Ep. #543: Senator Bernie Sanders, Jim Belushi
Real Time with Bill Maher- 1,165 views
- 26 Sep 2020
Bill’s guests are Senator Bernie Sanders, Jim Belushi, Coleman Hughes and Bakari Sellers. (Originally aired 9/25/20)
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher. How are you? Thank you very much. While we're here, masked and anonymous, thank you very much. Thank you for appreciate it. Now, please, God, you went through a lot of shit to be here. You had to get tested. Right. And you have masks.
And you know, and I really appreciate it because this has made such a difference to have, you know, for me and the audience just to quote Jerry Falwell's poor boy.
There's nothing like a live audience that that's like. But it's 38 days before the election feels less like an election, more like going out of business sale, doesn't it?
It's like all wars must go in America. But this week, the president just fucking flat out said what I've been saying. He's going to say forever that he's not leaving. You know, that the law and order president refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power should he lose. I mean, even banana republics are like, this is bananas. I mean, right, if you are the president, the only acceptable answer to the question is of will you submit to the peaceful transference of power is yes, it's not.
We're looking at it strongly not. We'll see what happens at these fucking people and saying this guy will do anything to steal an election. This week, he was talking about how they found a lot of ballots thrown in the river.
Yes, that's a big election problem, wet ass ballots, that's really. I just can just say this, if you if you're a black voter in a red state, you've got to get in line now.
Sorry, just put it that way.
But seriously, I mean, Trump called in voting today this scam. The Democrats are trying to pull this. He said this scam will be before the Supreme Court. Yes. Which we're currently stealing a seat on.
So vote all you want. Because I'm screaming and suing because nothing says democracy like a president who's a squatter and you know this, I think he picked the person for the court today.
But all week at the, you know, rallies or the Trump people have been chanting, fill that seat, fill that seat. Even the tea baggers are going. That sounds good.
I. Tea bagging was bad, but this. But apparently the pick is going to be this me, me, Amy, we'll all be saying this name a lot, I'm sure, because she's a fucking nut religion.
I was right about that. Would do. Amy, I'm sorry, but Amy call me Barrat Catholic. Really Catholic. I mean, really, really Catholic. Like speaking in tongues, like she doesn't believe in condoms, which is what she has in common with Trump because he doesn't need.
My background is calming down, so she's going to be on the court, RBG laying in state, Trump visited RBD casket when he walked in, everybody went Boo.
And, of course, all the ass kissers around Trump, they told him, no, sir, they're saying coo coo.
But so funny, but we're losing our country, OK? But I'm glad we're laughing, so Trump unveiled it.
Was it today his is new, his new, his old, his forever coming great national health care plan, which, of course, is not a plan at all. It's never plan.
It's just will work with Congress and Mexico will co pay for it.
This plan is nothing ever planned. It's been two weeks away since twenty sixteen in the time it took Trump not to come up with the plan, nature came up with a whole new disease.
Yeah, terrible milestone this week, two hundred thousand dead from coronavirus in America. And rumor is a rumor that the 200000 dead was a big Trump fan. And this is sweet. Before she died, the Make a Wish Foundation brought her a black teenager to yell at.
No, I'm standing by that joke, that's a fine Joe.
I didn't do it, and The Washington Post this week reported that at Trump, an unguarded moment says racist stuff about blacks and Jews. Yeah, I got news for your post. It's not that great in unguarded moments either.
He apparently he says things like, blacks are lazy, Jews are greedy, and Slovenian women are never in the mood for sex.
All right. We got a great show. Bakari Sellers and Pohlman Hughes are here. A little later, we'll be speaking with the great Jim Belushi. But first up, he is the longest serving independent in Congress who ran for the 20 20 Democratic presidential nomination. You know him. You love him. Bernie Sanders is over.
Bernie not hearing anything, but. Can't hear you, can't hear me now, I can hear you. Yeah, I passed out the joint in the control room, and so, Bernie, you look tanned, rested and ready. They always look better when they get off the campaign trail. It must be grueling campaigning. But look, you made a speech yesterday and, you know, it was about what we do when Trump says he's not leaving. And I imagine this is a speech you never thought you would have to make.
Well, I mean, that's absolutely true. I mean, this country today faces enormous problems. We have massive income and wealth inequality, but the only major country not to guarantee health care to all. You got millions of people working for starvation wages. We got climate change. We got a systemic racism. We got a whole host of problems. Never in a million years that I ever think that I would have to give a speech about what do we do if a president refuses to lose office, leave office, if he loses.
I never, never thought that I would have to give that speech or anybody else. But that is where we are today. And I would simply say, Bill, I know you have made this point many, many times. Listen to what Trump is saying. Don't brush it off. Don't say, oh, this guy's crazy. I'll say this, you know, any any other day. Listen to what he is saying and what he is saying over and over again is, quote, The only way that we, i.e., Trump can lose the election is if it is rigged, end of quote.
