Ep. #486: Adam Schiff, Bernard-Henri Lévy

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.

Yeah, 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 Mo.

Start the clock.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

I appreciate you putting on a brave face because

you made it through a whole week of the national emergency.

And

yeah, because of the invasion coming up from Mexico, we have to do our part on the home front.

If you see salsa, say something.

So Donald Trump,

dealing with the emergency, spent the week golfing,

golfing and poop tweeting.

And, you know, I was afraid this is going to happen.

It's getting a little close to home for me now because he's now starting to threaten comedians.

He was very upset about Saturday Night Live last week, week, and he said, why isn't there retribution?

What the fuck does that mean?

Retribution for comedians.

And Alec Baldwin, now who plays Trump, of course, says he now fears for his family's safety.

And they were scared enough already being Alec Baldwin's family.

So,

and of course.

Trump, somehow he has the time dealing with the national emergency to be tweeting about Jesse Smollett.

Or Smollett, I don't know how to pronounce that, but he was Jussie, poor Jesse, was charged with a felony for filing a false police report because if there is one thing Trump cannot abide, it is a self-serving liar.

And of course,

Fox News.

loves this story, of course, because it proves their stupid theory that racism is a hoax.

They're saying, Fox News, that the mainstream media isn't covering the Jussie Smollett Smollett story.

Isn't covering up.

Some of them just died in a stampede.

But, you know, Jesse, he wanted to raise his profile, so he allegedly paid two men $3,500 to assault him for being black and gay, something he could have gotten for free in Texas.

I kid Texas.

I love Texas.

And...

And the two men he hired, allegedly, were,

where at least one of them was an extra on Empire.

Jesse, what were you thinking?

Never give the extras lines.

Am I right, show people?

No, this totally destroys the previous image I had of Jesse Smollett, which was, I don't know who that is.

But we don't want to come down to who are.

Jesse, you're probably feeling pretty bad right now.

Don't beat yourself up.

Don't beat yourself up.

In less than 48 hours, you've got to host the Oscars.

No, no host this year.

Oscars are Sunday.

No host, because a host might say something interesting, and we can't have that in America.

And next year, to be safe, no presenters.

You just grab the Oscar with your name on it, scan it, and bag it yourself.

That's it.

And

there was, I'm not kidding, there was talk this year, I'm not kidding about this, of trying to have as the host of the Oscars a robot.

A robot.

Is that crazy?

Well, Ryan Secrets turned it down.

So don't worry.

But I know why you guys are happy.

Bernie Sanders is in, declared that he is part of it.

Not quite the way you were last time.

I hope you still like him.

Anyway, he's a socialist, and a lot of the party has moved toward him.

I mean, the big star of the party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she was a Bernie supporter and is right on his page.

People are saying, wow, what a dream ticket that would be.

The 77-year-old Jew

and a 29-year-old former bartender.

For socialists, that's a dream ticket.

In L.A., that's a third marriage.

But,

you know, they.

I love Bernie.

They asked Bernie about AOC, and he said, that's where I get my email.

So he's...

And no, boy, what a day of scandals.

R.

Kelly today, indicted on 10 counts of aggregated sexual abuse.

Prosecutors say the evidence is so overwhelming, he was named Archbishop of Philadelphia.

So that's interesting.

And also.

Also, you know who got caught today?

Robert Kraft.

You know who that is?

He is the owner of the New England Patriots, charged with soliciting prostitutes at a Florida massage parlor.

A rubbing tug.

A billionaire is at a rubbing tug in Florida.

Man, he won six Super Bowls.

He needs more happy endings?

And, you know.

I always knew the Patriots were cheaters.

But what an excuse Robert Kraft had.

He says he was just deflating his balls.

Okay, we got a great show.

Don't resist

Claire McCastle and Rick Wilson are here, and a little later I'll be speaking with philosopher Northur Bernard Henri Levy.

But first up, he is the U.S.

Representative for California's 28th Congressional District and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

We're hoping he will save us all.

Adam Schiff, ladies and gentlemen.

Adam Schiff,

how are you?

Welcome home.

Great to have you here.

Okay.

Adam, I know why you like to do our show.

You get to sleep in your own bed.

That is true.

Okay.

That is true.

So you put out an open letter today.

I read it.

Interesting stuff.

And it's funny because I was going to ask you about this because I assume you do talk to Republicans after hours.

Now, I know when Obama was president, they complained he didn't socialize enough with them.

Do you socialize with them?

Do you talk over drinks privately?

We do socialize, and certainly there are a lot of private conversations

where they will express their deep fears, misgivings about this president, about his lack of ethics, about his basic lack of decency.

So you're saying in this letter you want them now to do that publicly.

What you're saying over Martinez, you want to hear publicly.

You know, people will stop me in the corridor,

Republicans, and say, keep doing what you're doing.

Really?

You know, even senior Republicans, which of course would be heresy for them to say publicly,

I don't need private confidences, misgivings anymore.

We need public statements.

We need people to take a stand.

We need people to vote their conscience.

You know, the president now

has declared this unconstitutional emergency.

