Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #519: Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Gillum, Sarah Isgur, Ezra Klein

Episode Date: February 8, 2020

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 2/7/20) 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 Maher. For Reid, our officials underplaying the global economic consequences of the coronavirus. Ooh, coronavirus. I think most generally people don't know where it's going right now. And I think it's probably fair to say it's likely to get worse, at least on the basis of what we're looking at now. See, the Chinese have been very good at dealing with all the technical aspects of the problem. They started out slowly because they were trying to do. deny it in sort of very typical of a

dictatorship. They initially, even in bad news, doesn't travel. But then they got on it. They built two hospitals in a week. I mean, only in China, can you do something like that? Well, you say hospitals. A big room with beds is why I, so... That's not a hospital. I grew up in India. You know, that'll count for...

I mean, they're trying to quarantine a lot of people. The challenge, I think, is what do you do about the psychological, the political ramifications of what's happening? So now there is this whole movement mostly on the net of people saying, why did the doctor

who alerted everyone to the virus get punished? The Chinese are stuck between two impulses. On the one hand, they don't like bad news getting out. They want to punish people for spreading bad news. On the other hand, they want to solve the problem. And the two are coming into conflict right now. But so far, it does look like, again,

it's looking at least as bad as SARS. They send us a lot of bad stuff. Remember the poison dog food? and the, you know, the toys, the lead and the paint. Are they trying to fuck with it? I don't think it's personal, but I don't think doing it, too. How will the Trump re-election team's $1 billion disinformation campaign further polarize our political parties, Ezra?

Ooh, it's not going to be great. So there are, I think, two things worth thinking about here. One is that I am not a big believer that all these Facebook micro-targeting efforts, etc. work as well as all the bullshit were fed on them says. Like Cambridge Analytica, no evidence that worked at all. A lot of, I mean, you ever looked at an ad online? You buy a bike. Then for three months, something follows around me like, would you like a bike?

Right. And so a lot of this stuff, it looks good-ish when a campaign wins and it turns out to have not been that effective. The issue with disinformation, Steve Bannon, your guest earlier talked us about this, the way you can stop the media from being able to report on anything is to give them so much that they are trying constantly to report on everything. The thing that Trump understands better than anyone else in politics

is you flood the zone. And then you can, one, control the conversation, but two, you can make sure that nothing you do. No scandal, no issue, no effort can get that much attention. And so you're just constantly moving to the next thing. The thing the media needs to be able to do is focus on what is actually important.

And that is a hard thing for the media to do. The media is very distractible. It's got a short attention span, and it's way too online. So reporters are always on Twitter, always on Facebook, always chasing the latest controversy. And what the Trump administration

has often figured out how to do is use that almost character flaw to drive the entire media crazy and through that to drive the country a little bit crazy too. It's a lot easier for reporters to cover Nancy Pelosi ripping up a speech than it is to cover

the facts of what was said at the state of the union. It's more fun. The headlines are more fun. and play it on a loop. And any reporter can cover it because it's just how you feel it. Right. Liberals can go, we're winning. We owned him.

You don't have to have a... We're going to win. We're going to lose so bad. It could be just me, but my mother and mother-in-law spent a lot of time forwarding around on Facebook, all of these articles. When you look at the sourcing of it,

you have no idea where it comes from. It's not a legitimate source. I don't think we can underestimate the power, and quite frankly, if it wasn't powerful, they wouldn't be spending, at least in my state, I don't know, to the tune of six million a week in some cases, targeting certain constituencies online just to push fake news. They built a vast apparatus on the right of all of these different accounts that look like it's a news source, only so they can give somebody the validation that they know something,

and they're sharing information or news, which is better than my political ad or your political ad, but a third-party source that looks like it's validating something true that is absolutely made up and out of holecloth. In fairness, the Russians ran a lot of those, too. For sure, but I'm just saying, I wouldn't underestimate, particularly in a place where elections are won in the margins. My state, 30,000 votes, 10,000 votes in a U.S. Senate race. We're not talking about moving a whole bunch of people here. We're talking about moving a couple of thousand people at a time

