Ep. #543: Senator Bernie Sanders, Jim Belushi

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

Thank you.

How are you?

Thank you very much.

Wow,

we're here,

masked and anonymous.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for, I appreciate it.

Now,

please,

I know you went through a lot of shit to be here.

You had to get tested right, and you have masks and you're sitting apart.

I really appreciate it because this has made such a difference to have, you know,

for me and the audience

to quote Jerry Falwell's pool boy.

there's nothing like a live audience.

That's what.

But

it's 38 days before the election.

It feels less like an election, more like a going out of business sale, doesn't it?

It's like all rules must go in America.

But yeah, this week the president just fucking flat out said it, what I've been saying he's going to say forever.

He's been not leaving.

You know, that the law and order president refused to commit to the peaceful transference of power should he lose.

I mean, even banana republics are like, this is bananas.

I mean,

right?

If you are the president, the only acceptable answer to the question is of, will you submit to the peaceful transference of power is yes.

Not, we're looking at it strongly.

Not, we'll see what happens.

Are these fucking people insane?

This guy will do anything to steal an election.

This week he was talking about how they found a lot of ballots thrown in the river.

Yes, that's a big election problem.

Wet-ass ballots.

That's really.

I just.

Let me just say this.

If you're a black voter in a red state, you've got to get in line now.

I'm sorry, just put it that way.

But

seriously, I mean, Trump called mail-in voting today this scam the Democrats are trying to pull.

He said, this scam will be before the Supreme Court, yes, which we're currently stealing a seat on.

So vote all you want.

Because I'm skaying and suing, because nothing says democracy like a president who's a squatter.

And, you know, this, I think he picked the person for the court today, but all week at the rallies of the Trump people have been chanting, fill that seat, fill that seat.

Even the teabaggers are going, that sounds gay.

Teabagging was bad, but this.

But apparently the pick is going to be this

Amy Comey

will all be saying this name a lot, I'm sure, because she's a fucking nut

Religion.

I was right about that one, too.

Amy,

sorry, but

Amy Comey Barrett, Catholic, really Catholic.

I mean really, really Catholic, like speaking in tongues.

Like she doesn't believe in condoms, which is what she has in common with Trump, because he doesn't either.

I remember that from Stormy Daniels.

So she's going to be on the court.

RBG laying in state.

Trump visited RBG's casket.

When he walked in,

everybody went, boo.

And of course, all the ass kissers around Trump, they told him, no, sir, they're saying, coo,

coo.

It's so funny, but we're losing our country.

Okay, I'm glad we're laughing.

So Trump unveiled,

was it today, his new, his new, his old, his forever coming great national health care plan, which of course is not a plan at all.

It's never planned.

It's just we'll work with Congress and Mexico will co-pay for it.

This plan, this nothing ever plan, it's been two weeks away since 2016.

In the time it took Trump not to come up with the plan, nature came up with a whole new disease.

Yeah, terrible milestone this week.

200,000 dead from coronavirus in America, and rumor, it's a rumor that the 200,000th dead was a big Trump fan.

And this is sweet, before she died, the Make-A-Wish Foundation brought her a black teenager to yell at.

No, I'm standing by that joke.

That's a fine joke.

I didn't do it.

And the Washington Post this week reported that Trump in unguarded moments says racist stuff about blacks and Jews.

Yeah, I got news for you, Post.

He's not that great in guarded moments either.

Yeah, apparently he says things like blacks are lazy, Jews are greedy, and Slovenian women are never in the mood for sex.

Stereotype.

All right, we got a great show.

Bukhari Sellers and Coleman Hughes are here.

And a little later we'll be speaking with the great Jim Belushi.

But first up, he is the longest-serving independent in Congress who ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

You know him, you love him.

Bernie Sanders is over here.

All right.

Bernie, how you doing?

I'm not hearing anything.

What's that?

Can't hear you.

You can't hear me?

Now I can hear you.

Yeah, I passed out the joint in the control room.

So, Bernie, you look tan, rested, and ready.

They always look better when they get off the campaign trail.

It must be grueling campaigning.

But look, you made a speech yesterday, and,

you know, it was about what we do when Trump says he's not leaving.

And

I imagine this is a speech you never thought you would have to make.

Bill, I mean, that's absolutely true.

I mean, this country today faces enormous problems.

We have massive income and wealth inequality.

We're the only major country not to guarantee health care to all.

You've got millions of people working for starvation wages.

We got climate change.

We got systemic racism.

We got a whole host of problems.

Never in a million years did I ever think that I would have to give a speech about what do we do if a president refuses to lose office, leave office if he loses.

I never, never thought that I would have to give that speech or anybody else.

But that is where we are today.

And I would simply say, Bill, and I know you have made this point many, many times, listen to what Trump is saying.

Don't brush it off.

Don't say, oh, this guy's crazy.

He'll say this, you know, any other day.

Listen to what he is saying.

And what he is saying over and over again is, quote, the only way that we, i.e.

Trump, can lose the election is if it is rigged.

End of quote.

In other words, if we win, that's great.

And if we lose, we really didn't lose because it's rigged.

You all know mail-in ballots are very dangerous.

