Ep. #445: Bill McKibben, Chelsea Handler

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, convenient installation options, and the best selection of BF Goodrich tires.

Go to tire rack.com to see their BF Goodrich test results, tire ratings, and reviews.

And be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

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

Start the clock.

much.

Okay.

Oh,

thank you.

Okay.

Alrighty.

Thank you very much.

Oh.

Thank you so much for

thank you.

I love you too.

And I really

Thank you for coming.

This is our last show until I know.

We will be back January 19th to talk about all the mass shootings and masturbating actors

that make America the greatest country in the world, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah, you know what?

I need a break.

I'm not going to lie.

I think we all need a little break, right?

I mean, this has been a tough year for America, for truth, for women, for potted plants.

I don't even know where to start with the harassers.

I watched entertainment tonight last night.

It was just a half hour of Nancy Odell throwing up into a bucket.

But if there's any bright spot in it, down in Alabama, where Roy Moore is,

and you'll admit it, that's quite a.

From Alabama,

where Roy Moore is running for the Senate on the Republican ticket, his opponent, the Democrat in Alabama, Doug Jones, is ahead in the polls.

Wow, in Alabama.

And political experts are saying that his recent surge is due to not fucking kids.

Yeah, that's where we are in America.

Yeah, Roy Moore has nine accusers now, and Moore said he would not drop out.

Moore had a press conference yesterday.

Judge Roy Moore, he said, we need, he's not dropping out because he said we need moral value back in our country.

And then OJ came up to discuss anger management.

Wow, these guys, they got big balls.

We got to give them that.

Yeah, I mean, all these accusers are coming forward.

One girl said that Roy Moore hit on her when she was at the mall.

As you do when you're the district attorney in your 30s.

So she didn't give him her phone number, so Roy Moore called the principal of her school, who called her in.

And you know what his

excuse is?

He said, I don't remember dating any girl without the permission of her mother.

I'm a chivalrous child molested.

That's where we in Alabama, of course, a high school senior is a MILF.

You know, that's.

No, I mean.

I mean when I think of Alabama back then I think of their horrendous civil rights record but you know forget the police dogs get the DA to stop humping my leg

and you know he was you heard this Roy Moore was banned from the mall

too creepy for an Alabama mall

That's like being too fat for the Iowa State Fair

Too high for Burning Man.

And then there's another woman who came forward who said she went to see Roy Moore in his office in 1991 to sign some custody papers, and Moore grabbed her very hard in the butt.

She was 28, but Moore says in his defense, she looked much younger.

So, you know, Fox News has not really wanted to talk too much about the sexual harassment when it was Roy Moore or Donald Trump or everybody at Fox News.

And then Al Franken came along yesterday, right?

Very disturbing.

I was so shaken, I called Bill Cosby to see if he had anything that could calm me down.

I know Bill has stuff like that.

But

as I'm sure you know by now, when Al was on a USO tour in Iraq in 2006 with Leanne Tweeden, he released a picture where he's mock-groping her while she's sleeping, not cool at all.

And then he wrote a sketch where they were kissing as a pretext to actually force a kiss on her.

This is what she says.

So Al's a friend, but Al, I got to tell you, if you write a comedy sketch where you, Al Franken,

kiss a model and the next line of dialogue isn't get off of me creepy, it's not comedy, it's science fiction.

So he did,

a bad thing and the condemnation has been universal, which he deserves.

What he doesn't deserve is to be lumped in with Roy Moore or Kevin Stacey or Harvey Weinstein

or Donald Trump.

Donald Trump calls his accusers liars, threatened to sue them, did long riffs at his rallies.

We would say that they were too ugly for him to assault.

Plus, with Al Franken, we're talking about one incident.

Trump has 16 accusers.

Roy Moore has nine.

Roy Moore spent more time chatting up young girls at the mall than Santa Claus.

So how about another Me Too campaign where it's I can tell two unlike things apart.

Me too.

I know the difference between a man who once acted like a dick and a man who is a dick.

Me too.

I know the difference between someone who behaved like a high schooler and someone who targeted high schoolers.

Me too.

In overseas news,

but there is some overseas.

I mean Trump got back from his big 12-day trip did you see this his speech to declare his 12-day Asian trip a huge success

a better trip than anybody ever had they loved me more than Obama over there and did you see this speech yesterday oh my god he was racing through it like

sniffing

kept taking drinks of water did you see that

He never actually fought in Vietnam, but he still came home with a drug problem.

I don't understand.

And

everybody made a big deal of him taking the water.

You know what?

I don't care if Trump drank water during his speech.

I want to see if Trump can keep talking when Putin takes a drink of water.

All right, we got a great show.

We got Carl Bernstein, Rebecca Tracer, and Max Brooks are here.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with the, oh, he's hilarious, Chelsea Handsler is back, Shaved.

But first up, he is an environmental activist and author of the novel novel Radio Free Vermont a fable of resistance Bill McKibben the lion of the movement

Bill, how are you?

Great to see you, sir.

