Ep. #501: Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Seth MacFarlane

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

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

Start the clock.

Exciting, I know, I know, I know.

Show you, I know, it's

you've got

you've got debate fever, that's what it is, isn't it?

Did you watch all four hours?

How many watched all four four?

I thought so.

Nobody.

Okay.

I think I know what America's biggest problem is now, overcrowding.

There was 20 liberals

on stage.

Fox News called it Comic-Con.

But the debates, of course, were held in Miami.

So for an old Jew like Bernie Sanders, it was a home game.

And, oh, it started out strong.

Bernie promised health care for everybody.

And after what Kamala Harris did to Joe Biden, Joe needed it.

Joe, oh.

Joe definitely got his bell rung a little bit, didn't he?

I mean, by the second hour, he was sniffing his own hair.

That was very annoying.

Luckily, Mary Ann Williamson brought her

healing crystals.

It's always the last show before a vacation.

I start to lose it, so help me luck.

But I thought it was really interesting that this was, I thought Joe's actually worse moment.

They went around and they asked him, what would be your first act as president?

And Biden said, to defeat Donald Trump.

Yeah, that's when the kids came on stage and took away his driver's license.

And look,

first of all, I want to say,

I always come out against ageism, but before I say, oh, you're a hypocrite, you do old jokes.

Yes, I do muddy old jokes.

Because ageism does not mean everything old people does is okay.

It means judge people individually by who they are and how they act.

And I'm sorry, it's a case-by-case basis.

Some people do look good at Joe's age.

He didn't look good last night.

He did look kind of old.

And it works the other way.

Swalwell looked too young.

Kept asking to pass the torch, pass the torch, he wouldn't stop bringing it up.

Finally, Yang offered him $1,000 to shut the fuck up.

But, I mean, honestly, the Democrats, so often their own worst enemy, still, you know, trying to get the Twitter mob instead of the 98% who give a shit about Twitter.

On the first night, Julian Castro won the woke Olympics on the first night

when he said trans females should have the right to an abortion.

I agree.

Now if only they had a uterus.

Try selling that in the Red States.

If a man identifies a woman, then we stand with her right not only to imagine that she's pregnant, but to terminate that pregnancy, which is not possible.

No.

No, really.

Oh, they were going nuts that first night.

They were trying to out-Spanish each other.

And then, do you see DeBlasio?

I am the only person on this stage with a black son.

It was like Billy Zane in Titanic.

I have a black son.

He announced his new campaign slogan, Different Strokes.

And

then they were asked to give the closing statement.

You know, what's the most important thing to you?

They all said their thing.

And Marion Williams had said, to beat Trump with love.

And

Putin tweeted in.

He said, make sure to get it on tape.

All right, we've got a great show.

We've got Max Brooks, Joy Reed, and Adam Gopnik.

And here a little later on, we'll be speaking with my good friend Seth McFarlane who's backstage.

But first up, she is the first female combat veteran running to be president of the United States and Hawaii's rep from the second congressional district there, Tulsi Gabbard.

Tulsi.

Hey.

How are you doing, Aloha?

Great to see you again.

Yes, great to see you.

Wow.

That's not the Aloha crew out here.

Is that an organic uprising for you?

Did you bring some people with you?

Oh, come on.

Okay, well, I love you and I love Hawaii.

I thought you did quite well.

Thank you.

I did.

We're going to eliminate some people tonight, and you're not one of them.

I want you to stick around.

No.

What do you think of the debates in general?

How did you think the party in general looked?

Look, I think it's tough when you've got 60 seconds to say, well, how are you going to solve climate change?

How are you going to

deal with the national security threats that we face?

How are you going to deal with this threat of nuclear war that we face?

So I think the format is challenging, but I think all of this

really comes down to who can best defeat Donald Trump.

But those issues didn't come up a lot.

That's the problem.

Yeah, right.

That is the problem.

Right.

Well, you know, if I was just a

passing viewer who was like checking over the field shopping, my first look at a lot of these people, I would have thought, well, the Democrats really, really, really, really, really, really care about illegal immigrants.

They also care somewhat about health care and

energy and

the environment, mostly about how they affect illegal immigrants.

At one point last night, they were asked, or was it your night, to raise your hand if you think that illegal immigrants should get free health care?

And they all raised their hand, and this was the New York Post headline today, who wants to lose the election?

What do you think about that?

Well look I saw an interview that you did recently talking specifically about how the media is driving for profits and ratings and divisiveness rather than actually looking at what are the real issues that the American people are struggling with?

How are we as candidates running for president seeking to solve those challenges?

But ultimately, I think what all of this comes down to is that ultimate question is who is the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump.

That's our objective in November of 2020.

But the people on the stage, they seem to be playing to the Twitter rotty.

Yeah.

That 2%.

One thing I like about you is having been to war, I feel like your attitude about the Twitter people is like, I've been to war.

So I could give a shit what you people say about me.

That's pretty much it.

Yeah, I think so.

It's true, though.

I mean, this is really

about leadership or the lack thereof.

And we have too many politicians who, you know, put their finger up to the Twitter wind and see which way it's blowing and then respond or change their position or whatever the case may be rather than actually leading, looking at these issues based on their merit, on their substance, saying what is in the best interest of the American people.

That's what I try to do.

And honestly, people have a hard time figuring me out because I don't play those games.

