Episode #392 (Originally aired 06/17/16)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Good afternoon.

Afternoon.

very much.

Thank you so much.

You're very kind.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Hey, hey.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

All right, all right.

Please, I'm blushing.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think I know why you're cheerful tonight.

It took a full year.

but Donald Trump is catering in the polls.

He is

cratering is what I meant to say.

He's also catering.

He's got a business on the side.

Trump steaks.

They're going like

hot cakes, which he's also selling over here.

No.

No, he's cratering.

I don't know.

Was it something he said?

Don't ask me to explain Americans, really.

I mean, he has been saying crazy, offensive shit for a full year, and now they go, hey, wait a minute.

This guy, there's something a little off about this guy.

He is setting records for political unpopularity.

70% of Americans now have an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump.

Okay, all right, all right, all right, all right.

That's up 10 points in a month.

His favorable rating is only 29%.

That's historically low.

He's got 77% unfavorable with women.

They view him negatively.

89% unfavorable, big surprise with Latinos.

94% unfavorable with black folks.

Okay, but

Trump never changes.

Today he tweeted, the people who hate me love me.

No, they don't.

His campaign has blood coming out of its whatever.

No, really.

I mean no one even wants to be his vice president.

The only people who will say yes, Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie.

That's who they're talking about.

I think Christie would be great.

First of all, he would shatter the glass floor.

He's a heavy man.

No, but the Republicans are having real buyers' remorse about this Donald Trump.

It's like buying a monkey, you know?

Everybody thinks it sounds fun to have a monkey, and then you get it home, it starts throwing poop and tears your face off.

So listen to this.

The Republican power brokers are now considering putting in a conscience clause at the convention.

You're right, sir.

That is kind of funny in itself.

No, at the convention, which would unbind the delegates and allow them to vote for someone else.

This is new for the Republicans, trying to keep white people's votes from counting.

But speaking of the conventions, what a good time to announce that real time will be on not just Friday convention week, but Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you, HBO.

That's right.

We're going to be on, I think, at 11 o'clock.

That's what it should end, or 8 o'clock, whatever time zone you're in.

But yes, we will be covering the convention because it is going to be a category five shitstorm.

Oh,

at the Republican convention, there will be blood.

When they try to take it away from Donald Trump, because his supporters watch a lot of professional wrestling.

And conventions have a lot of folding chairs.

you do the man

uh

but to be fair

we want to be fair we will also be doing the democratic convention we will also be on wednesday thursday and friday for that and and

And we will cover it when the Bernie people and the Hillary people throw kale at each other.

Because that's not quite as violent, but

no.

No, the Republican convention is going to be the fun one because already they're losing all their corporate sponsors because of Donald Trump, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, they pulled back.

Today we found that Walgreens, Ford, Motorola, UPS, Wells Fargo,

all pulling out,

you know.

The only one they have left, XLACs.

X-Lax.

For when you just want to get this shit over with.

That's no straggler.

But

no, you know what?

Trump, he blew it.

This week, we had a national tragedy, and everybody in politics, their response, as always, completely predictable.

Republicans talked about radical Islam.

Democrats talked about gun control.

Trump talked about himself.

And did you see the shooter?

I mean, the shooter said the punishment, he said that what he did was punishment for the filthy ways of the West.

You know, I just want to say to all my friends, gay, straight, and in between, get your filthy on.

You know what?

Get your filthy on.

You can have our filthy Western ways when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.

Filthy ways of the West.

That should be California's new motto.

When you come in across the border from Nevada, welcome to California, home of the filthiest ways in the West.

I mean, and did you see the pictures of the shooter and his family at Disneyland?

Okay, one, they seemed to be enjoying the West just fine that day.

And two, where was that alligator when we needed it?

All right, we got a great show.

Emily Miller, Josh.

Barrow and Colonel Lawrence Wilkinson are here.

A little bit speaking with writer-director Ruby Patel.

But first up, she's the author of All the Single Ladies, Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, and a writer-at-large for New York Magazine whose recent cover story is Hillary Clinton versus herself, Rebecca Traister.

Hi, Rebecca.

Boy, you have a long intro.

How you doing?

I'm great.

I'm happy to be here.

Oh, I'm happy to have you.

All right.

So single women, I understand, are going to be the key voting block in this election.

They are.

That's interesting because in past elections, we heard they don't vote enough.

They were the key voting bloc in 2012 as well.

They were 23% of the electorate, so almost a quarter of the electorate, and they voted for Barack Obama by a kind of staggering margin, 67 to 31 percent.

And by many

by many measures.

By many measures, they are responsible for Barack Obama getting reelected.

And I have this sneaking suspicion that the margin might be wider when it comes to choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Yeah, but you know who doesn't like Hillary?

White women.

Among white women, Hillary and Trump are tied.

What is that?

White women, let's see, woman, woman, hater.

Well, interestingly,

woman hater.

Though interestingly, amongst white single women,

single white women vote Democratic as well.

So marriage is the problem.

I've always said that.

Married white women are your problem.

Married white women are your problem.

They're not my problem.

Well, let's talk about marriage.

You know, it's interesting the way things have changed.

When I was first doing a show in the 90s, you know, I had to like stick up for the idea of being single is normal.

You're not a weird person if you don't get married.

And now, whenever I tell people, I've never been married, they're like, good for you.

