Overtime – Episode #388 (Originally aired 05/13/16)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, real time with Bill Maher.

Okay,

from the internet, Jack, how do you combat the strands of racism in the Republican Party?

Now, Jack, you used to be what?

The something the Avenger, the Sunday Avenger, the Dixon?

There was a controversy about that.

I've had to wrestle with my own past and some things.

You know, this Trump phenomenon, what's bothered me the most is I think it's true what Jeremy said earlier.

There are people out there who are openly bigots or hateful and all the, I mean, I don't think anybody that says

something that's politically incorrect is necessarily that, as you've noted, but there are a lot of people out there who are straight up hateful.

They don't like minorities.

They don't like gay people.

And I think Trump, and I don't think he intentionally did this.

I think he's just being himself, has opened the floodgates.

I honestly think, I don't think he's that intentional.

I think he's just being himself.

But I think people who feel that way feel that they can freely express those things in ways that are not good for our society and not good for the country.

I think that's a problem.

How do you combat it?

You'd be better than that.

I'm a conservative, I'm a libertarian, but I'm positive.

I look for the best in individuals.

I don't group people together.

I don't say, you know, that's the worst thing you can do to demonize human beings is to group them together, say these people are bad, and not judge them by their individual worth and human dignity.

A speech Michael Moore could have given.

Michael, would you consider making a film on the media and its influence on election results?

Somebody should make that film.

I don't know if I'm the person to do it,

but

actually, I wanted to, at the beginning of this election season, I was going to kind of secretly film, go on a number of these shows, not your show, of course, but other shows, and just kind of show people what happens behind the scenes, how this comes together.

And I was just talking to Scott, your producer.

That discussion between you and Jeremy that took place, you never see that on the mainstream broadcast networks, you know, where you guys really got into something very serious.

You have a serious disagreement.

Wait, wait.

HBO is kind of a mainstream broadcast now.

Oh, really?

Really?

You think so?

HBO?

I don't think HBO is mainstream at all.

Really?

Yes.

Have you seen Game of Thrones?

Have you not?

You think that's mainstream?

I think we're on a mainstream network.

I don't think I do a mainstream show.

That's the difference.

But that's, you know.

Right.

Okay, you're the father of dragons.

But

let me ask you a broader question.

What do you think is the future of documentaries?

Because, I mean things have changed in the movie business a lot since you started making them.

I mean I don't know in this day and age whether people they don't even I see move I see most of my movies when I'm on the road doing stand-up on the weekend in the hotel and and they're like you know the recently in theaters and they're like sometimes they're like wow these are big stars and it never even saw the light of day in a theater because the only movies that seem to open now are about robots punching each other.

Well let me ask the question back to you.

Why haven't you made more documentaries?

Because that's your thing.

I never know.

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

I'm sorry, but you made

your film, your one film is still one of the top 15 largest grossing documentaries of all time.

But I always said to him, I said before it, I said after it, I don't want to be Michael Moore.

Only he can do what he does.

This is the one topic.

that I wanted to tackle.

Religion is stupid and there is no God.

Right.

You weren't going to do that one.

Right.

Well, you did a great job with it.

You and I want to do a movie.

Yes.

Are we still live on the internet right now?

We're still live.

It doesn't matter because we can't get this thing going.

Well, but you, but the truth is, folks, Bill and I do have a secret plan.

Yeah, we do.

And we've now discussed it publicly.

And

we're not going to release our 28th.

No, we want to do a movie called The Kings of Atheism.

I thought, you know.

Okay, there it's out.

There it's out.

It's out.

What's the worst that could happen?

That we get it made?

As opposed to now when we're not?

No, but you've just told the Almighty that we're going to do this, and now

you and I have to survive the next six months.

No, I want to.

Remember the Kings of Comedy?

The Kings of Comedy, there was like four

African-American

and then they did the Latino Kings.

Yes.

The Kings of Atheism.

Kings of Atheism.

And we can't get anybody we want to sign up for.

We are going to have four of America's top comedians.

I'm going to film it, and we're going to travel through the Bible Belt putting on these shows.

We are going to live to the end of introduction.

I mean, the first person I wanted to do it was my fellow atheist and boyfriend, Seth McFarlane.

I can't get him to commit.

Maybe you people could.

He'll do it.

He won't do this.

Well, we can't can't get him to do it.

Maybe they will.

If we got Ricky Gervais,

Sarah Silverman.

Sarah Silverman.

And others, I think.

And others will come out, too.

Yes.

Listen, Bill, this is a movement that you actually are responsible for.

You're the most public person who, for the last decade or so,

has been at the forefront of questioning this.

And you did it when it was not popular, when somebody at HBO, this mainstream network we're on, must have said, Bill, you know, that's

not matter, right?

It was Disney.

Well, but now, but now, now people are going to be able to do that.

But the great thing about you directing it is that you're not an atheist.

Yes, well, that's where the humor will come in.

You know, the humor will come in in a lot of places.

I will ride the bus with the comedians, you and your ABCs,

and you'll have 10 days.

Right.

You'll have 10 days to convert me to your debauchery, basically.

So all everybody has to do is contact Seth, Ricky, and Zara and tell them to do our movie.

And then we're done.

And Ari, get us the money to do it.

All right.

Jeremy, does Edward Snowden seeking asylum in an autocratic state like Russia damage his credibility as a champion of human rights?

No.

Well, I mean, the first problem with that question is that it's based on total bullshit.

