kids on Twitter who say if Trump wins, they're moving to Canada.

Canada doesn't want you.

No.

It's clear.

Canada's immigration policy is to favor skilled professionals.

And sorry, drawing a flower in the cappuccino foam doesn't count.

Canada's ideal candidate is a 35-year-old doctor with no kids who's willing to relocate to the Northwest Territories and open a clinic for Indigenous people.

That's a long way from art school graduate who sells candles on Etsy.

New rule, now that Oregon has become the first state to decriminalize heroin, Coke, meth, and mushrooms, they have to change their tourism slogan to Oregon, come for the heroin, coke, meth, and mushrooms and stay because you're unresponsive.

New rule, someone must invent an energy drink called five-hour Cornaki.

It's part cocaine, part the pill Bradley Cooper took in Limitless.

And it allows you to stay up for an entire week at peak performance.

Peak performance, wearing the same clothes.

Not the best thing for punchlines.

All right, finally, new rule.

Now that the engagement of Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton is Instagram official, they must hurry up and do it and stay married for the good of the nation.

Because if there is one thing America needs right now, it is a symbol of reconciliation between red and blue America.

Now,

a month ago, the tabloids were filled with disturbing stories about the imminent breakup of this handsome charismatic couple, and it shook me to my core.

It's true.

Us Weekly reported the pair's opposing political views have become a big problem,

which I could have predicted.

He's a good old boy from Oklahoma and sings about trucks and beer and things that happen down by the river.

And she's the pop princess hollaback girl from California.

Of course they voted for different people.

I don't know that for a fact.

I just know it's true.

Come on.

She's Whole Foods.

He's Piggly Wiggly.

She grew up playing punk.

He grew up hunting skunk.

She stands in line to vote, he stands in line to dance.

She thinks guns are crazy, he thinks the best cheese comes in a can.

Just the fact that they're together is almost Shakespearean.

Rodeo and Juliet.

But they make it work because they see each other as more than just who they voted for.

Their biggest issue with the person sleeping next to them isn't party affiliation.

It's untreated sleep apnea

And they say, yes, we're different, but that's also more fun, and we're going to make that work for us.

They see the world differently, and they love each other.

What a concept.

I'd like to try it.

I'd like to try it in America because that's how I feel about my country.

You complete me, Alabama.

Because you complete me doesn't mean because we're exactly alike.

It means because we are different.

I don't want to live in a country without the red states.

I like traveling there.

When people talk to you in Oklahoma, they're not scanning the room to see if there's someone more important.

Because frankly, when I'm there, there never is.

Also, they laugh like nobody's watching.

They don't have a non-dairy, gluten-free, hypoallergenic stick up their ass.

Even the pro-lifers will laugh at a good dead baby joke.

Look, I'm pro-choice, but I also get it that a fetus is irrefutably becoming a human life.

So can I see why some people think you are actually the one who's deplorable?

Yes, I can.

So let's all stop doing that.

Let's all stop seeing each other as deplorable.

Wednesday, Biden said, we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies.

Look at this guy.

Do you think he's a racist?

I don't.

And I don't think Gwen Stefani would marry one.

One out of ten Trump voters voted for Obama.

I doubt if Blake Shelton was one of them.

But that's okay.

We don't all see the world the same way.

Get over it.

During the campaign, there was a lot of talk about who can unite us.

No president can unite us.

We have to unite ourselves.

There are only two ways this country country can go.

Either we come together and forgive our differences, or we turn into the Balkans.

For decades, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, was a diverse city where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims lived together as friendly neighbors.

In 1984, they hosted the Olympics.

Eight years later, people were getting shot by snipers when they went out for milk.

Don't tell me it can't happen here.

If Trump has taught us anything, it's that it can't happen here is a terribly outdated phrase.

It not only can happen here, it kind of is happening here.

People were afraid in this election to display lawn signs for the candidate of their choice if it was in a neighborhood where that was a decidedly minority opinion.

That's like gang neighborhoods where you dare not get caught wearing the wrong color.

Now more than ever, We need an example of cross-cultural love to send a message to our broken nation that love can lift us up where we belong like a majestic eagle soaring above the fray and shitting all over the haters below.

And that is why I say for the sake of the nation, Gwen, Blake, You have to make this work.

I'm serious.

It would be psychologically devastating if you are one symbol of America's two halves coming together, shit the bet on this.

So don't.

Get married, do it quickly, and make it stick forever.

No pressure.

All right, that's our show.

I want to thank Rosa Brooks, Malcolm Mance, and Tristan Harris.

We'll be back next week, hopefully.

Thank you, 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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