I mean, it's hard to make a weaker case for an emergency than the one he's made, where Congress has deliberated for months about this.

Congress has rejected his proposal.

Congress has come up with a bipartisan consensus instead on something else.

And this, for him, is an emergency.

Well, it's a complete end run.

It's an attack on the principal power of the Congress, the power of the purse.

If Republican members won't defend their own institution, what hope is there that they'll defend the judiciary or anything else in our system of citizens?

So, what makes them fold?

Because I see them all the time looking like they're going to be something.

That guy Kennedy from Louisiana, John Kennedy, was good for a while.

Lindsey Graham was good for a while.

Mitt Romney, Richard Burr, who is the counterpart right on the Senate committee,

he seemed like a normal guy for a while.

This week he said, you know, we've looked at the evidence, we don't see anything that would make us think the president was involved in collusion.

I think Trump is a blackmailer.

What, what, what, what does, do they have pictures of these guys with a duck or something?

What makes these guys wilt like that?

You know, he's still popular in their base, and they're terrified of having a Trumpist primary challenge.

And that, I think, cows them into silence.

But you're right,

it's inexplicable.

Why be there?

What's the point of being there?

Why do you aspire to be a member of Congress if, when the country really needs you, you're missing an action?

You know, the statement that some of my colleagues have made, there's there's no evidence of collusion, for example, you might as well say there's no evidence that the president is dishonest.

Hello.

Do you hear the words coming out of his mouth?

I mean, the evidence is

all too plain.

You know,

everybody's waiting on pins and needles tonight because there may be a document dropping in the Manafort case.

Well, if you look at just the Manafort case, here's the campaign chairman meeting with someone believed to be associated with Russian intelligence, offering polling data, and apparently not a top line, here's why we think Donald Trump is going to win, but raw data.

Why is that being provided to the Russians?

And why are they lying about it?

And why is Roger Stone lying about his contacts with the publishing arms of the Russians or Gussifer II, which is directly of the GRU?

Why is Flynn lying about his contacts?

You know, these and 100 other communications, why all the lies?

why all the obstruction?

Why all the Russians?

Why is every day I hear Kalimnik and Daspravia and Natalie Gabgevka?

I never heard these kind of names before.

And

when you talk about the corruption, everything

that the Trump name is associated with is being investigated.

The Trump organization, right?

The Trump charity was, the Trump University, the campaign, the inaugural.

I mean,

I read today in the New York Times that, or I guess it was yesterday,

that he went to the,

he asked Whitaker, who was the Temp

Attorney General for a few months, asked him to put

somebody who knew he was a supporter in charge of the Cohen investigation in New York, in the Southern District.

Now, isn't that itself obstruction of justice?

Well, it certainly looks like obstruction to me.

I mean, he's trying to handpick someone to put their hand hand on the scale or protect him.

He wants a Roy Cone in the Southern District of New York.

But, you know, here's another thing that just to me is so telling about how this president has dumbed down our moral standards.

You have two attorney generals, the last two attorney generals, Matt Whitaker, who auditioned for the part by going on cable news and saying, this is how I could privately cripple the Mo investigation, and then Bill Barr, who basically auditioned the same way.

Both of them refused to commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers.

Is it so much to ask that the top law enforcement officer of the country would commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers?

But apparently that's no longer part of the job requirement.

And that is a sad day in America, but it's also part of why they were chosen.

Part of why they were chosen.

If Bill Barr

was going to commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers, he would have never been appointed.

And this is where we are.

And this, Bill, is why I wrote this letter to my Republican colleagues.

You know, every day, bit by bit, drop by drop, we see our democracy evaporating.

And

you need to look at the cumulative total of all this and how much damage is being done.

And I think my colleagues have to ask themselves, why am I here if not to defend this beautiful system we have and speak out and act out and act my conscience and whatever my voters do?

You know, I always tell my constituents

the job of a member of Congress is not to get reelected.

It's to do the right thing and still find a way to get re-elected.

The problem is

no one who needs to hear this is hearing it.

That's the problem.

Do you get invited on Fox News?

Yes, I do.

You do.

I do.

And I go on Fox from Time.

Sean, how did he invite you on?

Oh, he invites me a lot.

You don't go?

You know, I used to go.

You should go.

I used to go.

That's who needs to hear your message.

I thought you weren't invited.

No, I am invited.

I am invited.

Please go.

You liked me.

I do.

But I like America, too.

You got to get in the bubble, man.

This bubble's already sewn up.

We got these going.

Here's the thing about Fox News.

And there are credible journalists, some on Fox News, but

just trying to think of some, but I've got to say that.

There are.

It's not about them.

It's about the audience that's listening to it.

No, I am.

At least they would hear the argument.

The challenge that we face, and I think this is the cross-cutting challenge of all, and it's demonstrated by Fox News, is we now get our information from such different places.

Right.

And people live in their information world.

My point is, if there had been a Fox News when Richard Nixon was president, there would have been no premature end of his administration.

You know,

my favorite anecdote of Watergate is, because this is so Trumpian, you could imagine Trump doing exactly the same thing.

