Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you. These sparsely populated people, thank God for. I know it's hard. Thank you. Our last show, I appreciate. Thank you very much for doing what you had to do to get in here.

It is our last show of the season, and it has been 17 days now since the election. Trump is still behaving like a psycho beauty pageant queen who will not let go of the tiara.

And this is also the last time I will see anybody publicly before the holidays. So merry and happy because it's been that guy out of here.

Half my wife never had Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was always when you picked out at 2:00 in the afternoon, just passed out on the couch. Now, every day this year was that.

I from now on, I'm going to be referring to this period in history because we need a name for this as the functioning. We had. We had the Great Recession and then we had an economic expansion, and this is the fucking thing, that's what we are in now. I mean, I was in a store the other day.

It is depressing. The big hot novelty toy item this year for the holidays is elf on a ventilator. This is.

I don't get this country, the Trump people, they don't want anybody to wear a mask because they say it's all about conformity. These are the same people who want everyone to kneel or not to fuck that joke.

I mean, when I was, you know, the people who they want to kick you out of the country, if you want to forget it, you get what I was trying to get there. And it's the last show of the season. I'm losing it.

But but you know what? They can all jump in a lake because, like. No, seriously, because Democrats who are always preaching, wearing the masks, they keep getting caught doing what we're not allowed to do. Nancy Pelosi did. Lori Lightfoot did. Now, Gavin Newsom, you see this? He was at some sort of birthday party, indoor. I haven't eaten indoors. Publicly since March, without a mask and at the table, there were lobbyists from the California Medical Association just like getting shitfaced with Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Right, good. Yes, let's keep it even. But, you know, they say there are two new vaccines and they're are coming in just in time for the holidays. And this is this is big news. They say they are almost impossible to get. And there was about a 90 percent chance of them working. Maybe I'm thinking of PlayStation five.

Oh, and the president, oh, he idei he's in the holiday spirit, yeah, he had a screening last night of his favorite holiday movie, How the Grinch Stole Pennsylvania.

This guy, I mean, it just I mean, did you see what Team Lunatic was?

Was putting forward this week, Rudy Giuliani was out there, he's having quite a third act, but he's not looking for his dick in his pants. He's out there.

He's out there as Trump's lead lawyer because all the regular lawyers have quit and he's got a new theory about who fixed the election, Venezuela, Venezuela. Apparently, he says Dominion, that's the voting machine company. They're actually out of Canada. But he says they're owned by another company, which is funded by a Venezuelan associate of Hugo Chavez, who is dead at this point.

MSNBC just cut away to a cuckoo clock was.

Wait, wait, wait, that's not all Spain. Spain is involved. Yes, Venezuela, they make the machines that zombie, Hugo Chavez, he makes that.

But then the votes got sent, he says, to Barcelona, Spain, where they were fixed for Biden and then sent back to the U.S. At this point, Rudy just kneel down like James Brown and two handlers came out and put a straitjacket on him.

And then the judge said, order in the court and he said, Tanqueray and tonic, please. And then things got weird. I'm going to show you a picture now, but warning the following may be disturbing to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised. This is what happens. This is what happens when Dracula gets out of the coffin too early in the day.

I mean, that's his hair and. You know, the Trump people are saying these colors don't run. Sometimes they do. Apparently they do.

Sometimes even Jeffrey Toobin was like, God, that's embarrassing. All right, Jeffrey Toobin. All right. Never mind. We got a great show, our last show of the year. Jon Meacham and Alex Wagner are here. But first up, my good friend. He is a distinguished professor of African-American studies and ethics at Vanderbilt University now and author of Long Time Coming and Reckoning with Race in America, Michael Eric Dyson.

You are like James Brown. That's great, great. I like that for you. I mean, how are you doing, man? I'm pretty fair for a square, as they say, in my neck of the woods.

Yeah, well, thanks for going through all the stuff you have to do to you. Came just in time. I think we're closing down soon. Yeah. You you're shutting down man on the curfew. So I just. Yeah. You know, I think we're going off the air just at the right moment. It'll be better next year. Yeah, but I wanted to ask you about this year. First of all, I mean, your book.

Great book. I read it quickly. It's a great quick read. Thank you. Serious stuff, of course. But the year 2020, I mean, 2017 was the year of Harvey Weinstein and then the Metoo movement. And it seems like everything changed to a degree with gender stuff right now. Right. Do you are we going to look back at 2020 that way with race? Yeah, that's a great parallel to. Yeah, I think so.

In this sense that George Floyd opened the minds and eyes of so many other people. Now those of us who have been victimized by it historically and consistently, some among us said, well, dang, I guess you missed like the slavery part and the Jim Crow part and you missed the the other stuff.

But I go whenever people wake up, they wake up.

Whenever they become aware, they become aware. And I think, look, we were all at home, those of us who could afford to stay at home with the pandemic. And we're looking at our screens anyway. And when George Floyd's image flashes across the horizon of many of these devices, it was astonishing. And many white brothers and sisters said, wait, so black people have been making claims. We've been going like, well, OK, you must have said something.