I don't fit in those boxes that they set up.

Right.

And I mean, politicians have always put their finger to the wind.

That's okay to some point.

You're supposed to represent, to a degree, the people who voted for you.

But put your finger up to the 98%,

not the 2%.

If you're going to put your finger in the wind, don't do it to the 2% wind, is my request.

Okay.

So, what do you think of Putin?

This all got buried because of the debates.

Trump is in Japan.

He met with Putin.

Loved it, of course.

His spirit animal.

I mean, he was joking about the fact that Putin meddled in our election.

Some reporter said, are you going to tell President Putin not to meddle in the election?

He made a joke out of it.

He made a joke out of the fact he said something about reporters, fake news.

We have to deal with that.

You're lucky in Russia, you don't.

Which, you know, Putin has killed, by some accounts, over 20 journalists, so get it, haha.

I mean, this is just beyond the pale.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we have to take seriously the security of our elections because of the vulnerabilities that exist still now, that really have the ability to undermine our democracy.

There's a hacking conference that's held every year in Las Vegas.

where I think a 14 or 15 year old girl from Florida hacked into a replica of Florida's election system in less than 15 minutes.

There are too many states in this country who still don't use any type of paper ballot or have any paper record of the votes that are cast.

So when you think about whether it's a foreign country or a rogue actor or a high school student who's going in with the intent of manipulating the outcome of the votes that we cast, that is the true danger to our democracy and to our elections.

I've introduced legislation called the Securing America's Elections Act that would very simply solve that.

Make sure that there's either a paper ballot, or if you're using a machine, have a voter-verified paper backup so that no matter what happens, no matter who tries to interfere in our elections, we have the ability to audit that and make it a lot of money.

Republicans wouldn't vote for it.

Well, the problem is that whether it's Republicans in leadership or Democrats in leadership, they're talking about how much they care about the security of our elections, but they've failed to do anything about it.

They've failed to pass my legislation or other people who've introduced similar pieces of legislation.

It's all talk.

It's non-excuse to me how the Republicans can see

a display like that of Trump with Putin.

He's done this before, but you know, with the American flag pin,

I think you've got to take that pin off if you're okay with that.

Look,

getting

back to what our mission is, what our focus is, is putting the interests of the American people above all else.

And that is the problem with Washington.

Whether it's one party or the other party, they'll go after the other party while they they turn a blind eye to the problems of their own rather than putting the people.

So one place where you're

fairly similar to Trump is you're a non-interventionist.

I mean, you see this with Iran lately.

He's kind of torn.

You know, part of him, of course, always wants to strike back.

But he has kind of staked his claim, foreign affairs-wise, on being the guy who does not want us to get into more wars, more regime change wars.

You're on that same page.

He talked a lot about that in his 2016 campaign.

But through his administration and through his presidency, we've seen something very different.

I think that's why a lot of folks who voted for him are, they feel very betrayed.

You mentioned Iran.

He says he doesn't want to go to war with Iran.

But if you look at the actions that he and his administration have taken, and maybe he's not aware of it, maybe these guys are doing it on their own, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and others, but every single decision that they have made towards Iran is laying the groundwork for an eventual war.

But we're not there yet.

And he could have done it last week when they shot down the drone.

And he said something which I think if Obama had said it, we would have liked, which was, hey, we don't know who made that order.

That's what Kennedy said in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Let's not be rash.

If he really doesn't want to go to war with Iran,

he's got to swallow his pride and get back into the Iran nuclear deal.

Swallow his pride.

That's not going to happen.

No, because if he doesn't, I mean if he doesn't,

John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and others, I mean they have they have literally laid the dynamite and

refused.

One thing about him, he's the boss.

Yeah.

You know, he doesn't care what other people say.

Okay.

So where are you on impeachment?

Impeachment is not going to get rid of Donald Trump.

No.

We've got to understand that first.

Probably.

It's realistically it's not a problem.

So you're in no one not yet.

No, because I think it's important that the American people are the ones who decisively defeat defeat Donald Trump in 2020.

That's the debate in your party.

Good luck with the campaign.

I'm glad you're out there.

Tulsa Gabber.

Thank you.

Okay, let's meet our panel.

Okay.

All right, here they are.

He is a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and author of the new graphic novel, Germ Warfare, a graphic history.

Max Brooks.

Max.

He's a staff writer for for the New Yorker and author of A Thousand Small Sanities, The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.

Adam Gopnik, Adam.

And she is the host of MSNBC's A.M.

Joy, an author of The Man Who Sold America, Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story.

Joy Reed, back with us.

Three to have you.

Okay.

So,

look, there's too many people in this race, right?

So we saw them last night and the night before.

I think tonight I'll give you veto rights, but I'm going to get rid of 10 of them right now.

Is that okay?

Can we just feel, okay, and if you disagree, just say, but okay, this guy, Hick and Looper, nice guy, no, get out.

Okay?

Nice guy, get the fuck out.

Okay.

This is Michael Bennett.

You know, if you Google Michael Bennett, the first five that come up aren't even this guy.

Name Michael Bennett.

Get the fuck out.

Okay.

Oh, Vice Principal Delaney.

Nice guy again.

Another year.

Get out.

Tim Ryan, I think he said one good thing.

No.

I like him.

Kirsten Gillibrand.

Al Franken says hello.

