Overtime: John McWhorter, Sam Stein | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

okay okay these are the questions uh andrew yang and a group of former uh republican and democratic officials announced their new centrist political party uh i think david jolly's involved with that i saw their uh brief announcement of this and they said um other third parties haven't worked here's why ours will right do you think they can become a viable third party who is that too that's to all of your us ah you want to take it well the one thing that i um why is that tough no why is that such a hot potato jamel in the new york times has a very skeptical piece about this and it's all well taken but i think that we also forget that a lot of these things are driven by personality and charisma and there are only so many lessons you can take from 1850 because we have something called social media and so i think all bets are off at this point i think that the idea is valuable it's clearly urgent and i think that we need to see whether things could happen on the basis of unpredictables history can't teach us everything i just piggyback and add two things one is it requires a lot of money okay and the other thing to your point about personality you need someone who's dynamic who can cross appeal uh so it could work and by work i mean it could siphon off enough votes to affect the election if you had an extremely rich person with you know dynamic personality who did it uh but i don't know you know michael bloomberg could have done it but he chose to run in the democratic party so there's probably a reason for that you need more of a personality then michael bloomberg [Applause] they've actually had personable people run before it's not that it's that when when a third party starts doing well yes one of the other two parties steals what made them popular and adopts it right they were you know ross perot did pretty well and i think the republicans stole his thunder a little bit you know on debt and stuff they of course didn't follow through they're the biggest dead hypocrites in the world but you know and we had other ones back um wasn't um well i think the problem on the left is that there's like this trauma lingering from ralph nader right like you the idea that a third party would come in siphon off a couple thousand votes and you'd have a florida 20 2000 redux is you know panic fuel for a lot of progressives and so you're more likely obviously to get something in the centrist who would peel off moderate republicans but democrats are fearful of that because they need those people to leave the republican party and support them so that there's a lot of incentives that work again but it is an interesting dynamic about how much people are full of because it won't work because and it people are really as chris was saying they are more in the middle and there is this hunger this thirst for something that isn't and yet when push comes to shove and they get in the voting booth i don't know if it's whether the attack ads work on them or they just think that that party will lose they don't want to vote for a loser but they don't follow up they don't follow on those convictions i think a lot of it is the i think i mean political advertisement is you know geared around creating a whole culture of fear of the opposition i mean that is it's potent it's targeted and it's persuasive i do think though you know the one sort of caveat is that like you know joe biden's not a radical i mean he's not he's just not and he was put forward as a democratic nominee precisely because he bends into the radical he has been yes and i think that's part of that's part of what's been a problem for mr president is that he's raised these expectations by you know saying yeah let's do all this this two trillion dollar bill social media makes all this different though and i think that yes there's a possibility that social media could create a furor a united group of people constantly whipped up to stay together who were actually in this middle it would be a matter of branding but maybe those forces that for example kept perrault as a marginal figure could actually make a difference this time because of what twitter in particular is like it really creates a whole new world it would depend on the branding and the charisma but i can imagine that maybe it would be different this time because of these things in our pockets and the way it unites groups together it can create a new group in other words well i think what would happen my prediction is you could have it like a sensible middle party and it would then what would happen is it would force the democrats to go back to being the sensible middle party and they would because they would see that's where you know biden i mean biden reminds me of some grandfather and when when aoc and the woke people come into his office and he's just he just goes along he doesn't really understand it it's like grandpa can we have money to go play fortnite and and he's like yeah just take i don't know what fortnite is i don't know what tick-tock is just get out of my hair you know and that's really okay nearly one in three americans say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against the government ish pro or con [Laughter] is this an indication is this is this an indicator that we're already in a cold civil war well i would say we already are yes what does this tell us about the next presidential election how often were people asked about that particular thing before that's a genuine question now you would be inclined to put that in a poll where people asked in 