You must have acted or misbehaved. But my God, we can see here prostrate on the ground a black man meaning harm to no one being the recipient of Derek Children's neck, his mortally depressed column, his neck being squeezed and asphyxiated for no good reason. And I think that shook America to its core and not just America. People all over the world were responding. And you think this is more about racism than policing? Well, I think well, the two go hand in hand.

I think it's about the persistence of what now has become a term systemic racism. And I think it's about the fact that police people have been way out of control for too long when it comes to African-American and Latino people.

Where. Give me a comparison of give me a I mean, you're almost my age. Give me a comparison of nineteen eighty two thousand twenty twenty. Yeah, I mean, there's some difference. Well, there's no doubt. Well, nineteen eighty. You've got the rise of Ronald Reagan. Right. And hip hop.

I mean like with policing. Right.

Well but I'm saying so with racism in general. You got racism in general. Right. Look, you got law and order stuff. You got Nixon 20 years before talking about law and order. Then in 1980 the the the restoration of an American society that had gone off the rails, people perceive. So Ronald Reagan was there to police it back into order. You think about 2000. What happens? You know, Jesse Jackson has run a couple of times through the presidency.

People have said, oh, look, there are different avenues and possibilities that are now awake to us. But then you had the fights against affirmative action in the courts. And then when you think about even ten years ago in 2010, you know, we're in the second year of the presidency of Barack Obama. And so that was a huge shift. That was a Gutenberg shift in the consciousness of American culture that now this black man can be the face of America, the avatar of American democracy, the embodiment of the noble aspirations of James Madison and George Washington.

And Thomas Jefferson is now this Sunkist son of America who embodies the best ideals and the noble aspirations. But at the same time, beneath it all, you have this undercurrent of the mistreatment of ordinary, everyday black people and the police. And I can tell you, Bill, I didn't write much about it in this book. I've written about it in other places. I've been a victim of that kind of brutality for most of my life. And it has become routine for many of us.

Tinnen to put your hands on their put your wallet on the dashboard, you tell your kids be as look and a lot of other people have to do this too. But we have to have a special attention paid to that. Be extremely careful, be deferential, because we want you to get out with your livelihood. What I'm asking you is the difference between like from now and 20 years ago. Right? You might your answer might be there, isn't it?

I just want to know that because, like. I think, look, there is a difference, but there's a difference in awareness of people seeing that the police have mistreated black people consistently, look, we can trace it back to seventeen hundreds when the slave stuff got started, the slave patrols in Virginia. Since that time, I'm telling you, Martin Luther King Jr. talked about police brutality in 1963 and his March on Washington speech. So, yeah, things have shifted in terms of awareness, possibility of black upward mobility, people getting along better.

Rodney King's answer. Can't we all get along with some of us got along better in some places. But I'm saying the lethal persistence of anti blackness in this country has been a constant drumbeat. That is a company, the social dance of black people in many areas in America. That's the reality.

That's the hurtful thing. But you I mean, in your book, is it really the last chapter in your book called White Comfort?

Yes. And you write you acknowledge that there is diversity and thought, no doubt in the black community, no doubt extreme. I assume you are for that. Absolutely. OK, so, I mean, I've heard a lot of I've had some of them on the show. Coleman use your Chameli for. John McWhorter, professor, like you, he talks about the religion of anti racism, he wouldn't agree with everything you're saying. He says we've never been less racist.

No, that doesn't mean there isn't racism. Right. Right. But what is your view of that view?

Look, I think look, John McWhorter, a friend of mine, a very smart guy. I respect all the people you talked about. They don't represent the masses of black people. No. One, they don't represent the basic belief of black people. And here's the point. Most black people want more policing, not less. I was about to say black people are culturally conservative. They're unlike, look, I don't represent the mainstream, if you will, of black thought when it comes to things like that.

Right. As an ordained Baptist minister for 40 years, I've seen some of the stuff that goes on in these churches. Now, black communities say, look, we want people to protect us. We want when the cop we call the cops, though, the cops, not to this not to fail to distinguish us from the criminals. And the problem is black people call the cops more than anybody. If you want to get down to who calls the cops black people.

Look, Mama, I told you, I want those biscuits butter. I'm calling the cops on you right now.

So the thing is and you ain't done it right. But the point is that we want when the cops show up, not to direct a common, ordinary interchange between two human beings into something like that. What do I mean?

So when the cops stop Sandra Bland for a traffic signal or something on her car and it ends up she's in jail, hung two days later, Walter Scott down in South Carolina, he stopped because his left turn signal was wrong and the guy ends up shooting him. So the ordinary interactions that many white brothers and sisters can take for granted end up in death for black people. So, yeah, a lot of black people don't want the police to be abolished.