How'd you do it, man?

I mean, it's like a badge of honor.

There are now more unmarried people in the United States by about a percentage point.

We are a single majority nation.

We are a single majority nation.

And it's not just some weird trend or quirk.

For women, especially, who historically have been economically dependent on men, have been sexually dependent on men in eras when they couldn't control their reproduction through birth control or abortion, have been dependent on men if they wanted to have socially sanctioned families,

the fact that circumstances have changed and that now they can be earners, they can participate in public and political life, they can have liberated sex lives, they can have families without being married, what that means is that it displaces marriage as the organizing institution that organizes gendered power, among other things.

And it creates all kinds of new paths for women.

It remaps women's adulthood in a way that is totally unprecedented and is discomforting to a lot of people.

Yes.

I mean, you said it beautifully.

What I would paraphrase that is, a woman doesn't just have to marry a loser.

No, but that's a revolution.

No, it is a revolution.

Like before you had to marry someone.

You had to.

And now it's more like, well, I'll marry somebody if somebody great comes along.

And if it doesn't, I'm okay with that.

It raises the bar on relationships.

And it raises the bar on men's behavior.

And, you know,

yeah, okay.

So, yeah, I love that word you used.

You said women used to be hustled.

Yeah.

Hustled off to the highway of marriage.

Yeah, hustled down that aisle.

Right, you just were pushed.

And at the beginning of your adulthood, because you were dependent, because you had to establish a relationship to the kind of American who could be an earner and

who could provide you with a socially sanctioned sex life and a family, that had to kick off your adulthood so that for hundreds of years, the median age, as long as they kept track, median age of first marriage for women fluctuated only between 20 and 22.

In 1990, it crept up over 23 point to 23.9.

Today it is over 27 and higher than that in many cities.

So even for those who are marrying, they're doing it later and spending more years of their adulthood outside of this institution that historically really confined them.

It's so interesting.

You know.

You're a little younger than me.

No, you're a lot younger than me.

Okay.

But who wasn't at this point?

Okay.

So like I graduated high school in 1974.

Okay, so I needed a summer job.

You know, you know what my summer job was?

I sold pots and pans door to door.

And what they said was, look, get high school yearbooks, find the women who are not going to college, and knock on their door.

Because they will be needing pots and pans.

This is...

I was a pretty good pots and pans.

I only lasted about three days.

I was like, what the fuck am I doing?

Really, I would rather get blowjobs behind the 7-Eleven than do this job.

This is just...

Well, this is the difference because if marriage was the thing that kicked off your adult life and you were a woman, you know what you were given?

Pots and pans.

Right.

And dishes.

And that was your life.

Your work, in fact, was to support the public participation of your husband, the earning of your husband, by taking care of the family, doing the cooking, keeping the house.

That's part of how you enforced marriage as the organizing principle is because if you had a population of wives dependent on these earners, they also then had to do the labor that enabled the men to go out into the world and earn.

And that was pots and pans, that was babies.

I mean, there are still Republican politicians who talk about that in nostalgic terms.

They talk about it obsessively.

This is dogma for Republican politicians.

Mitt Romney gave a speech at a graduation just a few years ago where he urged everybody, you know what, go out there and get married.

But don't just get married.

Marry early.

This is Republicans who

push the idea that the so-called success sequence, graduating from college,

graduating from high school, college, getting married, and then having a child is the cure for poverty and everything else that ails America.

But it's also because they think if women are on their own, it's going to be the government's job to support them more.

That's a lot of what it is.

It is the government's job to support them more, as the government has supported white men throughout our entire history.

I'm not kidding.

The government enfranchised white men at the founding, protected it throughout while disenfranchising people of color and women.

The government has built infrastructure that supported businesses that were owned by white men who profited.

The government has depressed, by not protecting wage equality, by not offering paid leave, has depressed women's ability to participate in the workforce and compete against men for the money and the power, and has left them as this population that needs to do the domestic work.

I'm just a pot and pan salesman.

Don't yell at me.

I'm just trying to sell my pots and pans, okay?

All right.

Well, thank you very much for coming.

You're a great guest.

I hope you join our panel sometime.

Rebecca, Chris.

Thank you very much.

Let's meet our panel.

Hey.

Hi, everybody.

Hey.

I'm just a pot and pan salesman.

He is the former chief of staff.

Wow, he's on our show to Colin Powell, who is now distinguished visiting professor at the College of William and Mary.

Oh, yes, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, one of my favorites, is over there.

How you doing?

He is the senior political correspondent for One American News and author of Emily Gets Her Gun, but Obama wants to take yours.

Emily Miller, thank you, Emily, for being brave enough to come into the Lions Den.

We appreciate that.

He is the senior editor for Business Insider and an MSNBC contributor, Josh Barrow.

Hey, Lou.

Barrow.

Barrow.

It's all right.

It's like, don't think of pink elephant, and then I fuck it up every time.

Remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

Okay, let's start with the politics before we get into the heavy stuff, because it was a heavy week.

As I mentioned in the monologue, a real difference this week in the polling with Mr.

Donald Trump.

Why now?

I mean, it's been going on for a year.

Why now?

Why did it all kind of like start going south this week?

I think it's two things.

I think we're seeing in this round of polls the Judge Curiel controversy.

