Bill Maher and Ben Shapiro debate America's polarization, contrasting their views on pandemic mandates, climate geoengineering, and Trump's election fraud claims. They analyze the Ukraine war, arguing deterrence failed due to Western inaction since Crimea, while Maher speculates Putin seeks imperial glory akin to Milosevic despite modern Russian cynicism. Ultimately, they agree that despite deep ideological divides, engaging in non-political dialogue remains essential for a less fractured society. [Automatically generated summary]
His long-running show, Real Time with Bill Maher, hits its 20th year on the air next year.
It's been Bill's vehicle to challenge, and often mock, politics of the day from his liberal perspective.
But Bill's one of those old-school liberals you don't see too much of these days.
Progressive ideas on taking care of people and the environment, but also an adamant defender of free speech and a critic of wokeness, meaning his commentary and joking about news and politics often hits the left, too.
Given the Russia and Ukraine news right now, in this episode, we revisit President Trump's presence on the world stage and his relationship with Russia versus that of President Biden.
We'll also discuss left-wing media misinformation and dishonesty on COVID the last couple of years, and what it would take for Bill to cross that political aisle and finally vote Republican.
Hey and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
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First of all, I was afraid of COVID protocols that were going to be onerous.
So I was like, I'm not going to do it in a blue state.
But it turned out there was a lot of protocols last night from the city of Miami and the theater.
There's so many people with their hands in the protocol pie now.
The unions can get involved, the networks.
So it's not just the government or the CDC.
Everybody who wants to indicate how much better a person they are than you by showing how much more safety they can get.
I honestly think we need any of this now.
But that's why I chose to do it in Florida, because I've been to Florida a couple of times.
It was the first place I went after I got back on the road, I think about a year ago.
And I've been back a couple of other times for gigs here, and there just was much more of a feeling.
And I know people who live here who say, yes, we never acted like this was the end of the world.
This is not the Andromeda Strain.
Yes, it's a serious thing that we should respect and take seriously.
But Florida had the reputation, well-deserved, for life goes on.
And so that's why I chose to do it in Florida.
And that's why, I mean, that's the one thing I'm going to say.
I like that better.
You know, I have a lot of quarrels about how this coronavirus was handled.
I mean, you can respect it and have compassion for the people who suffered from it, and still have, as I do, and I have made this very known to my audience, who mostly doesn't like me for it, that I don't think it was handled the right way.
Yeah, I mean, for us, I mean, for my family, we actually moved mid-COVID from L.A.
to Florida, and this is one of the reasons.
I mean, in L.A., they shut down all the public parks.
You couldn't take your kid outdoors.
And then there were a bunch of riots, and it was like, well, if I could take my kids rioting, it would have been okay, but I couldn't take my kids rioting, so I had to be double quarantined in my home.
I was quarantined for the virus and then quarantined because there were riots outside my door, and it was like, I'm getting out of here.
I mean, one of the first editorials I did when I had to be doing the show from my backyard was about how Just in general, I think we should handle any disease, but especially this one, more internally, not just externally.
Yes, there is that element.
Externally meaning vaccines.
Okay.
Yes, I'm glad we have the vaccine.
I personally would not have wanted to get it, but I did.
Took one for the team.
I would have rather had my own immune system handle this one.
Now, to me, it's a case-by-case basis.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
I just think everybody's different.
Now, there are some diseases out there I would fight you for the vaccine.
OK.
But this one because America is so unhealthy.
That's the essential part we don't address.
So unhealthy to begin with that it's great we have a vaccine because that is what is saving the lives of everyone smart enough to get the vaccine who is not in good health to begin with.
I mean, there's a lot of silliness on both sides, a lot of bad information on both sides.
I don't think the liberals liked it when I pointed out That I think it was something like 41% of Democrats, when asked the question, I mean, and this was in the New York Times, they had Republican versus Democrat views on COVID.
And something like 41% of Democrats, when asked the key question, how many people who get COVID need to be hospitalized, thought it was over 50%.
When it was, of course, around 1%.
I mean, that's a crazy number.
To be off that much about the... No wonder they think you need a mask everywhere.
If you think half the people who get it need to go to the hospital and it's really 1%, how did they get that bad information in their head?
And I said, you know, Fox News and the right wing has a lot to answer for, for a lot of misinformation out there.
I would put climate change as top of that list.
But the left-wing media should answer for that.
How did your audience get that bad idea in their head that so many people need to go to the hospital who don't?
