Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #458: Ronan Farrow, Ross Douthat

Episode Date: April 28, 2018

Bill’s guests are Ronan Farrow, Ross Douthat, Ian Bremmer, Ana Marie Cox, John Podhoretz (Originally aired 04/27/18) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. Let us pray. No, I know why you're happy today. You feel safe. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Bill Cosby has been found

guilty of sexually assaulting dozens of women, and he's been sentenced to 10 years in the White House. So, no, he's going to jail, and he, at best heed the advice that he always gave younger black men in America. pull up your pants. It's... I want to really...

Yeah. Now, uh, Mr. Dr. Cosby, is still doctor? Maybe not. But his lawyers are arguing for very lenient sentencing,

they say, because he's completely blind. Uh, no, you're thinking of the wife. He's... He's good. Now, our president, the president who knows the best people, Another, what, it must be bad luck, huh? Because he knows the best people.

Another appointment went sour. Dr. Ronnie Jackson, you know, Dr. Ronnie Jackson. He's the physician to the president. We have one of those in this country. And he's been that way for a long time. He was there for Obama, George Bush. We didn't know a lot about Dr. Ronnie Jackson before. But then when Trump became president,

Dr. Ronnie gave him his physical, remember that? And said he was in great shape and not obese at all. and we all said, is this guy high? And yes, is he apparently has been very high? Apparently, he has been handing out drugs. So indiscriminately, his nickname was the Candyman. Okay, A, how does this guy like this get to be the physician to the president? And B, is he still accepting patients?

I'm asking for a friend. But Dr. Runny said these false allegations, he's stepping down. He's not going to take the job at the VA, which would he was put up for. He said, these are allegations are false, and they become a distraction to the president. A distraction to this president? All he does is golf, watch TV and eat. How could there be a distraction? Unless you're a sand trap, a commercial, or a chicken bone, you're good.

A distraction. He needs... Yeah, distraction. He's calling Fox and Friends in the morning. Did you see that? Did you see him prank call Fox and Friends yesterday? Oh, my God. He babbled like Rain Man ate a bag of Coke.

I mean, the three... This is where we are in this country. The three hosts of Fox and Friends looked very worried. Really? They were like, this is too stupid for me. us, and we're the hosts of Foxwood friends. But, hey, let's not

forget the good news. North and South Korea. Did you see this? The presidents of North and South Korea? Met? Look at them. Look like the before and after to a Slim Fast and Supercuts commercial. And what is

with all the hand-holding these days? You know, these guys are doing it, and these two. could not stop doing it. The only people we can't get to do it are these two. Now, they've had a lot of visitors there to the White House lately, the Japanese prime minister, the French president, the German chancellors there. Now, Melania loves these state visits.

She now knows how to say, please take me with you in 16 languages. Oh, poor Melani. It was her birthday this week. Trump, they asked him about it on Fox and Trends. Maybe I didn't get it too much. But then they had a little ceremony at the White House, and Trump said, make a wish. And his dick fell off.

Well, it is... It is a strange White House. You have to admit, when the president and his wife have no contact, and the American president and the French president, half his age,

cannot keep their hands off each other. I mean, they were all over each other these two. The hugs, the handshakes, the two-handed handshakes, the hand-holding, the cheek-kissing. I thought he was going to... I thought Trump was going to take him. furniture shopping. I mean,

at one point, Trump said, call me by your name. What the hell? It all came out. It all came out. Okay, they had the first state dinner. The Trump stood at the White House, and, you know, it was France. So they wanted it to be really classy. So they took the chicken out of the bucket. All right. We got a great

seat. We got Anna Marie Cox, Ian Bremer, and John Padereitz, and a little later I'll be speaking with author and columnist Ross Douthit. But first up, he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist writes for the New Yorker whose new book is War on Peace, the End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan Farrow! Great to see you.

You've... Thank you to be back. You have had quite a year. I am very tired, though. You got a Pulitzer Prize. Are you 30 yet? I am 30. Just 30.

That's old in TV years. I still got your... Oh, fuck you. You got your first Pulitzer Prize. That's pretty great for your... work in the Harvey Weinstein stuff, and the Me Too Movement. And now you've got this book

about a completely different subject, which is really well received by very serious people about foreign diplomacy. I noticed that the president spoke to Congress and really echoed a lot of the thoughts in your book. Unfortunately, it was the president of France. Well, first of all,

what do you think of this eight play that I was just talking about between him? What was going on there? This power moves of yanking each other? Dusting the... The imaginary dandruff off the shoulder. I mean, this is not diplomacy. And you have Macron get up before Congress

and talk about Voltaire and Ben Franklin in the 1700s. And everyone's like, yes, please, more of this. We want professional international relations. And it's just not happening here right now. Trump thinks Voltaire is a Harry Potter character. So I don't know. That landed.