When the tapes were revealed and the White House didn't want to give out the tapes and didn't want to make them public, didn't want to give them to Congress, they came up with a solution.

We'll give them to James O.

Eastland, this old Democratic senator, and we'll let him tell the public what's on them.

Well, he was notoriously deaf.

Right.

And you could see Donald Trump saying this, but the difference between then and now is if Donald Trump proposed that today,

Fox News would say, that's a brilliant idea.

That's a brilliant idea.

And the people who want to.

That's why you've got to go there, man.

All right.

I will go.

Great.

For you.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

My last question.

You know,

I always ask myself how the Republicans can abide by the fact that this president, okay, attacking the Democrats, we get that.

But he attacks the institutions of government.

He attacks the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department.

This is unbelievable to me.

And I was trying to think, how could he get away?

Why do they put up with this?

But then I thought, you know, when a Republican attacks government, that goes back to Reagan.

Reagan famously said something like, the scariest nine words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Ha ha ha.

When you lay that groundwork that the government is evil to begin with, that they can do no right, yeah.

40 years later, Trump comes along and he says the FBI is crooked, people buy it.

You think that's what it is?

You know, I think that what Republicans admired about Reagan was not just his ideology, which was very clear, but the fact that he projected a sense of decency and a sense of optimism.

I remember feeling as I watched our president in Helsinki say,

I believe this guy, Vladimir Putin, over my own intelligence agencies, I thought to myself, Ronald Reagan once said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.

Well,

the Republican Party has left Ronald Reagan.

There's nothing left about him in that party.

There's no decency in the leader of of their party.

There's no integrity.

There's no optimism in Donald Trump's Republican Party.

America is a victim.

I just came from Munich where we had this security conference and where the speaker led a delegation to do our part as Article I.

to

convince our allies that we value NATO, that we value the European Union, the transatlantic alliance.

And our allies have profound questions about whether they can count on America anymore.

That's the legacy of this president.

That was not Ronald Reagan's legacy.

All right, Congressman Adam Schiff.

Look for him on Fox News, everybody.

Thank you, Adam.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Let's meet our panel.

How are you?

Hey, great to meet you.

Yeah.

Okay, here they are.

He is a Republican strategist whose New York Times best-selling book, Everything Trump Touches, Dies, will soon be in paperback.

Rick Wilson.

Rick, how you doing?

She is the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and co-author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics.

Donna Brazil is over here.

And she's a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC and the former Democratic senator from Missouri.

Claire McCaskill, what a great honor to have you here.

Thank you.

Okay.

So I read yesterday that Donald Trump is trying out nicknames

because, you know, little Adam shit just doesn't happen.

You gotta, it's amazing with all the national emergency going out.

He has the time.

But I watched his speech in Miami where he was talking about Venezuela.

He used the word socialist, socialistic, or communist, or communistic 34 times.

And I have a feeling whoever is the nominee of the Democratic Party, that's going to be the nickname.

That is what he is going to do.

You are a commie, and not a good one, like my buddy Kim Jong-un,

or the ex-KGB guy who I love so much.

I mean, a bad copy like Woody Guthrie, you know.

So what do the Democrats do about that?

Because Bernie Sanders is in, the face of the party is AOC now.

They're looking more like a socialist party.

What do they do?

Oh, first of all, we ignore Donald Trump because in a couple of weeks.

Well, that didn't work out too good last time.

No, well, last time we paid too much attention to him,

but we ignored the people who listened to his lies and his bullshit.

This time, I think it's important that the candidates go out there and they talk about the issues.

And look, my mother used to say, it's not what they call you, it's what you answer to.

We're answering to the American people who want to lower prescription drugs.

We're answering to the American people who want to deal with climate change.

And if he wants to get out there and call us a bunch of names, guess what?

He's a juvenile.

I mean, what do you think, Senator?

I think we've got to realize that there's five states, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

That turn the election.

That turn the election.

And we've got to make sure that whoever is nominated understands those states and speaks to the people in those states.

And if we get carried away with some ideas that are great for our party, but probably not going to get 60 votes in the Senate, we need to stay not on the macroeconomics, but maybe on the macaroni and cheese issues.

You know, like, you know, how can I send my kid to college?

How can I afford to retire?

Well, socialism answers some of the things that you can do.

Well, but that's not the answer I think that people in those states are going to be comfortable with.

Maybe not.

Especially older voters.

They probably like the programs, but not the names.

Yeah, they don't like the names.

We've got to be careful of the names.

Names matter.

You said famously when you were running only a year ago, you said, I'm not one of those crazy Democrats.

That's correct.

I am not.

I am.

You are.

Yeah, I think you might be.

I'll take it.

I'll take it as a badge of honor.

A badge of honor.

But, you know, you're running in Missouri where Donald Trump won 57 percent of the vote.

It's amazing a Democrat gets elected at all there.

What do they think when they hear ⁇ what is a crazy Democrat to them?

Why do they think Democrats are crazy?

Well, I think the crazy I was referring to were not the Democrats that fought with me shoulder to shoulder to try to fight the tax cut or to pass the ACA or to do all the things we did as a Democratic Party when I was in the Senate.

