Real Time with Bill Maher - Evangelical Poontang, Election Meddling, Demonized Media | Overtime with Bill Maher (HBO)

Episode Date: January 27, 2018

Bill and his guests – Roger McNamee, Zooey Deschanel, Michelle Goldberg, Ro Khanna, Rick Wilson answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 01/26/18) 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. Okay, here we are. Hi, everybody. We're back on the air. Zoe, should food ethics be taught in school alongside nutrition? Oh, that's an interesting question. Food ethics,

like, I would think that that's like against factory farming is what I would teach in school. Yeah, I mean, I think that would be great. I think the more we can talk about food and have it enter the conversation. Right now, we don't talk about food really at all. Are your kids in school yet?

My two-year-old's in preschool. Because, you know, you're going to have to look at what they give them for lunch in school. I bet you're a lot of... I pack her lunch. But, like, in schools, don't they? I'll pack her lunch, so. She likes, she likes carrots and pickles and stuff like that. But not broccoli.

She likes broccoli in the garden. In the garden. Yeah, as long as she picks it. I make her go out and pick it. Can't pack the garden. Oh, the lunch. Put the whole garden in the bank. Rick Wilson, why do religious fundamentalists

give Trump a pass on behavior that they otherwise condemn? Well, it's in the book of Poon-tang, verse 7. The book of Puntang. And it says, Thou shalt allow the Donald to fuck porn stars

and let him get away with it. It's, no, it's just, it's a, imagine a giant Mount Everest-sized pile of hypocritical bullshit, and that's where they are on the peak of that man. forgotten that word, Puntang. Well, there you go. It sounds...

Like the 90s. There was a shrine. The Puntang Shrine, New Delhi, I would be very... Is there a lack of media attention on how the ongoing Russian bot social media desk will impact our midterm elections?

Heck yes. Right? It's an ongoing... That's the thing that, you know, if you're going to shut down the government, Again, how about the fact that, forget the last one, they're not fighting the ongoing war that's happening now. To be fair, I think there's been a big change this week,

one of Rose's really fine colleagues, Congressman Schiff from California. Yes, sure. So Adam Schiff, supported by our senator, Senator Feinstein, wrote a letter to the big, really, to Facebook and Twitter, saying you have got to do something about the ongoing, Russian manipulation because there was a thing relative to this, you know, the Devin Nunes conspiracy. And the reality is that this is a huge issue. I mean, we have to recognize that there is a structural problem in our democracy in that we have a lot of people who believe things that are demonstrably not true.

Roughly a third of the population, roughly 25 percent on the right. And there was more on the right than on the left simply because Fox News was out there for a long time creating its own filter bubbles. And so when the Russians came in, it was just a lot of easy. easier to create disarray by focusing on the right than it was on the left. But they're all the people, you know, the anti-vaxxers and the people believe in contrails and all that stuff. So it's not like there aren't anybody on the left. They're on both sides.

And when people are in that state of mind, if they're like people or bots who act like like people who say, oh, by the way, you should also believe this. You're going to believe those people. It's like a cult. And we need Facebook to contact every person touched in 2016 by Russian interference. and explain to them, hey, you're an American. This was done to our country by a hostile... Contact every single person.

No, it's actually... They have the email address for every single one of those people. They know every single time they were touched. They have massive databases of all this stuff. And fortunately, we have members of Congress, and Roe is one of them, who understand that these issues are not about left and right. Even if you like the outcome of the last election,

you're not going to like the next one. Roe, do you think your no-pack caucuses? will grow in the coming years. We'll tell us what it is first. No, PAC caucus just means you don't take any money from corporate PACs or lobbyists. Like Bernie did. There's seven of us in Congress who have that,

and I'll tell you why it's going to grow. Because when you have a Congress that isn't acting on policies that 84% of the American support under their gamers, or isn't acting on Medicare for All, which has 80% support, or is acting to repeal net neutrality? When net neutrality has 90% support,

Something is wrong. Yes. And what's wrong is an influence of money. And yet, Trump didn't spend nearly the money Hillary did, and he won. No. And Roger has insights on partly... And that's partly why. We got an in-kind expenditure from Vladimir Putin, so... Yeah, but it's not all about money.

In fact, sometimes money can work against you. You know, Hillary bought a million ads. People get sick of those ads. Trump was smart. He didn't advertise till the end. Yeah. You know, people see the same ad every day for two months in those markets. We don't get it here in California. because it's a done deal.

We don't see ads. We're not in play. But, you know, in Illinois or wherever the battleground states are, you see them all the time. You come to hate that person. They're just, the ad plays too much. But a presidential race is a little bit different because you get to come on things like Bill Maher

and other things. Everyone knows who you are. When you're running for Congress and no one knows who you are, I mean, probably no one knew who I was until I came on this show. No. And, you know, you got to raise money. and the problem is that when you raise money, you're beholden to those interests. So it's a huge issue.

Okay. Is the fact that liberals, Mrs. Fia and Michelle, aren't willing to demonize right-wing media to the extent the right does with the media, one of the reasons they lose the messaging war? I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know.

It's too long a question. I mean, I think it's hard because... I think that basically you have... The right has waged this systematic assault right on the very idea that there can... I mean, it's kind of postmodern, right? They've waged this assault on the idea that there can be objective truth, that you can believe anything you see in the quote-unquote mainstream media, right?

They haven't demonized the left-wing media. They've demonized whatever... Knowing things. And whatever used to provide a kind of common source of information and a common source. The war on knowing things. Right. And so... I don't know that it really would help for liberals to go out and say that, you know,

Sean Hannity... I mean, everyone should say Sean Hannity sucks. but it doesn't really... I think it would actually reinforce the sense of persecution and of inferiority that drove a lot of lesser educated Republican voters into the arms of Fox and Rush Limbaugh. They were told, you're smart too. But that's the, yeah, that's the catch-22.

You can't say you're stupid, but then they keep acting stupid. Yeah. They're not stupid except for all the behaviors and beliefs that are form of gay and . That's right. All right, let's go have some broccoli. Thank you, everybody. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

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