But, okay, it seems like the Europeans are playing good cop, bad cop with Trump, because they have Macron come in and they have make-out sessions. And then now Merkel is here, who he doesn't like very much. She's a little spicier. And she said

something really interesting. She said, you know, we can't depend on the United States to be the leader anymore. And I guess that's where the world is. Well, you know, we have actual metrics on this. There was a Pew survey of G20 countries just in the last few days. And what they found is,

people do trust the United States less than Germany now. Yeah. And why not? I mean, why do we have to be in that position? That was not something that was thrown down by Thor. Why can't it be somebody else's turn? I mean, we're not still holding the Germans responsible for you or what, are we? Look, fair...

I'm not going to touch the Holocaust stuff tonight. However... I'm just saying it was a very long time ago. How long did Germans have to say, we're not those people anymore? I think the problem is not that Germany may be taking the place of the United States in terms of international relations leadership. It's that China is filling the spaces we're leaving behind. So everywhere around the world, we are slashing our diplomatic spending.

We do not have ambassadors. We do not have assistant secretaries of state who can actually embed things like this upcoming North Korea meeting in long-term strategy. And what's happening with China is they are spending more and more on their diplomats in places like Sudan, where once they were this rapacious interlaborate, didn't give a crap about human rights, stole all the oil, and then got the hell out of there. Now they've got a regional envoy doing shuttle diplomacy,

trying to get political settlements in these difficult spots. They've got big, big-scale development projects. And they're building all over the world. They're building everybody's roads and hospitals and power plants. And every kid in every corner of the world sees that. And increasingly, they don't see a U.S. embassy there. Yeah. I mean, Napoleon said, China's a sleeping giant, letter's sleep,

and they're woke. Speaking of woke. They are woke as hell right now. But unfortunately, not on human rights or the kind of leadership that I think we all value and hope is present. But it seems like our problem is the problem that happens with every empire.

First of all, we were never supposed to be an empire. And I don't think we use that word enough. America is an empire, unlike any other country now. We have troops in, you know, over 100 countries, bases all over the world. Some of these places that we fought in World War II, we still have 40, 50,000 troops. I don't understand why.

But whenever you have an empire, the thinking tilts toward the military as the people who can solve everything. And it seems that is where diplomacy suffers. It's because Americans, they just never stop voting for more money for the military, let the military do everything. We put them on a pedestal and everything else is not what it used to be around the world. It's a vicious cycle. We no longer have diplomatic capacity. diplomatic capacity. We don't have

negotiators. We don't have peacemakers. And so people do trust the military more. We do run everything through the military. And politicians get on the campaign trail every time and they denigrate I think people who are really brave men and women serving the world everywhere as

diplomats. These people get characterized as dusty bureaucrats. They're not. They are in difficult, dangerous places right alongside our military. It's a part of the encroachment that Eisenhower talked about all those years ago. It's the military industrial complex. It slowly takes over everything. And, you know, one of the things I write about in this book, War on Peace, is I was a little

guy at the bottom of the totem pole at the State Department in Afghanistan. If you wanted to build a well or reach out to a community in rural Afghanistan, you had to do it through the Pentagon if you wanted it done this year. And that's a real problem, because the Pentagon is thinking tactically. It's not thinking about our long-term strategy necessarily. Okay. So let's switch subjects to your other big area, which is you wrote the article about Harvey Weinstein. It was supposed to go on NBC, right? It was.

But it wound up at the New Yorker because NBC, now they're dealing with a story about Tom Broca and Matt Lauer and, gosh, what's in the water over there? And Bill Cosby, it's very fitting you're here right after he gets sentenced, or not sentenced, but found guilty. These were the big fish. These were the really bad people.

Do you think there's an excess in the movement that is causing a backlash that's hurting it. I'm thinking about people like Al Franken, Aziz Ansari, Garrison Keeler, you know, I was reading a story about him, and it said, well, he had a reputation of bullying in the workplace.

That could just be somebody's opinion. And then it said, and on several, on one occasion, I thought, oh, here it comes. The penis came out at the Christmas party. And on one... Everyone had this pent-up desire to show their penis

that we just didn't talk about for years. years and years. Not everyone, but. Well done. But a shocking number of people. I don't get the MO. But it said on one occasion, he posted an off-color limerick. And I thought, maybe we've gone too far here.

So I would just point out, I think that our culture has actually been pretty good on the whole about self-regulating. So you mentioned disease Ansari. You know, that blog about Disease Onsari came out. It was clearly a single source. narrative about a date gone wrong and there was a debate about how far gone wrong it was. But I don't think anyone saw that and said, oh, he's Harvey Weinstein. This is a multiple rapist. I think people have separated these things, clearly.

But he's not around anymore. Is that true as he's on sorry? I think so. I think he's... I guess we'd have to ask him how he's doing these days. Well, I think we could find that out. I don't think we have to ask him directly, but I don't think his show is on anymore. I just think that that reporting was regarded exactly as it should have been. People saw for what it was. There was a debate about it. Did they? There was a lot of criticism of it. I think so. There was some. I think people are divided. I think a lot of people are,

yes, you're right. There was backlash, and I think he suffered a lot also from it. And I would say that those cautionary tales, I think, have been pretty well received by fellow journalists. Overall, what I've seen is the vast majority of the reporting that's actually

broken through has been very meticulous, has referred to very serious crimes. And, you know, this separate discussion of the gray areas and how far it should go, I think we're sorting that through just as we should be. Al Franken, you think he should have quit? You know, I didn't do any reporting on the Al Franken's story. I know, I don't know the... You can have an opinion. Yeah, you know, I do think that it's correct to distinguish between these kinds of violations and these kinds of behavior. But I would also just make a point, this whole conversation bill

was under wraps for decades. There is so much pent up anger and heartbreak and lack of of accountability that I do think it is understandable that it's coming out in Torrance right now. Okay. Well, you're doing amazing work on a number of fronts. You obviously have your mother's incredible compassion. She's great. And your father's steely ambition. Whoever that may be.