In other words, if we win, that's great. And if we lose, we really didn't lose because it's rigged. You all know, mail in ballots are very dangerous. They're a hoax. They're a scam. So we cannot lose this election and obviously we're not leaving office.
But I've been I mean, I ask you this question in April. I've been asking this of Democrats for four years and they pretty much just laughed it off. You said in April, I asked you, what, what what do we do? You said, will you mobilize the American people in a way that they've never been mobilized before to remind the president whether we like it or not, we live in a democracy? He said. I think we have to make it clear that if he loses the election, he'll be out of office and replaced by the new president.
I don't hear a plan there. I just hear a wish. We wish that would happen. I still don't know what the plan is.
Well, you know, the bottom line is there are things that we have to do now to make sure that Biden wins. And if Trump attempts to stay in office after losing, there will be a number of plans out there to make sure that he is evicted from office. But right now, in the next five weeks, our job is to defeat him and defeat him badly. Because the truth is, if we win in Michigan and Wisconsin, in Minnesota, in Pennsylvania, apparently Biden is now ahead in Ohio, we win in Florida.
It will be very hard, very hard for Trump to try to stay in office.
So my message is, one, he's good at doing things that are very hard for. Again, I just don't hear what the real I don't hear them bones on this. I just hear we want it to turn out good and it should turn out good. And we're the good people. I don't hear what I've never heard what we're actually going to do, what we can do well. Well, you haven't heard it because it's never happened before in American history, so you are asking for a plan to do something that no one has ever had to do before.
But we're going to give you any I don't know if anyone has the specific plan, but at the end of the day, what will have to happen, in my view, is the American people by the millions. And I would hope, by the way, that Republicans join us who understand that democracy is more important than any particular candidate they want and they don't.
They want it and they don't they to join you because they never join you and they don't believe that.
Well, I'm not talking about members of Congress. And if your point is that trauma that Trump has dominated, it isn't that who matter.
And. Some members of Congress, the American people, what doesn't, but some people if bill millions of people after this election in one form or another yet to be determined what say to this guy, you're no longer the president. What form? In early January, you are leaving office, but there's no for you to leave office. The form is this. I mean, I know here's the Atlantic this week says the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election result and appoint loyal electors.
Because we don't, of course, have a direct, direct democracy. We have electors. We have an electoral college in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. Now, I've been looking into this electors. What does the Constitution say about it? What can a cheater do? Is this is this a norm or is this a law? It seems like it's a norm, and that's what Trump is great at doing. He says all these things that we thought were laws really weren't.
They were just things that people did because other people had some degree of honor. But I don't. So I'm not going to do it. And apparently no, Bill, that he's allowed me to ask your point is right. In other words, theoretically, you could you know, Biden can win Michigan by six points and Trump will say, well, we think this massive voter fraud and the legislature is appointing a Trump slate of electors. That's what you're talking about.
Theoretically, they can do that. But the outrage in this country, the willingness of people to say, sorry, that is not what you're going to do and you're not going to destroy American democracy. I think you're underestimating that reality. And I think that is exactly what will happen.
Oh. I with all due respect, I think you're overestimating it. I know I don't know because I don't know what what what form does it take where we're in the streets every day? I've seen that. I've seen people do that in countries. I'm not here.
Well, you've never seen that here because you've never seen a president try to undermine American democracy in the way Trump may be trying to do it. So all I'm saying here is let's take one step at a time. The first step is let us defeat Trump, let us defeat him badly, and I think defeat him badly. He's going to have no choice but to leave office. If he refuses to do that, then we got plan number two. And it's a little bit premature to talk about it.
But the bottom line is, I do not believe you and I may disagree on this. I do not believe that people in this country, including millions who put their lives on the line to defend democracy, are simply going to say roll over and say, OK, Mr. Trump, you could stay in office even as you destroyed democracy and even as you lost the election. I don't think that's going to happen, frankly.
OK, so what do you talk about privately with Republicans right now, like this week? And seriously, I mean, you're a senator. You've worked with Mitch McConnell for years. You see him in the elevator. Do you say to him, Mitch, look, I know we don't agree on anything, but you're not really going to do this, are you? I mean, I see how you stole the Supreme Court seat. You switched on that, but you're not really going to let Trump do this.
Well, you know that they are now giving lip service, you know, as soon as Trump repeated his remarks that he might not leave office, even if he lost all these Republicans saying, oh, well, you know, Trump says crazy things. Of course he will. We believe in the Constitution. We believe in the rule of law. That is what they're giving lip service to. Do I have absolute confidence that Republican senators will, in fact, have the courage to stand up to Trump and say, you lost the election, you're out of here?
I think some will I think some will not know how many will do the right thing, I don't know, but I'm counting more on the American people than I am on the Republicans.
And so say so in the best possible worlds. Biden wins and he takes office. What do we do with these Republicans after that? Ones who showed? When it mattered that they were willing to cast aside democracy, do we just say, well, you know what? No biggie. You were willing to throw democracy under the bus, but come on back.