Eric Swalwell, I like him, but you know, too young.

Looked like he was wearing a toupee last night.

Get the fuck out.

Marion Williams said, I like it.

Wait, wait, wait.

We need to get...

No, she was never supposed to be there.

Who?

The crazy hippie lady.

Yeah, no.

I heard that there were too many Democrats.

She snuck through security.

She found herself on stage.

And Rachel Maddow was just too overwhelmed.

I didn't notice.

Okay.

She said a great thing about health care that I'm going to try to read after the show.

I mean, during the show, but Andrew Yang, really smart guy, wrong business.

You're in the wrong business.

Betto, I like Betto a lot.

I talked to him for...

Pastor Betto.

You want him still in?

Should I.

He reminds my daughter of a youth pastor.

I feel badly.

We can have that picnic.

But

he's not doing good.

It's not looking good.

It's not going well.

And this guy,

start spreading the news.

You're leaving today.

Okay.

All right.

So now we got it down to 10, right?

Okay.

Okay.

So

we are off till August 2nd, and so this is our cliffhanger episode.

Well, you'll come back in a month and see if Joe Biden has survived.

What are your debate takeaways?

So, you know, it's interesting that you did that the way you did, Bill, because I do think of this kind of like either survivor or the bachelorette, right?

So the idea is there are 20 people, they want to all get a rose.

So your strategy has to be either eliminate someone else so that they don't get a rose, right?

Be the nice person nobody attacks so that you can remain and go on to the next round, right?

Or be the villain like Omarosa was on The Apprentice, then you go to the end because the producers won't let you be cut.

Right?

So everybody went in, and most people didn't think about that.

It's not a serious country.

Well, unfortunately, Trump is president, right?

The reality shows the reality.

But this proves it's not just him.

This is the Democrats.

They're doing it.

They set it up like this.

They could have set it up more too.

The whole thing had the quality of a totally surreal charade.

Because there we get the perky debate music and that big image of the White House as though George Washington were still living in it.

And it's as though nobody wants to pay attention to the reality that the guy who was actually in it is an overt enemy of liberal democracy.

It's a guy who every day does something to attack not just the norms or the premises of liberal democracy, who's playing a scene out of Goodfellas with Vladimir Putin at the same time.

We are living in the midst of a national emergency and what we see in the democratic debate is argument about how much private health insurance you're going to take away versus what percentage you're going to take away.

I think,

well, and also this was, I thought this was a great debate for the presidency of Sweden.

I'm going to take away your guns.

I'm going to raise taxes on the middle class.

You're going to pick your doctor.

I mean, they should just dub it.

What question do you think is fun to do?

Could one candidate have said before they tried to outdo each other in how much they love,

and we're all compassionate.

This is the compassionate party.

You got that vote.

Could one of them have said, you know, Trump always says we're for open borders.

We're not.

First thing we'd like to establish is that we're for secure borders.

And then go into your compassion.

We have to do what you're talking about.

Because I agree with you that the problem that we're having, and I think the Democratic Party is having it writ large, not just in this debate, they're not taking seriously the threat that this president presents to democracy.

They're debating as if Jeb Bush is the right to be able to do it.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, standard issue Republican.

But the worst of that is, Joy, too, is it re-normalizes Trump because by treating him that way, it makes him seem more normal.

And the other horrible thing that they're doing is that they're giving hostages to Trump.

For instance,

on immigration, yes, but also on health care.

You know, in every one of those wonderful universal Medicare systems, and you know, I feel very personally about this, as they all like to say.

Everything is so personal.

I feel very personally about this because I was raised in Canada with universal health care, lived for many years in France with a wonderful system, and every one of those systems has a strong private component to it.

Private insurance goes along with public insurance.

That's all you have to say.

Of course we're going to keep private insurance.

You talked about immigration.

This is not a standard immigration debate.

What we have now is a debate over whether or not the United States is operating concentration camps at our border.

We have an almost Geneva convention level threat to people's lives.

What, six children have died at the border?

We're throwing kids in cages.

We're putting up military tents.

This is not normal immigration.

People died when Obama was president in the same situation.

But he didn't have this policy.

This policy of taking mothers from their kids, this idea that we're going to set up camps.

Again, we all agree.

This is true.

We all agree.

We need to debate that on the level that it is.

As serious as it is.

I agree, Joy, but there are a thousand, to coin a phrase, a thousand small sanities between accepting the bigotry and brutality of Trump and simply seeming to suggest that

we can have open borders, which is a total another hostage for giving me Trump yesterday.

No, but it's always about this one thing.

Should we call it concentration camps or should we call it something less?

And really, most of the debate should be over here in another bigger area.

And can we also point out, in a culture where everybody gets offended about everything?

Yes.

Jew, half Jew, half Jew, we got two Jews.

Anybody Anybody here offended by using concentration camp?

A little bit.

A little bit?

Okay,

enough to completely walk away and throw everything out the window?

No, no analogy is ever perfect.

No analogy runs in all fours.

But what's happening in the border, we know what it is.

We see what it is.

It's horrific.

It makes us look like the kind of country we used to send monitors to.

Right.

But absolutely, Joy.

The problem is that those things are so horrific, and this returns to my original point: that if we try to treat them as though they're normal political issues,

we normalize Trump's kind of natural case.

This is from 2016.

