Dave Smith critiques Bill Maher's claim that the upcoming midterms are history's most vital election, arguing instead that every contest is framed as existential due to government expansion. Smith refutes fears of a Trump-led coup or total democratic collapse, citing data showing increased support for Trump post-January 6th hearings and noting that checks and balances have long failed against surveillance and corporate collusion. He contends Americans aren't ignorant but are reacting to an oligarchy where the Fifth Amendment is nullified by tax laws and free speech is compromised by social media censorship. Ultimately, the discussion suggests voters embrace radical alternatives not out of ignorance, but as a desperate response to perceived authoritarian overreach and lost liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Radical Change After Midterms00:10:18
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
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If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
No Robbie the Fire Bernstein today.
He is out spreading laughter to a sad, sad world.
So he won't be making this one.
I apologize.
We missed an episode last week.
That won't happen again.
I have been moving.
I'm in my new home, as you can see, kind of a plain background, but I am constructing a studio for Part of the Problem, just a matter of yards from where I sit right now.
So I'm very excited to get that done.
I apologize if I could use a haircut and a shave, and I'm a little shaggier looking than normal.
Moving really sucks.
I love the new house, but the process of moving is a real bitch.
And I've always hated moving.
I've moved many times in my life, but I've always, as someone who's lived in New York City for most of my life, moving has been a process of moving from one apartment to another.
It's much, much different than moving from a house to another house.
And that's much different than moving with two very small children.
It is hard to get a lot done when you constantly have a one-year-old and a four-year-old demanding your attention.
So anyway, it was a whole process and getting moved in and getting the kids all set up and all of that stuff.
So I've been very busy with that, but I appreciate all you good people sticking with us.
And I will make sure to get you all of your normal part of the problem content this week.
Of course, on November 25th, which is coming up soon, day after Thanksgiving, me, Robbie the Fire Bernstein, and BK Chris will all be up in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Tickets for that are moving fast.
This is going to sell out.
So make sure you go grab them up at my website, comicdave Smith.com.
Los Angeles on New Year's Eve with the great Louis J. Gomez.
So make sure you guys come out to that one as well.
And big New Year's Eve show out there.
All right.
So for today's episode, I got to talk about my boy Bill Maher.
He's, you know, we've done response episodes to him before.
This one was particularly, I don't know, worth talking about.
It's really something.
Bill Maher is really, I'll say this for him, right?
And a lot of people give him shit.
People love him and people hate him.
I will say that when Bill Maher nails a point, which he still does from time to time, it's particularly enjoyable.
That's my personal opinion.
Like when he is right and he nails something, it's like, oh, yeah, it's great to watch Bill Maher just tear this thing to shreds.
But man, when he's off, it is cringy.
And this was, I think there's been a lot of things about Bill Maher that I disagree with and a lot of points that I think he's wrong on.
You know, this, this was the, was different.
This was different than previous ones.
I really actually couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe that he put this out.
It was so, it's so removed from reality.
It's the most hysterical take on the midterm elections I've seen from anyone.
I mean, I suppose that, you know, there's been more hysterical takes from like some person on MSNBC who I don't know anything about, but I just expect a little bit more from Bill Maher.
But anyway, let's get into this and respond to it.
And I think we'll have some fun.
Here's Bill Maher.
And finally, new rule.
Well, we had a good run.
I know that's not really a rule, but since everything in America is about to change in a very fundamental way, what the fuck?
Rules are about to go out the window.
Tuesday is election day, and I know I should probably tell you to vote in what, honest to God, is really the most important election ever.
So, okay, yes, you should vote.
And it should be for the one party that still stands for democracy preservation.
All right.
So let's already jump into it.
So, man, this is dark, but you know, so a couple of thoughts that I have there is imagine like saying, man, this country is really about to change.
I mean, we're about to go through a serious change after this midterm election.
Joe Biden losing the midterm elections, which obviously it seems like he's about to.
Who knows?
But that's what it seems like.
I'll mention there's a couple indications that something else might be going on here.
Then we'll get into that at some point.
But imagine sitting around in the year 2022.
And I got to imagine that part of this is just that Bill Maher is so filthy, stinking rich, and that he lives in Hollywood and he's just so removed from what this, what, what regular people, regular, what the vast majority of people living in the United States of America are going through.
Because to even say this country is about to radically change.
Yeah, it already has.
What do you think the last three years has been?
A pretty radical change in this country.
I mean, we could go back the last 20 years and what radical change it's been.
But holy shit.
I mean, everything has changed.
Yes, no kidding.
Everything has changed.
And the change has been a fucking disaster for the vast majority of the American people.
