FLASHBACK: How To Disagree w/ Bill Maher

All people talk about is politics all the time.

What is Facebook?

It's arguing with some kid you went to high school with.

You're in Chem Lab together.

And now you have to talk about who's on the Supreme Court?

That's, I think, what is tearing America apart.

Because there's a million things you could talk about that aren't political.

And you find out, oh, this person is not that different from me.

Do you know the crowd is not with you?

I got that impression, yeah.

And

I've joined Bill Maher on his show a couple of times in the last couple of years.

It's always a blast.

We're having such a good time and now we're gonna fight.

In this episode, Bill returns the favor.

His long-running show, Real Time with Bill Maher, hits its 20th year on the air next year.

It's been Bill's vehicle to challenge and often mock politics of the day from his liberal perspective.

But Bill's one of those old school liberals you don't see too much of these days.

Progressive ideas on taking care of people and the environment, but also an adamant defender of free speech and a critic of wokeness, meaning his commentary and joking about news and politics often hits the left, too.

The Andrew Cuomo death watch.

Biden called on him to resign.

Nancy Pelosi called on him to resign.

Chuck Schumer, yes, called on him to resign.

Anthony Weiner called for a double date.

That's a different kind of guy.

Given the Russia and Ukraine news right now in this episode, we revisit President Trump's presence on the world stage and his relationship with Russia versus that of President Biden.

We'll also discuss left-wing media misinformation and dishonesty dishonesty on COVID the last couple of years, and what it would take for Bill to cross that political aisle and finally vote Republican.

Hey, and welcome.

This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

I talk about them every single show.

Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?

Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com/slash Ben.

Bill, thanks so much for stopping by.

I appreciate it.

What's VPN?

Well, that's where they disguise your internet address.

I just started and I'm lost.

It's the Russians can't monitor your internet traffic and then bomb your home, I think.

I think that's the basic idea.

So how's Florida treating you?

You know, I love Florida.

I'm here to do a special,

HBO stand-up special, which I did the last two days, Friday and Saturday, and here we are on Sunday.

I chose Florida to do it.

I could have done it anywhere in the country.

First of all, I was afraid of COVID protocols that were going to be onerous.

So I was like, I'm not going to do it in a blue state.

But it turned out there's a lot of protocols last night from the city of Miami and the theater.

There's so many people with their hands in the protocol pie now.

The unions can get involved, the networks.

So it's not just the government or the CDC, everybody who wants to

indicate how much better a person they are than you by showing how much more safety they can get.

Not that I honestly think we need any of this now.

now.

But that's why I chose to do it in Florida, because I've been to Florida a couple of times.

It was the first place I went after I got back on the road, I think about a year ago.

And

I've been back a couple of other times for gigs here, and there just was...

much more of a feeling.

And I know people who live here say, yes,

we never acted like this was the end of the world.

This is not the Andromeda strain.

Yes, it's a serious thing that we should respect and take seriously.

But, you know, Florida had the reputation well deserved for life goes on.

And so that's why I chose to do it in Florida.

And that's why, I mean, that's the one thing I must say.

I thought

I like that better.

You know, I have a lot of quarrels about how this

coronavirus was handled.

I mean, you can respect it and have compassion for the people who suffered from it and still have, as I do, and I have made this very known to my audience who mostly doesn't like me for it, that I don't think it was handled the right way.

Yeah, I mean, for us, I mean, for my family, we actually moved mid-COVID from L.A.

to Florida, and this is one of the reasons.

I mean, in L.A., they shut down all the public parks.

You couldn't take your kid outdoors.

And then there were a bunch of riots.

And it was like, well, if I could take my kids rioting, it would have been okay.

But I couldn't take my kids rioting.

So I had to be double quarantined in my home.

I was quarantined for the virus and then quarantined because there were riots outside my door.

And it was like, I'm getting out of here.

I mean, one of the first editorials I did did when I had to be doing the show from my backyard

was about how

just in general, I think we should handle any disease, but especially this one, more internally, not just externally.

Yes, there is that element, externally meaning vaccines.

Okay, yes, I'm glad we have the vaccine.

I personally would not have wanted to get it, but I did.

took one for the team.

I would have rather had my own immune system handle this one.

Now, to me, it's a case-by-case basis.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer.

I just think everybody's different.

Now, there are some diseases out there.

I would fight you for the vaccine.

Okay?

But this one, because America is so unhealthy, That's the essential part we don't address.

So unhealthy to begin with that it's great we have a vaccine because that is what is saving the lives of everyone smart enough to get the vaccine who was not in good health to begin with.

But, you know, that certainly wouldn't have been my way to handle it.

So, I mean, you've been very vocal on this, and obviously you say your audience doesn't like you very much for it.

Why do you think this became such a politicized point of view?

Because what you're saying, I mean, you and I disagree on so much about politics, but on this sort of stuff, it seems like this is just the basic data, which is that for a lot of people who are obese people who are older, people who have a prior immune problem, those people really, really needed the vaccine.

If you were young and you were healthy, and if you were in decent shape, your chances of death from this were really not particularly high.

We're not talking about the black death here with a one-third death ratio.

And yet this turned into not only that you need to mask up forever, but that you needed to triple vax and mask post-triple vaccination.

I mean, my view of this was I was basically quarantined with my parents.

My parents were 65, so I want to make sure they didn't get it.

And so we basically holed up with them and we didn't go outside for in LA for a long time.

And then the minute the vaccines were available and we took the vaccines, my parents got them mainly.

As soon as that was over, we were done.

I mean, we had enough faith in what we were being told about the vaccine to figure, okay, we're done here.

But following the data has become a bad thing and you're labeled an anti-vaxxer even if you're pro-vax.

I mean, I got double vaxx.

My parents got triple vax.

My wife, who's a doctor, is triple vax.

And we were labeled anti-vax anyway because we weren't saying that you should lose your job if you didn't vax.

Right.

I mean, there's a lot of silliness on both sides, a lot of bad information on both sides.

I don't think the liberals liked it when I pointed out

that

I think it was something like 41% of Democrats when asked the question, I mean, and this was in the New York Times, they had Republican versus Democrat views on COVID.

And something like 41% of Democrats, when asked the key question, how many people who get COVID need to be hospitalized, thought it was over 50%

when it was, of course, around 1%.

I mean, that's a crazy number to be off that much about the...

no wonder they think you need a mask everywhere.

If you think half the people who get it need to go to the hospital and it's really 1%,

how did they get that bad information in their head?

And I said, you know, Fox News and the right wing has a lot to answer for for a lot of misinformation out there.

I would put climate change as top of that list.

But the left-wing media should answer for that.

How did your audience get that bad idea in their head that so many people need to go to the hospital who don't?

And you know, as you started to say, I did an editorial about this about a month ago.

Again, not well received by a lot of people, but I was just, again, giving the facts.

We know who gets this and dies from this.

Who gets it?

Everybody.

Everybody gets it, including if you've had the vaccine.

which they were wrong about.

Okay, they weren't trying to be wrong about it, but you know, my overarching opinion was modern medicine, it's wonderful, but you're wrong about a lot.

Stop being arrogant.

Don't look at me like we've got the white coat on and the stethoscope around our neck.

Just do whatever we say, because when have we ever been wrong?