This is Trump talking about, well, just watch.

Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it's so dangerous.

You walk down the street, you get shot.

All right, now remember, all the liberals going nuts about this.

It was so unfair, it was so wrong.

Here's Corey Booker Wednesday night.

I hear gunshots in my neighborhood.

I think I'm the only one, I hope I'm the only one on this panel here that had seven people shot in their neighborhood just last week.

Yeah, but the difference is Corey Booker doesn't believe any country run by a black person is a shithole that is ungovernable.

Right?

Donald Trump is a very important thing.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're changing the subject.

No, but I'm saying that the difference is that

it's where it's coming from.

Donald Trump is also the guy, his own lawyer said, drives through black neighborhoods saying these people don't know how to live.

But his attitude toward African Americans is important here.

Corey Booker is not hostile to the African American community.

I don't think that's a good idea.

That's hard to know.

And that really misses the point.

Again, you can take urban violence as a serious problem without turning it into a plague of horror that is afflicted on us, which is especially afflicted on white people.

It sounded to me like they said very similar things, but we hated one because it was on one team and liked one because it was a problem.

They said

that's a problem.

In totally different contexts with totally different history.

There's also a larger global picture.

There's a larger historical picture here, which is if you don't, if if the moderates do not address legitimate concerns, legitimate problems,

the radicals will do this.

You saw this in Germany, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Vietnam.

Anytime there's a legitimate concern, if we don't get in there and solve the problems instead of ignoring it, the radicals will hijack those problems and that will make it their banner.

That's a legitimate concern.

The legitimate concern is, okay, there's been illegal immigration since I was a kid.

Okay.

Right, so what do we do?

That's the legitimate concern.

The legitimate concern is people think that their jobs are being taken away.

That's not necessarily a legitimate concern, it's a perception among

these brown people are aware of the people.

We need to dig in

and figure out why are the jobs going away.

It's not because illegal.

I don't know anybody that I grew up with in high school who put strawberry picker as their main goal.

Nobody.

Nobody said, wow, I'd love to wash dishes for the rest of my life.

And yet the perception is they're taking our jobs.

Right, but Joy's point, which I think is a reasonable one, is the perception is false.

Nonetheless, the perception persists.

That's what politics is there to do.

And Donald Trump is stoking the perception in order to use it to whip up demagoguery.

Donald Trump is not a typical American president.

But he's using racial panic.

Well, because

the real concern is that globalization has destroyed millions of lives.

It's not about immigration.

But you can be concerned about immigration and not be someone who was just motivated by racial panic.

And I think they get offended when people say that to them.

Like, you're only offended, you're only motivated by this one thing.

Whereas

there are so many people from these three South American countries who are seeking asylum.

Now, Farid Zakaria wrote today about the fact that asylum

is eating up the immigration system.

Right, and it's defined.

But why?

Because Donald Trump has broken the asylum system.

He stopped acceding to cultural, I mean, to international norms.

Donald Trump broke the asylum system.

There's nothing wrong with it until he decided to go to the system.

There's no question about that.

That returns to the central point, and that is that Donald Trump has so perverted the basics of American democracy that it makes it only possible to think that you're identifying with a brutal bigot

when you take a more cautious attitude towards immigration.

That's why the only thing that matters is defeating Donald Trump and why it is so catastrophic when Democrats, instead of focusing with all the sobriety and coalition building that's essential to this moment in order to defeat Donald Trump, get involved in these absurd squabbles back and forth between each other

about tiny notes of discourse and stuff.

I agree, and I think what we need to do is reform the two-party system.

No more Democrats and Republicans.

It's It's got to be moderates and whack jobs that we need to give

knee-jerk liberals and batshit conservatives sporks.

Let them stab each other's eyes out while we pave the roads, fix the schools, and the wars, and get the lead out of the goddamn water.

All right.

Time for.

Yes.

Every time we take our little summer break or our winter break, when we're off for a month, so many people depend on us for getting the news.

They shouldn't, but they do, and I love them for it.

We We do future headlines.

So if you get your own news only from this show, we will tell you what the news is going to be.

These are the future headlines for the month of July.

And you will see Don Jr.

to launch luggage line called douchebags.

Utah legalizes eye contact during sex.

Teen texting while driving, runs over teen texting while crossing street.

Neither notices.

Vatican porn scandal, two popes, one cup.

Thank you.

Taco Bell unveils own version of Impossible Burger, Unlikely Burrito.

NASCAR officials admit even they can't tell which car is when

and Trump denies raping the environment earth not my type

all right let's bring out Seth he is the ultimate multi-hyphenate

He's the best voice actor we've ever really had on television or movies in America.

He's also, what does he do?

He's a director, he's an actor, he's a producer,

he's a singer.

He's only ballerina is the only area of show business he has not yet.

Oscar hosts, he stars in the news.

Well, he's on the news Showtime, I can say that.

Wow, mini-series, the loudest voice.

They never used to let me say that.

You must have a lot of pull.

And his latest album is Once in a While, Seth McFarlane, everybody.

Seth

McFarland.

How are you?

How are we doing?

All right, guys.

All right.

All right.

Come on.

Get dressed.

The show's soon.

First of all, are you doing more Orville's?

Yes, we are.

Oh, good.

Because

I love the Orville.

Look at all your fans.

Thank you.

I need a show like the Orville.

