Ep. #443: Col. Jack Jacobs, Graeme Wood

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This is a Bose moment.

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

Okay, thank you, Benny and my sight.

I know it's exciting.

I know, you're all here.

And I think I know why you're happy.

You say it every week, but this time I really mean it.

Why you're happy today.

Trump has left the country.

I feel lighter already.

This must be how parents feel when they send their kids off to summer camp.

But it's a 12-day trip to Asia, 12 days.

And somebody asked Trump before he lay, they said, who's in charge while you're gone?

And he said, who's in charge when I'm here?

So

he's going to China, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, all the countries with factories that make his Make America Great Again hats.

Of course, China's the big one.

He wants to study their wall.

No, he does.

Well, he said.

He said, when's the last time you saw a Mexican in Beijing?

See?

But then

South Korea, Trump will be in South Korea.

That should be fun.

TMZ meets DMZ.

And then Vietnam, where of course there was a war that Trump avoided

with multiple deferments because of his bone spurs.

And now he gets to go back as President of the United States.

Who says the Dodgers didn't win?

I know.

Angela, you're very upset about that.

Sorry about that.

But did you at least have a good Halloween?

Because, oh, Halloween, what?

I don't know what you gave the kids this Halloween, but over at Robert Mueller's house, they were handing out indictments.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yeah.

This is just the beginning, but Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager, the head guy at the campaign there, 12-count indictment, money laundering.

tax evasion, failing to register as a foreign agent, lying about all of it.

And I love this, he had three passports.

I didn't know you could do that.

Three American passports.

Trump said he was going to drain the swamp, then he hires the creature from the Black Lagoon.

And

there's a new character.

We'll have to build a new evidence wall.

George Papadopoulos.

Never heard of this guy.

He was a go-getter there, meeting with the Russians.

We'll talk about it.

But he was reporting to a big up in the campaign named Sam Clovis.

Do you know Sam?

There's Sam Clovis.

Who this week, get this, Trump picked to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist.

And then Sam withdrew when he remembered he was not a scientist.

And

they asked Mr.

Clovis, you know, what expertise do you have regarding agriculture?

And he said, eating it.

But speaking of eating our seed cord, let me tell you,

the Republicans unveiled finally this week their new tax plan.

So hang on, Americans billionaires.

Help is on the way.

And it's amazing.

I mean, remember the Tea Party?

Remember the Tea Party back in 2009, 2010, the way they took over Congress?

Based on their bedrock principles that debt is out of control, our biggest crisis, an existential threat to our way of life.

Yeah, forget all that.

Yeah, this new tax plan blows a $1.5 trillion hole

in the debt.

And

someone asked Paul Ryan,

they said, when did Republicans stop caring about debt?

And he explained, after careful consideration, that the current president is white

and rich.

So,

and of course you know there was another horrible terrorist attack in New York.

Trump immediately started tweeting, stupid weak president doesn't keep us safe.

And then he was like, oh wait, that's me now.

But here's the feel-good story of the week.

You heard what happened at Twitter on the last day at work, an employee there,

an employee there, oh my god, deleted Trump's Twitter account for 11 minutes.

I don't know who this person is, but I have one thing to say to them.

Thank you for your service.

All right, we got a great show.

Rob Ryder, Christina Valentoti, and Jeffrey Lord are here.

And a little later, I'll be speaking with author and ISIS expert Graham Wood.

But first up, he's a military analyst for MSNBC and a Medal of Honor winner.

Talk about thank you for your service.

Retired U.S.

Army Colonel Jack Jacobs.

Jack!

How are you, sir?

Great to see you again.

All right.

All right.

So I'm guessing, as a military man, you're a student of military history.

What you would think, yeah.

Yeah.

And you remember when Caesar crossed the Rubicon?

I'm that old, but

I don't mean you were there.

But that's, you know, that's when Rome went from a republic, of course, and there were, as soon as he crossed, that's what that phrase means.

As soon as he crosses the Rubicon, we're no longer a republic, then the army's in charge.

I wouldn't bring this up in America because we never had these issues before.

But the toddler-in-chief seems to be

constantly being babysat by generals.

He's constantly, he said it just today.

He was talking about, you know, the FBI should go after this, and I'm very frustrated, the Justice Department.

That's not what the president should do.

It's like he's aching to be a dictator.

How concerned are you about this military thing going on?

No, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I would be worried about the fact that there seems to be some level of ineptitude at at least one end and probably both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I think if

we're going to see something different probably in the midterm election, and one of the reasons the Republicans are not doing anything at the moment is because they want to see what the outcome of that's going to be.

They don't want to irritate Trump's base.

Things might change at the midterm election.

I'm not worried about national defense

in terms of the leadership involved, but over the

longer term, we need to get a trend.

What if he gives a crazy order?

Ah, well, you.

Ah.

That's not an ah kind of answer.

Ah.

What an interesting notion that

he blows up the world.