Okay, so it's fitting you're here on our last show because this has been a year where we saw terrible things happen with the environmental movement.

And I was very dismayed to see last week that the Paris Accords, which were signed two years ago, none of the industrialized countries are even close to meeting their

The scariest in a way was what happened in China where they've actually been pretty good about putting in a lot of renewable power.

Last year their coal went up, coal use went up because they had a wicked drought, California-style drought, and they couldn't run their hydroelectric dams.

This is the sort of thing that's starting to happen.

The vicious feedback cycles are starting to kick in.

We had a record rise, three parts per million, in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere last year, and we're afraid it's because oceans, forests have been damaged to the point where they're no longer absorbing carbon as quickly as they used to.

So we're right on the edge.

It's the moment to be moving fast.

Yeah, I've heard that for years.

We're right on the edge.

We've got to start moving fast.

I mean, in some ways, we're right over the edge.

I was in Sonoma last, you know, two nights ago talking with people who'd come through the fires.

I mean, this is as close as we get to sort of the definition of the good life in America.

Beautiful place, huge vats of wine everywhere.

There's people fleeing for their lives, and lots of them not making it out.

That kind of thing happens someplace on this planet every day now.

Yeah, and you know, there's another conference going on this week in Bonn, Germany, and the Trump administration showed up with a plan

for coal.

They're trolling the climate agreement meetings now.

They got trolled right back.

All 400 people who were sitting in the room for this coal presentation just got up and left.

And the

craziness of it, I mean, the rest of the world's like, oh, electric cars, solar batteries, whatever.

The Trump administration's like, we've got some great 18th century technology that we'd like to show you here.

Yeah, Rick Perry wants to subsidize coal and maybe whale oil after that.

I mean, when you think about that, someone did a study, a report a few weeks ago.

There's more people in America who work at Arby's roast beef sandwiches than mine coal.

In a rational world, we'd be having Oval Office summits on sort of roast beef policy, you know.

I mean, the real jobs, the real thing we should be subsidizing is sun and wind, which we desperately need.

Have you ever convinced a denier?

Have you ever been able take someone aside and just talk to them calmly and rationally and have them go, wow, I see your point.

I must have been wrong all these years.

This is the right question the week before Thanksgiving.

My advice would be don't wreck dinner sort of trying to argue with your crazy uncle.

Most people, the 70% of Americans understand what's going on.

The 30% who don't aren't going to be convinced by the next

study of infrared absorption patterns in the stratosphere or whatever.

They

believe what they believe for ideological reasons.

If you spent the last 30 years kind of marinating in Rush Limbaugh, you'd be

impervious to reason, too.

And so

I think

the right

response is to say, we've got to take that 70%

and get them active and engaged in this fight, or at least some part of them.

If you just can't stand it at Thanksgiving, you know, turn to them and say, you may not believe in global warming, but global warming believes in you.

Right.

And I want to get your opinion on the economics of this, because I don't think this is brought up enough that economics really, we know how it affects the environment and the argument that it's going to ruin jobs, which is, of course, not true.

But it's also true that the people who are poor

generally don't care about the environment when you cannot blame them because

the argument is they have more immediate problems and they do.

I'm just making the point that income inequality very much impacts environmental progress.

As long as people are living hand to mouth, they kind of can't be.

I'd always heard this, right?

Environmentalism is something that rich white people do.

If you didn't know where your next meal was coming from, you wouldn't be

an environmentalist.

When we started organizing 350.org, first thing we did was this global day of action.

We had 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.

People were sending in pictures from every corner of the planet.

It took me about half an hour of watching those come in on Flickr to realize that pretty much everybody we were working with was poor, black, brown, Asian, young, because that's what the world consists of.

I think you can make a pretty good argument at this point that rich white people may represent more of the environmental problem.

Oh, they they definitely

use more resources, yes.

And they kind of get in the way of things, too.

I mean, you know, those rich white people

are self-loathing clapping.

So let me ask you about this elephant thing because I saw a great documentary this year called When Giants Fall.

I think you can Google it and you'll see it.

You can see it on the Internet.

And it's about the elephants and their plight.

And Trump, he's kind of hedging on it now.

Yes, he is.

But he was saying yesterday they were going to undo the Obama rule because we have to undo everything Obama did, of course, and that you couldn't take your trophies from killed elephants back here to the United States.

What do you think of that?

Because there actually are some environmental people.

What?

You know what I'm saying?

This is just the Don Jr.

Protection Act, you know,

bring back the tusk of the thing you cut.

And it goes hand in hand with, I mean,

he's saying we're going to take a pause on this one today because there was so much resistance to it.

Maybe he could also perhaps pause the new rule they put into effect earlier this year that

lets hunters shoot hibernating bears in their dens.

Oh, I didn't hear that.

Look, I think there's...

Because they're sportsmen, though.

I think there's a contest in the White House every day.

What's the cruelest thing you can think of?

And whoever wins gets to wear the red hat for the next day or something.

It's just, it's insane.

All right.

Do we have any hope, Bill?

