Overtime – Episode #741: Max Brooks, Sarah Longwell

Mom." All right, he's a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and bestowing off and next work since he's the founder and publisher of the BoWark and also him, how to eat an elephant, Sarah Longwell. What is that title?

How to eat an elephant?

“Why don't you tell them it's a funny book and a funny title?”

I mean, it's how do you solve a big intractable problem and how do you get voters to basically understand that the mega experiment has been a disaster? So it is the Republican elephant. It is the Republican elephant, but it's also an idiom, you know, how to eat an elephant one bite at a time.

It used to work for them. That I did. I was a Republican for most of my career. And then Donald Trump hijacked the Republican party and turned it into a fashion. You think you would go back after Trump?

Under no circumstances. Really, you think it's gone forever.

I don't think, I mean, I think that the party that I was part of is never coming back.

And the voters don't want it back. I mean, role of my work now is about listening to voters. And the Republican party is something completely different from the one that I was part of. Right. Okay.

These are from the people.

“Does the panel have any reflections on the 25th anniversary of 9/11?”

Well, yeah. Let's hear from you folks. I just bowed it off. You know, I was thinking when we were talking earlier. The 9/11 commission did a report where they said one of the biggest failures.

The security failures was a failure to imagine. Where nobody imagined that somebody could attack Americans on American soil. But terrorists couldn't do it. They didn't imagine the idea of turning a plane into a weapon like that. And it feels like that with AI, a little bit, that we are in a moment of a failure to imagine what could happen.

And that we're at the very beginning of that. Right. Well, I would also say that that sometimes the term failure of imagination is a term to absolve you of responsibility. I would call it a failure of belief. Because every time there's something, there's Pearl Harbor, there's 9/11, there's COVID.

There's always people sounding the alarm.

Always. People do imagine it. But then there are people who say, well, I don't believe it. It just wouldn't happen. And that's different.

Because when you hear it and you choose not to believe it, you have a responsibility. And I think that's a problem. The COVID analogy is really interesting. And some ways, you know, when you remember in the beginning of COVID, and it came out later, and I think one of Woodward's book, that Donald Trump was being told, this is really bad.

It is coming for us. And he said, it's the flu told us not to worry about it. It seems like his little, you know, we'll get the gear. We just did it on the show about what he said about AI. When there's a little gear, you just plug in this flu, they just unplug it.

It's a leopard light on the screen. It's like a cartoon, bugs bunny train. You just pull the lever and it stops. But anyway, it's not as important as Donald Trump. Because I don't know.

And there's no other way for him to figure out how to make himself into a hockey player, beating up the Canadian Prime Minister, or, you know, being the real answer. The memes he makes usually. Yeah, he loves his AI. Right.

“That's how he gets really big and tough.”

But I feel like watching the towers in real time. And then I remember for at least 10 years after that, there was a lot of conspiracy theories about you. What you saw with your own eyes, planes hitting buildings and then the buildings falling down. Oh, sure.

That's what they wanted you to think. I feel like it inaugurated an error.

I guess there was always conspiracy theories.

But an error where everything was a conspiracy. You could not really trust your own eyes about anything. And this went on for a very long time. Truthers, members, truthers, truthers. We had to get to the bottom of it.

Yeah. I mean, do you think that's over? I mean, I was in a Taylor Green. She was a 9/11. Not completely over, but a lot of them really recanted over the years.

I mean, as more information came out. And it just seemed counter-intuitive, shall we say? I do think that was kind of the internet, you know, social media and the internet meeting a huge event. And it did break people's brains in the beginning, right? Because for the first time, you could, you know, really go deep on.

But they didn't show us this angle or that angle. And I don't think that the conspiracy, you know, around 9/11, maybe it's gotten a little bit better. But Donald Trump launched his entire political career with a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama's birth certificate. Like the conspiracy theories, some of them were probably true about Epstein. But there's, I mean, we live in an entire conspiracy land right now.

I mean, I think it's just, it's just out of hand. And having said that, I do believe Candace Owens is a man. [ Laughter ] And it's you.

[ Laughter ] [ Cheers and applause ]

“Max, what do you make of the far right party in Germany winning a state election this week?”