But Bill and I know that that term, Jim Clyburn and others have said, hey, that's the death knell. You talk about abolition. Do you know in the 18 50s, most white people were not in favor of abolition of slavery. So things do change. So the thing is, is that are you interested in the commercial of the product? I'm all for whatever language gets us over. I'm not I'm not a stickler for if it's abolitionist versus reformers.

I just want the fact that police people seem to consistently and repeatedly murder, kill, maim, harm and destroy black life with wanton abandonment without being held to account.

And when they do, they have qualified immunity that protects them. But I remember doing editorials about the police and I was sure it was going to get me arrested right on this show. Right. Five years ago even. And part of the point I was making was there's never any repercussions that now there have been now you go down the list and lots of police have been put in jail, tried and found guilty for stuff. So, I mean, you would add, well, a few more.

And it's not a tsunami. It's not a tsunami. It used to be none, no doubt. And that's progress. But Malcolm X said you can't put the knife in my back nine and just pull it out six inches and call that progress. Well, it has been acknowledged. No, no, I'm acknowledging that there's been some progress. But do you know the overwhelming majority of black people live in fear? LeBron James, who's a rich guy who plays for the L.A. Lakers, says we live in terror against what the police will do to us.

That's a reality that I think many white people hadn't seen until these snuff films. The pornography of black death is repeated in the cinema of of black existence. And these films show us that no matter which hands up, get shot, hands down, get shot, speak to the police in a saucy way. Shot. Don't say anything at all. Get shot. No matter what we do, the crime is not what we do. It's who we are.

And that's the reality that we have to confront when it comes to police brutality.

All right. Well, I thank you always for your perspective. You're very amazing person to your talk. Thanks. I wish we could have dinner, as we usually do. We can hang out a little bit next year in Jerusalem. All right, Michael Eric Dyson. All right.

Thank you, sweetheart. I appreciate it. OK, here they are, he is the author of His Truth is Marching On John Lewis and the Power of Hope, who occasionally advises President elect Biden. Jon Meacham is over here. Jon Meacham. And she's a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the co-host of executive producer of Showtime's The Circus, Alex Wagner.

How are you doing? OK, so got to start with my favorite topic, Trump not leaving it 17, 17 days after the election. And the leader of the ruling party keeps insisting that he won in a landslide against his opponent, Joseph Biden.

Chanko and the pesky courts. You know, we still have courts that seem to be working right, because they keep saying, you know, we can't allow this claim of fraud because there's no fraud and little things about legality and evidence. Although Jenna Ellis, Jenna Ellis, we had Trump lawyer.

We had her on last week. She said with Rudy this week in court, this is a quote. Your question is fundamentally flawed when you're asking where is the evidence?

And Rudy said, When I went to bed on election night, he was ahead in all those states.

How is it they all turned around?

Well, first of all, Rudy, we know you sleep in the day so you can hunt at night. I. My question to you is we come back on this show January 15th, where are we on January 15th? You're not going to have a concession. Donald Trump is let's be explicit.

Don is trying to stage a coup right now, but I think he's trying to undermine the results of a democratic, free and fair election and trying to throw out legally cast votes so that he can win. I mean, I think we need to be explicit about what we are undergoing as a country right now. I see no future in which he concedes. I think he will probably avoid having to deal with the White House exit and turn over to Joe Biden some creative way.

But you can bet there will be a rally, there will be some kind of public event. There will be probably some sort of sort of Trump being de facto White House somewhere else in the country. This man is not going to say that he lost ever.

So we'll have like two popes like that, like when there was two popes, Mar a Lago meets Avignon. Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought of that until right now.

That's a good point, that I think the future is key to how many of Trump's voters, all 70 million or so of them, are going to follow that papacy. And I think the reason that so few, relatively few Republicans have spoken out about this, I mean, it's sort of the Marx Brothers did a coup. And so it's easy because it seems so incompetent to make fun of it. But this is an administration whose fundamental incompetence has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the most significant weakening of institutions that, however flawed, have produced by and large a more perfect union, have given it the most stress and strain since the 60s.

So it's a it's easy to be amused by by Rudy, but we're just lucky that our authoritarians are so incompetent and everybody's incompetent.

It wasn't just Trump that led to those deaths. He certainly did his part. Right. But we're an incompetent country. Well, that's true and an unhealthy one.

But I got to say, though, I spent a considerable amount of time with these local election officials, especially those in Pennsylvania. These are civil servants who spent a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of folks trying to make sure that this election came off with a hitch.

And it did. It's our one feather in our cap. But that actually I mean, that matters because if Trump had been able to find any opportunity to say there's been here even without it. But here's the problem. Rudy said in his statement the other day, What we are seeing is a massive influence of communist money from Venezuela, Cuba and likely China. These are just buzzwords that his people hear. OK, so they had the massive march on Saturday, OK?

I mean, I saw people interviewed there. They think to a person they think he won the election, that there will be a miracle where he will still stay in office. If not, it's stolen because he is the rightful heir to the seven kingdoms.