They're a hoax.

They're a scam.

So we cannot lose this election.

And obviously, we're not leaving office.

But

I mean, I asked you this question in April.

I've been asking this of Democrats for years, and they pretty much just laughed it off.

You said in April, I asked you,

what do we do?

You said, well, you mobilize the American people in a way that they've never been mobilized before to remind the president whether he likes it or not, we live in a democracy.

You said, I think we have to make it clear that if he loses the election, he'll be out of office and replaced by the new president.

I don't hear a plan there.

I just hear a wish.

We wish that would happen.

I still don't know what the plan is.

Well, you know, the bottom line is there are things that we have to do now.

to make sure that Biden wins.

And if Trump attempts to stay in office after losing, there will be a number of plans out there to make sure that he is evicted from office.

But right now, in the next five weeks, our job is to defeat him and defeat him badly.

Because the truth is,

if we win in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Minnesota, in Pennsylvania, apparently Biden is now ahead in Ohio.

We win in Florida.

It will be very hard, very hard for Trump to try to stay in office.

So my message is, number one.

He's good at doing things that are very hard.

Again, I just don't hear what the real...

I don't hear the bones on this.

I just hear we want it to turn out good and it should turn out good and we're the good people.

I don't hear what we're, I've never heard what we're actually going to do, what we can do.

Well,

you, there's a...

You haven't heard it because it's never happened before in American history.

So you are asking for a plan to do something that no one has ever had to do before.

But so we're going to do that.

So without giving you any, I don't know that anyone has the specific plan, but at the end of the day, what will have to happen, in my view, is the American people by the millions,

and I would hope, by the way, that Republicans join us, who understand that democracy is more important than any particular candidate.

They won't and they don't.

They won't and they don't.

They won't join you because they never join you and they don't believe that.

Well, I'm not talking about members of Congress.

And if the point is that Trump is that Trump has dominated

the issue matters is the American people.

What doesn't it?

And

if millions of people after this election, in one form or another, yet to be determined,

say to this guy, you are no longer the president.

What form?

And early in January, you are leaving office.

But there's no form.

You will leave office.

The form is this.

I mean, I know, here's the Atlantic this week says the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors, because we don't, of course, have a direct democracy.

We have electors.

We have an electoral college in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.

Now, I've been looking into this.

Electors, what does the Constitution say about it?

What can a cheater do?

Is this a norm or is this a law?

It seems like it's a norm, and that's what Trump is great at doing.

He says, all these things that we thought were laws really weren't.

They were just things that people did because other people had some degree of honor, but I don't.

So I'm not going to do it.

And apparently,

these electors.

your point is right.

In other words, theoretically, you could, you know, Biden can win Michigan by six points, and Trump will say, well, we think this massive vote of fraud and the legislature is appointing a Trump slate of electors.

That's what you're talking about.

Theoretically, they can do that.

But the outrage in this country, the willingness of people to say, sorry, that is not what you're going to do, and you're not going to destroy American democracy, I think you're underestimating that reality.

And I think that that is exactly what will happen.

I don't know, because I don't know what

form does it take?

We're in the streets every day.

I've seen that.

I've seen people do that in countries.

I've never, not here.

Well, you've never seen that here because you've never seen seen a president try to undermine American democracy in the way Trump may be trying to do it.

So all that I'm saying here is let's take one step at a time.

The first step is let us defeat Trump.

Let us defeat him badly.

And I think if we defeat him badly,

he's going to have no choice but to leave office.

If he refuses to do that, then we got plan number two.

And it's a little bit premature to talk about it.

But at the bottom line is, I do not believe, you and I may disagree on this i do not believe that people in this country including millions who put their lives on the line to defend democracy are simply going to say and roll over and say okay mr trump you can stay in office even as you destroyed democracy and even as you lost the election i don't think that's going to happen frankly

okay so um what do you talk about privately with Republicans right now, like this week?

No, seriously, I mean,

you're a senator, you've worked with Mitch McConnell for years, you see him in the elevator.

Do you say to him, Mitch, look, I know we don't agree on anything, but you're not really going to do this, are you?

I mean, I see how you stole the Supreme Court seat, you switched on that, but you're not really going to let Trump do this.

Well, you know that they are now giving lip service.

You know, as soon as Trump repeated his remarks that he might not leave office even if he lost.

You got all these Republicans saying, oh, well, you know, Trump says crazy things.

Of course he will.

We believe in the Constitution.

We believe in the rule of law.

That is what they're giving lip service to.

Do I have absolute confidence that Republican senators will in fact have the courage to stand up to Trump and say, you lost the election.

You're out of here.

I think some will.

I think some will not.

Now, how many will do the right thing, I don't know.

But I'm counting more on the American people than I am on the Republicans in Congress.

Okay, so say,

in the best possible worlds, Biden wins and he takes office.

What do we do with these Republicans after that?

Ones who showed

when it mattered that they were willing to cast aside democracy?

Do we just say,

well, you know what?

No, Biggie.

You are willing to throw democracy under the bus, but come on back in.

Is that what we say?

Well,

no, I think what you say is, you know what, guys,

you showed an incredible disrespect for the Constitution, for the rule of law,

for support of authoritarianism.

