Ep. #467: Malcolm Nance, Nancy MacLean

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Start the clock.

Right here with me.

Thank you very much.

All right, thank you.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

That's enough of that, I tell you.

I'm so I love you.

Thank you.

I'm so.

Please, I'm all over Clems.

I know, and I'm so glad you're in a good mood because I'm in a good mood.

Why?

I'm wearing ostrich underwear.

Oh, it's the best, the ostrich.

I tell you.

No, we've been on vacation for about, I can always tell when it's time to come back from a vacation because the state is on fire.

That seems to be.

And do you know that it is 95 days until the election?

So.

Clear your calendar.

And the voting systems are more insecure than the president.

Now,

our president has always been unhinged.

And I have to say, in the last month, he did not get more hinged.

Did you see this week?

He held two of his Hillbilly Nuremberg rallies.

And

It's scary to people in this profession.

I mean, he calls the media the enemy of the people, except, of course, for Fox News.

They're so far up his ass, they're the enema of the people.

Yeah, from now on, collusion, not a crime, but journalism apparently is.

We live in a country now where reporting reality

gets attacked because it threatens the fantasy world created by the cult leader.

So it was kind of good to see.

A couple of days ago, all our top security people, head of the FBI, head of the director of national intelligence, all those dudes were out there saying, it was Russia.

It's Russia now.

It's happening again.

It's not a drill.

Now, if we can just get the commander-in-chief on the same page.

Because when Trump says no collusion, he means with his own national security team.

I mean, how can these people expect to do their job when the president himself is tweeting, as he did a couple of days ago, that the Attorney General has to stop this rigged witch hunt with Russia?

What happened to I Can't Comment on an Ongoing Investigation?

Remember those days?

And if you're so innocent, why do we have to stop the investigation?

It's a little suspicious.

It's like when you come home, and the first thing the kids say is, the babysitter's a liar.

How would I know that?

Don't think that deeply into it.

Anyway, but look, all praise to President Trump.

We have to give the good news to unemployment is at an 18-year low.

However, our real biggest, true economic problem is income inequality.

And that's not getting better.

Still,

no reason for what happened this week.

Someone cut one of Betsy DeVos's yachts loose.

It's true, but it's okay.

She has 10.

Yes, now comes the real challenge for Betsy DeVos, subtraction.

Oh, but

you know who is apparently going broke?

This was shocking, the NRA.

Did you see this?

A recent court filing was made public and they are in such grave financial trouble, they said they've already lost all their insurance coverage and they soon may be unable to exist.

Not really.

I feel bad for them.

They say the only thing they own of real value is Congress.

But you know,

but you know who apparently was living very well?

This guy, Paul Manafort.

Have you seen that the try?

He was Trump's campaign manager, and he's on trial now, and apparently he was living very well.

He had an $18,000 karaoke machine.

Cashmere jeans.

Do you have the cashmere?

Cashmere.

I did.

and the ostrich jacket worth $15,000.

He pled not guilty by reason of MC Hammer.

It's an interesting defense.

In five years, he spent a million dollars just on suits.

I said this motherfucker hurt a cocaine.

But listen, we're in California.

California has

okay, well, we don't have to gloat,

but we are the leader of the resistance.

We do get a lot of shit.

People make fun of us, and fuck them, because we are the leader of the resistance.

Yes.

Leader of the resistance, and also something we did a long time ago, mileage standards for cars, because we are so big, we raised mileage standards, and the automakers, they all had, they were forced to make their cars in line because you can't not sell cars in a state with 40 million people.

So naturally, Trump now is trying to get rid of the standards for cars, and he says it will save lives.

I could not make this up.

He said, listen to the logic.

If your car gets bad mileage, you'll drive less and have less of a chance to get into an accident.

Yes, Trump is claiming he is doing this for safety reasons.

Always the number one concern of the man who fucks porn stars without a condom.

He says don't think of it as smog.

Think of it as a permanent Instagram filter.

It's

but okay

The last thing that I must report to you, I don't want to,

but this happened this week, and it was kind of a big story.

I learned a new word.

I didn't want to.

But that word is QAnon because we saw this at the Trump rally.

All the people, not all the, but a lot of them wearing these two, there, Q, Q, and we're with Q, we're all Q.

At first I thought, oh great, Republicans have finally come to terms with their sexuality.

But no, no.

This is a big movement on the right.

See, we don't hear about these things because we're not crazy, but see,

Q is a person, a member of the deep state, way high up in the deep deep state, but now he's turning on them and he's revealing that the world is run by a giant pedophile ring.

Really?

Every president since Reagan has been part of it, Hillary Obama.

You know who's a pedophile?

Tom Hanks.

Steven Spielberg.

And who's going to stop this?

Trump.

Trump.

Because who is more qualified to stop pedophilia than the creep who used to walk in on Miss Teen USA pageants?

He wasn't being a creep.

He was looking for pedophiles.

He's the Serprico of child molesters.

Trump loved those girls like they were his own daughter.

We got a great show.