1951 are you ready to take arms against the government i imagine many more people would have said yes then really and we can know now what was their big beef against the government imagine there would have been people who were very angry at for example still angry at franklin d roosevelt still angry at inequality in the system right there's a great deal of anger yeah you're right i mean the civil rights movement right i mean the 60s were there were people angry for incredible anger obviously assassination there was a lot of talk before kennedy got assassinated about that this is a common american thread lunatic a very despicable american threat you know obviously we've never experienced a president sort of harnessed the degree that trump has and i think that's what makes this kind of a unique moment but it's been with us throughout our history for sure uh okay why isn't biden more aggressive on legalizing marijuana yeah what i mean why is that why is that the one issue when the grandkids come in and say grandpa can we have some money to legalize i wrote about this because this is crazy to me at a time when he's experiencing like an incomplete enthusiasm deficit on the left here's an issue where it's like 80 of the country's like yes legalize this just do it and he's like uh we need to study it it's um it's low-hanging now the actual reasons the actual reasons and i'm not saying i'm not saying i believe them the actual reasons are is that he has a history of addiction in his family and he actually believes that's what it is that marijuana has a gateway protect which it doesn't of course it's hunter yes and that's i don't but he thinks hunter started on the pot it's a real it's a real belief that he helps right and i'm sure we did but so what we all start somewhere and of course that came out wrong that's not what i meant but i mean that beer is a gateway drug you know if you're if you're going to be hunter biden it's not the marijuana you can't stop everyone versus marijuana because one out of so many people is going to wind up that but it's like and the other thing that it was that i wanted to write about this is that it's not like biden hasn't touched sort of socially progressive hot topics before i mean he was the guy in 2012 yep who came out and said let's do gay marriage and everyone's at times like that is nuts what are you doing you're going to lose ohio this is crazy right i said it i'm gonna do it well it wasn't that was not quite that intentional is my recollection well everything's a little bit intentional he didn't go in there being like you know what maybe i'll just throw out that i support gay marriage yeah i think he did really yeah he was talking about somebody specific and he was just doing what he does riffs and he you know he he was just riffing and then the next day in the office like what did you do we were backing marriage his experience he has an experience knowing that it doesn't backfire right he could do it with pop but he doesn't so sam is it really true that there are people from states all over the country there's a question sure states from all over the country there's this ground swell to legalize marijuana and then hopefully go further if you ask me and the president has actually said that he's not interested because of the family issues in his conviction he is he is our reporting is that he has conveyed this to his aides that he is nervous about his own family's experience his current platform is decriminalization which obviously is different than legalization and there's a lot of people in the party who really think legitimately that this could be one of those issues that's so low-hanging could energize people yeah it would just if you just got it out of the way and we'd look back and be like what were we and it would be a social revolution and by the way it's already de facto in effect of course how do i know this i used to travel this country so paranoid i would put a little bit of marijuana i don't know what i'm aware [Laughter] no not there under my nuts really there was a little thing that was like it looked like half of a cigarette it was a metal it was just a tube that's all you need to smoke through and i only needed like this much i took one bud put in a kleenex under my nuts and i was ready if they said what is this what we gonna say i was gonna say it's not meaning the pot and then if they caught me i said it's snot i had that ready that's how paranoid i was and you don't still do that just for schizophrenia and now like and then there was a phase where i'd be like oh what states is it legal what can i i don't even think about it because even if it's a state where it's illegal are they really going to make a good thing about a thing under i don't care and i was like i just put in my nuts because i like it thank you everybody [Applause] you

Channel: Real Time with Bill Maher

Views: 628,238

Keywords: Chris Cuomo, podcast, The Chris Cuomo Project. John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University, NYT Newsletter Opinion Writer, host, Lexicon Valley, Sam Stein, White House Editor, Politico, contributor, MSNBC

Id: v9qkIrvZVSM

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022

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[u/Life_Calligrapher562]

The conversation always goes the same. The part I find most telling, is that they always talk about third parties in terms of national elections, not in terms of building from the bottom up.

[u/palsh7]

Disappointing that RCV wasn’t broached.

[u/YangforPresident]

This guy is a reactionary grifter. He writes about culture war nonsense.