Is that what we say? Well, no. I think what you say is, you know what, guys? You showed an incredible disrespect for the Constitution, for the rule of law. For support of authoritarianism and you know what, we have control of the Senate now and what we are going to do is use the Senate to represent the needs of the working families of this country whose needs have been ignored for too long.
And you are not going to obstruct us and don't lecture us.
We are going to move forward in a democratic way, fair way to finally make sure that the desperation that working families are experiencing today, unemployment, low wages, no health care, unable to send your kids to college, whether you like it or not, whether your billionaire friends like it or not, we are going to move forward and protect working families and restore faith in America. Democrat Bernie, thank you. Great to see you. Congratulations, by the way, on a great campaign and on moving the Democratic agenda to right where you wanted it to be.
All right. Thank you very much, Bernie Sanders. Let's move on. Meet our panel. Hey, guys. All right, good evening. How are you doing? He is a CNN political analyst and the author of My Vanishing Country A Memoir. Bakari Sellers is over here.
Thank you. Hi. Great to see you again. And he's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman Coleman Hughes. Great to see you.
All right. So. All right, guys, you know, I must tell you, first of all, there's many times when we've had an African-American guest on the show and I've said in the production meeting, let's not talk about the black issue.
I think that's a that's a more of a compliment is to say we're all Americans, we're all people. We don't have to always get the black question. But tonight, you're going to have to I mean, we once had on Andrew Sullivan and Barney Frank, two gay men as like. Let's not gay not come up, but we don't live in that country anymore. No. So I just want to ask the first thing. It seems like I live in a country where you're worth half the country sees that there's no racism.
I've made many jokes about the polling that always shows that about two thirds of Republicans say reverse racism is a worse problem, a fodder of comedy here. And then really so they say racism is gone.
And then there's a big part now, I think critical race theory, they call it, where racism is everything and everywhere. Please tell me that we all agree. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Oh, definitely.
I mean, I think we all agree. I think we would all agree that the answer is somewhere in the middle. But for many people in this country, particularly black people, for the last four hundred and one year we've been dealing with this issue of race.
It's not something that you can just say today.
Today, I'm going to put my race suit on and put my race card in my pocket and go out here and play it. And tomorrow I may not. I mean, we're dealing with this. I'm raising black children. I go to work every day, have to be unapologetically black and bring my whole self.
I'm on CNN and I have to go out there and articulate the issues that directly affect my community.
And so and it's exhausting. But you want to talk about those, too, right? Yeah, but it's also exhausting, too. I mean, I don't want to talk about I don't want to be on TV where we have another funeral, whether or not it's George Floyd or Jacob Blake or Brianna Taylor, I don't want to do that.
But to be black in America, Bill, I think it's necessary to understand that to be black in America is to be in a perpetual state of grieving.
And we've seen that throughout covid.
We've seen that throughout this year. And that happens to be a reality. I mean, the way I look at racism, it's kind of like murder. It exists everywhere in every society since the beginning of time. It probably will always exist. We can make progress in reducing it, but it's always going to be there to some degree. The notion that we can ever get it to zero is naive and utopian. We always have to denounce it, of course.
But as you say, I definitely think racism exists in America.
There's no doubt about that. It's also possible to exaggerate how much racism exists, to mistake a problem for being about racism when it's actually about a particular institution like the police or the criminal justice system being flawed in ways that don't listen.
I heard someone groan and this is this is important because, you know, this is what no other show will talk about. But it has to be talked about. Are we reacting with data and facts and reality to the police problem? Or are we just reacting? So I think that's a false question, so are we reacting to data, the data shows that in the past year one thousand and ten people as of today have been killed by law enforcement.
We know that black people in this country are two times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than their white colleagues. But there is also the factor of how many interactions with black that's called poor policing.
I mean, that's that's called time disparity. That's called a what's called the broken.
When when black people account for 50 percent of murder victims and perpetrators and are overrepresented in contacts with the police, you have to take that into account.
You also take into account overpolicing of those communities as well.
You also take you also with them. But most Americans say they do not want the police to be funded. Many say they want as many or more police.
Well, that's that. So defunding the police, just so we can be clear, since we're what the world is watching us does not mean that when I call 911, one of my mom calls 911 one, the police will not show up. But what it does mean is that we won't have bloated police budgets, but instead will have after school centers, instead will have mental health professionals who arrive on the scene. Instead, we will actually be able to build community.
That's what that means. But I want to get back to the beauty parlor, agree on that. I think we need less policing of petty drug crime.
Correct. Look at that. We got to look at that. We're making progress. Right.
But but but more policing of homicide and violent crime in neighborhoods where over half of crimes are violent crimes are not getting solved. So it's a complex. To me, just the people have this idea that I want to see the police budget cut by half. I want to I want to see the police improve whatever that means for the budget. That might mean spending more to train them more and so on.
And so but I think we agree because not fully, but I don't want I just don't want less police. I just want better police.