And, you know, as you started to say, I did an editorial about this about a month ago.
Again, not well-received by a lot of people, but I was just, again, giving the facts.
We know who gets this and dies from this.
Who gets it?
Everybody.
Everybody gets it, including if you've had the vaccine.
Which they were wrong about.
Okay, they weren't trying to be wrong about it, but, you know, my overarching opinion was, modern medicine, it's wonderful, but you're wrong about a lot.
Stop being arrogant.
Don't look at me like, we've got the white coat on and the stethoscope around our neck.
Just do whatever we say, because when have we ever been wrong?
My answer, a lot.
You've been wrong about a lot.
Not because you're corrupt, although sometimes there's that too.
But you've just been wrong about a lot, including a lot about this vaccine.
Where do you ever see that in any story about anything?
And of course, 78% of the people who died or are hospitalized were obese.
And that's another one that's not a popular opinion to talk about, but I Feel like I have to because it's such a salient fact in this.
If you just said to somebody, okay, there's an X factor in this of 78% of the people who get it, this X factor accounts for 78% who die or go to the hospital.
Wouldn't you be a little curious, if you were a news organization, wouldn't you be talking about that fact all the time?
And yet we're at such a crazy place with obesity.
It is the ultimate third rail in discourse.
I'm talking about everything you could possibly talk about.
That is the ultimate third rail.
You just do not talk about it.
And of course, we need to talk about it.
That's the real epidemic.
Not coronavirus.
That's going to become, as it has now, I think, become a much more mild disease.
And it's going to be with us forever, as all viruses are.
It's not going to disappear, I don't think.
But the real epidemic is obesity, and that we don't talk about.
So my basic theory is that as a society, we've really cracked down very hard on the idea that people have any sort of control over their lives, and whenever you imply that somebody has control over their life and they have a problem, and that maybe they can avoid that problem, they get very, very angry at you.
And obesity is a great example of this, because the vast majority of people who are obese are people who probably should be eating less and creating caloric deficit.
Famously lost weight and they shamed her for that.
That's through the looking glass.
When you're the bad person because you lost weight and it's just seen as a different way of living.
There's no judgment to it.
And look, I don't believe in shaming.
I'm not fat-shaming.
I'm fat-splaining.
I'm splaining.
That, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Absolutely.
But science is not.
Science is not.
And those facts are unforgiving when you look at the number of people who died.
And you didn't have to be that much overweight to have a much worse outcome, having to go to the hospital, having to get ventilated.
I think 40% of the people who died had diabetes.
And again, even take COVID out of the picture.
I was talking about this before COVID and got lambasted by James Corden and other people.
Who attacked me.
Oh, Bill, you're such a bad person.
Again, I'm not shaming people.
I'm just saying we were never going to solve the health care crisis in this country until we get our arms around this thing.
And we're not allowed to talk about it or else you're a bad person.
And anyone who doesn't, I'm sorry, you have blood on your hands.
Anyone in the media who doesn't talk about this because you're so afraid of the reaction, you have blood on your hands because you're not doing these people a favor.
You're not doing people a favor.
Like I always say, ever see a fat 90-year-old?
Never.
Shouldn't that tell you something?
I mean, you're either going to die fast from COVID, especially if you're not vaccinated from this, or slowly.
And also, it's going to bring down, as it was before this, The economy of the country.
Because, I mean, when we were debating health care in this country for years, and Obamacare, and on and after, it was always about, we would look at the charts, we would see how much health care spending is going up, and people would say, we can't do it.
We can't just not do anything.
Right?
Whether you thought Obamacare was a good idea or some other program.
We need some program to deal with this.
But never part of that program was, let's ask the people to participate in their own health.
I think this is what you were getting at.
We don't ask people to, you have to participate.
It can't all just be, the government can't solve this On their own.
Vaccines can't solve this on their own.
You have to do it.
You know, I said at one point, it's not between you and the government, it's between you and the waitress.
So in a second, I want to ask you about how that kind of ties into broader issues of identity politics.
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So one of the things I think that we're speaking about here is the attempt to turn everything into an identity.
And so if you are, Adele is bad because she shed her identity as an overweight singer for a new identity as just a singer who's not overweight.
And there's this feeling about nearly everything in American life.
Everything can be boiled down to an issue of identity.
And the problem with that, of course, on a broader political level is once everything's an identity, including your political perspective, every political argument becomes an attack on you as a person.
Because if your identity is your politics, and then I disagree with your politics, that's not us having a rational debate.