And you know what?

We have control over the Senate now.

And what we are going to do is use the Senate to represent the needs of the working families of this country whose needs have been ignored for too long.

And you are not going to obstruct us and don't lecture us.

We are going to move forward in a democratic way, fair way, to finally make sure that the desperation that working families are experiencing today, unemployment, low wages, no health care, unable to send your kids to college, whether you like it or not, whether your billionaire friends like it or not, we are going to move forward and protect working families and restore faith in american democracy okay bernie

thank you great to see you congratulations by the way on a great campaign and on moving the democratic agenda to right where you wanted it to be all right thank you very much bernie sanders let's move our meet our panel

hey

hey guys all right good evening good evening how you doing he is a cnn political analyst and the author of my vanishing country a memoir Bukhari Sellers is over here.

Thank you, Hai.

Great to see you.

And he's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and host of the podcast, Conversations with Coleman.

Coleman Hughes, great to see you.

All right, so

all right, guys, you know, I must tell you, first of all, there's many times when we've had an African-American guest on the show and I've said in the production meeting, let's not talk about the black issue.

I think that's more of a compliment, is to say, we're all Americans, we're all people.

you don't have to always get the black question,

but tonight you're going to have to.

I mean, we once had on

Andrew Sullivan and

Barney Frank, two gay men.

I was like, let's have gay not come up.

But we don't live in that country anymore.

No.

So,

and I just want to ask the first thing.

It seems like I live in a country where

half the country sees that there's no racism.

I've made many jokes about the polling that always shows that about two-thirds of Republicans say reverse racism is a worse problem.

There's been a fodder of comedy here.

And then, really, so they say racism is gone.

And then there's

a big part now, I think critical race theory they call it.

where racism is everything and everywhere.

Please tell me that we all agree the answer is somewhere in the middle.

Oh, definitely.

I mean I think we all agree.

I think we would all agree that the answer is somewhere in the middle.

But for many people in this country, particularly black people, for the last 401 years, we've been dealing with this issue of race.

It's not something that you can just say,

today I'm going to put my race suit on and put my race card in my pocket and go out here and play it, and tomorrow I may not.

I mean, we're dealing with this.

I'm raising black children.

I go to work every day, have to be unapologetically black and bring my whole self.

I'm on CNN and I have to go out there and articulate the issues that directly affect my community.

And so, and it's exhausting.

But you want to talk about those issues.

No, too.

Yeah, but it's also exhausting, too.

I mean, I don't want to talk about, I don't want to be on TV where we have another funeral, whether or not it's George Floyd or Jacob Blake or Breonna Taylor.

I don't want to do that.

But to be black in America, Bill, I think it's necessary to understand that to be black in America is to be in a perpetual state of grieving.

And we've seen that throughout COVID.

We've seen that throughout this year.

And that happens to be a reality for many people of folks.

I mean, the way I look at racism, it's kind of like murder.

It exists everywhere in every society since the beginning of time.

It probably will always exist.

We can make progress in reducing it, but it's always going to be there to some degree.

The notion that we can ever get it to zero is naive and utopian.

We always have to denounce it, of course.

But as you say, I definitely think

racism exists in America.

There's no doubt about that.

It's also possible to exaggerate how much racism exists, to mistake a problem for being about racism when it's actually about a particular institution like the police or the criminal justice system being flawed in ways that don't narrow.

You see, now I heard someone groan, and

this is important because

this is what no other show will talk about, but it has to be talked about.

Are we reacting with data and facts and reality to the police problem,

or are we just reacting?

No,

so I think that's a false question.

So, are we reacting to data?

The data shows that in the past year, 1,010 people as of today have been killed by law enforcement.

We know that black people in this country are two times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than their white colleagues, right?

But there is also the factor of how many interactions with black people.

That's called poor policing.

I mean, what that's called

time disparities.

That's called

When black people account for 50% of murder victims and perpetrators and are overrepresented in contacts with the police, you have to take that into account.

You also take into account over-policing of those communities as well.

Most black people in America say they do not want the police defunded.

Many say they want as many or more police.

Well, that's that.

So defunding the police, just so we can be clear, since the world is watching us, does not mean that when I call 911 or my mom calls 911, the police will not show up.

But what it does mean is that we won't have bloated police budgets, but instead we'll have after-school centers.

Instead, we'll have mental health professionals who arrive on the scene.

Instead, we will actually be able to build community.

That's what that means.

But I want to get back to the case.

I think we need less policing of petty drug crime.

Correct.

Look at that.

Look at that.

We're making progress.

Right, but more policing

of homicide and violent crime in neighborhoods where over half of crimes or violent crimes are not getting solved.

So it's a complex, to me, just people have this idea that I want to see the police budget cut by half.

I want to see the police improve, whatever that means for the budget.

That might mean spending more to train them more and so on and so forth.

But I think we agree because,

not fully, but I don't want...

I just don't want less police.

I just want better police, right?

Okay, so

that's the issue we're real.

Because I worry that there's going to be more riots and more unrest in the streets

and

over something that may not be true.

Now, Charles Barclay and Shaquille O'Neal commented about Breonna Taylor yesterday.