I really did.

You remember when I made you do Captain Kirk impression?

Oh, yeah.

First of all, yes.

Yep, yep.

I knew that was there.

Anyway, okay, so that's good.

So I want to talk about the debate format because we were tweeting last night, I mean, texting to each other, and also I retweeted you.

Amazing, we were thinking the same thing a couple of times.

First of all, the audience.

Why do you need an audience?

The audience has to fucking go and like now.

It's the worst.

It's

bad.

It's bad for a million reasons.

First of all,

the number of candidates in this particular situation is obviously through the roof.

Every second counts.

And when you have to, you know, I have a wonderful acting coach named

Aaron McPherson, I'll call him out, who said that there was a time when not everything got a standing ovation.

Right.

And now every show you go to, everything gets a standing ovation all the time.

Did you stand when Seth came out?

Yeah,

I really think you shouldn't, you know.

No, I know.

But every single, you know, tagline gets this woolly.

Well, because

it starts to eat up time.

I don't think this can be a serious country until we make the media, the news media, a lost leader again, like they used to be, where they didn't have to make a profit.

Because I don't know who set this up, and I love MSNBC,

or the DNC.

They could have stopped it.

They couldn't get the DNC.

They could have set it up in a much more mature way.

They like this Thunderdome.

Like, what's this thing where,

how do you break in?

Just start talking.

Right, right.

There's no rules.

Just interrupt and be louder than the next guy.

If you're talking over three other people, who quits first?

Game of chicken.

This is not the way to pick a pressure.

No, and it turns the candidates into a sideshow.

Right.

Everybody's grandstanding.

Everybody's putting on a show for the audience.

And the audience at home is not invited to think for themselves.

No.

Because they feel like they're watching Mike and Molly.

And all these.

And they are.

All these humble brags about, you know, my, everything is personal.

Like, everything is a personal thing.

Yeah.

And everything has to build into this anger thing and outdoing virtually everybody else.

You think you don't like kids in cages.

I don't like it even more than this guy doesn't.

I gotta say, and I loved, I warmed up to Kamala hugely last night.

I thought she did fantastic.

But

the one candidate who seemed immune to that was Buddha Judge.

Yeah.

It was the one candidate who seemed like he was.

If the audience, whether the audience was there or not, you would have gotten the same performance.

Yes, I think that's true.

And

we both had that same feeling that Pete could be the guy.

To me, and again, this is so interesting about age.

You can be old and dumb, and he was the youngest one on the stage, and I thought he looked the most mature, he looked the most real.

He looked like he didn't have to think, you know, he's the smartest kid in the class.

He didn't have to, and we're not just saying that because we're gay.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You said you wanted to wait.

Did my balls taste for you?

No, no.

No, but he is like the smartest guy in the United States.

I have every time, you know, the only thing I ever wanted out of politics was for the president to be smarter than me.

Right.

Right.

Yes.

Whoever the president is.

You know, Buddha Judge is smart, but he also, I thought the single most impressive moment was

when he was asked about his relationships with the police department, and he said, because I couldn't do it.

The reason it was done.

I didn't get it done.

I didn't get it done.

He owned it.

He owned it.

And he was very eloquent.

You know, Buddhajudge obviously is a very smart guy, very eloquent.

The challenge he's going to have is that the road to the Democratic nomination goes through black voters.

And I was in the room with two African-American men watching, and as he's saying that, both almost simultaneously said, then why didn't you fire the police chief?

You fired the black chief.

The challenge for Budajudge is that most of the other people who are asking to be president are coming from a position of legislative power.

He's already got executive power, and he needs to have demonstrated that he used executive power in a way that was helpful to the 40-something percent of African Americans in his city.

And he could use an endorser, somebody from his community, who said, Yes, this guy was on our side.

His challenge is that for all his eloquence, he's not moving the black community because they're saying, wait a minute, when the first police chief thing happened, you fired the black chief.

When the second thing happened, what are you using your power for?

I think that's the challenge.

I've never normally recommend a book that is written by a candidate running for president, but I actually read his book, and

it was very enlightening.

What is it?

Shortest Way Home, it's called.

It was very informative as far as that issue.

Most Americans aren't going to read it.

They're just going to look at you.

So what is it?

Read the fucking book.

What does it say?

What's up,

it's so dicey and so complex.

And I'm certainly not going to summarize it in the age of Twitter.

Right.

But it is, but it is, you know,

I'm reading this and I'm like, holy shit.

But what if this creates...

How the hell would I handle this?

And I can't answer it.

What if this creates the ultimate wedge in the Democratic Party?

What if the Brentwood crowd is all, because Pete does crazy good with what?

The uppered

white, the rosé people.

Look, that's his political challenge.

I mean, I have a strong liking for Pete Budich because I have a certain class interest in short, overeducated, articulate little people, right?

Doing well in the world.

So I naturally am drawn to him.

But that's what a great politician has to do.

He got over the hurdle last night.

And exactly like Obama in 2008, when Obama was faced with the Reverend Wright issue, and he rose to that challenge in the opposite direction, so to speak, Bhutish is going to have to do that.

He's going to have to

prove to the African American community.

If you collapse in South Carolina, you will not be the nominee.

Can I read what Tim Ryan, who we threw out already?

Sorry, Tim.

But I thought he made a point the first night which got lost, which which is something I kind of say a lot.