That's me attacking your character.
That's me saying you're a bad person.
It's me trying to un-person you.
You hear this sort of language all the time in a variety of issues.
If I disagree with you, obviously the most obvious example is on transgenderism where the argument is that if you don't want Leah Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, swimming against women, this is because you're trying to erase Leah Thomas's transgender identity.
Once everything becomes an identity, even putting that example aside, then It prohibits you from actually having rational conversations with people.
The entire basis of rational conversation is my identity doesn't matter.
What I'm arguing up here with you is what matters.
Yeah, I would agree with all that, but you would, or I would ask you if you would agree that there's certainly a lot of that on the right too.
What is more of an identity than the Trump voter, the white person who thinks that America is being taken away and becoming a different kind of country than they remember it?
You know, let's make America great again, wink wink, you know, white again.
I mean, that is also a type of identity politics, yes?
I mean, for the people who actually believe that, sure.
But I wonder how much of that is reading into somebody else's politics, your desired, you know, character flaw.
I mean, you see that on the right doing that to the left, too.
I mean, there have been good studies showing that people on the right tend to think that people on the left don't care about family, people on the left don't care about Personal values.
And then when you actually ask people on the left what they care about, they care about a lot of those things.
You know, their idea, again, it's sort of your point about identity politics, their conception, I think, and it's wrong, Is that every Latino in America is thinking, boy, more immigration.
That would be the best thing.
And a lot of them are thinking, no, I'm here.
The last thing I want is someone else coming over who's going to do my job for a little less money.
And, you know, I wonder when this is going to sink in, in the Democratic Party leadership.
I think it's going to be very difficult for them because I think that there is a sort of math that was done in the early part of the 20th century with people like Reuters share writing about this talking about how there was this new emerging Democratic majority was going to be a majority minority coalition as the demographics of the country changed and became less white.
Inevitably, these minority groups would continue to vote at the same rates that they were voting for Democrats.
So if you get more Hispanics, you get more black voters, you get more Asian voters, inevitably this would be sort of the new rising wave.
And Obama really did model that in 2012.
He had a very diverse coalition combined with college-educated white liberals.
And so they thought this was going to be the formula here on out, and that was always going to be the formula.
And it turns out...
The guy who wrote that piece, he came out recently and he said, yeah, I got that completely wrong.
It's just not true.
Because the Hispanic vote, it turns out, is malleable.
A lot of people who are Hispanic identify as white Hispanic, right?
A lot of people who are Hispanic don't think of themselves primarily in terms of a certain racial identity that dictates politics.
They may vote differently.
I mean, Cuban-Americans don't vote the same way that Venezuelan-Americans vote, who don't vote the same way the Mexican-Americans vote.
The question is whether they're so tied into this sort of intersectional coalition where everybody is described based on their race, as opposed to a broad platform that anybody can ascribe to no matter what, that they can't get out of that sort of mindset.
And it feels like, sort of, yeah, I mean, I think that's the disappointment of Biden in some ways.
Biden was supposed to be a moderate who was above all that, and he really hasn't governed that way.
And then, you know, they're like, well, I made it, and I'm sorry, but I'm pulling up the ladder.
Because if I leave the latter down, then again, you're going to come in and take my job.
And I don't identify that way.
I'm an American now.
And that's sort of what we want.
I can't remember, I read this recently, but somebody wrote an article and said that the Hispanic vote is starting to look a lot like what happened with the Italian vote.
But didn't the Italian become much more of a Republican bloc?
And I mean, that could happen.
And if the Democrats lose that, they're in a lot of trouble.
Because that is a rising demographic as far as numbers.
And if that number even becomes like 50-50, I mean, it's funny because it was only a few years ago that people were saying, oh, well, the Republicans are cooked.
The whites are going down and the people of color.
And of course, if the people of color are going up, but they're voting the wrong way, as far as the Democrats are concerned, then you're really in a lot of trouble as far as winning elections, which I assume is what they're still trying to do.
Yeah, I mean, I think wokeness is such electoral poison for Democrats, not just because it's treating people as members of identity groups that they may not see as their chief signifier, but also because, to a certain extent, they're only appealing to certain identity groups.
I think that there are a lot of Hispanics in America who looked at the platform of Black Lives Matter in 2020, which said, get rid of the cops, the cops don't need to be here, defund the police.
And there are a lot of Hispanics who are saying, wait a second, I'm upwardly mobile economically.
I'm socially mobile.
I also may live in an area that has high crime.