Right. OK, so that's so that's the issue here, Rick, because, you know, I worry that there's going to be more riots and more unrest in the streets and and.
Over something that may not be true now, Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal commented about Brianna Taylor yesterday. They got a world of shit about it today. And I think what they were saying is we don't know if this is a racist cop killing or just plainly it's horrible policy. No knock entry's. Yeah, binley.
Anyone's going to get killed in that situation. I agree. And I think that we don't need to have it. We don't we don't need to have no knock warrants.
We don't need to have chokeholds. We need to ban those across the board.
I think Democrats and Republicans alike, if you want to if you want to take from Tonight Show a policy initiative, it's that.
However, it's not the fact of the killing of Brianna Taylor, per say. It's the fact that there was a lack of accountability.
That is the biggest issue is still black.
But because in Malcolm X said it best, I didn't think I would be quoting Malcolm X on Bill Maher tonight. But Malcolm X always talked about the fact that the most disrespected person on the planet is the black woman period.
And we see that day in and day out. But it's the lack of accountability.
You cannot tell me that if that was a white woman who was asleep, the police came in her house, fired 20 shots, that there would be no accountability, no indictments for the murder of that.
Five years ago, a man named a white man named Derek Cruz in a very similar situation, no knock warrant. They shot him in the face, completely unarmed. What that tells me is there is a much deeper issue than racism. There's a reflexive urge to go to the race issue. I understand it. But the truth is that police in general generally do not get punished for misbehavior. I mean, everywhere. And it's white. It's black. Well, so we have to solve that issue, of course.
But reflexively making it about race.
And this is they were there cops doing a cop job with a cop handbook and cop training. I feel like that's like the biggest problem here.
Cops, you know, I mean, you've talked about this a lot.
I mean, you have said racist cops killing unarmed blacks is a false premise, because if you look at, again, the data, it's like if you threaten cops in any way, they will kill you.
That's the problem, is that they have a very difficult job. This is a country full, full of nuts, let's be honest. No, I agree. I agree with that. If you threaten them, if you resist, if you do, they think that that that allows them to just neutralize the threat, i.e., fucking kill you. And that's why they empting, like, the whole clip into they've got to stop doing that, emptying the whole clip when they feel threatened.
I just I'm not sure that it's a race thing.
I fundamentally believe, though, that you see more de-escalation, that you see more individuals who are able to go home. Dylann Roof killed nine people in a church, including one of my friends. Right. He killed nine people, drove all the way to North Carolina and got Burger King right. He happened to make it to prison alive. And the most recent case with Carl Rittenhouse, white boy crosses lines with the AR 15, kills two protesters, walks directly by the police with his hands up.
And they just say, come on, come on, come on by.
And so you see them not represented.
You're cherry picking examples there, are they not happen, but I mean, the truth is that no, you're cherry picking who they happen, but for every example you could come up with, I can come up with examples of white people getting killed in precisely the same circumstances that black people do, either reaching for a gun or seeming to reach for a gun. And if we're talking about what violent crimes go unpunished, actually the bigger problem is that black murders go unsolved more often than than white murders do.
So it's not that the police are just ignoring white violence or violence committed by white people. If anything, they need to be paying more attention to violence that is committed and suffered by black people.
I think that I think that the point that I'm attempting to make is not necessarily that interaction, although I think that's a big issue. And one of the larger points is the lack of accountability we saw when and when.
A law enforcement officer, however, went along, when a law enforcement officer goes in and and just as you said, empties a clip, or we all admit that law enforcement officers have very difficult jobs. Right. They keep our community safe. They have very, very difficult jobs. I am just saying, though, when you absolutely do not need to kill somebody or shoot somebody seven times in the back or whatever it may be, just be held accountable, of course.
And, you know, things have changed in that area. But I remember doing editorials on this show about you have to hold cops accountable for this.
And it did happen the last five years. A lot of them who did those horrendous things like shooting someone in the back were held accountable.
Brianna Taylor doesn't even get justice of a very different scenario because the cop was fired upon first.
Right. Obviously, Kenneth Walker had every right to fire because he thought they were intruders. Totally understandable. However, once the cop is fired upon, he has to have a right to fire back.
There's also a level and I don't want to I don't aim is murder. But it doesn't it. But yes, because if you walk in and you do not announce yourself right.
I will see right. What you say. That's what I am. Just like I get it. Yes. OK, but let me just can I say this to me? I think the system actually worked perfectly. I honestly do, because I don't think the system is built for people of color. It's not built for black folk to have accountability and it's just not the system worked the way it was supposed to. What we have to do is either tear the system down or reform it and reimagine what law enforcement should look like.
OK, let me. Let me ask a quick question about something else. I mean, we seem to have changed the goal from not seeing color. That's the old liberalism that I grew up with. What what? You gave me a look. Are you think colorblind is a thing?
Well, I think it's a goal. No, not that not that we don't see it.