Right, right. Right. There it is. Here are the stats.

Eighty eighty eight percent of Trump voters think he won the election, over 50 percent of Republicans or Republicans. What do these people do? This is over. This is like 70 million Americans, which sounds to me like if they don't think the president who's installed is real, that's a fifth column. That's a large fifth column in America. What do they do? How does a country talk about not how not being able to survive?

You know, it's divided, cannot stand, cannot stand the I think this is the key question for all of us, because what we've done is we have managed to, as a country, consign reason to the sidelines. We don't think anymore. We feel and that's a large part of the pandemic tragedy is I don't feel like wearing a mask.

I don't feel like listening to a doctor. I don't feel like listening to experts. Well, we don't really care. I mean, the purpose of the Enlightenment was that your thoughts and data and fact would at least have a chance against feelings and emotions and passions and appetites and ambitions. And we've done pretty well for a long time with that. Not great. What's basically happened, I think broadly is that nineteen sixty four historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

And it's this recurrent suspicion, as you laid out, that there is a larger conspiracy out there of unseen forces because people have a fundamental human need to believe that there are these secret forces that are arrayed against them. And every moment is Armageddon. Every moment is existential. And so therefore, compromise is not possible. And. What's happened is the paranoid style, which was the John Birchers in 64, has widened to a huge swath of the country.

And the big task for all of us, and I think it's a task of citizenship and talking to your neighbors and just actually trying to say, look, there is such a thing as fact.

Well, it's been aided and abetted by a conservative media echo chamber that has and the Internet.

John Birch had to come to your house with a pamphlet. Yeah, the memoir.

I mean, I spent, you know, the entire fall talking to Trump voters. They live in a parallel universe. They do have alternative facts. They are fed. Those facts are fed to them in a systematic for profit way by the Murdoch family, by right wing media outlets and by the unleashed conservative echo chamber online. I mean that putting that genie back in the bottle is going to that's what I would say.

The only person in this country who has the power to really change the direction of this country is Rupert Murdoch now Rupert Murdoch.

It's interesting because, you know, Trump is already trying to peel people away because Fox News is kind of divided about him.

But they have certainly been critical. And some people have called the election for for Biden. If and it looks like Murdoch is doing it, it looks like he is throwing his lot in with reality. Right. For a change.

He a lot of the Fox viewers will stick with they'll be divided. Right. But I think Rupert Murdoch, more than anyone else, holds the fate of this country in this hand and Australia and Australian fucking us that.

You know how I feel about Australians always sleeping on your couch and trying to steal your girlfriend the world, the world is flat.

You know, I'm just speaking for myself here, not not for any transition or anything.

But we do have a shot here.

If the government and the private sector under a President Biden can take care of the pandemic, there's actually a case study here. I'm not saying it's going to be a panacea, but if there is competence, if there are, you know, and if the vaccine timetable works, you may have a moment where people will be able to look at the institutions of which they are so skeptical right now and say, well, things are getting a little better. This election was not that far outside the historical mainstream in terms of the margin.

I think one of the things that's sadly.

Well, amazing, amazing. You're right. It was liberals need to get over that. I think I write liberal. They need to look at why write that they so many people consider that toxic. That was my editorial last week. We won't get back into it. But there are many reasons.

Biden comes in with a larger percentage of the popular vote than Truman, Kennedy, Nixon in 68, Carter in 76, Reagan in 80, Trump also one more Clinton. Either time he did, but he didn't. But Biden's at fifty one percent. So just you got I mean, we can look back, but it's one percent I we are if we are fifty one. Considering what they had to look at for four years, I bet you look you, I know you love this image.

You're preaching to the choir here. I get that. But it is a fifty one percent country. We killed seven hundred and fifty thousand people to abolish slavery. It was not a we didn't have a conference at the nineteenth century Brookings Institution and say, hey, let's go do this. Yeah.

Which is a substantial percentage of the whole country at that time. Yes.

I grew up in a region where until fifty two years ago we lived under legalized apartheid at the ballot box in our lifetime. So I'm not saying let's therefore let these folks let this stuff go, but let's have some sense of proportion.

I don't know. I think, you know, we have a battle right now against an unseen enemy and one side has no interest in fighting it for completely partisan reasons. I mean, that is a cravenness. The inability, the inaction, the dismissal of covid-19 as a deadly virus is just tells you the ends to which the Republican Party and Donald Trump will go to preserve a sort of partisan worldview. And that is, you know, I mean, maybe the the distribution of the vaccine and, you know, getting out of masks next year will help things.

But I think Donald Trump is going to be on the sidelines, a claiming credit for it the entire time. His followers will believe that. And I have a hard time imagining they're going to come back into the fold of institutional democracy, despite the fact that institutional democracy will have saved their lives.