I think this is so dangerous.

And I think we have to understand that immigration in Europe is very different than it is. Very different. For two very different reasons. Number one, their nation states. There are indigenous people there that have been there since the fall of Rome.

So they feel they have a way more moral clarity. When, when we say, "Oh, they're coming to take our country." It's like bullshit. It wasn't ours to begin with. We know that. Everyone knows that. In Europe, no. The English are from England. The Germans are in Germany. So there's that.

But also, when people say they're coming here and they're getting on welfare, no, they're not. Our welfare states sucks. People come here to work. But in Europe, they literally do take from the welfare state. It's a completely different type of immigrant, which places like Denmark are, I've done studies on. Denmark was very clear. They said, "Listen, we can either open the floodgates

or we can preserve our welfare state." You can't do both at the same time.

And the problem is, if we're not careful, Europe is going to tip right.

And when they go right, they go really right. You know, I was at that right wing English rally a couple of years ago. And it was a skinheads. Right? It wasn't. Oh, well, it should be good. It should be good. It should be good.

It was mom and pop T-shop. It was real. It was real. It was my country. That terrified me because when mom and pop T-shop starts saying, "New England for the English" you're like, "Oh, shit." Well, I mean, there is crazy shit going on in Europe. I mean, the English put out a pamphlet a couple of weeks ago about asylum seekers

and they had to tell them, like, "We don't do right here. We don't do child molestation error. We don't do female general mutilation here." There are people coming from countries where we do not really share much cultural heritage. And there are beliefs that just are not compatible with liberal beliefs, which is what's so weird. I was getting a little bit of the editorial that the liberal progressive ideas are somehow the ones

that wound up on the other side of the tracks from where the progressives are supporting. Well, we have a ironic secret weapon in this country for assimilation. That is the workforce. The fact that when you come to America, you hit the ground running and you are working.

“And therefore you have to assimilate. You have to mix.”

Whereas in Europe, if you go and you get on welfare, you get on the dull. You can be cloistered in a neighborhood where your own community can become even more radical. Can I say that in America though, voters don't think about it the way Europeans do. I mean, even I listen to Maga voters all the time say, "My wife is an immigrant or they want people to come here." They just talk about, they have sort of a moral alibi where they say, "We want people to come here at the right way."

And I think that for a lot of -- and this is where Democrats are going to have to figure out. People do want a secure border in the United States, not just Republicans. We vote a lot of Democrats. And so understanding that there is a sort of compromise here where as long as the border is secure, Americans want people to come here. They're concerned that people are getting deported. They're certainly concerned that there are mass agents running around shooting Americans and immigrants.

They don't want people to be treated poorly. America is a pluralistic society. Everybody did come from all over. And so I think that we have a real leg up on what's happening in Europe because we are used to assimilating people here. It's what we have done the entire time we've existed. There's also a huge difference between Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

And I've seen this, my think tank work going there.

And I can tell you, I've said this before, the problem is guilty honkeys.

It's the same problem here. It's the problem over there in Western Europe. They are crushed by their guilt of colonization. In Eastern Europe, they were the colonized, right? At no point in history in a troubled country did someone say, "Oh God, run, here comes the checklist."

So, therefore, they have no guilt. They say we take care of our poor people first before we open up. And that's a huge difference in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Yeah, they're not quite as pure a blood, as you say. I mean, you were talking about the English, being English.

Yeah. And the original inhabitants of the island were my people, the Celtic. The Celtic, the Anglican. Okay. Saxons, the Prifes.

Then the Germans came. Yeah.

“That's why they're called Anglos Saxons.”

Saxony is in Germany. They came in the fifth century. And they took over. And then the Normans came. Yeah.

Okay. Those are Vikings. Okay. But you can see how it's easier for them to spin it because they've been English since what the time was.

Right. But like the House of Windsor. They just made that name up. Battenberg. Their name is Saxcoberg.

Yeah. The King, who was King of England at the time of the American Revolution, didn't speak English.

They're fucking Germans. All right. All right. I love the Anglos. Okay, our Germans.

Max, you've written novels set in the Minecraft world. What do you make up 70% of Americans now playing video games for at least an hour a week? No. I mean, I think video games are fine.