We got Charles Blow, Kristen Soltis Anderson, and Steve Schmidt are here.

And a little later, he's speaking with author and history professor Nancy McClain.

But first up, he was the career U.S.

counterintelligence terrorism intelligence officer and author of the new book, The Plot to Destroy Democracy, How Putin's Cyber Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.

A great patriot, Malcolm Nance.

There he is.

I bow to you, sir.

Good to see you.

Your patriotism.

So much more than ours.

How are you, Malcolm?

No, you always got a smile on your face.

I don't know how you do it.

I need sedatives.

Do you have any?

But okay, the first thing, I just, we're talking about the election there and the monologue.

You saw they're into Facebook again.

Can they be stopped?

Do you think Russia can be stopped as we are presently constituted?

Yes, Russia can be stopped.

You have to understand something.

There are a lot of safeguards built into the Constitution.

And what the Russians have been doing is they've figured out that there are a few things within our system of government that they can exploit.

And the first one was freedom of speech, freedom of the the press, right?

And when they do that, then they can go after other components of it, like right to assembly.

But first, they have to actually destroy the fundamental underpinnings of American democracy.

And the way you do that is you elect a president, and they elected a president.

So can we stop that?

What can we do?

What the founding fathers in the Constitution wrote, which is right to assemble, which is to mobilize and wipe away electorally

the people who have undermined our democracy.

Well, I hope that's true, except that they got that rigged too.

I mean,

you can only rig so much.

I know, but like, in the last 16 years, two of the presidents have not won the popular vote.

So, you know, we talk about how the Republicans' days are numbered because they're getting older.

Yeah, but it doesn't matter if they got the whole thing rigged.

Well, I mean, with gerrymandering and voter suppression and the Koch brothers and all the money and all that.

Sure, but I think their biggest thing that they've rigged is they've rigged apathy.

They've managed to get 50% of the electorate to not even come out.

Right.

You know.

But what about the actual hacking?

I mean, there was a hacker convention this weekend in Vegas.

That must be a great party.

Was Stormy Daniels there?

Because then it would have been really sad.

No, we'll get to Stormy Daniels in a minute.

But somebody hacked into the voting booth in 90 minutes.

I think last year, a 16-year-old got in there in 45 minutes and made the voting booth play a song.

Right.

And Rick rolled it.

It's a voting booth.

We turned the voting booth into a jukebox in 45 minutes by a 16-year-old.

You're telling me we can stop Russia?

Well, you know, I used to work at NSA.

We can do anything if it's electronic.

But you have to understand the underlying attack strategy.

The American electoral system is made up of a lot of diverse systems, whether you're talking about computers for voting, you know, electronic voting, but a lot of it's still paper ballots, mail-in ballots.

You can't hack those, okay?

You can try to stuff ballot boxes.

That's very hard to do.

The place, though, if the Russians are going to attack, they are not going to attack those machines.

They are going to attack the simple laptop or desktop that's sitting in a state registrar's office that tallies up all the numbers that come in from those disparate voting systems.

That could be one or two small computers.

computers.

They used to do it on chalkboards, actually, you know, back in the 60s.

They would do it on chalkboards and they'd write down and do the math right in front of people.

That's vulnerable.

And if I were going to do targeteering on it, I was going to choose what to do in a national election, I would go right to that computer and then I would make it change numbers right before everyone's face so that you would know that it's happened and throw chaos into the system.

But the only way to make sure that that doesn't happen is you've got to vote.

And that's where our biggest problem is.

I think that's going to change.

I think people are going to vote.

But so you work for the NSA, you said, and other agencies.

We don't want to go too into your path.

Whatever.

But, you know, you know me.

I was never one of those liberals who shit on the intelligence agencies and the people.

Yes, some mistakes were made.

We're all humans.

But I got to tell you, when I see, and I can only imagine how you feel about, when I see Trump saying things like, John Brennan is a low life.

He called him a lowlife.

Michael Hayden, Clapper.

You know, I've had some of these guys on the show.

When I see these guys, I do not see people who are power hungry.

First of all, like you just said, you can do anything.

If you guys were power hungry, you would have taken over by now.

Right.

And I wish you would now.

But

the fact that this president, to save his own skin, is willing to throw under the bus as collateral damage our intelligence service and call these, he said Clapper, I guess they got to him too, got to him.

Like he funnied up the intelligence.

It looked like Trump lost the popular vote or some bullshit.

And who was it that got to him?

Some mafia boss?

Some, you know, I don't know, Russian mafia boss who was a former director of the KGB?

I'm sorry, that's Vladimir Putin, right?

But

these guys.

These people are heroes.

I'm going to talk.

I know.

They are I agree.

I know Mike Hayden.

I know John Brennan.

I've met them both.

They would walk by the statue of Nathan Hale, the first spy to die for this nation, day in and day out, thanklessly.

You wouldn't believe the people that work.

This audience is a pretty good cross-section of the average person that works at NSA or CIA or DIA.

And they don't want recognition.