They got a world of shit about it today.

And I think what they were saying is, we don't know if this is a racist cop killing or just plainly it's horrible policy, no-knock entries.

Plainly, anyone's going to get killed in that situation.

I agree, and I think

we don't need to have no-knock warrants.

We don't need to have chokeholds.

We need to ban those across the board.

I think Democrats and Republicans alike,

if you want to take from tonight's show a policy initiative, it's that.

However, it's not the fact of the killing of Breonna Taylor per se.

It's the fact that there was a lack of accountability.

That is the biggest issue.

It's the lack, but because, and Malcolm X said it best, I didn't think I would be quoting Malcolm X on Bill Martin, but Malcolm X always talked about the fact that the most disrespected person on the planet is the black woman.

Period.

And we see that day in and day out, but it's the lack of accountability.

You cannot tell me that if that was a white woman who was asleep, the police came in her house, fired 20 shots, that there would be no accountability, no indictments for the murder of that woman.

So five years ago,

a white man named Derek Cruz in a very similar situation, no knock warrant, they shot him in the face completely unarmed.

What that tells me is there is a much deeper issue than racism.

There's a reflexive urge to go to the race issue.

I understand it, but the truth is that police in general generally do not get punished for misbehavior.

It's very rare.

And it's white, it's black.

So we have to solve that issue, of course, but reflexively making it about race.

And this is,

they're cops doing a cop job with a cop handbook and cop training.

I feel like that's like the biggest problem here.

Cops, you know, I mean, you've talked about this a lot.

I mean, you have said racist cops killing unarmed blacks is a false premise.

Because if you look at, again, the data,

it's like if you threaten cops in any way, they will kill you.

That's the problem.

And look, they have a very difficult job.

This is a country full of guns and full of nuts, let's be honest.

No, I agree.

I agree with you.

But if you threaten them, if you resist, if you do, they think that

that allows them to just neutralize the threat, i.e.

fucking kill you.

That's why they empty like the whole clip into, they've got to stop doing that, emptying the whole clip when they feel threatened.

I just,

I'm not sure that it's a race thing.

I fundamentally believe, though, that you see more de-escalation.

that you see more individuals who are able to go home.

Dylan Roof killed nine people in a church, including one of my friends, right?

He killed nine people, drove all the way to North Carolina, and got Burger King, right?

He happened to make it to prison alive.

And

the most recent case with Kyle Rittenhouse, white boy crosses lines with the AR-15, kills two protesters, walks directly by the police with his hands up, and they just say, come on back, come on by.

And so you see that.

It's not representative, though.

You're cherry-picking examples.

There are plenty of.

Did they not happen?

I mean, the truth is that, no, you're perry-picking them.

They happened.

But for every example you could come up with, I can come up with examples of white people getting killed in precisely the same circumstances that black people do, either reaching for a gun or seeming to reach for a gun.

And if we're talking about what violent crimes go unpunished, actually the bigger problem is that

black murders go unsolved more often than white murders do.

So it's not that the police are just ignoring white violence or violence violence committed by white people, right?

If anything, they need to be paying more attention to violence that is committed and suffered by black people.

I think that the point that I'm attempting to make is not necessarily that interaction, although I think that's a big issue.

One of the larger points is the lack of accountability.

And so when a law enforcement officer,

when a law enforcement officer goes in and and just, as you said, empties a clip, or they, we all admit that law enforcement officers have very difficult jobs, right?

they keep our community safe they have very very difficult jobs I am just saying though when you absolutely do not need to kill somebody or shoot somebody seven times in the back or whatever it may be just be held accountable of course of course and and you know things have changed in that area but I remember doing editorials on this show about you have to hold cops accountable for this and it's it did happen the last five years a lot of them who did those horrendous things like shooting someone in the back were held accountable but Breonna Taylor doesn't even get justice.

Right, but this is a very different scenario because the cop was fired upon first, right?

Obviously, Kenneth Walker had every right to fire because he thought they were intruders.

Totally understandable.

However, once the cop is fired upon, he has to have a right to fire back.

There's also a level, and I don't want to,

but yes, because if you walk in and you do not announce yourself, right?

Horrible.

It's the policy, right?

Wouldn't you say that's the problem?

Well, I am just like, I get it.

Yes, okay.

But let me just, can I say this?

Let me move.

I think the system actually worked perfectly.

I honestly do, because I don't think the system is built for people of color.

It's not built for black folk to have accountability.

And it's just not.

The system worked the way it was supposed to.

What we have to do is either tear the system down or reform it and reimagine what law enforcement should look like.

Okay.

Let me.

Let me ask a quick question about something else.

I mean, we seem to have changed the goal from not seeing color.

That's the old liberalism that I grew up with.

What?

What?

You gave me a look.

You think colorblind is a thing?

I think it's a goal.

No.

Not that we don't see it.

That it doesn't matter.

No.

Never.

That was never the goal?

No, I thought that was the only thing that was.

That was the goal.

That was the goal.

The goal was never.

I was a part of the civil rights movement for Martin Luther King, Byron.

No, Frederick Douglass?

No, it was never the goal.