Great to see you. Rodin Farrow. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. All right, let's meet our panel. All right. He is president of Eurasia Group and author of Us versus Them The Failure of Globalism, Ian Bremmer. He is the editor of Commentary Magazine

contributed to MNBC News, MMSNBC. Uh-oh, watch out. Please welcome John Padertz. John, how you going? Good, thank you. We've got you back from too long. Decades. You always get them back. It may take decades, but we do it. He's a political columnist for a sci-fi network

and host of the Crooked Media Podcast with friends like these. Anna Marie Cox. Great to see you out. Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's Obert Clems, you can answer them after the show on YouTube. I want to first start with that Fox and Friends thing because it was very disturbing to me,

and I just want to hone in on the lies because he broke his own record for lying within a sentence. He's done that many times. But he's saying, I swear to God, he was saying that he was talking about CNN. And he said, I don't watch it at all. I watched it last night. He did it within a breath.

Within a breath. And, okay, that's the kind of lie we just accept from him now. It's casual, but we normalized it. But he also said this week that Iran, we gave them $150 billion, which is not true. You know, he says James Comey released classified information, really important things that are not true. And I was reading about these two lawsuits, one from the Sandy Hook parents,

who were suing Alex Jones, who says Sandy Hooks was a hoax. And then Summer Zeros, I think is her name, suing Donald Trump, says he lied about saying that what she was saying about him was false. And I thought, this is the most important thing we have to do in America right now, is start penalizing liars. because we are drifting further and further away from a place where truth matters. I think you've got to separate out the Somerservos story

from the Sandy Hook story, because Summer Zervos has a case that she was slandered by Trump, who said that her story is not true. If, in fact, it could be documented, that the story is true. That is slander, and though I'm not sure that she can get this done

during the presidency, after the president... I'm just saying that Comey should sue Trump. Obama should suit Trump. for saying that he wiretapped it. I'm just saying that I don't think we can leave this in the court of public opinion anymore. I think part of the problem is that... That's what the liars want.

Is that Trump lies authentically. It's who he is, right? Where, like, when Hillary was lying, you could tell that, like, it wasn't... She had to kind of architect it, right? It felt fake to her. So it was fairly meta. She actually cared whether she was lying or not.

I think that's... I think one of them has a conscience. Trump in the moment doesn't actually have a sense of whether he's lying. I don't believe it. I don't buy that at all. I think he knows perfectly well that he's lying, and his entire career has demonstrated to him that he can lie without consequence. That's the story of Donald Trump. Yeah, he doesn't care if he's lying or not. It's not where they knows he's lying or not. But Ian was saying, and, you know, he can go bankrupt without consequence.

Yeah. He can, you know, he can say, yeah, he can say that there was no birth certificate without consequence. And who can say he's wrong? Look at him. Look, he's sitting there in the White House. There were no consequences. There are no consequences. And that's why I'm saying we have to start. Is that going to work? I mean, seriously, will it work to? Something has to, because we're drifting further and further from the shore of truth

to the point where we're not going to be able to see it anymore. Do we want to empower lawyers more in the United States? Yeah, I would think, I wouldn't expect to hear from you that we should be more litigious. That that would be like lawyers in court to the answer. Okay. Otherwise, we just seem to we accept this, you know, we're in this post-truth world. People say that term now, like, oh, well, it's a post-truth world. What are you going to do? Trump lied to the FBI director.

That's a felony. I wonder if we're looking at this a little bit wrong, which is to say, like, we're looking at the problem as one of, like, you know, public figures lying to each other and people not caring. Maybe the people not caring is the problem. And you can't make people care if other people are suing each other. I would say that people do care.

That Donald Trump is locked at 40% support, around 40% support, because 60% of the people think, that he's a liar and a person, a bad character. Then you have to ask yourself, the 40%, who are they? And I think it's very clear that people have now decided that they are on teams. And they're on the right, they're on Trump's team,

and so when a pollster's going to ask them how they feel, they're going to go with their teammate and not somehow vague it up. I think they have a deeper truth, right? Which is that if you feel like for a generation or more, that the establishment has facts, but they don't care about you. They're lying.

They're not helping you. Whether it's the mainstream media or it's the politicians in establishment or it's the business types, and somebody else comes around and says they're going to break things, you don't care so much if they are getting caught or fact-checked by the Washington Post. Your book is called Us versus Them, right? And you say, you know, it's Trump that causes that,

not the other way around. Because it's not just the United States. We see the same exact thing happening in Europe, too. I mean, Brexit happened despite all the facts of the contrary because a bunch of people said, yeah, I can vote with your facts. You're not going to help me in the slightest. So let me go another way.