And it turns out Americans don't like blatantly racist attacks on the judiciary that also signal that a president might use his power to support his own businesses and

defeat his political opponents through untoward things.

And then the response to the shooting.

I think there had been this idea that if there was terrorism, that would be good for Trump because people would be scared.

I thought that.

I thought that.

And then he said it was totally unhinged stuff, and it turned out that voters don't like that.

So maybe the public has better sense than we realized.

Well, you'll know a lot of, I think you all know a lot of conservatives don't put a lot of stock into some polls.

I'll tell you, my network did a poll, 2,000 people, mostly Democrats, post-Orlando, and has them neck and neck.

But on the bigger picture on polls, we're going to see...

Well, we don't.

They're your polls.

We all have polls.

Yeah, we all have polls.

In most polls, he did go down this week.

Okay, but bigger picture.

You're going to see the candidates go up.

You're going to see them go down.

It's going to go on until September.

And during the Republican convention, you're going to see Trump's numbers go up, believe it or not.

During the Democrat convention, you're going to see Hillary's numbers go up.

It's all going to settle down when we can get into the debates in September and October.

That's when people start, that's when you'll start seeing the real numbers that matter.

Until then, it's just a horse race and a daily up and down.

Well, okay, that's a very charitable way to look at it.

That's not the way I see it.

I see it as this was the week it ended.

No, no, no, no.

Haps, half, half.

And by the way, I don't think I'm not the only one because most of the Republicans who were caught on camera this week basically said, I don't want to talk about it.

I mean, they dashed into the elevator.

What specifically do you think made Donald Trump just his whole campaign?

You know what?

I think it's

selfishness.

The judge thing looked selfish.

There is no constituency for Trump University except Donald Trump.

and attacking the Mexican-American judge.

And then when he basically said the first thing out of his mouth after Orlando was, I was right, I was right about terrorism.

He looks like what he is, a narcissist.

I think what you've said...

I think what you just said is key from my perspective.

And by the way, I sold pots and pans too.

So I empathize with you.

You did not.

Really?

Yeah.

High school.

Boy, was it tough.

It is tough, yes.

I think the, as Rich Armitage said the other day, the Republican leadership is in a fog.

And I think they're in a fog primarily because of what you just said.

They realize now, incontrovertibly, they do not have a winning candidate.

And they don't know what to do about it.

That's it.

That's it.

Larry and I are old friends.

I think you know that, Bill.

We worked at the State Department together, and he is a loyal patriot.

But on this, we completely disagree.

Absolutely.

All right, that's fine.

That's fine.

I think Republicans, the Republican establishment in D.C., their issue is not about, the issue is that they don't control Donald Trump.

And you can talk to anybody at the RNC, which I do on a daily basis, and the leadership in the House and Senate I do also on a daily basis.

They don't know Donald Trump.

They can't control him.

He doesn't use their pollsters.

He doesn't use their money guys because he's not a politician.

And so that's why the elite and the establishment in Washington don't like Donald Trump.

But there's 14 million Americans out there.

That's one reason I think what I just said is operative, because what we have is we have a man, whether he intended it or not, has caused the Republican Party in its present incarnation, an objective with which I don't necessarily disagree, to commit suicide.

The party is self-destructive.

And that's why I think this week they're looking for an out.

I think this week they are saying, you know what, we reserve the right for a late-term abortion for Donald Trump.

Because.

No.

we're going to be able to do that.

You guys are not going to be able to do that.

We're not for abortion, but the life of the party is at stake.

Okay.

All right.

No one is.

In cases where the

conversation is only happening in L.A.

Hollywood, in New York, in D.C., in New York.

You people, this is not happening in the rest of America.

You saw those poll numbers that I was citing.

Which are a little questionable.

Those are very high negatives.

You have to admit.

But what's the problem?

And it's people.

We don't want to be in favor of

Only winning white people.

Is there enough white people?

There are

13.5 million people who voted for Donald Trump.

In Republican primaries, within the bubble.

But they're not in D.C., New York, you people's world.

But they're also surrounded by other people in their state who are not Republican primary voters.

Mitt Romney got 62 million votes in 2012.

In general, just like that.

But I'm saying, like, the 13 million people who went out to vote for Donald Trump in primaries, that's not enough for him to win the election.

We see it clearly in the polling.

My point is that their votes count.

They are people who want to vote for it.

Like this all-hole pundit elite conversation is irrelevant to the voters.

Okay, let's talk about the other stuff that happened this week because it's important.

And I thought Barack Obama really nailed it when he said about eight years ago that Americans cling to their guns and their religion because this tragedy was brought to you by guns and religion.

And anytime somebody shoots up a gay nightclub, the question is

not was religion involved, it's what religion was involved.

What?

Are you kidding me?

And unfortunately.

There's only one religion, and that is bombing and terrorization.

I was just about to say that.

Okay.

There is a lot of people.

I was just about to say, yes, exactly.

I'm sorry, folks.

That's the truth, too.

I agree.

We have to be real on both counts.

Yes, the God hates fags.

People show up with placards and posters, and they're despicable, but they don't show up with guns and bombs.

That's just the world as it is today.

Thank you.

The answer is not to ban Muslims, however.

The answer is to ask more of Muslims, I think.

And the answer is incontrovertibly, in my mind, that we need some kind of control on the weapons in this country.