I mean, there's blame to go around everywhere. There's blindness on some parts of the world. I'm also amazed at how many people have been saying to me lately, oh, I can't wait till 2020 is over, as if when the calendar turns over. Oh, boy.

That is how the virus will still be here.

Trump will still be here. OK, he's not he could be worse pissing outside the tent in. Yeah. I mean, just for one thing, he's going to have he's going to be the ultimate kingmaker. He's going to have a veto power if we get him out, if he's going to have a veto power over every single Republican candidate, not but almost everyone. If you get the Donald Trump treatment, you know you're not going to get the votes.

Yeah, that's a scary proposition. No, it's America held hostage. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, if Donald Trump is the Republican Party, we should stop separating. Yeah, he is the Republican Party, but I don't think they've ever had someone who could do that.

Anyway, this is our last show of this annus horribilis.

And, you know, it's so funny, the paradox that we think of you and Elizabeth, the second welcome to the crowd.

And I always think of you when I use a Latin phrase, which is not that often, but I'm always amazed that, you know, people have said to me and I had to kind of agree, it was like, oh, what a terrible year.

And then they go, Yeah. And it went so fast. And it kind of did. And I and I thought to myself, yeah, you know, when I'm 100, if I live that long, I'm gonna remember this year it was terrible, but it was memorable and it was not like anything else. So I, I made a little video to myself, to future me, because, you know, when I'm with you, when I'm 100, I don't know.

So so I made it for myself to remind myself of what this year was when I'm one hundred. But I figured I'd show it to you. Would you like to see it.

OK, well this. A little video I made to my 100 year old self. Hey there, future me if you're watching this. Congratulations on making it to 100 soon you'll be old enough to watch Fox News. Anyway, I'm reaching out to you because I figure at 100, after all the pot we smoke, your mind must be like soup, which you probably have some on your shirt right now. But look, if there ever was a year that people are going to want to hear about.

It's the famous Plaga of 20/20 and Bill, you live through it. You're going to I say you're going to want to remember some of this because it was a pretty special time in March.

We got locked inside everybody all the time. And let me tell you, we may not have had toilet paper, but we had a raw determination to get back on the air. And your intrepid producers came through and put the home back in home box office. Thank God for back and man caves.

You used every square inch of your home, your own home at first shooting the whole show and nothing but an iPhone. You interviewed senators, congressmen and mayors from a chair in front of a cutout of Trump giving the finger and two feet away from a stripper pole. This really happened. There were lots of challenges, technical weather. Doing your own makeup, but always wearing a fresh suit, just like you always had in the studio, so people out there with no fuck you virus.

But the big one, how do you do monologue comedy when you have no audience? Bill, you son of a bitch, you got superhigh one night and figured it out. Finally, after five months, she got back to the studio just in time to see Joe Biden get elected. Trump refused to leave something the pundits said no one could have predicted.

I don't see him leaving willingly if I don't see him leaving. He is not going to leave. I'm the guy who says he's leaving. He's not going to leave even if he loses. I don't think he's leaving. He's not going to leave. He's not leaving. I don't think he's leaving. I'm right. And you won't leave. But he's not leaving. He's not going to leave. He's not leaving. He's not going to leave. Well, old timer, I hope that Trump or even more dreadfully one of his offspring isn't president of.

You're watching this. Most of all, I hope you remember how grateful you were to the entire intrepid, unbreakable staff at real time for pulling miracles out of their ass every week. And to the folks at home for letting us do what we do.

Keep both sides honest in good times and bad, even when the audience wasn't really there, you knew they were there and you were there for them. We usually whenever we have a break, we have one in December, we have one in the summer, we usually do future headlines. This is one we did in June. I just wanted to show you, because sometimes they really come true.

So we're going to put that up on line this year and I'll be there shortly. OK, so let me ask you about Georgia, because Georgia seems to be the proxy war for all the marbles.

Let's not even go into why Georgia is having this runoff, but they are. There is fifty two Republican senators right now, 48 Democrat. If the Democrats win those two seats and the runoff is on January 5th, then they get the Senate because the tie is broken by vice president. Kamala Harris, who Trump calls a communist monster, and he is not given to hyperbole, so this is like super important.

This is is this why? So many of the Republicans will not break with him because it's about the Senate, because if you don't win the Senate, the whole thing is almost pointless. Putting Biden in there, Mitch McConnell is just going to want to make him a one term president. He's going to want to tank the economy. He's going to rediscover the deficit.

Georgia, it's all about getting those two seats in Georgia. Yeah.

And another missed investment opportunity was buying a TV station in Atlanta so you could the ad dollars going forward because you could you could just look at another another problem, George, is the new Florida. It's the pivot point. It's a really interesting state. The north part is Pat Buchanan country from way back in 92. It's where Doug Collins came from. You have the how much poetry is this? You have the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in King's pulpit in John Lewis's district, standing in a year where more people voted.

And without that turnout, without, by the way, the most important person, the Democrat running and the most important person of twenty twenty, I would argue, is Jim Clyburn.