I call the toxic D.

Why is the D next to your name in about half the states in this country just complete poison?

And he said we have a perception problem with the Democratic Party.

We are not connecting to the working class people in the states I represent, like Ohio.

We've lost all connection and we have to change the center of gravity for being coastal and elitist and Ivy League, which is the perception to be somebody these forgotten communities, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, I mean that is a meme that he's saying that the data doesn't support.

I mean I literally sat and just read the data from the 2016 election and to the extent that white voters were economically anxious, it produced one of two things.

No vote at all, because poor people don't vote of any race, or a vote for Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump's voters were

working class.

I do think it's perceived.

We put it on the white broke people when they're not the ones.

It is perceived that liberals, right, in a bar fight, when everyone is throwing bourbon bottles, the liberals are trying to start a tasting of artisanal bourbons

in the middle of it.

And that is a perception.

No, no, I'm not going to lie on that.

That is a perception that we do have and that we have to work against.

Joyce said something amazing on MSNBC last night.

She said.

She was doing my show.

I heard it.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, girl.

I like that very good.

She said, African-American voters tend to vote with their heads and not with their hearts.

They're very practical.

They're very strategic.

Now, Joyce, would you be offended if we culturally appropriated that for white voting

would it be all right maybe you could teach a class i don't know but in pragmatic voting but actually there is this sense of like oh i need to be inspired i need to vote with my african americans don't need that they need to know who can win because the stakes for african americans are so much higher right the stakes are usually put on the president so what happens if he can win

they think he can win they think give us a white guy who's not going to be

thinking even after last night older african americans are sticking with biden for two reasons nostalgia he's obama's guy and number two there really is a perception that because trump is president, that this country is not where we thought it was in terms of its maturity racially.

And so they're like, give us the white guy who can beat Trump.

Tall white guy.

Right.

And so a lot of older African Americans are sticking with him despite the last 90s.

But younger African Americans are not.

Is he still that?

Yeah, that's it.

Is he still that?

He cannot overcome Kamala Harris, who is his friend.

What is he going to do against Donald Trump?

That's his challenge.

He's got to do better than he did last night.

But not even worse.

Yeah.

Very easy.

So you think.

And the ageism attack, this whole thing when Swallow was saying, you're old, you're old, you're old.

Wait a minute.

We're up against Trump.

I don't care if he's old.

I don't care if he died last year.

Wrap him up, put a pussy hat on him.

Yay!

I'll say it.

The only thing about that

is troubling is that I, you know, I work in film.

We work, you know, 13, 14 hour days.

I'm 45.

By the end of those days, I'm fucking wrecked.

I have nothing left.

And that's a job that's a fraction as stressful and as taxing as President of the United States.

I that is a concern.

I do worry that but you drink during the day

Can I just say that one thing that Kamala Harris did do, and she distinguished herself last night as the one person who I thought was showing me what a debate with Donald Trump would look like, what it would look like for her to go with Trump.

She showed me that, and I think that's why a lot of people are gravitating, especially, I mean, younger African Americans would like to have that hope again.

I think she gave people that hope that she could be the one that could take on Trump.

She's a Bill Barr already.

She showed that she she was afraid of her.

She would prosecute Trump.

But the difference is, the key difference in voters are: no matter who is the Republican candidate, at the end of the day, they will get behind him because they know no matter who he is, he will do something more for them than the other side.

Our side will say, Well, you know, I'm just not inspired.

I'm just gonna stay home.

If that doesn't change, it doesn't matter who gets the nomination.

If we don't all come together, we're dick.

I remember being at a

I remember being at a Halloween party during the last election, literally dressed as Oscar the Grouch, yelling at a celebrity who I will not name about Hillary Clinton in the Supreme Court and why it was important to get behind her.

That was your party, and you were yelling at me.

That's why Democrats have to define and articulate the scale of the national emergency and then build the largest possible coalition.

Remember who we're up against.

I will get, if that crazy hippie crystal lady gets the nomination,

I will give a pain for her.

Can I read something?

She gives us all the love that she needs to get that monster out of the Oval Office.

Can I read what she said, Speaker?

Because

I mean, she's not crazy.

I know she is a hippie lady, and she's not going to be president.

We already threw her out.

But

for me, who has been saying this exact same thing on television for a very long time, it was very gratifying to hear somebody say, we don't have a health care system in the United States.

We have a sick care system.

What we need to talk about is why so many Americans have unnecessary chronic illnesses, so many more compared to other countries.

And then she mentioned big pharma, insurance companies.

She said it has to do with chemical lobbies, environmental policies, food policies, drug policies.

And I'll give you one more that she's even too much of a politician to say the people of America don't lift a finger to help with health care.

They make horrible choices.

They eat constantly.

And we never ask them.

We have this giant health care problem and giant health care bill.

We never asked them to participate

in the solution of this.

And by the way, though, when Michelle Obama tried to grow a garden and tell kids to have healthy lunches, you would have thought that she bombed, you know, a major American city.

But if people acted like

that, she was sorry.

But who is also up in arms about this?

The U.S.

military.

Because this is true.

Three-quarters of...

draft age Americans, if we really had to go to war, are too fat or too sick to fight or drugs.

And that's true.

This is a true statistic.

And an Army general actually said this.

He said, six months of basic training is not going to undo a lifetime of bad nutrition.