This does not seem like a good plan to me.
And so, moving in terms of this agenda and making this kind of tip of the spear, the argument for a lot of Hispanics that America is a deeply racist, unfixable place, that doesn't apply to a lot of people.
It's an argument that really applies to a very narrow segment of the American population.
No, I always say, let's live in the year we're living in.
You know, because sometimes when the people you're talking about, you know, you think it was, you know, 1960 or 1860, and it's like, yes, we have a very sorry history, racially, in this country, including a lot of stuff that's still going on right now.
I mean, it's not like racism is extirpated here in America.
But it is very different than it was, and we need to live in the present era, in the present time, with the present conditions.
But when you say woke, you know, it's become, and I make fun of it too, because it's become an eye roll in many ways.
If woke, I assume at a certain moment, and it wasn't that long ago before we didn't have the term.
I only heard it, I don't know, what, it was three, four years ago?
Five years ago at most when we heard the term woke, and it was like alert to injustice.
Okay, I'm down with that.
I always have been.
People still understand that about me.
But, yes, it became sort of a byword for a lot of this goofy stuff.
You know, letting three-year-olds decide what gender they are.
This wasn't something five years ago.
Free speech, you know, used to be a left-wing thing that we were proud and owned, and now that seems to be under attack.
So again, I think I've stayed the same.
And look, as long as the Republicans are a party who, in my view, does not take seriously the emergency of climate change, and I'm not sure if they even believe in American democracy anymore, certainly most Republicans, I think, did not, and Congress So let's get to those two issues in just one second.
trying to not count the votes in an honest election.
As long as those two issues are what they are for Republicans, I don't think they're even savable.
Whereas the Democrats, maybe I'm being a cockeyed optimist, but I still think they are savable.
So let's get to those two issues in just one second.
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So let's talk about those two issues, because I know there are a lot of people in my audience who are thinking, OK, so if we just solve those two issues, then maybe Bill Maher votes Republican for the first time.
That's the other thing about voting in California.
It's so different than where the Republican Party is now.
It's not like if he won he was a crazy person who was, you know, going to start not counting the votes or do the crazy things that Trump did when he was president or, you know, not concede elections or something.
He was just, you know, he was a Kansas conservative.
And I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary, I think.
When he was the original maverick.
And I may have voted for him in that election.
If he had gotten the nomination.
I have come to really like Al Gore and know him personally and I like him a lot.
But I was not happy the way he distanced himself because of Monica Lewinsky.
That, to me, was always the big flaw with the Democrats.
It's like, come on guys, just man up a little bit.
Just remember he kissed his wife real hard at the convention.
So let's start with the climate change thing and then we'll get to the voting thing.
So on climate change, there's I think sort of a reasonable spectrum of opinion inside the Republican Party and then there are the people who just outright say climate change is not happening, it's not human cost.
The position that's been taken by a lot of Republicans, including me, I say that climate change is happening, I fully accept the IPCC estimates and the range of estimates from the IPCC.
I just think that the solutions that are being proposed are completely unreasonable.
So I think this idea that we're going to just pour money into green energy and this is going to magically solve the problem does not solve the basic problem, which is that most of the forms of energy we're talking about are not nearly competitive on the world stage with carbon-based energy.
So, a carbon tax would be almost impossible to do globally, is the issue.
So the biggest emitters, not on a per capita basis, but on an absolute basis, are China and India right now.
And they're not going to carbon tax anything.
We still have a global competition with China and India in terms of foreign policy and allowing them to pollute up the wazoo while we sacrifice our own energy ambitions.
That seems like a bad recipe for Europe right now, for example, with regard to Russia, which means that if you're actually going to do something, what I've talked about before is doing things like building sea walls.
I mean, either on the planet or in the restaurant.
It's just... But, I mean, this adapter, and it's funny you say that, because I was having dinner with a friend of mine, Just a regular liberal person, not a crazy person, left or right, but generally a liberal person, lives in Los Angeles.
And I heard him say exactly what you said.
I thought, oh, that's interesting that he's where you are.
He said, you know, we're not going to do anything about this.
Let's be honest.
We're going to have to start just adapting.
I still think we should try a little harder for a little while more to do something about it.
And I mean, you don't think if we led the way at some point that would have some influence on other countries?
Do you think China and India would just say, OK, forget it, we're just going to hold hands like Tom and Louise and drive off the dreadnought?
I mean, I think China would immediately take advantage of our Sacrifice on the on the economic front in order to gain more power.
