Ep. #480: Rep. Eric Swalwell, Garry Kasparov

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

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

Start the clock.

Right here with me.

Great to see you too.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much.

Oh, stop it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here on this

special night.

It is our,

I know.

I know.

Folks, this is...

This is our last show before next year.

We come back January 18th.

That's two months.

So thank you for, I appreciate that, but this has been an amazing season.

I want to thank my producers, my crew, my head writer, Donald Trump.

I tell you,

I'm sorry to leave you for two months, but I need a break from this motherfucker.

I mean, this has been very stressful.

Ten months of him.

This is the time of year when I make the transition from medical marijuana to recreational marijuana.

But you know,

Trump is going to be here tomorrow.

He's coming to California to check on, you know.

Well, you know, checking on the wildfire situation.

And he says he can relate because last Tuesday he also lost a house.

But this

is what we're going through here in this date.

This is very serious, really serious shit.

If you have seen what's going on and some people have been affected, we have at this show.

I read in the paper today, they said human beings were probably responsible for the fires.

There goes my theory that it was free-basing raccoons.

Of course, Trump's response, you saw that, was to blame the victims, threatened to withhold federal funds.

This is what he does every time there's a disaster.

Wildfires, mismanage your forests.

Mass shooting, you should have been armed.

You know.

Hurricane, your island is very inconveniently located.

His response to every tragedy is, how can I hurt?

He is to empathy what food courts are to ambiance.

That's

And

today he went out of his way to say he's coming here just for the firefighters.

I don't want to give the impression that he gives a shit about the citizens of this state who didn't vote for him.

He only once came here before, you know that, to look at wall swatches.

Remember he went down to the border to see what wall, the wall he still hasn't built.

You know, by the way,

Trump fans and others, if you're keeping score, no wall, no health care plan that was better,

cheaper, covered everybody, no.

The trade deficit, bigger, bigger.

The tax cut did not pay for itself.

The debt, of course, is exploding.

North Korea building bombs again.

You know, Mr.

President, you can only slide so long on charm.

At some points.

But actually now, I have to say, today, there is in the news This is a pretty big story something he is actually behind once in a while.

He stumbles upon the right thing a bipartisan prison reform bill that's going to address the draconian three strikes laws mandatory sentences for some reason Trump suddenly has taken an interest in

prison reform

why you know

yeah

Today he made a fool of himself saying he answered by myself.

Nobody helped me with these answers.

The

written questions from Robert Mueller said it took a little longer than usual because he's not used to lying and writing.

And, you know, the word now from Washington, everybody's saying, reporting this, that he's apparently literally depressed.

He's barely

touching his nightly chicken bucket.

And he should be depressed.

He should be worried.

I mean, everybody has skeletons in their closet.

He has mass graves.

I mean, House Democrats have been spotted at Costco buying subpoenas in bulk.

They have

a lot of things.

But this is because he lost the election.

That's why he's depressed.

Now they have the subpoena power.

Trump has, by the way, about the election, Trump has a theory that he gave us yesterday about voter fraud.

He said, oh my god, I can't believe we have to actually talk about what this guy says.

This bothers me so much.

Anyway,

he's a spoiled five-year-old and we're the man his mother brought home from the bar.

So we have to

We have to pretend

to talk about this stuff.

Okay, so he says that people people with no right to vote sometimes get this, go to their car,

put on a different hat and a different shirt, and come in and vote again.

I

it sounds like an episode of the Brady Bunch, quite frankly.

But you know what?

Let's end on a happy note.

Newly elected Democrats, they had their orientation.

We saw, got it,

it looks a lot more like America,

a lot more diverse.

34 new women and

the Republicans

Republican side all white all straight one woman

party of Lincoln party of sausage

all right we got a great show Ben Jones Nancy McLean and Steve Schmidt are here and I little letter be speaking with the great activist, author, and chess master Gary Kasparov.

Okay, but first up, he was just re-elected to his third term as U.S.

rep from California's 15th and it's his birthday Congressman Eric Slowwell

Okay

What was your wish?

To be with my family, but if I can't be with them I want to be with the real-time yeah, you must really want to be president because

it's your birthday and you're here on my show.

That's right.

And it's how many?

38?

38.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

That makes you a Scorpio?

I'm Scorpio.

That's right.

You believe in astrology?

No, no, no, no.

It's fun to watch.

You got my vote.

Done.

I'll just.

Don't you love California?

Okay.

So you were in Iowa recently.

I was.

You like corn.

I do.

And I like celebrating.

And we won two congressional seats there.

I know, but there's 50 states.

Why go to that one?

And we we almost won the seat where I was born to beat Steve King and we're going to get him next time.

Oh you were born in Iowa.

Yeah.

I was born in Iowa.

Put out convenient.

Yeah.

By accident of birth.

Yeah.

Okay.

But I mean you are talked about as someone who might be running.

You would be the youngest president ever if you were the president in 2021.

Yeah and what I've gone to Iowa for is to help us put two new candidates in place, but also I am considering it.

And I think our country needs new energy, new ideas, and a new confidence.

And people in Iowa,

people

in the heartland or along the coast, they believe that if you work hard, it should add up to something, that you do better for yourself and dream bigger for your kids.