You didn't have SNCC and SCLC.

You didn't have King, so you could all of a sudden not see us for being black.

No, it's not.

That's not what we're saying.

I said it doesn't matter.

Race exists, but I'm not going to judge you on the basis of it.

I'm going to judge you as an individual.

And that is something that has been lost in the discourse right now.

That's not even a goal for many people anymore.

People want to say, my blackness is the most important thing about me.

You have to meditate on your whiteness and feel guilty for that.

I don't want you to feel guilty about your white.

I want you to recognize who I am.

am i bring my so what i'm saying is i bring my whole black self

yeah but i bring my whole black self to the table i bring it to work i want you to see the diversity i want you to see the richness richness of my culture the richness of my heritage the richness of my blackness i mean

i don't want to know why i don't know if we're really having an argument about it i i mean i recognize those qualities about you

does it have to be on my mind every second when we're having a beer what you see the game today boy you're diverse man.

Not at all.

But I do want you to give it value, though.

But nobody wants you to be colorblind.

I just find that to be nonsensical.

No, but to be color, obviously no one can actually be blind to color.

Even literally colorblind people can see race.

But

at the end of the day, it's about where we're pushing towards as a society.

Are we pushing towards a society where

I have friends who say their kids in elementary school are getting workshops where they're separating white kids from black kids, and this is is how they're teaching them about race.

They're teaching them to see their friends as a black person first.

Is that the direction we go in in terms of our anti-racism or do we have a different anti-racism that's more universal and says obviously racism is horrible and the reason it's horrible is because race is only skinned deep.

I mean I have a 15 year old daughter.

I have a 15 year old daughter who left me as conflicted as I could possibly be after the death of George Floyd.

She got with her girlfriends, put on a mask, dressed in all black, and she went out and painted a Black Lives Matter sign, right?

She and her two other black girlfriends had Black Lives Matter sign.

I was conflicted.

Why?

Because I was so proud.

We come from an activist family, but I was also so distraught that at 15, she can't be like Baron Trump.

She just can't go out and be a 15-year-old.

She has to reaffirm her humanity and her identity on a sign and fight for people to recognize that humanity.

I just think colorblindness is.

I'm going to

interrupt this to return once more to the theme that's obsessed me.

There's the headline I saw in the New York Times yesterday: Trump won't won't commit to peaceful transfer of power.

And it was on page 15.

This is not the paper I grew up with, but okay.

They wrote: Mr.

Trump's refusal to endorse perhaps the most fundamental tenet of democracy, as any president in recent memory surely would have, was the latest instance of which he has cast an uncertainty about the November election.

I would put that on the front page.

That's just crazy me.

And, you know,

they wrote

the once unthinkable notion that a president might refuse to accept the results of an election.

Well, it wasn't unthinkable to everybody, and I'm not going to say this anymore, but we did make a montage.

And then I'm going to shut up about it, but it does fucking stick in my craw.

That nobody listened to me and that I got no help from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.

Mainstream media should have amplified.

Why are you staring at me?

I'm not not staring.

I don't know if you will.

But I'm saying mainstream media, I got no help amplifying the point I was making.

And he was answering me.

I'll show that tape too.

But show the first montage, please.

I don't see him leaving willingly.

I don't see him leaving under any condition, including people knocking on the door with guns.

He'd be scarface.

I just don't see this man giving it up.

And I just think he has many cards he hasn't played yet.

He is not going to leave until he wants to leave.

I don't think he would even leave if he lost an election in 2020.

Oh, I'm the guy who says he's not leaving even if he loses the election.

People have been saying I'm an alarmist and I'm crazy because I keep saying he's not going to leave even if he loses.

I don't think he's leaving.

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

So I'm a third-rate respected comedian

who says if he loses, he's not leaving.

No, I've been saying for a very long time now that I don't think he's leaving.

He said, I will bet you a million dollars right now that if you lose the 2020 election, I'm right and you won't leave.

He's not leaving.

He probably will have lost the election, Trump, and he probably will not leave.

You know, he's made me part of his act because I always say he's not going to leave.

He's not leaving on January 20th because if Trump loses the election in November, he's not going to leave.

I've been saying for a number of years that if Trump

loses the election, he's not going to leave.

I cannot picture that man gracefully conceding and walking away.

You're the only person I could get interested in my theory that Trump was not going to leave.

And, you know, like I say,

I

get it that, you know, these mainstream media people don't like me, probably because I have people like you, Coleman, on my show, people who walk outside the boundaries like I do.

We don't just, you know, take it, bend the knee and just parrot the one true opinion.

So we're bad people, so they don't cover this show.

But on this one, you could have given me a little help.

Because let me show, because

there is one guy, there is one person who was amplifying this, Trump.

This crazy Bill Maher.

Bill Maher, you ever hear this one?

He says, you know, he's not leaving.

And I'm telling you, he's not leaving.

And in four years, he's not leaving.

You know, he's not leaving.

You know he's never leaving office, don't you?

He's not leaving.

You know that.

He's not leaving.

You know that.

He's not leaving.

No, I'm telling you, he's not leaving.

He'll never leave.

You know he's not leaving, don't you?

He's never going to leave.