Edward Snowden was seeking to go to Latin America, and when he was en route to Russia to then catch a flight to Latin America, the United States canceled his passport and and he still remains without a passport.

So he didn't choose,

of course he's still in Russia.

I've chatted with him recently.

He wrote the foreword to our

book.

Well, I mean, I looked at the girl.

His girlfriend joined him there?

She did.

She's got a girl.

Yes, he has.

And his same girlfriend who was like under the sort of full force of the national security state initially because he didn't, it appears he didn't tell her anything about this before he's in Moscow.

He fled the scene.

And yeah, yeah and they possibly

i mean there's no doubt i mean russia is a is a reprehensible uh human rights violating sure autocratic society uh however uh edward snowden i i i truly support him and believe that his entire motive in doing this was a just one and and that is rank propaganda that's used against him to imply he's somehow a treasonous ass who's giving secrets to the fsb he the russian intelligence service he didn't bring any documents there he didn't choose russia The United States chose Russia.

And the question is: did they choose it knowing that that would be the way that they could hammer him, or did they really believe that they were going to somehow be able to snatch him if he got on Aval Morales' plane, which they forced to ground, or another nation's aircraft?

Well, this question is right in line with that.

Have we miscalculated how to deal with Russia and its influence on the conflict in the Middle East?

Well, yes, I guess.

That's for anybody.

We don't have to answer it.

Yeah.

The internet ain't the boss of us.

You've stumped this internet.

You win dinner for two at Pepe's.

It's like stumped the band, but with the panel.

Bob, is the lack of civic education to blame for the state of politics and discourse in this country?

That's absolutely.

I think it's a significant factor.

Yeah, they used to teach civics.

We essentially stopped teaching civics in the United States States in the 19th century.

People don't even know how government works.

Yeah.

People on who should be in it.

Frankly, Donald Trump

didn't have much of a background in civics.

Therefore, he thinks that he's going to be elected to be George III, not the President of the United States,

and would govern like that.

I think one of the most critical issues to deal with the Trumps,

both personally and their philosophy of government, is to reintroduce serious study of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy into our schools.

What do you say?

A place from which it's virtually vanished.

It's totally gone.

It's gone.

And history

largely as well.

Yet every school day still begins in most schools with a pledge of allegiance to the flag, and then nothing about what that means or what it stands for or what we're supposed to be doing about it.

And one of the scenes I actually cut out of my film, we went to Austria.

Austria is one of a half a dozen dozen countries now that have lowered the voting age to 16.

Because what they found is, is by getting kids to vote, starting in high school, they bring candidates in, they bring the registrar in, they get them going then and interested in it.

They've now, the statistics show their 18 to 25 year olds vote at a higher percentage than ours do in other countries where the voting age is 18.

Michael, what they're voting for in Austria is not particularly appealing at the moment.

They've just had a big far-right gains in local elections in Austria.

So

Scotland,

Scotland, the voting age was lowered to 16 to allow 16-year-olds to vote last year on whether or not Scotland should remove itself from the UK.

We are not them.

I mean, our college kids are more like high school kids.

16-year-olds?

Are you kidding?

Yeah, but we've got to step somewhere to make them aspire to something.

You know, like we expect this.

And it's just like driver ed at 16, they should start to learn about this process and be involved in it.

And it's not just Bieber.

It's not just the issue of lowering the voting rates.

There have been aggressive efforts to keep the current 18 to 21 year olds from voting.

For instance, in my state,

you can vote early in a senior center, in a library, every place except on a university campus.

It's a very

specific effort to restrain and constrict the youth participation in voting.

The Republican Attorney General in Michigan got a law passed that prohibits students in Michigan from voting on Election Day at their college campus.

They have to leave college that day and drive.

If you're at Ann Arbor and you live in Traverse City or Flint or whatever, you have to drive there on Election Day, or you have to have figured out how to get an absentee ballot a month before that.

You can't vote where you're going to school.

They did that so that they could, again, gerrymander out thousands.

I mean, in Michigan State, you've got 50,000 students there.

And yet, Michigan State is represented by a Republican in Congress because those 50,000 students couldn't vote in the place where they live and go to school.

This goes on all over the country.

It's never written about or talked about.

And you're absolutely right, Bob.

I think it's a big problem.

And then you also add to that you have real voter disenfranchisement that continues, violations of the Voting Rights Act in African-American communities, in poor communities.

I mean, this is still rampant.

I mean,

there really is a sort of Jim Crow racist element that continues on with our elections.

I wonder if Senator Graham, though, would support a bill that said that every congressperson has to wear for their first day in office a suit that has logos of the top 50 corporations that funded their campaign like mascara.

That would be a great tax lesson.

You did that?

I did that in the 90s.

Of course, you've been ripped off many times since.

Oh, okay.

Maybe you should look at the Australian model where if you don't vote, you get a tax hit.

I mean, it's the only country in the world where voting is effectively mandatory.

But do we want people voting?

Yeah, why not?

Why shouldn't you go and if you don't like

you go and you spoil your ballot?

If you don't like any of the options there, you spoil your ballot.

At least you've shown the civic there are too many countries in the world that don't have the right to vote.

If we have the right to vote, we should protect it.

And if that means giving people the right to vote.

Do you know that 60% of people?

All they have to do is spoil their ballot.

It's not infrared.

This is America.

Do you know that

60% of the people in this country believe the Noah's Ark story is literally true?

I don't want them voting.

Then we need more education.

We got to go.

Happily that's 60%.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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