And right now, we have a Trump-slump top-floor economy where it only works for people who work on the top floor, and everyone else is just getting screwed.

But how do you win a state like Iowa?

And I mean, Obama won it the first time, right?

He won Indiana, too, and a bunch of other states.

Okay, there's some Democrats who seem to have the key to it.

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's not always easy, Sherrod Brown, John Tester, Manchin in West Virginia.

What is that secret to

take the toxicness out of the D next to your name in so much of the middle of this country?

You got to show up and listen.

I'm the son of two Republicans.

My brothers are cops.

They're Republicans.

I worked as a prosecutor in law enforcement, and so I

understand

what a lot of them care about, which I think is what you and I care about, which again is that right now, too many families are seeing their health care protections gutted.

They're seeing they're working hard and they're paying for tax cuts at the top.

Their communities aren't being invested in.

By accident, I think Donald Trump stumbled onto a lot of these issues: people who felt like they were disconnected, weren't seen, weren't heard, but he's not delivering for them.

And I don't think you have to insult those people, you just have to tell them how you're going to deliver for them.

So, how would you deliver for them?

Modern schools in every community, once and for all,

once and for all join the rest of the First World and have a health care guarantee in our country.

Well that's interesting because now

the Democrats kind of ran on health care for this election and it worked and it was Nancy Pelosi, not only her idea to do that.

She was the architect.

Well she got it passed.

Obamacare.

I mean the pre-existing conditions thing which really resonated with a lot of people because they have pre-existing conditions.

So now a lot of people want to and your party seem to want to dump her.

I've heard talk like, well, we have other qualified women.

I mean, it doesn't have to be a woman, right?

I mean, we're.

It has to be the most qualified person.

She was the best leader we have.

Right.

I mean.

Okay.

And Bill, she was the architect of the Affordable Care Act.

These candidates ran on protecting health care, and that was top of mind at the ballot box.

And if we're going to protect what Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to, we need her there leading us.

And for people who say, you know, the argument was Nancy Pelosi is a drag on Congress and we're not going to win as many seats, this is the biggest pickup for Democrats since Watergate.

So why does, well, why does Kevin McCarthy get promoted and you're going to fire Nancy Pelosi?

Also, yes, she's effective.

She's proved that.

Also, whoever is in that job, they're going to trash.

They're going to try to make us look as shitty as possible.

So why not use her?

Because she's already pre-tarnished.

Why ruin a whole new person?

We saw this in 2002, right?

You saw Max Cleland, three

triple amputee.

They turned him into Osama bin Laden.

They're not going to canonize you just because you're now the person in the chair.

I think it's a mistake to replace her.

We should be uniting right now.

There's a lot of work to do for the American people.

Okay, so

I've read your tweets after the election, and you know, you were saying to Donald Trump, kind of right in your face, welcome to democracy.

You know, we have oversight now, but it's only the House.

It's not the Senate.

What can you really do?

Protect the country now.

How?

Well, I mean, I get it that you can subpoena stuff, and you can have witnesses.

You can't impeach them, because you don't have the Senate.

They have to convict.

There's not 67 senators, so you're not going to impeach them, right?

Right.

We're going to investigate where the Republicans are unwilling to investigate.

But for the last two years, I've been been defined by just panic and outrage by everything that he's done and trampled on our democracy and the rule of law.

Now, because people cared and they went to town halls and town squares and marched, they voted to put a check on these abuses of power.

So we can protect health care.

We can protect paychecks, make sure that no more people are paying for folks at the top.

But most importantly, we can protect our democracy and investigate where they were unwilling to.

So presidential immunity, that's over.

But if people don't care about the findings, I mean, like the New York Times did an exhaustive search on his tax returns, or what he paid in taxes, and how he got his money.

And it was an amazing result that they found.

His whole origin story was a lie.

He said, I started with a little pittance from my father, maybe a million dollars.

He got over $400 million from his father.

No one cared.

Why would they care when you throw another bunch of evidence on the pile that he's a crook?

Because we're going to see his tax returns.

The American people will know if the president...

But here's why it's a

we'll see his tax returns.

You know, it's going to be shady.

You know, it's going to be this shell company's.

It's going to be very hard.

It's not going to say right there, he cheated.

And people are going to go, yeah, he's smart.

He got out of paying taxes.

I'd love to do that, too.

But if he promises that he's going to make their life better because he did so in his own personal career, and it turns out that that was all a fraud, people are going to care.

They want to know if the president is a tax cheat, and they also want to know if it's affecting our national security.

We have seen decisions on Russia, decisions in Saudi Arabia.

They are being driven because of his prior financial interests.

So again, those days are over.

We can now intervene, interdict, and just stop the president from cashing in on access to the government.

Even if he has the Attorney General, I mean, I feel like this Matthew Whitaker story is not getting what it should.

It was last week's story.

It's still an outrage this week that he put a stooge in there.

This is what third world dictators do.

I know Democrats just rolled, hey, we have diverted, we got an Eskimo.

He got the Attorney General.

Right.

And we're not powerless anymore, though.

And I've tried to encourage my colleagues that if this had happened and we weren't in the majority, we should be panicked.

But now let's project confidence and tell the American people, you elected us to stop this.

We're going to stop this.

And so we're going to protect Bob Moeller.