He's going to stay.

All right, so that's it.

I won't bring it up again,

but

can I ask you, gentlemen, one, what do you foresee for November, December, January?

I want to know your prediction and if you think there's something we can do about it.

And also, it's very relevant to the race issue because a stolen election will be seen very much as a race issue.

And it, of course, largely is.

I mean, it's everybody's election being stolen, but it is especially an African-American electorate that is being deprived.

So,

what do you think?

What do you think?

I think Democrats are proverbial bedwetters.

You know that.

I know that.

We are.

I was pretty hard on Bernie, but I love him.

Yeah,

I love him too.

But I think that there has to be a priority.

Everybody's asking, Will he leave?

But you got to beat him first, right?

So that's the most important thing.

I don't think you're going to have an election day.

You think that's the most important thing, just winning?

Yeah, right.

That's first.

Because you can't get to step two.

It doesn't matter.

I don't think that matters.

I don't think it's going to be election day.

I think it's going to be election week or election week.

Right.

It is.

Well, that's not an opinion.

That's the truth.

And I also don't.

Ballots won't come in on November.

I didn't even know.

I mean, Trump taught us to think of the things that are not imaginable.

I didn't know you could just take up mailboxes, just take them up off the street.

I didn't know that was possible.

That's, again, norms.

He just runs right over them.

So I would encourage people just to go down and vote early.

Don't put your ballot in a mailbox.

Go down and vote early if you can.

Put a mask on.

Stand six feet away.

That's right.

That's right.

You gotta.

The virus is scary, but Trump is scarier.

That should be on that.

Trump is scarier than the virus.

With Trump, people are always trying to interpret what he's saying and put it in one of two categories.

Either the he's serious category or the category where he said, oh, why can't we use our nukes?

And then nothing has come of that.

So my bet is at the end of the day that if he is defeated, he will leave, but he'll complain, he won't concede, he'll say it was rigged, it was the deep state, it's fake news.

30% of the country will agree with him, and he'll feel vindicated from whatever mansion he's living in for the end of time.

That's my guess.

What I'm really worried about, though.

I think so.

I mean, what I'm really worried about is that there will be rioting in the streets.

There will be rioters on the left burning cities if Trump wins or seems like he won on election day, you know, because the mail-in ballots haven't come.

I'm afraid there could be far-right militias clashing with those riders on the.

Oh, I think whoever wins, there's going to be trouble in the streets.

I think, I don't, you know,

I believe, and I think the president enjoys this violence, but I do think that's the only thing that's going to be

the Boogaloo boo.

Of course he does.

The Boogaloo Boys.

Yes, it's all good for him.

You know what's amazing to me real quick about the chaos?

When we were having mass ordinances in Michigan and Wisconsin, you had all of these armed militias with these ARs and AKs walking and hanging the governor of Kentucky in effigy.

And nobody said anything.

They said, liberate all of these states.

Oh, my God, we love our guns, right?

But you start marching because somebody dies, and they're like, oh, wait a minute now.

We're a little nervous.

I mean, there's going to be guns.

And

I'm afraid to say I think

when this has happened in other countries, what has to happen is the military steps in.

And I think maybe Trump's original sin when he was running, which was saying McCain wasn't a war hero, and calling the military suckers and losers.

I hope that will come back to haunt him.

And the military might have to step in on our side.

And I think they might.

All right, let's move on.

Something light and frothy.

He's an actor, musician, and advisory board member for the Last Prisoner Project, who hosts the three-part Discovery Channel series, Growing Belushi.

Jim Belushi is over here.

Jim?

That's a

crazy way to do it.

Oh,

No, but you know me, as a lifelong pothead, when I read that you had gotten full-on into the pot business, I mean, I said to myself, one thing, is he holding?

And, oh, you, oh, well,

that's it?

Really?

You've got...

I'm always holding something.

You've got thousands of acres of pot and you give me this.

But so, I mean, I'm watching your show, your series.

You're doing a reality show, basically, on being in the pot business.

Enjoying it?

Oh, you seem to.

I'd love it.

I mean, I love the farming of it.

I mean, this is agriculture.

The actual growing.

The actual growing.

I got my hands in the soil.

I'm keeping the soil at 64 degrees in order for the micronutrients to go into the roots, in order for the DHC to rise.

I'm pruning it.

I'm harvesting it.

I'm curing it to 12%.

You're mushrooming.

I am running it to the dispensary.

I'm having a ball up there.

But you're not, I hope you're not quitting acting.

I was watching the movie Thief.

Oh, yeah, my first movie.

I'm with Michael Mann.

With Jimmy Khan?

And I was like, 1980?

1980?

This guy's been around 40 years.

I've done a lot, Bill.

You have done a lot.

That's what I'm saying.

By the way, I'm bringing in.

I'm bringing in both.

I'm bringing in the acting and the cameras because of the show.

I'm bringing everything I know about it.

We don't want to lose you as an actor, but

your family is involved with this.

I mean,

I'm trying to find out.

Happily,

sometimes it seems, sometimes not.

I mean, this is to have the, you know, sit them down and say, hey, I'm having a big change in my life, gang.

We're moving to a pot farm and becoming farmers.