But aren't we letting the voters off the hook, his voters off the hook a little bit? I mean, I really do think there is an element there that's more about what they think they're going to lose in the future. Yeah, no, it's actually all about perception. Like, self-identified people, self-identified poor people who were white, like has twice as like to vote for Hillary, I think, than for Trump. They voted more for Hillary. Yeah, they're self-identified as poor.

Right. There was people who are worried about losing something that voted for Trump. I think something like all of the rich people without college degrees voted for Trump, like 20% of his voters were earned more than $100,000 but didn't have a college degree. So the really the striking difference about Trump voters isn't that they were literally left behind. Is they're fearful of left behind? They weren't the people that were left behind. They're the person who are worried about losing something.

The people who actually lost something voted for Hillary. Okay, but think about this. So in 2008, John McCain got 45.2% of the vote. and in 2016, Trump got 46. There isn't much difference there. Some of it was constituted a little differently, but I think it's very clear that we have this very divided country,

and again, if you think about it as teams and don't psychoanalyze the voters that much, there are people who are going to vote for this team and there are people who are going to vote for that team, and they're pretty close to being even... But to people are very... Except you have to psychoanalyze them because the most significant predictor

for voting for Trump was racial animus and racial resentment. And if that's one of your teams, you're like, you need to know who that is. The one advanced industrial democracy in the world where you're not seeing teams play out is Japan where they're all Japanese. Right?

Right. And they believe just as much in their business community and their political establishment and their media now as they did 20 years ago, the United States and Europe, nowhere is that actually true. But again, again, I just don't think that you can dismiss. You can say racial animus is the reason for it. Trump got 63 million votes.

Hillary got 65 million votes. that's pretty close to being even, even though, obviously, two million more is two million more. And those are the same... No, but those are the same... Those numbers break down the same way over the last three elections.

But are you saying that racial animus motivated the McCain voter? No, no, no, but it's the biggest predictor. And I think if our teams are being divided across racial lines, I think that's a cause of concern. It's not so much like, oh, we're about even, but half of them are in the clan. I mean, like, you have to be concerned

about the half-the-half-term... I do think the left got bullied into saying, is to not saying, you're racist. Yes. Because they're, that offends us. It's worse than anything else is to call me a racist. Right. But they obviously were okay with voting for a racist.

I mean, there's a small, kind of a small difference between being a racist and being okay. They were okay with the protest vote. They were okay with voting for anyone who's going to break things down. And we're not Sanders. Bernie Sanders is also a completely new phenomenon. for Trump, the people who were actually hurt by globalism, the people who were actually whose jobs were at risk,

they largely voted for Hillary Clinton. It was people who were scared. And I was looking at a study today, because I knew I was going to be talking to you, that you can break down support for globalization along racial lines. It is white people who are fearful of it. And it's people who color who are okay with it,

even though it's their job. It's not just race. It's change in general. Certainly race is a big part of it. But they still hate Hillary Clinton. And that is new. be still running against the person from the last election who's now just sitting as a grandma at home in Chappaqua, right?

But that is the animating force still of the Republican Party. That's getting close to stalking. They hate... They hate... No, it is. The Republican Party... They hate Hillary. They hate Nancy Pelosi. She's still...

But the Republican Party ran against Jimmy Carter for three elections after Carter left in one house. Oh, yeah. Oh, look at Reagan's speeches in 84. It was, do you want to? want to go back to that? Do you want Carter? I mean, didn't mention Carter by name. The reason that Republicans are running... I don't remember them saying lock him up. Right. Well, there was nothing to lock him up for. But in his case...

And there's something to lock up Hillary for? Well, there was not really, but, you know, she was under... She was under FBI investigation. Well, but how right was that? And, I mean, there's been a couple of Mia Culpals now in the press, Jeffrey Tuben, and Amy Chosec of the New York Times, both said, you know what? But we paid way too much attention to these emails, and we were actually doing Russia's bidding,

and it's very noble of them to now say... I'm glad they said that. I'd also like to hear President Obama talk about the fact that he really needed to have said a lot more at the time, and the presumption was, well, Hillary's going to come in and she's going to take care of it, but actually she didn't, and he was commander-in-chief, not just running a party, and we needed more from him at that point.

A lot of people, including Obama and Comey, were too concerned about the election results and not concerned about the election itself. Right. And we've seen that from Comey all week long. Speaking of lying, it has been bothering me a lot lately that conservatives, they have these publications where they lie, and I think they know they're lying, but they do it to make themselves feel better. Like, this is this week, look at the cover of the globe this week.

This is a conservative publication. Clinton was caught in double murder investigation. Since what is the glow of a conservative publication? It is. They publish, you know, William F. Buckley Jr.? Like, that's the globe. You've got a byline in there, man. Come on.

They're seen it. They're in Trump's pocket. You know that. I know, but that doesn't make them a conservative publication. That makes them a corrupt for Trump publication. I'm just saying... And the difference would be... Okay.