The crazy Democrats I'm talking about is the state senator in Missouri who actually put on our Facebook page that Donald Trump should be assassinated.

Well, this is a bad idea.

This makes us look very, very bad.

Or the people, frankly, who go in restaurants.

and get up in the face of someone and scream at people.

And I think what we've got to do is get back to realizing that how we appear matters, and we need to, he's bad.

I mean, he's got 53% approval in my state, but not in most states.

Still.

Still, right now.

So we've got to go after the issues that he is failing America on.

He's failing our farmers.

It's so easy to forget about that whole middle of the country.

I think one of the things that Democrats need to do in 2020 is to point out that although Donald Trump is going to go out and run this thing, oh, the creeping socialist horde, right now

he's paying farmers $7.7 billion

because of his stupid trade war.

So how's that socialism taste to you guys out there in the Midwest right now?

I mean, this is a guy who's doing damage to them every day.

And there is a point that I think

Claire's point is correct.

The Democrats can walk themselves into a box very easily.

They seek death all the time politically.

And so

it's important for them not to like lead with the commie stuff.

It's important for them to, and that doesn't mean you don't get to call Donald Trump.

That doesn't mean you don't get to like slap him down that he's a he's a bankrupt broke dick idiot.

But this is a guy

who is going to drag, it's going to drag Democrats into

whether they like it or not.

He's going to drag them into that whether they like it or not.

And if it's, you know, look, if it's a female candidate, she needs to say right off the bat, yeah, you're going to call me a bitch anyway, so let's get to it.

You know, they need to have some fight in that dog.

It needs to be smart.

The issue set needs to be smart and highly targeted, but they've got to fight with this guy.

They've They've got to show voters that they have some passion and some energy, and not just on the like, I am so excited about climate change.

Voters don't respond to that.

They respond to being told, I'm going to fight for you.

I'm going to help you.

I'm going to do something for you, your family, your kids, your job that's meaningful and important.

Climate change is meaningful.

Bill, it's but to the average voter out there, they rank it.

But that's what leaders do.

They convince you.

I get you, I get you, but I live in the world of actual.

But if Democrats are, the mechanics of it, though,

jobs in the economy are always going to be higher than climate change.

Even though they're interlocked, I mean,

voters running.

Bread and butter matter.

A to B.

Bread and butter matter.

But if Democrats run the same kind of bland, poll-tested, driven campaign, guess what?

That's why you get up in the shit.

We're not going to get people excited about voting in 2020.

We have to mix it up.

We've got to put a little Trinity, a little rule.

I agree with you.

You know what?

I agree with you.

Your base, though, is so jacked up.

Your base is going to come out and vote against this sonbitch no matter what.

You're going to have to get some people in places like Florida and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan who are those like male deer hunting Democrats.

Well, I'm going to make one prediction.

We have 452 candidates running.

The one that gets the nomination will inspire people.

That will happen.

It will be an inspirational candidate because they're going to have to fight through a hell of a crowd to get the nomination.

I've got to say one last name, Bill, and I know it's Black History Month, so I get a little extra time.

I'm sorry, Bill.

Hey, hey, I got no makeup.

This ain't no blackface.

All right.

I've been talking about blackface all damn month.

I'm so over talking about blackface.

All right.

We good?

We're good.

All right.

We good?

Pretty.

All right.

But what concerns me is that we keep talking about getting the 270.

And what happened in 2016 is that we bypassed so many people in trying to get the 270 that we forgot that we have people in the middle of the country that want to hear from Democrats.

They want to hear common sense solutions.

And that's what we, that's why, and that's why we have a lot of people.

Can I just stick up for the environment for one second?

I'm going to go ahead and do that.

Because I hear this every election.

It's like, well, you know what?

The environment is very important, but if you talk about it, you're going to lose voters.

They don't care about that.

Listen, AccuWeather predicts that the total economic loss to the state of California due to the wildfires, remember those a few months ago we had here, will be $400 billion.

Woo!

$400 billion.

So when Republicans say, you know, oh, you want to switch over to renewables, how are we going to pay for for that?

How are we going to pay for this?

Thank you.

And, you know,

people really do die because of climate change.

They really do.

Cancer used to be one in 100.

Now it's like one in three.

Right.

There's an insect apocalypse.

If the bees go, the food goes.

I mean, I know this is something that liberals cheer on, but everybody, a leader, is someone who takes that message.

That's what Republicans have always been good at.

Oh, the people don't believe that?

We don't care.

We'll make them believe that.

Oh, they like the public option?

Give us six months.

They'll hate it.

Right.

That's what Democrats have to do.

Absolutely.

I agree.

Okay.

Next issue.

We have a few minutes before.

Not so crazy.

We agree.

We both agree.

Jussie Smullett.

Smollett.

I've never heard of this man.

I'm so sorry.

Jussie.

Jussie.

Jussie.

I'm sorry.

I'm mispronouncing the name.

Look, I'm not defending him, but it seemed like when Trump does it, it's called truthful hyperbole.

You don't have to be.

But it seems to me that what it's said about America is that there is nothing as powerful as a victim.

And that is a big problem in this country.

He wanted to be a victim.