My answer: a lot.

You've been wrong about a lot.

Not because you're corrupt, although sometimes there's that too, but you've just been wrong about a lot, including a lot about this vaccine.

I mean, about this disease.

So we know who gets it.

Okay, 75% of the people who died over 65.

Now, that's sad.

Death is always sad.

I'm against death.

I don't care who knows it.

But, you know, Earth is a timeshare.

We can't all be here at the same time.

Some of us have to go to make room for others.

People are going to die when they start being over 65.

Something.

I mean, you can't stop aging.

Believe me, Ben, I've tried.

So that's 75%.

99% unvaccinated.

99%.

Where do you ever see that?

In any story about anything.

And of course, 78%

of the people who died or are hospitalized were obese.

And that's another one that's not a popular opinion to talk about, but I feel like I have to because it's such a salient fact in this.

If you just said to somebody, okay, there's an X factor in this, of 78%

of the people people who get it,

this X factor accounts for 78% who die or go to the hospital.

Wouldn't you be a little curious, if you were a news organization, wouldn't you be talking about that fact all the time?

And yet we're at such a crazy place with obesity.

It is the ultimate third rail in discourse.

I'm talking about everything you could possibly talk about.

That is the ultimate third rail.

You just do not talk about it.

And of course, we need to talk about it.

That's the real epidemic, not coronavirus.

That's going to become, as it has now, I think, become a much more mild disease.

And it's going to be with us forever, as all viruses are.

It's not going to disappear, I don't think.

But the real epidemic is obesity, and that we don't talk about.

I mean, I wonder why you think that is, just out of curiosity, why you think that everybody's scared to talk about it.

I have a theory, but I want to hear yours.

Let's hear yours first.

Okay, sure.

So, I mean, my basic theory is that as a society, we've really cracked down very hard on the idea that people have any sort of control over their lives.

And whenever you imply that somebody has control over their life and they have a problem and that maybe they can avoid that problem, they get very, very angry at you.

And obesity is a great example of this because the vast majority of people who are obese are people who probably should be eating less and creating caloric deficit.

You silver-tongued it beautifully, Ben.

I was just going to say they love to stuff their face, but it's really the same idea, isn't it?

Yes.

I mean, that's,

but we are in a different place with it than we were even five years ago.

Five years ago, it at least was thought to be a good thing to try to lose weight, right?

Now,

that's what they shame.

Adele

famously lost weight, and they shamed her for that.

That's through the looking glass.

When you're the bad person because you lost weight and it's just seen as a different way of living.

There's no judgment to it.

And look, I don't believe in shaming.

I'm not fat shaming.

I'm fat splaining.

I'm explaining.

That, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, absolutely.

But science is not.

Science is not.

And those facts are unforgiving.

when you look at the number of people who died.

And you didn't even have to be that much overweight to have a much worse outcome, having to go to the hospital, having to get ventilated.

I think 40% of the people who died had diabetes.

And again, even take COVID out of the picture.

I was talking about this before COVID and got lambasted by James Corden and other people who attacked me.

Oh, Bill, you're such a bad person.

Again, I'm not shaming people.

I'm just saying we were never going to solve the healthcare crisis in this country until we get our arms around this thing.

And we're not allowed to talk about it or else you're a bad person.

And anyone who doesn't, I'm sorry, you have blood on your hands.

Anyone in the media who doesn't talk about this because you're so afraid of the reaction, you have blood on your hands because you're not doing these people a favor.

You're not doing people a favor.

Like I always say, ever see a fat 90-year-old?

Never.

Shouldn't that tell you something?

I mean, you're either going to die fast from COVID, especially if you're not vaccinated from this, or slowly.

And also, it's going to bring down, as it was before this, the economy of the country.

Because, I mean, when we were debating healthcare in this country for years and Obamacare and on after, it was always about, we would look at the charts, we would see how much healthcare spending is going up, and people would say, we can't do it.

We can't just not do anything.

Right?

Whether you thought Obamacare was a good idea or some other program, we need some program to deal with this.

But never part of that program was, let's ask the people to participate in their own health.

I think this is what you were getting at.

We don't ask people to, you have to participate.

It can't all just be, the government can't solve this on their own.

Vaccines can't solve this on their own.

You have to do it.

You know, I said at one point, it's not between you and the government.

It's between you and the waitress.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the areas where it's sort of fascinating.

The way that we've treated in public policy vaccines with, for example, vacc mandates, you must get the vacc or you will lose your job.

And at the same time, if I so much as say to you that you might need to lose 10 pounds, this is the great sin.

Like, I don't see how you can hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time.

Right.

And look, we all do something.

Again, not shaming.

I drank too much for years.

But when someone would say to me, you know, maybe you should scale that back a little, I didn't say, how dare you?

You're drink shaming me.

It's just an alternative lifestyle.

What are you talking about?

It's just, I'm just as wonderful and perfect the way I...

No, I would say, yeah, you know what?

You're right.

And then I wouldn't do it.

But I would at least see the point.

I wasn't offended by that.

I was like, yeah, you're right.

I drink.

probably too Irishly and I shouldn't.

But boy, you're just a bad guy if you say that about food.

So let's talk about identity politics.

So one of the things I think that we're speaking about here is the attempt to turn everything into an identity.

And so if you are, Adele is bad because she shed her identity as an overweight singer

for a new identity as just a singer who's not overweight.

And there's this feeling about nearly everything in American life.

Everything can be boiled down to an issue of identity.

And the problem with that, of course, on a broader political level is once everything's an identity, including your political perspective, every political argument becomes an attack on you as a person.

Because if your identity is your politics and then I disagree with your politics, that's not us having a rational debate.

That's me attacking your character.

That's me saying you're a bad person.

It's me trying to unperson you.

You hear this sort of language all the time in

a variety of issues.

You're trying to erase me as a human being.

If I disagree with you, obviously the most obvious example is on transgenderism, where the argument is that if you don't want Leah Thomas, the biologically male swimmer swimming against women, this is because you're trying to erase Leah Thomas's transgender identity.

Like, once everything becomes an identity, even putting that example aside, then it prohibits you from actually having rational conversations with people.

The entire basis of rational conversation is: my identity doesn't matter.

What I'm arguing up here with you is what matters.

Yeah, I would agree with all that, but you would, I or I would ask you if you would agree that there's certainly a lot of that on the right, too.

What is more of an identity than the Trump voter, the white person who thinks that America is being taken away and becoming a different kind of country, then they remember it.

You know, let's make America great again, wink, wink, you know, white again.

I mean, that is also a type of identity politics, yes?

I mean, for the people who actually believe that, sure.

I mean,

but I wonder how much of that is reading into somebody else's politics, your desired character flaw.

I mean, you see that on the right doing that to the left, too.

I mean, there have been good studies showing that people on the right tend to think that people on the left don't care about family, people on the left don't care about personal values.

And then when you actually ask people on the left what they care about, they care about a lot of those things.

And on the left, you see the same thing with the right.

If you voted for Trump, it's because you want to make America white again.

It's not because you're concerned about, for example,

taking the immigration issue.

Let's say you're not concerned about the race of immigration.

You're worried about how people are going to vote once they move here and how that changes the legal structure of the system.

Or you're worried about the income level or education level of people moving here.