It's a little green acres.

It's very green acres, by the way.

And the show actually kind of feels like green acres at the show.

No, it does.

Yeah, my family, you know,

they actually had an intervention on me.

They actually,

my son was worried that I was going to blow all my money and he wouldn't have money for college.

And

my wife was worried I would never get an acting job again.

But you know what, Bill, this plant is...

Oh, you know, it's beautiful, yeah.

Don't even.

Don't even.

I mean, it's just ridiculous.

It's innocent involved.

No, I,

we don't have to do it.

We have to go there.

Preaching to the converted.

I think you know that.

It's about.

I mean, I think I smoke more than you.

I think so.

You're not a big...

You're not a smoker?

I'm a micro-doser, you know.

I've had a lot of trauma.

What is the point of that?

It just chills you out.

Really?

Yeah, it just kind of takes away the sleeping.

But is it the goal to get high?

I never understood these people.

I smoke, I go to sleep.

I smoke in the sleep.

Yeah, well, it's a medicine now.

I mean, you smoke to chill out.

There's a lot of PTSD that's going on.

There was a veteran that I ran into that was a medic in the Iraq war, and he said, I saw things that happen to the human body that nobody should ever witness.

He said, I have PTSD.

They gave me a bottle this big of 600 oxycontin.

And I got off of it.

And he said, your strain, your black diamond OG, is the only strain that

allows me to talk to my wife, my children, and sleep.

And he teared up and he hugged me.

And I said, hey, man, I didn't make this and he said no but you're a steward

and that was the paranoia shift for me to move on from this is about getting high and getting loaded to there's real medicine in this that's really helping people stop the screaming

the screaming from anxiety

so I do I'm a microdose I do like 2.5 milligrams of this bang chocolate to go to sleep at night and I feel fresh in the morning.

I don't do ambien or Xanax or the PM stuff that makes you feel terrible.

It is a beautiful, beautiful way to medicate

anxiety, trauma, sleep, hopelessness.

And it's also, you know, stimulates creativity, you know that.

And music and the touch of your lover's skin and it makes you feel good.

And when you feel good, you have more compassion for people.

It's all the wellness in cannabis.

Yeah.

Where's that big oxy bottle now?

No, I'm joking, of course.

But look, I mean, I saw what you put on your Instagram post.

You said your brother would be alive

today if it had just stopped at pot.

Well, Danny Aykroyd's one of Said it.

And he said, you know, Jimmy,

if your brother was a pothead, if Johnny was a pothead, he'd be alive today.

And it really made me think about it.

And I know John suffered from CTE was a star football player he banged his head so many times a middle linebacker and he actually seizured in front of me at home one time and we didn't know what it was Bill I mean I actually saved his life I wish I could have done it the second time but the first time I did and then when he went to college and started using cannabis I think he found his medicine But back then, it was considered a drug.

It's still considered a Schedule I drug.

But if we knew what we know about cannabis today today back then, I think that would have been a great medicine for my brother Jen.

I do.

I really believe he'd be alive today.

And I got to tell you, you know,

it's not easy to be like the son of a great man or the brother of a great comic, but you carved out your own place.

You know, you really did.

You took a difficult situation and you had your own comic genius.

Yeah, you really did.

Thank you, Bill.

And I know it's really important to you, this Last Prisoner Project, it kind of reminded me of what John Kerry said.

Remember his famous thing when he got back from the Vietnam War?

He said,

talking about the last man to die for a mistake.

And you want to get people right out of prison who are there because they shouldn't be for marijuana.

Well,

there's a Last Prisoner Project that was started by Steve D'Ansel, who's the godfather of cannabis here in California.

And I support it because I really found out the real history of cannabis.

You It's never been about the plant.

It's always been about who's using it.

So what we know

in America is marijuana, they came

early in the last century, like 1910, from sailors, from Afro-Caribbean sailors that come

to New Orleans.

And then there was the refugees from the Mexican Revolution that came on the southern border.

And there was a lot of people in America that didn't like those people.

And they created race control with the laws.

That's when the laws began.

And they were targeting the

disparity in the community of color being arrested.

The enforcement

is four to one.

I'm so glad you brought that up because

something we could have got to in the other discussion, the drug war.

I got responsible for so much abuse.

I got Buster Pot twice in high school.

Really?

Yeah.

In high school?

High school.

Well, I I wasn't.

I never even smoked it in high school.

I saved myself.

I didn't go to jail.

And as a white guy who runs a pot farm, I'm making money-selling pot.

I got a TV show on it.

You know, it's on Discovery Channel, by the way.

You know, I have to sit on my farm.

You know, I'm doing something that they did.

There's 40,000 people incarcerated.

And three-quarters of them are correct.

We got to get them out.

Set them free.

Thank you.

All right.

Jim Belushi, everybody.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Time for new rules.

Okay, we even got to the drug war.

All right.

New rules, new rules.

Fox News.

Oh, yes, this is so true.

Fox News has to stop trying so hard to find celebrities who are voting for Trump.

It's just sad.

Last week's front page news was that liberal Hollywood has lost Samir Armstrong.

Armstrong,

who I looked up on IMDb and it said, beats the fuck out of me.