Yes, let's.

We do not.

We do not.

I own 14 weapons.

I've owned weapons since I was 12 years old.

I've hunted since I was 12 years old with my father, my brothers.

We do not need large capacity magazine, semi-automatic weapons in the hands of anybody in this country other than possibly law enforcement.

Why do you need some of them?

Where's my old friend Larry?

Why do I need that many?

Yeah.

I've accumulated them.

Oh, I see.

My father died and left me some.

My brother died and left me some.

For Christmas.

Yeah.

And I don't go sell them to just anybody.

Good person.

Oh, I'll buy some.

Yes.

I'll buy them off.

I wouldn't sell them to you.

Because my friend.

I'll buy my own.

I don't know what Larry's talking about.

She's totally wrong.

First of all, High Capacity Magazine,

John McCain made an egregious statement.

John McCain.

He withdrew it, but he made an egregious statement that said that Barack Obama was responsible for Orlando.

If anybody is directly responsible for Orlando, it's the Republican Party for styming all manner of gun control.

Okay, then, Clarity.

Clarity?

But you're not responsible for repealing the Second Amendment.

So there still would be 300 million guns in America.

I wouldn't repeal the Second Amendment.

Lieutenant General Jerry Braden said that Christ brought the Second Amendment to us, so I wouldn't

repeal the Second Amendment.

First of all, there is no, I wrote a book about this,

there is no gun control law that has ever been proven to reduce gun crime.

Australia did a confiscation program.

There is no gun control law in the United States of America that has ever reduced gun crime, and actually in Australia, the violent crime is a problem.

But can we get real here?

First of all, if he didn't use the AR-15, there's plenty of other guns in America.

Maybe they would not have been as effective.

But we are not going to have the cops go around and confiscate 300 million guns any more than we're going to deport 11 million illegals.

This is like saying, I want more Great Lakes.

Yeah, I thought.

America lives in a total fantasy game.

But you have to do something.

You have to do something, for example, like saying the people on the no-fly list can't buy weapons.

Absolutely.

No.

You have to have something.

All right, this has been...

And I'm also for getting rid of the AR-15s because it's such a microcosm of what's wrong with the AR-15.

The AR-15s.

No one will ever give an inch.

You have so many thousands of guns available.

Do you have to have every weapon?

Okay, so you guys, who is to blame then for the Boston bombing?

The Sarnaevs.

No, but what?

There's no guns used.

So if guns are the cause of the Saraza.

So because I kill you with a knife instead of a gun and someone else kills someone with a gun, guns aren't referred to.

It's more difficult for people to kill people, and so fewer people will be killed.

You all just said that guns are the reason that the terrorists are killing us.

Nobody said guns were the reason.

We were saying that guns are a part of the problem.

Just admit they're a vice, like drugs or alcohol or anything else, and that you don't care that some people are going to get killed.

Like drugs.

If you say to me, some people are going to get hurt and killed by drugs, I would say, that's too bad, but I still want them.

Just admit it.

Just don't make it a virtue.

It's not a virtue.

The whole point of gun ownership and the Second Amendment is that we, me, I'm a gun owner, like you.

I think you are?

Yes.

Because we want to defend ourselves.

That's the purpose of the Second Amendment.

It's not that we can go out and kill people.

Nobody wants to defend them.

By the way, let me clear something up here.

I don't own guns to defend myself with.

Why do you own them?

I own guns to hunt with.

So what happens if someone comes in your home?

You're just going to go?

I don't own the guns in case someone comes in my home so that I can shoot them.

Okay, but that's not a good thing.

But I don't expect someone to come in my home because I have law enforcement and other people.

people around.

What response time is for law enforcement?

The response time is 10 minutes.

The average response time for law enforcement is 10 minutes.

So in those 10 minutes, when that person is in your home, your time, you're not going to shoot.

I'm 71 years old.

I've lived in this country for 71 years,

except for the years I was deployed fighting for this country when I did need my guns.

And no one's ever entered my house and tried to kill me.

I want to take issue with what you said about Islam being singular in terms of the violent risk that it poses for gays.

Because Donald Trump said this week, like, ask the gays what you're afraid of.

And I think, you know, when you talk to gay people in America, if Donald Trump actually went and asked the gays, you know, the biggest violence risk is suicide.

There's all of this immense social pressure against LGBT people, against being who they are.

That's a different issue.

No, but I think that's the problem.

It's relevant, but it's apples and arms.

No, because you have Donald Trump and other Republicans coming and saying out, we're the real protectors of LGBT people in America.

That's true.

Because we'll go.

Right.

No, but I think there's.

He didn't ever know the term before last week.

I promise you, he thought it was a sandwich before last week.

They make the best ones at Trump Tower.

A sandwich.

But I just, you know, Islamist violence in in the United States is extremely rare.

I think it's very different from

the people.

We had 17 in 2,000 people killed, and now we just had 49 people slaughtered by Islamic radicals.

We had how many in San Bernardino?

But this is the American myop.

We're all just going to that point.

They think of the 3 million Muslims in America, who, by the way, are the lucky ones, because they can come out of the closet, or they can elope with someone who is not of their faith.

Or they can leave the religion.

Or they can leave the league.

Or they can draw a cartoon without getting killed.

This is not the case for so many millions of Muslims around the world.

Where are the liberals to stand up for them?