Those are not the same thing as the skin color of the person.

No.

And immigration is an issue where I think the Democrats are really not getting it.

I mean, they're losing the Hispanic vote.

It's an amazing thing.

Along the border in Texas.

Their idea,

again, it's sort of your point about identity politics.

Their conception, I think, and it's wrong, is that every Latino in America is thinking, boy.

More immigration.

That would be the best thing.

And a lot of them are thinking, no, I'm here.

The last thing I want is someone else coming over who's going to do my job for a little less money.

And,

you know, I

wonder when this is going to sink in in the Democratic Party leadership.

I think it's going to be very difficult for them because I think that there is a sort of math that was done in the early part of the 20th century with people like Roy Teixeira writing about this, talking about how there was this new emerging Democratic majority.

It was going to be a majority-minority coalition.

As the demographics of the country country changed and became less white.

Inevitably, these minority groups would continue to vote at the same rates that they were voting for Democrats.

So if you get more Hispanics, you get more black voters, you get more Asian voters, inevitably this would be sort of the new rising wave.

And Obama really did model that in 2012.

He had a very diverse coalition combined with college-educated white liberals.

And so they thought this was going to be the formula here on out, and that was always going to be the formula.

And it turns out,

the guy who wrote that piece, he came out recently and he said, yeah, I got that completely wrong.

It's just not true because the Hispanic vote, it turns out, is malleable.

A lot of people who are Hispanic identify as white Hispanic, right?

A lot of people who are Hispanic don't think of themselves primarily in terms of a certain racial identity that dictates politics.

They may vote differently.

I mean, Cuban Americans don't vote the same way that Venezuelan Americans vote, who don't vote the same way the Mexican Americans vote.

The question is whether they're so tied into this sort of intersectional coalition where everybody is described based on their race, as opposed to a broad platform that anybody can ascribe to no matter what, that they can't get out of that sort of mindset.

And it feels like sort of, yeah, I mean, I think that's the disappointment of Biden in some ways.

Biden was supposed to be a moderate who was above all that, and he really hasn't governed that way.

Right.

And they assimilate quickly, very quickly.

And then, you know, they're like, well, I made it, and I'm sorry, but I'm pulling up the ladder

because if I leave the ladder down, then again, you're going to come in and take my job.

And I don't identify that way.

I identify I'm an American now.

And that's sort of what we want.

I can't remember I read this recently, but somebody wrote an article and said that the Hispanic vote is starting to look a lot like what happened with the Italian vote.

Yep.

Or the Germans or the Irish or

everybody except the Jews who just kept voting Democrat forever.

Right.

But yes.

But didn't the Italian become much more of a Republican bloc?

And I mean, that could happen.

And if the Democrats lose that, they're in a lot of trouble.

Because that is a rising demographic as far as numbers.

And if that number even becomes like 50-50,

I mean, it's funny because it was only a few years ago that people were saying, oh, well, the Republicans are cooked.

Right.

Because look at the numbers.

The whites are going down and the people of color.

And of course, if the people of color are going up, but they're voting the wrong way,

as far as the Democrats are concerned,

then you're really

in a lot of trouble as far as winning elections, which I assume is what they're still trying to do.

Yeah, and I mean, this is why I think wokeness is such electoral poison for Democrats, not just because it's treating people as members of identity groups that they may not see as their chief signifier, but also because to a certain extent, they're only appealing to certain identity groups.

I think that there are a lot of Hispanics in America who looked at the platform of Black Lives Matter in 2020, which said, get rid of the cops.

The cops don't need to be here.

Defund the police.

And there are a lot of Hispanics who are saying, wait a second, I'm upwardly mobile.

economically.

I'm socially mobile.

I also may live in an area that has high crime.

This does not seem like a good plan to me.

And so moving in terms of this agenda and making this kind of tip of the spear, the argument for a lot of Hispanics that America is a deeply racist,

unfixable place, that doesn't apply to a lot of people.

It's an argument that really applies to a very narrow segment of the American population.

No, I always say, let's live in the year we're living in.

You know, because sometimes when the people you're talking about,

you know, you'd think it was, you know,

1960 or 1860.

And it's like, yes, we have a very sorry history racially in this country, including a lot of stuff that's still going on right now.

I mean, it's not like racism is extirpated here in America, but it is very different than it was.

And we need to live in the present era, in the present time with the present conditions.

But when you say woke, you know, it's become And I make fun of it too, because it's become an eye roll in many ways.

If woke, I assume at a certain moment, and it wasn't that long ago before we didn't have the term, I only heard it, I don't know, what, it was three, four years ago, five years ago at most when we heard the term woke and it was like alert to injustice.

I'm like, okay, I'm down with that.

I always have been.

I hope people still understand that about me.

But yes, it became sort of a byword for a lot of this goofy stuff.

That's what I'm always railing against.

That's why, like, they play me on Fox News now.

Yeah, I mean, how do you you feel about that?

Because you went from the guy who was...

I feel,

look, I haven't changed at all.

My politics hasn't changed.

They've changed.

People say to me, sometimes, you know, have you changed?

No.

It's that five years ago, no one was talking about defunding the police.

I never heard that phrase five years ago.

That's not me changing.

That's things changing.

I'm reacting to it, as I've always been.

You know, letting three-year-olds decide what gender they are.

This wasn't something five years ago.

Free speech, you know, used to be a left-wing thing that we were proud and owned, and now that seems to be under attack.

So again, I think I've stayed the same.

And look, as long as the Republicans are a party who, in my view, does not take seriously the emergency of climate change.

And I'm not sure if they even believe in American democracy anymore.

Certainly most Republicans, I think, did not in Congress condemn what happened on January 6th, trying to not count the votes in an honest election.

As long as those two issues are what they are for Republicans, I don't think they're even savable.

Whereas the Democrats, maybe I'm being a cockeyed optimist, but I still think they are savable.

We'll get to more on this in a moment.

First, when inflation jumps, when you hear the national debt is over $37 trillion, you ever think maybe now would be a pretty good time to buy some gold?

Whether to protect against the dollars lost in purchasing power, for peace of mind during global instability, or just for a sensible diversification, Birch Gold Group believes every American should own physical gold.

So along with the Daily Wire, Birch Gold created something special this month through September 30th.

If you buy from Birch Gold, you will get a signed copy of my brand new book, Lions and Scavengers, plus your very own golden Ben Shapiro bookmark.

Sounds cool.

We release an extremely limited number of those autographed books and bookmarks.

Text Ben to 989898 to claim your eligibility and start the process.

Plus, Birch Gold can help you roll an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold.

You're still eligible for a signed copy of Lions and Scavengers.

I buy my gold from Birch Gold.

Tens of thousands of other Lions do, as well.

It's just the smart thing to do.

Is it finally time for you to do it?

Well, I mean, I did.

Just a few weeks ago, I bought some more gold because, frankly, I'm a little worried about the nature of the economy.

Text my name, Ben, to 98, 98, 98.

Claim your eligibility today.

Act before September 30th again.

Text Ben to 98.98.98.

Have you ever voted Republican?

Absolutely.

I voted for Bob Dole in 96.

Now, I admit that was a sentimental vote because,

you know, I don't think I ever told you this.

My parents, both World War II veterans, met in World War II.

My mother was a nurse.