We're going to make sure that this hired assassin who was brought in to take out the Mueller investigation is not able to do it.

And also, we're going to do all we can to get him to recuse himself because he's prejudged the investigation and he has been plotting for months months with Donald Trump to do this.

So the American people have spoken.

They want a balance of power over an abuse of power.

Okay.

Well,

I'm glad that you guys took the House.

How many seats are you going to think you have?

Like 38, 39?

Pretty close to 40.

That's a lot.

Almost all of California, even Orange County.

Single digits of California.

Yes.

My final question.

Do we really need two Dakotas?

I've seen...

I bring this up quite often, but, you know, I mean, it's not fair that California with 40 million people gets two senators and Dakotas with about 800,000 people get four.

I think that's where we start the reform.

You could start that, Congressman.

Well, if I want a good Thanksgiving with my mom, who was born in South Dakota, I'm going to say yes, but we should start going back to the Dakotas because we have had Democratic senators there again.

We can win in Kansas, we just did.

We can win in Nebraska and Open

We have before.

So let's start going to the next one.

I want to hear Eric Swarwell.

Happy birthday, Mr.

Eric Swongwell.

All right, good luck with your run for president.

Thank you.

Let's meet our backup.

Co-host of the Words Matter podcast with Elise Jordan.

Steve Schmidt is back with us.

We love him now.

Liberal Los Angeles.

She is the Duke University History and Public Policy Professor and author of Democracy in Change.

Nancy McLean back with us on the panel.

Great to see you.

And he's an activist author and host of CNN's The Van Jones Show.

Van Jones.

Whoa!

Easy, easy, easy.

Okay, don't forget to send it.

Love you too.

You two want to talk that out?

Later.

Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime, so we're going to answer them after the show on YouTube.

I want to start talking about the fire.

This is very personal to us.

Global warming really

is now something that we should realize is happening now.

There are people on this show who didn't come to work this week.

Somebody lost their house.

They have no clothes.

And I'm not in competition with any other kind of disaster, but when you see some of this, can you show some of the footage of what it looks like?

I mean, look at this.

I mean, all the kind of disasters we have in this country, like school shootings or horrible mass shootings,

this is even worse.

The death toll on this is going to be a shocking number.

And

it's disheartening that green initiatives in the election that we just had all went down.

Florida, Arizona, Washington State, they all voted down green initiatives.

I don't know what it's going to take, I guess, your house catching on fire.

Well, and the only one that did pass was, I think, the city of Portland, so give them at least a little bit of praise.

However, this is going to get worse.

I mean, these fires are getting worse.

And for Donald Trump's base, let's be clear.

We have fires in California, but the farmland right now, you have droughts and then floods.

It's really hard to grow crops when you go from drought to flood, which is going on.

So, you know, and he talked about infrastructure.

There's no better infrastructure than building, you know, wind turbines, solar panels, and also hardening our infrastructure against these kind of disasters.

And if Donald Trump wants to do something about infrastructure, it should be green infrastructure.

We would have to

re-organize how we build our homes.

I mean, he keeps calling this a forest.

It's not a forest fire.

It's not the forest.

It's what, right?

It's what they call the

wildland-urban interface.

In other words, it's...

It's buildings.

You may have noticed as well.

Well, it's the areas like beyond the suburbs, but before the cows.

Yes.

You know, it's where upper-middle-class people have a horse or less

well-off people have a car on the lawn.

I live next to a forest, so I get that.

North Carolina is full of beautiful forested areas next to homes.

One in three homes in this country is in this area.

Absolutely.

I don't know what's going to happen if they all start catching fire.

Well, I think, I mean, clearly, we're going to have to learn to cope with what is happening right now and how people are being affected by it.

But I think we also have to press harder and say what has happened when one of our major political parties in this country has closed turns its back on science, has said we don't care, we're going to plug our ears, close our eyes, and we're going to deny that this is happening.

And we have to be clear that that party has been totally taken over by the fossil fuel industry and by the Koch Donor Network and all of these other people who will push to do anything to keep us from acting on this life-threatening disaster, both in our country and in other countries.

And we've got to say that's not acceptable.

The same way we got people elected in the midterms, we've got to be going door to door, holding politicians' feet to the fire and saying this has to stop now.

Just like with the guns, right.

That's how I felt.

They seem to.

The sad thing is, a guy ran for president in 2008, said global warming was real, caused by humans, cap and trade would fix it, and it would create millions of green jobs.

I miss that guy every day.

His name was John McCain.

John McCain ran as the climate champion.

So it's only...

You were the green initiative guy.

Right?

Wasn't that your job?

That was my job.

Barack Obama and John McCain fought about every issue, but not this issue.

So very recently, both parties have the common sense to know you can't cook a planet and live on it at the same time.

Okay.

Steve?

But

I mean,

put aside all the preponderance of the scientific evidence, you just know from your own eyes that the weather is different today than it was 10 years ago.

Just commonsensically, we have these super storms.

We're seeing these Armageddon fires.

Hundreds of people will be dead.

And we have a crisis in our politics.

I mean, we have an unconstitutionally appointed acting attorney general who's a complete crackpot who recently

recently was involved in a scam company that was selling time travel technology.

And we sit and we wonder and say, hey, you know, why is it that nobody will believe the science?