You keep doing what.

We've got lots.

I mean, the hope is in the resistance.

And it's been a good year.

This year.

It's got to start with politics.

Well, that's right.

And we saw in Virginia that the resistance is starting to electoralize.

So we'll go forward with that on the new year.

Thank you, Bill.

You're a hero for what you do.

Bill McKibben, everybody.

Okay, let's meet our panel.

Hey, hey, hey.

How yeah?

Okay.

Wow, they like you, panel.

He is an author and non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Max Brooks is back with us, Max.

He is a CNN political commentator and journalistic icon who with Bob Woodward brought down all the president's men.

Carl Bernstein.

And she's a writer at large for New York Magazine and author of all the single ladies now in paperback.

Rebecca Traister back with us.

How you doing?

All right.

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

Well, Carl, you know, it's not original at all to ask you to compare Trump's pressure problems with Watergate.

It's terrible, but I have to.

I just want to ask you specifically about last week when he was in Vietnam, Trump, and

he was talking about Putin, and he said, he said he didn't meddle.

I asked him again, you can only ask so many times.

That's a rule now?

You can only ask so many times.

Every time he sees me, he says, I didn't do that.

And I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.

I think he's very insulted by it.

He's so protective of Putin's feelings.

This to me seems like public collusion.

Is there such a thing and is that impeachable?

Public collusion.

I don't think it's impeachable.

I think that his conduct in terms of his embrace of Putin without any thought given to the actions of Putin to undermine our elections in this country is extreme and it's a reason we have a special prosecutor trying to get to the bottom of what occurred and what Donald Trump may have to do in terms of perhaps enabling, helping to enable what the Russians did or not.

We don't know where this is going to go.

What we do know is there's a cover-up going on and that the President does not want us to know what the cover-up is about, whether it's indeed about something that happened with enabling the Russians, whether it has to do with his family money.

What we know is he sought to demean, undermine, obstruct, not necessarily obstruction of justice, obstruct these investigations to keep us from knowing what this is really about.

And that's why we have a special prosecutor.

We're going to find out, presumably, what this is all about.

I hope.

I guess what I'm asking is, yeah, that's all in the past, but it seems like crimes are happening in the present.

It seems to me, well, first of all, he's calling our own former

CIA head and national security head hacks while he cozies up to Putin.

It's like

his favorite national foreign policy advisor on Russia is Putin, and on China, it's G.

That's, to me...

Part of the problem, and you've identified it, is how do you separate what might be criminal, what might be a conspiracy, from the merely outrageous and vile?

And it's very difficult to do in this presidency with an aberrant president.

And that's what we're trying to sort out.

That's why the press has been so good.

The old-fashioned mainstream media has coaxed out these stories about both aspects of possible criminality as well as

indeed a president of the United States who many people in the Congress, Republicans, believe is unfit to be the president.

And that's part of the story too.

What these, it's not me,

not me saying he's unfit, but people in the military, people in the highest ranks of the intelligence services, Republicans in Congress, there are a large number of them who believe he's not fit to be president.

So all these things are coming together.

The possible conspiracy, and yet the outrageous daily actions and lying on a scale we've never seen by a modern president of the United States.

And then there's also something that we can do as citizens.

You know, it's easy to feel powerless and sort of, oh, please, Muller, save us.

But on the home front, as individual citizens, we can be more responsible for the information we take in and the information that we pass online.

And that's important.

You know, we need to re-evaluate online information the sort of the way we re-evaluated free love in the 80s.

You know, it's great, it's wonderful, but there are consequences.

It's not free.

You have to be safe and responsible about where you put it.

Well, we're definitely going to get to that issue.

The other thing is that the companies that are profiting from the dissemination of this information could also play a part in being more responsible.

Oh, yeah.

Whereas so that Facebook and Twitter, I think, need to take a lot more responsibility for the information that they earn money

for disseminating, helping to determine the outcome of this election and the fact that we have this vital guy to begin with.

What about WikiLeaks?

Now we learned this week that WikiLeaks is in contact or was during the campaign with Don Jr.

And among the things they're direct messaging each other.

Hi Don, this is from I assume Julian Assange, right?

Hi Don, if your father loses, loses in quotes.

We think it's much more interesting if he does not concede and spends time challenging the media and other types of rigging.

It's It's hard to imagine that coming from anybody but a Russian agent.

And I mean, Don, I guess, could plead idiocy that he didn't know he was.

And he'd be right.

Whether he was colluding with them, but plainly they were colluding with him, right?

And okay, so WikiLeaks,

talk about a fall from grace.

I mean, we've seen it with a lot of men lately.

But, I mean, WikiLeaks used to be a champion of seemingly what they're absolutely not helping with right now.

Well, this is where this weird ideological crossover took place.

And you could feel it a little bit during the election.

And there was a lot of pushback.

You know, Wikileaks was championed by a segment of the left, I think, for very good reason for a long time.

And yet Wikileaks itself seemed to be...

already early on

championing Donald Trump.