I mean, this is the reason I say this is because this is precisely what you're seeing from Russia, right?
Europe has gone way more in a green direction than the United States has, and they're still basically powering their economy with Russian natural gas and oil.
I mean, 50% of Germany's natural gas and oil were coming from Russia.
And so the minute that Russia invades Ukraine, all of a sudden the price is double in these places.
And it turns out all these investments in green energy were making them dependent on one of the world's most aggressive powers.
Like, they're real, they're real unintended consequences to listening to Greta Thunberg when you make policy.
Well, I did a whole thing on Greta and Kylie Jenner about three or four months ago, which was an indictment really of the younger generations, because they're the ones who would have to care about this more than me.
I'm 66.
I've had my fun with the Earth.
You know?
I mean, I want to save it for the future, but they're the ones who are like, you ruined the planet, and we're environmentalists.
And I showed I think Greta has like 13 million followers and Kylie has 289 million.
And she's always getting on board a private jet.
And that generation, they seem to care so much about that kind of thing.
They want materialism.
Bitcoin, which is horrible cryptocurrency for the environment, uses more Currency than some entire nations.
They love it.
Don't even know it's bad for the earth.
I've asked them.
They, oh no, that's news to me.
So, until the younger generation cares more than they do, and I don't mean, you know, the Greta's, there aren't those, but in general, you know, I just think people are just gonna use up what we have until it's gone, and that's a bigger problem if you're 25 than if you're my age.
So on the climate change thing, if the proposals were for seawalls from the Republican Party and not, this snowball means there's no global warming, then you'd be in the ballpark.
Developing world, which nation are we talking about here?
Are we talking about nations where people are burning dung for fuel?
Because, I mean, by the way, we should mention that when it comes to green energy, it's very easy for first world people to care a lot about solar panels, but when you're burning dung for fuel in Africa, that makes it very, very difficult for you to care.
But what I'm saying is, third world, okay, places that have not had air conditioning, places that have not had cars, Okay, and now they finally are getting them.
It's very hard to say to them, look, we've been enjoying these things for quite a long time now.
The nice thing about being in communist dictatorship is that if you more people die, you know, what's a few more beans worth more or less is the nice thing about being a horrific tyrannical dictatorship.
I mean, unfortunately, you know, communist authoritarian nations don't have a great environmental track record from Chernobyl to Beijing today.
You know, what I said before about woke and like why it's an eye roll, it's like among the many goofy things they believe that they didn't used to is that, you know, maybe communism is worth a try again and capitalism is bad.
So in a second, I do want to get to the kind of big elephant in the room, of course, when it comes to all this stuff, which is voting and Trump and all of the sort of insanity of the last couple of years.
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Okay.
Okay, so let's talk about the notion that the entire Republican Party is sort of held hostage to the voting priorities of Donald Trump when it comes to his belief that the 2020 election was stolen, or maybe him saying that that's what he believes.
It's sort of difficult to tell what he once believed, what he convinced himself to believe, or whatever.
But getting outside of his head... I think he really believes it.
I don't know if he believed it the day that the election happened, but I think within a couple of hours he had I think they have proved in psychology that if you tell yourself a lie enough, you, you, you know, I think O.J.
thinks he did not kill his wife.
I think if you live a lie long enough, I mean, I know people who literally have changed their age.
You think that would be something that's kind of like easy to remember, and they really think they're a different age, because they've been telling the lie for so long.
So I really think Trump thinks he won that election, but... Okay, so that, that...
The basic idea here is that the Republican Party is a threat to sort of the very health of democracy.
And that if the Republicans are in charge, again, of say all three branches of government, they can pass whatever they want, that their first move is to stymie the ability of people to vote.
It seems to me that regardless of what Trump says or what he does, and I've been very vocal about the fact that the election was not stolen in 2020.
I know you have.
I know that.
It was as legit as any other vote.
I know.
And so I don't buy that.
With all of that said, the evidence of widespread voter suppression that has been alleged by, for example, Stacey Abrams in Georgia does not exist in the same way that the voter fraud evidence that Donald Trump suggests is widespread does not exist.
In fact, there's probably better evidence of mild voter fraud in particular areas than there is voter suppression.
You really can't name a person in the United States who said, I desperately wanted to vote.
I'm not going to argue with you a lot about that.
It is a little bit overblown, that issue.
And so the idea that Republicans are going to step in and just quash people's ability to vote and this ends democracy, I find that difficult to believe.