I think he was the last one from the World War II era, and he was going to lose.

So it's an easy vote, isn't it?

So that's the other thing about voting in California.

It's not like if he won, it's so different than where the Republican Party is now.

It's not like if he won, he was a crazy person who who was, you know, going to start not counting the votes or do the crazy things that Trump did when he was president or not concede elections or something.

He was just, you know, he was a Kansas conservative.

And I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary, I think,

when he was

the original Maverick.

And I may have voted for him in that election.

No, if he was, no, no, in

gotten the nomination.

I was not, I have come to really like Al Gore and know him personally, and I like him a lot.

But I was not happy the way he distanced himself because of Monica Lewinsky.

You know, it's like, that's, to me, was always the big flaw with the Democrats.

It's like, come on, guys, just man up a little bit.

Just remember he kissed his wife real hard at the old convention.

It was very awkward.

It was very.

And now in retrospect, it was even more awkward.

And terrible politics.

Yes.

You know, they should have just said, okay, you know,

Bill Clinton, as I think Hillary herself once said, he's a hard dog to keep on the porch.

That's just,

you know, I knew Roger for a while.

I met Bill a few times.

I can tell you some funny stories.

That's who they are.

You know, they're good old boys.

They like ladies.

And it just, you know, it's just some of the stuff that went on back then about, you know, if he cheated on his wife, how can we know he's not going to cheat on the country?

You know, dumb things that people said.

Like, you know, it's very different.

So let's, so let's start with the climate change thing, and then we'll get to the voting thing.

So on climate change,

there's, I think, sort of a reasonable spectrum of opinion inside the Republican Party.

And then there are the people who just outright say climate change is not happening.

It's not human cost.

Position that's been taken by a lot of Republicans, including me.

I say that climate change is happening.

I fully accept the IPCC estimates and the range of estimates from the IPCC.

I just think that the solutions that are being proposed are completely unreasonable.

So I think this idea that we're going to just pour money into green energy and this is going to magically solve the problem does not solve the basic problem, which is that most of the forms of energy we're talking about are not nearly competitive on the world stage with carbon-based energy.

But what about a carbon tax?

So a carbon tax would be almost impossible to do globally is the issue.

So the biggest emitters on it, not on a per capita basis, but on an absolute basis are China and India right now.

And they're not going to carbon tax anything.

We still have a global competition with China and India in terms of foreign policy and allowing them to pollute up the wazoo while we sacrifice our own energy ambitions.

That seems like a bad recipe for Europe right now, for example, with regard to Russia, which means that if you're actually going to do something, what I've talked about before is doing things like building seawalls, exploring geoengineering.

Adapting.

Adapting.

Because humans are great at adapting and we suck at actually preventing.

We're very good at adapting, suck at preventing.

I mean, does adapting include like going going to Mars like Elon Musk?

I mean, that's not, that's not like top of the agenda.

I mean, I think that seawalls are better.

But sure, I mean, I like space travel as much as the next guy, but I don't think.

Mars?

I mean, I am a big fan.

I'm not going to spend lots of money on it, but

this isn't like top of my proposal list.

Okay, I'm a big Elon Musk fan,

but Mars, come on.

If it gets that bad, I mean,

I'm sure I won't be around for this, but Mars, please.

I mean, there's no air.

I mean, do I get to be there by myself?

am i bothered often like

there's no air yeah no there's some problems 200 and below zero there are sandstorms that last for months at a time it's no matter how bad we screwed the earth it couldn't be worse than that that's it that's it just there are fewer people there are fewer people there are fewer the companies

i mean it depends where you're living i mean i mean the restaurants there's no atmosphere that's true i mean either on the planet or in the restaurant yeah it's just

but i mean this adapter and and it's funny you say that because I was having dinner with a friend of mine, just a regular liberal person, you know, not a crazy person, left or right, but you know, generally a liberal person, lives in Los Angeles.

And I heard him say exactly what you said.

I thought, oh, that's interesting that he's where you are.

He said, you know, we're not going to do anything about this.

Let's be honest.

We're going to have to start just adapting.

I still think we should try a little harder for a little while more to do something about it.

And

I mean, you don't think if we led the way at some point that would have some influence on other countries?

Do you think China and India would just say, okay, forget it.

We're just going to hold hands like Telman Louise and drive off the direct military.

I mean, China would.

I mean, I think China would immediately take advantage of our sacrifice on the economic front in order to gain more power.

I mean, the reason I say this is because this is precisely what you're seeing from Russia, right?

Europe has gone way more in the green direction than the United States has.

And they're still basically powering their economy with Russian natural gas and oil.

I mean, 50% of Germany's natural gas and oil were coming from Russia.

And so the minute that Russia invades Ukraine, all of a sudden the prices double in these places.

And it turns out all these investments in green energy were making them dependent on one of the world's most aggressive powers.

Like

they're real unintended consequences to listening to Greta Thunberg when you make policy.

Well, I did a whole thing on Greta

and Kylie Jenner

about three or four months ago,

which was an indictment really of the younger generations, because they're the ones who would have to care about this more than me.

I'm 66.

I've had my fun with the earth.

You know?

I mean, I want to save it for the future, but they're the ones who are like, you ruined the planet.

And we're environmentalists.

And I showed, I think Greta has like 13 million followers and Kylie has 289 million.

And she's always getting on board a private jet.

And that generation they seem to care so much about that kind of thing they want materialism bitcoin which is horrible cryptocurrency for the environment uses more currency than some entire nations they love it don't even know it's bad for the i've asked them they oh no that's news to me

so until the younger generation cares more than they do and i don't mean you know the gretas there are those but in general you know, I just think people are just going to use up what we have until it's gone.

And that's a bigger problem if you're 25 than if you are my age.

So on the climate change thing, if the proposals were for seawalls from the Republican Party and not this snowball means there's no global warming, then

you'd be in the ball.

Yeah, I also think we could lead more.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I do think

if we took the lead, if we planted our flag on the ground and said, we're doing this,

I think you can get people.

I think you can shame people a little bit.

Now, I understand it's very hard to...

Can you still use the term third world or is that bad?

I do.

I mean,

that's right.

Okay, well, it's bad.

Developing world, which nation are we talking about here?

Are we talking about nations where people are burning dung for fuel?

Because, I mean, by the way, we should mention that when it comes to green energy, it's very easy for first world people to care a lot about solar panels.

But when you're burning dung for fuel in Africa, that makes it very, very difficult for you to care.

But what I'm saying is third world, okay, places that have not had air conditioning, places that have not had cars.

Okay, and now they finally are getting them.

It's very hard to say to them, look, we've been enjoying these things for quite a long time now.

You stop that right now.

Now, bad timing.

Yeah.

Bad timing for you.

You have to forego these these things.

So I take your point.

It's going to be very hard for India and China.

But I mean, they're not stupid.

I mean, they must understand that what good is it to win the economic race if you can't breathe?

Well, but

in Beijing, don't they sometimes have to

take drastic measures because you can't breathe there?

Well, the nice thing about being a communist dictatorship is that a few more people die.

you know, what's a few more beans more or less is the nice thing about being a horrific tyrannical dictatorship.

I mean, unfortunately, you know, communist authoritarian nations don't have a great environmental track record from Chernobyl to Beijing today.