Every president has had the opportunity to do exactly that.

I know, but every president wasn't a demented man-child in clown makeup.

This is what I'm.

Yeah.

I wasn't worried about these issues at all before.

Well, if you're a general in the White House, I guess you keep the football away from the president if you're concerned about that.

But they have to take orders from him.

That's it.

Well, well, you know,

if you're at the bottom of the food chain like I was.

You mean among generals?

I mean, colonels.

Even, yes, any time, you're required to put your two cents in.

You get the order, and the order, as long as the order is not immoral or illegal, you have to carry it out.

But when you get to be at the top of the food chain, you're responsible for making sure also that we don't do anything stupid.

Oh.

Well, that bus has sales.

But if you want to know whether or not the president can order the destruction of the entire known universe by himself and not be checked by anybody,

Yes, he could.

Ah.

Okay, so what about General Kelly?

You know, we were only a few weeks ago thinking, this is the guy, thank God he's around.

And, you know, he's done some pretty boneheaded things lately.

First, going after that war widow and at least the congresswoman who was defending her, and now talking about Robert E.

Lee like he's a hero in the Civil War,

there should have been a compromise.

And he looks to me like just another version of Trump, which is an elderly white male Fox News viewer.

Well, it's really kind of interesting.

That's dangerous to me.

His responses

have been something of a shock to a lot of people, including those who know him and know him well, who had a great deal of respect for him, Marines who've served with him.

for whom he served, and so on.

He was viewed to be something of the adult in the room.

Right.

And then he came out on the podium and started this ad hominem argument.

Ranting like a Fox News viewer.

Really quite disconcerting.

Yes.

But the most significant bit, of course, was talking about the Civil War.

And those of us who went to public school in New York City learned all about the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act when we were in middle school.

Now you're testing my history.

Aha.

Yeah, Yeah, I'm a little fuzzy on that.

And the fact of the matter is, Lincoln wrote that very famous letter

five years or six years before the Civil War started, in which he said, he wrote,

a nation can't survive half slave and half free.

Right.

Five years before the war started.

Sure.

So anybody who articulates that the war was not about slavery has been smoking too many left-handed cigarettes.

I can show you a few of those if you'd like, currently, but.

This is a family show.

Oh, I know.

But so it seems to me we have never had more really, really disturbing national security issues.

When I think of, I mean, my top four, let me get yours, see if you think these are the four and in what order.

North Korea.

ISIS, Islamic terrorism, that kind of stuff.

The environment, the Pentagon is totally on the page,

ahead of the politicians on the environment being a national security threat.

True.

And Russia,

all those four areas are all

really like

nerve-wracking.

I think

we've got a lot of threats.

The world is quite fragmented, and the threats are fragmented.

We're not organized to cope with them all.

ISIS is a problem only to the extent that ISIS is getting defeated defeated overseas, and as a result, they're going back to first principles, which is to

blow up innocent civilians.

So

that is a problem.

They were doing a lot of harm to innocent civilians in the territory they conquered as well.

Quite, but they're on the way out there, at least for the time being.

They're liable to come back again.

But for the moment, they're going back to the kinds of things terrorists always do, and that is to go to places like the United States and Europe and shoot up the countryside without necessarily taking any territory.

So they're off the territory bit now.

North Korea is a particular problem, and it seems like it's intractable, but if you consider the fact that North Korea is basically a continuing criminal enterprise, and the only thing they want to do is continue killing their own citizens, taking 40 to 50 percent of the gross domestic product and putting it in their pockets and all the rest of that stuff,

it comes clear that they do not want to antagonize the United States by setting a nuclear weapon on Guam or any other place because they know they'll get annihilated.

So

North Korea's view is if they have a nuclear weapon, then nobody's going to bother them and they can continue ripping off their own people.

North Korea, I think, is less of a problem than a lot of people think precisely because it's a continuum.

I'm glad you have such optimism.

Would you ever consider if Trump called you tomorrow and said, would you come in here and babysit babysit with me for

like so many other military men have, would you take the call just to serve your country?

I've got to restring my tennis racket.

I don't have time for that, so

thank you.

Colonel Jacobs, thank you again for your service, both overseas and on this row.

All right, thank you.

Let's greet our panel.

Hey, Oku's here.

I keep

running into you, Rob.

Okay, here is our panel.

final.

She is the Los Angeles Times Assistant Managing Editor for Politics, Christina Bellentoni.

How you doing?

Great to see you.

He is a contributing editor of the American Spectator, former White House Associate Political Director under President Ronald Reagan.

You remember him from CNN, Jeffrey Lord's back with us.

And he's the big-time movie director's latest film, LBJ, with Woody Harrelson debuts in theaters today.

Rob Reiner is over here.

Okay, so don't forget to send us your questions.

Tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

All right, let's start with Russia because, you know, this cloud has been hanging over the White House, and this week it started to rain.