That it doesn't matter. No, never. That was certainly that was never the goal. No, that was the goal. That was the goal. Because there was no civil rights movement for Martin Luther King.
No, no, no. It's never the goal.
Didn't have you didn't have snaked NSCLC You didn't have King. So you could all of a sudden not see us for being black.
No, it's not that's not what we're saying.
I said, does it matter that race is racist? Yes, but I'm not going to judge you on the basis of it. I'm going to judge you as an individual. But and that is something that has been lost in the discourse right now. That's not even a goal for many people anymore, that people want to say, my blackness is the most important thing about me. You have to meditate on your whiteness and feel guilty for it.
I don't want you to feel guilty about your. Why not? I want you to recognize why you did. I bring my what I'm saying is I bring my black, so. Yeah, but I bring a black self to the table. I bring it to work. I want you to see the diversity. I want you to see the richness, richness of my culture, the richness of my heritage, the richness of my blackness.
I mean, I don't know why. I don't know if we're really having an argument about I mean, I recognize those qualities about you. And you think you have to be on my mind every second we're having a beer. But you see the game today. Boy, you're diverse, man.
Not at all. But I do want you to give it value, though. I know. But nobody want you to be colorblind. I just find that to be nonsensical.
No, but to be obviously. And no one can actually be blind to color, even literally color blind people can see.
But at the end of the day, it's about where we're pushing towards as a society.
Are we pushing towards a society where where I have friends who say they're kids in elementary school, are getting workshops where they're separating white kids from black kids, and this is how they're teaching them about race. They're teaching them to see their friends as a black person first.
Is that the direction we go in in terms of our anti-racism or do we have a different anti-racism that's more universal and says, obviously, racism is horrible? And the reason it's horrible is because race is only skin deep.
And I mean, I have a fifteen year old daughter, I have a fifteen year old daughter who left me is conflicted about could possibly be after the death of George Floyd.
She got with her girlfriends, put on a mask dressed in all black, and she went out and painted a Black Lives Matter sign. Right. She and her two other black girlfriends had Black Lives Matter. I was conflicted. Why? Because I was so proud. So we come from an activist family. But I was also so distraught that at 15 she can't be like Barry Trump. She just can't go out and be a fifteen year old.
She has to reaffirm her humanity and her identity on a side and fight for people to recognize that humanity.
I just think colorblindness is I'm going to interrupt this to return one theme that obsessed me. The headline I saw in The New York Times yesterday, Trump won't commit to peaceful transfer of power. And it was on page fifteen I this is not the paper I grew up with, but OK. They wrote Mr. Trump's refusal to endorse perhaps the most fundamental tenet of democracy as any president in recent memory surely would have, was the latest instance of which he has cast and uncertainty about the November election.
I would put that on the front page. That's just crazy. Make. They wrote to the once unthinkable notion that a president might refuse to accept the results of an election.
Well, it wasn't unthinkable to everybody and I'm not going to say this anymore, but we did make them time and then I'm going to shut up about it.
But it does fucking stick in my craw that nobody listened to me and that I got no help. From The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. Mainstream media should have amplified. Are you staring at me?
I'm not starry eyed, but I'm saying mainstream media. I got no help amplifying the point I was making and he was answering me. I'll show that tape, too, but showed the first montage, please. I don't see him leaving willingly if I don't see him leaving under any condition, including people knocking on the door with guns, but he'd be Scarface. I just don't see this man giving it up. And I just think he's he has many cards he hasn't played yet.
He is not going to leave until he wants to leave. I don't think he would even leave if he lost an election in 2020. Oh, I'm the guy who says he's not leaving even if he loses the election. People have been saying, I'm an alarmist and I'm crazy because I keep saying he's not going to leave. Even if he loses. I don't think he's leaving.
He's not going to leave even if he loses the election.
So I'm a third rate respected comedian who says if he loses, he's not leaving. No, I've been saying for a very long time now that I don't think he's leaving. And I will bet you a million dollars right now that if you lose the 2020 election, I'm right and you won't leave. But he's not leaving. He probably lost the election, TRUMP and he probably will not leave.
You know, he's made me part of his act because I always say he's not going to leave.
He's not leaving on January 20th, because if Trump loses the election in November, he's not going to leave.
I've been saying for a number of years that if Trump loses the election, he's not going to leave. I cannot picture that man gracefully conceding and walking away. You're the only person I could get interested in my theory that Trump is not going to leave.
I get it that, you know, these these mainstream media people don't like me, probably because I have people like you, Coleman, on my show, people who walk outside the boundaries like I do, we don't just, you know, take it, bend the knee and just parrot the one true opinion. So we're bad people so they don't cover this show.
But on this one, you could have given me a little help because let me say, because there is there is one guy there is one person who is amplifying this Trump. This crazy Bill Maher says, you know, he's not leaving, and I'm telling you he's not leaving and in four years he's not leaving.
You know, he's not leaving. You know, he's never leaving office, don't you? He's not leaving. You know that. He's not leaving.