I didn't want recognition until I got pulled into media.

We just want to keep you safe.

And Donald Trump does not fundamentally believe that that is what those people are doing.

He's important to him.

He's what's important to him.

But this is, you know, when he attacks the deep state,

I always think the deep state, first of all,

you know, Time magazine has man of the year, even though it's sometimes a computer or a group of people, or, you know, we still use that term, the deep state should be the man of the year.

My question to you is, how deep?

How deep is your state?

I really need to know.

Because we're living in a land of fools.

No, there's no such thing as deep state.

Deep state is the janitor.

It's the government.

Yeah, it's the janitor at GSA that is there polishing the floors at night.

It's the person who makes social security checks arrive on time.

Yes, but it's also Hayden and Clapper and Brennan.

That's the deep state, is the people and James Comey and McCabe and all these people who are still there.

He's still having to fight the deep state.

My question is, when he fires a lot of these, he's fired a lot of them already.

How deep is it?

How long before we don't have

to do it?

Yeah, I mean, what are you going to do?

You're going to start going down to the third tier angle.

That is exactly what he's going to do.

They are already talking about impeaching Rod Rosenstein, right?

Right.

Okay, because who gets the report, the Mueller report?

It's the person in that job, the deputy attorney general.

So, if he has a reliable collaborator, when he gets that report from Mueller, he can throw it in the garbage.

Yeah, no.

First off, that stuff is going to go into a classified vault and it's got to go through about 20 people to get there.

That stuff is going to fall off a truck by a pallet load in front of the New York Times.

I'm sorry.

That's true, too.

Yeah.

All right.

So you are on my page that we are not

overreacting to Russia.

No, we're actually underreacting to it, I think, right?

We are, yeah.

You ever hear that song in the musical Hamilton where George Washington rides in and everybody thinks he's a savior and the first words out of his mouth is, we are outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned.

We got to make an all-out stand.

That is where we are.

We are under attack.

And this election that's coming up, this could be the last one as we know it.

So if we lose it.

What do you think,

the meeting that Putin and Trump had, two hours there together,

just talk to me like, no cameras, no audience,

we're just having a couple of brews.

What did they really say to each other?

What did Putin want?

What did Trump want?

Are they as overt as, hey, thanks so much for rigging the last election for me.

You know, we got another one coming up.

You could get your bots to do something for me.

I promise.

I'll get the sanctions lifted.

Is it that naked?

I wouldn't be so sure if it was that naked.

I think it was, I think they've already got that plan hashed out.

I think that, look, Trump in 2012, sorry, 2013, when he went to Miss Universe, met with the top 12 oligarchs in Russia in secret, just like this.

He went in there a blank slate.

When he walked out, he was spouting to this day the Kremlin Party line, the elimination of NATO, the breakup of the European Union, getting America out of all of its treaty obligations, the elevation of Vladimir Putin.

That could only have been put into his head by men who are so rich that he's jealous of their riches.

So whatever they said in that meeting.

I'll tell you what I told Chris Matthews the other day on hardball.

I think what happened there was a secret Yalta, which was the meeting in the 1940s between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, where they divided up the Western world as it was going to look at the end of World War II.

I think that that meeting heralded the realignment of the Western world.

And what is it?

Well, you break up.

Well, the first thing is you destroy the Atlantic Alliance, breaking up the United States, NATO, and the European capitals, and you re-angle it to a poll between an autocratic Washington and an autocratic Moscow leading an axis of other European autocracies after you knock down their governments.

And Trump did that.

He called for, while he was sitting at Theresa May's table, he called for regime change in Brittany.

This is his plan to do it in the open, right?

Yes.

I knew guys who used to cheat on their wife like this.

They'd be at the most popular restaurant.

Honey, if I was cheating, would I be sitting here with my hand on her ass?

That's his method, right?

He does it right in open, and people can't believe.

I mean, the tweet this week about sessions should cut down, should close down the investigation.

The admission to Lester Holt, it's all out in the open.

Yeah, but he's doing it.

He's only speaking to 30% of the population of the United States.

But we can see him.

Yes.

And

we can hear him.

I don't know if he knows that we can hear him, but we can.

Yeah.

All right.

And he doesn't care, though.

All right, I got to go.

You're a great patriot.

Thank you for doing what you did and what you keep doing.

Keep talking.

Malcolm Nance, get his book.

Must reading.

Thank you.

Let's read our panel.

Okay.

Crazy stuff.

Charles, how you doing?

Okay.

All right, here's our panel.

He is the ex, ex-GOP political strategist

and co-host with Elise Jordan of the new podcast, Words Matter, premiering Monday, August 6th.

Steve Schmidt is over here.

Steve Schmidt.

She's a columnist for the Washington Examiner and political attributor for ABC News.

Kristen Soltis Anderson back with us.

And he is a columnist for the New York Times and author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, a memoir.

Charles Blow.

Hey, Charles.

Great to see you.

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

I didn't get to Facebook, really, with Malcolm Nann, so let me ask you that question.