And I'm just wondering, in light of recent developments, what someone like you, Jeffrey, would think of show that we have a little montage of Donald Trump denying he knows anything about Russia, and anybody who ever worked for him knew anything about Russia.

I have nothing to do with Russia.

To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.

No, nobody that I know of.

Now,

that becomes a bald-faced lie at this point, right?

Well, the thing is,

I can hear the groans.

Because

he's already spinning himself into the ground.

There's going to be a whole

lot of Jeffrey Wands

in a minute.

Come on, just say,

he's indicted for lobbying activities from 2006 to 2014 before Donald Trump ever ran for president, right?

Oh, come on.

Well, it is.

Again, back to the last one.

First of all, first of all,

not the entire group of what we're talking about, right?

Like three different distinct things.

And by the way, you know, that rain cloud, they just announced the trial for Manafort and Gates.

It's going to be May 7th next year.

This is going to continue to go on for a long time.

So, okay, but we do have information now.

I mean, we had it before, but we have even more that shows that he did know.

And by the way, the Manafort thing goes up to February of 2016.

So

it's not quite the way you present it.

It doesn't matter.

The point is that we have this guy, Papadopoulos, who says he was talking to Trump directly about Russia.

And when he said, look, Russia told me they have the hacked emails from the Democrats.

And I told Trump, Trump, and Trump said, well, we should go directly to the FBI.

No, he didn't, because he's a traitor.

He said, great, set up some meetings and let's find out more.

And the fact is, Trump doesn't know anything.

So he probably wouldn't know that you were supposed to go to the FBI.

But

Paul Manafort, when he was in that meeting in June with Jared and with John Jr.,

he knew that that's what you were supposed to do is go to the FBI.

My question question is, was Paul Manafort installed by Russia?

I mean, that's what Paul Manafort did for a living.

He laundered.

That's called the swamp.

That's called the swamp, yeah.

Right, right.

Which is bipartisan, I have to say, which is what the problem is.

Wow, we got to that quickly.

Well, I mean, this is what they do.

Fox News is already preparing its viewers for the firing of Robert Mueller because, I swear to God, Corey Lewandowski said, what we should be focusing on are the continued lies of the Clinton administration.

He's not talking about the Bill Clinton administration.

He's talking about the Hillary Clinton administration, you know, because she's president now.

Or Sean Hannity.

Sean Hannity called you president.

But just because you're not president doesn't mean you get to collude with the Russians and break the law, which is what she seems to have done.

In order to lose an election.

That's what she did.

Right?

But my question about Paul Manafort, it looks like maybe, because he kind of walked in off the street and said, hey, I'll work for you for free.

It's a little suspicious that a guy who had

been working for Russian puppets for years would, it just seems they're always in the same place.

Which precinct was turned by this?

Precinct.

Yeah.

Oh, so you're going to the, we don't know if it affected the election?

It didn't.

But that's not what we're going to do.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

That's not true.

There's no intelligence community that has ruled out that it didn't affect the election.

We don't know if it made the election go one way or the other, but it definitely affected the election.

Otherwise, you wouldn't take out ads on Facebook.

If you're saying that there's no effect to putting out lies,

then don't take out ads.

That's right.

Yes.

Well, the Clinton campaign.

Look, this is politics, folks.

The Clinton campaign puts out stuff all the time, right?

I mean,

how are we to know that wasn't from Russia?

They were busy colluding with Russia, right?

They were getting the Russians.

You know what I love?

You know what I love?

With a straight face, he says this.

A straight face.

And he's a nice guy.

He just keeps

called dissent.

He looks so much more relaxed after being on.

Rob has that affection.

No, no.

No, but he, but you know about that, Bill, because he spoke.

I mean, I don't think what, but

Jeff was wrong.

I mean, no, no, seriously, to throw him off that because he made a joke.

I mean, it was clearly a joke.

Oh, clearly.

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's clearly a joke.

Listen, I'm not on either side in terms of the policies, but I mean, that was a bad deal.

I think it looks like he's more relaxed.

He is, because we're talking about him like he's not here, but

he looks like he's a lounging around.

Come to our sides and can lure him in.

After spending two years of eight to one,

this is a breeze.

So we got off on nothing.

But we got off on the face of the future.

Let's talk about this, what you were bringing up about Facebook, because

the guys from,

not the CEOs, they didn't show up, but somebody, I guess the lawyers from the United States.

Mr.

Stretch.

Mr.

Stretch was one of them.

Mr.

Stretch, right?

From

Google and Facebook and Twitter testified before Congress, and they said, Facebook said 140 million of their users may have seen this propaganda from Russia.

So to tell me that you know that it didn't affect the election,

and of course

they will never admit that because that would be like saying the advertising that you buy here on Facebook doesn't work.

And of course it works.

That's why propaganda exists because it works.

One of the things, I mean, I think we have to be careful about getting government into media, period.

But one of the things that I do think we need to think of is when you go to advertise on Facebook, should you not identify where you're getting your money from?