This is a national security initiative.

The problem again comes back, right?

Michelle put that organic garden in, and one of the first things Trump did was to dig it up.

To dig it up.

Why did he do it?

Oh, fuck those carrots.

Exactly.

Because it's a symbol,

it's nihilistic acts.

Because we're so tribal.

Exactly.

Tamper to a fan.

And so much of that.

That's why.

Trump serves fast food.

He nihilists.

He knows that climate change is real.

He just knows that we want it gone.

Gone.

That's what it is.

He would rather expire from the heat than give us the satisfaction of the future.

Then that should be our idea.

We should all embrace Russia.

Then he'll turn against it.

If we all are pro-Russians, then he'll be like, ah, fuck up.

All right.

So something happened yesterday that is so much more important than everything we have talked about, which is a little weird.

We should probably be better citizens, but, you know, we are an entertainment show.

Gerrymandering is boring.

Oh, God.

But the Supreme Court ruled on it, and that is going to have far-reaching effects.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

This debate will be forgotten in a week.

But the Supreme Court, John Roberts, now the swing vote, five to four.

This is Brett Kavanaugh being on that court, and the other guy who stole Merrick Garland's spot being on that court.

And gerrymandering, we all know what gerrymandering is.

This was the Supreme Court's

opportunity to get in there and do something to save what we have left of a democracy, and they decline.

None of our business elections.

Roberts, same way with the Voting Rights Act,

same way with Citizens United.

Like, we don't get involved in elections.

Let this country go to shit.

That's not.

We don't get involved.

And by the way, John Roberts has been an opponent of the Voting Rights Act since he was in the Reagan administration.

He's not the incidental side swing vote from Kennedy.

He's actually an active participant in this.

This is engineering minority rule.

The idea here is that they're pretending it's partisan gerrymandering.

It's just a euphemism for racial gerrymandering.

It's taking everybody black in Mississippi and putting them in Benny Thompson's district.

And one black congressman.

Every black person misses it.

It means it's 33%.

Democrats do it too.

On nothing like the same scale.

Nothing on the same scale.

And if we lose the Supreme Court, if we have another four years of Trump, forget it.

We'll never get that point.

Two crucial points here, too, though.

It's another 5-4 decision.

Crucial Supreme Court decisions were never in the past narrowly 5-4 decisions.

It reveals that the court no longer has anything approaching real constitutional scrutiny.

It's a straight up and down partisan vote.

And Elena Kagan's dissent on it it was eloquent.

And she asked the

crucial question.

She said, is this anybody's idea of what democracy is supposed to be?

But it remains a respectful dissent.

At what point does the degree of iniquity force the liberal justices on the court to say, this is intolerable?

This is the only thing that I'm going to do.

They force the Democrats to listen to peace with a judge and say, maybe we need to add some more memories.

Or that's not an obscenity or craziness.

That's a necessary question.

Also, just so folks understand why gerrymanding is so bad, because when you're in a safe district like that, when your district is gerrymanded, so you cannot lose, there is no incentive to work with the other side.

You can only be primaried from the fringe of your party.

That's one reason why they don't go against Trump.

They can only be primaried from the right.

Okay.

Final question.

We have two minutes left.

It is the 10th anniversary of Michael Jackson's passing.

You still play his music?

This is a tough one.

I saw the documentary that talked about these two women, and it was devastating.

I had had to watch it kind of in two settings.

Did you watch the Oprah after Shorty?

I couldn't watch anymore.

It's difficult because I grew up with Michael Jackson, you know?

He's something that's so much apart.

It's not a problem.

Everybody did, even people who didn't grow up with him grew up with him.

Yeah, I mean, he was so much The Wiz, my favorite film of all time.

Michael Jackson is music.

It's very, this is a tough one.

I was never a huge.

But it's a compelling documentary.

I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan.

But anybody who knows anything about cultural history knows that there is simply no connection between the personal qualities of CB beings and the quality of their art.

Charles Dickens, the most wonderful storyteller in the history of the English language, treated his wife with a brutality that just makes you shiver to think about.

And he was the warmest.

There simply is no connection between the two.

I'll show how recent it is too.

I mean it's like you can read Dickens, but it's a lot harder.

Well you know I worship Frank Sinatra.

I think Frank Sinatra was the greatest performing artist of all of all time.

And Frank Sinatra did things that were so brutal to people that, again, you shudder to read about them.

Yeah, but there was no Twitter.

There was no Twitter, but people knew and we know now.

The more important point, Seth, is we know now, but we still are able to say that.

That's true, not together with that particular thing.

Don't talk about Frank Sonak.

But why can't we do both?

Why can't we acknowledge with one part of our brain that the person, whoever it was, was a Charlie Chaplin, did horrible things too, probably, I think, with young girls and like that.

And we could enjoy their art.

I mean, I am going to keep playing Michael Jackson.

That's it.

Because his music

didn't do things with little little boys.

But that's what grown-up people do.

They make that decision.

That's an authenticity.

Thank you.

What grown-up people do.

Have two thoughts in their mind at the same time.

Because if you go down this road, I've said this before, you go down this road of putting out everybody, especially in the music industry, who did something freaky, you will wind up with polka music.

Oh, Lawrence Realt.

You don't want to know about Lawrence Welfare.

No.