Well, here's Fox News. Will California secede from the United States? Dream on, assholes. International arrest warrant issued for George Soros. Not really, but it makes them feel good. and Hillary always. Look, horrific Hillary Clinton's snuff film circulation. Yes, she's got a snuff film on out.

So I thought, you know what, why don't liberals have our own fake news? We might know it's fake, but it'll just make us feel good. So we're starting liberal fake news. Please may not be exactly true. But, for example, I'm doing a bit here, John.

It's moved back. For example, Will Oprah change his mind? We'll run in 2020 alongside Black Panther. See? Human trafficking ends thanks to Whole Foods petition. Melania set to file for divorce. I'm in love with Rachel Maddow, declared his first lady.

Study, listening to public radio, regrows hair. Harry Weinstein sentenced to be kicked in nuts by cast of oceans eight. Gunnuts, bullet, dropped by good guy with a tote bag. Study, Wakanda is real. Indiana is made up. NASA finds Earth-like planet covered in kale. Wow, the liberals are gonna love that. Networks to announce all full shows will be about transsexuals.

Star-Spangled Banner to be replaced with something by Beyonce. Ruth Bader Ginsburg to run marathon, so healthy she could live another 50 years, says Doctor. And real secret of Obama birth certificate, he's twins, and now the other one can run. All right, sorry for yelling. The New York Times op-ed, columnist, his latest book is to change the church, both Francis and the future of Catholicism. Our friend, Ross Douthan is here, Ross.

How are you, sir? Good to see you. Okay. Yes, I know you've been busy, and, you know, you know I have to pick a little bond with you here. Only one? Well, we might have a couple,

but a couple of days after Hugh Haffner died, who was a friend of mine, you wrote a column, which, for someone who's so Christian, seemed very unchristian to me, very uncharitable. First of all, he was barely cold. He was, but I waited until he was barely cold, at least. Yes, you waited until he was dead.

That was an act of charity. Right. I mean, people usually get a couple of days. Or season the opportunity, one of the two. Okay, so let me just read a couple of things you said about him. He said, half was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution. He wasn't a pimp. I knew him you didn't.

With quailudes for the ladies and Viagra for himself. a father, the things you lay at his feet, a father of smut addictions, eating disorders, eating disorders, abortions, divorce, and syphilis. Yeah, I'd stand by most of that. They printed it in the New York Times, so it has to be true.

I'll leave that alone. A pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read. How the fuck do you know? how many people in 1950s were reading the uptike stories. That's great. That is creative license. You're right. Oh, creative license. It's creative license. Okay. They credit it in the York Times. 16, well, you know, 16 people read the update. Well, doing flesh procurement for

celebrities, no. You said, then you say late half was a lecherist low life Peter Pan playing at perpetual boyhood. I, uh, ice cream for breakfast, pajamas all day. I thought conservatives liked freedom. You know, you... But apparently, if you... I didn't... If you want to wear pajamas,

well, wait, while bodyguards shooed male celebrities away from his paid harem. So what, was he procuring them or shoving them away? Well, there were stages.

There were the mid-half parties, and then there was late half who didn't... What's your sex life like? Because I just... I just don't... I just don't understand people who are so mad at people who live differently.

Walk me through how... I wouldn't be mad at half if he lived differently. You were going to defend my sex life. I was going to say, if anything, I bet it's consensual, which is all it needs to be. And Hugh Heffner's was not? There was congressional testimony, I believe, from people who were from former playmates who talked about things like drugging them and forcing them into acts. I don't remember.

From the playmates themselves. They testified at the Meese Commission. Remember that? I remember the Meese Commission. Yeah, I don't remember that. That's what I watched late at night. He runs of the meat. Yeah.

And this is like... No, but look, we can... I mean, we should have this out, right? I don't have a problem, you know, Hugh Heffner's private life was Hugh Heffner's private life, but Hugh Heffner was a public man, right? You could watch his entire, you know, the last five or ten years of his life in a reality TV show,

the girls next door. And his whole thing was, I'm Hugh Hefner, I'm selling my life as a model for young men the country over. And I think it's totally reasonable after a life lived 50 years in the public eye, hugely successful magazine. He's a rich man to look at that arc and say, you know, where did the mainstreaming of pornography end up? And it ended up somewhere kind of gross and squalid, don't you think?

First of all, he was a... Just a little squalid? But why does he get blamed for that? That's like blaming nuclear weapons on the inventor of the musket. I mean, he hated that... I think... Do you know what Playboy looked like? I mean, it was not really pornographic.

Yeah. No, I mean, HEPF started out, sure. The original playboy looks totally tame. It's tame now. It's girls in short shorts at a car wash. Right. You know. But the Hefner credo was the pursuit of sex is, if not the most close to the most important thing in human life. And all censorship has to follow. If I may say, it's the pursuit of sex by men. That's the most important thing in life. And that's what the problem I've had with you, Hefner. Actually. If it was about like the equal pursuit of sex.

by everyone, and it was all the potential. It was, you know, people don't think... I think Anna needed to write this article, personally. People don't remember that... It's like the one thing he and I agree on, so we're kind of like... In 1950... But wait a second. In 1953,

when this magazine started, I mean, women had no choices. They were in the home. They didn't work generally. They sometimes went from their father's house to their husband's house. That's where they were. I thought feminism was all... Wait a second. I thought feminism was all about choice.