They said the same thing about my generation because we were playing Pac-Man too often. We were going to the arcade. But it wasn't violent. Aren't they very violent?

My craft is not violent. No. My craft is, it's, you're building blocks with Legos. And you're planting wheat. It's, it's, it's.

Why do they like you? Sometimes you kill the pigs.

“You, if you want to be violent, you can.”

But it doesn't make you violent. I don't know. I can't play that game.

And they're always killing pigs.

It depends on the game. Well, that's still true. Like, like, should I be worried that they like to kill them? Maybe worth a conversation. Okay.

But they make meat. They make food out of them. Well, that's different. We do that in here too. It's not like Call of Duty.

You can't plant wheat in Call of Duty. You must kill. So it depends on the game. What is attractive about it? I don't get it.

Why, why would a kid want to, what'd you say? They building blocks? You can build a house. You chopped out of, you punch a tree. You make wood and you'd use the wood to build a house.

But you're not. You're doing not doing that. You, I, I would, when I was a kid, we went outside and actually did things. I made a little for it.

[ Laughter ] I, I, I, I, I don't know. [ Laughter ]

“When we, when we were talking earlier about the pond?”

Yeah, the pond. I, boy. I was like, I wish my kids would go to a pond. [ Laughter ] Is it a thing?

My perhaps. [ Laughter ] All right. In Minecraft's defense, I will say that the game, like, that actually teaches kids things like patience and planning.

It is brain training. If used, right, that's why I worked the books. I get it. I just don't even get a game. I'll let them play. So, but if you, yeah, but if you watch your kids play and you say no, no, no, you're actually learning to take life in steps as opposed to just blowing someone's head off in another video again.

I just don't understand why they find it amazing. All right. How should the U.S. respond if China attempts to take over Taiwan?

Oh, I know. I know. Like, question. Well, what kind of important one? It is important one. Although, um, last I remember Darling Graham didn't know whether Taiwan, what the whole thing was about anyway. I don't think that we have Republican legislators anymore who even know why Taiwan would be an issue. Okay, that's Lindsey Graham sister and I've heard that many times and I'm sure that's true. I don't think she's, I think you're alluding to that different than a lot of legislators.

“You don't have to need, you don't have to have any qualifications for running for office in this country. It is really the job. You have to have some, I think an LA in California. I think you need a license to braid hair.”

Yeah. But you don't, I mean, you just need a bow tie in a smile. That's all you need. You just, you just have to get out there. You just need a silverville is a senator of the United States. You should ask him about Taiwan. See what he says. And now, which I feel like it's we're entering the age where the X influences are now going to be the politicians. It's one. First we went to the phase where it was the Fox news people. You know, it was the, or the weather girl or something was like, I think in Arizona, somebody.

Sure, you know, and now it's like even worse, now it's, you know, it's the people on TikTok and they're vast stories of knowledge. This is why it is, it is so insanely dangerous the time we're living in because also TikTok was from the Chinese Communist Party. I've spoken to college kids about this, right? I've said, how many of you have seen Gaza footage of the war in Gaza? All the hands go up. How many of you have even heard of the weaker genocide? Nothing. And when I say to them, more mosques have been destroyed in China than wherever built in Gaza. Nothing.

I said, have you heard of re-education camps? Nothing. Have you heard of a tiger chair, which is the number one torture device of the people's liberation army?

Nothing. I said, yeah, because you're all on TikTok because the Chinese Communist Party will never let that out.

Well, I hardly think a lot of American teachers know about this either. But this is the problem is if you, if you stop educating the electorate, they will elect morons. That's right. And we definitely did do that. All right. I'm not happy now. Thank you for your live next week. We'll be right back here. Hachonu episodes of Real Time with Bill Mar every Friday night at 10, or watch a many time on HBO on the moon.

For more information, log on to HBO.com. Larry David is back in their new HBO original Limited series. What a pleasure to be a part of such a historic occasion.

This is a declaration of common sense.

Those who don't know history.

“You are the world's worst part of China.”

Our doom to watch Larry David repeated what the hell is going on here.

Watch life Larry in the pursuit of unhavenous. Now streaming on HBO Max.

Visit hbulmax.com for details.