Facebook, I never understood Facebook.

I think it's the worst thing to happen to this country since high fructose corn syrup.

Thank you very much.

But plainly, that is a way that they are screwing with our elections.

Should Facebook face bigger fines, penalties, something from the government?

Well, if they can't fix it, they absolutely should.

We owed them no sympathy, right?

How long are we going to give them to fix it?

But I just want to say this.

They've made

boatloads of money, zillions of dollars, right?

if you can make a sweater track me and show up the exact sweater that I want every time by selling all of my profile information to every advertiser that wants to have it yeah you can do anything right you can you can examine your platform and figure out who

has access, who is manipulating it, who are you, what third parties are you letting have access to it.

You can do that.

The reason that Facebook is not doing that is that they want to make it as easy as possible for the most people to be on that platform.

And the only way to make it safe is to make it a little bit harder for some people to be there and to to have a better gatekeeper on that site and to make a few less zillion dollars see i i disagree that there needs to be fines and and fines for what Facebook's stock price dropped in in the last week or two it was like the biggest one day loss in the history of the U.S.

stock market Zuckerberg driving an Uber now possibly because

because of the pressure being put on the platform by all of these stories.

I mean, Facebook, the reason why Facebook was able to defeat its competitors in the early days of social media is because the promise of Facebook was that the people you were interacting with were really who they said they were.

You had to have a name, it had to be your real identity.

So, Facebook should be expected by their users to live up to that promise.

But I don't believe that we should be expecting Mark Zuckerberg to become the FBI and the CIA.

I think, do you want Silicon Valley billionaires to become a business?

No, but you said, I mean, we all know that we need ID to buy groceries.

Why not ID to get onto Facebook?

Would that be so hard?

And wouldn't that stop the Russian bots?

How would you even begin enforcing that?

What type of ID to get onto Facebook for a global platform that serves people?

Something that tells you you are.

They already expect that you are who you are.

And right now they're trying to sift out who the...

Because if they don't, people are going to leave the platform and their stock is going to keep dropping.

Like the market is pressuring them to do the right thing.

All right.

Can I read what Dan Coates said?

He said, we're doing everything we can to have a legitimate election.

That is such a,

what an encouraging statement.

Let me read it again, just so you feel good over the weekend.

We're doing everything we can to have a legitimate election.

It's just,

so I feel like we're becoming one of these countries.

You know, every week, like, what are these countries that, you know, where the leader reports his kids?

And what are these countries where they have military parades?

And, you know, it's not that he hasn't attacked the media before, but we do take it a little personally, right?

When it gets to this nasty level,

he called today, I think, the media horrendous, horrible people, disgusting, enemy of the people.

We're all in the media now.

You're a pollster.

You're supposed to be dispassionate.

But we can be passionate about this, right?

But I think every American needs to be passionate about this.

I mean, the free press in this country predates the Constitution.

It was enshrined in the Constitution, but it predates the Constitution.

It is one of the things that makes America different, that makes America special, and that makes America great.

And

when we have people

like the president, with the power of the presidency, trying to whittle away at that,

to attack not only the truth sayers, but the truth seekers, including the investigators.

Anybody seeking the truth, he attacks, right?

Once you are removed from truth, anything can sprout into that desert.

Yes, if you only believe Trump and Facebook,

that's your choice.

Well, so being a journalist is already a very dangerous job.

I mean there was the slaughter of journalists in Annapolis.

It was not because of Trump, it was because of a crazy guy who didn't like that they'd done an expose on him.

My point being that being a journalist is already really dangerous.

So what bothers me about this conversation about Trump saying mean things about the media is sometimes and most journalists well I know look I don't like come on enemy the people is not mean.

We're way past mean.

Most journalists are trying to do the right thing, but there are a handful that have gotten into this like pro-wrestling thing where they when Trump says mean things at the rally, they say, well, I'm how dare he say that?

And then they take selfies with all the people with the Make America Great again.

This isn't.

And it's like pro-wrestling.

And it's not good.

But this isn't a question about media bias.

What we're seeing is five things.

We're seeing somebody go to mass rallies, constantly lie to incite fervor in a cult of personality base.

We're seeing him make victimization honorable.

They're all victims, right?

We're seeing the allegation of conspiracy, the deep state, hidden, nefarious movements that only the leader can see.

We see the scapegoating of mass of minority populations, vulnerable populations.

And then lastly, the assertion that I need to exercise these powers that no president has ever claimed to have.

This is deliberate.

This is an assault on objective truth.

And once you get people to surrender their sovereignty, that what is true is what the leader says is true.

What is true is what the leader believes is true, even though what's true is staring you in the face.

When that happens, you're no longer living in a democratic republic.

35% of this country has checked out.

They have joined the cult.

They are obedient.

They are obedient to the leader.

And this is straight out of 1984 with Winston at the end of the book.

When the party official is holding up four fingers and says, Winston, how many fingers there are?

Winston in tears says, I see only four.

And the leader of the party says, but it could be three or it could be five.