Well, you know,

that's what they're trying to do.

Yes, there's a bill now for it.

We have those laws when it comes to political advertising.

And you can't tell me that a really spooky ad on television that slings a bunch of lies, because both sides do it, that has the little fine print at the bottom, someone's going to go look that up and maybe issue a really irritated press release about it.

There's not any teeth in that, right?

You might know where the money's coming from, but it's not like there's going to be people digging into that new, you know, federal election commission record on Facebook and Twitter ads, right?

There's a limited subsection of people that study that and try to make the American people care about it.

Campaign finance as a whole bores people usually.

This is pretty sexy.

Absolutely right.

Hillary carpet-bombed, like they used to do in every election, it didn't work because

people see those ads over and over.

They hate the person who put the ad out, and of course, they know it's coming from that person.

The most effective advertising is word of mouth.

That's why Facebook is so dangerous because people don't know that they're repeating propaganda.

And the really scary part about this is the Russians came in, used Facebook, used Twitter, and invaded and infected us in a way that propaganda, like you say, works.

And now they're here.

Now they're here, and we cannot determine what's real and what's not.

And they're going to do it again.

They're doing an enemy.

And the commander-in-chief is AWOL on this issue.

Let's even forget the past.

We know they're going to try to do it again.

And we have a president who denies that they did it before,

doesn't seem to be concerned about it at all.

Remember Bush sat there for seven minutes on 9-11?

Right.

Well, he's sitting there.

Trump is like sitting there for like

years.

Yeah.

It's like seven minutes times his whole term.

Right, right.

And he's just sitting there while we're under attack.

Well, Bernard doesn't want to be Chinese, and nobody ever wants to say anything about it.

Because what?

The Chinese, the Chinese have hacked.

Well,

the Chinese have hacked into the White House and they've hacked hacked into the Defense Department.

The State Department.

But they haven't weaponized it the way the Russians were able to weaponize these hacks.

None of these security agencies, you're a good American, right?

You believe in our security.

All 17 said it was the Russians.

So why are you bringing up China?

Well, because I think they're probably the greater threat.

But in the long term, the issue here, I think, really also has to be an element of personal responsibility, right?

If you get a crazy email from your crazy uncle that says, you know, Barack Obama's a Muslim or whatever, it's your obligation, if you don't believe that and you would like to prove that person wrong, to go on Snopes and to send them the factual information or here's the copy of the picture.

It's not that different on Facebook.

You have a responsibility if you're going to share something.

Maybe Google it first.

Maybe

wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

By the time Snopes picks up the fact that it is illegitimate, that thing could have gone viral and

behind.

And what we saw in DC goes to that, right?

With Comet Pizza, like there was actual potential violence there based on some of these erroneous problems.

The main thing is she lost the election.

And it wasn't because of the Russians.

Well,

it was because of her.

It was a combination of reasons, as every complicated thing is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not going to make it through the whole show here.

You're going to do it.

Okay.

Let me ask about another issue.

The tax plan that came out today.

I was mentioning it in the monologue, especially about the Tea Party party.

party.

Am I misremembering that?

That the Tea Party is there solely because of this issue?

That debt was going to be our downfall, and now they have a tax plan.

Cutting taxes.

I know, but

first it was debt.

You can't cut taxes and not increase the debt unless you cut revenue.

There's no revenue cutting in there.

But this happens every time.

That's going to hurt all those people.

Every time a Republican gets into office, They do this.

When the Democrat is in office, they run on the idea that they're running up the debt because we're not allowed to run economics.

And if Mitt Romney were president, this is a very similar tax plan that you would have seen, right?

You know, this is the tax plan that Paul Ryan has wanted for a decade and longer.

But I have to do a reality check because it's not law, right?

We are a long way from that.

They presented a plan.

You immediately see Republicans who are worried about an election that, by the way, is one year from Monday.

They're concerned about the fact that it blows a hole hole in the deficit.

They're concerned about the fact right here in California it could disproportionately.

Where is it right now that the government has to be huge and we have to be paying for this enormous government?

Where is that risk?

No, I know what you're saying.

You're saying,

this is the star of the beast theory, except they never get around to doing that.

We've done this over and over again.

The swamp.

Yeah, but it has to be part of the big overall deal, which is the major chunk of money goes to the military and to Medicare and to Social Security.

And that big deal that they always talk about, unless you're going to look at those big pots of money, then you can't make a tax cut like this unless you explode everything.

And no one has the political courage to tackle all those things in either party.

And also to Amazon.

You know, Chris Christie in New Jersey is offering them like $5 billion in tax breaks because there's this competition for them to put up their giant warehouse somewhere.

Really?

They'll go broke without those tax breaks?

All right.

So one of our favorite refillable refillable bits as we call them here is, I don't know it for a fact, I just know it's true.

And this is, you know, this, this,

it's so funny because this started before Donald Trump.