Definitely without Jim Clyburn endorsing Joe Biden, Donald Trump would be president for real, not just in his own mind.

Yeah, I think the the thing about the Georgia race, it's going to be an uphill climb for Democrats. If you look at the numbers from the election in November, Biden won the state by amassing a really broad coalition, not just of the Democratic base, but of peeling off moderate Republicans who just wanted Trump out of office. But that same group of Republicans did not vote for down ballot Democrats. John Asef, one of the Democrats who's going into this runoff race, got 100000 fewer votes than Joe Biden.

Right. And that's evidence of people are saying, get Trump out. But Biden doesn't get the two Republicans running are both criminals.

So, I mean, maybe criminal is the word that they would object to. But I mean, one is, is this Perdue, David Perdue, who used to run the general, OK?

And the other one was Kelly Loffler, who whose husband owns the stock exchange. I know that sounds like a joke about rich people and an Adam Sandler movie, but that's that's that's a real thing.

He owns the stock exchange. So there are two regular downhome folks.

Anyway, they were both privy in January to the reports coming out of the government about how bad coronavirus was going to be. And they went out there and told the suckers that it was all OK and then dumped their stock.

And stuff that was going to be affected like casinos that were going to shut down. That's not going to affect the vote.

I mean, it it didn't in the first pass at this. I mean, I think there is a real appetite on some parts of the moderate base that's going to be critical in this race not to have a Democratically controlled Senate and White House. And it's going to be a very hard case for John Asaph and Raphael Warnock to make that this isn't handing Joe Biden the keys to the kingdom. We all know it's really important.

How does that how does the Republican Party function with this coalition now of Kuhnen, which is really the force? That's where the energy is. And the Charles Koch you know, Charles Koch, the Koch brothers, he said last week he's he's very rueful about his past support of Republicans.

Apparently now he's like, boy, we made a big mistake because apparently, you know, Frankenstein's monster got out of control there a little bit.

How would these two going to coexist? The greedy traditional Republican and the Democrats eat babies Republican. It's a fabulous question because you have the sort of the respectable Republican view and the way that they justified. I think I bet the Georgia Republicans did this. I bet there were. I bet there were more than a few Georgia Republicans who probably voted for Biden and then voted for the Republicans down the Senate on this idea that somehow another Joe Biden, who, by the way, is about as much of a socialist as my Springer Spaniels.

Right.

I mean, it's just they're actually they do have tendencies.

They are more communist than than Joe Biden is. But this is this respectable thing. We want divided government because we want you know, I just think.

You know, once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, and this is an existential moment in American Democratic lowercase D history. And we have one more shot at this.

The voters of Georgia have one more shot to get this right by sending these Democrats to the Senate.

It's funny that, you know, Biden ran on. You're hurting. Help is on the way and Trump ran on. Everything's great.

Mm hmm. And yet I'm reading as the returns come back and we get the more detailed analysis of what happened in the election, Trump won in places where people are suffering and Biden won in places where things are going great. It should be the opposite. Yeah, that's how fucked up this country is. I don't think policy matters anymore. I don't think they should ask that question. Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Does it matter to them? Well, if that's not what they're voting on, I mean, people are voting on money, though.

I mean, I think that's when you ask the question about what is the Republican Party, the sort of polite establishment Republicans who are still in bed with the party that hosts Kuhnen supporters. They're there because they think they're going to be able to hold on to more of their money at the end of the day. And they are willing to basically make a deal with the devil on literally every other front because they think their tax rates are going to stay low.

I mean, I truly think that is the tide lines at this point between the establishment, upper class, educated Republicans and the base of people who have jumped so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole that they can't see there.

But we know about taxes here in California. No, I. I wouldn't I wouldn't say we were undertaxed. This is not this is not an original point to me.

But I think this could be a cause for you. Partisanship as essentially become religious right. We have structural parts. If you have your own holy books, you have your own saviors. You have your own view of the world drome cosmology. You have people who are, you know, hard, hard core. You have people who show up on Christmas and Easter, you know, tax day and whatever.

And so, yeah, the C in the Christian is the tax day vote Trump voter.

And so therefore, rationality that is that is working through the data is being shoved to the side. And I think I think this is much more about culture and identity than economy and health right now. Hmm.

Well, there's also demographic change afoot. And I think we're at a hinge point demographically, right, where one tribe, white patriarchy is on the downslope and an ascendant brown tribe is at the gates. And I think Trump has successfully stoked a lot of fear around that change, which is happening, which is existential, which is Darwinian in a lot of respects. And this is the after effect of that fear and that anxiety about, you know, a change in what it means to be an American and what this country actually looks like in a huge.

And a huge question is whether Trump is the last gasp of the patriarchy or is there more to come? And there's more to come, but and so how how long and what happens to this broad anxiety? How does it manifest?