It is what the party tells you.

And that is when democracy dies in America.

It's scary, but it did not begin to talk.

It didn't begin to talk.

Here's a straight line.

Come on, it's on a level that you.

Ten years ago, ten years ago, Sarah Palin walks out on stage at the Republican convention in Minneapolis, and she ignites a piece of the Republican base and then attacks

the lamestream media.

In 2012, Newt Gingrich rises in the polls in the South Carolina primary by attacking the media on stage.

This is not something that began with Trump, but the seeds have been planted in this within the Republican Party.

The seeds are not true.

See, that's the thing.

You are condemning the Republican Party, which it should be condemned, because forever they knew that these people were in that party.

They knew they were benefiting from this element of their party, and they turned a blind eye to it.

They said, I believe that we can control this.

We believe that we can bring them over to moderation.

We believe that we can keep these people hidden in the attic and only have them come out on election day.

And what you found out was that you cannot contain that monster and that Donald Trump has unleashed your monster that you always knew was there and has turned on you.

And now mainstream Republicans are now saying, oh my God, my party's going, no, that's the party that you were baiting and feeding the whole time.

It is different.

And you know what?

I want to show this clip.

I saw this Congressman, Stephen Lynch.

I'd never heard of him, but I saw him on TV.

And I want to show you a little bit of what he said a couple of weeks ago.

Are you kidding me?

This is where we're at now?

This is a disgrace.

A disgrace.

that was a national embarrassment in Helsinki

I was embarrassed that our president was siding against our intelligence agency it's time to decide what you stand for

do you stand for democracy or you stand with that gangster in Moscow and I'm

I am showing that

Because I feel,

first of all, it's very genuine.

It's not a trumped-up speech.

He really was feeling that.

And I feel like this, the Democrats are not doing this.

When I read you, what I just heard you, you do it.

You do it.

You don't have to do it.

You're a pulser.

We don't expect it from you.

But I hear moral outrage from you.

I read it in you.

An appropriate level of ire.

It's not about just screaming.

But I think the people in this country do not understand the level of the crisis we're at.

And to a degree, this has to take place.

This kind of talk, this kind of rhetoric, because I don't think otherwise they're going to get it.

Democracy is in regression all over the world.

In Poland, in Hungary, in Austria, in Italy, we see the rise of autocrats and autocracies, and to see an American president cheerleading it is as scandalous as it is disturbing.

But the assaults on the rule of law, the lawlessness of this president, the attacks on our institutions, and this may all be much more fragile, and it's certainly more fragile, I think, than I thought it was.

But the truth of the matter is this.

When we look back in history to the 1930s, fascism did not rise because it was strong, but rather because democracy was impotent and weak.

And when you have a country now where 80% of people born in the 1930s thinks it's essential to live in a, they think it's essential to live in a democracy, you ask the same question of people born in the 80s, the number is 25%.

That is a profound crisis, and America is under attack.

It is under attack by the Russian Federation that is trying to eradicate trust, faith, and belief in the American Republic, in our democratic institutions, and our political leadership and the majority party is complicit in it.

They are not defending this country and they are unfaithful to their oaths of office and to the Constitution of the United States.

This week something happened.

Jeff Sessions announced a religious liberty task force.

Are there religious people here tonight?

Well, you're going to be insulted by this bit.

Because, you know, they have this martyr complex, the Christians.

I'm sorry they do, just because I'm sure of your know-who.

And

so they feel like even though they're 69% of the population, they're somehow under attack.

So they have created this religious liberty task force, including this magazine, Religious Liberty Weekly.

Would you like to see some of the articles in in here?

Because this...

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Social media bombshell, pick of light shining through clouds not mandatory on Christian profiles.

Wow, there's a lot of fucking religious people here today, aren't there?

Recognizing the signs of oral sex.

It may be going on right under your nose.

And threat in the sky are rainbows gay air.

Okay, let's bring out Nancy.

She's a history professor at Duke University and author of Democracy and Change, the deep

history of the radical rights stealth plan for America.

Nancy McLean.

How are you?

Great to meet you.

You can bring that home with you.

Okay, so we've been going on and on about the trouble the country's in, but you've written a whole book about it.

And I think you would agree with some of our panelists here that it's been going on longer than Trump, right?

Yes,

but I would say thank you and amen to.

Yeah, okay.

This feud that he was sort of having with the Koch brothers, I know you've written a lot about the Koch brothers, it's really phony, isn't it, because they're basically on the same page, wouldn't you say?

Yes, it's a tremendous distraction.

I have been studying Charles Koch and the plan that he's been developing and the ideas that they've weaponized for over a decade now and I have learned one thing which is never pay any attention to any individual play and instead look at the long game that he's playing.

Once you understand that long game and you understand the strategy, you can get a better sense of what the pieces are and what to anticipate.

A case in point is this.

Suddenly we're seeing signs of light between them, all the other things that did nothing to upset Charles Koch, all the horrors that we've seen in different places, nothing about what happened at the border, etc.

Why now?