The people who could not abide apartheid for one second.

Somehow, when it comes to gender apartheid, which is in so many countries around the world, they are not to be heard.

It is a liberal cause, or it should be.

There are millions and millions of Muslims who are gay around the world, who have no one to stand up for them.

And I didn't hear any of it this week.

It's none of it this week.

In ten Muslim countries you get the death penalty for just being gay.

Could we have a little perspective on this issue?

Size matters.

Including Iran where we just have been making deals.

I mean these are countries where I mean this religion

It's not comparable.

It's not okay.

It's what you're saying and I'm agreeing.

I disagree with you trying, I think you're trying to attribute it to religion.

That's like blaming Christianity for pedophile priests.

You know, I don't blame Christianity for pedophile priests.

I blame people.

It's connected.

It's the justification.

I'm not sure that's true.

I think it's a putrefaction.

It's a corruption of the religion when people get a hold of it and do these sorts of things.

Well, let's look at why we're talking about

ISIS.

And back to what you said about Senator McCain.

We're here because we're having this problem with ISIS.

It's gotten so powerful because President Obama said, I'm going to take all of our troops out of Iraq in 2004.

We're going to get to this, but I have to interrupt you because as long as we got on to religion, one of the amazing headlines I saw in the paper this week was that Mel Gibson is

making Passion of the Christ II, which, now I saw Passion of the Christ.

As movie making, I thought it was terrific, but I didn't remember the ending.

And I'm thinking, where do you go with this work?

Now, Mel, I don't know if you have a script yet.

I don't know.

But I know you need a hit, my friend.

So let me just make a few suggestions here.

How about Ariana Grande as Mary Magdalene

and One Direction as the Apostles in Passion 2?

I know what you did last Easter.

Kevin James is the Lord.

Kevin Hart is doubting Apostle Thomas in Passion 2.

I thought you was dead.

How about this?

One of the biggest hits of all time, E.T.

It's about a guy who comes to Earth

just saying, Passion 2, JC, the extra celestial.

Or get Tyler Perry involved.

He's got a great track record, makes a lot of money.

Passion 2, Jude's family reunion, it's right on target with its Christian following.

The new Ghostbusters is coming out.

Look, my money is on those gals proving the naysayers wrong.

Why not piggyback on that and do Passion 2?

I'm a Ghostbuster.

Who doesn't love the chipmunks?

Those wide-cracking scams could

make a great supporting cast for Passion 2.

The squeak shall inherit the earth.

All right.

He is the actor, writer, and director of the documentary Meet the Patels, which is currently available on all streaming platforms.

Ruby Patel.

Hey, Ruby.

How are you, sir?

Great to see you.

How are you doing?

Okay, so, you know, your name is spelled R-A-V-I, and I just learned it's pronounced Ruby, not Ravi.

No, well, you mislearned.

It was actually.

I fucked up everybody.

It's not Ruby?

It's pronounced Ravi.

Ravi.

Ravi.

Where'd you get Ruby from?

Did you get the spelling?

I'm bad.

Sorry.

Ravi.

Okay.

But Patel.

I'm a big fan of yours, too.

It's just the name.

I loved your movie.

It is.

Thank you.

Patel.

There's so much.

How many Patels are there in India?

A lot.

Yes,

like 10 million?

I couldn't tell you the numbers.

Right, but so many that

parents like yours, who are Patels, not only want you to marry an Indian girl, they want you to marry a patel.

That's right.

That is unique in the world.

And even a specific kind of patel.

And I recall in the documentary, you know, my dad is naming all these different kinds of patels that exist and then this 10-mile radius of the kind of patels that fit best.

And it was the way that they got married.

And that's, you know, the movie's about kind of how they keep that system going today.

And what's so interesting about the movie is you seem so Americanized.

You are.

But obviously.

Is it the haircut?

No.

No, because the picture cut is.

You're funny and you don't have an accent.

And the whole movie, I'm going, why is this guy even doing this?

Because you're trying to make your parents happy.

That's right.

You had a girlfriend, a a white girl.

That's right.

And you

love to.

Broke up with her.

And then to make your parents happy, you go on this journey.

Yeah.

for a year to try to find an Indian girl all over the world using their bio data.

I mean, they really do this scientifically, right?

Yeah, no, it's a real thing.

And, you know, I didn't just do it just to make them happy.

I think it was more about figuring out what I really want.

And part of what I want is to make them happy because I love them.

But also, it was the first time in my life where I really

got to question these things that were handed to me.

I think a lot of the problems that you guys are talking about today is about people finally having to face these laws and religious beliefs that kind of conflict with the way morality has evolved today.

Right.

And your parents had a

polite golf course, of course.

Not a bad shot, not a bad shot.

Stop.

He's on the way.

Thank you, David.

Oh,

this is great.

So, but your parents had an arranged marriage.

I mean, they met each other for 10 minutes before they got married.

Yeah.

That's so interesting and

it worked because they're very happy.

Oh they're so happy.

They're adorable.

I mean you've got to be

absolutely cinema gold.

Right.

Yes.

But

we in the West

I mean

we're sort of enamored with romantic marriage.

I mean every movie has the meet cute.

You even referenced that in your movie.

You know you have to meet cute and then you have to agree on everything and you find the one and and I guess it looks like you know because of the divorce rate that's problematic because we ex we expect so much whereas your parents expected nothing so they were always playing with the house money.