And look, I'm glad Samar Armstrong won't be bullied into silence, but nobody's bullying her.

We just like her to work a little faster on our Grand Caramel latte.

Terrible.

Terrible.

New rule, if you're selling a handbag online, there are two things it can be.

New and fake, or real but used, so not in great shape.

There's no such thing as a gently loved handbag.

Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain was gently loved.

This, my friend, is a secondhand purse.

New rule, humans have to explain how they'll drop whatever it is they're doing to band together and spend hours in a desperate fight to return a beached whale to the sea, but then they'll walk by this guy like, get a job, loser.

New rule, if the salesman spends an hour telling me how reliable the car is, the manager can't spend an hour on how I need an extra warranty.

You mean for my great new car that's also a piece of shit?

New Roll since the trophy for Russia's Teacher of the Year looks like a dick.

The award for best porn movie must look like a book.

And you can see by the look on that teacher's face that a dick-shaped award makes its recipient very happy.

Especially when she said, I know exactly where I'm going to put it.

And finally, new rule, power is like owning rabbits.

The more you have, the easier it is to get a lot more.

That's actually not a new rule.

It's a rule as old as time, and it was my theme in this space two years ago when another Supreme Court vacancy was in the news.

And that theme, that power begets power, should be on everyone's mind right now.

The idea that when you lose power, you've not only lost that fight, you made it harder to win the next one.

That's how power works.

When Democrats lose elections, they lose the ability to appoint judges.

Trump has appointed a quarter of the entire federal bench, and unlike his wives, that's for life.

In Florida, the people voted to restore voting rights to ex-felons, but that's not really going to happen because Trump appointed five of the six appeals judges who found a way to undo that and as is so often the case make it harder for Democrats to vote which means more Republican senators who appoint more conservative judges.

Power is a perpetuating cycle like when Terminators build more robots.

Of course, Democrats are screaming now about Republican hypocrisy over Trump filling the Ginsburg seat in an election year.

They said one thing when it was Obama, now they're saying the complete opposite.

How do they sleep at night?

I'll tell you how, like a baby.

Because like a baby,

like a baby, they have no morals.

And if you haven't gotten it yet, this kind of completely bald-faced, premeditated hypocrisy should make it clear.

There's no catching them in an inconsistency.

They don't care because it's all only about power.

The only rule Republicans play by

is the people who win make the rules.

Power talks, losers walk.

Nancy Pelosi's response to stopping Trump getting a third seat on the court was, quote, we have arrows in our quiver that I'm not about to discuss.

Great, now the Democrats are bringing arrows to a gunfight.

But I don't think we have any arrows in our quiver.

I think our quiver is bare.

They have the power and they're going to use it to make a court with six conservatives.

And when the 2020 election winds up in the lap of that court, as they're practically already promising it will, guess who wins?

We can't stop them from getting the court seat, which means we can't stop them from picking the election winner.

It's like being in an arm wrestling contest.

You can come back from here.

It's almost impossible to come back from here.

How different it all could have been, not to relitigate old wounds, but all the Hillary equivocators from 2016,

the people who said she was racist, not really that different from Trump, the ones who voted third party, the ones who stayed home because, you know, the lesser of two evils.

Sorry, but you all have to eat it one more time.

Because, oh, how I would love me some of that Hillary evil right now.

You know, the evil where liberals would currently have a 6 to 3 majority on the court, the evil where people wouldn't be facing having their health care taken away or their right to vote or where America wasn't sliding into autocracy.

Yes,

yes.

Let's look at the alternative universe.

If a few more people in 2016 had told themselves, yeah, she's not my favorite, but you only get two choices in our system.

It's probably better to make sure this sane competent person gets in as opposed to a malignant narcissist.

In that universe, we're still in the Paris Climate Accord, and Iran's nuclear program is still frozen, and maybe so is Greenland.

There have been none of the rollbacks on clean air and water.

Dreamers don't have to worry about getting tossed out of the only country they've ever known.

William Barr is just a right-wing crank self-publishing a book on our moral decline.

And Brett Kavanaugh is drinking from home.

Oh, it's a wonderful world, this world.

People hearing the words p-tate only think of R.

Kelly.

And no one has needed or heard of a pink pussy hat, let alone try to knit one.

And look, no nation as fundamentally unhealthy as this one could escape a pandemic unscathed, but I think Hillary would have done a little better than let them drink bleach.

So

the Supreme Court hears oral arguments to overturn Obamacare on November 10th.

Once this new justice is seated, Obamacare is likely gone.

And after that, Roe versus Wade.

So I hope you enjoy carrying your rape baby to term.

You can name it Jill Stein.

Yes, Joe Biden is far from a perfect candidate, and I have serious doubts they'll ever let him take office.

But giving him a vote total so huge it will be hard to ignore is the very last Hail Mary pass we have.

All right, that's our show.

Have a great week off.

We're off next week.

Nothing going on in the world.

We'll be back October 9th.

I want to thank my guests, Bukhari Sellers, Coleman Hughes, Jim Belushi, and Bernie Sanders.

And you.

Thank you so much, folks.

Thank you, guys.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.