Why now?

Because they are this close to getting Brett Kavanaugh, a Koch-selected Supreme Court justice, on the court just in time to affect what Koch is actually seeking, which is, in the language of the architect whose ideas he's weaponized, who I studied in my book, James Buchanan, the first U.S.

Southerner to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, changes in our Constitution so radical as to be called a constitutional revolution.

They want to transform our Constitution in a radical and fundamental way, and we are all being distracted by the president's tweets while this is going on.

And that's so crazy, because the people who need the Constitution changed are the liberals.

We're the ones it's not working for.

So true.

I mean you mentioned the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court should be seven to two liberal because four of the justices were appointed by two by Bush and now two by Trump.

Two presidents who lost the popular vote.

That's what I mean.

The Electoral College works for them.

So so what do they want that they're not getting now?

Yeah, I actually have a little history lesson, a little civics lesson toward the end of my book where I point out that our Constitution is already the most restrictive of majoritarian democracy in the world.

We have what are called four veto, four, what's called veto points.

We have four, most people have one, maybe two, maybe three, we have four.

So these guys are so essentially greedy that they want to add more veto points to what we have.

What is a veto point?

What do you mean?

So things like the Electoral College, right?

Like the capacity of the Senate to veto, et cetera.

But what they want to actually put into effect is instead of a constitution of checks and balances, as we have now, a constitution of locks and bolts.

And while we're all distracted by Donald Trump's tweets, the network that Charles Koch is funding, groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, have been lining up authorizations for a constitutional convention.

They now have 28 of the 34 authorizations needed to call the first ever Article V Constitutional Convention since our Constitution was crafted.

And they have 10 liberty amendments, they call them, teed up and ready to go.

And we haven't been paying any attention at all, with the exception of groups like Common Cause.

Well, what are the 10 amendments?

What's like the top two horrible ones?

Yeah, okay, so this is also an example of how folks on our side could be a little bit more curious and stop thinking that we know everything and actually read the other side's stuff and pay attention to it.

Because some of these, there's a book that was a bestseller on the right that none of us have heard of called The Liberty Amendments that goes into this.

And you can Google them, but they include

a balanced budget amendment, which polls well and people understand that it would mean the end of Social Security and Medicare and all these other things that we value.

They also include putting voter ID in the U.S.

Constitution.

And they are so radical that they actually include revoking the 17th Amendment.

Now, nobody's going to remember what the 17th Amendment is, so I'll just tell you real quick.

It was a progressive era victory that let the people directly elect our U.S.

senators.

instead of having them selected by state government.

Senators

used to be appointed.

Exactly.

And the state government is the easiest for corporations to capture.

And the network knows this, and they've been capitalizing on it, and they now control 30 states.

And they're essentially putting a chokehold around progressive policy nationally and in the states at the local level with something called preemption.

So listen to this.

According to the Weldon

Cooper Center, by 2040, that's only like 20 years away, eight states will have half the population.

And 16, if you add another eight states, they'll have 70 percent.

The 16 most populous states will have 17% of the population.

30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate seats, of course, because California with 40 million people gets two senators, and so does Wyoming, with eight people.

So

it looks like we're becoming this country where

I feel like it's Iraq under Saddam.

And the liberals, let me go with me,

right?

Because the Sunnis were the minority, but they ran the country, right?

They were a third of the country, but they were in power.

And two-thirds of the country was the Shiites, and they had no power.

And we're going to be two-thirds of the country, the Liberals, but we're not going to have any power because of the axis of evil of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and Charles Koch.

And if I may say, they are actually.

What do we do then?

They are quite aware that they are a minority.

So I actually quote Charles Koch in the book when he says in 1997 when he's really launching this effort in earnest, he says, since we are greatly outnumbered, the failure to use our superior technology ensures failure.

Meaning, they know they are a permanent majority.

Repeated historical experience has shown them that the majority of the American people would never sign up for the America they are trying to bring into being, an America with no social security, no Medicare, no anti-discrimination legislation, no protection of our air and water, on and on and on.

So how are they going to get around that to still get what they want?

Stealth.

And doing things like voter suppression, using the myth of voter fraud, gerrymandering, destroying labor unions, and Planned Parenthood sources of collective.

And we don't pay, and you're right, we don't pay attention.

And you know why?

Because we're so distractible.

Facebook.

Exactly.

It's all the evil of Facebook.

It's true.

People don't read.

They think Facebook is reading.

It's not.

Okay, so let me ask this political question.

Trump is endorsing a lot of these

Trumpy candidates, and they're winning.

As soon as he, you know, they were talking about the

primary.

Should we be rooting for this?

I think this is actually a good thing, because I think what has to happen in the fall is that other Republicans have to see the Trump candidates lose.

Of course, they're going to win the primary, but that's the only way to break the stranglehold on the Republican politician, no?

Well,

if you look at the special elections, you're sitting there as a House campaign strategist.

You're saying that unless you're in a district that's plus 25% Trump or greater, right, you could be in trouble.