Yeah.

Is that about right?

That's about right.

You know I think the one thing that I learned while making the film was, you know, I was raised with this kind of over-romanticized idea of love, that it's this thing where you're just supposed to bump into a girl, spill coffee on her, and the next thing you know, you're married and you have kids.

But then I saw the way my parents got married and how well it worked.

They're an incredible couple, and they're so in love.

And I was speaking to someone when we were doing the research, and they told me about these three major pillars to love.

And depending on where you were raised and what kind of family, you put emphasis on different pillars.

So here in America, we put almost all of our emphasis on love, this idea of chemistry.

And because we put so much emphasis on it, the minute it goes away, we're like, oh, this isn't right.

It's over.

And it always goes away.

It always goes away.

Because the more you get to know someone, you find out they're crazy.

Because they're all crazy.

I know.

And that's, you know, and.

They're not just crazy.

You're just too used to them.

There's only, so many fucks in the can.

And then you're hitting the can.

There's got to be one more in here.

No, but when you get to that crazy, that's when your crazy comes out.

And then you can talk about each other's crazy, and maybe you're a little less crazy.

But that's kind of how it works.

But, you know,

that's where the other two pillars come in, actually, is can't just stand on love.

You also have to have a commitment.

And commitment is increased by compatibility.

That's what these biodata things really do.

But what's so interesting is that the white girl that you were with at the beginning,

that you broke up with, you get back with her.

Your parents are disheartened at first, and then they learn to love her.

And then the great irony, they love her, and you dump her again.

I love that part.

Oh, man, thanks for that.

That's really helping things.

That's a sweetheart move by you.

But isn't that what happened?

I'll tell you what was the interesting twist in that whole thing.

You asshole.

You married somebody else.

You didn't marry that girl.

When we...

That's a whole nother documentary, Bill, if you want to.

I know, but that's what happened.

When we broke up, the beautiful part about it, we talked about putting it back in the film, was my parents were mad at me.

They were were upset.

They had come to love her.

Right.

And that to me is like the real lesson for me out of that whole experience in my life is how to really love in the context of conflict.

Because we all know what it's like to want to make the people around us happy.

And with us, I think like what you saw in my parents and myself was like, hey, I want to make this work.

We have differences.

But you know what's more important than that is creating just a safe space.

Right.

Okay.

So I want to go back to the discussion we were having before.

I want you to join it.

Great.

We'd love to.

Great.

You were saying something about the rhetoric.

Well, no, I was saying on the

territory.

Radical Islamic terrorist.

Yeah, he says he won't.

He still, he said without saying, he won't say radical Islamic terrorist.

I don't understand this.

I cannot understand why he won't say who the enemy is.

And I mean, Larry, you're a lifelong career colonel.

How do you identify an enemy in war?

And not, you were in the Vietnam War.

Do you say like we're fighting against some people in Asia?

Well, first of all, as I said in 2001, I would not have called this a war.

I would have continued what we've been doing before and used the law enforcement instrument and thereby made them the criminals they are.

Treat them as criminals, not as warriors.

Look at the problem we had and the issues we created by trying to define them even in the law once we had decided to make them warriors.

we then decided we had to make them illegal combatants so they couldn't be warriors.

They're not warriors.

ISIS.

They're criminals.

ISIS is waging war against the West.

And President Obama, just for political purposes, said we're taking out our soldiers in 2004.

ISIS isn't waging war against the West.

What are they doing?

It's waging conflict in Iraq and Syria.

And Paris and Brussels.

And certain places.

Oh, well, you know, that's their extension of their influence

where they're waging war.

It's not war in Paris.

If you treat it as war in Paris, you've got a whole different paradigm.

Why haven't the French declared war?

They have declared.

Because they're not as stupid as we are.

The reason you don't.

Okay, but.

Go ahead.

The president's reason for not using the term Islamist extremism is the idea is he doesn't want to give in to ISIS's frame where there is a war between Islam and the West.

He doesn't want to set up this situation where one and a half billion Muslims around the world feel the need to pick sides in a war with the West.

The idea is to contain and destroy ISIS without letting them become a representative.

Here's the one thing that Trump said this week that made a little sense to me.

He said, when I listened to Obama today, and he sounded madder at me than the shooter.

Couldn't we just address the big elephant in the room, which is the shooter, before we go right to elephant phobia?

Trying to address the shooter as a product of Islam is like, as I said before, trying to address the priest who abuses children as a product of Christianity.

And by the way, let me say, I've been married for 50 years.

I've got to get this in, and I agree with everything you just said.

But you love your, and you love, okay, all right.

Happily married.

Happily married.

I think what he's hitting on is like a systemic issue that happens way before even religion.

It's about family.

It's about the lack of introspection.

By the way, everyone needs to be in therapy.

Wouldn't the world just be a better place if everyone was in therapy?

No.

I mean, we don't place any emphasis on introspection in this society.

And I feel like people go out there in the world.

Yes.

I think that's all we do.

What?

Liberals, yes.

As a country, I think.

And people with money.

I guarantee you, the people who are serving in the armed forces and the places they come from don't do therapy.

And with PTSD, they actually probably some need them.

All right.

But back to this issue.

Could I quote David Cameron?