This idea, I was just like, you know, there are things that I can't prove, I just know they're true.

And now that's, of course, how we actually operated the government.

But I like to make a list every six months or so.

For example, I don't know it for a fact, I just know

I don't know for a fact that Paul Manafort will be played by Joe Pesci in the movie.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that if you tried to pull out one of Donald Trump's hairs, the whole thing would unravel like a Christmas sweater.

I just know.

Not true.

Not true.

Not true.

I don't know for a fact that all of Sarah Huckabee Sanders' sweaters are covered in cat hair.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that Johnny Depp calls friends in the middle of the night and says, Am I turning into Nicholas Cage?

I don't know for a fact that even if I didn't know Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross's name, I would guess it was Wilbur Ross.

It almost has to be.

I don't know for a fact that when people talk about seeing other people, they're already banging someone else.

That one hurt.

I don't know for a fact that vibrators think dildos are lazy.

I don't know for a fact that Colin Kapermick sometimes takes a knee just so the people behind him can see.

And I don't know for a fact that your therapist is infinitely more disturbed than you'll ever be.

All right, he is the national correspondent current for the Atlantic, whose latest book is The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State.

Graham Wood.

Hey, Graham, how you doing?

How are you, sir?

Hate to see you.

Okay, so you wrote the book on ISIS.

That can't be easy.

And I remember when you wrote in The Atlantic about it, and we had an attack this week from somebody who was making no bones about the fact that he was in with ISIS, right?

Yeah, singing the fight song from his hospital bed.

Oh, really?

Okay.

And you wrote back in the Atlantic in 2015, the reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic, very Islamic.

The religion preached by most of its ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

What do you mean by that?

Well, you know, people say ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, and what I'm suggesting is that it's part of the Islamic tradition.

You know, the Islamic tradition is 1,400 years long, and it is diverse, and ISIS has a piece of that.

It is a phenomenon that comes from that tradition.

It's not the only thing that you could say was Islamic, but it's looking at things like the idea of a caliphate, like the idea that there are particular laws that were handed down from the beginning, and it is implementing them in a way that would be recognizable to Muslims from many, many centuries before.

When people say a religion is, it's almost a silly thing to say, right?

Because it's practiced by different people in different ways.

So

to some people, it is ISIS, and to, of course many more people it is not.

But to just say it is a religion of peace, hopefully to all, unfortunately not to all.

Yeah, most Muslims do not consider ISIS the best representation of the religion, but we could say that about various Christian sects too.

And we're totally used to talking about Christianity as having a crazy fringe, a kind of mainstream center, peaceful Christians, warlike Christians, and ISIS happens to be one part of that spectrum within Islam.

The difference with the Islamic world is that there are many more fundamentalists, mainstream people,

or what we would call fundamentalists.

I think the best analog within Christianity might be the Westboro Baptist Church, which is this group that used to picket the funerals of servicemen.

They picket me.

They're like 50 people.

They pick at me.

It's a small group.

With ISIS, unfortunately, there were about 40,000 people who traveled to Syria to fight on their side.

So that's a much larger proportion.

So when people say that it's a a double standard, how Trump reacts, now I think we all agree Trump's solutions are horrible, right?

Okay.

I would agree with that.

And his reactions, yes.

But they said there's a double standard in the reaction to the Vegas violence that we saw, the Las Vegas shooter about a month ago, and this.

Or you mentioned the Westboro Baptist Church, people mentioned Tim McVeigh, they mentioned Anders Brevik, they mentioned the Ku Kux Klan.

Is there a difference?

Do you see, I mean, there is, I think you started to say, just in numbers.

Yeah, we don't even know what happened with Vegas yet.

But the difference, I think, is that ISIS is claiming part of this tradition.

So it does have a certain way of kind of justifying itself that's different from other types of violence.

Now, it doesn't mean that those other types of violence aren't concerning.

In fact, they in many cases claim much larger numbers, you know, 59 people in Las Vegas.

But what ISIS is able to do is...

Well, during, that's this year.

Yeah, that's in one event.

ISIS is mentioned that

guy was not trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

He was very

effective at killing people from

one hotel room, of course.

But with

what we get is the sense that

any individual Muslim can be kind of activated in an ISIS mold because of the belief that they can speak to this kind of understanding that ISIS is reviving a tradition that they have some part of.

Now,

that's something that I think certain other ideologies don't quite have the ability to do, is to try to awaken the sense that we've got the right version of something that you're already part of.

Okay.

What do you think is the effect when people, I mentioned this has happened to you because you've written realistically about this, say

you're Islamophobic?

Yeah, I mean, I have to look at some of these issues with kind of, you know, Trumpian orange-tinted lenses.

And I understand

that this is not a great time to be a Muslim in the United States.

Muslims are targets of bigotry.

They're targets of actual Islamophobia.

But at the same time, at some point, you have to engage the bullshit detector.