And the captain and Teniel.

That is all it is.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

It's time for new rules.

Okay, new rule.

Now that the Justice Department is alleging that Representative Duncan Hunter used campaign funds to pay for his affair with a lobbyist, and his affair with a woman in his office,

and his affair with a woman who worked for a congressman, and his affair with another lobbyist, and then another lobbyist, he has to admit he has a type.

And that type is anyone not my wife.

Also, Representative Duncan Hunter has to tell me, before our interview, you washed your hands, right?

New roll, those CAPTCHA codes on websites have to stop making me feel like I took the bad acid.

Especially when I did take some bad acid.

Because then you send me to the other screen where it asks, are you a robot?

And I spend the next 30 minutes thinking, whoa, maybe I I am a robot.

New Rule, when people ask why there's so many homeless in Los Angeles, show them this million-dollar listing.

Let your imagination run wild, says the ad.

More like let your imagination pitch a tent under the freeway.

It's perfect for your dream home.

Yeah, if your dream is to make crystal meth for MS-13.

New roll, we don't have to put politics in every movie.

Toy Story 4 has a new character, Forky, the spoon that wants to go in the trash.

Now, you can say it's just a message about recycling, but we've seen that pissed-off expression before.

New Roll Spencer Gifts has to explain why they think it's appropriate to sell both rugrats jigsaw puzzles and remote control vibrating panties.

Geez, half the store is toys are us and the other half is toys in us.

And finally, New Rolls, stop telling me every time you find evidence there might be life on Mars.

Until the rover pans to the left and there are little green men doing ducklips, I don't care.

Mars is back in the news because methane was found up there by NASA's robot called the Curiosity Rover, which sounds like your Tinder profile if you only do anal out of town.

And now with the 50th anniversary of America's first man on the moon moment approaching on July 20th, there's lots of talk about space forces and manned missions and going back to the moon and on to Mars.

And

please, have you flown coached lately?

You can barely put a man on the surface of LAX.

I don't know if Mars is full of methane, but we're full of shit.

We're not going anywhere.

Mike Pence said the stated policy of the Trump administration is to walk on the moon again by 2024 by any means necessary.

He really used that phrase.

Now applaud, you people, applaud if you believe that's actually going to happen by 2024.

Well, to everyone who applauded, I have some Avenati 2020 t-shirts I am letting go for a very reasonable price.

Folks, really, America can't maintain our infrastructure, can't update our power grid, we can't get off oil, can't even secure our elections.

And we're going to fly 35 million miles to Mars.

Have you looked at our math scores?

Forget the launch.

We couldn't even do the countdown.

You want to find water on Mars?

How about first we find water in Flint, Michigan?

I'm sorry, but we're not the, we'll race you to the moon country anymore.

We're the I've fallen and I can't get up country.

And as far as this argument goes that we got to get back to the moon to use as a launching pad to get to Mars, where we really got to go, because we're trashing this place so bad, we need a backup planet.

Here's an idea.

Instead of going to Mars, how about we just stop treating Earth the way Led Zeppelin treated hotel rooms?

This is something I addressed in an editorial here a couple of years ago, that if we're going to spend the time, effort, and money to make an entire planet sustainable for human life, why not the one that already has air and water and the right temperature, and oh yeah, we're here.

Well,

this position

This position was deemed completely unacceptable by a number of experts who live in their mother's basement

who

who accuse me of being anti-science.

I'm not anti-science.

I'm just a big fan of oxygen.

It's my second favorite thing to inhale.

In fact, It's easy to list what Mars does offer by just taking everything humans need and adding no.

No air, no surface water, no heat, no natural resources, no Wi-Fi,

which to millennials is worse than no air.

I would say let's colonize Mars if we didn't know what was up there, but we do know what's up there.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And even if it comes to that, and we do someday need a side piece space rock,

why not the moon?

Instead Instead of going all the way to friggin' Mars?

Why travel tens of millions of miles when we have our own desolate, lifeless shithole

only 250,000 miles away?

I have more frequent flyer miles on Delta.

It takes six months to get to Mars and Mars and Earth are rarely aligned for travel.

So missions can only happen during a two-week window every two years.

If you get in trouble on Mars, you're on your own.

It's like living in Puerto Rico.

But we can get to the moon in three days.

Amazon will be delivering there.

Oh, but Bill, I know, nerds.

I know.

I know the argument you're going to say, but a Mars Day is close in length to our Earth Day, whereas a moon day can last 28 Earth Days.

Who gives a shit if you have to live underground or in a fucking dome the whole time?

How badly would we have to rat fuck the Earth before living like that was preferable?

It's not easy to live in the Sahara or the North Pole or West Virginia.

But it still beats Mars.

It's summertime now.

Don't you want to be outside?

I'm going to spend as much of my July vacation as I can outside, where I can do so many of those summertime things I like that I couldn't do outside on Mars, like breathing

and throwing a frisbee and peeing in the ocean.

I love summer.

Summer on Earth, ice cream.

Summer on Mars, use cream.

All right, that's our show.

We're off for July.

I'm back on August 2nd.

I'll be at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Wow, August 18th and at the Mirage in Vegas, September 6th and 7th.

I want to thank Max Brooks, Adam Gopnick, Jerry Reed, Seth McFarlane, and Tulsi Gabbard.

Stay tuned for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you.

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.