So it's just a little weird to say, like, oh, but the incumbent who is, you know, presiding over a terrible economy and record high inflation and, you know, all of this, it's like, oh, he's going to lose the midterm election.
That seems like the most fucking normal thing that's happened in the last three years.
I mean, Jesus, this is the big change.
All right.
And then, you know, he repeats the line that this is the most important election of our lifetime.
And, you know, this has become like a punchline that people make fun of because, you know, this is what they always say.
I mean, literally always, every single election, we are told that this is the most important election of our lifetime.
I will say, and people might give me some shit for this.
I think he's right.
And I think they're right when they say this is the most important election.
In fact, I think they're always right.
I think every time they say that, they're always right.
And they always say this is the most important election.
The next election, that's the most important election.
That's the most important, you know, and it's true.
I think that this is the most important election.
I think the last election was at the time the most important.
And the one before that was at the time the most important.
And I think this is what big government democracy leads to.
It leads to an ever-expanding government that touches every part of your life more and more and more.
And so then the next election is more important because it's more important who's going to be in control of this government that reaches into every corner of American life.
So I actually do agree with him.
Yeah, this is the most important election, but it really speaks to like this fun.
You would think after a while, like, I bet Bill Maher would have agreed that in 2004, George W. Bush's reelection campaign was the most important election of our lifetime.
I bet he would have agreed with that at the time.
And certainly the vast majority of the corporate press would have agreed with that.
I mean, does George W. Bush get a second term or not?
This is the most important election of our lifetime.
And then I bet in 2006, when the election was about the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives and what they could defund the war and blah, blah, blah, it's a rejection of the surge and all of this stuff.
I bet they thought that was the most important.
2008, Barack Obama, for sure, they thought that was the most important election.
First black president, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever, and go on and on and on and on.
They all think every election is the most important election.
But doesn't that say something?
Like, if all these elections are the most important elections, how come they just keep getting importanter?
Why is that?
It seems like, did we never get any of them right?
If we did, shouldn't they stop being so important at a certain point?
Shouldn't one of these elections ever be the second most important and not the most important?
And the reason why they keep getting more and more important is because the power of government grows bigger and bigger and bigger, because that's what government is incentivized to do.
Just like everyone, every business is incentivized to make more and more money, except they just can't, they don't have the coercive power of government.
So government is able to do it, whereas businesses sometimes have, you know, they have profits and then they have losses.
Government has huge losses and they just spend more money.
So the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then whoever rules over that now bigger and bigger, bigger government, yeah, it's more important who's in that position.
Anyway, that's just an aside.
But here's Bill Maher's ultimate point: one party believes in democracy and the other party doesn't.
Why Elections Matter More Now00:11:52
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's keep playing.
But it's also a waste of breath because anyone who believes that is already voting, and anyone who needs to learn that isn't watching, and no one in America can be persuaded of anything anymore, anyway.
The January 6th hearings, it turns out, changed nobody's mind.
Democrat Jamie Raskin said the hearings would tell a story that will really blow the roof off the house.
No, that was Hurricane Ian.
The hearings, roof not blown.
The committee did a masterful job laying out the case, but we live in partisan America now.
So it's a little like doing stand-up when half the crowd only speaks Mandarin.
No matter how good the material is, it's not going to go over.
After all the hearings, the percentage of Americans who thought Trump did nothing wrong went up three points.
That's American now.
It's like trying to put an argument in a marriage.
Even when you're right, it still gets you nothing.
Okay, so let's stop there.
So there's something interesting that Bill Maher said there where he blatantly contradicted himself.
I don't know if he noticed, but he said there's no persuading anyone in America today.
And then he said the Trump, the January 6th hearings didn't change anyone's mind.
And then he mentions, oh, that it did.
And in fact, three percentage points were viewed Trump more favorably after.
So people were persuaded.
People's minds were changed, just not in the way you wanted them to be.
Now, it may not be a drastic number, but that's not no one.
That's 3% of the United States of America's pretty substantial number.
It's the Libertarian Party's vote total.
So, you know, there's that is something.
And it's just kind of interesting that he goes, he goes, well, this is because of partisanship.
And then in his words, he goes, even the way they masterfully laid this out, it still persuaded people in the opposite direction.
And again, as somebody who looks, I'm just me, and I got this little show that I run and stuff like that.
But I know I've persuaded a lot of people.
I don't believe that you can't persuade anybody in America anymore.
There's lots of people who are still able to be persuaded.
I know, because I'm in the business of doing it, and I've done it with a lot of people.
So it's just, you have to deliver a compelling message.
You have to make good points, you know.