This is a prime minister of Britain.

I think we all respect him, right?

These are the kind of things he says after a terrorist attack.

He said, we believe in respecting different faiths, but also expecting these faiths to support the British way of life.

Too often we have lacked the confidence to enforce our values for fear of causing offense.

He says these reforming voices, they have a tough enough time as it is, talking about Muslim reforming voices.

We can't stand neutral in this battle of ideas.

We have to back those who share our values.

I would love to hear that first.

Now, of course it's wrong when any Muslim American is given a dirty look, asked extra questions, but it's not the same as people getting shot.

We have to put things into perspective.

It's not just Muslims that shoot people.

Of course it's not.

I mean, up to this point,

this is Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, where some of my good friends.

Just died.

Sir, that is a false equivalency.

Come on, on, how many terrorist attacks, Muslim-inspired terrorist attacks, have there been in the last 20, 30 years?

And how many Christian-inspired?

The New York Times.

I didn't mean Timothy McVeigh was Christian-inspired.

What I'm aiming at is what James Comey has been talking about.

There are bad people and bad ideas.

A mentally unstable person.

He wasn't lone wolf and mentally unstable.

He said and called, he called the police repeatedly and said, I'm doing this for ISIS.

Yeah, it was something he could reach out for and make himself seem something.

And what about the...

You

I think Americans

are already alarmed enough about terrorism.

It is a statistically really unlikely mode of death.

People should be more worried about ordinary terrorism.

Well, they are trying to get whether they eat people.

Except they are trying to get a nuclear weapon.

And

I don't think there are any Christian groups that are trying to obtain a nuclear weapon system.

I've been in the briefings.

I've been in the briefings with the NSA, with the CIA, with Israeli intelligence, with French intelligence, with British intelligence.

The scariest thing in this country to all these people, and I guarantee if James Comey were here, he would be shaking his head up and down, is the lone wolf terrorist getting his hands on something like you're talking about.

Something like the Unabomber, something like the guy in Orlando, something like any of these people who go

off their rockers and start killing people, happening that the FBI knows nothing about because they are lone wolves.

And you are saying the chance of that being the Unabomber or Tim McVay is equal to that of being the

terrorists.

I'm saying the FBI and other law enforcement entities are more concerned about that than they are the other because they can listen to, track, network, go after the finances of, and even introduce the military into combating the other.

They can't go after these lone wolves.

Larry, this guy's not a good person.

Until they do it.

Larry,

these lone wolves are to be a little bit more.

This guy is not a lone wolf.

You guys, stop repeating that.

He is not a lone wolf.

He went to Saudi Arabia twice.

The CIA, I mean, the FBI has been investigating him twice.

He was on the terror watch list, which his gun would have been blocked had he been still on the terror watch list in 2016 when he bought that gun.

He is not a lone wolf.

He got the propaganda from ISIS online.

He went to Saudi Arabia.

He's also not a member of ISIS.

I mean, the guy's on Grinder.

You think they're calling him part of his team?

He's getting up to heaven.

He's going to get a thousand virgins running for him that he can't even touch.

And there's more.

ISIS was all for him until they found it.

Yeah, and then they got a quote.

Can't do that anymore.

Yeah, yes.

These people, they're using ISIS because it's available to him.

He's lonely.

He has no one around him.

He's powerless.

And that's an easy source of power because he can't get rejected from it.

He gets online

and he says, that's my team.

Now I feel validated.

He's not.

It's the same stuff that happens in social conservatism.

It's exactly.

Wait, wait, how so?

Well, I'm saying what happens in any religion when people are pressing.

When you're a conservative person,

I'm talking, no, I'm saying what happens is when people jump out, when people act out, they latch on to

the closest thing in terms of in this case it was just the ideology that it is that creates murdering 49 innocent people you had a guy shoot up a planned parenthood clinic in colorado springs just a few months ago i'm saying he killed three

no it no one is no one is saying that the only bad things happen in the muslim world we are saying i am saying

i agree with you yes that there you have to go where the preponderance of it is and there is no doubt that it that most of it happens in this sphere

in the name of this religion yes in the name of this religion.

Now we're not saying all Muslims in the world are like this.

Of course, most of them are not.

But when I hear Hillary Clinton said this week, freedom-loving Muslims, well, this is what Bush, this was his mistake, to think all people in the world want to be just like us.

I don't know if freedom, as we think of it, is the same way they think of it.

What's important to me is separation of church and state, for example.

Well, great.

I'm glad you're applauding that.

That is not something that is important to most Muslims in most Muslim countries.

In fact, it's antithetical to what they believe.

The state follows the rules of the Quran.

Church and state should not be separated.

I hear you talk about this all the time.

I have more Muslim friends than probably all of you guys combined, and they live here in America, and they don't subscribe to Christian.

In America, that's 3 million out of 1.6 billion.

Exactly.

Shouldn't they be saved from being a part of that description?

Of course.

But shouldn't the other ones be included in it?

Shouldn't the liberals in this country stand with all those people who have to face what I call everyday terrorism?

Well, let's add to the weight of the three million.

There are plenty in Indonesia.

No one is in the middle of the middle.

Indonesia.

You know what?

In Indonesia, if a woman wants to join the military, she has to undergo what they call the two-finger test.

What?

They put that in her.

It's dirty.

It is dirty.