I mean, a case could be made that we very often are callous about people's life in this country as well.

I mean, I will say we haven't killed 100 million people for an ideology recently.

So

what are you talking about?

Communism.

Absolutely.

Well,

Stalin, what I said before about woke and why it's an eye roll, it's like among the many goofy things they believe that they didn't used to is that, you know, maybe communism is worth a try again and capitalism is bad.

You know, things like that.

Right.

That

again, I didn't change.

Yeah.

You changed, you know?

Okay, so let's, so let's talk about the notion that the entire Republican Party is sort of held hostage to the voting priorities of Donald Trump when it comes to his belief that the 2020 election was stolen, or maybe him saying that that's what he believes.

It's sort of difficult to tell what he once believed, what he convinced himself to believe or whatever.

But getting outside of his head.

I think he really believes it.

I think at this point he definitely believes it.

I don't know if he believed it the day that the election happened, but I think within a couple of hours he'd

have proved in psychology that if you tell yourself a lie enough, you,

you know, I think OJ thinks he did not kill his wife.

I think if you live a lie long enough, I mean, I know people who literally

have changed their age.

You think that would be something that's kind of like easy to remember?

And they really think they're a different age because they've been telling the lie for so long.

So I really think Trump thinks he won that election.

Okay, so that given,

the basic idea here is that the Republican Party is a threat to sort of the very health of democracy.

And that if the Republicans are in charge, again, of, say, all three branches of government, they can pass whatever they want, that their first move is to stymie the ability of people to vote.

It seems to me that regardless of what Trump says or what he does, and I've been very vocal about the fact that the election was not stolen in 2020.

I know you have.

That the vote was as legit as any other vote.

I know.

And so I don't buy that.

With all of that said, the evidence of widespread voter suppression that has been alleged by, for example, Stacey Abrams in Georgia does not exist in the same way that the voter fraud evidence that Donald Trump suggests is widespread does not exist.

In fact, there's probably better evidence of mild voter fraud in particular areas than there is of voter suppression.

You really can't name a person in the United States who said, I desperately wanted to vote, and I was legally able to vote, and now I can't vote.

And so, the idea that Republicans are going to step in and just quash people's ability to vote, and this ends democracy,

I find that difficult to believe.

I'm not going to argue with you a lot about that.

It is a little bit overblown, that issue.

I do think that the Republicans do want to suppress votes.

I think when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, I think that was not a good move because I think they were naive

that

such a thing was not necessary anymore.

But I think they have studied this and found that at the end of the day, it doesn't really make that much of a difference.

The people who want to vote are going to vote.

Now, we shouldn't make it harder for them.

There shouldn't be long lines in black neighborhoods and no lines in white neighborhoods.

Sure.

There shouldn't be like one drop box in all of Houston County or something for 2 million people.

Drop boxes are typically not the way you vote until last five minutes.

There are a lot of examples of chicanery that you must admit should not be going on.

To me, the greatest form of chicanery is what we see in California with ballot harvesting.

If I'm looking at something that I think is really corrupt, ballot harvesting is the practice where parties can go door-to-door and pick up ballots from particular doors.

And so if you have a really well-funded Republican machine, then you go to all of the Republican houses, you pick up their ballots.

That seems like a real possibility of either voter fraud or intimidation.

That's more dangerous to me than some drop boxes get

taken away.

I mean, that's but this is not even where we have the major contention, or even such a thing as voter ID.

They've done surveys on this, and most people are okay.

By the way,

a voter ID.

Even gerrymandering, which everybody's all up and hot and bothered about.

I mean, it happens when Republicans are in charge and when Democrats are in charge, and it doesn't seem to have all that much of an impact on a broad national scale in terms of the allocation of the vote.

Gerrymandering is horrible because what it does is that it just encourages the extremes of either party.

I mean, I don't disagree with that.

I just don't think that it...

If we had fair districts, people would have to come to the middle.

And that's what would, I think, more than anything else save this country, because we're breaking down into this country where the only people who get elected are the far extremes of either party.

And of course, you can't legislate, you can't come together, you can't compromise when you have those two kind of factions

in the

Congress.

But

my worry more about what we're talking about is what Trump is doing now, which is trying to, behind the scenes,

put people in place so that in the next election, when he tries to do what he did in the last one, it works.

When he calls up, as he did,

and why he wasn't impeached for this, I don't know, when he calls up the Brad Raffensburg or the Secretary of State of Georgia.

Georgia, correct, and says, can you find me 11,000 votes?

The next time he'll have somebody who will say, yes, I can.

In fact, I can find 12,000.

How about that?

That's what I'm worried about.

It's what Stalin said.

It doesn't matter who votes.

It matters who counts the votes.

That's where they're heading.

So if that were to happen, obviously that would be a crime.

And if people were to be following the state of the world,

you don't think that's what Trump is trying to do?

Put his stooges, his loyalists in places where there were Brad Raffsenbergers before.

Everybody who's run in a primary with the platform that they wish to do that has lost.

And so my great worry about the

platform for

I'm going to be

throwing out votes, for example,

like if you're running for

state election official in

particular counties in Arizona, if you're running on the platform, then I'm going to be able to throw out ballots that I just don't like, or I'm going to.

Well, send electors.

Well, alternative states of electors have to be selected by the state legislature.

I mean, I've seen no evidence that their state legislature.

They're changing the law sometimes where it's not the state legislature who gets to make that call.

Well, this is why they need to reform the Electoral Account Act, right, at the federal level.

Okay.

I mean, that needs to be radically revised.

And where's the Republican Party on that?

I mean, they have enough support to do that in the Senate.

It's been Chuck Schumer who doesn't want to do that because he's been holding it up based on him wanting to do a broader voting bill.

That's always the Democrats.

They can never just take it.

No, no, Romney, Collins, even McConnell's on board for the Electoral Accounts Act revision.

Like everybody's on board for that one.

And if they had just broken that thing up into 90 pieces,

they passed half of them.

Easily.

It's crazy.

It is complete insanity.

So, you know, with sort of all of this said, and I think that you're right that it feels like the country is separating right now in some pretty extreme ways, it seems like to me that that's a problem, but it could be partially a solution.

The reason I say it could be partially a solution, as a member of the great sort, as somebody who moved from a blue state as a person who votes conservative to a red state, and Florida is growing increasingly red, and California is growing increasingly blue.

As that happens, it seems like to me, the hope for the country is not that we start electing moderates at the national level who start coming together and doing things.

It seems like the hope is that everybody sort of says, if we're going to stick around in the same country, it's got to be weapons down.

In other words, the federal government needs to let California be California, needs to let Florida be Florida, needs to get the hell out of the way, because otherwise it's going to be a bare majority of red people cramming down their views on the 49% of blue or vice versa.

So either we go back to a much more strong federalist system in which all of the localities that are now much more sordid politically sort of govern how they want to, and then we all share a couple of things like national defense

roads.

Or we're going to just get this kind of rock'em sock and robots till the end of time.

I don't think it's going to get better.

I think it has to start with an attitude adjustment.

I mean, when I sat down, that cup you have there that says leftist tears.

Available with your subscription today.

Your producer said, would you like one?

And I said, no.

I don't want to endorse that attitude on either side.

that,

like you cry, you're leftist tears.