And reveling in ignorance has become a central qualification to be able to call yourself a conservative in this era to the country's great detriment.

And Donald Trump's.

Donald Trump is now putting forward.

Where was that 10 years ago?

I don't know.

That was not around.

Well, we did.

When I worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger, we passed climate change legislation in California.

We passed climate change.

We did it 12 years ago.

No, they seem to literally resent trees.

It's like liberals are pro-trees, so they have to be anti-trees.

Well, Donald Trump has just nominated someone who's a coal industry lobbyist to head the EPA.

I mean, that's just like, you know, but let me go on to this subject, because it's kind of related, about the way people in this country now, especially on the right, I'm sorry, but it is more on the right, just make their decisions based on not what's good for them even, just because they want to make the lib chards cry.

Owning the libs.

Owning the libs.

And, you know, we have this tremendous divide in this country.

The election proved that the divide is even bigger, the urban versus rural.

You know, I call it the Whole Foods versus Piggly Wiggly.

Well, you laugh, but 70% of the House seats that the Democrats slept were in a district that has a Whole Foods.

Okay, so what I'm getting to is Amazon.

Amazon had this year-long tease.

Where are we going to put our two big new factories or centers, wherever they do their bullshit?

So

they had a chance.

America is aching for someone to take one for the team, to step up, do something to bridge this divide.

They could have done that.

Amazon has that power.

They didn't.

They put the two places in New York and Washington, D.C., places that don't need it, okay?

And by the way,

these two places plus Seattle, their headquarters,

wow, what a coincidence, all within seven miles of where Steve Bezos has a home.

Yeah.

And it was even worse, I think, than that in the sense that there are 235 cities in America who put a lot of work into those bids, right?

Think of all the person hours, all the monies that could have been serving local needs that instead went to trying to please Amazon when it turns out they were, Amazon was just playing them against these bigger cities to drive up the extortions that it was going to get from these bigger cities.

And I think Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post has a slogan that says democracy dies in darkness.

Well, he should apply that to Amazon's practices.

No more secret deals, no more extorting our cities, no more demanding that we take tax dollars from our schools and our roads and our cities to the richest.

Yes, that's all true.

But it would have been a patriotic thing to do, to put it in, you know, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I did my special this year.

Thank you, Tulsa.

It was great to be there.

And there's smart people there.

I think a lot of the problem we have is that it looks like the people on the coasts have all the money and all the fun and all the celebrities and they're having a big party and the flyover people, they're left out of the party.

I don't have as good education, the poverty rate, the more opioids.

And they're like, you know what, if I can't get invited to this party, I'm just going to fuck it up.

I'm just going to put a turd in the punch bowl if you don't want me to join.

So is that, voting for Trump is like putting a turd in the, okay?

Well, that already happened.

I was just in Tennessee at a death in my family.

It's amazing.

You're in the middle of the country, beautiful people, smart people, motivated people.

No real opportunities.

You're trying to become the manager at Applebee's or get promoted at your job at the hospital.

And you think about what if that plan had gone to, hey, you can stay on the coast, fine, go to Baltimore then.

Like go someplace where people need you.

That's what I would say if you have the opportunity.

Go someplace people need you.

So

what do you, you are,

of course, involved.

You were involved in this prison reform.

Still am.

And you think Trump is going to follow through?

He says he's supporting it.

Well, we'll see.

We'll see.

I mean, it looks like another case of Republicans being interested in a subject when it affects them because Jared Kushner's father went to prison.

Is that.

Look, that's a big part.

But who cares as long as it's getting done, right?

Listen, let me just say a couple things about it.

This bill,

which did come out of Jared Kushner's idea, his day I went to prison.

Frankly, a lot of people who care about this issue care about it more when it hits them.

I think that's true about most issues.

But it started off as a pretty small, kind of like a minor bill.

It's just become what the New York Times says is the most substantive criminal justice reform bill in a generation.

It's called the First Step Act.

It would let 100,000 people who are locked up in federal prisons earn their way home sooner.

It would prevent them from shackling women and abusing women behind bars, especially when they're pregnant, and a bunch of other good stuff.

The crack powder cocaine disparity, that would get addressed retroactively.

There's stuff in this bill that even law enforcement says would make the streets safer when folks come home.

So that's a very, very positive thing.

It undoes all that dirty hairy bullshit from the 80s, right?

When we

free strikes you're out and mandatory sentencing.

It became a prison factor.

Beginning to roll that stuff back from a president, and the reason I got irrationally exuberant about the whole thing was that they had this president that was saying American carnage.

When this guy was elected, the prison stocks went through the roof.

They said, ah, haha.

And yet, we have been able, because formerly incarcerated people, here's the deal.

It's not that Trump is so good.

It's not that the Democrats are so good.

It's that the prisons are so bad and people are suffering so much that the people who are affected by that have been fighting and bringing the best out in both parties.

And we should keep fighting for people behind bars.

I don't care who supports it, Trump or anybody else.

Let's put the people first.

Okay, so every year we, when we are about to take our break, give the audience what they need because they're not going to be able to follow the news without this show.

So, we predicted for you something we call future headlines, ladies and gentlemen.

And these are the stories.

Even though we won't be on until January 18th, you're caught up already because you're going to see these stories.

For example, White House unveils presidential hairdo advisory system.