Half's early complaint was mostly... Nobody forced you to be a... Force anybody to be a playmate? Well, it wasn't half's early complaint that this 50s culture didn't give him enough choice, right? I mean, that he, you know... He got married and he didn't like his wife anymore and so on, and so he moved on to a world of perpetual adolescence.

And also, the stop between... If you make the stop between living with your parents and living with your husband to, like, you can take your clothes off from me, that's not much of a choice either. Then don't buy the magazine. Why do you hate people who don't live the way you live? People have different libido levels.

I don't hate people who don't live this way out of it. This is pretty hateful. I'm not, look, again, Bill, that's a hateful. If you want to take your friend seriously, as you should, as an important figure in American history, as someone who unleashed a revolution and how we think about pornography and everything else,

you have to look at where that revolution ultimately took us. Because hef won, right? Like the idea of a world where, you know, it's a conservative culture, and there's a pornographic magazine behind a paper bag in the store and, you know, people look at it and so on. That's not the world that Heth built. Heff built a world of...

I mean, you know what pornography is like now, right? Now, again, that's not what he was doing. And also, the way you gloss over it, you say porn and everything else. The world of 1953 was a real iceberg in this country, very repressed. And because Playboy was kind of the tip of the spear of saying, look, there could be an alternative way to live.

It was the tip of the thing. It really was. It was just the tip. Is that what you're saying? It really was for gay rights, for civil rights. I mean, he was ahead of all these issues, and you just refused to... I guess the question is... But what is he actually famous for, right?

I mean, yeah, you know, Hefner was on the right side of a certain number of causes, and I would give him credit for that. But he's not remembered as a civil rights pioneer. He's remembered because he was America's first really successful pornographer. Weinstein was on the right side of a couple of causes. I mean, that didn't... Right. I don't think we want to give him any credit.

Women's Marches. We have a different definition of pornography. See, if I just see a woman naked as God made her, to me... I'm getting to you. To me... To me, that's not pornography. I would... But I would agree with you that I never saw pornography on the computer

until a couple of years ago because I grew up on Playboy. And I was afraid to go on there because, ooh, they're going to put a cookie in there. Are they going to find out what I'm doing? So I didn't really know what a... I didn't really know what it was. Shame works. And I'll tell you something, when I saw it, it is not benign. You're right.

What's on the computer now, it's rapy, it's demeaning to women, and that's a lot of the problem with the youth in America. They got that on their phone when they're 12 years old. And it's not ethically produced. But that's not Hugh Hefner. Let's move on to the church. And I'm right. Okay, so you have a book.

I mean, I've heard the term, you are someone to, more Catholic than the Pope? Yeah. I went there. You kind of went there. Now, I was raised Catholic, so I remember all the sacraments and that stuff. And the big thing, I didn't realize this was such a big thing

with conservatives like you, and maybe Mel Gibson's on your side of with this. He's even, yeah, further. Okay, that what this Pope did was that he changed the rule, and by the way, they're always just changing the rules. So the fact that you're upset about this one just amuses me. You know, I mean, everything with the church.

This just in. We can have meet on Friday now. Okay, but okay. We'll put that aside. Communion for remarried divorces. That's... Tell me, explain why that's such a big deal with the Catholics. It's a big deal with the Catholics,

or at least the weird ones, like me. Because, you know, it goes all the way back to the New Testament, right? And Jesus says a lot of weird things in the New Testament, some of which I think you agree He says a lot of radical things about poor people and, you know, rich people and sharing wealth and things that Republicans... That's the one part of it that's actually new. Right.

You do know his biography is old. No, but the other part that's actually new, right, in the New Testament, is that actually he says radical things about sex, about sex too. That are radical even by the standards of the time. So he... Well, he gets in an argument with the, you know, the Pharisees and Sadducees. Thanks very much. Yep. I'm the Jew here.

No, I mean, let me. Kill it. No, I mean, preemptily. I didn't kill him. I didn't. Why does he get this? Why is he the federal? That's right.

There's a lot of apologizing. That's right. Preemptive apology. And I accept your apology on behalf of the entire Jewish people. That's what I was hoping for. Okay. Please. Okay.

Thank you. So he gets in these arguments with these wonderful Jewish people. Okay. That's true. Totally did not kill him. Totally didn't, yeah. And that was the Romans. And they say, well, Moses said we could divorce our wives. Right. And Jesus says, well, yeah, God

let you do that because your hearts were hard, but in the beginning, God made them male and female, blah, blah, blah, and everybody, and you can't get divorced, basically. And the Catholic Church is, for all that it has changed a few rules here and there over the years, from time to time, meet on Fridays. It's the only church in Christendom that has held on to that crazy, radical idea

that if you make a vow that marriage is forever, it should be forever. And the church has already compromised in various ways. It's made an ailments easier to get and so on. And so my view is basically that Francis, who is a wonderful pope in many other ways, has gone too far towards, you know, saying basically the Bill Maher worldview is cool now, right?