resulting in 29 electoral votes we can assure the president. I think that Democrats, practically after 2016, got so freaked out about Russian disinfo that they forget that the biggest problem, they had in 2016 was how the media covered Hillary Clinton's emails. A real story way out of proportion. Not Russian media. Not Russian media. Our media. This media. Yeah. And what you're saying is true,

but the upside of polarization, which I don't get to talk about all that much, is that in this disinfo campaigns, people don't get moved. They're getting so much information and they're already mostly chosen aside. And the people who are easy to move around, to the extent anybody's easy to move around, they're pretty tuned out of it. They're not the folks on Facebook getting tons of

political news and interest because they're the people Facebook's algorithm knows don't like politics, or they would have already more or less chosen his side. So I think people need to worry more about real news and stories done badly and a little bit less. Fake news is a film we can all agree on. It's bad. It shouldn't be there. But it's not the key thing to worry about in the election. I also think that should be worried about the majority of Americans who are registered to vote and are not turning out to vote. I agree with that. What is it that we can do to one ensure that when people go vote, their votes are actually counted. And that the person who wins is the one who actually won the election. That I agree.

A slightly different point, but a lot of people keep talking about how to turn these Obama Trump voters back to Democrats when they're not talking about how to turn the Obama nobody voters out at all. That's 4 million people. If you look at Iowa, the most distressing news for Democrats should have been that the Iowa turnout numbers looked like 2016, not like 2008, 2012. In other words, the Obama surge didn't happen. I think it's important because people always think Trump, is enough to bring out the Democrats.

No, it turns out you need a positive vision. Negative energy is not enough. You need positive energy. Totally agree. The only other thing... I was almost going to vote for Bernie now, now. But that's why... That was the point of my end

there. His people are obnoxious enough to actually get in the streets and fight. Because, I mean, here's the next question. Are there any solutions to depolarize America? Is there a legitimate risk of violent conflict if we don't. There totally is that risk.

And I don't know how you depolarize America, but I'll give you what I have been saying, but I noticed there was sort of not a big answer in your book. Usually they put it right in the title. You know, this is the problem, and my solution. Oh, yeah, no, I don't play with subtitles and I don't play with solutions. There you go. But let me say this about it. We are not going to depolarize

America. What we can do is make America work better amidst polarization. And the single biggest thing we can do to make America work amidst polarization is to democratize America. The only reason that can break the system so completely, is it when you actually have a majority, the majority still can't govern? The problem is not that people disagree. Polarization is just disagreement. We had that before. The problem is that our system grinds to a halt amidst disagreement. You have Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama during Merrick Garland.

So if you didn't have things like the Electoral College, like the Senate's disproportionate way of representing states, like gerrymandering, like the filibuster. And so if people could actually come in if they want a majority of the population, that majority can then have things happen. and then the public could decide, do they like it or not like it? We'd have a lot healthier for politics and people just being angry that nothing happened and blame shifting over who's to blame for it not happening. But it's not going to happen as, right? Well, that's why I don't believe in solutions.

The people who have to do it are the Republicans. I agree with you will be disempowered. I know, it's important to know what you have to do. It's hard to get Michael Bloomberg to buy Fox News, and I think the discourse in this country could change drastic. It's not, I mean, polarization, I think, is really too weak a word. It's hate.

People hate each other. I mean, you look at social media. It's so much hate. A good example of it is we didn't used to, like, shit on people right when they died. I saw it when Hugh Hafner died. I saw it last week when Kobe Bryant died. Right, same day. They brought up his trial and shit.

We used to, like, you know, wait a little bit. They don't care anymore. I mean, Rush Limbaugh, now, look, I'm not going to pretend that I haven't been guilty when the Koch brother died last year. Wow, was I mean. But he was already dead. I didn't think he could hear it, and I don't think his family's watching. Rush Limbaugh, you know, yes, I'm not a Rush Limbaugh fan. He did some terrible things.

But I'm not going to do jokes about that. He defended me after 9-11. Rush Limbaugh did, and I never forgot it. And maybe that's... We could just pull back a little on the dead people and the sick people. How about that is a start, everybody? What do you think? Let's not be shitting on people who are not cold yet.

All right. Thank you very much. Let's party. All right. 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.