And you guys didn't.
And once again, I think this is the thing.
And this is what's so cringy about this is that it's like, I think Bill Maher is just so removed.
I think it is really easy in the same way that there's so much of, you know, for as much of there's this talk about privilege that you hear on like in left-wing America, right?
White privilege or cis privilege, whatever.
There's never a real conversation about it that actually gets to the point of anything.
So, you know, stuff like it's like you see something like microaggressions.
Where are they concerned about microaggressions on college campuses?
Maybe amongst you know anchors at MSNBC who are all making you know at the lowest high six figures at the highest you know pretty high seven figures they're all really concerned about it.
You know where you don't find any concern about microaggressions at all on a job site.
No one cares about it there because you have to be very, very privileged to care about someone being offended by mean words, and in some cases, not even mean words, just words, you know, just not very soft words or something like that.
So, likewise, for what Bill Maher, I think, is so privileged to the point.
And by the way, God bless him, he deserves it.
Bill Maher is a very talented guy, and so he's made a ton of money, but it's just been so long and he's so rich and he's so removed that I think he almost doesn't get.
Why would it actually turn people off in the midst of record-setting inflation and on the heels of, you know, just the destruction of the COVID regime and the just complete ungluing of the American society in general and so many millions of Americans losing their jobs and just having to downgrade and just all of this shit?
Why would it piss people off?
Why would it actually turn people against the party making the case that they spent all of this time and effort and prioritized some government property being broken, some people not agreeing with the elect uh believing the election results?
Uh, you know, like, can you not even like understand where maybe, oh, yeah, maybe that isn't somebody's number one priority?
You know, like I'm uh I'm doing pretty well, and and I feel the effects of inflation, like I feel them.
It's like, you know, they're like, oh, this is what I would have, this is what I do have now because of this.
I, I mean, I know people are being absolutely crushed by inflation.
Like, there's people out there who are making like 70, 80K a year and have like a family of four that they support that used to be in a situation where they're like, oh, I have a good job.
I make pretty good money.
And I'm not even saying, like, I'm saying like four years ago, they were in this situation.
And today they're like, I'm drowning.
Now, imagine that.
By the way, this is, I'm talking about one person making more than the median household income in America.
So this isn't like some crazy scenario of like a struggling poor person.
I'm talking about someone who on their own makes more than the average household, the median household income.
Okay.
That person is now drowning.
Imagine that person turning this on and going, this is what the news is talking about every day.
Maybe this is why your case actually persuaded people against you.
And you never even had a fucking smoking gun.
Would you have?
Trump didn't believe the election results.
Okay.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
Ben Franklin said our country was a republic if you can keep it.
Well, we can't.
And unless a miracle happens on Tuesday, we didn't.
Democracy is on the ballot, and unfortunately, it's going to lose.
And once it's gone, it's gone.
It's not something you can change your mind about in reverse.
That's gender.
So here's what's going to happen: Republicans will take control of Congress, and next year they'll begin impeaching Biden and never stop.
They'll impeach him for getting out of Afghanistan and getting into Ukraine.
For inflation, for recession, for falling off his bike, it won't matter and it won't make sense.
But Biden will be a crippled duck when he goes up against the 2024 Trump-Carrie Lake ticket.
And even if Trump loses, it doesn't matter.
All right, let's pause on Inauguration Day 2025.
He's going to show up.
All right, hold on.
Hold on.
So, So, I guess the big fear.
So, this is it.
It's over.
The country's over.
Once you lose democracy, you can never get it back.
And of course, losing democracy is people voting for the party that you don't support.
And what's going to happen is they're just going to impeach Biden over everything.
They're going to impeach him for, you know, Ukraine, which would be unprecedented because we've never impeached a president over anything related to Ukraine before.
They're going to go impeach happy.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, that like if you have anyone to blame for that, like the president was set under Donald Trump.
By the way, I highly doubt, I highly doubt it happens.
Half of the Republican Party are more hawkish on Ukraine than Biden.
I'd say another, just spitballing here.
I'd say another 30% of the Republican Party is as hawkish as him.
And then like maybe the remaining 20% are on a scale of being like maybe a little bit less hawkish to being like the handful of people who are actually decent on this issue.
There's 10 at most in the House and the Senate who are actually good on Ukraine.
But let me tell you, if you were going to impeach a president over something, you know, funneling weapons into a war on Russia's border that is essentially an act of war against a nuclear-armed country without a declaration of war from the Congress.
Not the worst thing ever to impeach someone over.
You know what would be a lot more ridiculous?
Making a phone call where you threatened to hold up a weapons deal if they didn't investigate criminal activity that is being investigated by our Justice Department and then caving on the weapons deal and never getting the investigations.