He just didn't want to go through all the steps.

He wanted a raise.

He wanted a raise.

He wanted to raise.

He wanted money.

That's what he wanted.

No one wants to be a victim of hate crimes.

No one wants to be a victim of being attacked and brutalized because you're gay or you're black or you're Jewish.

That's bullshit.

He wanted a pay raise and he wanted to bring attention to himself.

I'm angry with him.

I'm upset with him.

And

he owes not only the city of Chicago apology, there are real live victims out there today.

And I refuse to shut up because he played a terrible game.

And it's painful.

I feel like we've gone from this place where now I hear people say, victims should be believed.

Victims should be taken seriously.

You're absolutely right.

Victims should not always be believed.

Take you seriously.

Absolutely.

That's a big difference.

But we seem to have skipped that step, as we always do.

Well, the problem is for so long, Bill, victims weren't taken seriously.

Correct.

You're looking at somebody who's spent a lot of time in a courtroom prosecuting sex crimes.

I mean, a lot of time in a courtroom.

And we have come a long way, but there is still in this country a problem that many victims are not taken seriously.

So if we are going to have due process, we can't just blanketly believe anybody who comes forward with any allegation.

But if we take them seriously and give them due process, that's what happened here.

They gave him,

took him seriously, and they investigated it.

The investigators did a great job, and they found out that he was, you know,

a jerk.

By the way,

I think, though, it speaks also, Bill, to the way our society is siloed into these two camps now.

There were a lot of people on the Democratic side who immediately were tweeting, and oh my God, this is the most horrible thing in the world.

They nobody waited.

On the Republican side, there was everybody, and the minute it was turned out to be this thing, it was, oh, all hate crimes are fake.

This isn't real.

We have got a, and you're right, everybody has a chance to be listened to and heard.

They can tell their stories.

And, you know, as painful as this episode has been, you know, the system kind of worked.

Yeah.

He got listened to, and unfortunately for him, he got listened to in a way that proved that he was fake.

Rick, there's still a lot of women out there.

No, I'm not disputing that at all.

And that's why this is such an awful case.

That's the problem.

And it's also an awful case because it immediately gives a lot of people on the Trump faction

this sense that, you know, oh, they're all fake.

None of this is real.

These are all just contrived things.

Well, no, you know what?

Pittsburgh wasn't contrived.

No.

No, no.

That's an evening.

That's the bad part of it.

Is that Fox News will dine out on this forever?

Because another problem we have is Americans love the anecdotal.

One story, as opposed to a lot of peer-reviewed science, means that it's not.

And meanwhile, we have another maniac out there assembling guns and weapons to try to destroy journalists and businesses.

right and we're going to get to that I'm going to bring out Bernard in a second but we're going to get to no but I also just want to say one other thing I saw Jussie's interview with Robin Robertson yeah good morning he's not a good actor

I hate to say it all right let's bring on our mid-show guests

Our mid-show guest, he is a philosopher, human rights activist, and author of The Empire and the Five Kings, America's Abdication and the Fate of the World.

Please welcome Bernard-Henri Levy.

Sir!

What a great pleasure, sir.

I have been following you for a long time.

Me too.

Really?

Me too.

Don't say that here.

I didn't do nothing.

So.

Good start, as you see.

So many things I love about you.

One of them is that you love America.

And I always wonder why.

Because you are...

Well, because you are a public intellectual, which we don't have in this country.

And we are very...

America is a very anti-intellectual country.

What do you love about us?

You don't live here, that's what it is.

No,

I have an announcement for you.

Oh, you do?

America does not equal Donald Trump.

No, no.

Even before.

Even before Trump, we were anti-intellectual.

There's only one man in America who believes that America equals Donald Trump.

This is Donald Trump himself.

Except him from outside.

America is much bigger and much more lovable than Donald Trump.

So why don't your countrymen feel that way?

I mean you you have said France was built upon the hate of America.

What I explained in my book, in this book, is that we have two friends.

We have the friends of Lafayette, of D'Hutogueville, and we have the friends of the fascists, the old fascists from the right and for the left, who hate America.

Those who hate America in Europe are

the fascist thinkers.

They hate the idea of a country based on a creed.

They love roots, soil, race, and so on.

And they hate this strange idea of a country based in a sky of ideas, which is also America.

But what happens when we become the fascists?

When we become the fascist?

I'm talking about America now.

I mean, I worry that this country is becoming something unrecognizable.

I think we all do.

We hear it on the show every day.

I know.

That's why, that's the reason why I wrote this book.

Right.

in order to say to my fellow countrymen and also to Americans that there is an American creed, an American exceptionality, which is again much bigger than this epi phenomenon.

Who is Donald Trump?

Donald Trump is nothing.

Donald Trump is an epis, of course.

And look how

I was listening to all you guys.

I was listening.

And I listened to your program rather often.

Thank you.

Look at that.

This is a democratic red basis.

This is a democratic poll.

This is more America than this crazy nuts White House.

I hope your optimism wears off on me.

But I know.

I mean, you are, unlike a lot of people in Europe, unlike a lot of people in America, you want America to get more involved.