I do think that the Republicans do want to suppress votes.
I think when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, I think that was not a good move because I think they were naive, that such a thing was not necessary anymore.
But I think they have studied this and found that, at the end of the day, it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
The people who want to vote are going to vote.
Now, we shouldn't make it harder for them.
There shouldn't be long lines.
In black neighborhoods and no lines in white neighborhoods.
Sure.
There shouldn't be like one drop box in all of Houston County or something for two million people.
To me the greatest form of chicanery is what we see in California with ballot harvesting.
If I'm looking at something that I think is really corrupt, ballot harvesting is the practice where Parties can go door-to-door and pick up ballots from particular doors.
And so if you have a really well-funded Republican machine, then you go to all of the Republican houses, you pick up their ballots.
That seems like a real possibility of either voter fraud or intimidation.
That's more dangerous to me than some drop boxes get taken away.
Even gerrymandering, which everybody's all up and hot and bothered about.
I mean, it happens when Republicans are in charge and when Democrats are in charge, and it doesn't seem to have all that much of an impact on a broad national scale in terms of the allocation of the vote.
I just don't think that... If we had fair districts, People would have to come to the middle.
And that's what would, I think, more than anything else, save this country.
Because we're breaking down into this country where the only people who get elected are the far extremes of either party.
And of course, you can't legislate, you can't come together, you can't compromise when you have those two kind of factions in the Congress.
My worry more about what we're talking about is what Trump is doing now, which is trying to, behind the scenes, put people in place so that in the next election, When he tries to do what he did in the last one, it works.
When he calls up, as he did, and why he wasn't impeached for this, I don't know, when he calls up... Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State of Georgia.
Georgia, correct.
And says, can you fine me 11,000 votes?
The next time, he'll have somebody who will say, yes, I can.
In fact, I can fine 12,000.
How about that?
That's what I'm worried about.
It's what Stalin said.
It doesn't matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes.
I mean, I've seen no evidence that their state legislature... They're changing the law sometimes where it's not the state legislature who gets to make that call.
So, you know, with sort of all of this said, and I think that you're right that it feels like the country is separating right now in some pretty extreme ways, it seems like, to me, that that's a problem but it could be partially a solution.
The reason I say it could be partially a solution, as a member of the great sort, as somebody who moved from a blue state as a person who votes conservative to a red state, and Florida's growing increasingly red and California's growing increasingly blue, As that happens, it seems like to me, the hope for the country is not that we start electing moderates at the national level who start coming together and doing things.
It seems like the hope is that everybody sort of says, if we're going to stick around in the same country, it's got to be weapons down.
In other words, the federal government needs to let California be California, it needs to let Florida be Florida, it needs to get the hell out of the way, because otherwise it's going to be a bare majority.
I think it has to start with an attitude adjustment.
their views on the 49% of blue or vice versa.
So either we go back to a much more strong federalist system in which all of the localities that are now much more sorted politically sort of govern how they want to, and then we all share a couple of things like national defense and roads, or we're going to just get this kind of rock em, sock em robots till the end of time.
And look, I've said horrible things about lots of people, including many on the right, and used words I probably shouldn't have.
Yeah.
But I think we've got to step back from that, because we're at a place now where we're just loathing each other.
Maybe, I don't know, I wasn't alive for it, but I don't think people all through the history of this country had this kind of loathing for each other, where we see people with t-shirts on the right that say, I'd rather be with Russia than the Democrats.
Well, I don't know if anybody on the left is wishing they'd rather be with another foreign entity than the Republican Party.
I've never seen an equivalent of that on the left.
The hatred for Trump, in particular, was strong enough that if you'd given people... Of course, he was everything that was wrong with a human stuffed into one man.
What I mean is that Barack Obama literally sat with Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 and pledged him flexibility post-election if Russia would back off.
What I mean is that the Democratic Party... You're saying that's an equivalent to... I'm saying it's much worse than Trump saying That he believes whatever he believes because no one took Trump seriously about anything.
Okay, but if you're the president... You didn't take Bill Clinton seriously when he was banging everything inside.
I don't really see why you're taking him... What does that have to do with this?
No, I mean... I mean, you're talking about what the president... Bill Clinton in his life is... the comparison is Bill Clinton in his sexual life is frivolous.
Donald Trump in many of the things that he does, including his political life, is frivolous.
I don't treat him with the same seriousness I would treat Barack Obama.
It doesn't affect me or the nation what Bill Clinton did in his personal life, his sexual life.