That's what Trump got impeached for.
For in a tempted quid pro quo that he never got and completely caved on.
It'd be less ridiculous than that impeachment.
But whatever.
Yeah, they're going to impeach Joe Biden for anything, for everything.
Trump Impeachment and Biden's Future00:02:12
And then he'll be so wounded when he runs against Donald Trump because really, that's what's going to make Joe Biden wounded.
That's it.
The fact that he had to survive impeachments.
Come on, man.
Joe Biden is going to be fucking wounded.
Joe Biden is wounded walking into his living room tonight.
Okay.
He doesn't need to be impeached to be wounded.
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Quitting Smoking with Fume Promo00:14:57
Let's get back into the show.
Here is where Bill Maher starts to get really goofy.
It doesn't even matter if Trump loses, he's going to show up.
He's going to show up the next day.
Lake ticket.
And even if Trump loses, it doesn't matter.
On Inauguration Day 2025, he's going to show up whether he's on the list or not.
And this time, he's not going to take no for an answer because this time he will have behind him the army of election deniers that is being elected in four days.
There are almost 300 candidates on the ballot this year who don't believe in ballots.
And they'll be the ones writing the rules and monitoring how votes are counted in 24.
All right, let's pause this here for a second.
Policies, the behavior don't matter anymore.
So, okay.
I just want everyone to think about how absurd and out of touch from reality this is.
So, Donald Trump was, um, which, by the way, quick aside, I don't know if anyone here remembers this, but there was a whole spook campaign that Bill Maher was a big part of in 2016 that they said the big threat of Donald Trump was that he wouldn't accept the results of the election.
Because, of course, it was a given at that point that he was going to lose.
But their big issue was that he wouldn't accept the results when he lost.
And how did this make any sense?
Like, okay, so what?
So, who cares?
So, he loses.
Like, what's Donald Trump going to do if Hillary Clinton wins and he doesn't, and Barack Obama is handing over power to Hillary Clinton?
What is Donald Trump going to ride in on his chariot and fucking, you know, like seize power from Washington, D.C.?
It was so ridiculous at the time, but they all got spooked about this.
Donald Trump won't, you know, concede the election.
Then, ironically, of course, Donald Trump wins the election.
Hillary Clinton is the one who is refusing to concede, finally concedes, and then calls it bullshit the entire four years that he's in there.
But then in 2020, Donald Trump actually does it.
And he says this is bullshit.
And he challenges the election results in the entire time up till the current day.
He says, I didn't really lose the election and it was stolen from me or whatever the fuck Trump's saying.
But this is when he was the sitting president of the United States of America.
Think about this, right?
Donald Trump from Election Day in November up until, what is it, January 20th, is the commander in chief of the military.
He is the commander in chief of the military until he turns over power to Joe Biden.
All of that time, he actually is the president of the United States of America.
And even then, he couldn't hold on to power.
So, how in the world do you think if the president of the United States of America wins the election, it won't matter because Trump's showing up.
He's showing up, even if he's not on the guest list.
It doesn't even matter if he loses.
He's just going to come seize power from the position of being out of power.
How?
Who's behind Donald Trump?
Are you telling me that you think the military and the CIA and the FBI, these people are all behind Donald Trump?
Really?
And oh, look, and then of course they run the thing where they go, oh, there's 300 Republicans on the ballot who all believe the big lie.
Okay.
Look, as somebody here, and I've told you guys this many times, I've never been convinced of this narrative that the election was stolen from Donald Trump through like ballot harvesting or any of that shit.
I am not, the 2000 mules thing did not sell me.
I just, I haven't been convinced.
I thought that Giuliani and Trump's other lawyers talked a big game, and then they never really had the evidence to back it up.
I do think the election, you could argue, was stolen in other ways, much more in plain sight, like the Time magazine piece argued, but you know, that aside.
This Donald Trump is saying the election was stolen.
The election was illegitimate.
Donald Trump was the Republican president.
He's the biggest figure in the Republican Party.
Of course, a lot of Republicans are going to go along with that.
But this would be like if you were like, you know, take how many Democrats, you know, in the running in, say, the 2018 midterm elections were running who were on record believing in the big lie of Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump win.
How many?
All of them?
Was there one who didn't believe that?
You see?
And of course, because it's just fucking politics, because they're just going to go, oh, yeah, that's what our base wants to hear.
So we're going to say that.
All of this chinning up.
I mean, come on, man.
You really think the fucking Republicans are about to come in here in these midterm elections and what?
Orchestrate a coup and reign in fascism on the government?
