You know it’s a good week on Real Time when the two stories that have consumed the week’s news — the accusations against Andrew Cuomo and the accusations against the Royal Family — take a backseat to weightier topics such as crony capitalism and the hegemony of China.
“We’re not losing to China,” said Maher on HBO Friday night. “We lost. We’re just waiting for the returns to come in.” That was part of a scathing “New Rules” segment where he called Americans “a silly people.”
“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st Century if you are a Silly People, and Americans are a Silly People,” said Maher. “That’s the classic phrase from Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes, they will remain a Silly People. Well, we’re the Silly People now.”
Maher then pivoted to China.
“You know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Suess book? China. All 1.4 billion of them could give a crouching tiger flying f*ck. Because they’re not a silly people.”
“We all know China does bad stuff,” he said, “But there’s got to be something between a totalitarian government that knows what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”
Speaking of the latter, the Real Time host and guests comedian Larry Wilmore and author Scott Galloway had at what Maher called the “screen companies” — Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. “Jeff Bezos lost 35 billion in his divorce and made it all back in 1 month,” said the host.
Galloway, who is also a professor an NYU, responded with his own flabbergasting facts.
During the pandemic, “We’ve seen billionaires go from 1.9 trillion in wealth to 4 trillion,” he said. “We’ve had one individual add the GDP of Hungary to his net worth since the first virus — and that’s Elon Musk — just in time to ‘Peace, out’ and move to Texas so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes.”
“The dirty secret of this pandemic,” continued Galloway, “is that the top 10% if not the top 1% are living their best lives.”
Those issues all but eclipsed the accusations against Andrew Cuomo — of which Maher said, “Obviously if he was head of any corporation, he would be gone” — and what he dismissed as “The Royal Thing.”