And if someone says ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, then I think they're really going to misunderstand what's motivating people to kill in its name.

And it cuts off debate, does it not?

It absolutely does.

My belief has always been that you're never going to solve the terrorism problem

unless you modernize the religion, that until the religion itself has a reformation and enlightenment like Christianity did,

this problem is going to persist.

Would you agree with that?

I think it might even be a more dispiriting situation than that.

ISIS, in some ways, is the reformation within Islam.

They're doing what, you know, 500 years ago in Christianity, we had Martin Luther saying, we don't have to listen to the established church.

we don't have to listen to the Pope.

ISIS is saying, your neighborhood Imam, forget him.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

We're the ones, we can just read the Quran, and we're going to have an interpretation that is extremely violent, but it's the right one, even though we're the minority.

So this modernization of Islam can go both ways.

It can go in an enlightened way, or it can go toward one that's unfortunately very violent.

And again, one of the differences, I think, is that there is more support in a general population.

When we get this polling back, it seems to show like 20%

of worldwide Muslims are what they would call Islamist.

They're not terrorists, they're not taking it violently, but most of the things terrorists believe they believe.

Yeah, they would say that they want Sharia to be represented in the government, but they might mean something so different from ISIS that they would hate ISIS.

I mean they might just believe that in some way the constitution in their countries should reflect Islam.

But death for leaving the religion.

There is disconcertingly high levels of support for that.

That's true.

Right.

Things like that, which are not liberal principles.

No, they're not compatible with what I would say are,

you know, ideas of human rights that I would recognize.

Okay.

Let me ask the panel about the politics of this, because, of course, Trump immediately flew into action and tweeted that it wasn't his fault.

And at moments like that, I just hate him so much.

And,

you know, his Muslim ban is a terrible way to handle this, right?

I mean, it's not effective.

It's un-American.

It is bigoted.

But I also don't know what the Democratic position is.

I mean, I saw their responses.

It was all about how Trump handled it badly, which is true.

But it didn't address the issue itself.

And I've said this many times.

I just think the Democrats are blowing it on this issue.

Terrorism is a real concern to people.

I really don't, I don't think it's a Democrat or a Republican issue.

This is a very complicated issue, as you point out.

And one of the things you talked about is

reforming the religion, and you're saying it's already been reformed, but the fact of the matter is, until people are of

willing to accept peace as part of their religious tenets, this is not going to be solved.

And I don't think there's a public policy that's going to cure what this is.

This is something that has to be worked at from the ground up in some kind of organic way.

And I don't know.

What do Democratic Party?

In terms of the politics, though,

when you look at the Democratic Party historically, it split.

You had tough Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, John F.

Kennedy, and then you had sort of a softer version, the McGovern, Carter, et cetera.

And I think as long as the public perceives that a party, Republican or Democrat, is not addressing a threat,

what they see as a threat, then they're going to turn on them.

But the question is, how do you address that?

What are the policies to address that?

Well, there's a big issue here.

It's important to think about that the sort of fight against ISIS that the government is embarking on is based on a 2001 war authorization after the September 11th terrorist attacks, right?

This is 16 years in the making that if Congress, there are members in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party that would like to actually debate going to war with ISIS to be able to actually say, this is what we're attempting to do, this is what we are attempting to fight, rather than a war that was fought for very different reasons that could go on in perpetuity.

See,

we don't know exactly what to do.

I can tell you what not to do.

What you don't do is send

an armed force into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein and unleash a 1,400-year-old sectarian war.

That I know you don't do.

But again, that's the thing with Donald Trump.

That's the past.

That's the past.

That's not going to to win anybody any elections.

Even Trump believes that.

He does not believe that.

But

how about a Democratic politician standing up and saying, we find not only the terrorist act intolerable, but the beliefs behind it.

This idea that we're infidels, we're not infidels.

And of course, I'm not saying all Muslims, everybody else is infidels.

This is the political correctness problem.

It is partly that.

Some of these beliefs are not liberal.

That's the irony is that liberals are defending illiberal tactics.

But the problem I find with that is what do we do about it once we find out what their beliefs are?

We can't police beliefs.

What we have to do is find out what people are doing.

What is most important to me and most worrying is the 40,000 people who went over there.

These people, if they come back, they won't be just ramming a Home Depot, a truck, into a bike path.

They'll know how to kill people in an industrial scale.

So I think what we can do is actually look at the military side and probably have more productivity, more efficiency than if we looked at the population.

Why don't we treat, for example, the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia the way we treated race apartheid in South Africa in the 80s.

Yeah.

People were

every liberal had that as a cause.

And you see, or the way gay people are treated.

Right.

It's the death penalty.

Well, we don't have a president that believes in those kind of human rights.

We don't have that.

He's going to go to the Philippines and say, good job, Duterte.

I'm not going to tell you for the life of me why so many liberals are hesitant to say these people will push gays off roofs.

I mean, you know, and we cannot, we cannot do that.