That is going to happen.

Florida to recount the recount of the first recount.

There's a story I can guarantee.

Self-driving Uber, self-driving, still insist on blasting Armenian music.

Wow.

A heartfelt moment as boy reunited with cell phone.

Oh, that's...

Democrats launch launch GoFundMe to cover Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bubble Route.

That's...

That's a...

Yes.

Put in a word with the big man for that, because I can't.

Santa killer freed under Florida's stand-your-chimney law.

Wow, that's...

LGBTQ group called homophobic by LGBTQ A group.

White woman calls 911 after spotting black man on box of rice.

All right, he was the world's top chess player for 20 years.

He became a pro-democracy activist and now a co-author of the new book, Fight for Liberty, Defending Democracy in the Age of Trump.

A true hero, Gary Kasparov, is over here.

Gary Kasparov.

How are you, my friend?

Great to see you.

You know everybody here, I'm sure.

Oh, Boson.

Okay.

So, Gary, you are such a good person to have here as America retreats from liberal democracy.

I have some experience with this.

You do.

And

it's disheartening.

We thought a generation ago when the Cold War ended that things were going to turn out differently.

I guess, first of all, could they have, could Russia have gone a different direction than Putin or was he inevitable?

It's a long story.

And a sad story.

I think we should talk now about the lessons we can learn from this story.

And I think everyone should recognize that democracy is not for granted.

So you have to fight for that.

Somehow, you know, I think it's a Trump election, a very important milestone because Americans understand it's, you know, it's always in making.

It's in the mechanisms that have been developed 240 years ago or so.

They're getting rusty.

And it's very important that you revisit it.

And there's certain even amendments, you know, could be reconsidered because, again, the end of the 19th century, people couldn't foresee everything.

It's one of the best documents ever written because they could, you know, predict so many turns of history, but not everything.

And it's now it's, you know, we have to look at this again.

And the idea of the book was just,

between us, we call it Federalist Papers 2.0.

It's just to actually bring these values and to adjust them to the demands of the 21st century.

So Trump, kind of a stress test for democracy.

It's the Trump's election was a stress test.

His re-election would be probably a demise of democracy.

I think so too.

And I have been saying to anyone who will listen on this show for as long as I can, he's not going to leave even if he loses the election.

And I've heard maybe I finally have a witness here who will agree with me.

Look, he didn't want to recognize results of elections.

No, he didn't want to recognize the results of elections.

He had won.

Right.

Right.

What's he going to do when he loses one?

He's doing it in Florida now.

He's setting the table for that.

Look,

again, we should even credit, if you may call it the credit, that he succeeded in two years turning bad into normal.

All of a sudden, something that we believed would be unacceptable, you know, even a coffee house debate, now it's a part of a mainstream political battle.

And

no doubt he will not stop.

We haven't seen the worst.

Because he will be fighting with survival.

Look, his affection to all dictators, in my view, based on his psychological envy to them, because he also wants to be like them.

So he wants to act without any checks and balances.

That's why I guess he was depressed by the results of these elections, because all of a sudden now he could be checked.

But again,

the presidential power is so vast.

And we have to agree that in the last few decades, probably after Watergate, we could see the accumulation of more and more power in the Oval Office.

And by the way, Trump's election was another warning that many things, many loopholes had to be closed.

We have to look at the presidential power and at the checks and balances and

to recognize that, again, we did a very poor job predicting Trump.

And now it's time to prepare for 2020 because I have no doubt that he will fight his tooth and nail.

And what we saw in this midterm, prepare for wars.

And what happens if he doesn't go?

What do you think happens to the world?

I don't think it's not about him staying there if he loses.

It's about the price this country will pay.

But what's even more important is the image of America worldwide.

Because what Trump again succeeded in doing is ruining the image of America being just a true democracy.

Because all of a sudden you see the man who acts like Vladimir Vladimir Putin or other you know fellow dictators.

Well, I want to read this quote and I've read it before on this show.

It's Paul Ryan.

They caught him on a mic.

He didn't know he was being taped

with Kevin McCarthy, who is now their leader.

And McCarthy says, there's two people I think Putin pays, Rohrbacher and Trump.

Swear to God.

And Ryan says,

This is off the record.

No leaks, right?

This is how we know we're a family here.

Chilling.

mafia-like.

It's not like Paul Ryan says, oh my god, you think Trump is on the payroll of Putin?

I cheered on results of the election.

And Rohrbacher in Orange County, because he lost.

My comment was that it's a

first elections that Putin lost, fair and square.

Well, that's the thing.

I mean, if anybody Putin was going to get involved in it, it would be the election of Rohrbracker.

If people don't know who he is, they call him Putin's congressman.

Don't forget, he is.

He is

one of the biggest fundraising events was organized by Eric Prince.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's it's more than $200,000 was raised for Rohrbacher.

I believe there were other

Russian connections that had been used to prop him up.

He's been on our show many times, Dana Rohbracher.

Nice guy, traitor, but a very nice guy.

But I mean,

that's all very discouraging.

On the other hand, the antibodies have started to kick in.

Even in Europe, you know, Brexit's starting to curdle and possibly come apart.

Here we have the midterm elections.

And And don't forget, our wave, the so-called blue wave, the rainbow wave, was bigger than the Tea Party wave.

