Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #730: Ben McKenzie, Dan Jones, David French

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 5/15/26) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Welcome to an HBO podcast. from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Ma. All right, he's an actor and the filmmaker of a new documentary. Everyone is long to you for money, Ben McKenzie. He's a New York Times columnist podcast host and visiting professor at Lipscomb University, David French.

And he's a historian podcast, a new book. Coming up, this wall is called Castles Dan Jones. All right. All right, first one's for you, Ben. Which politician understands the risks of cryptocurrency best? Oh, yes. Anyone on our side? There are a few.

Elizabeth Warren understands the issues quite well. Senator Chris Van Hollen understands the issues quite well, and that's it. All right. For Dan, do you think it's correct or incorrect to call right-wing leaders like Georgia Maloney fascist? She's the head person in Italy. No, no. You think she's a fascist? No, I don't think she's a fascist.

Oh, okay. I think that we're using this outdated language from the 20th century to describe a whole new style of politics. And I think that in fact, the reaching for the term fascist has become so easy and so lazy that anyone who expresses any opinion pretty much at all. Fascist, fascist, fascist. Let's say that communist is also used in a relatively similar way.

And these terms are historical terms that were pretty specific to the 1930s in the case of fascism. I think it's easier to define communism than it is fascism. Fascism, I've heard so many different definitions, and I think we all kind of feel like the Supreme Court with pornography. I know it when I see it,

but it's hard to kind of... Is it the mixing of corporate power with military power? You know, what is it exactly? But you know what, when you see it? I've been saying it about Trump for years, that, you know, like there are things that look like they're heading toward autocracy or fascism.

But, you know, honestly, in a lot of them, we haven't gotten there. Well, I mean, 1930s fascism is fairly easy to define. It's militarism, it's nationalism, it's control of the press. I mean, it's a lot of things that are brewing now. But the trouble is by using that term. And because it's now, I mean, you get things like eco-fascism. What the fuck is eco-fascism? Right.

Wind farms everywhere. Come on. So the term has lost it. It's meaning. And in using it, it's just become a sort of lazy term of generic abuse. And I think in the case of Maloney in Italy, I think her aunt, you know, her, was it her father, her grandfather, I think was a fascist. But, you know, you could say about the Democratic Party, they're the ones who fought for slavery. Okay.

So, I mean, everybody's got, if you go back in time, it doesn't matter. What are you now? I mean, I'm not even sure she's that much of a right winger. She seems to be liked by the other people in the EU. They don't seem to treat her like she's some sort of crazy lady. I mean, it overlaps now with populist in Europe. So, I mean, people would call Nigel Farage in the UK a fascist. Well, undoubtedly, he's a populist, and he's an old-fashioned conservative,

and he has views on immigration that some people would say are harsher than they would like. But that is not the same as saying he's, for example, Oswald Mosley. I mean, there's a profound difference. And in some of it, I think, comes down to a failure to be able to define. the politics of our own times. We don't have an adequate language for what's happening in the world at the moment. So we're reaching for this language out of time,

which is, in a lot of cases, the language of the mid-20th century. Okay, this is for you, David. Are there any reforms you would like to see implemented on the Supreme Court? Oh. How much time do you have? No.

I'll start with one. I think we need term limits for Supreme Court justices. Yeah. And the system is becoming broken in the sense that we're now nominating younger and younger and younger people with the hope that they can be in their robes for 30, maybe 40 years. That's an enormous amount of stagnation. Number two, what we have is an enormous amount of unpredictability.

So you don't know in any given presidency, are they going to be nominating a Supreme Court justice? Are they going to be nominating three? You know, we had one four-year term with Biden. He had one. We had a four-year term with Trump. He had three nominations. That level of unpredictability starts to drive voters crazy because every single presidential election,

the Supreme Court is theoretically in play. If you do it with 18-year terms, that's plenty of runway to be a justice. Right. And that would mean you'd have two nominations per four-year term. Year one, year three. It's very predictable.

The other thing that I would like to do, I want to get back the filibuster on Supreme Court justices. That is not a Supreme Court reform. It's a Senate reform. But one of the problems that we have now, Bill, is if you look out at the universe of judges who are eligible to be Supreme Court justices,

what they're doing now is a lot of auditioning. They're writing opinions, expressing very strong opinions and concurrences and dissents that are all sending messages to senators, nominate me, I'm strong, I'm strong, I'm strong. When I was coming up in the legal profession, the people wanted to be justices and judges play their cards close to the vest. They were scrupulously fair.