Not most of them push gays off roofs, but yes, a certain do, certain percentage, a small percentage, right?

No, you're right.

And then there's that Islamist group that is hundreds of millions of people who wouldn't do it, but think, yeah, gay people really don't have a right to live.

I mean, it's...

And this is

an effort that started in the 50s.

I think Kutbo was the first guy to come to America and take a look at men and women are dancing together and went back and started.

I think the beginnings of what we see is this radical Islamic terrorism.

So it goes way back.

And we have to understand where it's coming from.

And that's another reason why Trump's plan is so stupid is because there's no sense keeping people out.

This guy was here.

The Sarnaev brothers were here.

The guy who shut up the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was here.

We should just be more careful, though, about having people come into the country without examining, for instance, social media.

But how do you know?

But the people who got into Manhattan, he came here in 2010.

There's no way you're going to be able to know seven years in advance that he's going to swear allegiance to a terrorist group that at that point didn't even exist.

Well, I mean, you examine where he's from, at least as I understand it from listening to some of these experts that use Uzbekistan as a particularly hotbed of this kind of thing.

Well, there's a lot of people.

That's not on the travel ban.

That's a lot of hotbed.

Right, yeah.

And so maybe it should be.

And so it says so, maybe it should be.

Well, again, there was this diversity immigrant visa program.

That's how we got in here, also known as the Green Card Lottery, and I didn't know about it.

And apparently, it's for people who are from geographic regions that are underrepresented.

Australia being one of them, by the way.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Don't talk to me about Australians.

There's too many of them.

Taking hard jobs.

Oh, are you kidding?

I did a whole thing about that one now because I was obsessed about that.

It's a brown sense of subject, but it's.

Just the Hemsworths.

It's an example of trying to set a policy based on an event that's politically convenient for one party or another, where you didn't hear a lot of discussion about shifting the policy after the Vegas shooting, for example.

We didn't have a big conversation about gun control because the party that cares the most about gun control is not the party that's in control of the government right now.

And that's what this is about more than exactly precisely where they're from or being able to filter through old social.

The lottery aspect drives me crazy.

I mean, would Harvard say we're going to have a lottery and the first five people get, I mean, what is that?

I understand being a welcoming nation that appreciates immigration, that's who we are.

That's how we were built.

But we don't have to like beg them to come here when they weren't even thinking about it.

It's like we don't have enough Uzbeks in this salad.

Okay, so before we run out of time, you mentioned what got you fired.

So let's, people are probably wondering if they don't remember it.

You tweeted Zig Heil, right?

I wrote a column.

You wrote a column.

I love Nazis.

It was about a group called Media Matters, which makes it its business to run around and pressure advertisers to take people off the air.

television, radio.

Oh, I'm sure they're familiar with me.

I bet.

I bet they are.

Absolutely.

And I had noticed over time, Alan Dershowitz had said that they had an anti-Semitism problem.

I had noticed this in other places.

So I mentioned this in the column and speculated how they would rewrite the First Amendment.

And I put in there, borrowed something from Mussolini and did it that way.

And then I said at the end, the American spectator was unable to confirm that the last two words in the draft were SIG heil.

So then

tweeted out a couple days later.

Insane

purity police nonsense that you have to go away because you made a little joke.

And the thing that got me was, I knew that when they set up these pressure taxes, I talked to one of the advertisers on a Rush Limbaugh show.

He's not political, he's Jewish, and they went after his business, threatened him, threatened him with his physical safety, you know, attacked his business.

I mean, this is nuts.

Could I bring up this other political correct thing that happened last week?

Because the pitcher for the Dodgers, you Darbish, who has no future as a pitcher.

He did not do well in the series.

But, you know, we all.

We're all rolling Darvish.

Yeah, we

all.

But he was, there was a little controversy, and he's a little bit my hero this week because the guy on the other team,

what's his name, Yuriel?

Okay.

He hit a home run.

He was excited.

He gets in the dugout.

Eugh Darvish is from Japan.

He did the thing where he held his eyes to look Asian, which is not cool.

No one is condoning it.

But I saw, I turned on the TV.

I mean, no one died.

You would have think, I mean, the world had cut, he's suspended for five games next year.

And here's Eugh Darbish's statement.

He said, it's not like I was irritated by it.

He did something he shouldn't have done, but I wasn't angry at all.

I was told the next day he wanted to speak to me, and I

communicated to him that it was completely unnecessary.

Yes.

How about that new rule, Snowflakes?

You can't be madder than the victim.

Then the victim.

That's right.

That's right.

You know, not everything has to be a federal case, right?

I mean, there have been people that have been been reprimanded for doing a lot less than what you said or what he said.

And then there's also people that have faced zero consequence for saying a whole lot worse.

And, you know, I will point to at real Donald Trump, which has said a lot of things that violate Twitter's policies and

so there's kind of that umbrage meter that gets cranked up and it's very partisan and it's something that...