You know that he's not leaving. No telling you he's not leaving. He'll never leave. You know he's not leaving, don't you?
He's never going to leave. He's going to stay. All right. So that's it. But can I ask you, gentlemen, one, what do you foresee for November, December, January? I want to know your prediction and if you think there's something we can do about it. And also, it's very relevant to the race issue because a stolen election will be seen very much as a race issue. And, of course, largely is. I mean I mean, it is I mean, it's it's everybody's election being stolen, but it is especially an African-American electorate that is being deprived.
So. But what do you think, what do you think? I think Democrats are proverbial bedwetters, you know that. I know that we are. I was pretty hard on Bernie, but I love him. Yeah, I you know, I love him, too. But I think that there has to be a priority. Everybody's asking, will he leave? But you got to beat them first. Right. So that's the most important thing. I don't think they're going to have an election day.
Do you think that's the most important thing? Just winning? Yeah, right.
That's first, because you can't get to step two. It doesn't matter. I think I don't think I've got anything that matters. I don't think is going to be Election Day, I think is going to be election week or like. Right. It is. Well, that's that's not an opinion. That's the truth. And I also Dalitz won't come in on November. I didn't even know. I mean, Trump taught us to think of the things that are, you know, not imaginable.
I didn't know you could just take up mailboxes, just take them up off the street. I didn't know that was possible. That's again, norms. So he just runs right over them. So I would encourage people just to go down and vote early. Don't put your don't put your ballot in a mailbox. Go down and vote early if you can put a mask on standing to the left.
That's right. That's right. You got the virus is scary, but Trump is scarier, that's that should be on that. Trump is scarier than the virus with Trump.
People are always trying to interpret what he's saying and put it in one of two categories, either the serious category or the category where he said, oh, why can't we use our nukes?
And then nothing has come of that. So my bet is at the end of the day that if he if he is defeated, he will leave. But he'll complain. He won't concede. He'll say it was rigged. It was the deep state. It's fake news. 30 percent of the country will agree with him and he'll feel vindicated from whatever margin he's living in for the end of time.
That's my guess. What I'm really worried about, though. Optimistic, but I think so. I mean, what I'm really worried about is that there will be rioting in the streets.
There will be rioters on the left burning cities if Trump wins or seems like he won on Election Day, you know, because the mail in ballots haven't come, I'm afraid there could be far right militias clashing with the rioters, although I think whoever wins is going to be trouble in the streets.
I think I don't you know, I I believe and I think the president enjoys this violence, but of course, he does see the boogaloo boys.
You know, you see it's all good for him to make.
You know what's amazing to me real quick about the chaos when we were having mass ordinances in Michigan and and Wisconsin, you had all of these armed militias with these acres and acres walking and paying the governor of Kentucky in effigy. And nobody said anything. They said liberate all of these states. Oh, my God, we love our guns. Right. But you start marching because somebody dies and they're like, oh, wait a minute. Now, wait a little girl.
I mean, there's going to be guns. And I'm afraid I'm afraid to say, I think what's happened when this has happened in other countries, what has to happen is the military steps in. And I think maybe Trump's original sin when he was running, which was saying McCain wasn't a war hero and calling the military suckers and losers, I hope that will come back to haunt him.
And the military might have to step in on our side. And I think they might. All right. Let's move on to something light and frothy. He's an actor, musician, advisory board member for the Last Prisoner Project who hosts the three part Discovery Channel series, Growing Bellucci. Jim Belushi is over here.
That's a crazy way to do it. I have a studio, but I don't know, but you know me as a lifelong pothead, when I read that you had gotten full on into the pot business. I mean, I said to myself, one thing, is he holding? And oh. Oh, well, that's it. That I'm always holding something back, thousands of acres of pot, and you give me this little bit of the world, but but so I mean, I'm watching your show.
You're serious. You're doing a reality show basically on being in the pot business, enjoying it. Oh, you seem to love it. I mean, I love the farming of it. I mean, it's the actual growing. The actual growing. I get my hands in the soil. I'm keeping unsoiled 64 degrees in order for the micronutrients to go to the roots, in order for you to rise up pruning it. I'm harvesting it and I'm curing it to 12 percent less.
Women-Owned I am not saying I am. I am running into the dispensary. I am. I'm having a ball up there. But you're not.
I hope you're not quitting acting. I was watching the movie Thief. Oh yeah. My first movie.
I like a Man with Jimmy Carter and I was like 1980, 1980. This guy's been around 40 years. I've done a lot, Bill. I love a lot.
You have done a lot. Minute I'm bringing in both. I'm bringing in the acting and the good because of the show. I'm bringing everything I know. We don't want to lose you as an actor, but your family is involved with this. I mean, I'm sure I'm trying to find out happily. Sometimes it seems, sometimes not. I mean, this is to have the, you know, sit them down and say, hey, I'm having a big change in my life, gang.