They want to see if she's a virgin.

And this is the moderate country that they hold up as an example.

And look, and this is part of

the U.S.

foreign policy, is trying to promote a lot of the people who are not going to be able to do that.

So let me know.

Let me see if I've got you straight here.

So you want our president, whether it's Trump or Obama or Clinton or whomever, to go out and declare war on all these people who don't believe the way you do?

Where'd you get that?

When did I say that?

What do you do about it then?

I said get real.

Oh, get real?

Okay, what does that mean?

It means established.

Stand up for liberal values.

Stand up for things that if they were happening in

liberal, not liberal with a small L, not liberal political

Liberal like from the French Revolution.

So you would side with the.

Separation of church and state.

Equality of women.

But how are you going to bring this to them?

Well, first of all,

just that, of course, not by force.

We've got 50 people in the State Department right now using the dissent channel saying that that's what we should be doing in Syria.

What do you mean?

Well, I'm not in the State Department and I'm not one of them.

Thank you, panel.

Time to go to New Rule.

New Rule, the 36-year-old

Georgia man who's stripped naked in front of a waffle house and pressed his genitals against the front door

has to work on his verbal skills.

I mean, how carnival, how hard can it be to just say, I really, really like waffles?

New Rule, Canada's Joanne Barnaby, who claims she was out picking wild mushrooms when she was confronted by a hungry wolf and then cleverly lured the wolf towards a bear so the bear would attack the wolf,

has to tell us what kind of mushrooms and how many did she eat.

New Rule, there's such a thing as being too ready for Hillary.

This is creepy.

Neural, if you want people to take you seriously, lose the basketball net trash can in your office.

It doesn't say I'm fun and sporty.

It says so many of my ideas are shit, I've made a game of it.

Neural, the next time a Christian dies by mistake, and makes a brief visit to heaven, while he's there, he needs to ask Tupac Jakor, do you know you're selling Sprite?

And finally, new rule, now that the Trump phenomenon seems to have peaked, Americans must ask themselves, why?

Why for so long was there one set of rules for everyone who's ever run for president?

and then suddenly a completely new set for this Donald Trump person.

Because when it comes to lowering lowering the bar, he really raised the bar.

So

it's been a year and a day since Donald Trump descended on an escalator to announce he was running for president, and since then, he's just kept on descending.

So let me take you back in time to the pre-Trump era.

and show you what people used to think was a monstrous political gaffe.

Here's Al Al Gore and Bush I, each doing something at a debate that the country found to be beyond the pale.

Here's differences.

Under Vice President.

We have a question right here.

Yes, how has a national debt?

Shocking, isn't it?

Sighing and looking at your watch to show such blatant disrespect for our sacred democracy.

Then there's this guy at a debate, bragging about his dick.

He referred to my hands.

If they're small, something else must be small.

I guarantee you there's no problem.

I guarantee.

What if Bush had done that?

Read my lips, six and a half inches.

Or take the sensitive issue of race.

There was a firestorm back in 92 when Ross Perot said to a black audience, Now, I don't have to tell you who gets hurt first when this sort of thing happens, do I?

You people do.

Oh my God.

He said, you people

smother him with the AIDS quilt.

George Allen was a rising star in 2006, and then his career was over when he said, This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, macaqua, or whatever his name is.

Did you hear it?

Did you hear it, everybody?

He said maca.

Whatever the fuck that is.

Trump tweets more racist shit than that before lunch.

He retweets white supremacy.

He began his campaign by calling an entire minority group rapists.

He says our black president faked his birth and might be working with ISIS.

He did this.

Look at my African American over here.

Look at him.

That's not worse than you people?

And what about basic old dumbness?

I seem to remember Dan Quayle being pronounced unfit for office dumb

because he misspelled potato.

And Sarah Palin's brief flirtation with respectability came crashing down when she could not name what news sources she read.

All of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

But Trump doesn't even pretend he can read.

He just hears things.

I'm hearing.

A lot of people are saying

this is his favorite news source.

He hears things.

It could be from a passing mental patient.

Could be the voices in his own head.

And

when he does read, it's the National Enquirer.

and he refers to it as the paper

oh I'm sorry I'm not being fair he does have one other news source all I know is what's on the internet

right me too I get my news from Pornhub

no wonder he once said I love the poorly educated

John McCain and Bob Dole both veterans but but war does things to a man, both were accused of being too angry, too angry to be president.

After all, Bob Dole once said this.

And Senator Dole, is there anything you'd like to say to the Vice President?

Yeah, stop lying about my record.

What a raving lunatic.

But this is okay.

Oh, I don't know what I said.

Oh, I don't remember.

Yeah, what what about that?

Obama once just compared his poor bowling skills to the Special Olympics cut to the apology tour, but we're good with this.

Oh, I don't know what I said, ah.

And finally, the ultimate third rail, insulting the military.

Obama got endless shit for once saluting with coffee in his hand, violating an ancient military rule dating to never.

But Trump can say John McCain isn't a war hero?

If Hillary said that, they'd be burning pantsuits in effigy.

All right, thanks, Archelle.

Don't forget to watch our convention coverage in July.

Three nights.

I want to thank my guests, Colonel Lawrence Wilkleson, Emily Miller, Josh

Barrow,

Ruby Patel, and Rebecca Tracer.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you.

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.