And what about just the structural problems we have that I would just just to start with the top two in my book, the Electoral College and the Senate, we are we seem to be concerned because of what you were just talking about, the way the demographics are changing. I mean, Biden's going to win this by seven million popular votes. I don't see the Republican presidential candidate winning the popular vote ever again. And the Senate, of course, is run by Republicans.

They have talk about rigged, you know, because again, my pet peeve, the Dakota territory gets four.

Right.

And California with 40 million people gets to I mean, it is so we're going to be consigned to this at least semi minority rule, that structural problem number one and the other is just Idiocracy. The people just get dumb and dumber, Tommy, not us.

I mean, there's a guy, Tommy Tuberville, he just got elected to the Senate in Alabama, does not know the three branches of government. This is like the most fundamental question you can ask anybody. I mean, immigrants who take the test are like, yeah, I know.

You ask me the next week. Right? He said it was the House, the Senate and the executive. I mean, and then there's the Kuhnen lady and the baby eaters that are coming in to follow.

I don't know how if the teachers are stupid, how the kids get smart.

You know, I just don't know how we overcome these structural changes. Maybe I'm being crushed. Yeah.

Not only is it minority rule, but minority rule by a party that has shown itself to have no governing agenda other than. Right. Obfuscation, intransigence, stonewalling. Liberals cry there.

What's what is the Republican Party? And yet we need to reconcile what it what it is because it is going to play the dominant role in American politics in the forthcoming future.

I mean, I think it I don't mean to be totally the most negative person in the world. But, you know, President Obama was talking this week about why people turn to America. And it's not just because we export all these wonderful cultural ideas, but it's also because we are the litmus test for self governance. And in this moment, this is what it looks like when that experiment in self governance begins to fail and we make their phone.

But yes, but this is this is what we are.

Self-Government is only as good as we are. And so the structure itself is irrelevant.

But politicians, let's be honest, politicians are mirrors of who we are.

They are much more than they are. Right. And that's the scary one minute left. Tell me something hopeful, something optimistic, something one optimistic, hopeful thing. And then I'll say mine. I thought of a lesson. I said, Oh, that's a great question.

And the season with tell me something hopeful, John, the the end of the year is coming. We like that.

I think that the fact that Joe Biden won the same popular vote more than Ronald Reagan, more than Clinton, more than Truman, more than Jack Kennedy, suggests that we are a 51 percent country and it may just be fifty one percent. But he is president and Trump is only president in his and Rudy's mind. And this small tribe. It's a big thing, actually, I think we've lost sight of this. Try as you might. At the beginning, on January 20th, a woman who is the daughter of a Jamaican and Indian immigrants is going to become the country's first female vice president.

Soon, the next person may be the next president. The American story continues to change.

Mine is Keith Richards. Stop smoking.

I, I just I'm just saying anybody can do anything at any time because I didn't think that anything. Change is always possible. All right. Time for new rules, everybody. No doubt that the police chief of Marshall, Arkansas, resigned after posting on his social media death to all Marxists Democrats. Someone has to ask him how many Marxist Democrats are there in Marshall?

If there's two, that's one more street lights. It's a one horse town.

And unless that horse has breeding the Communist Manifesto, I think we're safe.

They're all neighbors of the Georgia woman who turned her porch into a restaurant for chipmunks must conduct a wellness check.

Hey, we all get lonely during a pandemic, but turning your porch into an Applebee's for rodents. All I know is get there early in the day because dinner is nuts.

There are all the woman who couldn't have children of her own and so had her own mother be the surrogate mom, let's never say to her daughter at breakfast, hey, clean your plate. Grandma worked hard on those egg.

It's the last show on this mural. Someone must tell the Michigan couple who had a daughter after 14 sons. Congratulations. Oh, and also stop having children.

It's a uterus, not a salad shooter. Neuroscience has to explain why once you turn 60, everyone looks like a child.

Cops look like are 15 major leaguers look like they're 12. And not to put too fine a point on it, but this is my proctologist.

And finally, new rule. Hey, it's our last show of the season. Screw the rules. Tonight, I'd like to tell.

Tonight, I'd like to tell you a tale of Dr. William Miller, the American preacher whose teachings spawned the Seventh Day Adventist religion of today in the 19th century.

Miller grew an enormous following by telling anyone who'd listen that he could by reading the Bible and then applying his own math to predict the exact date for the second coming Jesus.

Big return to show business, which good news, bad news also meant the world would be coming to an end.

So peaking in the early eighteen forties, William Miller's rallies attracted thousands of people, all focused on this one idea that the world was going to end on his predicted date of October 22nd, 1840. For that is the day the world would come to an end. Spoiler alert it did not.

Christ totally blew them off. He was supposed to show up and just flaked. Typical. Now, when you stick your whole religion on one all important prophecy that doesn't come true, the logical reaction from followers should be, well, I guess that was a bunch of bullshit.