I mean, I understand.

I understand you.

I mean, it's a joke, but yeah.

I know, but it's the attitude you have.

And look, I've said horrible things about lots of people, including many on the right, and used words I probably shouldn't have.

But I think we got to step back from that because we're at a place now where we're just loathing each other.

We didn't, I don't, maybe, I don't know, I wasn't alive for it.

I don't think people always, all through the history of this country, had this kind of loathing for each other where we see people with t-shirts on the right that say, I'd rather be with Russia than the Democrats.

That's insane.

I mean, that is insane.

That's an insane.

It's a feeling of a lot of people.

Yeah, and on the left, vice versa, for sure.

I mean, well, I don't know if anybody on the left is wishing they'd rather be with another foreign entity than the Republican Party.

I think that's some...

I mean,

I've never seen an equivalent of that on the left.

The hatred for Trump in particular was strong enough that if you'd given people that.

Because everything that was wrong with a human stuffed into one man, you can't hate them for that but i mean i wouldn't say that about joe biden i wouldn't say that about bill clinton i wouldn't say that about barack obama all presidents who i really loathe i mean this is this is not right but they didn't like stand with putin and say i believe him over my own intelligence agencies i mean they didn't rob charities and uh you know make fun of the handicapped and do a million things that that's not i mean well i mean what i mean is that barack obama literally sat with dmitri Medvedev in 2012 and pledged him flexibility post-election if Russia would back off.

What I mean is that the Democratic Party had their candidate.

You're saying that's an equivalent to...

I'm saying it's much worse than Trump saying

that he believes whatever he believes because no one took Trump seriously about anything.

You and I had this conversation in 2018.

That's a ridiculous argument for the president of the United States.

Oh, don't bother with him.

Did you take him seriously about everything?

You took Trump seriously about the president.

Of course I did.

Really?

When he is a good person.

But you've seen him.

Like, really?

I know.

Okay.

But if you're the president of the...

He didn't take Bill Clinton seriously when he was banging everything inside.

I don't really see why you're taking him.

Doesn't that have to do with this?

No, I mean.

I mean, Tony, what the president is.

Bill Clinton in his life is,

the comparison is Bill Clinton in his sexual life is frivolous.

Donald Trump in many of the things that he does, including his political life, is frivolous.

I don't treat him with the same seriousness as he's

the life.

You can't compare those two things.

I don't really care, Witten.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't affect me or the nation what Bill Clinton did in his personal life, his sexual life.

It matters very much what the president does in his political life when he stands with a foreign leader who is an adversary, almost an enemy, now an enemy, for sure, and says, I believe him over the people in my own government, my intelligence agencies, the people who keep us safe, and then lied about it when they came after him.

Oh, believe me, in that Helsinki press conference, I went after him with a blowtorch.

But the actual impact of that was far more negligible than the impact of Barack Obama saying to Dmitry Medvedev what he said.

I mean,

Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea two years later, and Barack Obama, one year later, was handing over Syria to the Russians.

So, I mean, like, in terms of actual hard policy, this is one of the problems with trying to gauge Trump that I always had, is that for every other president, you could see a direct connect between the thing they were trying to do and what they actually accomplished.

The things they were saying were intended to accomplish a particular purpose, and then it would either accomplish the purpose or not accomplish the purpose.

And with Trump, as I've said before, I feel like on his epitaph, it will say Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, he said a lot of shit.

Because he did.

He said a lot of shit.

And we all know that instinctively, that when you read his Twitter feed, you weren't reading the well-thought-out press, you know,

focus-grouped comments of Barack Obama, who actually, as much as I dislike Barack Obama's policy, he thought through what he was doing.

I don't think anybody thought that Donald Trump was anything more than a bundle of impulses in a lot of ways.

But he was not a game show host at the time that he was saying this shit.

What was the impact of it?

Well, I would say.

Of a lot of the shit that he was saying.

I mean, that's really the question.

Well, I don't know.

We're going to find out how this war goes in Ukraine, won't we?

Then the question there is whether that was incentivized by Donald Trump or whether it was the pullout from Afghanistan, whether it was the last six months of saying we would do nothing.

At that very press conference, they asked Putin, would you like...

Donald Trump to be an off duh.

Duh.

Right.

Absolutely.

Why do you believe Vladimir Putin?

You just said it's bad to believe Vladimir Putin.

Because he was just so convincing in that moment.

And why wouldn't he want a useful idiot in office?

Someone...

It seems like he's taken more territory under Democrats than Republicans.

Well, I don't know if that has to do with us at all.

Not everything has to do with us.

What's going on in Ukraine?

Okay, but now you've created a bit of a non-falsifiable argument.

When something bad doesn't happen, then it has to do with Donald Trump.

And when something bad happens, it doesn't have to do with the Democrats.

Well, no, that's not what I'm saying at all.

I'm saying Donald Trump encouraged encouraged Russia, encouraged them to meddle in our election.

He stood there in public and said, if you can find something, Russia, please, I hope you're listening.

I mean, really, what would your reaction be if a Democrat did that?

I ripped him up when he said that.

Again, I'm not saying that what he said is good.

I'm saying that to take Donald Trump's commentary with it with no grain of giant salt is a good thing.

Let me ask you what you think is going to happen in 2024.

You think Trump's going to run, right?

I'd be shocked if he doesn't.

I would be shocked too.

Okay.

And what about getting the nomination?

Now, I was talking on my show, the very last one we did, about how his numbers are way down.

I said, this is a great opportunity now for Democrats.

Don't do that.

Don't do the version of cry your leftist tears.

Don't be like, ah, you morons, you voted for this guy and now.

Say, just handle this with graciousness.

Handle this the way Lincoln did after the Civil War.

You know, with malice toward none, charity for all.

This is how we have to come back together.

So he's going to run.

Is he going to get the nomination, or is maybe your boy here, DeSantis, going to fight him?

I mean, the big problem for the Republicans is going to be whether anybody runs against him because he's a giant wrecking ball.

I mean, and if you run against Trump, you run the risk that he wrecks you so hard in the primary that you have no chance in the general.

And so

that is the big question.

So what do you think will happen?

I mean, I think that if he runs, it's going to clear the field.

Right.

Okay.

So he's running from political analysis.

I do.

I doubt.

So he's running again.

Okay.

So it's November of 2024.

He loses just the way he did last time.

Let's say that.

He's running against, I don't know, say the Democrats come up with someone.

They roll out the body of Joe Biden.

Yeah, it could be a weekend at Bernie.

Yeah, exactly.

No, I mean, certainly they, I don't know.

Yeah, I wish I could say, well, they've got this guy in the wings and he's going to be great.

I don't know.

I can't even think of like

it's difficult.

Yeah.

So I completely concede Trump could win.

The hologram of Barack Obama.

Yeah.

Well, I suggested that he gay marry Biden.

Then Biden would win and he'd actually be president, although he'd be the first electoral electoral.

He's like Edith Wilson.

Right.

Exactly.

One of those.

But

so I could see that Trump could actually win that election easily, especially if the Democrats keep doing the stuff they are doing to piss people off, like in schools with all that kind of stuff.

I mean, that's what my theme has been that, yes, both parties have a lot to answer for.

Again, I've told you where my politics are in general, okay?