You could be in a plus 20% Trump district and you could go down in 2018.

So I think there's going to be an enormous blue tsunami.

I think the Republicans will lose control of the House.

But

what will be left behind will not be chastened.

It will be more batshit crazy.

Because what's left behind are going to be people in plus 25, plus 30% Trump districts.

And their only vulnerability, and

in a country now where the politicians pick their voters, not the other way around, their only vulnerability is to be out crazied in the next primary when 12% turnout occurs and only obviously the craziest people turn out.

And that's what Christine O'Donnell wants.

I don't mind if they're bad shit crazy as long as they're in the minority.

Right.

If they don't win,

be crazy.

Just be in the minority.

Because what we have now is a Congress that refuses to play its role as a check and balance in the presidency.

That cannot exist.

I have a little bit of a different perspective on the political side of this, which is that it depends on what kind of a district you're in.

In House races right now, the vast majority of Democratic ads are not focused on fighting Trump.

They're focused on the issue of health care.

On the Republican side,

more of these House folks are running ads about Trump.

The Senate is a very different picture because in the Senate, you have a lot of Democrats in states that Trump won.

And so in that case,

Trump plays a very different role than he does in, you know, right now, Democrats need to pick up 24 seats.

23 seats are that are Republican held are in districts that Hillary Clinton won.

There, if you're one of those folks, you would maybe rather not Donald Trump come to your have Donald Trump come to your district.

But if you are a Democrat in a red state and all of a sudden Trump shows up and says, get this Democrat out of here because they're obstructing my agenda, that can complicate things.

So it just depends on the geography and what race you're talking about.

Man, so I'm a historian, and so I feel slight discomfort because the conversation is so focused on the near term.

My first book was about the Ku Kucks Klan of the 1920s when it was the biggest right-wing organization we've experienced.

This 25% can do enormous damage.

I mean, I think we all understand that, to the norms of our society, to the way government operates, to we're already seeing the impact on the lives of even children of color in elementary schools from what the right has unleashed.

So, I think it's really important that we not just focus on the next election

cycle or the one after that, but instead start thinking about how are we gonna break that up?

How are we gonna reach the people who have been so deceived and so agitated and had their buttons pushed by this right?

And I know because I got on their mailing list, so I know the stuff they sent out, and it is ugly.

And they keep them in a state of high alert.

And I feel like if we get into a situation where we're just yelling and they're just yelling, we're not gonna break up this impasse that we're in, and we're gonna have to be a lot more strategic.

I hear that argument a lot because, and I'm very curious about it.

Because

where am I supposed to meet a bigot in the middle?

Right.

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah.

How does that work?

Yeah.

I'm so glad that you asked that because

it isn't what I'm suggesting.

I'm suggesting thinking about bringing into the conversation other things like the fate of Social Security, our public schools.

Look at the red state teachers' mobilization.

There are people who are angry.

They understand our society is coming apart.

They have a vision of what to do with it.

So on the particular question that you raised, Demos, the organization, great organization, but they've done actual focus groups on this issue, and they have poll tested these things that circulate among liberals, saying they poll tested two messages.

One is just a pure economic message to white voters that ignores all that Trump is doing and ignores this toxic environment.

The second one says to people directly, these people are trying to turn us against one another, trying to leverage hostility against African Americans and against immigrants and against people who are lesbian and gay or queer in order to get their agenda.

And if you approach people honestly and you give them that message that that is wrong.

You talk about white.

And yes.

No, no, no, Tony, you're right.

You just said, what am I talking about?

But it's a very serious thing because

this whole conversation after 2016 was about how do we make white people feel less anxious and afraid,

more comfortable.

Isn't that a very curious thing to tell the rest of us who've all lived our lives feeling afraid, uncomfortable, anxious, that we know how to make life of the killer.

Also, I mean in a week, excuse me, but in a week when we found out a lot of the people on the right believe in QAnon, that they believe there's this giant cabal of child molesters running the world, you know, that when the people say, don't say, don't, it doesn't help to say they're stupid.

But you think Tom Hanks is a pedophile.

Again, just like what you said, I don't know how to meet in the middle there.

I don't know where to, I don't know how to talk to that person.

You can go back through history, right, all the way to the beginning.

25% of this country has always been whack jobs, right?

Always, right?

I mean, going back, the penchant for conspiracy,

the know-nothing movement that throws the marble that the Catholic Pope donated for the Washington Monument into the Potomac River.

It has always been there.

The point is, there are more of us than there are of them.

And in an election that is secure, right, you hope that that manifests itself.

But fear is a contagion in a democracy.

Trump uses fear, and he's exhausting the opposition.

When you're in a fight, you can win two ways.

You can bring your opponent to submission, think Germany and Japan after World War II, or you can break their will to fight.

Think of the United States and Vietnam.

And the degree to which Trump and his lies and the constancy of the craziness, it breaks people's wills.

It checks them out.

They become exhausted by it.

And I think that there's some evidence in the polling to see that's happening.