You were

involved in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, you think we should have got in there?

And I think a lot of us here in America think, wow, we have not had a good experience with that.

We haven't handled it well.

It always seems to be clumsy.

It always seems to be too warlike.

Whenever we get involved, it seems like it's with the army.

No.

Whatever you, we, the West, don't get involved, it is a disaster.

Syria,

400,000 deads, millions of refugees, and a country completely emptied, voided of its substance due to non-commitment.

So, of course, we can decide this, but then we have to take our responsibility.

When we don't commit, when America is unfaithful to its own DNA,

it is a disaster.

Yeah, there's a void, and someone will step in.

Russia, China, the people in the United States.

China, Russia, Turkey, the great Democrat MBS, the man who cuts his opponents into 14 pieces.

these guys, when you recede, they push on.

They push.

This is the situation.

What do we want?

Do we want the world to be shaped?

Really, I believe that for my children and my grandchildren, and even your children, and maybe your grandchildren and other people.

No, there are none of those.

I don't want the world shaped by Vladimir Putin.

We have already elections shaped by Vladimir Putin.

You had an election in America.

And they're doing it again.

We might have one in France.

What's going on?

Every day I read in the paper about the yellow jackets in France.

It started out as a protest against high gas prices, I think.

And it seems to have morphed into something darker with elements of anti-Semitism.

Why does everything in Europe wind up being something involved with anti-Semitism?

In Europe and also sometimes in America, yes.

Remember Pittsburgh.

Remember all these millions of Twitters that preceded and followed

the election of Donald Trump.

You want a competition between America and Europe?

I don't advise.

I don't like this sort of no, there is today what is true.

And again, it is I don't want to make too much advertisement, but it is the topic of my book.

There is a real

wave and tide of populism.

Populism means also is the nickname, a gentle name for fascism, therefore for anti-Semitism.

And this wave is going,

wiping off all our countries.

The West, Europe, America, of course Russia, which is the fatherland of

this populism, the place where they puppetize, marionetize this populism.

So we have that everywhere.

And of course anti-Semitism is the climax.

of this populist trend.

And it's absolutely normal that we have it.

But it would be absolutely normal to resist,

to face and to contain it, and we don't do enough it.

All right, one more thing I want to quote you on, because I think we see very eye to eye on social media.

And you said Trump and Zuckerberg, two blades of a pair of scissors, cutting the fabric of truth to ribbons.

I really believe that, yes.

And

if Twitter is Donald Trump.

It is.

Now it is.

Now it is Donald Trump.

This man cannot speak in any other way than by Twitter.

And I see all the new, this is very strange.

All the commentators, they wonder, in one case, why did he react immediately about

this actor who pretended to be

immediately?

And for the Hassan story,

I listened to your colleague Colbert yesterday, who was saying, what happens?

Donald Trump does not tweet.

When Donald Trump does not tweet, it is a national event, therefore a world

event.

So Donald Trump is Twitter.

Twitter is Donald Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg has to be aware of this news.

Twitter,

not Malcolm Zero.

Face Kerberg, I don't know who it is.

No, the boss of Twitter has to know that now...

I'm sorry, I like them so little that I don't even know who owns what.

Twitter has to know.

For people who missed this story, Christopher Paul Hassan, I think is his name.

He is a

Coast Guard officer.

Okay.

He said things, they found an arsenal, first of all.

And by the way, remember Cesar Sayok?

That was last fall.

This is the guy, this did almost the same thing, a guy who is a big Trump supporter.

The new one, Paul Hassan, says he wants focused violence to establish a white homeland.

He was studying the methods of the Unabomber, the Virginia tech killer, and other mass killers.

He wants, he says, upset that Democrats might illegally impeach Trump, so he would like to kill them first, and he wanted to kill almost every last person on earth.

He is known as a moderate among Republicans.

So.

Poor, grand old party.

Poor, grand old party.

Seriously, poor Republicans.

But Trump this week, again, talking about the press as the enemy of the people.

And, you know,

how many times does this have to happen before we realize that, you know, these guys are the son of Sam killers, and he is the dog that they are listening to.

Absolutely.

And they asked him about it today.

He said, they said, did you think your language affected this?

He said, no, I don't think so.

I think my language is very nice.

But his language is very nice, but language can kill.

Yes, it's not very nice.

Which we have to be aware of.

Words can be like bullets.

Yes.

Words are

like bombs.

That's what I'm saying.

Is that people hear this?

When you say too much that

the newspaper is the enemy of the people,

when you say too much after Charlottesville that there is evil and good on the two sides, when you say that too much, it gives force to those who have the guns.

Let me read one more quote.

Roger Stone.

Roger Stone, who was in court this week.

He had said back in August of 2017, you try to impeach Trump.

Just try.

You will have a spasm of violence in this country.

A politician that votes for it would be encouraging their own, would be endangering their own life.

Yes.

You know, these words have meaning.

They actually mean that.

The thing that's so weird about this is why is this so hard for him?

You know, why?

I mean, here's a guy who's arrested that clearly wanted to kill a lot of people.

Whether you like the people he was going to kill or don't like them, you're president of the United States.

