Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #486: Adam Schiff, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Donna Brazile, Claire McCaskill, Rick Wilson

Episode Date: February 23, 2019

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 2/22/19) 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. Here we are on overtime. Look at all these questions. Congressman, what will Democrats do to stop social media manipulation by the Russians and Republicans in the next election? Well, we're doing a lot already. We've been continuing to investigate just how the Russians manipulated social media, what other countries are now starting to do to follow their example. but the problem is sadly even broader than that.

We saw in Alabama, even Democrats experimenting with false flag operations on social media. You now have the very real prospect that domestic people are going to use social media to do the same kind of mischief. Like May. Russians did. So we are doing our best to get out good information. We're continuing to press the social media companies to disclose more and more of the false information that took place during the last. election, the one before that. And we're also...

You can't really stop at all, can you? I mean, it's up to the people, ultimately, to get sophisticated. Because, you know, when they talk about the liberal media, the media isn't liberal anymore, because the media is social media. And social media isn't liberal or conservative. It's fucked up.

But I think you're identifying a real problem is that there is a generation now, mostly 60-plus, that when they read on Real Eagle Patriot News, BuzzFeed, 3,000.org. And they see a story about Hillary being a robot lesbian. And they go, oh, ah! And they love that stuff, and they've become addicted to it.

And she's not a robot. Did I know that? She's not a lesbian. So bad. So bad. We're bad. We're terrible. We make jokes. It's horrible.

But I go to Congressman Schiff, we have to first identify how these social media companies are collecting funds for these advertising. If we don't do that, if we don't get them to disclose, then it's very difficult for us to follow the money and to understand how they're using it to manipulate our elections. Okay, Claire, should moderates be working to make the Green New Deal better rather than merely dismissing it?

I don't think anybody's dismissing it. First of all... Nancy Pelosi kind of... Well, here's the thing. There's no... There's nothing there. It's an idea. It's an idea. And there's no meat on the bone. So what we have to do is our party, all of us agree,

that being environmentally responsible also creates jobs and helps our economy. And there is a reason that we should come together and quit trying to divide our party. Oh, there's progressives and she's a dirty, moderate. You know, we all kind of need to be together on this one. And I think this is one of these deals. It's amazing to me how Republicans,

I see it on this show all the time, they get away with talking points about the environment from the 90s. Right. They're not even up-to-date talking points. Let's talk about science and let's come together. I like the Green New Deal. I do too. And I like how aggressive it is.

I do too. And look at the contrast. You've got the Democrats pushing aggressively on the Green New Deal. And what are the Republicans and Trump doing? They're appointing a climate denier to head a climate commission.

They're pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. They're appointing a oil and gas lobbyist and the Secretary of Interior. If you're going to choose between those two, I'm going to go with aggressively environmental. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Which one of the five?

Five Kings from your book currently represents the greatest threat to the U.S. And when you talk about the Five Kings, you're talking about five countries. I guess you're talking about the Sunni as an entity. That's not one country. All of five are dangerous for the U.S. But you're talking about China, Russia. But then two that I wouldn't have guessed, but you say because they were empires in the past, Persia, currently Iran and the Ottoman Empire, Turkey.

Now, if we're going to get our ass kicked by the Ottoman Empire again, we are worse than we, I thought. In trouble. But America is an unwilling, reluctant empire. The peculiarity of America is that even when America is an empire, it is

reluctantly. Yes, of course, but unwillingly. There is a quote from a very famous writer which is, Americans are involuntary romance. Romance. Romantic. Yeah, sure.

No, no. Romance. Italians. Oh, I see. Empire from involuntary. Romans. And this is the different.

Putin is a voluntary imperialist. China wants really to shape the world. Erdogan wants to have all the area of the former Ottoman Empire back under his rule. But we have troops in. How many countries do we have troops in?

Like over 100. We have bases all around the world. If we're so reluctant, why do we do it so much? Why do we never leave anywhere? We still have troops in Germany. You are leaving, Donald. Trump is living. That's good for you. Maybe, I don't know.

That's the one good thing I thought he was going to do. Donald Trump has 2,000, you have, America, has 2,000 troops in Syria. Yeah. Whose task is to protect the last Syrian Democrats who were not exterminated and butchered. Whose task is to protect the last Kurds who were our allies and whom we betrayed. And Donald Trump wants to withdraw these 2,000 special unit of American soldiers. This is very bad. Let's end on a feel-good story.

The ISIS brides are coming home. No, there are two ISIS brides I read about this week. One British woman who is not sorry about it. She says when she saw people beheaded, she said, that's good because they were obviously enemies of Islam. But the American girl, I think she's from Alabama. She feels very bad about it. Trump wouldn't let her in.

Should they be able to come back? The Trump administration said right off the bat, She can't come back. She's not an American citizen. Well, there is some question about whether her father was still a diplomat when she was born if he wasn't, and she was born in the U.S. She's a U.S. citizen. Right. Now, what should happen to her? She should be brought back to the U.S. as a U.S. citizen.

She should be indicted and taken to court because she went out and joined a terrorist operation. And I'm sorry she feels bad about it. But the reason we have to do it that way is that the rule of law matters. Just Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump saying, nope, she can't come back. That's not following the rule of law. Well, the courts will figure out whether she's a citizen. Yeah, the courts will... But what we should be talking about, there are thousands of interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan

who saved Americans' lives, who worked shoulder to shoulder with American troops. And this administration has cut off their visas. That's right. So let's forget about the woman who wanted to kill the West. And let's get these interpreters who are in danger every day and get them over here. Just to show you, we were talking earlier about the hypocrisy of the administration. When we were in Europe on the delegation to Munich and to NATO and Brussels, we met with Belgian leaders. And the first thing they raised with us, not surprisingly, was a tweet of the presidents,

in which hours before our meeting the president had tweeted, Europe, you better take back these 800 foreign fighters that we are going to basically let go. Let go when we leave, when we pull out of Syria. And I agree with you completely. I think that would be a mistake. You better take them back, because if you don't, I'm just going to release them. Right.

And they said to us, you're our ally, and we have to learn about this, not in private diplomatic discussions, but in a threatening way on Twitter. And then, less than two days later, the president says, oh, that woman and child, I've instructed the Secretary of State not to allow them into the country. Right. So Europe, you take those 800, but I'm not going to allow a woman and child to come into the United States for prosecution. How can you maintain any kind of credibility or leadership? Your lack of consistency to this extent.

No consistency. All right. You tell them that on Fox News. Baby Trump. All right. Thank you, everybody. Lach consistency. Catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

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