And so 95 days from an election, which I would argue is the most important midterm election in the history of the United States of America.

I agree.

Right?

In fact,

everybody out there,

everybody out there has a job to do.

And it's to vote and make sure your friends vote because there must be a check on this lawless administration or we're down the road 10 miles into Trumpistan, looking at the United States of America in the rearview mirror.

Great way to end it.

Thank you, panel.

Thank you.

Time for new rules, everybody.

All right, New Roll, the guards who caught this Texas woman trying to smuggle meth into prison have to tell me, what tipped you off?

And she has to tell me me why, out of 28 million Texans, you're the only one not wearing a trucker hat.

That was too rough, I agree.

New World police must admit that stealing a shark from an aquarium by wrapping it in a blanket, placing it in a stroller, and disguising it as a baby was a brilliant plan.

Because nobody ever says anything when they see a really ugly baby.

New rule:

fat guys have to settle on a strategy for suits.

Alex Jones says, go four sizes too small, so you look like an ugly kid who had a summer growth spurt.

But Trump says, no, wear them six sizes too big.

Like it's a tent on the circus is your ass.

Wait a second, his jacket's too small, yours is too big.

Did you guys hook up?

New Roll, the Scottish ice cream parlor that sells mayonnaise-flavored ice cream,

has to apologize to the rest of Scotland.

You invented a food that's shitty even for Scotland.

That's like making a porno that's too twisted for Japan.

You've seen that porno.

New rule, someone must tell the pride of lions that stalked and ate three rhinoceros poachers in the South African game reserve, hey, next time, save some room for dessert.

And finally, New Rule, the party of Reagan, has to explain how it has become the party of Putin.

While real time is on our break last month, the infamous P-tape was finally found.

It's a high-definition video of a press conference in Helsinki,

and it's irrefutable evidence of a Russian hoe, and his name is Donald Trump.

And like most hoes,

he always sounds terrified when he's he's with his pimp.

President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

And what he did is an incredible offer.

He just said, it's not Russia.

I will say this.

I don't see any reason why it would be.

Yeah, this is like after 9-11 if Bush stood on the rubble at the World Trade Center and shouted into the bullhorn, Bin Laden is innocent and the FBI will hear from all of us soon.

Yes, the President of the United States is a traitor, but being Trump, a man who's never been faithful to anything but himself, that is not such a surprise.

But how did Russia flip an entire political party and not the one that was supposedly soft on Russia?

87% of Republicans say Trump should invite the dictator who keeps attacking us to the White House to stay, probably.

And Melania said he could have my room.

Now,

of course, part of this is due to the Republican Party now being a straight-up cult.

Trump can claim that when he said would, he meant to say wouldn't.

And because every day is opposite day now, the rest of the party says makes perfect unsense to me.

Would is wouldn't, and being friends with Russian thugs is, repeat after me, good, not bad.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Good thing, not a bad thing.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

It's a good thing, not a bad thing.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Good, not bad.

Good, not bad.

Good, not bad.

Good,

not bad.

So that's part of the answer.

But for such a fundamental shift for an entire party,

there has to be something more going on here.

And I think there is.

I think the dirty little secret about the Republicans and their newfound love for baseball, apple pie, and Mother Russia is that it's about race.

Last year, Ann Coulter tweeted, in 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European.

As far back as 2013, Matt Drudge called Putin the leader of the free world.

David Duke described Russia as the key to white survival.

Today's Republicans, what's left of them, do not like the melting pot.

And Russia, that pot don't melt.

Russia is one of the last places on earth to say, fuck diversity, we're here, we're white, get used to it.

I remember going to London in the 80s, and everybody was white.

The closest thing to an Afro was these guys.

But now London looks like New York, and the mayor is brown, and the princess is even half black.

In the recent World Cup, the French national team didn't look like the old France.

They looked like the new France.

Germany let in a million Syrians.

The fatherland is now the brotherland.

You know how many Syrian refugees Russia has taken in?

Two.

Martin Sheen has more refugees in his pool house.

This is what the Russian army looks like.

The ballet.

Their basketball team looks like the team that plays against the Globetrotters.

They have a drink called a white Russian.

That's actually the whitest drink there is.

Let's see, I want to get drunk, but I also want a glass of milk.

Russia is a hunky oasis and Republicans love it.

Russian kids don't learn the words to desposito.

And a Barack Obama does not become the president of Russia.

Wingnuts.

used to accuse Obama of being a foreign agent who took over America.

But when a foreign power actually did take over America, and it was the proudly white one, their response was, come right on in.

To the members of the grand old party, Russian meddling in our elections isn't a breach of national security.

It's just white people helping white people.

What Republicans call governing.

All right, that's our show, ladies and gentlemen.

I'll be at the Oakdale in New Haven, August 12th, at the Fox in St.

Louis on the 25th, and at the Kansas City Music Hall, August 26th.

I want to thank Steve Schmidt, Kristen Solkas-Editson, Charles Blow, Nancy McLean, and Malcolm Nance.

Grant us out for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.