Like, okay.
That would take Republicans actually having a backbone for once.
I'd be pretty shocked to see it.
But this is all just like complete fantasy land shit that Bill Maher's off into.
Donald Trump's going to lose the election and still show up and seize power.
Just totally removed from reality.
All right, let's keep playing.
Trump could be filmed throwing a baby off a bridge and still win.
Not to give Herschel Walker any idea.
This really is the crossing the Rubicon moment when the election deniers are elected, which is often how countries slide into authoritarianism, not with tanks in the streets, but by electing the people who then have no intention of ever giving it back.
The Republican up for Wisconsin governor just said if he's elected, quote, Republicans will never lose another election.
This is how it happens.
Hitler was elected.
So was Mussolini, Putin, Erdogan, Victor Orban.
This is the it can't happen to us moment that's happening to us right now.
We just don't feel it yet.
We're the Titanic right after the iceberg hit.
And honestly, too many Americans just don't care and won't even care after it happens.
This is really something.
So you have a clip from one guy saying Republicans will never lose another election.
That doesn't in itself, that's very different than him saying there'll never be another election, right?
I mean, I don't think that's the point that he was making, but maybe I'm wrong.
I don't know enough about the details of what that guy said.
But again, if you want to talk about like hyperbole amongst politicians right around election day, you can find lots of examples of that.
And that's not certainly not unique to Republicans.
Republicans and Democrats all say a bunch of bullshit.
And you know what they're actually going to do when they get in there?
Is they're just going to serve the interest of their corporate donors.
That's pretty much what's going to happen.
Like it's, it's just going to be, don't worry, Bill Maher.
The crony system that we have will continue and it's not about to fall apart if the Republicans win the midterms.
At best, there's like four hardcore Republicans who are actually going to like buck the establishment who might win next week.
So, or in a few days, I guess now.
I'm losing track of time.
This move's taking it out of me.
But, you know, one of the things that's pretty amazing about this idea that Bill Maher puts out there that a lot of Democrats are putting out there that we have this real threat to our democracy.
And he goes over, you know, Hitler and all, you know, how, oh, people were voted in.
And yeah, the Nazi Party was voted in.
That is true.
And then they, you know, really took over and became fascistic dictatorship or fascist dictatorship.
What's interesting about it is that it's so removed from the reality of how the United States of America's government operates versus the fantasy versus how it presents itself.
So what do you, you know, are the CIA and the Pentagon and the FBI and the NSA, they are all very concerned about the threats to democracy.
Our unelected, permanent shadow government is very concerned about the threats to democracy.
Doesn't that just say it all right there?
Maybe this is why January 6th hearings didn't move the needle.
Maybe this is why it actually lost support, persuaded people in the opposite direction.
If you want to talk about fascism, let's say that you really believe in democracy.
Now, I've been on record saying before, I find in theory, there are a lot of problems with democracy.
You know, the way, certainly the way that it's talked about in the current day.
So, you know, democracy, Ludwig von Mises, the great economist, he was a proponent of democracy and he argued that democracy allows for the peaceful transfer of power.
That's better than warring every time, you know, someone wants to take power from the other.
It's better to just have a vote.
And there's a solid argument for that.
Certainly when you weren't talking about the modern era superstates that we're talking about today, it made a lot more sense.
Perhaps there's even still an argument, that argument that Mises made.
You know, at least if you have a vote, then you can have the peaceful transfer of power.
But that's not really the argument that people make today.
The argument that they make today is that democracy is a moral good in itself.
And that democracy means that the government is the government of the people and for the people or something like this.
So that it's inherently everything good is democracy.
Everything bad is fascism or whatever.
But of course, in theory, this doesn't really make sense, right?
Like a majority supporting some policy doesn't make the policy good or bad.
If the majority of people tomorrow supported slavery, that would be no, it wouldn't make slavery any more moral than if we had the current support for slavery, which I'd imagine is 0.001%.
But who cares?
At one point, the majority of people supported slavery and it was evil.
Now, no one supports slavery.
Still evil.
Doesn't matter, right?
The question is whether the policy is good or bad, not whether the majority support it in the same sense that if, you know, two rapists and, you know, a helpless woman are in a room together, it doesn't all of a sudden, all of a sudden become okay because a majority supports the rape.
You know, it's just, it doesn't work theoretically on paper.
But I would also argue, like I've made this argument before, that I also would say that I don't really think too many people believe in democracy.
Like in their heart of hearts, I don't really think there's many people who believe it.
They may say they do, but they don't really.
I don't think that there's too many left liberals or progressive types who would say that, like, you know, the example I've used a lot before is gay marriage.