I'm not coming over to this side.

I do think that Republicans are more dangerous.

But what pisses people off

with Democrats is so much closer to home.

It's so much up close and personal.

I mean, when you look at Ukraine, I mean, the Ukraine issue that he was impeached over, yes, I think it was an impeachable offense, absolutely.

But to most people, it's like Ukraine.

I mean, the Palin family working as a team couldn't find it on a map.

That's where most Americans are.

It's like, it's very far away.

It doesn't really influence my life a lot.

But when you have my kid coming home from school and saying, mommy, am I a racist?

And you're five.

You just learned the word.

That's what I worry about with the Democrats.

And in that scenario, Trump could win.

But if he doesn't, if he loses like, say, about the way he lost last time, not by a lot, but no, you don't think, you think he's going to go gently into that night?

No, and I don't think it's going to matter.

And the reason I think it's not going to matter is because I think that the constitutional structures have proved themselves extraordinarily durable to all parties, by the way.

Well, we'll see.

We could make a small bet.

You're a wealthy man.

Sure, let's do it.

So

what is the bet and what are we betting on?

One million pesos.

No, I'm not afraid.

1 million rubles.

It is worth $1 right now.

Right.

Just a friendly gentleman's $100 bet.

Okay.

I think the scenario I laid out, I think, is much more likely that he tries to, that it's, you know.

Well, I'm not saying that that's an unlikely scenario.

I mean, this is why I'm asking, what are we betting on?

Like, the question is, does he succeed or not?

If he doesn't succeed,

then

because, see, here's the thing.

I think that we actually may agree on a lot of this stuff.

Meaning, I would be surprised if he loses an election, if he went quietly into the night.

It would be counter-character.

It would be counter-history.

That's not what he does.

Look, what we're doing is what America needs to do.

Two guys who don't agree on everything, who are basically on two different sides, but who can talk without hating each other.

You know, I'm doing a,

like you, I'm doing a podcast now, and it's not political.

It's so much fun.

to get away from politics sometimes.

I would love to have you on.

I'd be blessed.

I think it drops like the 21st of March or something like that.

I I think it can even subscribe now.

But

I would love to talk to you and find out what's under the amica.

And never

spot, I mean, that's my word.

And not talk about any of what we talked about today.

Because my theme is often, this is how we get our country back.

People talk politics too much.

When I was a kid, People never talked politics.

It was almost considered impolite to talk about politics or religion.

I remember my parents parents with their friends, and these were people who were very close.

They never talked.

I think sometimes they didn't even know what religion they were.

They were like, I think they're Episcopalian.

We don't get them.

And now all people talk about is politics all the time.

What is Facebook?

It's arguing with some kid you went to high school with.

You're in Chem Lab together.

And now you have to talk about who's on the Supreme Court?

That's, I think, what is tearing America apart.

Because there's a million things you could talk about that aren't political and you find out, oh, this person is not that different from me,

unless we wander into whether Democrats eat babies.

So let's just say, maybe they do, maybe they don't.

Maybe they order it, they just push it around on the plate, they don't really eat it, but it's

but just stay away from that stuff.

I would love to do that with you.

That'd be a blast.

That'd be super fun.

Really?

Yeah, no, I would 100% do that.

I mean, I don't know.

You know, I don't know.

I know so much about you from listening to you.

You're so good at what you do

politically and about important, weighty issues.

And I know so little about everything else about you, you know?

Yeah, no, that'd be fun.

I don't know who you, do you root for the Florida teams now that you left L.A.?

Nah,

I'm a lifer.

My dad, my dad's from Chicago, so I'm a Chicago White Sox now.

It's the same way.

See, look at that.

Yeah, exactly.

I've been in L.A.

since 1983.

I never left the New York teams.

Even though they stink.

I still root for the Knicks.

Alrighty, so let's talk about the Ukraine situation.

So it seems to me that when it comes to Ukraine, there are, I mean, not just seems to me, it's pretty obvious.

There are no good options.

When deterrence fails, there are no good options anymore.

And the grave failure of the West was that we spent 30 years basically thinking that bad people are not bad people if we talk to them strong enough.

And

if we negotiate with them, or if we ignore them taking pieces of territory in Georgia under Bush or under...

or Crimea under Obama.

If we just ignore it hard enough, then maybe it sort of goes away.

And now deterrence has failed.

And it seems like the world order is radically reshifting.

Like the United States, we seem to treat this as almost a natural disaster, like a thing happening far away.

But in Europe, they're treating this as an epic-shifting event.

They're talking about rearming.

They're talking about forming new security alliances with Eastern European countries.

Where do you think this ends up?

I think this is actually turning out to be, I mean, obviously what's going on for the people of Ukraine is horrible right now.

But I think in the long run, I think it's going to be a good thing because, first of all, Putin is being shown to be way less strong than we we thought he was.

I mean, this is, I don't know what the opposite of Blitzkrieg is.

Quagmire.

Yeah, I mean, he's quagmiring.

Yep.

Right.

It was supposed to be a cakewalk.

So was Iraq.

You know,

I'm so surprised that he actually did it because

it wasn't really necessary.

I tried to explain one night on my show that I think a lot of this comes from he thinks he's the savior of the Russian people.

I think when you get to that level where he's been in office, he's been in absolute power for 20 years, what is left?

What's in the soul of a man?

He wants to be a hero.

And he thinks this is the way to do it.

I think people, no, this is history major stuff.

Kiev, or Kiev, I guess we say it now,

is the ancestral home of Russia.

It's the beginning of the Russian state.

from around the year 1000.

I'm not saying that that gives them a right to take it.

It is a completely different nation now.

It changed.

It's not even part of Russia anymore.

But that is, and I think that's what is in his mind, is I'm going to reclaim this.

Yes, the Russian state moved to Moscow, but it's almost similar to the way Kosovo, I mean, when Milosevic started the Balkan Wars, it was all about,

the year was 1989.

It was the 600th anniversary.

In that part of the world, that's like yesterday.

You know, that's so foreign to the way Americans think.

But it was 1389,

this battle in Kosovo, which again, not even part of Serbia anymore, but it was the ancestral home of Serbia, and we got to get it back.

And this, I think, is what Putin wants.

That is what he thinks in his mind.

And what he's finding out is that not only are the Ukrainian people hate him for doing this, but the Russian people hate him for doing this.

They're like, are you crazy?

This is not the world we live in anymore.

We're on TikTok now.

We can see dogs getting shot and families being torn apart and things blown up and we're a modern country or trying to be one.

Look at what are you doing?

So I think it's just going to turn out horribly for Russia.

The question I was going to ask you is,

do you think it was the right thing to

not only keep NATO going after the Soviet Union fell, but to encroach right up to Russia's borders?

Because a lot of people don't.

I don't.

I actually do think that, well, I think that here's the thing.

If you are going to make overtures to a nation that they should try to join NATO and then not back it up, that's the worst thing you could do.

So we took sort of the worst path with Ukraine.

We were encouraging them, maybe you'll join NATO, maybe you won't join NATO.

If you make an overture, maybe we'll consider it.

And so that leaves them in an incredibly vulnerable spot because we're basically saying to them that you have to make overtures to us.

And meanwhile, Russia is on your eastern border.