And maybe the ideological thing they had in common, at least over the past couple years, is a shared desire for Hillary Clinton to lose the presidential election in 2016.

That was both left and right.

WikiLeaks said they were going to be kind of equal opportunity disclosers.

They've been nothing of the kind.

They've been pawns, particularly of the Russians.

They're not an equal opportunity discloser of information.

So

if I can ask one more Watergate comparison question, we live now in the post-truth era.

That wasn't true of Watergate.

Watergate wound up being kind of a victory because you intrepid reporters did what the First Amendment says you can do and you unearthed the truth.

But there wasn't what I call state TV, which is Fox News, who are giving this alternative reality and that there are so many people.

The people who watch Fox News think the Russia thing is just made up.

It's It's just fake.

And, you know, as you were just saying about Twitter and Facebook and passing on information that isn't real, I don't even know what's real anymore when I read something.

I think you got a small piece of it with Fox, but it's much deeper than that.

That we now have a culture in which people, by and large, and increasingly, are not looking or interested in the best obtainable version of the truth.

Too many people, and this is very different from the time of Watergate, are looking for information to

underscore and reinforce what they already believe.

And they're not open.

And this goes for people on the left as well as the right.

There's no monopoly here.

And what happened in Watergate was...

Well, there's not an equivalency either.

No, there is not.

It's asymmetrical.

There's no question it's asymmetrical, this unwillingness to look at science, among other things.

But we do not have a culture.

open to the best obtainable version of the truth in our citizenry the way we did at the time of Watergate.

And one of the key differences is, look, Watergate, our institutions worked, not just the press, the judiciary, the Congress of the United States, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, which was heroic in Barry Goldwater, the 1964 nominee of his party, marching to the White House and telling Richard Nixon he must resign.

We don't see a Republican Party now that seems to be interested in principle above party or the best obtainable version of the truth.

This is a big difference between Watergate and what we're seeing today.

Yeah?

I want to make one point about the sort of fractured attentions and the ability to burrow into our own ideological home, wherever that may be, within the new kind of more democratized media.

And I agree with you about all the ways that it's problematic.

But it is also true that when media was consolidated in the way that it was in the Watergate era, and you had three networks

and everybody was looking in the same direction at the same time, response could be better organized and you might be able to sort out your news sources better.

But at the same time, that consolidated power meant that certain stories weren't told.

So you could have the three networks, but they didn't necessarily cover Shirley Chisholm's speech at the 1972 convention.

And so

it was a very narrow lens that determined some of the news that we got.

So there is a kind of democratizing impact of having social media, even though I agree with you about all the ways in which it's problematic.

Well, we have a totally different media configuration.

But even then we had other magazines, less mainstream news, but we're developing stories too.

But you're right in that

today we've got, you know, a smorgasbord.

Although one thing that has not changed is that at least three times in my lifetime, a conservative has won the White House because the left has split wide open.

You know, let's not forget 1979 that Jimmy Carter was challenged for the presidency by Ted Kennedy for being too conservative, if you can believe that.

And the middle left and the far left split apart and through that gap roared a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan that started a conservative revolution.

So Reagan didn't win.

We lost because we turned on each other and didn't know how to compromise and come together.

Okay, we're going to get to more of that.

But this is our last show before January 19th.

And, you know, a lot of people do get their news from this show, right?

I mean, this is the smart people I call them.

So we always do this as a service when we're going off the air for a while.

We do future headlines because people are not going to know what's going to happen the news until next January 19th.

So we predict the headlines for you.

Future headlines, ladies and gentlemen, these are the headlines you are going to see

for the next couple of months.

Mike Pence demands turkey stop laying there with its legs spread like some whore.

Tinder admits 90% of dates end with girl crawling out of restroom window.

Third jurgle comes forward to accuse Richard Gere.

Oh, that's terrible.

A third one.

Multiple women accuse Ted Cruz of sending dick pic after he mails a picture of his face.

Toddler with gun accidentally shoots mass shooter with gun.

Oh, well

Niagara pulls Hannity ads outrage Fox fans cut off their dick.

Yeah, that probably is going to happen

Jeff Sessions mistaken for elf on shelf chased through mall

All right, let's bring out Chelsea now an activist for Emily's Lists comedian host of a reponently titled talk show on Netflix now streaming episodes for its second season one of our favorites Chelsea handler

There she is.

We get that ready for you.

How are you?

Great to see you.

Hi, hey.

Okay.

Hi, guys.

Okay.

How are you?

I'm good.

I'm going to bring some positive energy and we're going to get excited about what happened in Virginia, what happened in New Jersey.

We had a lot of good news.

We had a lot of women elected.

It's true.

So we have to focus on that.

As you said earlier, it's the resistance, but there were women who, out of the 16 women that Emily's list sponsored, 13 won and got elected in the Virginia House of Delegates.

We had our first African Americans elected.

We had our first Latinas elected in that state.

We had our first transgender person.

Woman.

Woman.

Already screwed that up.

And we had our first Asian American woman elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

So it delegates,

it is an important time, and there are things to recognize that are happening.