Gay marriage was being legalized in state after state after state.
And then there were still like 20-something states where gay marriage was outlawed.
And the Supreme Court came in and just ruled that gay marriage was the law of the land in all 50 states, basically just forced it on the remaining states.
And I'm fine with that.
I mean, I don't think government should be involved in marriage, but as long as they are, I don't really have a problem with gay marriage being legal, whatever.
I've never heard a progressive or a liberal or a leftist ever say, no, they shouldn't have done that.
It should have been left up to the democratic process in each state.
You get my point?
Like, you don't really believe in the process.
You want your ends, which is correct.
That's how you should feel.
Like, no one, if it was that, you know, it's not like when there was way back in like 2004 or whatever, 2008, it was like 55% of the people were against gay marriage.
And I never heard anyone on the left say, well, if the majority of people are against it, then they're against it.
Democracy, right?
They were like, no, this is evil.
And we think gay marriage should be legal.
And I, so in other words, I don't think anyone really just believes that if the majority feels this way, then that's what it should be.
So if the, like, for example, if the polling said that 52% of people were pro-life, I don't think that the pro-choice people would go, well, that's democracy, right?
I think they'd still think it's a violation of a woman's right to bodily autonomy or whatever.
And of course, the same for the pro-life people.
Even though the majority of people are pro-choice, a slight majority, but the majority are, that doesn't stop any of us from being pro-life.
It's just, so there's a lot of people who pretend to believe in democracy.
I don't think they really believe in it that much when it comes down to it.
Democracy vs Authoritarianism Warning00:15:00
But let's just say you did.
If you really believed in democracy and were concerned about threats to democracy, would you really be concerned about January 6th or Trump not, you know, Not accepting the election results.
If you're really concerned to, if you're really concerned about the threats to democracy, let's talk about the CIA.
You know, like let's talk about unelected, unaccountable, permanent shadow bureaucrats and spies and people who really wield enormous control over our government, who the voters never had any say in putting in there.
If you're really concerned about fascism, let's talk about the Patriot Act and indefinite detention and lockdowns and vaccine mandates and all of this stuff, right?
Like, but no, none of that, none of that.
It's just all of the people who will support all of that go, but, you know, even though the Democrats have denied the legitimacy of elections a million times, now the Republicans are doing it.
That's supposed to be the big threat of fascism.
It's just so goofy.
It makes no sense.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
And honestly, too many Americans just don't care and won't even care after it happens because they never followed politics to begin with and were never taught in school what Democratic government was supposed to look like.
So how sad can they be about losing something they never knew they had?
You can try and tell them that we will no longer have a system of checks and balances, but they will have an answer for that.
What's checks and balances?
All right, let's pause it here.
Democracy's hard.
Pause it.
Athens.
I mean, just what unbelievable arrogance, man.
And he's so wrong.
He's so wrong to think that the problem is that people never paid attention to politics.
Look, we got more people paying attention to politics right now than we ever have.
And in every way, like in areas of life that you used to just assume had nothing to do with politics.
I mean, you can't go to a fucking football game or turn on network television or anything.
Politics touches every corner of life nowadays.
More people are paying attention than ever, and things are worse than ever.
God damn, I wish less people paid attention to politics.
And I say this as somebody who makes a decent amount of money off of people paying attention to politics.
We'd be better off if we didn't.
I mean, I'm supposed to, but none of the rest of you.
I just like, you know, okay, there's my cockiness to match Bill Maher's, but all the people listening to this show, we should be paying attention, but no one else.
It's just like the idea that, oh, it's just that these people are so stupid that they don't even know about checks and balances.
Bill Maher, we haven't had any fucking checks and balances in 200 years.
What are you talking about, dude?
Checks and balances?
Like, in what way?
What checks and balances?
So, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sold a war based on lies.
Well, the checks, what would the checks be?
Well, Congress.
Okay, they didn't declare the war.
They still did it.
What balanced that out?
Oh, you know, they instituted torture.
It's completely illegal.
Where were the checks and balances there?
Oh, there's none.
They got away with it.
They're both sitting around in their mansions, growing to an old age.
Well, fucking some Iraqi mom, you know, who held her fucking dead baby in her arms 15 years ago.
She, no, no justice for her.
There's no checks and balances.
It's all fucking myth.
Nobody ever gets held accountable at the highest levels of government or even in the highest levels of the corporate press.
They all just keep spewing their goddamn bullshit.
Nothing, no, the checks and balances.
Please, let me tell you something.
Someone, this, this caricature that Bill Maher has made up of a guy who's never heard of checks and balances, he's more enlightened than someone like Bill Maher who believes there are checks and balances.