It matters very much what the president does in his political life when he stands with a foreign leader who is an adversary, almost an enemy, now an enemy, for sure, and says, I believe him over the people in my own government, my intelligence agencies, the people who keep us safe, and then lied about it when they came after him.
Believe me, in that Helsinki press conference, I went after him with a blowtorch, but the actual impact of that was far more negligible than the impact of Barack Obama saying to Dmitry Medvedev what he said.
Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea two years later.
And Barack Obama, one year later, was handing over Syria to the Russians.
So I mean, like, in terms of actual hard policy, this is one of the problems with trying to gauge Trump that I always had, is that for every other president, you could see a direct connect between the thing they were trying to do and what they actually accomplished.
The things they were saying were intended to accomplish a particular purpose, and then it would either accomplish the purpose or not accomplish the purpose.
And with Trump, as I've said before, I feel like on his epitaph, it will say Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, he said a lot of shit.
Because he did.
He said a lot of s**t. And we all know that, instinctively, that when you read his Twitter feed, you weren't reading the well-thought-out press, you know, focus-grouped comments of Barack Obama, who actually, as much as I dislike Barack Obama's policy, he thought through what he was doing.
I don't think anybody thought that Donald Trump was anything more than a bundle of impulses in a lot of ways.
The question there is whether that was incentivized by Donald Trump or whether it was the pullout from Afghanistan, whether it was the last six months of saying we would do nothing.
So I could see that Trump could actually win that election easily, especially if the Democrats keep doing the stuff they are doing to piss people off, like in schools, with all that kind of stuff.
And that's what my theme has been.
Yes, both parties have a lot to answer for.
Again, I told you where my politics are in general, okay?
I'm not coming over to this side.
I do think that Republicans are more dangerous.
But what pisses people off with Democrats is so much closer to home.
It's so much up close and personal.
I mean, when you look at Ukraine, I mean, the Ukraine issue that he was impeached over, yes, I think it was an impeachable offense, absolutely.
But to most people, it's like Ukraine.
I mean, the Palin family working as a team couldn't find it on a map.
That's where most Americans are.
It's very far away.
It doesn't really influence my life a lot.
But when you have my kid coming home from school and saying, Mommy, am I a racist?
And you're five.
You just learned the word.
That's what I worry about with the Democrats.
And in that scenario, Trump could win.
But if he doesn't, if he loses like say about the way he lost last time, not by a lot, but you don't think, you think he's going to go gently into that night?
So in a second I want to ask you about, you know, kind of America on the world stage since Ukraine is obviously in the news and where you think that's going.
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Alrighty, so let's talk about the Ukraine situation.
So, it seems to me that when it comes to Ukraine, there are, I mean, not just seems to me, it's pretty obvious, there are no good options.
When deterrence fails, there are no good options anymore.
And the grave failure of the West was that we spent 30 years basically thinking that bad people are not bad people if we talk to them strong enough and if we negotiate with them or if we ignore them taking pieces of territory in Georgia under Bush or under Or Crimea under Obama.
If we just ignore it hard enough, then maybe it sort of goes away.
And now deterrence has failed.
And it seems like the world order is radically reshifting.
Like the United States, we seem to treat this as almost a natural disaster, like a thing happening far away.
But in Europe, they're treating this as an epic shifting event.
And they're talking about rearming.
They're talking about forming new security alliances with Eastern European countries.
I think this is actually turning out to be, I mean, obviously what's going on for the people of Ukraine is horrible right now.
But I think in the long run, I think it's going to be a good thing because, first of all, Putin is being shown to be way less strong than we thought he was.
I mean, this is, I don't know what the opposite of Blitzkrieg is.
That is what he thinks in his mind, and what he's finding out is that not only the Ukrainian people hate him for doing this, but the Russian people hate him for doing this.
They're like, are you crazy?
This is not the world we live in anymore.
We're on TikTok now.
We can see dogs getting shot, and families being torn apart, and things blown up, and we're a modern country, or trying to be one.
What are you doing?
So I think it's just going to turn out horribly for Russia.
The question I was going to ask you is, do you think it was the right thing to Not only keep NATO going after the Soviet Union fell, but to encroach right up to Russia's borders.
I actually do think that, well, I think that, here's the thing, if you are going to make overtures to a nation that they should try to join NATO, and then not back it up, that's the worst thing you could do.
So we took sort of the worst path with Ukraine.
We were encouraging them, maybe you'll join NATO, maybe you won't join NATO.