The world is getting browner and gayer, and everybody needs to hop on.

Excited.

So there are good things happening, you know.

I mean, it is a devastating circumstance that we're in, but there are good things happening.

So we have to kind of hold on to that hope, I think.

My first question.

Well, I was going to ask you, what's going on with you, though?

Before we get to all that.

I just can't fucking take it anymore.

That's what's going on with you.

We care about you.

You're not doing your show anymore.

You're more of an activist now.

I have to be.

I feel like, you know what, I have money.

I don't have to work.

I can spend my time trying to get women elected.

We need women in office.

We do.

And so,

well, first of all.

I think Elizabeth Warren really has to run for president.

That's the woman,

especially at this moment.

By the way, Elizabeth Lauren is somebody that Emily's list recruited.

They took her and said, you should run for office.

Yes.

So, I mean, this is a great organization for anybody who wants to support women to support.

So, 19% of the House is, only 19% of are women, and 21% of the Senate.

But women vote.

Why don't they vote for themselves?

Well, I think that we had, I mean, this is my personal opinion, and I think this is, I think we had a thing where women have a problem supporting other women in powerful situations.

They don't have a problem electing a predator, but they have a problem electing somebody who stayed with a predator.

You know what I mean?

Like with Hillary, it was like, well, we can't elect her because she's with, but they don't have a problem electing the man.

So it's almost like there's a backlash on women that don't support women.

And now that we have this maniac in office, I think women are like, oh, shit,

oh, this is not what we planned on.

I think the backlash that we're seeing now with the sexual harassment and everything is the reaction to Trump being the president of our country.

But he still won white women.

Right.

I mean, and that was after the Hollywood access tape.

Do you think

is child molester with Roy Moore different?

I feel like that is a litmus test, talking about truth.

That is a litmus test for whether Fox News and that crowd can make something just not be.

Because Roy Moore's attitude about everything is, well, she's lying.

Or that

your book is a forgery.

Or it's fake news.

No, he's got Zillow blaming Tokyo.

He's literally saying, oh, well, Tokyo was asking for it.

What do you expect?

No, no.

But there's a big difference between somebody

taking accountability and responsibility

for an act and somebody giving blanket denials and then accusing their accusers of lying and then

pretending they're going to sue them.

On what grounds, I don't know.

Because

when there are more than one person that comes forward, then you take that seriously.

I agree with you on Al Franken.

I'm sorry, he's not a predator.

We all know, anybody who's met him knows that that's not true.

And he made a mistake, absolutely, but he is not a predator.

And also, I feel like we've lost our ability to think in this country, to tell unlike things apart.

I mean, there's a...

There's a difference between zero tolerance.

We have zero tolerance of that, and maximum punishment.

Does everything have to be max?

I mean, we don't have that for murder.

There are different grades of murder and other crimes, not for this.

I think that the focus on the punishment and on what the repercussion is going to be is where this conversation goes wrong.

And I think it's largely steered by a media that immediately after a picture is published says, Do you think he should resign?

Like within three hours, somebody has to set up the conversation.

Somebody has to, right?

The media sets up the conversation.

It is not the women telling the stories who are coming for these guys' jobs directly.

In fact, many of them are going, I don't know, I feel I don't know what it means.

But the focus on

what the punishment is going to be is also, on some level, an easier conversation to have, because then we get to fight about it.

Should he resign and we all go to our partisan battle stations than actually looking at the more difficult conversation, which is that it is about the whole culture.

It's about the culture that empowers white men to abuse their power in a million ways, from the villainous predators to the fact that there is a sense of humor that we all understand in this country, that if a woman's asleep, it's funny to grab her tits, and that a man can gain power and stature and a place in the public sphere by profiting from that from that comedy.

That doesn't make him the same as Harvey Weinstein and it's not about him.

It's about reckoning with the fact that we make that culture, we participate in that culture, it's our good politicians, it's our friends, it's our husbands, and it's ourselves.

That is a harder conversation to have and it's the one we should be having about this moment, not should he resign and will a governor appointment.

That's absolutely right, but I think that is the conversation we are having.

I think we're deciding like, okay, now it's become, you know, there's a tipping point happening.

This is happening everywhere.

What are we going to do about it?

What are the repercussions?

Going to sex rehab in Arizona at the meadows?

Is that going to fix Harvey Weinstein?

I mean, no.

Is there a larger problem that we have of not being able in this culture to look at things contextually,

to make distinctions in our politics,

in our views of gender, in all kinds of questions?

The inability to to recognize context as the all-important aspect of the truth.

Facts strung together individually are not necessarily the truth.

And that's the internet agents.

Everything else

is

the presidency, it goes to media, it goes to the questions that we're discussing here.

And it also means in the case of Trump, there is a possibility that after this special prosecutor, if he's permitted to finish his investigation, it's possible he won't find a conspiracy.

But yet there will be, one would hope, a report that puts everything into context.

That's what we lack on a daily basis in our culture.

Can I ask just about the politics, though?