That's the real idiotic position.
You're better off to have not even known about this bullshit propaganda than to be the one who's dumb enough to believe in it.
All right, let's keep playing.
Democracy's hard.
Athens didn't have to deal with Fox News or the smartphone that made everybody stupid.
And they only lasted 200 years.
So R246 doesn't look that bad.
All right, let's pause it there too.
By the way, I fucking hate this thing too.
Like, look, there's a lot of problems with fucking technology and social media and like all this shit, but this idea that the smartphone made everyone stupid, I really don't like this.
And I think it becomes a cop-out for kind of the regime that it's like, that's the problem, right?
The smartphones made everybody stupid.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, I'm sure there's some of it, but I think it made people smarter.
Maybe consider that, Bill Maher.
Maybe the reason why no one trusts CNN or, you know, the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever, Fox News or any of this shit.
Maybe the reason why no one trusts that.
Maybe the reason why no one even believes the latest election results.
Maybe the reason why no one even believes that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay nudist, you know, because of right-wing hate.
Maybe that, maybe the people don't believe any of that shit because they've gotten smarter from the smartphones.
Maybe that's why.
Maybe it's become so impossible to convince a large portion of the population that these people who lie through their fucking teeth about everything are ever telling the truth.
And maybe that's actually why we're in the position we're in right now.
Maybe it's not the failures of the fucking people for not knowing about all the fucking shit that you know about.
Maybe the thing is that they're finally starting to know some shit.
And so now they're seeing through all of this.
And okay, sure, maybe it manifests itself in some, you know, ways that aren't perfect sometimes.
And they're very likely to be taken in by charlatans and they're very likely to believe conspiracies that aren't necessarily true.
But the biggest conspiracy of all is that there are fucking checks and balances in our system.
The biggest conspiracy of all is that we live in a democracy.
We do not.
We live under an oligarchy.
And everyone should fucking know that.
If you pay attention at all, you should know that at this point.
Come on.
Bill Maher, you had George Carlin on your show years ago and he broke all this shit down for you.
We don't live under a democracy.
As George Carlin said to Bill Maher, we have the illusion of choice.
That's what the American people have.
And that's what we've had for my entire life.
The illusion of choice.
You don't get to choose, but we will pretend that you do.
I think people are waking up to that.
I think that's what's happening.
I think the smartphones are making people smarter, you know, and some people dumber.
But with what Bill Maher is talking about, I don't think it's that they're getting dumbed down.
Let's keep playing.
But before we do go, I'd like to say a little farewell to some of the things that really did make America great that now we're going to lose forever.
Like the peaceful transfer of power, the jewel in our crown, that thing that so many other nations couldn't pull off that we always did.
Oh, well, the Bill of Rights.
When there is no accountability at the ballot box, there are no actual rights.
Look, General Isimo Trump is not going to bring back child labor or end social security or resegregate the water fountains.
He doesn't hate Jews.
Ivanka's a Jew and he loves her.
Now that she's 40, only as a friend, but still.
But make no mistake, it will be an entirely different way of life for many because our elections will just be for show.
Like in China and Russia and all the other places Trump says a very strong free speech.
Well, he's a man who's always taken criticism well.
But I wouldn't count on that one lasting.
All right, let's count on freedom of religion.
So, I mean, again, I don't know, like just to say before, like, I think the craziest myth that you could believe is that we've had a Bill of Rights because we really have not for so long.
And you could go down, go through the whole Bill of Rights.
You give me an amendment to the Constitution, and I will tell you how it has been violated.
Whatever you want.
You know, the Second Amendment, how many people are sitting in prison for decades over gun possession charges?
You know, the Third Amendment, how many people are, you know, got militarized police with tens of thousands of SWAT raids a year.
They get the wrong door.
They don't even fucking care.
You know, the Fourth Amendment, see the NSA.
The Fifth Amendment, see the IRS, right?
Oh, you have the Fifth Amendment.
You have the right to not incriminate yourself.
Except every year, or perhaps every quarter, you are forced to incriminate yourself, to give up all of your information to the federal government so that they can potentially prosecute you for the crime of making money, the crime of producing something in a capitalist, supposedly, economy.
Yeah, we don't have a Bill of Rights.
We have a piece of paper that says we have a Bill of Rights, but no one follows it.
But it's funny that Bill Maher hones in on the First Amendment and talks about freedom of speech.
I mean, yeah, I guess we have freedom of speech, kind of.
You know, don't ask Julian Assange about that, but okay.
You know, of course, don't say the wrong thing on social media, or the federal government will collude with the social media companies to make sure you're silenced and ruined, as we now know, factually has happened to lots of people.