In other words, the Tea Party, 6.8% they beat us by in terms of a total popular vote.

This was nine points.

So we had a bigger wave than the Tea Party.

We didn't get all the seats we deserved because of gerrymandering.

But think about that.

That means that the antibodies are starting to kick in.

We should be proud of that.

I think we should be proud of that.

But also, let me go to the point of that.

It's good that

you mentioned the rest of the world because

we're seeing the same kind of phenomena in Europe as well with the simultaneous rise of the alt-right but also very far-left groups.

And Vladimir Putin was very good in just using this new landscape because he doesn't care.

He can support any group that is spreading chaos.

And I mean, look at Germany.

I mean, as a result of

Merkel's policy, because they didn't want to interfere in Syria, they accepted refugees.

We have in Germany now the third largest party, neo-Nazis.

94 neo-Nazis in German Bundestag.

And it's a time when there was no economic crisis.

But everywhere we look around the world, Van, we see rising illiberalism.

You can no longer look at Hungary and Poland and say these are liberal democracies.

Far-right parties in Austria and Germany.

Trump's fetish for autocracy.

And what we should understand about Trump, it's not the question isn't...

Can he lock up reporters?

The question is, if he could, would he?

And does anybody believe that the answer is no?

The answer is yes.

Every day he assaults our institutions.

He assaults the foundational pillars of a constitutional republic.

And this is all much more fragile, I believe, than we think it is.

I mean, fascism did not rise in the 30s because it was strong, but because democracy was weak.

And we have a crisis in our democracy.

Democracy is lubricated by trust, faith, and belief in the system.

And it has been eroded singularly by this president's constant assault on every institution that's been handed down as part of our American heritage through great sacrifice and great valor.

And it is appalling.

Steve Schmidt, he's going to fight Smallwell for that Democratic nomination.

I swear to God, he is.

Everything that you just said, Steve, but I think also as a historian, it's important important to take this back.

And Donald Trump came to us as the result of some chronic problems in our democracy in our country.

Speaking of Amazon, I mean the fact that we have basically gotten rid of antitrust

enforcement in this country, right?

That we have the wealthiest individual in the country, the wealthiest corporation, and they are using the political process to extract more favors to distort democracy so that it doesn't work for people in all these communities that voted for Trump.

Facebook is worse than Amazon.

Did you see that yesterday?

Yes.

Facebook, it turns out that

Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, they knew about all this Russian interference before and during the 2016 election, and they spent a lot more time covering it up than doing something about it.

I mean, but even more chilling than that, too, I think, is the fact that they actually

hired.

They hired a firm that engaged in dark ops that tried to build on this antagonism to George Soros, which we've already seen in Hungary, has led to the most virulent anti-Semitism and the shutting down of a university.

And they actually at Facebook were willing to agitate that even after the bomb to his home, even after all of this.

Like, what is going on with these companies?

But also, are we complicit?

Every time we get that easier order on Amazon or we go to Facebook and give them likes that give the information to them that they sell to others, we also have to face, I think, our own implications.

I think the question with Facebook is:

is it literally, is it the worst thing ever invented or just the worst thing in the last 50 years?

I mean,

it is a vessel that has done real damage, real harm to our liberal small L institutions.

And we have a right in this country to look at these companies and make a decision as a people.

How big, how powerful do we want them to be?

How much information do we want them to have on us?

And they clearly...

cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

What I think is

no big company can.

That's what this proves.

These were all supposed to be liberal companies.

The reason that this hurts, I think the reason that people feel disappointed and even betrayed is because all the other institutions are failing.

And there was this sense that maybe these tech kids would be able to bring us a better future, that they would be the disruptors, that these kids would come up with a great new set of opportunities for us.

And it turns out that they are equally fallible and unfortunately.

And greedy.

And greedy.

And unfortunately, now we have...

How much money do you need to have when you wear the same t-shirt every day?

But

I don't understand the way these people think.

I don't.

Here's what I think about it.

I see you trying to get in.

Here's what I think about it.

We now live in a world where we have so much data and so little wisdom.

That's the world that we live in.

You're so right.

There is an opportunity for them to begin to make some progress.

I don't know that Washington, D.C.

is going to be much more wise in trying to regulate them, but I think

they are young people, they've created something, I think they've now got to grow up and take more responsibility.

Yes, first of all, I have to say that technology is agnostic.

It's about people.

Yes, humans still have monopoly for evil.

Right.

And now we're dealing with new technology, very so powerful.

And of course, you know, as it happened many times before history, first it's used for destructive purposes.

You started with nuclear bomb and then nuclear reactor.

Because it's much easier.

And it goes right to porn.

Facebook.

technology, it goes to porn.

Yeah, that's just an instance, yes, it's true.

But Facebook knew about the inherited weaknesses of their technology as Twitter.

They have been warned by myself and many others

before 2016 that it's open-ended system would serve, as I said, as a beehive for Russian bear.

Because it was, Putin already built the industry of fake news and troll factories.

He has been doing it since 2004, 2005 for Russia.

And then he moved to neighboring countries, then to Europe.

So America attacking America was just a matter of time.

You said a great thing.

You said dictators don't ask why.

They ask why not?

Why not attack Wisconsin?