Because I take your point, and I think it's valid.

But it is kind of important who is in the Senate right now.

I mean, that's why they're willing to put up with maybe a child molester to get the vote for the tax cuts.

That's how they play the game.

I'm not suggesting we go there or that far.

But Al Franken can't be in the Senate, we don't need his vote because we do We do need his vote.

We do need his vote on things that affect millions and millions of people.

So we can do two things at once.

We can have the

complaint is with the fact that it immediately goes to the question of the.

But lots of people just wrote that or said that.

They just

go on TV and they say to Trump, oh, will he fire Bob Mueller?

It's like, don't say that.

Don't give him any fucking ideas.

Gravity to it.

But it occurred to him first.

I don't think he he needed to put that.

What I heard from people who were making this argument yesterday was: well, we have to get rid of Al Franken because otherwise it's a push.

They're going to say Al Franken, we say Roy Moore.

And this is what Democrats always do: they shrink from making the counter-argument.

Instead of going there with, oh, well, we can't win this.

We're just going to go away.

Let him resign.

Make the counter argument.

Do what I just did in the monologue.

Say he's not the zodiac killer.

It's not the same thing.

And Al Franken.

And Democrats should be able to point out that Al Franken's reaction is to begin an investigation into his behavior.

And that, given that,

not to give him cookies, that's correct.

That's a good response.

We should also have an investigation into the 16 women who've accused Donald Trump.

And

Democrats, I haven't heard anyone make that point.

Well, the culture, listen, this is

what I was saying earlier was the reaction to women voting for Donald Trump, the reaction of women voting for somebody who admitted on tape that he's a sexual predator.

He admitted it, was bragging about it.

They went and voted for him.

And that after effect, I think, you know, that pendulum of looking at what they've done, I think has led to this.

I believe that.

I think women are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Not to call out Fannie LeMamer from the civil rights movement, but women are just like, oh my God.

Look what we did.

And better late than never.

You know, I want women to stick up for each other and look out for each other and never facilitate any Harvey Weinstein bullshit like this again.

Yeah, but

this has to be a long game that we have to play, a cultural long game, because we don't want to find ourselves in the exact same trap we found ourselves after Obama.

Because right after Obama got elected, suddenly everybody was spouting that we were living in a post-racial society, which is bullshit.

It took us 400 years to get here.

And we can't say suddenly we're living in a post-sexist society because remember, while all this is happening right now, we're talking about this great backlash.

People are speaking up the number two movie in the country is starring Mel Gibson all right so let's not pretend this is going to go away overnight this has to start with our kids what we teach them how we teach little girls to fight back how we teach little boys to respect girls this has to be a long cultural game that we play for the next generation

Okay, can I bring up one other aspect of this, which is...

Before you say anything, I just want to go on the record and say that I'm currently dating Mel Gibson.

so that was fucked up that you just did that but I mean I forgive you daddy's home too forgives you too

oh really I almost was gonna ask you how's it going

he knows I like older men not that old no offense Carl it's okay

I can take it I like people

okay

well yeah and speaking about that defense that Harvey Weinstein had about well hey it's not my fault I grew up in the 60s Carl was that okay in the 60s?

Was it like in my day, Bob Woodward and I used to whack out tallywhackers to everyone in the Washington Post?

Those were good days in the 60s.

Everything has changed.

Ready?

It was never okay to masturbate in front of a coworker, right?

Right?

Please tell me that's true.

I think there's a lot of HR that says you're not supposed to do that.

But even back in the good old days, right?

Okay, thank God.

Obvious, obviously.

One of the things, it seems to me we're at a moment culturally of a great reckoning here.

And it also comes from earlier feminists, that what we're seeing is part of a continuum, the first wave of feminism,

the whole idea of violence against women having the kind of currency in our culture today in terms of the way we discuss it,

it comes from what we've been doing over the past 20, 25, 30 years.

This is not

right.

This does not just come out of this moment.

Okay.

I was going to say,

Al Franken's accuser, Leanne Tweeden, has forgiven him and said he should, her opinion is he shouldn't step down.

And I said a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about the baseball player who made the objective Asian thing with his eyes, he was making fun of a, he was just teasing him, but it was a big thing.

I said, you can't, and the baseball player, the Japanese baseball player, said, that's not a big deal to me.

I forgive him.

I said, you can't be more offended than the victim.

Right.

If his accuser, and it's only one accuser.

Now, if we find out tomorrow, it's eight more, and I don't think it will be, but if we do, different story.

But once she says that, isn't that game over?

You can't be more offended than the person themselves.

I feel like part of the problem we live in is that we, this is happening in a time when people are just so self-righteous.

We have to stop letting five self-righteous millennials at the Huffington Post bully everybody into having opinions that they don't really hold.

But we have to be careful because we created those.

Our generation, we raised,

well, as a parent, I can tell you.

I didn't create that.

But we raised the whole generation to be this way.

And we have to be careful next time to say, listen, it's not just about you.

You got to take your lumps.

You have to listen.

You have to talk.