Quite a First Amendment.
Oh, but freedom of religion.
That might be a threat.
That might, you know, be threatened.
You know, don't tell that to the people who tried to go to church or synagogue or a mosque during 2020 who were arrested for it.
But all of a sudden, there might be a threat to that.
This is what's so like how out of touch Bill Maher is: is that like it's not that, you know, like, it's not that people, like, he's been enjoying all of these freedoms.
He's had the freedom to be a militant atheist for all of these years.
He's had the freedom to do whatever he wants to.
I think what Bill Maher has to understand is that it's not that other people had these freedoms and didn't appreciate them and now don't realize that they're at risk.
It's that other people realize that they've already lost these freedoms and now they're in a fuck it mode.
Like, well, fuck it.
We've already lost this.
Let's try to take out the enemy who's taking all of this away from us.
That's at least the mindset that they have.
And I think there's a very strong argument that they're right about that.
They may not be right in who they're supporting, but they're goddamn right that this is just naive bullshit.
Religion lasting.
QAnon and the other shock troops of the Trump takeover of the Republican Party are all quasi-religious entities who want a Christian government.
Oh, and the FBI might be replaced by an army of proud boys under the leadership of Michael Flynn.
Even something like Pot, will it stay legal?
It probably depends on whether Snoop Dogg calls Trump brilliant one day.
I mean, that's that's how things will be decided.
Hold on.
So this is, I mean, how insane this is.
Trump is just going to become this dictator who can decide whether pot's legal in every single state and all of this.
Donald Trump, they have this guy being fucking Mussolini or Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or something like that.
The last time Donald Trump was president, he was framed for treason by his own government and no one went to jail for it.
What type of dick now they've got him controlling every state's local cannabis rules?
Like, how fucking, how removed from reality is this?
Wild Take on Bill Maher00:03:46
This is just, it's unbelievable.
It's just like a last-ditch effort at this insane fear-mongering.
All right, let's keep playing.
Rule of law.
Ah, the rule of law.
That one was a real jewel.
Yeah.
Maybe our finest hour as Americans was after World War II when we gave even the defeated Nazis a fair trial.
Justice Robert Jackson said that voluntarily submitting our captive, defeated enemies to the rule of law was one of the most significant tributes that power had ever paid to reason.
Well, power will very soon not be paying any more tributes to reason.
Not in America, anyway.
So, yeah, I urge you to vote, but I've always been a realist.
I'm afraid democracy is like the McGrib.
It's here now.
It'll be around for a little bit longer, so enjoy it while you can.
All right.
Well, there's Bill Maher.
Very convinced that democracy is here now and will be gone soon.
I think Bill Maher can he can relax.
Whatever we have now that he thinks is democracy isn't going anywhere.
Unfortunately for him, it's not democracy.
But fortunately for him, what we have will be staying and it will be more of the same corporatism.
and authoritarianism and all of the same shit that we've had for a while, perhaps a slightly different flavor of it.
It's pretty wild to see this type of take from Bill Maher, who I know is not good on a lot of things.
But man, this one is just, I don't know.
He's really out to lunch on what these midterm elections mean.
And you can even, it's kind of like these people who talk about climate change, but then buy waterfront property.
So like, you got all the means in the world.
Fucking leave.
You're really this, this afraid of what's going to go, what's going to go down?
I don't think you are.
I don't think you really believe any of this shit.
Anyway, I'll say this one thing before we leave.
Everyone does seem to think that the midterm elections are going to go the Republicans way.
I'm one of them as well.
If I had to guess, if I had a gun to my head, had to bet on it.
I say, yeah, big wins for the Republicans on election day coming up here.
I will tell you, there was something really weird about Joe Biden giving that speech the other day where he preemptively said that there's a big threat to the people who are denying the results of the midterm elections already.
I don't know.
I just thought that was really weird.
It's a really weird thing if you're the president who's about to lose a big midterm election to say that whatever the results of this election are, you have to decide it.
Excuse me, whatever the results of this election are, you have to believe it.
You know what I mean?
It's a strange thing to say.
And then he went off on this whole thing about how the results may not be known for days or weeks.
I don't know.
Just that made me think maybe something here is going to happen.
It's a little bit more than what we're expecting, even what Bill Maher is expecting.
We'll see.
All right.
Thanks for listening, guys.
That's the podcast for today.
I'm set up in my new house.
We will get back on our regular schedule and get you all the episodes that you guys are used to.
We got a lot of fun stuff planned for this week, building the new studio.
A lot of big things coming in the future of this part of the problem podcast.