If you make an overture, maybe we'll consider it.
And so that leaves them in an incredibly vulnerable spot, because we're basically saying to them that you have to make overtures to us.
And meanwhile, Russia is on your eastern border.
And so Russia is looking at that going, no, we're not going to do this at all.
If you're going to make a move, make it strong.
In other words, if you're going to have Ukraine join NATO, make Ukraine join NATO and you make sure that they have the armaments necessary to defend themselves and you have a mutual alliance pact.
If you're an independent armed nation, by the way, right now, like to me, the one long-lasting ramification that's incredibly dangerous, if you're a non-aligned nation right now, you don't have a mutual defense guarantee with either China or Russia or the United States, how fast are you looking for a nuclear weapon right now?
I mean, you are looking like hell for a nuclear weapon right now because you don't want to be in a conventional war with a major power.
So I disagree to one extent, which is that you'll notice that there are a bunch of nations that Putin has attempted to invade.
Not one of them is a member of NATO.
So I think Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would all be Russia right now, if we had gotten rid of NATO.
I mean, Finland has been bordering Russia since 1949 as a member of NATO.
All of these nations joined NATO in the 90s.
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, I think they all joined either 99 or 2004.
Yeah.
And that was indirect opposition to, at that point, Putin, right?
You're talking late 90s, early 2000s, since Putin took power in 1999.
So I think the sort of optimistic vision, which is that if we had made more nice overtures to Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin was a plutocrat and he was an incompetent plutocrat at that.
And then he was replaced by a much more competent plutocrat and a dictatorial plutocrat who had territorial ambition.
And so I tend to be much more, you know, hawkish in terms of not trusting other nations to spin on a dime and suddenly become our friends.
And so the idea that... It worked with Japan and Germany, didn't it?
Well, no.
We fully occupied Japan and Germany after nuking Japan twice and after firebombing the living hell out of Germany.
Right, so there's a really good book by a woman whose name escapes me right now, it's called Secondhand Time, won the Nobel Prize a few years back, and it was an oral history of Russians talking about the Soviet Union post-Russia.
So it's just her interviewing a bunch of people who are standing around in 2000 talking about what the Soviet Union was like, and there's one particular Interview that's really striking, where she's talking to an old Soviet who had been imprisoned, tortured in Lubyanka by the KGB, who'd had friends and family members shot by the KGB, and ended up, or the GRB at the time, and ended up, GRU at the time, and ended up in World War II seeing a person who'd tortured him.
And the person looked at him and said, we're both Russian.
And he says now, he says, I don't understand the world I'm living in.
My kids want Levi's and they want radios.
Why can't we have that Russian greatness back?
And I think the biggest mistake the West makes generally, and this is true with Russia today, it's true with China as well, is that we tend to think that everybody wants the same things that we want.
They want material well-being.
They want longer lives.
They want their kids to go to good schools.
On a fundamental level, unfortunately, I think that that's not always true.
I think that there are a lot of people who want... George Orwell wrote this about Hitler in 1940.
You know, one of the reasons Hitler is successful is because what Hitler realizes is something that we in the West don't, which is we say we want a washing machine and we want nice radio.
What Hitler understands is sometimes people want blood, struggle, toil, and tears.
And if they don't want that, then it takes them a while to realize that the cost of that is too high.
And maybe that's what we're seeing right now in Ukraine, we can hope, is that the Russian people are beginning to realize... The Russian people, by the way, five years ago were polled about Stalin, and 70% of whom said, good guy.
Maybe they're starting to realize there are too many costs to this.
Yes, well, because strongman is built into the Russian culture.
And I also would say this about the Russian people.
You can't have communism for as long as they had it.
And it's a little like being from a broken home.
And I'm being abused as a child.
Communism was so evil, I mean, what it did to the psyche, the cynicism that it incurred in people, that you're not going to get over that in just a generation.
I think it's a very cynical country, a very cynical mentality there.
And, you know, when I hear people nowadays, fact free, talking about how, you know, a lot of, you know, if you look at Gen Z, it's like a lot of them think, oh, maybe communism Be good to give that another try.
You know, they just don't understand.
Because they have this idea in their head that if something happened before they were alive, what does it matter?
It didn't really happen.
It's like, but stuff did happen.
Stuff did happen.
I know you weren't around for it, but it really did.
And other people noticed it.
And we learned that lesson.
You know, communism doesn't work.
And it makes people very cynical.
Remember that old joke they had about, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us?