And I love you. Right. I love you. But like if you were the pope, you know. Right, it's going to be real time with Pope Francis. But, okay, so, so, so you can't get divorced, right? No, you can get divorced. In the Catholic Church?

You can get divorced. Are they, they changed that? Are they changed that? Okay. But you can't get communion if you're divorced? If you're remarried. Okay, but if you can't get communion, you can't get into heaven? No, you can get into heaven.

This is like it happened in Costello, Root. So you can get- Who's in paradise. Oh, it's a good. You can get into heaven, yeah. Okay, so why is it such a big deal? I mean, it's a big deal because people understandably feel like they're cut off from an important sacrament. I get the feeling from your book that you think this is such a cornerstone in stopping the big comeback of the Catholic Church.

You're looking for the Catholics to make a comeback. They've been losing market share. I mean, they have. I mean, this Pope knows he's got to put, he's got to put asses and pews or he's out of the job. But I got to tell you, that's not going to happen. The trend is never going to go back toward refilling churches and religious. I mean, it's just not. I mean, I used to be a lonely pioneer on this watch.

It's just because we're 400 years past the scientific revolution. We know things now. We don't need the... Sponsored in Catholic and Protestant universities all over Europe, you know? Sir Isaac Newton noted Christian. Also had a lot of astrological theories that neither of us should talk about. I mean, he was a cool guy otherwise. I mean, it does seem like imposing more rules is not a way to, like,

open up the church to people. I mean, if you're looking to increase market share, like, let's have more rules. I mean, no, I don't think my argument, well, in a certain way, I think Bill is right, right? I think liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics and liberal Christians and liberal Jews and conservative Christians. Thank you, Madam's having, I accept your apology. I got a liberal Christian in the bang over there. I've been having these arguments ever since, not since the scientific revolution, but since the sexual revolution, right? Which basically came along, and thanks in small part to your friend Hugh Hefner. sort of separated

New Testament. No, I'm saying, I'm giving them credit. You agree with this, right? Yeah. So it's separated sort of middle-class morality, normal American morality, and what the New Testament and the Torah had to say about sexual ethics.

Can I suggest... Ian, what's your religion and what's your sex life? I'm a lapsed Catholic. You're a lapsed Catholic? For now. For now. Wait till the after party. No.

The after party. Can I get into the after party? Well, we call it purgatory and, you know... I know, I feel like the Catholic Church is one of the more retrograde institutions in the world, and I'm delighted that despite all of that, someone like Pope Francis can inspire us.

Right? Can I... Can I suggest that? When you look around the world today, there are no leaders, right? There are no leaders in the United States. There's no leaders in Europe. There's no leaders on the... And suddenly, you've got the leader of the Catholic Church, right? I mean, anti-science, Catholic Church, anti-gay-gay-gay-gay-all-the-stic.

Antsai, all this stuff, and yet he's the person. Come on. But you know what? The Gallup on climate change incident. It really depends on one century you're talking about. I visited the Vatican for doing religiousism. I talked to some of the people in there, and I'm telling you, the people at the high levels, they know it's bullshit. No, really?

They do. They just know. Can I give you a thought about market share? You're saying people don't like rules. So here's the thing. Religions change sometimes. in order, in theory, to appeal to people who are either no longer practicing or never practiced. And when they do that, they are in danger and terrible risk of alienating the people who do,

who go to church, who go to synagogue, who make up the core. No, no, it's not, you have to retain, if you change your show to get people who don't watch, the people who do watch may stop watching because they don't like the changes. But Bill has, your point about the people at the Vatican is actually, I think crucial to the danger of the Francis approach, right? Which is that you can get into a dynamic in a church where, I mean, Francis's

approach has been, we're not changing the teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, but, you know, it's okay. And that's basically your sort of a version of your sort of winking thing, right? It's like saying, well, we've got this teaching, and it's still on the book somewhere in the Vatican, but come on,

we know it's okay. And that, to someone like you, makes it look kind of like bullshit, right? Pardon my... Language, but it's HBO, you know, I mean, right? I mean, certainly the bullshit starts well before that. But you would be surprised at the people in the hierarchy, I think, who do not really believe in the stories. They just know that the people have to,

so they keep that fiction up, and they're doing good things. That's what they do. They want to actually, and also, let's be honest, the Pope himself said it's a gay lobby, and he wasn't talking about the building. You know, I mean, they've got. a thing going on over there in Rome. And they don't want it to end.

Oh, come on. You're telling me it's not... I saw a spotlight. I lived outside of Boston. Can they stop having sex with young boys? That's all I ask. That doesn't seem to be a... I think we can say at this point, 15 years after the fact that as horrible as the sex abuse crisis,

it was in the church, it's not a distinctively Catholic problem. Sex abuse. I think we have at least established that. I'm talking about what goes on among the priests in Rome. Covering up. Seems to also be a general. Right. All right.

Well, on that note, I'll have to say it's time for New Rules, everybody. Well, no offense to the Spanish woman whose photograph went viral, but we must admit she really does look a lot like Donald Trump. The hair, the pout, the ruddy complexion, and she obviously likes hose. New Rule, the National Geographic has to stop telling everyone that the koalas have chlamydia. It's hard enough already to get Australians to go home. New Rule, don't take acid and try to assemble a dresser from IKEA. That's what these people are literally doing for a YouTube channel called Hykea.