Speaking about Facebook, I mean, we have to also mention that Obama administration knew about this attack.

Yes.

And Congressman Adam Schieff has been crying in September 2016 saying we have all the data to actually stop it.

But everybody thought, everybody thought Hillary would have won anyway.

So why should we interfere?

No,

that's not true.

Obama wanted to move forward on a bipartisan basis.

He reached out to Mitch McConnell.

And here's the deal.

Think about the instability that would have been created if Obama had gone out there on his own.

I'm sorry.

It could do worse than electing Trump.

Well, hey, listen,

if you don't elect Trump, but you wind up with an armed Tea Party response because you have, the since it's not, listen, I agree with Faye, but an American cigar defending the American Constitution.

He's sworn.

He knew there was a threat, and it was an open threat.

He had to interfere.

And that's for the same reason Facebook wanted to protect its business, the Twitter.

They didn't want to do anything that could jeopardize their internet.

The question for Facebook is this.

Is it an American company that operates globally or a global company that is headquartered in America?

Because if it's an American company, it should act in a specific way, and that is in defense of the vital interests of the United States.

The country is under attack.

The country is under attack by hostile foreign powers looking to interfere in our elections process.

Facebook is the vehicle by which they did it.

The senior executives of the company knew it was going on.

They covered it up.

They lied about it.

And that company, more than any company in the history of this country, has done more and more quickly to subvert American liberal democracy than any other ever.

Okay.

All right, all right, all right.

Before we run out of time for the year, because we only have a few minutes left, I gave my predictions predictions with future headlines.

I want to ask if anybody on this panel, tell me what's going to happen in the next two months.

I would guess a lot of indictments.

I mean, is this when Mueller's going to like spill the beans finally?

Look, I

am completely I've completely given up predicting what's going to happen with the Mueller investigation just because we've been waiting so long to hear from him.

So

whatever he comes out with.

Why would Trump go so apeshit?

I think I think he's very nervous.

He said they have found no collusion.

I love this.

They have found no collusion.

We don't have the report yet.

It's like people who write reviews.

I've been a victim of them sometimes before they see the show.

Yes, yes.

They are screaming and shouting at people.

Yes, can you imagine someone doing that?

Horribly threatening them.

I mean, this guy is just

to come up with answers they want.

They don't care how many lives they ruin.

Again, imagine a person.

These are angry people.

Yes, we don't see that with him.

They won't even look at the bad acts and crime.

We haven't seen that in a while, where he went after Mueller specifically.

He is afraid of something.

We don't know if what he's afraid of is criminally liable for himself or others, if it's just embarrassing, but whatever it is, he acts like a guy who's terrified.

And I think whatever his fears are, they are likely to come true by the end of the year.

That's what I think.

Okay.

Mike.

My concerns are

related, but different in that I actually fear for the potential for violence in this country because the Republican campaign strategy in these midterms when it came down to it was just the strategic use of racism to divide us against one another and to gin up this fear at the border and you know I have done research on the Ku Kuk Klan studied the history of the right in this country you don't unleash monsters like that and then bank them down.

And so when this caravan, if it reaches the border, already we have these militias going down.

I really fear that we're going to have bloodshed there.

But not to be too dark before the holidays.

I also think that we saw an incredible mobilization of the American people, or good people, in this election to turn things around, as you said, Gary, to take responsibility for our democracy, to make their voices count, to bring other people out, and to turn this thing around.

And so I think that work will continue, and we need to support that.

But I think we cannot underestimate the threat for violence.

I don't forget that 12 bombs were sent out.

The reason why we're not having a completely different tone to this show and everyone that took place after is because luckily they don't believe in science so they can't build a bomb.

Hey, look, somebody will.

I mean he's not good, you're right, he's not going to be the last guy to do it.

The attempted assassination of the entire leadership of the Democratic Party failed just because they weren't good at their job, at their mission.

And I do think that we've gotten, we've been punched numb so that something like that can happen, you forget two days later that it even happened.

And I think also with the Mueller situation, there's no referee that's trusted anymore.

If Mueller were to come out and tell the left Trump did nothing wrong, we wouldn't believe it.

And if he came out and told the right he did everything wrong, they wouldn't believe it.

We're now in uncharted territory where we don't trust the presidency.

Congress has been gerrymanded.

We don't trust that.

The Supreme Court's been stacked.

So you're now in a society where all of our institutions have this air of illegitimacy to them.

So we're going to have to try to turn to each other, not on each other.

That's going to be our challenge.

We thought Russia was going to become like us, and we became like Russia.

You live in a world where there's no vacuum.

So if you walk away, so your force will actually pursue you

in your own country.

And actually,

I don't know what's going to happen in the next two months, but my hope that something is not going to happen because typically all the dictators or would-be dictators, when they are frustrated, when they're limited domestically, they look for foreign policy and venture.

Yes.

And Trump still has all the powers.

Yes, he is.

And it's not just about the Mexican border.

Let's hope there will be no bloodshed far away because this is a classical way of diverting attention of the body.

Wag the dog.

Exactly.

Well, I mean, understand,

we have the U.S.

Army deployed to the border active duty elements of the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 4th Infantry Division, active duty units for a political stunt, for an invasion that is spun up and made up out of whole cloth.

