Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #466: Obamas, Civil War, Civility | Overtime with Bill Maher (HBO)

Episode Date: June 30, 2018

Bill and his guests – Ben Shapiro, Michael Moore, Jennifer Rubin, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.), and Bradley Whitford answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 06/29/18) 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. We're back, and here are the questions of the people. Bradley Whitford, how would your West Wing character, Josh Lyman? No.

Yeah. Lyman was the last name? Yeah. I didn't know that. Josh, I remember. Yeah. You would know, okay. Yeah, I remember.

How would your West Wing character fair in the Trump White House? Ugh. What a crazy question. How would he... Fair? Yes, he wouldn't be in the Trump White House. He's a Democrat.

Stupid question number one. It's really stupid. Ryan asked, should Barack Obama be leading the left into the midterms? Or is there a better option? I don't know if there's a better option. But the question I would ask about that

is, you know, Obama keeps saying he's playing the long game. What's he waiting for? I mean, it's about... I would hope that he would... So long will be dead before. Right. Yeah, I mean, now would be the time.

And I think he will. I think Obama will be very present. And even better would be Michelle. I think both. She may be the only choice, by the way, for 2020 to solve your problems. She's probably the most popular woman in America. Right. Yeah. Okay.

Which would be the best strategy for Dems in 2018? Taking the High Road or Fighting Dirty? We already answered that. Fighting Dirty. Michael Moore, which of your movies would you most like to make a sequel to? kind of interesting. Well, sadly, they're all still relevant. So, I mean...

You know, I was going to ask you about bowling for Columbine, about guns. Now that fascism's coming to America and their side has all the guns, any second thoughts? 78% of Americans do not own a gun. Right, and they're all the liberals. And there's...

Right, there's seven... That's what worries me. There's 7 million Americans that own 160 million guns. They have stockpiled them. This is the elephant in the room in terms of the discussion of what are we all going to do, putting our bodies in the line. What does that really mean? We'll do it non-violently.

But people are afraid. People were afraid. People who voted for Hillary were afraid that she would win because of, he told my Second Amendment people, this is going to be a rigged election. Get ready. Get your guns. He was calling for an armed revoke. if Hillary won.

And ask yourself the question. If it'd go on the other way, where he won the popular vote and she won the electoral college, that civil war would have already happened. And that's what everyone's afraid of. And we don't have, we don't own the guns, but there's more of us

and I think the military is still with us. And they've got bigger guns and more guns. And it never comes to that, but... You think the military is still with? It's a huge question. I actually have a huge I got that question. Because he's the commander-in-chief. Are you worried that that... I got that question from a sitting senator when we were talking about the war in Yemen, and I was trying to talk him into declaring it unconstitutional and getting us out of the damn war. And he sent everybody out of the office, and we talked for a few minutes, and he sort of presented that to me.

Wow. It was in terms of maybe a loss, massive loss in the midterms, which I don't think is going to happen now, but let's say it did. And then impeachment proceedings, proceeded with haste from both parties, and Trump would then call his legions in the street with their guns. And what would the military do? And frankly, I couldn't answer him. I said, I don't know.

You can't. I mean, it's worrisome because... I'm coming from him. Now, we have to listen to that. That's a hell of a constitutional question. It's worrisome because the military is in general, conservative, and also because he is their commander in chief. Here's an interesting point, though. Two sociologists did a paper recently called the Casualty gap. They studied the World War I, World War II.

to Korea, all the wars we have good data on, granular data on. They found there's always been an imbalance. Poor people die more than rich people. Everybody knows that, I think, has a brain. But in the last 17 years of war, the gap has grown astronomically. So they wanted to see if that had a political impact. They went and did a very fine poll with controlling factors for other answers and so forth. Came to find out that most of the families who lost someone or had someone wounded badly,

voted for Trump. There's a political result of what we're doing right now, which is letting poor people die overseas or get horribly wounded or come back with post-traumatic stress for all the rest of us. The Republicans have always had this amazing ability to be in an abusive relationship with their voters. The more they hurt them. Yep. The more the voters defend them. Yeah. I had a Teamster guy in the Midwest. He said to me that Trump groomed economically vulnerable Americans like a petter-a-ast. Wow.

Teamster said that? Yeah, I was like, wow. Teamsters have changed. But... Very erudite teamsters. But I think his vanity in search for love to fill the God-sized hole in his soul, which is not intelligence,

but it's as inevitable as water rushing down a hill. He will go for that love. and yeah, that's the bait and switch. There's economic anxiety. Oh, wow. Blaming immigrants works. You know, that turns it up, and then you and I get a tax cut.

That's, you know, the switch. Given the commonality of threats, Cameron asks, made on social media by mass shooters, should the government take a more active role in monitoring these sites? Not Donald Trump's government. I mean, I really don't want him. The thing that I fear more than Mark Zuckerberg is Donald Trump. So, no.

But, you know, we haven't talked very much about what happened in Annapolis. The person who is fomenting violence the most is the president of the United States. He turns the crowd on journalists, a hooting, hollering, screaming mass of people. He individually picks out journalists for them to direct their ire. He calls us the enemy of the people. He says that we are unpatriotic, that we do not love our country, and we're surprised when someone picks up on the talk? I feel it on the street, the way people drive, angry, and I feel like more than ever,

they're over the line, like the line in the middle of the road. I'm always honking, like, get on your fucking side of the road. I don't know if it's, maybe some of that is texting, but I never, I don't remember that before. I think, I think, though, worse than anger, most people, I think a lot of people in this audience are filled with despair. Well, it was a bad week. This was a week that

it was like 1940 when France fell. It was like 70 AD when the temple in Jerusalem fell. I mean, that's how it felt. There's another implication. Thank you, AD 70 fans. Are these conservative justices that bothers me? The Supreme Court throughout its history has always shown a deference to national security issues.

It rarely weighs in on national security issues, whether it's a Patriot Act, unconstitutional wars. We're going to get a court probably that's going to be even more so that way. And so that's more supportive of the national security state we have become, the warfare state we've become. And that's very, very dangerous. That's what Eisenhower warned against.

Walmart today had to remove a T-shirt that they have for sale. And the T-shirt said, rope, tree, journalist. Some assembly required. Oh, wow. And enough uproar about it, and they are not selling it anymore. But what were they doing selling it in the first place? Right. And I'm telling you.

Shame on you, Walmart, really. Yeah, no, it's really, it's, but he has, as generals, Trump has perpetuated this level of calling for violence, calling. That's where this civility, like I said, to Ben, that's where the civility debate, if we're going to get back to some place, we've got to do. it from let's not be threatening each other. And when I say each other, we're not doing it to them. It is unprecedented, even presidents who I totally disagree with,

they did not actively want to separate us. This guy wants to separate us. One little piece of hope, my mother's been dead for a while, but she was born in

1915. Earliest memory, everybody's dying from the flu. She goes to college. The depression happens. It looks like this country doesn't work. It looks like Western civilization doesn't work. She gets married, has two kids. Pearl Harbor happens.

She takes my dad, thinks she's never going to see him again. It looks like Hitler's going to win. It looks like Hitler's going to win. They live through that. Then McCarthyism takes out, you know, poisons the country. she would say just understand life is

we are used to a very comfortable time and that is not normal and we have to fight to defend those values but we can come back we come back because all those victories Bradley that they occurred because women took to the streets to get the vote

because my father and your mother joined up in World War II all those things that happens is because people fought back. And this is never going to come together unless people wouldn't do that. It means to vote. It means to go to Maine and tell L.L.B.

And it means to surround the goddamn capital and Handmaid's Tale Wednesday. Catch 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.