They were scrupulously unbiased in their public statements. I don't think it's an advance. I don't think we're better off because lower court judges, law professors, etc., who want to be justices are sort of advertising their ideological street cred. I think that's a bad way to do this. So those are two big ones. Bring back the filibuster. So did you actually have to have deliberation and compromise?

and term limits so that the American people know how long justices are serving when they're getting new justices and not every single presidential election. It goes crazy. Besides the fact that you're right, they're nominating younger and younger people. I mean, I could see a funny sketch

where there's a nine-year-old out. But you left out the other big thing why it's broken is that Mitch McConnell changed the rules. Mitch McConnell completely changed the rules. I mean, the rule was always, You get to pick. Now, it's kind of potluck who dies when you're in office. But if they do die, like Justice Scalia did,

you get to pick unless you're a black president or a Democratic president, whatever reasoning they were using at the time. And that, to me, just threw a wrench in the whole thing. It said, this is just a completely broken system now. Well, no, but Justice Roberts assures us that they're not political. They're not actors, not political. Let me defend the court for a minute. Look, this is a court that struck down.

You can defend the Mitch McConnell thing? No, no, no, no, I'm defending the Supreme Court. This is a court with six Republican nominated and justices that struck down Trump's signature domestic policy initiative that has blocked him from the deployment of the National Guard. And so there is real independence there. But I'm just saying that changed the whole game. I mean, it was a whole year before an election,

and that was the excuse they used. We can't do it this clause. That was never the rule before. Somebody died. Obama had a pick, and it was going to be, Merrick Garland. And it would have been better if he was on the court because he'd done such a shit job as the attorney general. Okay. Does the panel have any thoughts on who Satoshi Nakamoto is? He's that's a pseudonym for

the founder of Bitcoin. Yes. I'm the resident crypto guy, right? So Satoshi is the cult-like leader of this thing, right? It's a pseudonym. Well, he's the guy who invented it. It didn't exist until he picked it out of thin air. Right, right, right. the New York Times has done some reporting on this. They think it's this guy Adam Back, who's a British cryptographer. I don't know if they've proved it. Cryptographer?

Yeah. A mapmaker? No. Oh, that's something different, huh? What's a mapmaker? You wouldn't know, Dan. Cartographers. I'd say cartologists.

It would have been so much more interesting and he turned out to be a mapmaker, I tell you. One thing that's interesting about Adam Beck. So crypto has this myth of Satoshi has given it this real, like sort of cult-like intensity. But Adam Back, his company, received funding from Jeffrey Epstein. That's in the Epstein file. What's his company? What's he doing?

Lockstream. It's a crypto company. It's a crypto company. Oh, I see. I mean, that's what we're talking about, right? When I talk about crime, it's very abstract. But how can he have a crypto company if he's the one who invented it? Well, you know, yes.

I mean, he has, there's a side hustle. How could there be a company before he made it up? It's all so stupid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the panel's reaction to CIA director John Ratcliffe visiting Raoul Castro on Thursday? Well, Cuba, I mean, this is a tough one. Cuba, we took over Venezuela.

Okay, the bank shot from that was maybe we can get Cuba too because Cuba got a lot of its oil from Venezuela. We cut that off. trying to destroy this regime. And it is a horrible regime. It's a little like when you have a fever. Like, the fever is a good thing. It's there to kill the germs in your body.

It's roasting them to death. But if you let it get too high, it could kill you. You know, do we let the fever of no oil kill the regime, or is it going to kill the people? Right now, it's killing the people, though. Right now, it's absolutely, I mean, hospitals are being shot. They're not power. Children are dying.

I mean, this is horrific. It is very easy to... It wasn't good before. No, but it is very easy to inflict suffering with economic sanctions. It is very difficult to change a regime with economic sanctions. And we have seen this for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And the other thing I want to say is I am... I take a back seat to no one in my loathing, for example, of the Iranian regime.

The Iranian regime was responsible for killing men I served with in Iraq. I have no love for that Iranian regime. But my hatred for the Iranian regime or my loathing of communist Cuba does not overturn the Constitution of the United States. Right. And the Constitution requires the President before he's going to engage in aggressive military action or acts of war, and blockades or acts of war, to go to Congress, to make a case of the American people. But we haven't done that. Nobody's done that for generations. No, we've done that. You can't lay that all on this.

No, I'm not. But we had George W. Bush went to Congress for Iraq, even when his own Department of Justice told him he didn't. didn't have to. His dad went to Congress for Desert Storm. This is not ancient history. And he got kind of a blank check. It wasn't really to go to war. It was like, if you have to do something, go ahead, do it. I mean, Vietnam was a police. Going back to Korea was a police action. I mean, you use a different word and they just do what they want to do. But we can't just say, well, because past presidents have fumbled the ball and defied the Constitution that it just doesn't matter. No, I agree.

What we can say is in the 2025 inaugural address, Trump said, people are going to love me for all the wars. I stopped in all the wars. I didn't start. I mean, and here we have Venezuela, Iran. Well, this one was supposed to be short. We're supposed to be hit it and quit it, but, you know, wars are like relationships.

Easy to get in, hard to get out, you know. All right, we'll cut it off there. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. 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.