Evangelical Poontang, Election Meddling, Demonized Media | Overtime with Bill Maher (HBO)

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

Okay, here we are.

Hi, everybody.

We're back on the air.

Zoe, should food ethics be taught in school alongside nutrition?

Oh, that's an interesting question.

Food ethics, like, I would think that that's like against factory farming is what I would teach in school.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that would be great.

I think the more we can

talk about food and have it enter the conversation.

Right now we don't talk about food really at all.

Are you your kids in school yet?

My two-year-old's in preschool.

Because

you're going to have to look at what they give them for lunch in school, I bet you.

I pack her lunch.

But like in schools, don't they?

I'll pack her lunch still.

She likes carrots and pickles and stuff like that.

But not broccoli.

She likes broccoli in the garden.

In the garden.

Yeah, as long as she picks it.

I make her go out and pick it.

Can't pack the garden.

Oh, the lunch.

Put the whole garden in the bag.

Rick Wilson, why do religious fundamentalists give Trump a pass on behavior that they otherwise condemn?

Well, it's in the book of Poontang, verse 7.

The bull tang.

And it says,

thou shalt allow the Donald to fuck porn stars and let him get away with it.

No, it's just, it's a, imagine a giant Mount Everest-sized pile of hypocritical bullshit, and that's where they are on the peak of that mountain.

I'd forgotten that word, Poontang.

Well, there you go.

Sounds

Indian.

If there was a shrine,

the Poontang Shrine near Delhi, I would have been there.

Is there a lack of media attention on how the ongoing Russian bot social media will impact our midterm elections?

Heck yes.

Right?

It's an ongoing.

That's the thing that, you know, if you're going to shut down the government, government, again, how about the fact that, forget the last one, they're not fighting the ongoing war that's happening now.

To be fair, I think there's been a big change this week.

One of Roe's really fine colleagues,

Congressman Schiff from California.

Sure.

So Adam Schiff, supported by our senator, Senator Feinstein, wrote a letter to the big three, really to Facebook and Twitter, saying you have got to do something about the ongoing Russian manipulation because there was a thing relative to this, you know, the Devin Nunez conspiracy.

And the reality is that this is a huge issue.

I mean we have to recognize that there is a structural problem in our democracy in that we have a lot of people who believe things that are demonstrably not true.

Roughly a third of the population, roughly 25% on the right.

And there was more on the right than on the left simply because Fox News was out there for a long time creating its own filter bubbles.

And so when the Russians came in, it was just a lot easier to create disarray by focusing on the right than it was on the left.

But they're all the people who, you know, the anti-vaxxers and the people who believe in contrails and all that stuff.

So it's not like there aren't anybody on the left.

They're on both sides.

And when people are in that state of mind, if they are like people or bots who act like like people, who say, oh, by the way, you should also believe this, you're going to believe those people.

It's like a cult.

And we need Facebook to contact every person touched in 2016 by Russian interference and explain to to them, hey, you're an American.

This was done to our country by a

hostile.

No, it's actually, they have the email address for every single one of those people.

They know every single time they were touched.

They have massive databases of all this stuff.

And fortunately, we have members of Congress, and Roe is one of them,

understand that these issues are not about left and right.

Even if you liked the outcome of the last election, you're not going to like the next one.

Roe, do you think your no-pack caucus will grow in the coming years?

Well, tell us what it is first.

No-PAC caucus just means you don't take any money from corporate PACs or lobbyists.

Like Bernie did.

There are seven of us in Congress who have that.

And I'll tell you why it's going to grow.

Because when you have a Congress that isn't acting on policies that 84% of the Americans support under gamers, or isn't acting on Medicare for All, which has 80% support, or is acting to repeal net neutrality when net neutrality has 90% support, something is wrong.

Yes.

And what's wrong is the insurance of money.

And yet, Trump

didn't spend nearly the money Hillary did and he won.

No.

And Roger has insights on partly why.

And that's partly why.

He got an income expenditure from Vladimir Putin.

Yeah, but it's not all about money.

In fact, sometimes money can work against you.

You know, Hillary bought a million ads.

People get sick of those ads.

Trump was smart.

He didn't advertise till the end.

You know, people see the same ad every day for two months in those markets.

We don't get it here in California because

it's a done deal.

We don't see ads.

We're not in play.

But

in Illinois or wherever the battleground states are, you see them all the time.

You come to hate that person.

They're just, the ad plays too much.

But a presidential race is a little bit different because you get to come on things like Bill Maher and other things.

Everyone knows who you are.

When you're running for Congress and no one knows who you are, I mean, probably no one knew who I was till I came on this show.

No.

And, you know, you got to raise money.

And the problem is that when you raise money,

you're beholden to those interests.

So it's a huge issue.

Okay.

Is the fact that liberals, Mrs.

Fiou and Michelle, aren't willing to demonize right-wing media to the extent the right does with the media one of the reasons they lose the messaging war?

I'm not sure.

Well.

Yeah, I know.

It's too long a question.

I mean, I think I nodded off in the middle of it, but I...

Basically, you have the right has waged this systematic assault right on the very idea that there can, I mean, it's kind of postmodern, right?

They've waged this assault on the idea that there can be objective truth, that you can believe anything you see in the quote-unquote mainstream media, right?

They haven't demonized the left-wing media.

They've demonized whatever

use and whatever used to provide a kind of common source of information and a common source.

The war on knowing things.

Right.

And so

I don't know that it really would help for liberals to go out and say that, you know, Sean Hannity sucks.

I mean, everyone should say Sean Hannity sucks, but it doesn't really.

I think it would actually reinforce the sense of

persecution and of inferiority that drove a lot of lesser educated Republican voters into the arms of Fox and Rush Limbaugh.

They were told, you're smart too.

But that's the catch-22.

You can't say you're stupid.

Right.

But then they keep acting stupid.

They're not stupid except for all the behaviors and beliefs that are promulgated.

company.

That's right.

All right, let's go have some broccoli.

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.