Why is it so hard for him to look at that?

And by the way, it would be so reassuring to Americans, all Americans, I don't care if they're Democrats or Republicans, if he would just clearly say, this is outrageous.

I'm proud of law enforcement for finding the guys.

That's not who he is.

Outside of his abuse.

Because he can't bring himself to say things like, please don't kill your fellow Americans.

Right.

I mean, this is point 101 for the rest of the country.

White supremacy is bad.

But the secret of this is there's a metric in Donald Trump's mind all the time.

And that metric is, do they like me or do they not like me?

Exactly.

And he thinks guys like that like him.

Okay.

That's why he doesn't say anything about the that's why he was in the middle of he has a disease.

It's called malignant narcissistic personality disorder.

I've said this before.

Every article that you read about Donald Trump should begin with President Trump who suffers from malignant narcissist

because this explo nothing else explains it.

That explains it.

It's why he's a traitor.

It's why he's this way, just like you said.

It's only if you like me or you don't.

It's why he's loving up on Kim Jong-un.

Yes, exactly.

It's why Why he loves up on Putin, all of it.

Okay.

I really don't ever want to think about that image again.

I know.

Well, now

it may happen next week.

Are you all you three Catholics?

I am.

Kind of.

Kind of.

So we have.

Yes, no, and maybe.

Okay.

Well, they found themselves in the news once again, and I thought we had put this to rest.

How naive I was from to well, not to rest, but I thought things had gotten better.

I mean, it was first hit the news in 2002.

That's when the child abuse scandal really came to the fore.

We are apparently still at the convincing them it's a problem phase because the Vatican is having a big conclave now.

Kids stay free.

No, I'm joking.

And

the problem is that they see, first of all,

it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that the Pope, who is, you know, he has more power than anybody in any institution.

He's the Pope.

Cannot just do it because the bureaucracy apparently is so do what?

Do what?

Stop it.

To clearly say we're...

This is exactly what he's doing, to be honest.

I know you're prejudiced.

I'm a fan of the show.

Thank you.

I know what you think about the Catholic Church.

I'm prejudic against religion.

You're right.

I'm Prajerget against religion.

This is exactly what he's doing.

And what is happening now in Vatican, honestly, is a very brave

initiative.

More than others.

But he's

criminals.

But we're still some of the victims, some of the survivors of the abusers, to put all these people together and to liberate the speech.

What would be brave would be to say call the police.

He's still not saying that.

They are still treating it as a sin, and a sin is forgiven and a crime is prosecuted.

One of the stakes of this summit is to say to the bishops, to say to the bishops, now you will have to call the police.

This is the thing.

I don't think they've gone to the bottom of the city.

This will be the outcome.

I have a good idea.

You have two words.

And I'm not a Catholic, as you may know.

Women priests.

I agree with you.

Women priests.

I have another.

Women marriage.

Marriage.

Or just marriage.

Married priests.

Fuck the adults.

Fuck other adults.

Women and married priests.

The difficulty of having an institution that's a couple thousand years old and feels like

it is not accountable to temporal power, it has taken a lot to get them to this point, but they are in a moment of crisis where this has become so much of the Catholic Church's brand that I think it's an existential crisis.

Unless they handle this, you're not going to ever have people that weigh the good of the Catholic Church, the hospitals, the orphanages, all the things they do in the world.

The social determination.

But you will never have people weigh those factors because it will be the image of the brand will be they allow priests to molest children and they don't take them before law enforcement.

If they do that, if they do adopt a doctrinal policy where

priests caught in, you know, with with a child automatically gets sent into law enforcement's hands, great.

I think they could do themselves a huge favor by that.

But I do understand there's like a momentum problem inside an institution that thinks on 150, 250, 350-year timeframes.

Yeah, look, it took over what, what, 350 years, 400 for the Catholic Church to acknowledge Galileo was right.

Galio was right.

Galileo, yeah.

Galileo was right.

Sorry about that.

And 2,000 years, the church takes a long time to reform itself.

Look, I remember as a child sitting in the back of the church during the segregation period.

And they didn't apologize.

But when I went to First Sunday, I did go to church.

Now, I'm a Catholic by faith.

What church?

You go to St.

Mattress?

Who's that one?

Bedside Baptist.

I'm a great day.

St.

Mattress.

You're laying your ass in bed and think.

Oh, no, no.

Oh, no, darling.

Oh, you go to Royal Marshall.

Oh, I was raised Catherine.

You were raised.

I went to Our Lady of Mercy, and there was none.

Oh, I was afraid of the name of the name.

I went to Our Lady of Beth Mercy.

They did not like that.

And they apologized.

They apologized.

And, you know, our cardinal in D.C.

was the Frock, Cardinal McCarrick, who I really, growing up in D.C.

as a 21-year-old.

And this is the big event.

Honestly,

the dismissal of McClure is the big event.

Yes,

yes, you're right.

They are making some progress.

But first of all, I'd also like to tell people, I don't think they understand this.

Celibacy does not go back to Jesus.

I agree.

Okay, it's a fact.

Right.

It only was...

I've read it.

It was only in the 16th century that they said, this is how we do it.