But no, no, no, no, this sect doubled down and to this day refers to October 22nd, eighteen forty four as the great disappointment because of course it's disappointing when the world doesn't end.

But the important thing is that you didn't let your faith be shaken in the guy who got it dead wrong.

So by now you're saying, Bill, what the fuck does this have to do with what's going on in the world today?

Well, recently there's been another large group of people who had a great disappointment. And will not accept their loss and the challenge for us is how do you get people out of a cult, especially when every time you present evidence of what is obvious reality, they take it as proof of you being in on a conspiracy to destroy them. And for the answer to that question, we must turn to. And I'm sure many of you have already guessed who I'm going to say now.

Catherine Oxenberg.

Yes.

Catherine Oxenberg, actress, star of Dynasty, European royalty and lady in front of you at Whole Foods, Catherine Oxenberg, because she got somebody out of a cult.

And I know about 70 million other Americans I'd like her to talk to.

And now, if you don't know what I'm referring to, Catherine Oxenberg was recently featured in not one, but two documentaries about a cult called Nexium that brainwashed her daughter, India. Nexium was led by a conman now serving 120 years named Keith Ranieri, a.k.a. Vangard. What's the name he gave himself? Vangard.

And as I was watching this documentary, I couldn't stop thinking that Ranieri.

I mean, Vangard reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on who. For example, like most cult leaders, Vangard had an extraordinary need to be surrounded by asked. Liquor's telling him how great he was.

Has your being a part of my life enhanced my life? I don't have words to tell you how much it has a heartfelt tribute to Vangard.

You make it possible for us to grow ourselves every day and to the people that we want to be.

A very amazing man in many, many, many ways. Who did that remind me of.

I don't really have to be more proud to be standing next to you, but thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our president.

You're living up to everything. Everything I thought you would. You're one heck of a leader. Oh, yeah, that guy.

The one who is also always bragging about what a genius he is, but I'm smarter than him, I'm smarter than anybody. I'm a very stable genius. Donald Trump's very, very large brain.

We'll get this Vanguard's followers believed he was the demonstrably single smartest person in the world because he told them, he told them he spoke in full sentences when he was one and also that he invented his own math, just like Dr. William Miller.

And both Trumps and Vanguard's status as cult leader sprang from their creation myths as off the charts business demands, when in reality, Vanguard's consumer bylined business was a pyramid scheme shut down by the state of New York and about as successful as the three casinos. Trump drove into bankruptcy in the 90s when they both started fake schools.

And then there's the fact that both men were such unrepentant sex creeps, they literally could not stop themselves from bragging about it.

If we conquer a woman, if we grab the thing, we want to fuck whatever it is and fuck it. And if we do whatever we want and they like it, and when you're a star, they let you do it, you can do anything, whatever you want, grab them by the pussy.

Oh, yeah, you didn't notice? OK, it seemed rather parallel to me and like all cult leaders, they had to have that one queen bee around them who they deputized to recruit others into their sick games. Vanguard had Smallville actress Allison Mack. Trump has Lindsey Graham. And you know, when you're fighting a cult, you're not just fighting the leaders, but all the enablers who see you as an enemy. Truth is a threat to them.

That's why what Catherine Oxenberg did was so instructive. You've heard the phrase hate the sin, love the sinner. Well, she practiced. Hate the cult. Love the cultists. She didn't scream at her daughter that she was stupid, she didn't cut her off, she just kept trying to remind her of who she used to be. I think we need to try that on Kuhnen.

You know, the ones who believe that rich liberals are running a massive pedophile ring and eat babies and in some cases are really lizard people wearing a human mask, and they were assured that Trump was going to win re-election, as Dr. Miller's followers were, that the world was going to end in eighteen forty four.

They were told to trust the plan that Trump would get a second term devoted to busting. The Democratic sex trafficking ring. But now on message boards, we can see they have doubt and despondency, one of them wrote, My faith is shaken. I followed the plan. Trump lost what now? What now, opportunity to lift the scales from their eyes, but it's not going to happen from mocking them or calling them stupid or making smart remarks, like if Kamala Harris really is a lizard person, why didn't she eat that fly on Mike Pence, his head?

Don't do that. I'm saying don't do that. One more and then don't you rather, if you have Trump relatives over for Thanksgiving, understand they have been through a traumatic event, their savior, their strongest, smartest manliest hunk of a leader who ever lived, just got his ass kicked by the 20 year old man.

Don't gloat, don't even try to argue, because arguing with cult people only makes it worse if there's hope it's not in any of the words that were communicated.

It's in here. And so it is for me to all of you in the audience, thank you so much, who put up with so much just to be here, all of the folks who helped make this possible during this trying time, the crew to roll with it so. Well, my brilliant staff, thank you all and especially everyone at home.

Here's hoping for a better next year. Couldn't have got through this one without you. Thank you very much.

Thank you, John. Alex, thank you. Michael Eric Dyson Levak, January 15th. Thank you very much. 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.