You have to have a diet.

Exactly.

And people, we've had guests who canceled on this show because they don't want to talk about this subject.

People don't want to talk.

That's a terrible casualty that this country is facing.

I was reading, let me read this quote.

I don't even know who this is, Diplo.

Because I'm old.

Okay, I know who it is vaguely.

Okay,

I'm sure he's very good at what he does, electronic music.

I'm reading it, I mean, on a plane reading Rolling Stone magazine.

This made me cry.

Reporter, your Twitter used to be really wild.

Now you've toned it down.

Why?

Diplo, whoever he is.

Every once in a while he said, I might be political, and I just get millions of people attacking me.

I don't really feel like being a catalyst for arguments on the internet, whether it's politics or whatever.

Sarcasm doesn't travel well over the internet.

Especially being a white dude on the internet, I don't have any past to say anything sarcastic or funny.

So he just shuts up, and I see that all the time.

People just won't talk anymore because these harpies, it's like a swarm of bees coming at you.

But that's okay.

That's it.

Listen, that's coming from somebody who's on ecstasy probably all the time.

He's a DJ, you know?

So you have to take into account that, you're right, people get shy, they get gun shy, especially actors in our industry.

People don't want to, they have a brand that they want to protect.

They want to protect the Midwest and the South, and if they're selling clothing or whatever.

Luckily, there are people that don't give a shit about that.

And we're the left, not the South.

And this is genuinely dangerous.

We have a culture of 24-hour screaming.

But it's genuinely dangerous for the left because you cannot claim to love diversity and multiculturalism if you're not willing to have an open and honest dialogue.

And when you have open and honest dialogue, eventually, accidentally, some people might get offended.

But we have to have their dialogue.

And so Franken is a good example.

His first apology yesterday was kind of crap.

The like it was, I was trying to be funny.

That was not good, right?

That defense gets old real quick and goes very quickly to the ladies are just humorless.

Then he gave a second longer statement.

It was really good.

And one of the things that we have to get better at, in addition to not just shutting out the people who are going to be overzealous in their criticism is also talking about the people who are criticized giving them the chance to reckon with whatever it is they're being criticized for and give everybody on both sides of the equation a chance to discuss it.

What happened with Franken and his accuser is that he gave a good apology and she accepted it.

That model can happen more rather than just everybody yelling at each other.

And why are there still people saying you must go away forever?

Ask a question here.

We're really in the midst of a cold civil war in this country, in terms of our culture.

And perhaps Trump has brought it to the point of near ignition.

But is it possible that we could have a debate in which right and left, Republicans and Democrats, is it possible to have a fact-based debate?

No.

Next question.

But no, I agree.

It's not.

Well, that is.

I agree.

We We cannot have a fact-based debate in this culture.

And that, but I'm not saying it may be asymmetrical, but that lies at the bottom of a lot of what we're talking about.

So what about Bill Clinton?

Chelsea, you tweeted, imagine being molested by an older man, then that man denies ever doing it and then goes on and gets elected to United States Senate.

And Juanita Broderick tweeted back, yeah, Chelsea Handler, I can imagine, and goes into how she said she was raped by Bill Clinton, Yeah.

But see, unlike the right, you then said, oh, you have a point.

I said, I'm so sorry.

I apologize.

First of all, every victim deserves to be heard.

You know, anyone who's alleging any sort of assault or abuse needs to be listened to.

You can't just say that.

Do we have to re-look at Bill Clinton?

Well, do we have to go back to look at Bill Clinton?

I mean, I think that, I mean,

isn't the jury out on that?

We got what Bill Clinton was, okay?

He had a lot of sex with a lot of people.

And, yeah.

Well, that's, we know.

Right.

Now we're talking about forced sex which is forced crime right right I mean right you're right do we have to go back and look at that yes I'm not gonna disbelieve a woman I'm a woman and it is my job right now we're in the area where we have to believe every woman because we've done such a poor job at believing each other

one of the reasons

One of the reasons that I think it is crucial that we go back as part of this conversation and look at Bill Clinton is because the timing of what happened with Bill Clinton was really crucial to the development of this conversation about about sexual harassment.

It was right after the Anita Hill hearings in which the term sexual harassment and what it meant to women as a class, the way that this behavior disadvantaged them economically and professionally, came into the lexicon.

And feminists made this point even though Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court despite being accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill.

And then immediately after Bill Clinton is elected president and there is, because he is better for feminist policy than the 12 years of, and this is the politics you're talking about, and because there is a right-wing attack on him, and those things are simultaneously true, there is a left-feminist defense of Bill Clinton's power abuse with regard to Monica Lewinsky.

And that derails the clarification of the conversation around sexual harassment.

So, chronologically, before we even get to whether we believe Juanita Broderick, there is a derailment of that conversation in the 90s when the left is moved to defend Bill Clinton right after we've just talked about what sexual harassment means.

So, it's important to go back and talk about him.

On the other hand, we can't just make this about Bill Clinton and not the guy who's currently in the White House, not the guy who wants to be in the Senate, not the people who are in the Senate right now.