But let's go after Trump, not this guy.

Well, or

community training.

I think he got the message.

I don't think he was about to march in Charlottesville with the Nazis next year.

No.

I just think he's a baseball player.

He got excited.

He did something stupid.

Tell him, bad.

Let him go.

Let it go.

Let it go.

You don't want to do that, though, and that's the problem.

Thank you, panel.

Time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

Okay.

New rule now that survivors have come forward to say they were inappropriately touched by people named Weinstein, Spacey, Tobak, Ratner, Piven, Dick, Halperin, Hoffman, and George H.W.

Bush,

I want someone to interview this turkey.

I know it was years ago, but you shouldn't have to do that to get a pardon.

Hurricane, if you stood in line all day to get the new iPhone 10 and you're setting up the facial recognition, make sure one of the faces you make is this one.

That way when you drop it into the toilet, it'll know it's you.

Neurul, someone has to tell these young women, that's not Lester Holt.

Neurul, now that the two women who were lost at sea for five months have admitted that they never turned on their emergency beacon.

I don't want to hear any more jokes about how men won't ask for directions.

New Rule Melania must be in charge of setting the White House clocks during this weekend's time change.

It simply requires taking the small hand and pushing it back, and she has experience with that.

New rule, stop acting so shocked that Selena Gomez is back together with Justin Bieber.

If her body didn't reject a kidney, why would it reject an asshole?

And finally, New Rule, stop making movies where the hero is a guy who can drive a car.

Something we let 16-year-olds do.

What does it say about our psyche that Hollywood could always count on men to plunk down 10 bucks to watch another man make a motor go vroom vroom?

You know,

I recently caught up with Baby Driver because the critics loved it and I had forgotten that critics are stupid.

And it turns out it's just one more in a long line of movies like the Transporter series and Fast and Furious, parts one to infinity, and

the new wheel man, and Gone in 60 Seconds, and Driven, and Drive, and the Driver, and Drive Angry, and ten others, all with the exact same plot.

When there is a tough job or even an impossible mission, the key to it is a guy who possesses the elite, mind-blowing skill of driving.

Only Baby Driver can get us out of this with his great driving

and traffic.

Baby Driver,

Baby Driver, is so indispensable to the heist that the rest of the gang actually hates him because they think he's too young to be that great a driver.

Well, everybody but Kevin Spacey thinks he's too young.

Of course, the real world is not so glamorous.

Baby driver is really Uber driver.

Because driving is not that hard.

If baby driver is unavailable, you know who else can pick you up after you pull a job?

Your mom.

Driving is so easy that cars can now drive themselves in the same way that vacuum cleaners now vacuum by themselves.

There's never been a movie about vacuuming.

There was was a movie called Eat My Dust, but it was about driving.

Now, if Baby Driver was about an actual baby who could drive,

that would be impressive, but it's not.

It's about a man driving a car, which isn't impressive because I'm a man who drives a car practically every day.

And rarely, as I'm turning left onto La Cieneca, do I think this would make a terrific movie?

So I know what you're thinking.

Bill, you've got to make it a big deal about Baby Driver.

True, but it gets me to the larger point.

Hear me out.

What bothers me so much about these driving movies is that it's such a lazy way to be a badass.

Geez, you get more of a workout doing this.

Or even fake doing that when someone says, Hey, how was that movie about the really great driver?

And yet, every day on the street, I see some guy in a muscle car waiting at the light for the chance to peel out and burn rubber and tear ass down the street.

Like, we should all be so impressed that he can do this with his foot.

Oh, I did that with my foot.

But you know who you never see doing that?

A woman.

You probably have noticed in America lately that there's something wrong with dudes.

The recent stories of sexual harassment are about many things like misogyny and white privilege and old-fashioned being a pig, but I'm telling you, there is something toxic about this male laziness.

If Harvey Weinstein had made even a minimal effort, join Jenny Craig,

shaved,

listened, generally tried to not look like a Russian cab driver.

He could have attracted women the old-fashioned way by being rich and not entirely repulsive.

You know, with all these creeps, there's no whining, no dining, no game, no effort to be charming or witty just open the bathrobe and say hello to my little friend

and when they get turned down what is with this epidemic of I give up you win I'll just masturbate in front of you

Cosby didn't even want his women conscious apparently

Apparently Mark Halperin's MO was just to rub his erection against a woman in the office, like he's some kind of horny spider monkey who dabbles in political analysis.

Someone needs to write a book called How to Behave with a Woman Like You're Not an Asshole.

With chapters like No One Carrying a Resume Wants to See Your Dick.

And no one wants to do it in a room where there's a coffee machine.

All right, I'll be at Madison Bare Garden November 11th at the Performing Arts Center in Buffalo on the 12th.

I want to thank Christina Balentoni, Jeffrey Lloyd, Rob Reiner, Graham Wood, and Colonel Jack Dickens.

All right, join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

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