And so Russia's looking at that going, no, we're not going to do this at all.

If we had wanted...

If you're going to make a move, make it strong, in other words.

If you're going to have Ukraine join NATO, make Ukraine join NATO, and you make sure that they have the armaments necessary to defend themselves and you have a mutual alliance pact.

If you're an independent armed nation, by the way, right now, if like to me, the one long-lasting ramification of this that's incredibly dangerous, if you're a non-aligned nation right now, you don't have a mutual defense guarantee with either China or Russia or the United States, how fast are you looking for a nuclear weapon right now?

I mean, you are looking like hell for a nuclear weapon right now because you don't want to be in a conventional war with a major power.

But back to what I'm asking you.

I'm asking you

30 years ago,

1991.

Okay,

what should we have done done then?

The Soviet Union fell.

NATO was formed specifically to counter the Soviet Union and communism, which now was no more.

Why keep that

lions going?

Why not

invite Russia at that moment, Boris Yeltsin took over, right?

Invite them.

You're one of us now, as opposed to keeping this organization going past the point where it had a reason to be going.

I mean, the question is whether you really thought that Russia was going to be and develop toward being a friendly nation to the West or not.

If you were a skeptical...

But that caused them not to be.

I mean I wonder if that's the case.

I mean we'll never know.

But if they had disbanded NATO and said, look,

we're all capitalist countries now.

We're not fighting communism anymore and we're not fighting the Soviet Union because it doesn't exist.

So we should stop having this organization which treats you like the enemy and bring you in.

So I disagree to one extent, which is that you'll notice that there are a bunch of nations that Putin has attempted to invade.

Not one of them is a member of NATO.

So I think Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would all be Russia right now if we had gotten rid of NATO.

And Finland has been bordering Russia since 1949 as a member of NATO.

All of these nations joined NATO in the 90s.

Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, I think they all joined either 99 or 2004.

And that was in direct opposition to...

at that point, Putin, right?

You're talking late 90s, early 2000s, because Putin took power in 1999.

So I think the sort of optimistic vision, which is that if we had made more nice overtures to Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin was a plutocrat and he was an incompetent plutocrat at that.

And then he was replaced by a much more competent plutocrat and a dictatorial plutocrat who was, who had territorial ambition.

And so I tend to be much more, you know, hawkish in terms of not trusting other nations to spin on a dime and suddenly become our friends.

And so the idea...

It worked with Japan and Germany, didn't it?

Well, no, we fully occupied Japan and Germany after nuking Japan twice and after firebombing winning hell out of Germany.

So we didn't actually do any of that to Russia.

But we welcomed Japan and Germany.

We occupied them and forcibly deposed their empire.

Of course, right after the war, we had to.

Oh, no, we still have troops there right now.

I mean, we have troops in Okinawa.

We want them there.

Yes, but for decades.

We didn't want them there.

And they're on our side.

They're not occupying them.

They're not treating Germany and Japan as an enemy.

We treat them as an ally.

What I'm saying is we forcibly turned them into an ally.

I mean, we literally had American troops.

We still have American bases in Germany.

We have no American bases in Russia.

Meaning, the idea that we were going to take an

bases in Germany to fight Russia, to fight the Soviet Union, which doesn't exist anymore.

Yes, but in the aftermath of it, we fully toppled the regime, and then we proceeded to occupy and help reconstitute the government in that regime.

We had to occupy them right after the war.

I'm not making the argument against occupation in Germany or Japan.

The point I'm making is...

We occupied them until they were able to stand on their own feet, and then we left.

The bases there were for them because they were our allies now.

Well, I mean, we needed to keep the bases there also in order to encourage Japan, for example, not to go after nuclear weapons.

The idea is we'll defend you so you don't have to defend yourself.

We don't want you rearming militarily.

We built an entire European Union and EC

in order to keep Germany down.

We also made the emperor go on the radio and admit he wasn't a god.

Right.

So, I mean, so there's

a there's a really good book by a woman whose name escapes me right now.

It's called Secondhand Time won the Nobel Prize a few years back.

And it was an oral history of Russians talking about the Soviet Union post-Russia.

So it's just her interviewing a bunch of people who are standing around in 2000 talking about what the Soviet Union was like.

And there's one particular interview that's really striking where she's talking to an old Soviet who had been imprisoned, tortured in Lubyanka by the KGB, who'd had friends and family members shot by the KGB, and ended up, or the GRB at the time, and ended up, GRU at the time, and ended up in World War II, seeing a person who'd tortured him.

And the person looked at him and said, we're both Russian.

And he says, now, he says, I don't understand the world I'm living in.

My kids want Levi's and they want radios.

Why can't we have that Russian greatness back?

And then

I think the biggest mistake the West makes generally, and this is true with Russia today, it's true with China as well, is that we tend to think that everybody wants the same things that we want.

They want material well-being, they want longer lives, they want their kids to go to good schools.

On a fundamental level, unfortunately, I think that that's not always true.

I think that there are a lot of people who want, George Orwell wrote this about Hitler in 1940.

He said, you know, one of the reasons Hitler is successful is because what Hitler realizes is something that we in the West don't, which is we say we want a washing machine and we want a nice radio.

What Hitler understands is sometimes people want blood, struggle, toil, and tears.

And if they don't want that, then

it takes them a while to realize that the cost of that is too high.

And maybe that's what we're seeing right now in Ukraine, we can hope, is that the Russian people are beginning to realize.

The Russian people, by the way, five years ago were polled about Stalin and 70% of whom said, good guy.

Maybe they're starting to realize there are too many costs to...

There have been multiple polls that show that Stalin is still held in fairly high esteem by a significant percentage of the population.

Oh, Stalin.

I thought you you meant Putin.

No, not Putin, Stalin.

Yes, well, because strong man is built into the Russian culture.

And I also would say this about the Russian people.

You can't have communism for as long as they had it.

And it's a little like being from a broken home and being abused as a child.

Communism was so evil.

I mean, what it did to the psyche, the cynicism that...

it incurred in people that you're not going to get over that in just a generation.

I think it's a very cynical country, a very cynical mentality there.

And

when I hear people

nowadays, fact-free, talking about how, you know, a lot of, you know, if you look at Gen Z, it's like a lot of them think, oh, maybe communism, be good to give that another try.

You know,

they just don't understand because they have this idea in their head that if...

If something happened before they were alive, what does it matter?

It didn't really happen.

It's like, but stuff did happen.

Stuff did happen.

I know you weren't around for it, but it really did.

And other people noticed it.

And we learned that lesson.

You know, communism doesn't work, and it makes people very cynical.

Remember that old joke they had about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us?

That was the system?

I mean,

that's not going to go away overnight.

Well, Bill Maher, it's a pleasure to have you here.

I'm glad we can finally make it work.

This is a blast.

We should definitely do this again soon.

We will do it again.

And come on Club Random, my podcast.

I really want to, and we'll have a whole different kind of discussion well thanks so much for stopping by great to see you thank you ben

the ben shapiro show sunday special is produced by mathis glover executive producer jeremy boring production manager pavel waitowski associate producer just team turley editing is by jim nickel audio is mixed by mike koromina hair and makeup is by fabiola christina title graphics are by cynthia and gulo production assistant jessica kranz the ben shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

Copyright, Daily Wire 2022.