Frankly, the stakes are higher with a Trump in the White House.

All right.

Great discussion.

I appreciate it.

Time for New Rules, the last one of the season, everybody.

Okay.

New Roll, please tell me that when Trump asked these kids, hey, what's with all the ridiculous face makeup, one of them said, you first.

New rule, masturbation has to get back to the basics.

It's something you do alone.

It's what you do when you're not with a beautiful movie star.

Masturbation is sex, the home addition.

If one partner does everything and the other does nothing, it's not sex.

It's Simon and Garfunkel.

Not fair to heart eaters.

New rule, someone must remind the three UCLA basketball players caught stealing sunglasses from a store in China.

If you want to get away with shoplifting, don't do it in a country where you're four feet taller than everyone else.

New rule, the man in England who moved into the woods for a decade to avoid his wife

must be required to give toasts at all rehearsal dinners.

And you know, somebody said, Boy, that must be the craziest thing a guy ever did to get away from his wife.

And Bruce Jenner said, Here, hold my beer.

New rule, Santa has to move from the mall to the 99-cent store.

Half of Americans are broke, so taking their kids to the Santa at the nice mall with the Apple store is just cruel.

Better they visit 99 Cent store, Santa, sitting in a folding chair between the dented canned goods and the expired Pop-Tarts.

You want a Barbie?

Dream on, kid.

You're getting fashion doll.

And finally, New Rule, since this is our last show show before the holidays, let's remember to never lose sight of the true meaning of the season.

It's not about presents and fruitcake and putting up extra lights to show that you love Jesus more than your neighbor.

It's about a teenage virgin getting knocked up by God.

As depicted here in Botticelli's masterpiece, Mary, age 12, gets a visit from Judge Roy Moore.

And since this will be President Trump's first Christmas in the White House, I thought it would be appropriate to take a page out of Christmas favorites like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life, where a character is shown an alternative reality to their life.

Like when an angel named Clarence shows George Bailey what the world would be like if he'd never been born.

Huh, what if Donald Trump had never been born?

Wow, was that as good for you as it was for me?

Now, in a Christmas carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas past.

And since Donald Trump is truly the Ebenezer Scrooge of our time, angry, rich, and hard to look at.

Maybe tonight I could play the part of the ghost and show Trump an alternative reality of what his life could have been if he weren't such a shithead.

So Donalds, let me take you back, back, all the way back.

All right, not that far.

But far enough back to remind you that even though you're a big man now flying in the big plane and living in the big house and eating the big Mac,

Are you truly happy?

What happened to that little boy from Queens?

Here you are as a toddler, the last time you had a good hair day.

Your father was a strict authoritarian.

Is that where it all started to go wrong?

Because, you know, you weren't always the wrestling villain you are today.

You used to say things like, I'm not looking to make tremendous amounts of money.

I'm looking to enjoy my life.

What?

Donald Trump saying there's more to life than money?

What happened to this Donald Trump?

Did you hide him with your Russia connections?

Did you divorce him when he hit menopause?

You even used to show humility.

No matter how bright a person may be, there is always that element of luck.

Did you hear that, Don?

Luck!

Not on the greatest, I'm the smartest, only I can fix it.

I want that Trump back.

He spoke softly and wasn't a big dick.

Even had vulnerability.

You weren't afraid to show affection to Don Jr.

and to Eric and to Ivanka, especially to Ivanka.

You even dressed in a more vulnerable fashion, like the world's whitest pimp.

And when Rona Barrett asked you what was more important, work or love,

you said.

I would probably choose love.

Choose love?

Not pussygrabbing?

Careful, Don, it's a slippery slope to compassion.

Because the old Trump even used to worry about the poor.

New York City has been becoming a city of the very rich, actually.

And the poor, unfortunately, and the middle class are having a hard time.

Hear that?

You acknowledge the existence of poor people.

I know, it's so strange hearing those words now come out of your mouth.

It's like when the little girl in the exorcist says, your mother sucks cocks in hell.

Last year, when David Duke endorsed you, you claimed you didn't know him, but you sure knew who he was two decades ago.

Well, you've got David Duke just joined.

A bigot, a racist, a problem.

I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.

But now it's exactly the people you want in your party.

Do you see, Don?

Do you see what spending the last 20 years watching Fox News has done to your brain?

Is it too late to bring back the old Trump?

How the fuck should I know?

I'm a ghost, not Nostradamus.

But I do know you better be good, Donald Trump, because there's a jolly man who lives up north who hangs out with reindeer and watches everything.

And his name is Vladimir Putin.

All right, that's our show.

We'll be back January 19th, my seventh annual New Year's Hawaii tour this year with Bob Sagett and Reggie Brown as Barack Obama is at the Blaisdell in Honolulu New Year's Eve.

And now we are center New Year's night.

Thank you.

I want to thank Max Brooks, Carl Bernstein, Renecutra, Chelsea Handler, and Bill McKibben.

Join us down for overtime on YouTube.

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.