I know, white people, huh? But you can't argue with the result. New Rule, if the happiest we've ever seen you is at a funeral because your husband's not there, get a divorce. Don't worry about the money. His lawyer's Michael Cohn. Trust me, you'll get everything. New Rule, don't name your hand soap fragrance after strippers.

Jasmine and Mint. They're the reason I have to wash my hands in the first place. And finally, New Rule, well, actually tonight, it's not a new rule at all. It's an open letter to a dear friend of mine, Roseanne. First of all, pal, congrats on having what all the haters want more than anything, a big, fat hit. I hear, yeah. I hear you're getting ready to stick it to the execs at ABC again.

like 1993 all over. That's the year politically incorrect when on the air on a fledgling network called Comedy Central with minuscule ratings. You had the biggest show on TV, but you still came and did mine. And when I was down on my luck a few years before that,

you put a guest star's payday in my pocket. Aren't your back, stick out your chest and smack your lips. That's much more embarrassing anything you Hefner ever did. One of my favorite memories of you, Roseanne, is 2010. I made a Christmas video all about how our real religion wasn't Jesus. It was materialism.

This is our real religion. Greed. Oprah's show purports to be a lot about spirituality. If it was, then wouldn't she tell her worshipping flock to sit down and stop losing your shit over material stuff? stuff. Yeah, some famous people were among those gathered in my living room to be in the closing shot. But when they saw Oprah was being critiqued, solely they didn't want to be seen.

But not you. You're not afraid of Oprah or anybody. There you are, and I will always love you for it. But now it's 2018, and we have to talk about Trump. Because like it or not, you're now the face of the Trump supporter, because you really do speak for a certain kind of American who knows they're being screwed by someone, they just don't know who. But here's what you're missing about Trump. When he says he's looking out for the little guy, he's talking about his dick.

And as your friend, Roseanne, I must remind you of something very important. You're a socialist. You've been one for 30 years. You said most billionaires are violent pedophiles. You said all of my ideas are based in socialism. How does that intersect with Trump? All his ideas are based on national socialism. I'm kidding. He doesn't have any ideas.

But you do. You said that you wanted there to be a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they're unable to live on that, they should go to re-education camps. And if that doesn't help, then be beheaded. You're not Archie Bunker. You're Bernie Sanders. When I travel the country, people ask me about you. They're confused.

So, Roseanne came back to TV, but she's now a Republican? It's like if for the reboot of Will and Grace, Will was into women now. Or if they brought back cops and everyone had a shirt on. You had it right. Back when you said, there is a serious class war going on in our country, a war on poor people by rich people. Well, Trump is the guy who during the campaign said, the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.

They have to pay taxes. Yeah, then one week after the election when he was dining at the 21 club, you know, home to the common man, told his rich friends when he didn't know he was on camera. We'll get your taxes down. Say you, sir? Yeah.

And did he ever? He made their tax cut permanent and everybody else is temporary. So the top 1% walked away with 83% of the benefits. The elites he rails against on Twitter got billions forever and Roseanne Connor got peanuts with an expiration date. He cut the corporate tax from 35 to 21%.

I don't remember the forgotten American clamoring for that. This is what his fans have so much trouble seeing, the constant bait and switch. You said you like Trump because he talked about jobs. So did Hillary. So does every politician. You might as well say he wore a suit. But I'll give you one where he's. is unique, he said wages were too high.

Our taxes are too high. Our wages are too high. Everything's too high. We have to compete with other countries. Yeah, but not Bangladesh. He was a landlord who thought your rent was too damn low, and now he's a president who thinks your wages are too damn high. He talked tough. Yeah, talk tough to the pharmaceutical companies. He said, we're going to get drug prices so far lower than they are. Now your head will spin. is your head spinning, Roseanne? Because in the first scene of your new show, you and Dan are trading your meds

because you can't afford all the ones you need. Because Trump sold out to Big Pharma and sabotaged Obamacare. The program designed exactly for people like the comedy family. Yes, Trump says things. He says a lot of things. He never stops saying things. But what he does isn't the solution to your problems.

It's the cause of them. He's not a chance. champion of the common man? He's a Coke brother in Rip Taylor's wig. So here's the deal. I get that you were mad as hell and wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the whole works. And I won't judge that.

But if in the next six months you don't see Trump's magic starting to work for you, if you're still trading pills and driving an Uber, wouldn't the more realistic plot line for season two be your disillusionment with Donald Trump? There's no shame in it. You saw a miracle product on TV, and you ordered it. You impulse purchased a Trump.

It promised to drain swamps, build walls, and make things great again. But you got it home, and it flooded your basement, maxed out your credit cards, and dropped your phone in the toilet. All right, that's our show. I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas, May 18, and 19 at the Temple Horn Deal in Denver, May 26, and Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs at 27. I want to thank Ian Bram of John Paderex, Anna Marie Cox, Frostout, and Roman Farrow.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. All new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.