So

they have to become Jews again.

They will break with chastity, with celibacy, they will marry, and they will have a normal life.

And they will stop to be pedophobic and pedophil.

Both, because the two go together.

The homophobia.

Yeah,

yes, yes, of course.

But

homosexuals are not pedophiles.

That's correct.

That is correct.

We can't make it.

No, no, you can't mix those two up.

I agree.

Which rules?

Pedophiles and homosexuals.

That's right.

There are a lot of homosexuals in the category.

Pedophiles.

Right.

It's two different things.

Two different things.

Not related.

I don't know.

All right.

Not related.

Glad we all agree on that.

Time for new rules, everybody.

We got that one out.

Okay, new rules.

Okay.

New rules, Donald and Melania Trump must be thanked for

providing the answer to the question, what is the opposite of raw passion?

This is what a kiss looks like when both parties say, hey, watch my makeup.

New rules, no saying you're humbled if you win an Oscar on Sunday.

That's not what humbled means.

Being handed a gold trophy and told you're the best of everybody is the exact opposite of humbled.

The only humbling moment an award show ever had was when Lala Land won Best Oscar and then they pried the award out of their hands.

That, my friends, is humbling.

Literal, someone has to examine all the babies born last Tuesday morning and make sure none of their souls were stolen by Carl Lagerfeld.

I don't believe in the afterlife, but I've seen 11 Halloween movies, and there's no way this guy just left.

Nural Yakali de Roma, the woman featured in these artsy photos breastfeeding her four-year-old, must either be celebrated as a progressive feminist icon or arrested immediately.

And what is it with these kids these days thinking they have to post a photo of every meal?

New Rule, don't feel bad if you can't keep up with all the Trump scandals.

It's like Lucy at the chocolate factory.

I love that.

At first, you thought, I can do this, and then the scandals come faster and faster and faster

until the only solution is to guzzle Vitamita Benjamin.

And finally, new rule: if Bugsy Siegel could invent Las Vegas out of a desert stopover for GIs, Amazon can turn Nebraska into the next Silicon Valley.

As I'm sure you know by now, Amazon has scrapped its plans to build a giant headquarters in New York because the city balked at giving the richest company in the world a $3 billion tax bribe.

So Amazon took their ball and went home, which I guess explains this t-shirt.

But herein lies a chance for Amazon to show the world that a tech company can actually do good.

We have a problem in America called spatial geographic inequality, which means that the most affluent and educated people are clustered in just a few cities.

Last year, Hillary Clinton said, I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product.

I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.

Yes, you did.

And maybe that has something to do with why Trump voters are obsessed with owning the libs, because the libs own everything else.

The blue parts of America are having a big prosperity party, while that big sea of red feels like their invitation got lost in the mail.

And they still use the mail.

they turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities there's no real housewives of Toledo or

CSI Lubbock

There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you, who are you wearing?

Because the answer is always Target.

There are two Americas, and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are, where people drive Teslas and eat artisanal ice cream.

We have orchestras and theater districts and world-class shopping.

We have chef Wolfgang Puck.

They have chef Boyard.

Our roofs have solar panels.

Theirs have last year's Christmas lights.

We've got legal bud.

They've got bud.

We have anal bleaching.

They have Congressman Steve King.

The flyover states have become the passed over states.

That's why red state voters are so pissed off.

They don't don't hate us.

They want to be us.

They want to go to the party.

It's like we're the British royal family and they're Megan Markle's dad.

How do I know this?

Because 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to Amazon for the company to locate in their area.

all desperate for jobs that don't involve guarding prisoners or murdering chickens.

And Amazon picked two places that didn't need them at all, places where prosperity already was.

Bezos, you're worth $130 billion.

Take one for the team.

Stop playing cities off against one another and help a dying one come back to life.

I know this sounds like a pipe dream, and it's true, I was smoking a pipe when I dreamed it.

But if liberals are serious about winning elections, they have to start recolonizing the parts of the country they've abandoned.

Mississippi is the poorest state in the country.

Amazon could buy the whole state and rename it Amazippi.

If we keep leaving the red states behind, they're going to keep getting angrier and crazier.

Because if you're not invited to the party, the next best thing is to throw a turd in the punch bowl.

As opposed to what happens when Amazon moves to West Virginia, people get better jobs that don't give them black lung.

The locals meet people of different races and backgrounds and sexual orientations, none of whom kill them.

They find out gays don't ruin anyone's marriage, but they do improve the karaoke scene.

A yoga studio opens up, then an art gallery, a gym that admits women.

Then one of those trendy bars where inside looks like the outside.

Asians come and open a Chinese restaurant, and then Jews come because there's a Chinese restaurant.

And before you know it, there's legal weed and decent health care and the schools are teaching science again.

All right.

That's our show.

I'll be at the Sanger Theater in New Orleans, April 6th, the Marat Theater in Indianapolis on the 7th, April 7th, at the Mirage in Vegas, April 12th and 13th.

I want to thank Brick Wilson, None of Brazil, Claire McCastle, Brunel Henri Levy, and Adam Schiff.

Stay tuned for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.