We're moving to a pot farm and becoming farmers. It's a little green acres.
It's very green acres, by the way, in a show, actually kind of feels like green, you know. It does. Yeah.
My family, you know, they're they're you know, they actually had an intervention on me.
They actually my son was worried that I was going to blow all my money and he wouldn't have money for college. And my wife was worried I would never get an acting job again.
And but you know what this plant is? Oh, you know, it's flavorful.
You don't even. Yeah, I don't even I mean, it's just ridiculous. It involved. No, I you know, we don't have to we have to go there preaching to the converted. I think you know that it's a bit I mean, I, I think I smoke more than you. I think so. I'm a you're not a big you're not a smoker. I'm Michael Dosser. You know, I've had a lot of trauma. What is the point of that?
It just chills you out. Really. Yeah.
It just kind of takes away the it's to get high. I never understood these people. I smoke, I go to sleep. I smoke. Yeah, well, some medicine. I mean, you smoke to chill out. There's a lot of PTSD that's going on. I was a veteran that I ran into that was a medic in Iraq war and he said I saw things going to happen to human body that nobody should ever witness. She said, I have PTSD.
They gave me a bottle this big of 600 OxyContin. And I got off of it. And you said, you're strange, you're black. Diamond Oji is the only string that. That allows me to talk to my wife, my children and sleep, and he teared up and he hugged me. I said, Hey, man, I didn't make this.
And he said, no, but you're Stuart.
And that was the paradigm shift for me to move on from this is about getting high and loaded to there's real medicine in this that's really helping people stop the screaming, the screaming coming.
And so I do I microdots. I do like two point five milligrams of those being chocolate to go to sleep at night. And I feel fresh in the morning. I don't do Ambien or Xanax or the PMS stuff that makes you feel terrible. It is a beautiful, beautiful way to medicate anxiety, trauma, sleep, hopelessness. And it's also you stimulates creativity, you know that and music, the touch of your lover's skin and it makes you feel good.
And when you feel good, you have more compassion for people. It's all the wellness in Canada.
Yeah. Where's that big oxy bottle now? No, I'm joking, of course, but I mean, I saw what you put on your Instagram post.
You said your brother would be alive, I believe, today if if it had just stopped at pot. Well, a genie Aykroyd's one to the Senate. And he said, you know, Jimmy, if your brother was a pundit, if Johnny was a pothead, he'd be alive today. And it really made me think about it. And I know John suffered from CTE, was a star football player. And he said so many times as a middle linebacker and he actually scissored in front of me at home one time and we didn't know what it was.
I mean, I actually saved his life. I wish I could have done it the second time, but the first time I did. And then when he went to college and started using cannabis, I think he found his medicine. But back then it was considered a drug and still considered a Schedule One drug. But if we knew what we know about cannabis today back then, I think that would have been a great medicine for my brother John. I do believe we'd be alive today.
And I got to tell you, you know, it's it's. It's not easy to be like the son of a great man or the brother of a great comic, but you carved out your own place. I know you really did. You did. It took a difficult situation and you had your own comic genius. You really did. Thank you, though. And I know it's really important to you. This last prisoner project, it kind of reminded me of what John Kerry said.
Remember his famous thing when he got back from the Vietnam War? He said, I'm talking about the last man to die for a mistake. And you want to get people right out of prison who who are there because they shouldn't be for marijuana?
Well, there's yeah, there's the last prison project that was started by Steve Danzel was the godfather of cannabis here in California. And I supported because I really found out the real history of cannabis.
You know, it's never been about the plant. It's always been about who's using it. So what we know is in America's marijuana, they came, you know, early in the last century, like 1910, from sailors, from Afro Caribbean, sailors new to New Orleans. And then there was the refugees from the Mexican Revolution that came on the southern border. And there was a lot of people in America who didn't like. Those people. And they created a race control with the laws, that's when the laws began and they were targeting the disparity in the community of color being arrested.
The enforcement, yes, is four for one. I'm so glad you brought that up, because something we could have got to. And the other discussion, the drug war is I'm someone who is responsible for so much of this possible. But twice in high school. Really? Yeah. And high school. High school. Wow. I was I never even smoked it in high school.
I saved myself and didn't go to jail, you know, and as a white guy who runs a pot farm, I'm making money selling pot.
I got a TV show on it. You know, it's on Discovery Channel, by the way.
All right. You know, I have to sit on my farm.
You know, I'm doing something that they did. There's forty thousand people incarcerated now and three quarters. We got to get them out. God set them free.
Thank you. All right. Jim Belushi, everybody, thank you. All right. Time for your. OK, we even got to the drug war, right, neuros there on Fox News. Oh, yes, this is so true. Fox News has to stop trying so hard to find celebrities who were voting for Trump. It's just sad. Last week's front page news was that liberal Hollywood has lost Sumaya Armstrong.
Who I looked up on IMDB and it said, beats the fuck out of me. And look, I'm glad tomorrow, but won't be bullied into silence, but nobody's bullying her, we just like her to work a little faster on our grande caramel latte.