So sometime over the next two months, those units will be quietly withdrawn as if this never happened, because in fact it never did, and completely made up deployment.

And how many Christmases, Thanksgivings have these men and women missed to see them being abused down there on that border?

And they'll come home and we'll hardly see a story about it.

Trump's big lie having worked again.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

It's time for New Rule.

Okay, New Rule.

When Vladimir Vladimir Putin walks in, try to contain your excitement.

Try to be a little more like these two who look like Satan just entered the room.

And then there's this guy who looks like he's watching his prom date come down the stairs.

New rule, the people who were concerned about kids eating tide pods and are now concerned that Tide's new box looks like it dispenses delicious wine

have to tell me is it really that hard not to put tide in your mouth

Jesus

what a country new rule

new rule now that Alex Barker and Aaron Smith who both have the same rare condition that leaves them unable to smile have met, dated, and gotten engaged, someone has to tell them things are going to get easier because this is what every couple looks like after a few years.

That's it.

New rules, before I react to this photo of Mexican dwarf wrestling, social justice warriors have to tell me, am I angry because this exploits and body shames?

Or am I proud because they're fearless Latinx people who are beautiful at any size?

It doesn't matter to me.

Personally, I didn't even notice they were dwarfs.

I don't see height.

New rule: someone has to start an employment agency just for people with face tattoos.

Why suffer the embarrassment of going to a job interview only to be told, I'd like to hire you, but your face says pussy eater.

And finally, new rule,

let's stop talking politics to each other.

Everyone these days says that the way to bridge our frightful partisan divide is to talk to the other side so we can hear each other's point of view.

No,

that's exactly what you shouldn't do.

It never works.

No one ever flips to your side.

Talk to them, yes, but not about politics.

It's true.

You would have better luck trying to talk Tom Cruise out of Scientology.

Just don't go there.

When I was a kid, politics and religion was just not something the adults talked about.

It was considered private and kind of impolite and nosy to go there.

Politics was like Las Vegas.

What happened in the voting booth stayed in the voting booth.

We used to have no idea how much we really hated each other, and it worked.

So when people ask, how do we bridge the partisan divide?

I'll tell you how.

Shut the fuck up.

Really?

Really?

We never used to fight over politics 24-7.

If somebody said, eh, hot enough for you today, the other guy didn't say, yes, yes it is because of your party's environmental policies.

True though that may be.

But saying it at every opportunity doesn't help.

People don't change their politics.

Over the years, hundreds of people have come up to me and said, I saw a religioist and now I'm an atheist.

Nobody ever comes up to me and says, I watch real time every week and now I'm a liberal.

They'll flip on God, but not Trump.

That cult is serious.

Facebook.

Facebook used to be an innocuous place to humble brag and show cat videos.

Now it's a cauldron of political hatred.

It was a platform to gain friends.

Now it's more about rooting them out.

What's with this?

If you don't agree with what I just posted, unfriend me.

Fuck you, gladly.

We need to get back to what Facebook used to be about, letting us see who from high school was fat, gay, or dead.

So,

look, Thanksgiving is in a few days.

And that means spending time with family and in-laws, some of whom we may not agree with politically.

Just don't go there.

Don't waste your time talking to people about Trump.

If they haven't figured it out yet, neither will anything you say over the green bean casserole.

My childhood Thanksgivings were always in Princeton, New Jersey, because my father's sister married a country club Republican.

And I was aware my parents didn't like Republican politics, but they liked Uncle Howe.

There was zero talk at Thanksgiving dinner about how wrong they thought his politics were.

The ride home, that was a different story.

It's true.

James Carville and Mary Matlin, the epitome of political opposites, got married on Thanksgiving Day, and it's lasted 25 years.

Their secret

obviously hate sex

is a part of it.

But also, they don't talk politics at home.

Mary once told an interviewer, talking about the impact of the minimum wage is just not something that is high on our list of fun things to do.

Exactly.

Especially when there are so many other things you can talk about.

There's a book I've had on my shelf for years.

It's called 14,000 Things to Be Happy About.

I know, it doesn't really sound like me.

And you're right, it isn't.

But I use it from time to time in writing because it's just a list of random things that can serve the purpose of getting an idea started.

If you're high, it doesn't work so good.

But I thought of this book in relation to our subject tonight.

If there are 14,000 things to talk about just in this book, we don't need to talk politics all the time.

We could talk about,

I could read from from a, I will, a random page:

baking your own bread,

silent movies, fresh cut flowers, morning dew, mahogany, the three-day weekend, slumber parties, wagon wheels, fortune cookies, mother goose, Sunday naps.

See, talk about that shit.

Talk about how the parking lot at Trader Joe's is too small.

Talk about how pennies are a pain in the ass and they start playing the Christmas music too early.

Talk about how 69 is never as good as you thought it would be.

Just don't talk politics.

Okay, that's our show.

We're done for the year.

We'll be back January 18th.

Thank you, audience everywhere, for sticking with us.

I'll be at the castle in...

Oh, it's Hawaii time, Maui, December 30th in Kona Lui, and at the Blazedlle in Honolulu, New Year's Eve.

I want to thank Steve Schmidt, Nancy McLean, Van Jones, Gary Kasparov, Eric Swalwell.

Join us now for Overtime.

Thank you, everybody.

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.