Terrible neural, if you're selling a handbag online, there are two things that can be new and fake or real, but used so not in great shape, there's no such thing as a gently loved handbag.
Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain was gently love. This, my friend, is a second hand person, zero humans have to explain how they'll drop whatever it is they're doing to band together and spend hours in a desperate fight to return a beached whale to the sea.
But then they'll walk by this guy, like, get a job loser.
Well, if the salesman spends an hour telling me how reliable the car is, the manager can spend an hour on how I need an extra warranty.
You mean from my great new car, that's also a piece of shit. All since the trophy for Russia's teacher of the year looks like a dick. The award for Best Foreign Movie must look like a book.
And you can see by the look on that teacher's face that a dick shaped award makes its recipient very happy, especially when she said, I know exactly where I'm going to put it.
And finally, new rule power is like owning rabbits, the more you have, the easier it is to get a lot more. That's actually not a new rule, it's a rule as old as time, and it was my theme in this space two years ago when another Supreme Court vacancy was in the news. And that theme, that power begets power, should be on everyone's mind right now. The idea that when you lose power, you've not only lost that fight, you made it harder to win the next one.
That's how power works.
When Democrats lose elections, they lose the ability to appoint judges, Trump has appointed a quarter of the entire federal bench and unlike his wives, that's for life.
In Florida, the people voted to restore voting rights to felons. But that's not really going to happen because Trump appointed five of this six appeals judges who found a way to undo that. And as is so often the case, make it harder for Democrats to vote, which means more Republican senators who appoint more conservative judges. Power is a perpetuating cycle, like when Terminator's build more robots.
Of course, Democrats are screaming now about Republican hypocrisy over Trump filling the Ginzberg seat in an election year. They said one thing when it was Obama, now they're saying the complete opposite. How do they sleep at night? I'll tell you how.
Like a baby because. Like a baby. Like a baby, they have no morals, and if you haven't gotten it yet, this kind of completely bald faced, premeditated hypocrisy should make it clear there's no catching them in an inconsistency. They don't care because it's all it only about power. The only rule Republicans play by. The only role they play by is the people who win make the rules. Power talks, losers walk.
Nancy Pelosi's response to stopping Trump getting a third seat on the court was, quote, We have arrows in our quiver that I'm not about to discuss. Great. Now the Democrats are bringing arrows to a gunfight.
But I don't think we have any arrows in our quiver. I think our quiver is bare.
They have the power and they're going to use it to make a court with six conservatives. And when the twenty twenty election winds up in the lap of that court, as they're practically already promising, it will guess who wins. We can't stop them from getting the court seat, which means we can't stop them from picking the election winner. It's like being in an arm wrestling contest. You can come back from here. It's almost impossible to come back from here.
How different it all could have been. Not to relitigate old wounds, but all the Hillary equivocator is from twenty sixteen, the people who said she was racist not really that different from Trump, the ones who voted third party, the ones who stayed home because, you know, the lesser of two evils. Sorry, but you all have to eat it one more time. Because, oh, how I would love me some of that Hillary evil right now.
You know, the evil where liberals would currently have a six to three majority on the court, the evil where people wouldn't be facing having their health care taken away or their right to vote or where America wasn't sliding into autocracy.
Yes. Yes, let's let's look at the alternative universe of a few more people in 2016 had told themselves, yeah, she's not my favorite, but you only get two choices in our system. It's probably better to make sure this same competent person gets in as opposed to a malignant narcissist.
In that universe, we're still in the Paris climate accord and Iran's nuclear program is still frozen and maybe so is Greenland.
There have been none of the rollbacks on clean air and water, dreamers don't have to worry about getting tossed out of the only country they've ever known. William Barr is just a right wing crank self publishing a book on our moral decline.
And Brett Kavanaugh is drinking from home.
Oh, it's it's a wonderful world, this world, people hearing the words tape only think of R. Kelly.
And no one has needed or heard of a pink pussycat, let alone tried to knit one.
And look, no nation as fundamentally unhealthy as this one could escape a pandemic unscathed. But I think Hillary would have done a little better than let them drink bleach.
The Supreme Court hears oral arguments to overturn Obamacare on November 10th, once this new justice is seated, Obamacare is likely gone. And after that, Roe versus Wade. So I hope you enjoy carrying your baby to term. You can name it Jill Stein.
Yes, Joe Biden is far from a perfect candidate, and I have serious doubts they'll ever let him take office, but giving him a vote totals so huge it will be hard to ignore is the very last Hail Mary pass we have. All right.
That's our show. Have a great week off or off next week. Nothing going on in the world. We'll be back October 9th. I want to thank my guys, Bakari Sellers, Coleman Hughes, Jim Belushi and Bernie Sanders and you. Thank you so much, folks. You guys catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10:00. We'll watch him any time on HBO. On demand for more information, log on to HBO Dotcom.